"lines on my face, tears in my eyes, words in between my lips: a life unfolds"—-Secrets|Letters to Sylvia
“I have learned that when sadness comes to visit me, all I can do is say “I see you.” I spend some time with it, get up, and say goodbye. I don’t push it away. I own it. And because I own it, I let it go.”
Carolina Zacaria
I’m supposed to say things these days, a speech, share a memory, recite a poem, though always comes off half-assed written -since I never knew how to say things in public anyway (they paid someone else to do me, didn’t they?) I’m supposed to.
In the old days I just said whatever came to mind and they were not always bad, but they weren’t good either. I cringed on the whole thing but you always looked at me, teary eyed and grateful.
I got compliments. She’s such a writer, they said. She’s a poet, you added. (I’m not). We’d drink, we’d laugh. You’d act weird all night. I, what? look. The look of knowing I am wonderful but I don’t feel so. We partied up 90s style, without boomerang, without Instagram stories, or reel. The world before twitter.
For your endless curiosity, yes I share with her things, but mostly just smoothies recipes, a cleanse from whatever it was you drank the night before. But what I really want to say and tell her is that to fix you, she needs to replace all of your internal organs, there!
You’d be a new man.
Yes I am hilarious, but really, I’m serious. There’s no amount of herbs will revive his liver, or you know, his heart. It just is.
I don’t know what to say and my laptop is running on 7 percent battery but, happy birthday. I am happy you are born. I like your old heart. It’s beating. Eat cucumber. Sleep. Love. Live. Forget. Always.
PS. We’re not partying up.
PPS. Don’t tag me on any TBT
dear people who have been seeking to contact me via every possible platforms and planes, i gladly would like to inform you i am alive and somewhat well (let’s just call it that). we’re keeping it on the DL since the big bang and the rattles that follow. we are scattered around the world and are unable to regroup (yes i am that many, i am we and us and them) thanks to the ever prolonged pandemic. we have thousands stories to tell, poems lurking here and there, and we are looking (and longing) to share again like the good old days.
though these past three years have changed us in a way that is unimaginable, rest assured, we are still productively creating in abundance of peace and in a more private realm.
for you especially who clicked here, yes i see you and i appreciate you (i can’t really say i love you but i do). we will soon be together again though soon seems too far away.
until we meet again.
they say tomorrow might be the waves i cannot see
the sheer anticipation of what might have been
we’ve grown so old from heartbreaks so young a dream
we’re so vast a universe but no words to swarm in
this existence hurts my skin it hurts more everytime it doesn’t bleed
here in this dark place everything is shameful and unforgiven but
there’s a rabbit hole down here and there’s you and i and the world disappears we need to be somewhere else
but here we are, bloated up
and shrunk down into an instagram post
If you were alone when you were born, alone when you were dying, really absolutely alone when you were dead, why ‘learn to be alone’ in between? If you had forgotten, it would quickly come back to you. Aloneness was like riding a bike. At a gunpoint. With the gun in your own hand. Aloneness was the air in your tyre, the wind in your hair. You didn’t have to go looking for it with open arms. With open arms, you fell off the bike…
Lorrie Moore
Last time you see someone and you don’t
know it will be the last time.
And all that
you know now, if only you’d known then.
But you didn’t know, and now it’s too late.
And you tell yourself, “How could I have
known, I could not have known.
You tell yourself…
Missing Mom, Joyce Carol Oates
you and i, we’re a hush hush
they make you walk around with
a red carpet girlfriend
i step aside, smiling away
all these secrets and hideaways
man, you’re the best of news that i can’t share…
There was the story of a central California widow who had fought to have her recently dead husband exhumed, pleading her case that before he had died he had swallowed her diamond ring in some sort of spite and that she wanted this jewel returned. But in the end she confessed that she had not slept for many many weeks and that she had been spending her nights lying on his grave, trying to speak to him, and that all she really wanted was just to be able to see his face one more time.
Life After God, Douglas Coupland
I dream you still. And there I will be.
You don’t know my name. This is the past. And us is just a butterfly effect that didn’t happen. We are apart and at peace, just as before your eyes met mine, before our hands brushed and our words hushed. Before our secrets born into judging eyes. This is before everything.
And I am telling you this so you will search for me no more.
“I Want These Dreams Inside of Me”, When I My Own Daughter
Now we will count to twelve,
and we will all keep still.
For once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.
It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.
Fisherman in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would look at his hurt hands.
Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.
What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.
If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.
Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.
“Keeping Quiet”, Pablo Neruda
thinking of how you light up the dead parts of me
i seem to know how to pick them
out of a bunch I picked the darkest one
who’d call up cancelling whatever whenever
just to watch me dance all night
my then insecure boyfriend asked what’s going on
i don’t know, kid
i didn’t. but i knew i was
in for trouble
you stared and stared and oh that gaze, i wanted
those eyes staring at me for the rest of my days…
When I look into your eyes, I realise I came from a long journey across time, before yours nor mine. I knew this from recurring dreams. They’re so vivid that when I wake up, my arms my feet my body’s broken, sore and tired. These dreams are more than just a realm in my subconscious, they’re real.
In my dreams, I have your eyes, your smile, and everything’s new under the sun. In my dreams I am lost looking for something, anything feels like a mother. In my dreams, I too am abandoned, unwanted. In my dreams, I am you.
When I Look Into Your Eyes, When I My Own Daughter
these stories, they come to me in dreams the first time I fell asleep since they told me you’ve fallen into flatline
I dream you
sometimes in colours, green and oranges, purples and blues, and not bleak nor dark, we are not in the shadows
in these dreams, our children they’re born. they’re not sucked to death, they’re not stillborn nor bled away
they live and we give
names to their innocent loving faces
the eldest has my eyes, her brother has your smile
in these dreams we’re not bitter
we’re not numb from pain
in these dreams you are standing tall
little daughter dances on your devoted steadfast feet
her brother clung to your arms, his head rests on your secure and sturdy shoulder.
he’s falling into another dream.
in these dreams, I dance with you under the chuppah
and you recite a long vow, a song we used to hum
before we went to sleep
about lovers
lost
and again,
found.
On birthdays that are wiser,
The inward life tells us that we are multiple not single, and that our one existence is really countless existences holding hands like those cut-out paper dolls, but unlike the dolls never coming to an end. When we say, ‘I have been here before,’ perhaps we mean, ‘I am here now,’ but in another life, another time, doing something else. Our lives could be stacked together like plates on a waiter’s hand. Only the top one is showing, but the rest are there and by mistake we discover them.
Sexing the Cherry, Jeanette Winterson
I imagined Mum running wild with her ponytail, perhaps clawing her way at a concert to get closer to Dad on stage. I never picture her as a free-spirited human being (or a groupie who jumps around at a concert). In my mind she was timid and sad right after she was born. I noticed she forgot to breathe at times, she was the epitome of absence. It’s hard to imagine her being beautifully present. Even to this day I couldn’t for the love of god see the very thing that made Father fell madly in love with her that he literally gave up for her his fame, and eventually, his life.
All languages that derive from Latin form the word “compassion” by combining the prefix meaning “with” (com-) and the root meaning “suffering” (Late Latin, passio). In other languages, Czech, Polish, German, and Swedish, for instance – this word is translated by a noun formed of an equivalent prefix combined with the word that means “feeling”.
In languages that derive from Latin, “compassion” means: we cannot look on coolly as others suffer; or, we sympathize with those who suffer. Another word with approximately the same meaning, “pity”, connotes a certain condescension towards the sufferer. “To take pity on a woman” means that we are better off than she, that we stoop to her level, lower ourselves.
That is why the word “compassion” generally inspires suspicion; it designates what is considered an inferior, second-rate sentiment that has little to do with love. To love someone out of compassion means not really to love.
To have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with other’s misfortune but also to feel with him any emotion -joy , anxiety, happiness, pain… there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can’t ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it’s already happened.
Life After God, Douglas Coupland
drips on honeydew holy water new
icy breeze colourful rainbow rain, rain on me
don’t bite the bliss on an empty stomach
but ignore ignore, red flags or compliance
so wobbly a place you barely stand
filled with cracks you’re bound for heartbreaks
here we are and here i am
you go be you, i’ll stay and pretend
a friend that is not till the end
a ship that is slowly sinking
quietly drift drift like the wind softly
gone and forgotten, i’ll be
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.
101 Sonnets, Pablo Neruda
It was after dinner. You were talking to me across the table about something or other, a greyhound you had seen that day or a song you liked,
and I was looking past you over your bare shoulder, at the three oranges lying on the kitchen counter next to the small electric bean grinder. which was also orange, and the orange and the white cruets, for vinegar oil,
all of which converged into a random still life, so fastened together by the hasp of color, and so fixed behind the animated foreground of your talking and smiling, gesturing and pouring wine, and the camber of your shoulder
that I could feel it being painted within me, brushed on the wall of my skull, while the tone of your voice lifted and fell in its flight, and the three oranges remained fixed on the counter the way stars are said to be fixed in the universe.
Then all the moments of the past began to line up behind that moment and all the moment to come assembled in front of it in a long row, giving me reason to believe that this was the moment that rush out of sight into darkness behind the eyes.
Even after I have forgotten what year it is, my middle name, and the meaning of money, I will still carry in my pocket the small coin of that moment minted in the kingdom that we pace through every day.
This Much I Do Remember, Billy Collins
