Imagination
This tumblr is an archive of inspiration. Works of art and literature, poetry, photography, quotes, etc. I also maintain another tumblr for science, and yet another for the occasional piece of personal writing.
> Contact. Cassandra McLean.
-
Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook, not
the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication, not
the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punch line, the door or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don’t regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the living room couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the window.
Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied of expectation.
Relax. Don’t bother remembering any of it. Let’s stop here,
under the lit sign on the corner, and watch all the people walk by. -
I want to be a lost poem in a stranger’s coat pocket that conveys the importance of you
To assure you of my desires
To assure you of my dreams.
I want all the possibilities of you in writing.
I want to give you your reflection.
I want your eyes on me.
I want to travel in the lightness with you
And stay there
And I want everything before you to follow us
Like a trail behind me.
I want never to say goodbye to you
Even on the street corner or on the phone.
I want…
I want so much I’m breathless
I want to put my power into a poem
To burn a hole in your pocket
So I can sew it.
I want my words to scream through you.
I want the poem not to mean that much.
And I want to contradict myself by accident
And for you to know what I mean.
I want you to be distant
And for me to feel you close.
I want endless days when it’s day
And the nighttime never to end when it’s night.
I want all the seasons in one day.
I want the sun to set before us
And come up in front of us.
I want water up to our waists
And I want to be drenched by the rain
Up to our ankles with holes in our shoes.
I want to think your thoughts
Because they are mine.
I want only what’s urgent to you.
I want to get in the way of the barriers.
And I want you to be a tough guy
When you’re supposed to
Like you do already.
And I want you to be tender
Like you do already.
And I want us to have met for a reason
And I want that reason to be important.
And I want it to be bigger than us
I want it to take over us.
I want to forget.
I want to remember us.
And when you say you love me I don’t want to think that you really mean New York City
And all the fun we have in it.
And I want your smile always
And your grimaces too.
I want your scar on my lips
And I want your disappointments in my heart.
I want your strength in my soul
And I want your soul in my eyes.
I want to believe everything you say.
And I do.
And I want you to tell me what’s best for me
When I don’t know.
And when you’re lost I want to find you.
And when you’re weary
I want to give you steeples,
And cathedral thoughts,
And coliseum dreams.
I want to drag you from the darkness
And kneel with you exhausted
By the blinding light blaring on us.
And… -
- Joan: What do you want?
- Thomas: I don't know. Travel, I suppose. Adventure, if I could.
- Joan: Travel? Where would you go?
- Thomas: Have you not heard? Sea discoverers to new worlds have gone. Cabot to Newfoundland, others to America, the Indies. Some speak of China, Cathay, the fabled lands of Marco Polo.
- Joan: But where would you go?
- Thomas: I'd set out here... [touching her face] though the hair is a forest of ambush and snares. But the brow becalms us when it's smooth and plain. And the dark pools of the eyes are dangerous to our ship... for to be drawn into them would be shipwreck. The nose, like the first meridian, directs us down... to the Islands Fortunate... the swelling lips. I would anchor here... and hear the siren songs. [kisses her] Then sailing on... past the glorious promontory of chin. We may encounter survivors... as we travel down towards your India. And we pause at the Atlantic navel. [touching down her body] Then the current carries our pilot on... to another forest... where many are shipwrecked... and no further ever get.
-
Anis Mojgani (two-time National Poetry Slam Champion and winner of the International World Cup Poetry Slam) performs his spoken word poem “Milos” at Brown University October 2008Let us take a sack of spray paint and spray paint over the paintings.
Let dance through Paris;
kiss in the shadow of the Louvre,
crawl inside its windows,
scroll manifestos over its canvases,
write Morse code on the sculptures,
roll a sleeping bag on the floors to sleep inside of, tell one another a story by flashlight,
unearth everything from before,
bury each other inside the other,
feed grapes to the ants,
light fireworks in the fists of sleeping kings; kill a monarch.
Break back outside and find a world to do all these same things to;
up and upon against break the bricks, climb over them,
and when the sirens scream,
laugh aloud, hold my hand and run fast.
Run through the streets with me with a bunch of bottles,
a bucket of gasoline,
a mouthful of matches,
a pocketful of paintings and fresh-faced batch of policemen to chase the fires we are lighting,
laugh on a shoulder of gold.
And I thought that the museums where cemeteries where the dead paid the walls to hold what we had so that we could walk through what we once were,
And children take their skulls to turn into gardens,
to pluck for forefathers and farther stars
that on some nights resemble an armless mother praying for her arms to return.
Every tooth that we tear from our jaw to fling at the black gloved riot soldiers as another shadow that we are trying to lose.
Let every giggle be filled with lust; let us laugh this night away and I will fuck you like you were a prayer
that could save me by having my mouth around you,
and I will hold you afterwards like you were the pulpit and I was the sky,
and this love that danced between that hardness was a telephone line of holiness that those two things spoke through.
Take me into your heart like I was a saint,
and you were a face of forgiveness blooming in a valley destined to sink further.
Be a river with me;
Be the storm;
the bend in the path;
the front porch; the heat in the south;
be a boot full of banjo strings;
a fistful of written songs;
a mouthful of chocolate dust.
When they come to take us,
stab them between the eyes.
Do not take your hand from around mine.
Make a fist with the other, and punch spines like guilds, spit, sweat, kiss them like a grandmother. Howl open-mouthed terror love filled.
And when they come to cut out hair and ask to hear penance come from inside us,
say with me loud and trembling,
but loud and clear that:
“I have already emptied myself. I kissed regret goodbye, took the hands of another backwards angel, and rode backwards into the rain.”
When the hangman of ‘morrow comes to hang the sun in its daily execution say this with me: “Sarah we are apples, our love is an apple; I’m unbuttoning my shirt; painting a circle over my heart, please, just shoot straight.” -
who knows if the moon’s
a balloon,coming out of a keen city
in the sky—filled with pretty people?
(and if you and i should
get into it,if they
should take me and take you into their balloon,
why then
we’d go up higher with all the pretty people
than houses and steeples and clouds:
go sailing
away and away sailing into a keen
city which nobody’s ever visited,where
always
it’s
Spring)and everyone’s
in love and flowers pick themselves -
Quote reblogged from I Run From BearsAround 300 previously unpublished love letters by Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov to his wife Vera Slonim will be published next year in the US in the form of a book. Written from 1923-1975, the collection by the writer of Lolita will be published by Knopf publishers under the title Letters to Vera.
-
Some say love’s a little boy,
And some say it’s a bird,
Some say it makes the world go around,
Some say that’s absurd,
And when I asked the man next-door,
Who looked as if he knew,
His wife got very cross indeed,
And said it wouldn’t do.
Does it look like a pair of pyjamas,
Or the ham in a temperance hotel?
Does its odour remind one of llamas,
Or has it a comforting smell?
Is it prickly to touch as a hedge is,
Or soft as eiderdown fluff?
Is it sharp or quite smooth at the edges?
O tell me the truth about love.
Our history books refer to it
In cryptic little notes,
It’s quite a common topic on
The Transatlantic boats;
I’ve found the subject mentioned in
Accounts of suicides,
And even seen it scribbled on
The backs of railway guides.
Does it howl like a hungry Alsatian,
Or boom like a military band?
Could one give a first-rate imitation
On a saw or a Steinway Grand?
Is its singing at parties a riot?
Does it only like Classical stuff?
Will it stop when one wants to be quiet?
O tell me the truth about love.
I looked inside the summer-house;
It wasn’t over there;
I tried the Thames at Maidenhead,
And Brighton’s bracing air.
I don’t know what the blackbird sang,
Or what the tulip said;
But it wasn’t in the chicken-run,
Or underneath the bed.
Can it pull extraordinary faces?
Is it usually sick on a swing?
Does it spend all its time at the races,
or fiddling with pieces of string?
Has it views of its own about money?
Does it think Patriotism enough?
Are its stories vulgar but funny?
O tell me the truth about love.
When it comes, will it come without warning
Just as I’m picking my nose?
Will it knock on my door in the morning,
Or tread in the bus on my toes?
Will it come like a change in the weather?
Will its greeting be courteous or rough?
Will it alter my life altogether?
O tell me the truth about love.by W. H. Auden (1907-1973)
