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if you don’t want me,
don’t keep keeping me. there are
worse things than freedom. 

(Source: rollingbarrel)

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“not like these,” you said, “this kind is
too small,” while i tried to drown
myself in koi.

you were talking about the fish. 
i thought you meant your love.

(Source: mirrormaskcamera, via ipu-m)

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I want you to look
at me and tell me I’m not
the monster I see. 

(Source: ochibiotaku, via waffur-imnida)

oliphillips:

Double Exposure Oil Paintings

by Ho Ryon Lee

i worry that movement
leads me further away from you.
how can you hold me
if neither of us hold
still? 

(via paris2london)

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modern floriography
02/14/2012, in washington d.c. 

I should say something about loneliness
and how it is there, even when sometimes 
you are sleeping next to someone you think you love, 
listening to their breathing, your face hidden in their face,
you wake up and you realize what woke you up is  
your understanding that no two people
can truly understand each other, and you are not sure
if that’s okay, or how sometimes, well,
all the time, you are told you are beautiful
and unique and deserve better and that only ends 
with you feeling like you are settling, or maybe
that you are both settling, that one or both of you
is too good for the other, and you are not sure
if that’s okay, or if it isn’t, what you can do,

and I should say something about loneliness,
about how I told you that I don’t want to know
if I’m being cheated on, how we think that love
can only end that way, as if the death was not seeded
before, in how you stop calling to formally say
good night or how it is no longer touching to take
two hours off in the afternoon to have coffee
or how you never get to take those vacations
together and how you’re okay with that,
this slow separation into being alone, so that’s why

I should say something about loneliness, 
about walking in a big city on Valentine’s Day,
seeing flower salesmen and businessmen in the street,
exchanging armful of roses, like they were each other’s
dates, and you say you are romantic
all the time, but I should say that I told you 
I didn’t want love in the sense of gratuitous
giving, that I was done with giving and taking,
I wanted something else, I didn’t know what, 
I didn’t expect romantic gestures, who needs
adoration or convention or what other people think,
certainly not me, I am okay with forgetting
your birthday, you forgetting holidays, 
neither one of us remembering our anniversaries,

but I was walking down the street in a big city
on Valentine’s Day, and I was thinking that 
I should say something about loneliness, and
there were flowers in all different colors, 
and businessmen in all different businesses
buying them, and I was thinking
of all the different flowers I have bought
for myself or others — friends, mothers,
lovers — how I know you don’t know
which color of tulips are my favorite,
whether I prefer baby’s breath in my bouquets,
what it means to give someone yellow roses,
and I am not sure if I am okay with being okay with this,
or if in the end, it is not okay to admit that no one
has ever bought me flowers, unasked, if secretly
that means something is wrong with me, and

I should say something about loneliness,
something about when loneliness begins,
something about my loneliness, does it creep into you
and become your loneliness, until we are both lonely,
together and apart, is that where separation begins,
I should say something, I am waking up
in the middle of the night on a street in a big city
on Valentine’s Day with my arms full of roses
and it dawns on me that you will never buy me flowers,
and that I should understand loneliness by now, I should

say something about loneliness, 
but what can I say? 

thesquareone:

For strange woman (by in Belle)

For the strange woman
who for strange reasons
won’t leave you
alone. You are sick
with her like a fever,
later holding her
in your head, an afterimage,

perfectly. She uncrosses
her ankles, touching
the back of her hand to
her mouth, you touch
your hands, your mouth,
you are unable 
to play her out. 
She is looking

at you through the strange
doors of her hair and
you don’t know her name,
just some stranger,
she is a strange woman
in a cafe, looking
straight through you,
so it is stranger how touching
her image is, you can’t
leave it alone. You are sick
with it, how she sticks
with you, you play out
the afterimage, holding
out your hand to hold
onto her mouth, hold on,
mouthing out her name.

Strange woman, your own
strange reasons, you own
nothing about her, it is
a cross to throw aside, it is
a strange loss to have gained. 

brief interviews with hideous youth

When David Foster Wallace died we held our own funeral.
“Who will understand us now,” you said
in jest, “when we cannot understand ourselves?”
We ate aphorisms until our stomachs were heavy,
and it was a heaviness that was close to grief.
I dreamt that night of deep sea faults,
and his words were beds of seaweed close to shore,
We let ourselves be tangled. If we drowned,
it was not his fault.

This is what I know:
that someday we will stop believing
literature will save our souls.
No one needs poetry now.

But for now we are still young, and romance
has not flown from us like geese fleeing from the cold.
We could still go to Boston, start a snow farm,
wake up at the break of dawn to milk the snow cows,
whole buckets full of frost
frothing at the rim in piles, like ice cream.
Snow chickens laying snowballs, pellets of hail, and
we could hoe the lines of the snow beans,
raking the desiccated icicles after a day of unwanted warmth.

Age is a mild summer, slowly eroding the cold.
It eats in fits and spills. It is careful to be painless.
It sweeps away the brutal stretch of frost-bitten cheeks, 
the creeping chill. But one day you’ll miss
the wind that knocks you over,
the sharpness only the young can achieve,
pushing against the cold, head down,
hands shaking, indestructible.

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5 Ways of Leaving Behind Your Ancestral Family Who Toiled in the Yellow Dirt of Agricultural China and Was Sure the Great Leap Forward Would Bring Them Happiness

(with apologies to Wallace Stevens)

i.
Summer storm dying.
The sky, metallic yellow.
Lake sounds, far away.

ii.
The way your hands take apart
the petals of peach skin
is how I imagine them laying down
the first slabs of concrete,
when they first realized the bedrock
of Manhattan went deeper
than their skyscrapers could ever reach.

iii.
“The blossoms smell like
so many fish
are in the water”

 iv.
I wanted the land
to come up and force me
into transcendence.
I wanted its permanence
to render me
impermanent.

v.
You said, “Come
home,” and I told you
I didn’t understand.

unless forgiveness finds its nerve and voice,
unless the helmeted and bleeding tree
can green and open buds like infants’ fists
from ”Sibyl,” by Seamus Heaney

(via seasquared)

you make me wish 
i still felt love as strongly
as when i watched

you, naked 
back to the sun. 
(the yearning is like

death, and death
is like the harbor in which desire
finally comes to rest.)

(via seasquared)

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From the wet snap of green beans
in your mother’s kitchen
comes forth the quiet taste
of summer evenings,
your father eating noisily,
your mother’s chopsticks
poised over your bowl of rice
to give you more chang dou. 

From the dusty, bitter rind
comes forth sweetness:
the nutty taste of broad beans,
the suggestive smell of vanilla,
the flat sweetness of azuki,
which your grandfather knows
is called hong dou.

From the hairy palms of the soybean
comes forth the memory
of your grandmother shelling bags
of mao dou no one would eat,
how she would watch the TV,
her fingers working furiously around
the silken bellies of the beans.

From the ragged seam of your family,
the stringy backbone peeled back
to reveal softer insides,
comes forth the smallness,
that sameness, that is you,
dou miao, dou ya, xiao dou zi.

(Source: pjfish69, via seasquared)