But don’t speak of gardens.
Don’t speak of the moon.
Don’t speak of roses or the sea.
Speak of what you know.
Speak of the thing that rings in the marrow, that plays in your eyes with shadow and light.
Speak of the endless ache in your bones.
Speak of vertigo.
Speak of respiration and of desolation and of your treason.
It’s so dark, so silent, this process that grips me.
Just speak of the silence.
- Alejandra Pizarnik
“What is love ?
Great minds have been grappling with this question through the ages, and in the modern era, they have come up with many different answers.
According to the Western philosopher Pat Benatar, love is a battlefield.
Her paisan Frank Sinatra would add the corollary that love is a tender trap.
The stoner kids who spent the summer of 1978 looking cool on the hoods of their Trans Ams in the Pierce Elementary School parking lot used to scare us little kids by blasting the Sweet hit “Love Is Like Oxygen” - you get too much, you get too high, not enough and you’re gonna die.
Love hurts. Love stinks.
Love bites, love bleeds, love is the drug. The troubadours of our times all agree: They want to know what love is, and they want you to show them.
But the answer is simple:
Love is a mix tape.””
-Rob Sheffield
“There is something about words.
In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner.
Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts.
Inside you they work their magic.”
~Diane Setterfield
Love is a medicine I must confide,
sweet dosage of cinnamon & cyanide.
-Dylan of the Raven
"Embalmed in neon & shooting stars,
drunk on misfits & earthbound scars."
-Dylan of the Raven
you whom I long for,
how endless your not-returning,
you as shadow till the day of days.
~Alejandra Pizarnik
At times, I wish to disappear
like an ancient myth,
wandering in books,
unaware of its touch.
At times, like the withering foliage…
Untouched, crumpled, and gone…
At times like the winds, which no one can see…
At times like the heartbeats,
existing in bosoms yet can only
be felt with pressed hands… and someday,
if I do manage to become an air of
senselessness,I would tap and tap like
rain on the coffin of my own mortality.
~Channing M.
“My love,
ah,
how much love you have in your eyes for me,
here we stand at this bridge…
interplaiting our fingers in one moment,
in the next,
I jump.”
~M.Channing
May we eat the knowledge
of suffering,
may we eat the bitter
waste of the false food we have fed
others.
May we eat it in pain, and in time.
~Sharon Olds
