from How To Save Your Own Life

Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it… It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk everything, you risk even more.

- Erica Jong

vacation. here.

Hold your head high …

Hold your head high, heavy heart. I know it’s harder some days and the new year is the time to make a change, to prioritize your ambition, the romantic, the neglected art. If you feel critiqued incessantly, you begin to forget who you are. People, including us at times, who are preoccupied with criticism, have no room to be original or to produce anything. They’re just reiterating the lines that keep us in convenient, digestible boxes. You are cage-less, boundless, without limit, darling. Keep your heart free, no matter the times it is lost.

Those Of Us Who Think We Know

Those of us who think we know
the same secrets
are silent together most of the time,
for us there is eloquence
in desire, and for a while
when in love and exhausted
it’s enough to nod like shy horses
and come together
in a quiet ceremony of tongues.

It’s in disappointment we look for words
to convince us
the spaces between stars are nothing
to worry about;
it’s when those secrets burst
in that emptiness between our hearts
and the lumps in our throats.
And the words we find
are always insufficient, like love,
though they are often lovely
and all we have.

- Stephen Dunn

Westerburg

Aaron Allen Westerburg

Going out

Transition in Rose

When you’ve been …

When you’ve been to hell and back, when you know what that tastes like, this world feels so good now.

You can see those souls by the mark in their look, their pause before judgement, and their delectation for what the rest of us ignore.

When you meet these people, do not let them go. Surround yourself with them, ask questions, take pleasure in theirs.

Forgiveness …

Forgiveness, I finally decide, is not a form of amnesia, nor is it a form of madness as Derrida claims. For the one who forgives, it is simply a death, a dying down in the heart, the position of the already dead. It is in the end the living through, the understanding that this has happened, is happening, happens. Period. It is a feeling of nothingness that cannot be communicated to another, an absence, a bottomless vacancy held by the living, beyond all that is hated or loved.

- Claudia Rankine

–}

Letter Number One

23 February 1969

Dear Shep,

You lightning flash in my life, illuminating for a moment at least
everything,
this is a letter I can never send.
You are a man I may never see again in my life.
The tent you live in is soft,
touches my cheek
with sun
in winter.
You gave me nothing
except hope
and that is everything.
my life now
an iron sheet
a thick wooden lid
a heavy curtain
Rationality
gets one through life,
makes him a superior man (or woman),
allows him to meet the world on its own terms,
gives him many friends,
makes him live his life with commitment and honor
but it does not nourish him emotionally.
His wives leave him.
His lovers betray him.
He lives sanely and honestly
and the world heaves its irrational sighs
and bumps drunkenly against him.
I am a rational woman;
at the mercy of men who do not know how to love
but take what they want when they see it
and abandon it when it is inconvenient to hold,
heavy,
You could not carry me;
I was too heavy.
But I can’t blame you;
no one else seems to be able to either.
I carry myself so well;
this pond makes me wonder
an image of a nature writer bashing frogs on the head, until there
were 40 of them dead, to make his supper;
where are you
anyone
when I need you?
Shep, you came closer to understanding than anyone.
How little like George Washington you are.
But you too live without the knowledge of the desert.
I am the only one who can find water there,
lifting a leaf
I can find dew.
No one else sees it; this night/ this lonely night
It is my life.
my self-sufficient
lonely
life.

- Diane Wakoski

has it always been like this? generation after generation of lonely, hopeful women?

The greatest battle …

The greatest battle is not physical but psychological. The demons telling us to give up when we push ourselves to the limit, cannot be silenced for good. They must always be answered by the dignity that simply refuses to give in: Courage. We all suffer. Keep going.

- Graeme Fife