Lord Grant Me The Serenity To Do My Laundry, The Courage To Do My Laundry, And The Wisdom To Do My Laundry

i exist, i exist, i exist

kačka chmelíková // holly warburton // ? // image from pinterest // letters to a young poet by rainer maria rilke

bathroom sink meditations, r.a.

emotional processing is so funny because sometimes you’ll be violently sobbing on your bedroom floor over something that happened 4 years ago and then you’ll just. get up and make coffee. and go to the grocery store. and take all this fundamental sadness for a walk. and ponder the cosmic experiences of humanity while eating a sandwich. and that’s healing.

it astounds me even until now how i can come to this blog and go with a piece of my soul back in place. i was wondering if you had any poems on 'ghosts' and their 'haunting' people and places, romantic or otherwise. there is a ghost, you see, and she haunts me even though i know her to be alive and well. i am unsure of which terrifies me more: her being in and out of my reach or my hope that i too am her ghost.

so these are not all poems, but:

“I think ghosts are memory—memory haunts bodies, haunts places, haunts the narratives that hold our minor and miraculous lives together. Ghosts are that which return and return and return. The body has its own hauntings, too: phantom limb sensation, organ transfer memory, the traumatic self. And others.”

— Shastra Deo, interviewed by Sumudu Samarawickrama in Liminal Mag 

— Valeria Luiselli, from Faces in the Crowd (tr. Christina MacSweeney)

— Janet Fitch, from White Oleander

“But the fall—the falling / of it / even after it’s done—”

— Jorie Graham, from Overlord: Poems; “Omaha (Lowest Tide, Coefficient 105, Full Moon)”

— Jessie Lynn McMains, To Be Haunted

— Dorothy Allison, from Boston, Massachusetts (The Women Who Hate Me, 1983)

“it’s not enough to look back at the past as at a thing / to shy from, this is not / nostalgia, you must look at it,”

— Carl Phillips, from Wild is the Wind: Poems; “Gently, Though, Gentle”

— Nikki Giovanni, from “[Untitled]”

— Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

— Adonis, from Selected Poems; “A Piece of Bahlul’s Sun” (tr. Khaled Mattawa)

—James Baldwin, from Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems; “Conundrum (on my birthday) (for Rico)”

Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947 - 1963

instagram: velvet_mysoul

“I am young, and, at last, life is not so dark and so painful. The sun shines, and the moon is calm.”

— Takuboku Ishikawa, from “Romaji Diary & Sad Toys,” published c. 1985

sorry I wasn’t in the mood to be a person today, sorry I forgot to keep a conversation, sorry my soul needs ironing. give me a moment, a day or a so. it’ll be good. I’ll brush my hair and change my clothes. I’ll laugh a lot. I’ll say important things. it’ll be good.

C.P. Cavafy, from The City (tr. by Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard)