Thoughts on pining.

Well, nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love. Loving someone who used to love you can be the saddest thing in the world.


 If we must part forever,

Give me but one kind word to think upon,
And please myself with, while my heart's breaking.

With what a deep devotedness of woe
I wept thy absence - o'er and o'er again
Thinking of thee, still thee, till thought grew pain,
And memory, like a drop that, night and day,
Falls cold and ceaseless, wore my heart away!

- Thomas Otway


And then this happens, which is also sad:

I thought when love for you died, I should die.
It's dead.  Alone, most strangely, I live on.  


It's a process.

Love Be Brave

In a world you can get lost in

I find my way to him

I am purpose and regret

You're a feeling I'll forget

What will I do then?

How did I sleep at night

With you far from my side?

Hold me darling, make no sound

Silence speaks for me

Love be brave

No one will say it but you

And that has not yet been

The easy thing for you to do

How does he make love seem sweet

Isn't that some heavy feat

Do the birds suffer so

Do they sing because they know

This life don't go slow

Love be brave

No one will save you but me

And that has not yet been

The safest place for you to be

What will I do then?

Here comes a change over me

Something strange takes over me

I am brave and love is sweet

And silence speaks for him and me

- Laura Marling

Ballad

 

forgive me if i laugh you are so sure of love you are so young and i too old to learn of love. the rain exploding in the air is love the grass excreting her green wax is love and stones remembering past steps is love, but you. you are too young for love and i too old. once. what does it matter when or who, i knew of love. i fixed my body under his and went to sleep in love all trace of me was wiped away forgive me if i smile young heiress of a naked dream you are so young and i too old to learn of love. - Sonia Sanchez

Tonight I Can Write (The Saddest Lines)

 Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, 'The night is starry and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.


- Pablo Neruda

How Calmly Does The Olive Branch

How calmly does the olive branch

Observe the sky begin to blanch
Without a cry, without a prayer
With no betrayal of despair

Some time while light obscures the tree
The zenith of its life will be
Gone past forever
And from thence
A second history will commence

A chronicle no longer gold
A bargaining with mist and mold
And finally the broken stem
The plummeting to earth, and then

An intercourse not well designed
For beings of a golden kind
Whose native green must arch above
The earth’s obscene corrupting love

And still the ripe fruit and the branch
Observe the sky begin to blanch
Without a cry, without a prayer
With no betrayal of despair

Oh courage! Could you not as well
Select a second place to dwell
Not only in that golden tree
But in the frightened heart of me?

- Tennessee Williams

Maybe I Need You

You stole an enormous icicle from a neighbors shingle

And gave it to me as a gift.

I kept it in my freezer for seven months,

Until the day I hurt my foot,

I needed something to reduce the swelling.

Love, isn't always magic.

Sometimes its just... melting.

Or its black and blue,

Where it hurts the most.

Last night I saw your ghost

Pedaling a bicycle with a basket

Towards a moon as full as my heavy head,

And I wanted nothing more, than to be sitting in that basket,

Like ET, with my glowing heart glowing right through my chest

and my glowing finger pointing in the direction of our home.

Two years ago I said, I never want to write our break up poem.

You built me a time capsule full of big league chew

And promised to never burst my bubble.

I loved you, from our first date, at the batting cages

When I missed twenty-three balls in a row

And you looked at me

Like I was a home run in the ninth inning of the world series.

Now every time I hear the word love I think going, going,

The first week you were gone,

I kept seeing your hand wave goodbye

Like a windshield wiper in a flooding car

In the last real moment I believed the hurricane would let me out alive.

Yesterday, I carved your name into the surface of an ice cube

Then held it against my heart 'til it melted into my aching pores,

Today, I cried so hard the neighbors knocked on my door

And asked if I wanted to borrow some sugar.

I told them I left my sweet tooth in your belly button.

Love isn't always magic.

But if I offered my life to the magician,

If I told her to cut me in half,

So tonight I could come to you whole,

And ask for you back,

Would you listen?

For this dark alley love song,

For the winter we heated our home from the steam off our own bodies

I wrote too many poems in a language I did not yet know how to speak.

But I know now it doesn't matter how well I say grace,

If I am sitting at a table where I am offering no bread to eat.

So this is my wheat field.

You can have every acre, love.

This is my garden song.

This is my fist fight,

With that bitter frost.

Tonight I begged another stage light to become that back alley street lamp that we danced beneath,

The night your warm mouth fell on my timid cheek,

As I sang maybe I need you,

Off key,

But in tune.

Maybe I need you the way that big moon needs that open sea,

Maybe L didn't even know I was here, 'til I saw you holding me.

Give me one room to come home to.

Give me the palm of your hand,

Every strand of my hair is a kite string,

And I have been blue in the face with your sky,

Crying a flood over Iowa, so you mother will wake to Venice.

Lover, I smashed my glass slipper to build a stained glass window for every wall inside my chest.

Now my heart is a pressed flower in a tattered bible.

It is the one verse you can trust.

So I'm putting all of my words in the collection plate.

I am setting the table with bread and grace.

My knees are bent,

Like the corner of a page.

I am saving your place.

(Kim Taylor)

Maybe I need you,

Here in this world on fire.

Everything moving,

Everyone always tired.

Everything changing,

But nothing has changed, here.

Maybe I need you...

- Andrea Gibson

How It Ends

It has been … years

… months

And … days

Since the first time I saw you naked

Since the night you ripped off your shirt

Stuck your boobs in my face and said Touch them

I touched them like a diabetic third grader opening

a Snickers bar

You said

Hard

I thought, yes I am But you are so soft, I said,

Your lips, they’re like whale blubber

That wasn’t my best line

But it worked Tonight in the grocery store, I found one of your

hairs in my underwear

I pulled it out in the frozen food section and

screamed

THAT is so gorgeous, it could kill a man

Good thing I’m a leprechaun Lucky

Lucky Baby, I have no idea how this will end

Maybe the equator will fall like a hula hoop from

the earth’s hips

And our mouths will freeze mid-kiss on our 80th

anniversary

Or maybe tomorrow, my absolute insanity Combined with the absolute obstacle course of

your communication skills

Will leave us

Like a love letter

In a landfill

But whatever Whenever

However this ends,

I want you to know, that right now,

I love you forever

I love you for the hardest mile we walked together For the night I collected every sharp knife in the

house

And threw them one by one on the roof

Then told the sun,

Listen show off,

From now on, you are only to give me blades of grass;

Things that are growing and soft

‘Cause there’s this girl who says she wants to

float on her back

Through my bloodstream

And when she does, I want my rivers to reach the sea

D’you hear me, lover? Do you know, the night you told me you had a

crush on my ears,

I swore to never to become Van Gogh

And look, baby,

They are both still there

Just like my firefly heart is still right there in your glass jar

I never trusted anybody more to poke enough

holes in the lid So on the nights you sleep like a ballerina,

I try to snore like a piccolo

And I press my lips to your holy temples

And I say,

I crash into things in the dark

Even when the lights are on And I am wrong more often than I am writing

And even then, I am often wrong

But when my friends are in the bathroom at the

bar

Rolling dollar bills into telescopes,

Claiming they can see God, I will come to you

Holding my grandmother’s Bible,

I will press it to your chest

And I will bless it with your breath

And when you ask if I wanna roleplay Altar boys

fucking in the kitchen during Sunday Mass I will say,

Hell yes

But only if you leave a hickey on my ass

In the shape of Jesus’ palm

So I can be sure I got nailed

Down Lover,

You will never lose me to the wind

You are the lightning that made me fill my chest

with candles

You are the thunder clapping for the poem that

nobody else wants to hear You are an icicle’s tear watering a tulip on the first

day of spring

You melt me alive

You kiss me as deep as my roots will reach

And I want nothing more than to be an eyelash

fallen on your cheek Then being collected by your fingers

And held like a wish

I promise

That whatever I do

I will always try my best

To come true


- Andrea Gibson