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

The Fourth Step

When the boy from all of the old poems Sends you a letter saying, “I’ve been clean for six months now, And it’s time to apologise for what my hands did back then,” Strangely, It will not feel like healing, Even if it is true, Even if this letter is the kindest thing this boy has done for you in years, For who among us knows how to swallow such a truth? To know for certain how many things we hoped were honesty Were in fact just whiskey, That every song we danced to that night Were sung by the Hallelujah Junkie Choir. This boy, who always woke up smiling, Showed up at your door with three tomatoes and a mango, Reached those dirty hands into such dark things. How humiliating, And what does it say about you that everything you still call love, He now calls rock bottom? When the boy from all of the old poems sends you a letter saying, “I’m so proud of you, And all the ways you have not died In the years that grew between us,” You will write back, “I’m so proud of you too. Look how clean we have become in the hands of other people. How lucky we are, to have realised love need look nothing like a shot glass, Or a shotgun. - Clementine von Radics

Mouthful Of Forevers

I am not the first person you loved.
You are not the first person I looked at
with a mouthful of forevers. We
have both known loss like the sharp edges
of a knife. We have both lived with lips
more scar tissue than skin. Our love came
unannounced in the middle of the night.
Our love came when we’d given up
on asking love to come. I think
that has to be part
of its miracle.
This is how we heal.
I will kiss you like forgiveness. You
will hold me like I’m hope. Our arms
will bandage and we will press promises
between us like flowers in a book.
I will write sonnets to the salt of sweat
on your skin. I will write novels to the scar
of your nose. I will write a dictionary
of all the words I have used trying
to describe the way it feels to have finally,
finally found you.

And I will not be afraid
of your scars.

I know sometimes
it’s still hard to let me see you
in all your cracked perfection,
but please know:
whether it’s the days you burn
more brilliant than the sun
or the nights you collapse into my lap
your body broken into a thousand questions,
you are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
I will love you when you are a still day.
I will love you when you are a hurricane.”

- Clementine von Radics

Be Still

I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

-T.S. Eliot

On The Radio

This is how it works
It feels a little worse
Than when we drove our hearse
Right through that screaming crowd
While laughing up a storm
Until we were just bone
Until it got so warm
That none of us could sleep
And all the Styrofoam
Began to melt away
We tried to find some worms
To aid in the decay
But none of them were home
Inside their catacomb
A million ancient bees
Began to sting our knees
While we were on our knees
Praying that disease
Would leave the ones we love
And never come again

On the radio
We heard November Rain
That solo's really long
But it's a pretty song
We listened to it twice
'Cause the DJ was asleep

This is how it works
You're young until you're not
You love until you don't
You try until you can't
You laugh until you cry
You cry until you laugh
And everyone must breathe
Until their dying breath

No, this is how it works
You peer inside yourself
You take the things you like
And try to love the things you took
And then you take that love you made
And stick it into some
Someone else's heart
Pumping someone else's blood
And walking arm in arm
You hope it don't get harmed
But even if it does
You'll just do it all again

And on the radio
You hear November Rain
That solo's awful long
But it's a good refrain
You listen to it twice
'Cause the DJ is asleep
On the radio
(Oh, oh, oh)
On the radio...
 
    - Regina Spektor