brooklhyn

[brooklhyn]

Eliot Spencer and What I am Learning About Myself

A poem about my brother that isn't making it in my poetry book

I have little time on my hands, so much of what I consume has a purpose.

My food is treated like medicine (six brazil nuts a day...), media is an opportunity to learn what is happening, books and tv fill in the gaps of my knowledge from economics to how to cook for my elderly neighbors. You get the point.

My heart has dipped low, weighed down with the collected tears of the world in her pocket, looking for joy in a shadowy street.

I try not to give myself passes. After all, people giving themselves passes often leaves other lives at chance in my line of work. But reason and wisdom peak my interest. In the swoop a half-sided smile, I'm sent into the cold with a prescription for laughter.

With comedy quiet for the sleepy winter, somehow, I find myself transported back to a room of younger me with the click of a dvd in the player. It's not family movies- don't be so naive.

I have fragmented memories of these stories- they are seemingly more politically prolific today than I remembered. But what catches my attention is the man with the dedication and calmness. He reminds me of someone- he did back then too.

Living a 1,000 lives in the last fews years has set me on this hunt to dissect who I once was. I didn't remember until recently but the room younger me was sat in was one of expectation- waiting for the door to open and me to be swept up into open arms, circling around me with assurance that was safe.

Back then, I could tell myself he was off liberating Croatia. Now, my tears fill my heart as I know that his dying day came before my own.

[brooklhyn]

“Write in order not simply to destroy, in order not simply to conserve, in order not to transmit; write in the thrall of the impossible real, that share of disaster wherein every reality, safe and sound, sinks.”

— Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster

[brooklhyn]

[brooklhyn]

Hi everyone-

I started an instagram with some poetry. If you fancy, please go check it out. Much love friends.

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A post shared by Magnolia Revival (@magnoliarevival)

It’s a strange life I live and I feel it no more strongly than when I do common tasks- I love my Dyson like nothing else but I clean with homemade citric vinegar. I trust my great grandmother infinitely more than the mass media. I’m stuck between a desire to be drinking coffee in Paris while writing a novel and a house full of jars waiting to be filled with homemade pickles that taste like summers past. Aging is wearing on me- still younger than I’d like and more confused than I hoped to be. Houses are expensive you know. But I’m lucky I guess because I don’t owe a dime for college or my car, but my friends that owe $90,000? They are living rent free and drinking cosmos while I’m shopping the Aldi sale papers hoping that one day I’ll be able to pay a down payment. Sometimes it feels that doing right sets you seventeen steps behind. In my heart, I go back to the little girl I once was sitting in the little blue plastic chairs in the basement of my church hearing the age old adage that of course doing right is always better for you in the end but some days don’t feel like it. I’m not complaining- I like my debt and cosmo free life but I’d like a house someday. The paradox of life feels like an explosion in my stomach- wringing my hands and walking laps just trying to reconcile and trust all that I am, right now in this moment, all that I have been all these years, and all that I am being made to be. I wish someone could explain how I can be so old fashioned and yet so modern- but the other days? I’m so glad no one can define it, not even me. There’s a lot in my soul, but it settles just right- eventually.

[brooklhyn]

[brooklhyn]

“All men labor under some impingements on their freedom; none is absolutely at liberty.”

— George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo

[brooklhyn]

Czesław Miłosz, “Ars Poetica?”

[brooklhyn]

Scottish Highlands // Joe Hall

[brooklhyn]

[brooklhyn]

“ENTER THE VOID”

[brooklhyn]

@paperandcities | Instagram

[brooklhyn]

“I want to tell you, don’t marry suffering. Some people do. They get married to it, and sleep and eat together, just as husband and wife. If they go with joy they think it’s adultery.”

— Saul Bellow, Seize the Day

[brooklhyn]

[brooklhyn]

“Think of me as a guide. Think of yourself as a wanderer in a dark wood. It’s about to get darker.”

— Margaret Atwood, The Testaments

[brooklhyn]

“She was made entirely of a sweetness bordering on tears.”

— Clarice Lispector, The Complete Stories

[brooklhyn]

No one is more ingenious than the poor, wherever you find them. When you are poor every stage has to be thought through. Wealth is the opposite. With wealth you get to be thoughtless.

Zadie Smith, Swing Time (via quotespile)

[brooklhyn]

I’m back from the dead and happy to see that all of the sweet sweet fanfiction of Bucky Barnes is still alive and thriving. Oh how I’ve missed this.