Goblin Hole

In the first poetry workshop I ever took my professor said we could write about anything we wanted except for two things: our grandparents and our dogs. She said she had never read a good poem about a dog. I could only remember ever reading one poem about a dog before that point—a poem by Pablo Neruda, from which I only remembered the lines “We walked together on the shores of the sea/ In the lonely winter of Isla Negra.” Four years later I wrote a poem about how when I was a little girl I secretly baptized my dog in the bathtub because I was afraid she wouldn’t get into heaven. “Is this a good poem?” I wondered. The second poetry workshop, our professor made us put a bird in each one of our poems. I thought this was unbelievably stupid. This professor also hated when we wrote about hearts, she said no poet had ever written a good poem in which they mentioned a heart. I started collecting poems about hearts, first to spite her, but then because it became a habit I couldn’t break. The workshop after that, our professor would tell us the same story over and over about how his son had died during a blizzard. He would cry in front of us. He never told us we couldn’t write about anything, but I wrote a lot of poems about snow. At the end of the year he called me into his office and said, “looking at you, one wouldn’t think you’d be a very good writer” and I could feel all the pity inside of me curdling like milk. The fourth poetry workshop I ever took my professor made it clear that poets should not try to engage with popular culture. I noticed that the only poets he assigned were men. I wrote a poem about that scene in Grease 2 where a boy takes his girlfriend to a fallout shelter and tries to get her to have sex with him by tricking her into believing that nuclear war had begun. It was the first poem I ever published. The fifth poetry workshop I ever took our professor railed against the word blood. She thought that no poem should ever have the word “blood” in it, they were bloody enough already. She returned a draft of my poem with the word blood crossed out so hard the paper had torn. When I started teaching poetry workshops I promised myself I would never give my students any rules about what could or couldn’t be in their poems. They all wrote about basketball. I used to tally these poems when I’d go through the stack I had collected at the end of each class. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 poems about basketball. This was Indiana. Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore. I told the class, “for the next assignment no one can write about basketball, please for the love of god choose another topic. Challenge yourselves.” Next time I collected their poems there was one student who had turned in another poem about basketball. I don’t know if he had been absent on the day I told them to choose another topic or if he had just done it to spite me. It’s the only student poem I can still really remember. At the time I wrote down the last lines of that poem in a notebook. “He threw the basketball and it came towards me like the sun”

God I love poetry. I love poets.

you were born in 2006? what are you? a Honda Civic?

can i fucking help you?

I sure hope so, I need to get to 3rd and Broadway in fifteen minutes, step on it.

lava perfec t temp for put bbomb in! inside very Safe and Warm eels swim happily put bomb in Lava Pond. Put Bomb In Lava Pond. no problems ever bomb in lavva because good Temp andviscosity for hard shell safe of bomb fuse. Alava Pond yes a place for a bomb put bomb in laava pond can trust pond for giveing good safe to bomb. friend eels

"red-pill" "snowflake" everything about v for vendetta...fascists really do love to steal and bastardize culture from the queer people they are trying to destroy

always remember gay men are the reason we dont have to pay for public bathrooms in canada

WAIT HUH??? IM CANADIAN????? WHY HAVE I NEVER HEARS ABOUT THIS UNTIL NOW??????

two gay men got arrested for fucking in a public bathroom but they argued since you had to pay for it it was a hotel and it was fine. their defence worked and we dont have to pay for bathrooms anymore

thats because i lied about this

A top tier post, no notes.

FUCCKKKK NOOO FUCK FUCK FUCK

evangelicals being like "god made men to do This and be like This and women to do That and be like That that's just how it is" and it's just a picture of a white man and woman following traditional gender norms makes me so insane like you boring fascist fucks. god made 2 million species of beetles. god made whales, ducks, humans, and 1500 other species capable of same sex behavior. god made fish and amphibians that change sexes. god made more than 30 different intersex variations in human beings. god, in his infinite curiosity. wake up!!! fuck!!

"god wants women to have perfect no-makeup makeup looks and stay at home not talking back and upholding capitalism" god??? that guy who made lizards that shoot blood out of their eyes?? that guy who made salmon do whatever the fuck that is?? are you fucking crazy???

If a god exists, they are infinitely cooler than anything conservatives can think up.

I wish the world worked like it did in the stardew valley universe. If I'm strapped for cash I should be able to go grab some blackberries off the nearest roadside bush and go sell them to a grocery store for a quick ten bucks. I should be able to think "huh I wanna go talk to the wizard today" and then I go talk to the wizard in his wizard tower

@moonfox-mumbles

Me when I got to like episode 60 the first time around and didn’t remember Jack shit about who was who