Avatar

Take Me Easy & Leave Me Light

@defense-mechanisms / defense-mechanisms.tumblr.com

Lorne Ryan | 25 | Toronto This is a house for my words and the things that inspire me. My biggest talent is spilling things out of my pockets while walking.
Posts
Avatar
reblogged
of-spaceandstars
Don’t you know I love you but am hopeless at fixing the rain?  But I am learning slowly to love the dark days,

Derek Walcott, from “Dark August,” Collected Poem, 1948-1984 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1986)

Avatar
reblogged
on-poetry
Avatar
florizels
She says:   I gave my tongue to love   and this makes it hard to speak

Adrienne Rich, Excerpt of Terza Rima from Later Poems: Selected and New 1971-2012  (via 7-weeks)

Avatar
reblogged
A man once told me that much of my writing was about loss, that that was how I imagined the world, and I thought about that comment for a long time. In that sense of loss two streams mingled. One was the historian’s yearning to hang onto everything, write everything down, to try to keep everything from slipping away, and the historian’s joy in retrieving out of archives and interviews what was almost forgotten, almost out of reach forever. But the other stream is the common experience that too many things are vanishing without replacement in our time. At any given moment the sun is setting someplace on earth, and another day is slipping away largely undocumented as people slide into dreams that will seldom be remembered when they awaken. Only the continuation of abundance makes loss sustainable, makes it natural. There are more sunrises coming, but even dreams could be emptied out.

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost   (via nemophilies)

#rebecca solnit#this book changed me
Avatar
reblogged
Avatar
defense-mechanisms
Our bodies move progressively Through time, vessels within which We cannot regress back To warming under the light Which can be seen before we exit our mother’s womb, Yet We witness that light Again. & again By crawling through Life’s exit wound Stage left. The ones who have come Back for us (if we are lucky) shrug shoulders & In prophetic displays Say, “I suppose it was the flicker Between this life & The next.” For a brief moment We are nothing, we take refuge In the gash of our absence & Make that nothingness a home. They say we do not get to choose When progression renews itself, Restores you. To have a choice would implicate Control. No, The light appears. Sight seeps in, A type of mother tongue, & then Your father is teaching you His language.

Lorne Ryan, Mother Tongue (via defense-mechanisms)

Avatar

You know, I don't quite think I'll ever measure up to my own goals or be who I want to be. I used to lay out all these great idealistic goals for myself and I don't see them coming any closer. They hang like carrots in front of the horse's face. But I am a mule and refuse to move. I'm exploring the roots of my jealousy. Of others, of those close to me, of mundane bullshit like the shape of someone else's body in comparison to my own. And I'm finding that both the seed and flower of jealousy's stem is empathetic in its nature. I'm not ashamed anymore to say I want things for myself that I see in others. Partly because I know what it's like to have had it, and partly because I can empathize with what having it must feel like. And I don't know... I let it lap at me like water & sometimes it erodes at the core of me. & Sometimes I am an echo chamber, murmuring those jealousies until they sound like a different language altogether. Either way I feel like I'm both growing and standing still.

#what
Avatar
reblogged
figmentalism-deactivated2018052
I am torn in two / but I will conquer myself. / I will dig up the pride. / I will take scissors and cut out the beggar. / I will take a crowbar and pry out the broken / pieces of God in me. / I will conquer them all and build a whole nation of God / in me — but united, / build a new soul, / dress it with skin / and then put on my shirt / and sing an anthem, / a song of myself.

Anne Sexton, from The Complete Poems: “The Civil War,” (via violentwavesofemotion)

Avatar
Our bodies move progressively Through time, vessels within which We cannot regress back To warming under the light Which can be seen before we exit our mother’s womb, Yet We witness that light Again. & again By crawling through Life’s exit wound Stage left. The ones who have come Back for us (if we are lucky) shrug shoulders & In prophetic displays Say, “I suppose it was the flicker Between this life & The next.” For a brief moment We are nothing, we take refuge In the gash of our absence & Make that nothingness a home. They say we do not get to choose When progression renews itself, Restores you. To have a choice would implicate Control. No, The light appears. Sight seeps in, A type of mother tongue, & then Your father is teaching you His language.

Lorne Ryan, Mother Tongue

#poetry#life#death#time#language#writing#father#mother#light#body#mine
Avatar
I will sleep again, for the third time This week Lying on the green light Emitting from the soporific screen. I will shut my eyes Only tight enough to forget the day Which is now splayed out Behind me Like some sex doll, Made up to look too fuckable. In it's packaged veneer, the day, Like the day before it Looked good enough to eat & now, in its inhabited dullness, It seems inedible, unlovable. I will sleep, and wake within My bed to wrinkled jersey sheets With no memory of how I hauled my body Inside of it.

Lorne Ryan, Saturday Evening Masturbation

#poetry#writing#sleep#television#bed#currently#an attempt#mine
Avatar
reblogged
Avatar
elvedon

When did my body stop being a body? I wanted to be the knife in every scenario. To collapse into myself and emerge as something unbearable.

#yeah
Avatar
reblogged
Avatar
defense-mechanisms
I want the half smoked Cigarettes, the tobacco rush From ten years past. The yellow glow of neon lit your face In the Chinese food place Down Spadina. Your teeth claimed Twelve reflections of me & I did not drink more than Was becoming of a gentleman this time. Still, I don’t remember inviting you Back to my apartment to talk above The thunder of the subway line. Waking up to sunlight felt good this time. It’s been less than thirty hours of it this month Except last night, when you managed to swallow That light and keep it whole inside of you. & do I recall something about dancing? Us, two average Joes kicking dust In the dark corner of the dive bar, Smoothing the sheets of our faces While the neon scattered everywhere.

Lorne Ryan, Two Joes Dancing Mid-January (via defense-mechanisms)

#poetry#writing#cigarette#light#neon#love#relationship#reblog
You are using an unsupported browser and things might not work as intended. Please make sure you're using the latest version of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge.