@palemoonswamp / palemoonswamp.tumblr.com
a ten used to be our gold standard —so I give you today: this place holder with decimal point;
a harrowed caw from large-mawed body of myriad-mirrored clouds to claim, from devourees, its own sky below: a bloody washout.
and oh! it comes and goes, like weather —haps and fades —but unpredictably so;
and when scouring light-bursts slice through the mire, heaven falling to mind while clouds steal away tears, I’m sure
there’ll be only puddles left deep enough to drown in.
It is by design we don’t recollect our dreams. Blissfully unaware of the mercy we give ourselves; ignorant to greener pastures.
Children of the morning sun flowing as waves upon an ocean seeking somewhere safe to land atop a world forever in motion Children of a springtime shower the story changes trading places asking for love and understanding trying to fill in their empty spaces Children on the edge of darkness pawns of life unwilling dancers ever tearful with fearful trepidation asking question with no answers Children of fading memories stolen with their innocence pay the cost until as strangers they surrender never to recapture what was lost
My bedroom is a cinema and on the dresser sits the screen, powered by a candle. In 3D I am reliving scenes from last night’s gathering; pause, rewind, and play. Your eyes, they locked with mine, pause, rewind, and play.
Eyes without pretenses, void of hidden thoughts. They were open to take in and willing to put out.
Dont listen to that loser and keep writing ^^
That's so kind to say, thanks! 😊
Do not complain to the majority, If you expect for something specific to become the only priority.
Who gave you authority to take, Asking for every male’s benefits with no drawbacks is a mistake.
Allow me to relate the methods, When you demand stability why assume results in the decrepit?
It’s just subjective in your mind, But placing trust with the wrong places grants little hope to find.
Being blind cannot be a choice, The one whom loses is yourself when you cater to fragile boys.
They rejoice with support given, Having their way then leaving you to be broken by the decision.
You will forgive them in the end, Suggesting guys need education or a better upbringing instead.
Here is a thread of what I know, Pairing vague affection with streamlined flattery is just for show.
Though we are not all the same, Offer no trade for a man’s attention and stop playing their game.
Samurai X - Trust and Betrayal. 2011 I did this before the whole cast announcement. Only Kenshin was introduced at that time. (=
With gentle fingers the Sun pries loose winter’s hold - my heart beats faster.
stop writing.
Pffffft.
Never.Well, maybe periodically.
Hahaha you're shit sucks so much
Dunno if this is old or new, but if you have any tips that could help me improve that’d be welcome...
I avoid the eyes of the poreclain angel - tirelessly she observes the scenes below, as I reach for another cane
and snap it in two. Even without descending she knows I’m eating large colorless voids into the praised child’s celebration
then attempting to lick my sticky fingers clean - sorrily failing.
Field Mice
We have given you the best of our attentions through spring summer and fall now the nights are turning colder and we must sleep the long sleep of winter
tread softly in your cellars close garage doors on windy days in attics at Christmas move your boxes of old things with care for we huddle in nests dreaming of days when the sun will warm our whiskers and tails and we can wake and pretend we are still young again.
There isn’t a shovel sharp enough.
With that comes a soft, warm revelation that digging makes things dirtier instead of cleaner.
God dammit, how do you dig a black hole?
How do you scrape walls that are nothing?
It’s like sending a rake through the fog.
I bury instead the shovel.
Keep it hidden, I say.
While in graduate school at the University of Houston, I supplemented my income by working as a writer in residence for Writers in the Schools (WITS). I was with WITS for three years, during which I visited third, fourth, and fifth grade classrooms, and worked with groups of students visiting the Menil museum of art, the Houston Historical Society, and the Houston Arboretum.
When first hired by WITS, I expected that working to explain some of my favorite poems to fourth graders would result in me becoming a better teacher of poetry. What I wasn’t expecting was that (thanks to having my brain blown apart on a weekly basis as I browsed my students’ folders of barely legible poems) I would become a better poet.
Here are some lines written by students in grades 3rd-6th:
“The life of my heart is crimson.”
[Writing about a family member’s recent death:]
“My brother went down/ to the river and put dirt on.”
“Peace be a song, silver pool of sadness”
“Away went a dull winter wind that rocked harshly, and bent you said, ‘Father, father’.”
[Writing about a terminal illness:]
“I am feeling burdened and I taste milk…… I mumble, ‘Please, please run away.’ But it lives where I live.”
“The owls of midnight hoot like me shutting the door to nothing.”
[Writing about life as a movie:]
“The choir enters, and the director screams ‘Sing with more terror!!!’”
“I have provisions. Binary muffins. It’s an in/out/in/out kind of universe. We cannot help you, this is a universe factory. A sound of rolling symbols. Disappearing rocks, screams of lizards. Sanity must prevail. Save vs. Do Not.”
“I, the star god, take bones from the underworlds of past times to create mankind.”
These young writers are addressing subjects that still obsess poets fifty years older: sadness, death, love, responsibility, aging, family, loneliness, and refuge…and they are addressing these subjects in language that is new, and thus has the power to emotionally effect a well-seasoned (/jaded) reader. The average fourth grader is able to do this because she hasn’t been alive long enough to know how to do it (and by “it” I mean talk about the world) any other way.
Story time: When I was a child I believed that one day I might be allowed to cross into an alternate dimension by walking through a quilt hanging on my living room wall. As I got older I stopped believing that this was a possibility—not because I grew to believe that the universe was not an extremely strange place where incomprehensible things could happen on a daily basis, but because I passed year after year after year not being able to enter the spirit realm through a wallhanging.
Anecdote that I hope you’ll find relevant: When Jean Piaget began studying the intellectual processes of children, he was not doing so because he had any special interest in children. Piaget was interested, rather, in the intellectual processes of (adult) humans and was seeking a control group. [His first thought was that the best control group would be comprised of martians but, as he did not have access to martians, he decided to use children since children possessed what is farthest from human consciousness.]
So let’s look at what happens to our young writers as they age [I took these lines from poems written by middle-school/ high school students (Italics, mine)]:
Snacking on this and that my friends and I keep the party going even when it is over”
“Whispers of a secret crush being unraveled”
“I’m trapped in this hole that I can’t break through”
“Barack Obama in the White House. I can feel the inspiration Can you feel it?”
“Now I feel secure with my head held high.
Sad times. By middle school/high school, the average student has learned how normal people talk. The resulting language is underwhelming and predictable—the safe regurgitations of a thoroughly socialized consciousness.
While the average older student’s poems are heavy with allegiance to a limited view of reality, the average younger writer’s vision of the world is nimble and surprising—bazaar, yet true.
Last year I spent every Saturday tutoring an extremely undersocialized kid in vocab. When I taught her the word blandishments (“to flatter, coax, sweet-talk, appeal to”) she wrote this sentence: “The blandishments of the sugar flowers made the cake so much more inviting.”
The sentence is interesting because the student understood that a blandishment is something that attracts favorable attention without fully realizing that people almost always use the word to refer to a human action.
The poet’s job is to forget how people do it.
(source)
Never has such a short line of text completely broken my heart like “my brother went down to the river / and put dirt on”
LEARN TO UNLEARN
470 words (4400, total) on Devil’s Gate, a short story I’m going to finish tomorrow.
The big challenge today, so I could get past this step where I hate it and hate myself and hate the whole idea, was forcing the main character to tell me what his primary conflict was, and why he cared about The Thing. So I had him ask a character who wants something from him, and we found out, together, what was making me hate this thing. Now that the question is answered, I can finish the draft.
