Loneliness Sometimes Takes Strange Shapes I Suppose, There Is A Kind That The Fervently Wants Recorded

Miles of Rain

The days after school haven't met change

Since times seasons revolved round the sun

You still wait by the corner lane

And I walk up after the bells have rung.

We eat a mouthful of your smoke

And break off bits of corn to make cake

Before we slip into the deep red of the

Bell-cracked wine glass with a rake

On Wednesdays you say, my hair looks nice,

That's for the soap I needed to save till

The next month so we didn't run out of rice.

There is, you know, comfort in unwashed mill

And yet more softness in hands that are soiled

To the nails in lovers' mud and dust.

It is only the shortness of one arm that

Asks to be coupled to twos at first.

Still, your fingers are long enough

To meet both ends and still cup snow

For us to breathe in the iced snuff,

To keep awake among the rafters below

For a few moments more.

We laugh at eachother's smiles

Lie forgetting and run wilder than raccoons

In Philadelphian winters, though miles

Of shadow could never erase these monsoons.

Unless you make it so, these months

Don't hold weddings or coronations

Or those hourly bypasses to coffee haunts,

But as it is, the gaps are fit to ration.

It has always been the dry edge of monsoon

Since times the seasons revolved round the sun.

- pollosky-in-blue

The Flowers (Learning to Love Again)

The human effigy leaves my brain Unfazed these days.

I have detached my self From its very nature Seeking inner quietude; an escape From the ever gnawing.

So did I become passionless, Desireless; void Of corporeal aching; Mechanical in visual interpretations.

Muscles, tendons, fat, flesh Bone structures, imaginarily Dissected; Witnessed apathetic; Unsignified, their radiation electromagnetic Reflected on photoreceptors.

Eyes Fill not with wonder, Solely perceive functionalistically.

Yet the only tragedy here Is that I’m not allowed to forget The existence of my own effigy.

This vessel, Requiring maintenance, Demanding Its own existence So pressingly I cannot withstand.

Basic wants, and basic needs Will so lead to desire’s revival.

I await its corruption Uneager And fatalistic.

For now, I cherish This unadulterated predisposition As I am the world’s Witness.

I will love the flowers instead.

Experiencing the enrapturement Of true beauty In all its innocence.

— 11-5-2021, M.A. Tempels ©

Two days ago, I had gone up to the terrace to behold the sunset and breathe in some fresh air. I had always preferred the setting sun to the rising one, for soft dusk ensues after one while the other is succeeded by harsh daylight. Ah, for a world in which it is permanently twilight! The view from the place was one that might be seen from any building over two storeys high in the neighbourhood. It was rather the stark contrast of the sky at the opposite ends that piqued me. The east at sundown was a pale azure, almost unnatural in its monotonousness, disturbed only by a hazy sapphire mountain, whose original crude bareness was softened by the distance, imparting to it a hue reminiscent of the shade the sea is often associated with, but seldom found in. In the west meanwhile, the sun was letting afloat his final banners, on which seemed written all the wisdom of the mortal world, in a language nearer to me that the ones I had ever heard spoken or seen written, yet at the same time utterly incomprehensible. What is to be the use of poring over Greek and Latin if they don’t impart to me a knowledge of these transfixing scriptures? Here was a cloud whose ethereal inhabitants had borne the harsh rays of the sun all day and were now looking down with relief at his long awaited departure. What are you doing little one, so precariously perched at the edge? What are your irresponsible siblings thinking of? Have they gone to make arrangements for your moonlit revels? Ah, there comes your mother. She looks quite shocked. The chances of you wildly wandering in the gentle realms of cloudland soon again are not so high, are they? Look at your haze! One would think there was a storm approaching! How lonely your dwelling looks, a storm scud in the middle of pastel drifts! Another cloud, situated at a higher altitude than the previous one, part of it softly illuminated by the rays of the now setting sun was drifting by, as if determined to make the most of the sunlight by moving unhurriedly as possible. All this, coupled with the music of unconcernedly fluttering leaves, punctuated now and then by the sweet trill of some bird, with a mild breeze blowing in my face, made for a very pleasant evening spent in the company of two curious squirrels, and in the way most agreeable to me.

2022-06-18

Hydrangea

Canon EOS R3 + RF50mm f1.2L

Instagram  |  hwantastic79vivid

Queen of hearts, bows to the fools parade, insanity is a strange thing to take comfort in. ‘Mere blood and bone’ will lure you to depths of life/hell which human hand (only) must (only) touch. Vega of the lyre and bellatrix of the Orion in a dance of lights and life, bitterness sings a frayed melody to the hearthstone, listen to her woebegone voice in the soft refrain, fold away your letters and give away your life, for its not sadness but despair that requests it. Believe in phantoms, and one as old as yourself wants to touch your windows and watch its fragile hands pass through the glass. 

Nightfall, hushed and frozen stood the world on its tiptoes,

As the earth and sky together cajole to sleep the

little baby in the dark house, all lonesome and weeping,

Swaying on a broken cradle, has the house god

found a way to stop the sunrise yet? He watches the baby

rise and fall, the house empty and his heart emptier,

The creaks of a cradle fall on a headless ear,

The shrieks of the baby pierce through a stiller air,

The tree top will bend to the wind and

down will come baby, cradle and all.

White roses, it has always been white roses, with their inscrutable faces and slender thorns, the grotesque so beautifully encompassed in the lovely.

keep thinking about that richard siken interview where he's talking about simplifying the metaphor, by removing the "is" — and the moon, terrible. the distance between the object and the thing to which it is likened to falls away, it feels [it reads], smoother, unhindered by simplified vocabulary. and so, it becomes alive, breathing.

its the same way sally rooney has removed quotation marks, and her writing feels smoother from it, subtler, a more coherent story where there is no stepping in our out of characters. everything falls in line, the veil draws back: the distance between character/reader is removed and instead of having the feeling be cut up by speech marks – there is a greater intimacy. the boundary is gone. the feelings of the character no longer at a distance to yourself, the reader is immersed in the skin of the character. no longer a book away.

i see the same thing in the internets refusal to Capitalise. (realise how you just read that word differently? your internal tone of voice heightening at that C?) thats again, removing the distance [!], keeping a hold of that intimacy with the reader. cherishing that tender bond.

its interesting, because siken says he needs to rely on the reader to make the associative leap when the "is" is left out. the same is true for rooney, i think. the lack of quotation marks demands attention. with an unfocused an divided mind, the lack of speech marks can easily be more annoying than smooth, stopping the flow of which the text invites the reader into. the capitalization of words is a stop too, a poem with uneven syllables: an irregular heartbeat ruining the pulse of the rhythm.

comparative words, quotation marks, and capitalized words – they all stop the blood-flow of the text. disrupt the rhythm. cut the flow short. maybe im simply very sensitive to these things, maybe i think too much about literary devices, but i love this style of writing. this stripping down – this removal of boundary and convention. the moon, terrible [how incredible!!] more please <3