Mary Don't You Weep

James Baldwin

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive...

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.” 

I laid bare my chest, said do your best

Destroy me.

I've been to hell and back so many times, I must admit it kind of bores me

-Ray Lamontagne

Will wrench you by its ravings, discompose you

Boris Pasternak, best known for his penning of the epic Russian novel, "Doctor Zhivago", is also one of my favorite poets. He didn't write a lot (comparatively), but what he did write will dissolve you into one million particles of light.

~

The shiv'ring piano, foaming at the mouth,
Will wrench you by its ravings, discompose you.
"My darling," you will murmur. "No!" I'll shout.
"To music?!" Yet can two be ever closer

Than in the dusk, while tossing vibrant chords
Into the fireplace, like journals, tome by tome?
Oh, understanding wonderful, just nod,
And you will know I do not claim to own

Your soul and body. You may go where'er
You want. To others. Wether has been written
Already. Death these days is in the air.
One opens up one's veins much like a window. 

~

"February. Get ink, shed tears.
Write of it, sob your heart out, sing,
While torrential slush that roars
Burns in the blackness of the spring.

Go hire a buggy. For six grivnas,
Race through the noice of bells and wheels
To where the ink and all you grieving
Are muffled when the rainshower falls.

To where, like pears burnt black as charcoal,
A myriad rooks, plucked from the trees,
Fall down into the puddles, hurl
Dry sadness deep into the eyes.

Below, the wet black earth shows through,
With sudden cries the wind is pitted,
The more haphazard, the more true
The poetry that sobs its heart out. " 

~

"Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle,
cracked ice crunching in pails,
the night that numbs the leaf,
the duel of two nightingales,
the sweet pea that has run wild,
Creation's tears in shoulder blades."

~

Immovable titans will choke in the black vaults of day. Are these poems fermented enough to stun the thunder? It must have been delirious, to consent to be earth.

X as a Function of Distance from Ignatz

MONICA YOUN

(she opens the door)

(he is twelve inches

away) her fingers

still splayed across the

battened-down brass latch

of his sternum (she

closes the door) (he

is eight feet away)

her palm skids down the

banister clings to

the fluted globe of

the finial (he

is twenty-eight feet

away) (she opens

the door) the black air

is fast flowing and

cold (she closes the

door) she clutches her

thin intimacy

tight under her chin

and trips down the steps

(he is forty feet

away) the stiff wind

palpably stripping

his scent from her hair

from the numb fingers

she raises to her

mouth a cab pulls up

(she opens the door)

she bends the body

hitherto upright

(she closes the door)

the cracked brown vinyl

(he is ninety feet

away) biting the

backs of her thighs red

blotches suffusing

her cheeks I’m sorry

please stop she says (he

is four hundred feet

away) please stop the

cab (she opens the

door) the cab stops she

pushes a twenty

through the slot (he is

seven hundred feet

away) (she closes

the door) the husk of

something dry and light

falls to the sidewalk

crumbles away (she

opens the door) (he

is two feet away)

(she closes the door)

DISRESPECTFUL THRILLS

Lord Birthday, Instagram

To siphon light

14. wait

Monica Youn

To stand and wait is a task far weightier than simply to wait. It is to permit the distractible body neither ease nor action, nor food nor drink nor any such reprieve; it is to pit the body in enmity against its own heaviness.

To abide in readiness as in a winter orchard, the lacerated land bandaged in snow. To exist inert as if limbless, skin seamless as if reknit over what had been pruned away, knotted rootstock fit for no other service: no branch, no leaf, no fruit. To persist as a stripped stick persists in a white field, bark peeled back from one exposed split, uptilted as if eager for the grafted slip.

To stand and wait for the one who reaps where he has not sown.

Mercy sugars the starving soil with nitrogen, potassium, phosphate. Mercy captures rain in silver beads and stitches them through the threadbare weave of cloud. Mercy wields a scalpel cutting a cleft in the lopped-off stump, mercy forces home the rootless wand, mercy seals the join with tar and tape.

To foster the raw scion as if it were a son, to siphon light down through its body as if it were your own.