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You will never be let down by anyone
more than you will be let down
by the one you love most in the world
it’s how gravity works
it’s why they call it “falling”
it’s why the truth is harder to tell
every year
you have more to lose
but you can choose to bury your past
in the garden
beside the tulips
water it
until it’s so alive
it lets go
and you belong to yourself
again
When you belong to yourself again
Remember forgiveness
is not a tidy grave
It is a ready loyal knight kneeling before your royal heart
Call in your royal heart
Tell it bravery cannot be measured by a lack of fear
It takes guts to tremble
It takes so much tremble to love
Every first date is a fucking earth quake
Sweetheart, on our first date
I showed off all my therapy
I flaunted the couch
Where I finally sweat out my history
Pulled out the photo album from the last time I wore a lie to the school dance
I smiled and said “that was never my style
Look how fixed I am
Look how there’s no more drywall on my fist
Look at the stilts I’ve carved for my short temper
Look how my wrist is not something I have to hide” I said
Well I was hiding it
The telephone pole still down from the storm
By our third date I had fixed the line
I said listen,
I have a hard time
I mean I cry as often as most people pee and I don’t shut the door behind me
I’ll be up in your face screaming “SEATTLE IS TOO RAINY SEATTLE IS TOO RAINY
I’M NEVER GOING TO BE ABLE TO LIVE HERE.”
I sobbed on our fourth date
I can’t live here
In my body, I mean
I can’t live in my body all the time it feels too much
So if I ever feel far away know I am not gone
I am just underneath my grief
Adjusting the dial on my radio face so I can take this life with all
of it’s love and all of it’s loss
See I already know that you are the place where I am finally going to
sing without any static meaning
I’m never gonna wait
that extra twenty minutes
to text you back,
and I’m never gonna play
hard to get
when I know your life
has been hard enough already.
When we all know everyone’s life
has been hard enough already
it’s hard to watch
the game we make of love,
like everyone’s playing checkers
with their scars,
saying checkmate
whenever they get out
without a broken heart.
Just to be clear
I don’t want to get out
without a broken heart.
I intend to leave this life
so shattered
there’s gonna have to be
a thousand separate heavens
for all of my flying parts
And none of those parts are going to be wearing the romance from the
overpriced vintage rack
That is to say I am not going to get a single speed bike if I can’t
make it up the hill
I know exactly how many gears I’m going to need to love you well
And none of them look hip at the hot coffee shop
They all have God saying “good job you’re finally not full of bullshit”
You finally met someone who’s going to flatten your knee caps into
skipping stones
Baby, throw me
Throw me as far as I can go
I don’t want to leave this life without ever having come home
And I want to come home to you
I can figure out the rain.
by Andrea Gibson
I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,
for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.
But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.
by Frank O'Hara
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles
and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it
by Frank O’Hara
In gardens, it's the unwanted babies that grow best and biggest, swarming our beds of frail legitimate darlings with roots like wire and crude, bright flower-heads. They seem oblivious to the fury of steel prongsearthquaking around them. If they fall today, tomorrowthey'll stand all the greener. Too soon, the beautiful lives we've trembled over with sprays of pesticide, friendly stakes, and watering-cans at sunset, give in, leaving us helpless. The weeds, the unfavoured ones, stare at us hungrily, and since it is hard to live empty of love, we try to smile; we learn to forgive them.
by Carol Rumens
You look different every time you comefrom the foam-crested brineIt's your skin shining softly in the moonlightPartly fish, parly porpoise, partly baby sperm whaleAm I yours? Are you mine to play with?Joking apart when you're drunkYou're terrific when you're drunkI like you mostly late at night - you're quite all right But I can't understand the different youIn the morning when it's time to playat being human for a whilePlease smile!You'll be different in the spring, I knowYou're a seasonal beastLike the starfish that drifted with the tide, with the tideSo until your blood runs to meet the next full moonYour madness fits in nicely with my own, with my ownYour lunacy fits neatly with my own - my very ownWe're not alone...
Robert Wyatt
I lied when I told you I didn't have a phone number, she said. I wasn'tsure about you, but now that I knowyou're sane & responsible—aren't you?— I'm going to throw caution to the wind & hope it doesn't blow back in my face. But if you ever spent any time in a mental hospital I'd like to know. I won't let it prejudice me against you. I'm willing to give you a chance, provided you get a letter from a psychiatrist stating your case was closed.by Hal Sirowitz
I don't have a telephone, she said, so I can't give you a number. I'm not a great fan of planned dates. But if I happen to bump into youon the street I'd be willing to go for coffee. Let's leave it to chance. It broughtus together once. It could work a second time. You could help fate along by hanging outin Chelsea. That's where I live. If Igave you any more information I'd be cheating.
by Hal Sirowitz