Do Not Make Things Too Easy

Do not make things too easy.
There are rocks and abysses in the mind
As well as meadows.
There are things knotty and hard: intractable.
Do not talk to me of love and understanding.
I am sick of blandishments.
I want the rock to be met by a rock.
If I am vile, and behave hideously,
Do not tell me it was just a misunderstanding.

~ Martha Baird

You know what? Who cares what normal is, Simone? Let's protest. From now on we're the anti-normal, anti-average, anti-standard. You can eat when you want to, I'll wear what I want, and we'll die with a bag of chips in our hand a tablecloth on our head.

Amal, Does My Head Look Big In This? ~ Randa Abdel-Fattah

All This And Heaven Too

And the heart is hard to translate,

It has a language of its own,

It talks and tongues and quiet sighs and prayers and proclamations,

In the grand days of great men and the smallest of gestures,

In short shallow gasps!

But with all my education,

I can’t seem to commend it,

And the words are all escaping me,

And coming back all damaged,

And I would put them back in poetry,

If I only knew how,

I can’t seem to understand it,

And I would give all this and heaven too,

I would give it all if only for a moment

That I could just understand the meaning of the word, you see,

‘Cause I’ve been scrawling it forever,

But it never makes sense to me at all.

And it talks to me in tiptoes,

And sings to me inside,

It cries out in the darkest night,

And breaks in morning light.

But with all my education,

I can’t seem to commend it,

And the words are all escaping me,

And coming back all damaged,

And I would put them back in poetry,

If I only knew how,

I can’t seem to understand it,

And I would give all this and heaven too,

I would give it all if only for a moment

That I could just understand the meaning of the word, you see,

‘Cause I’ve been scrawling it forever,

But it never makes sense to me at all.

And I would give all this and heaven too,

I would give it all if only for a moment,

That I could just understand the meaning of the word you see,

‘Cause I’ve been scrawling it forever,

But it never makes sense to me at all.

No words are a language,

It doesn’t deserve such treatment,

And all my stumbling phrases,

Never amounted to anything worth this feeling,

All this heaven,

Never could describe such a feeling as I’m having,

Words were never so useful,

So I was screaming out a language that I never knew existed before

~Florence and The Machine

There are a great many strange things in the world...
But no matter how odd...
How incredible something may be...
If a human does not touch it...
If a human does not see it...
If a human is not involved with it...
It is simply something that happened.
Simply a matter that will fade with time.

Humans.
Mankind.
Homo sapiens.

Humans are the most profoundly mysterious living things in the world!

Opening lines, xxxHoLic ~ CLAMP

"I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with the roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frost-work, but the solidest thing we know."

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

The employment adviser exchanged his professional calm for unprofessional exasperation. "There must be something you can do, Doctor," he said, "a man of your educational background. The war hasn't made savages out of all of us. If anything, the desire for teachers has increased a thousand times since A-day."

Dr. Meigham leaned back in the chair and sighed. "You don't understand. I am not a teacher in the ordinary sense; there is no longer a demand for the subject I know best. Yes, people want knowledge; they want to know how to deal with this shattered world they inherited. They want to know how to be masons and technicians and construction men. They want to know how to put the cities together, and make the machines work again, and patch up the radiation burns and the broken bones. They want to know how to make artificial limbs for the bomb victims, how to train the blind to be self-sufficient, the madmen to reason again, the deformed to be presentable once more. These are the things they wish to be taught. You know that better than I."

After ~ Henry Slesar (The Giant Book of Science Fiction Stories)

Late Night

Late night and rain wakes me, a downpour,
wind thrashing in the leaves, huge
ears, huge feathers,
like some chased animal, a giant
dog or wild boar. Thunder & shivering
windows; from the tin roof
the rush of water.

I lie askew under the net,
Tangled in damp cloth, salt in my hair.
When this clears there will be fireflies
& stars, brighter than anywhere,
which I could contemplate at times
of panic. Lightyears, think of it.

Screw poetry, it’s you I want,
your taste, rain
on you, mouth on your skin.

~ Margaret Atwood

Cynical old boilers who have forgotten first love like to sneer at sublimated passion. It's so unfashionable nowadays to suffer desire and to do absolutely nothing about it. First love is expected to be a series sexual complications and condoms.

Cinderella's Sister ~ Anne Dunlop

Boats and Birds

If you be my star

I'll be your sky

You can hide underneath me

And come out at night

When I turn jet black

And you show off your light

I live to let you shine

I live to let you shine

But you can skyrocket away from me

And never come back if you find another galaxy

Far from here with more room to fly

Just leave me your stardust to remember you by

If you be my boat

I'll be your sea

A depth of pure blue

Just to probe curiosity

Ebbing and flowing

And pushed by a breeze

I live to make you free

I live to make you free

but you can set sail to the west if you want to

And past the horizon till I can't even see you

Far from here where the beaches are wide

Just leave me your wake to remember you by

If you be my star

I'll be your sky

You can hide underneath me

And come out at night

When I turn jet black

And you show off your light

I live to let you shine

I live to let you shine

But you can skyrocket away from me

And never come back if you find another galaxy

Far from here with more room to fly

Just leave me your stardust to remember you by

Stardust to remember you by

~Gregory And The Hawk

Rose Walker: Have you ever been in love?
Desire: You might say that.
Rose Walker: Horrible isn't it?
Desire: In what way?
Rose Walker: It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.
You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...
You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore.
Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart.
Desire: How picturesque.
Rose Walker: It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain.
Nothing should be able to do that.
Especially not love.
I hate love.

The Kindly Ones, The Sandman ~ Neil Gaiman

I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.

The Kindly Ones, The Sandman ~ Neil Gaiman

Submission

Always a new temptation, I am desire
Always in moderation, if it's a hunger from the heart
Trying to keep it all out of sight and mind
Out of sight and mind, trying to work a reason why, I don't recognize myself

The less you expect from me, the less you get
Every test you give me the more I can remedy myself
I can't keep giving into mistakes I've made
The mistakes I've made
I can't keep living life left behind, I don't recognize myself

Always a new temptation and no one hears me now
Always in moderation, if it's a hunger from the heart
Trying to keep it all out of sight and mind
Out of sight and mind
Trying to work a reason why, I don't recognize myself

I don't recognize myself
Are you now are you now are you now?

~ Delphic

Tallahassee

Window facing an ill-kept front yard
Plums on the tree heavy with nectar
Prayers to summon the destroying angel
Moon stuttering in the sky like film stuck in a projector
And you
You

Twin prop airplanes passing loudly overhead
Road to the airport two lanes clear
Half the whole town gone for the summer
Terrible silence coming down here
And you
You

There is no deadline
There is no schedule
There is no plan we can fall back on
The road this far can't be retraced
There is no punch line anybody can tack on
There are loose ends by the score
What did I come down here for?
You
You

~ The Mountain Goats

風の街へ

Kaze no Machi e
(To wind's town)

Kanji

時の向こう　風の街へ
ねえ、連れて行って
白い花の夢かなえて

甘い指でこの手をとり
ねえ、遠い道を
導いて欲しいの
貴方の側へ

その歌声絶えない昼下がり
目覚めて二人は一つになり
幸せの意味を始めて知るのでしょう
連れて行って…

その歌声切なく高らかに
全ての心に響くのでしょう
幸せの意味を知らずに眠る夜に…

まだ知らない夢の向こう
ねえ、遠い道を
二人で行けるわ
風の街へ

Beyond time, to wind's town
Ne, take me away
Grant the white flower's dream

With gentle fingers, take this hand
Ne, through the distant path
I want you to show me the way
To your side

That singing voice never ceases, in the early afternoon
Waking up, two people become one
The meaning of happiness, will be known for the first time
Take me away...

That singing voice, heartrendingly deep
Surely will echo in all hearts
Of nights sleeping with the meaning of happiness unknown...

Beyond the yet unknown dream
Ne, through the distant path
The two of us can go
To wind's town

~ FictionJunction KEIKO

In this world
love has no color
yet how deeply
my body
is stained by yours

Shikibu Izumi ~ Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan