This Crooked Crown: Fairy-Tale Logic
Fairy tales are full of impossible tasks:
Gather the chin hairs of a man-eating goat,
Or cross a sulphuric lake in a leaky boat,
Select the prince from a row of identical masks,
Tiptoe up to a dragon where it basks
And snatch its bone; count dust specks, mote by mote,
Or learn the phone directory by rote.
Always it’s impossible what someone asks—You have to fight magic with magic. You have to believe
That you have something impossible up your sleeve,
The language of snakes, perhaps, an invisible cloak,
An army of ants at your beck, or a lethal joke,
The will to do whatever must be done:
Marry a monster. Hand over your firstborn son.—A.E. Stallings
(Source: writings32)
"
1.
Through the night
the apples
outside my window
one by one let go
their branches and
drop to the lawn.
I can’t see, but hear
the stem-snap, the plummet
through leaves, then
the final thump against the ground.
Sometimes two
at once, or one
right after another.
During long moments of silence
I wait
and wonder about the bruised bodies,
the terror of diving through air, and
think I’ll go tomorrow
to find the newly fallen, but they
all look alike lying there
dewsoaked, disappearing before me.
2.
I lie beneath my window listening
to the sound of apples dropping in
the yard, a syncopated code I long to know,
which continues even as I sleep, and dream I know
the meaning of what I hear, each dull
thud of unseen apple-
body, the earth
falling to earth
once and forever, over
and over
The first time I say I love you, your face
crumbles. You look at me
the way man stares in terror
at the stars and the sea.You grasp your head, fist
your hair, hiss, whisper why me
why me I am weak I am
dirt I am dust I am
nothing—Why you? Because
the earth is made of dust
and dirt and you are as
essential to me as earth
is to sky; you give me something
to set my sun against.The dirt and the dust are not
weak. I could build a house
out of you; you are the roof
when I rain.
(Source: whatladybird)
If I had a shiny gun, I could have a world of fun Speeding bullets through the brains Of the folk who give me pains; Or had I some poison gas, I could make the moments pass Bumping off a number of People whom I do not love. But I have no lethal weapon - Thus does fate our pleasure step on! So they still are quick and well Who should be, by rights, in hell.
Goodness me, this is nearly unherad of these days - a Dorothy Parker poem in the Dorothy Parker tag that I’d never read before! :-D
Coda
There’s little in taking or giving,
There’s little in water or wine;
This living, this living, this living
Was never a project of mine.
Oh, hard is the struggle, and sparse is
The gain of the one at the top,
For art is a form of catharsis,
And love is a permanent flop,
And work is the province of cattle,
And rest’s for a clam in a shell,
So I’m thinking of throwing the battle—
Would you kindly direct me to hell?
Every now and then I reblog this poem yet again just because it exists. I actually think it might be my favourite poem in the all the world.
September - Jennifer Michael Hecht
Tonight there must be people who are getting what they want.
I let my oars fall into the water.
Good for them. Good for them, getting what they want.The night is so still that I forget to breathe.
The dark air is getting colder. Birds are leaving.Tonight there are people getting just what they need.
The air is so still that it seems to stop my heart.
I remember you in a black and white photograph
taken this time of some year. You were leaning against
a half-shed tree, standing in the leaves the tree had lost.When I finally exhale it takes forever to be over.
Tonight, there are people who are so happy,
that they have forgotten to worry about tomorrow.Somewhere, people have entirely forgotten about tomorrow.
My hand trails in the water.
I should not have dropped those oars. Such a soft wind.
In Which Seph Writes Haiku
So you know that “here is a haiku for everyone I’ve shagged” thing that keeps doing the rounds? I found the idea really quite appealing, so I cracked and wrote my own version. They still need some work, but I’m really rather pleased with some of them. (Source links back to the original dude whose idea I have nicked.)
(Source: benedictsmith)
“What’s Genocide?” by Carlos Andres Romez
their high school principal
told me I couldn’t teach
poetry with profanity
so I asked my students,
“Raise your hand if you’ve heard of the Holocaust.”
in unison, their arms rose up like poisonous gas
then straightened out like an SS infantry
“Okay. Please put your hands down.
Now raise your hand if you’ve heard of the Rwandan genocide.”
blank stares mixed with curious ignorance
a quivering hand out of the crowd
half-way raised, like a lone survivor
struggling to stand up in Kigali
“Luz, are you sure about that?”
“No.”
“That’s what I thought.”“Carlos—what’s genocide?”
they won’t let you hear the truth at school
if that person says “fuck”
can’t even talk about “fuck”
even though a third of your senior class
is pregnant.I can’t teach an 18-year-old girl in a public school
how to use a condom that will save her life
and that of the orphan she will be forced
to give to the foster care system—
“Carlos, how many 13-year-olds do you know that are HIV-positive?”“Honestly, none. But I do visit a shelter every Monday and talk with
six 12-year-old girls with diagnosed AIDS.”
while 4th graders three blocks away give little boys blowjobs during recess
I met an 11-year-old gang member in the Bronx who carries
a semi-automatic weapon to study hall so he can make it home
and you want me to censor my language“Carlos, what’s genocide?”
your books leave out Emmett Till and Medgar Evers
call themselves “World History” and don’t mention
King Leopold or diamond mines
call themselves “Politics in the Modern World”
and don’t mention Apartheid“Carlos, what’s genocide?”
you wonder why children hide in adult bodies
lie under light-color-eyed contact lenses
learn to fetishize the size of their asses
and simultaneously hate their lips
my students thought Che Guevara was a rapper
from East Harlem
still think my Mumia t-shirt is of Bob Marley
how can literacy not include Phyllis Wheatley?
schools were built in the shadows of ghosts
filtered through incest and grinding teeth
molded under veils of extravagant ritual“Carlos, what’s genocide?”
“Roselyn, how old was she? Cuántos años tuvo tu madre cuando se murió?”
“My mother had 32 years when she died. Ella era bellísima.”
…what’s genocide?
they’ve moved from sterilizing “Boriqua” women
injecting indigenous sisters with Hepatitis B,
now they just kill mothers with silent poison
stain their loyalty and love into veins and suffocate them…what’s genocide?
Ridwan’s father hung himself
in the box because he thought his son
was ashamed of him…what’s genocide?
Maureen’s mother gave her
skin lightening cream
the day before she started the 6th grade…what’s genocide?
she carves straight lines into her
beautiful brown thighs so she can remember
what it feels like to heal…what’s genocide?
…what’s genocide?“Carlos, what’s genocide?”
“Luz, this…
this right here…is genocide.”
(Source: dead-dog-fred)
I never know what to *do* with these. The guy who wrote them is kind of full of himself, and I feel wrong about the implication at the end, but - there’s something about some of them, isn’t there, and the idea itself.
I’m weirdly tempted to try my own.
(Source: nrvana)
