If You Forget Me

I want you to know

one thing. 

You know how this is: 

if I look 

at the crystal moon, at the red branch 

of the slow autumn at my window, 

if I touch 

near the fire 

the impalpable ash 

or the wrinkled body of the log, 

everything carries me to you, 

as if everything that exists, 

aromas, light, metals, 

were little boats 

that sail 

toward those isles of yours that wait for me. 

Well, now, 

if little by little you stop loving me 

I shall stop loving you little by little. 

If suddenly 

you forget me 

do not look for me, 

for I shall already have forgotten you. 

If you think it long and mad, 

the wind of banners 

that passes through my life, 

and you decide 

to leave me at the shore 

of the heart where I have roots, 

remember 

that on that day, 

at that hour, 

I shall lift my arms 

and my roots will set off 

to seek another land. 

But 

if each day, 

each hour, 

you feel that you are destined for me 

with implacable sweetness, 

if each day a flower 

climbs up to your lips to seek me, 

ah my love, ah my own, 

in me all that fire is repeated, 

in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten, 

my love feeds on your love, beloved, 

and as long as you live it will be in your arms 

without leaving mine.

~ Pablo Neruda

Comes the Dawn

After some time you learn the difference,

The subtle difference between holding a hand and chaining a soul.

And you learn that love doesn't mean leaning,

And company doesn't always mean security.

And you begin to learn that kisses aren't contracts,

And presents aren't promises.

And you begin to accept your defeats,

With your head up and your eyes ahead,

With the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child.

And you learn to build all your roads on today,

Because tomorrow’s ground is too uncertain for plans,

And futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight.

After a while you learn,

That even the sun burns if you get too much,

And learn that it doesn't matter how much you do care about,

Some people simply don’t care at all.

And you accept that it doesn't matter how good a person is,

She will hurt you once in a while,

And you need to forgive her for that.

You learn that talking can relieve emotional pain.

You discover that it takes several years to build a relationship based on confidence,

And just a few seconds to destroy it.

And that you can do something just in an instant,

And which you will regret for the rest of your life.

You learn that the true friendships,

Continue to grow even from miles away.

And that what matters isn't what you have in your life,

But who you have in your life.

And that good friends are the family,

Which allows us to choose.

You learn that we don’t have to switch our friends,

If we understand that friends can also change.

You realize that you are your best friend,

And that you can do do anything, or nothing,

And have good moments together.

You discover that the people who you most care about in your life,

Are taken from you so quickly,

So we must always leave the people who we care about with lovely words,

It may be the last time we see them.

You learn that the circumstances and the environment have influence upon us,

But we are responsible for ourselves.

You start to learn that you should not compare yourself with others,

But with the best you can be.

You discover that it takes a long time to become the person you wish to be,

And that the time is short.

You learn that it doesn't matter where you have reached,

But where you are going to.

But if you don’t know where you are going to,

Anywhere will do.

You learn that either you control your acts,

Or they shall control you.

And that to be flexible doesn't mean to be weak or not to have personality,

Because it doesn't matter how delicate and fragile the situation is,

There are always two sides.

You learn that heroes are those who did what was necessary to be done,

Facing the consequences.

You learn that patience demands a lot of practice.

You discover that sometimes,

The person who you most expect to be kicked by when you fall,

Is one of the few who will help you to stand up.

You learn that maturity has more to do with the kinds of experiences you had

And what you have learned from them,

Than how many birthdays you have celebrated.

You learn that there are more from your parents inside you than you thought.

You learn that we shall never tell a child that dreams are silly,

Very few things are so humiliating,

And it would be a tragedy if she believed in it.

You learn that when you are angry,

You have the right to be angry,

But this doesn't give you the right to be cruel.

You discover that only because someone doesn't love you the way you would like her to,

It doesn't mean that this person doesn't love you the most she can,

Because there are people who love us,

But just don’t know how to show or live that.

You learn that sometimes it isn't enough being forgiven by someone,

Sometimes you have to learn how to forgive yourself.

You learn that with the same harshness you judge,

Some day you will be condemned.

You learn that it doesn't matter in how many pieces your heart has been broken,

The world doesn't stop for you to fix it.

You learn that time isn't something you can turn back,

Therefore you must plant your own garden and decorate your own soul,

Instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.

And you learn that you really can endure.

You really are strong .

And you can go so farther than you thought you could go.

And that life really has a value.

And you have value within the life.

And that our gifts are betrayers,

And make us lose

The good we could conquer,

If it wasn't for the fear of trying.

~ Jose Luis Borges [translated by Veronica Shoffstall]

Enough

I am wearing dark glasses inside the house
To match my dark mood.

I have left all the sugar out of the pie.
My rage is a kind of domestic rage.

I learned it from my mother
Who learned it from her mother before her

And so on.
Surely the Greeks had a word for this.

Now surely the Germans do.
The more words a person knows

To describe her private sufferings
The more distantly she can perceive them.

I repeat the names of all the cities I’ve known
And watch an ant drag its crooked shadow home.

What does it mean to love the life we’ve been given?
To act well the part that’s been cast for us?

Wind. Light. Fire. Time.
 A train whistles through the far hills.

One day I plan to be riding it.

～　Suzanne Buffam

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