Celestial Coeurs🔮

People are always telling me I’m tough. Maybe because I’ve survived so much. Inside, I feel like cooked broccoli, and I don’t mean the stalks which should be crisp and tasty. I mean the heads that fall apart when you cut them.

I'm sitting here just crying because it's so hopeless to ever expect you to be otherwise. Don't make empty gestures. I want plain things, warm things. Above all, I'm sad, because it is always the same. Everything hopelessly the same. And rebellion. And a desire to run away from it all to some real human love.

I want you desperately. I want your strength and your softness, your hands, all of you. I want you, from me, to have the experience of being loved.

One day you’ll have whatever it is you’re now so confusedly seeking. That kind of calm that comes from knowing oneself and others. But you can’t rush the arrival of that state of mind. There are things you only learn when no one teaches them. And that’s how it is with life. There’s even more beauty in discovering it for yourself, in spite of the suffering.

So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.