Crystallization is a concept, developed in 1822 by the French writer Stendhal, which describes the process, or mental metamorphosis, in which unattractive characteristics of a new love are transformed into perceptual diamonds of shimmering beauty; according to a quotation by Stendhal: What I call ‘crystallization’ is the operation of the mind that draws from all that presents itself the discovery that the loved object has some new perfections.
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…
It’s hard to believe there’s a whole world of people out there that don’t know about you. They can look at you and look past you. I would be any one of them, with their hurt and their heartache, their vain longing, desire, resentment of others’ blissful ignorance to what (to who) makes it so. I wouldn’t tell them about you, they wouldn’t care. About the details of you, your looks and your skin, I would never try with all my might to describe that look: when we held hands and thread our way through the holiday rabble, and you looked back to make sure I was there, despite my hand in yours. Still I wish you’d look back now, now that you’ve let me back into that crowd, left me with all these faces. And I don’t know who you are but I know who you are to me: that feeling of recognition when I catch your eyes, that feeling of knowing: I have been loved by this face, I’ve held it in my hands, I’ve kissed it with my body, I’ve held it in my mind— for too long—and I see it when my eyes are closed. I close my eyes and see your face. I open my eyes and it’s a sea of strangers who aren’t looking for you, as I have been—for too long—and I would be any one of them. I would take on a hundred years of memories, five hundred seen with foreign eyes, ten thousand foreign faces loved hopelessly, hopelessly unforgotten, if it meant I could lose your face among them.
(Source: spoonerette)
Folks, I’m telling you
Birthing is hard
and dying is mean -
so get yourself
a little loving
in between
(Source: mermaidcomplex)
men and women finally break.
men and women
deliberately abandon their
loved ones in madhouses
sedated or
electrified
until they die.
cats kill cats at
3 a.m. in the morning
chewing off the front
legs and opening the
throat
leaving stiffened fur
and still forms
for any collector of
garbage and life
past gone.
so many wish to be kind
and understanding
so many wish to act educated
and knowing
so many use the word
love
as if they meant
it.
and too many believe it
when they hear it.
our chances are negated
by our very desire to
be kind.
we’ve got to raise taxes
so we can feed and
clothe and amuse
all those
in madhouses and elsewhere
who believed in love
when there was so
little
there.
Love’s not the way to treat a friend.
I wouldn’t wish that on you. I don’t
want to see your eyes forgotten
on a rainy day, lost in the endless purse
of those who can remember nothing.
Love’s not the way to treat a friend.
I don’t want to see you end up that way
with your body being poured like wounded
marble into the architecture of those who make
bridges out of crippled birds.
Love’s not the way to treat a friend.
There are so many better things for you
than to see your feelings sold
as magic lanterns to somebody whose body
casts no light.
All Times and All Tenses Alive in this Moment
by Mary Szybist
(Source: loveandzombies)
In using there are always two.
The manipulator dances with a partner who cons herself.
There are lies that glow so brightly we consent
to give a finger and then an arm
to let them burn.
I was dazzled by the crowd where everyone called my name.
Now I stand outside the funhouse exit, down the slide
reading my guidebook of Marx in Esperanto
and if I don’t know anymore which way means forward
down is where my head is, next to my feet
with a pocketful of words and plastic tokens.
Form follows function, says the organizer
and turns himself into a paperclip,
into a vacuum cleaner,
into a machinegun.
Function follows analysis
but the forebrain
is only an owl in the tree of self.
One third of life we prowl in the grottos of sleep
where neglected worms ripen into dragons
where the spoilt pencil swells into an oak
and the cows of our early sins are called home chewing their cuds
and turning the sad faces of our childhood upon us.
Come back and scrub the floor, the stain is still there,
come back with your brush and kneel down
scrub and scrub again
it will never be clean.
Fantasy unacted sours the brain.
Buried desires sprout like mushrooms on the chin of the morning.
The will to be totally rational
is the will to be made out of glass and steel:
and to use others as if they were glass and steel.
We can see clearly no farther
than our hands can touch.
The cockroach knows as much as you know about living.
We trust with our hands and our eyes and our bellies.
The cunt accepts.
The teeth and back reject.
What we have to give each other:
dumb and mysterious as water swirling.
Always in the long corridors of the psyche
doors are opening and doors are slamming shut.
We rise each day to give birth or to murder
selves that go through our hands like tiny fish.
You said: I am the organizer, and took and used.
You wrapped your head in theory like yards of gauze
and touched others only as tools that fit to your task
and if the tool broke you seized another.
Arrogance is not a revolutionary virtue.
The manipulator liberates only
the mad bulldozers of the ego to level the ground.
I was a tool that screamed in the hand.
I have been loving you so long and hard and mean
and the taste of you is part of my tongue
and your face is burnt into my eyelids
and I could build you with my fingers out of dust
and now it is over.
Whether we want or not
our roots go down to strange waters,
we are creatures of the seasons and the earth.
You always had a reason and you have them still
rattling like dried leaves on a stunted tree.