a home

I’m sorry if you couldn’t find me
I have been in the woods. I put myself there because
I couldn’t be good. I have been running with foxes
And hunting with crows
and I have found myself a home
where nobody goes.


Useless Magic: Lyrics & Poetry, Florence Welch

i am

I am the queen of spades, I am the wasp that stings, I am the dark serpent. I am the invulnerable animal who passes through fire and is not burned.

The Days of Abandonment, Elena Ferrante

void

I looked into a void of love. And I fell down. There was nothing else there. No where, where I was no one.


In The Pines, Alice Notley

sinking

She said once: I am a shell, and you can hear
the ocean sputter and cough in my bones; I swear,
I would swim, if I weren’t already sinking.

Sink, Yasmin Belkhyr

to grow

often we ask ourselves
to make absolute sense
out of what just happens,
and in this way, what we are practicing

is suffering,
which everybody practices,
but strangely few of us
grow graceful in.


Tony Hoagland

believe me, i've tried

She's gonna learn that this life will hit you, hard, in the face, wait for you to get back up so it can kick you in the stomach. But getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air. There is hurt, here, that cannot be fixed by band-aids or poetry, so the first time she realizes that Wonder-woman isn't coming, I'll make sure she knows she doesn't have to wear the cape all by herself. Because no matter how wide you stretch your fingers, your hands will always be too small to catch all the pain you want to heal. Believe me, I've tried.

Point B, Sarah Kay

the whole

i want love to be simple. i want to trust without thinking. i want to be generous with my affection and patience and love unconditionally. it is easier to love a person with their flaws than to weed through them. i want to love the whole person, not parts; and this is how i want to be loved.


chasing down the dawn, jewel kilcher

wild things

when despair for the world grows in me
and i wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of that my life and my children's lives may be,
i go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
i come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. i come into the presence of still water.
and i feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. for a time
i rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

the peace of wild things, wendell berry

para além da forma

As pessoas acreditam que dependem do que acontece para serem felizes, ou seja, que são dependentes da forma. Não se apercebem de aquilo que acontece é a coisa mais instável do Universo. Muda constantemente.

Um Novo Mundo, Eckhart Tolle

far far away

It's strange, the way a person's life can feel so far away,
Although the claims of its existence are encountered everywhere

John Koethe

layer upon layer

She'd wrapped layer upon layer of solitude around herself to protect her from a gaze, yet she wasn't exactly sure whose. If she was really honest with herself, she knew it was her own eyes watching her, but she nevertheless kept wrapping that solitude around her; there was nothing else to do.

To Mervas, Elisabeth Rynell

a state of mind

Hell is not a place, it's a state of mind and body.
It's an obsession with a voice, a face, a name.

Phantom, Susan Kay

Relato com um fundo de água

Era perfeitamente natural [...] que te lembrasses dele na hora das nostalgias, quando nos deixamos corromper por essas ausências a que chamamos memórias e é necessário remendar com palavras e com imagens tanto vazio insaciável.

Final do Jogo, Julio Cortázar

my hands burn all the time

Everything we touch
burns away, whether we give ourselves
or not, the same April day spreads to thinness,
the same winter afternoon
thickens to dark. I was thirty-eight years old.
Every time a door opened
I expected you. For months I hid your clothes
stiff with blood.


Skin Divers, Anne Michaels

we are intermittent creatures

The division of one day from the next must be one of the most profound peculiarities of life on this planet. We are not condemned to sustained flights of being, but are constantly refreshed by little holidays from ourselves. We are intermittent creatures, always falling to little ends and rising to new beginnings. Our soon-tired consciousness is meted out in chapters, and that the world will look quite different tomorrow is, both for our comfort and our discomfort, usually true. How marvelously too night matches sleep, sweet image of it, so nearly apportioned to our need.


Iris Murdoch

dissolving into foam

You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.

Crossing to Safety, Wallace Stegner

we're mere breaths

There's actually no such thing as an adult. That word is a placeholder. We never grow up. We're not supposed to. We're born and that's it. We get bigger. We live through great storms. We get soaked to the bone. We realize we're waterproof. We strive for calm. We discover what makes us feel good. We do those things over and over. We learn what doesn't feel good. We avoid those things at all cost. Sometimes we come together: huge groups in agreement. Sometimes we clap and dance. Sometimes we look like a migration of birds. We need to remind ourselves - each other - that we're mere breaths.


Micah Ling

wide open from all the feeling

You are so good. So good, you're always feeling so much. And sometimes it feels like you're gonna bust wide open from all the feeling, don't it? People like you are the best in the world, but you sure do suffer for it.


This is My Heart for You, Silas House

self-taught

invent yourself and then reinvent yourself,
don't swim in the same slough.
invent yourself and then reinvent yourself and
stay out of the clutches of mediocrity.

invent yourself and then reinvent yourself,
change your tone and shape so often that they can never categorize you.

reinvigorate yourself and
accept what is
but only on the terms that you have invented
and reinvented.

be self-taught.

and reinvent your life because you must;
it is your life and
its history
and the present
belong only to
you.


no leaders, please, Charles Bukowski

concealed admiration

Envy is concealed admiration. A man who admires something but feels he cannot be happy surrendering himself to it, that man chooses to be envious of what he admires. He then speaks another language. In this language of his the thing he admires is said to be nothing, something stupid and humiliating and peculiar and exaggerated. Admiration is happy self-surrender, envy is unhappy self-assertion.


The Sickness Unto Death, Søren Kierkegaard