Photo reblogged from A CLOCK WITHOUT HANDS with 34 notes
My favorite part of sending letters or packages is certainly the final stage (or beginning, depending on how you look at it): the wrapping of gifts in special paper, tying it up with string, the brilliant use of tape (rendered invisible). This could also be seen as the first stage, since it requires one to hunt and gather for bits and bobbins like string, embroidery paper, lace, handkerchiefs, and antique postcards and photographs. Letter writing allows one to indulge more in ritual: the careful selection of stationary (which may speak for one’s personal taste and character, or for the consideration of the correspondent), the process of applying a wax seal, and fountain pen ink that smudges easily on paper or at least stains the writer’s hands.
While snail mail may have its shortcomings, the benefits of having a mailbox stuffed with postcards and letters from dear friends makes up for the fear that my life could abruptly end like George Costanza’s betrothed, Susan Ross, at the mere contact between envelope and tongue.
Photo reblogged from in the ocean washing off my name from your throat with 148 notes
you have to decide
Text reblogged from bookshelf archaeology
The Experiment - Idra Novey
We all sensed we were in it, but didn’t know
who would fund this long a study, what the premise
behind it could be.
I suspected it was about ethics,
but the next week seemed as much as a test
in coping - the artistry of partial views. But if so,
who’d been scripted
as the control group?
Was it us, wilted for all to see in the humid city
like so many tulips crushed into a pewter vase -
or was it others,
in the suburbs, who kept
to their cars and tended to despair apart, in private,
where no one would suspect them of sorrow
until they’d already moved on?
The study continues:
the keeping of museums, of dictionaries,
with our best words - a wild faith that someone
will want to see
what we have made.
Text
all answers to the same question by charles jensen
1. The Union Negotiator
I have a deal for you:
tonight when I sleep I’ll think of you.
Of red rocks, of bull pens and spurs,
Kansas Turnpike, of Missouri,
how you’ll meet me there,
a continental divide, the places where two ends meet.
My legs will make a circle around you, your waist;
my lips will have secrets to slip over yours like a paper bag.
2. The Cartographer
I am land-locked. I am Paraguay at sunset, something swallowing
the sun beyond banana trees. I heard it once drop like a bomb
into clay; no one made a sound while the echo had its way
with ears across a jungle. I am land-locked here.
There are roads out in all directions; veins, but no seaways.
I will find you in water,
I will be the way you breathe.
3. The Neurologist
How you connect these gaps between cities:
electrical charges, phone lines. I am with you in an instant
and back again, the other side of a world, a coin.
A pulse felt in fingers; you are alive, burrowed beneath folds
of flesh. The way flesh folds you inside,
the way the brain cuts corners at all costs.
4. The Performance Artist
A cup of tea
on a saucer
on the west edge of a round table.
You are the tea,
I am sipping you, I might be
the scone.
5. The Tailor
I wrapped parts of you around me for warmth
and it worked: your arm as a stole, the barrel of your chest
a place for my lips to hide, your legs as leather belt.
I drew chalk doodles on the bedsheets, you said, What for?
I said, I will stitch a knock-off from your sweat.
6. The Demolitionist
There is a moment between plunge and blast, where I live,
these seconds. Where there is perfect and quiet calm,
an exhale and a resignation, I will crumble.
This wreckage is a series of broken bricks;
remember what it was, that moment:
the world pressing in. I am a window on the fourteenth floor,
I see where the city ends, the roads failing into dust.
7. The Palm Reader
Your hand sliding down my back knows omens
when it sees them. The patterns change, but all these lines
were once people the way you and I were once people.
This compass its own rose, all directions lead back to the center,
back to your cheek, your earlobe. This palm
knows your face, where it belongs: resting there.
Text reblogged from oh, lover.
I miss you in an unquantifiable way, like how someone would miss a concept, ideal, memory, void. Is it possible to miss something that you never had? Just as love is virtually negligible if never felt or known by its recipient, it’s immaterial that I might love you. And yet, I don’t allow myself to crave you. My timidity, my inferiority complex, my shame, prevent me from voicing this missing above a mere whisper. I can only muster these tentative, amorphous insinuations, buried under layers of periphrastic language, fundamentally defensive. It’s hard to be resigned to the inevitability of you fading, all the while scanning the hallways, stairwells, libraries, streets – hoping to merely catch a glimpse of you again. Anything to sustain me, to have your presence newly felt. That you’re here, that you’re real and tangible and still beautiful, still everything I both long to but wouldn’t dare touch, to even glance upon for a second too long.
(via motels)
Page 1 of 7
