sweet thursday ♕

Perhaps you will find in these travels a wholeness that eluded you—as men and women you were never free to register in your body whatever left a mark on your spirit.

Do you remember what you said to me once? That you could help me only by loving me? Well, you did love me for a moment; and it helped me. It has always helped me.

I love you. I love you, but I’m turning to my verses and my heart is closing like a fist.

I am the ocean; the earth; whatever dies for you.

I know by heart the salt and smoke elixir of your neck and fingers—

Sometimes, you just want something so hard you have to lie about it, so you can hold it in your mouth for a minute, how real hunger has a real taste.

in sleep and in sickness in drought and in doubt

“Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it every minute.”

I know that language goes hand in hand with an irritable melancholia.

Tell it over and over, the words get thick with unmeaning—yet never have we been closer to the truth of the lies we were living, listen to me: the faithfulness I can imagine would be a weed flowering in tar, a blue energy piercing the massed atoms of a bedrock disbelief.

“I am embroidered with love and grief”

What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged. It hurts, in the way that feelings do, and it also has physical consequences that take place invisibly, inside the closed compartments of the body. It advances, is what I’m trying to say, cold as ice and clear as glass, enclosing and engulfing.