compllexes

[compllexes]

“What I want from the river is what I always want: / to be held by a stronger thing that, in the end, chooses mercy.”

— Oliver Baez Bendorf, “Advantages of Being Evergreen” (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2019) (via Last Tambourine)

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[compllexes]

Yes, yes, moons, lovers, roses—

– Tennessee Williams, from “The Malediction,” Collected Stories (New Directions, 1985)

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Clarice Lispector, tr. by Johnny Lorenz, Um Sopro de Vida

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“Lost love is still love. It takes a different form, that’s all. You can’t see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor. But when those senses weaken another heightens. Memory. Memory becomes your partner. You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it.”

— Mitch Albom (born on this day in 1958)

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Mahmoud Darwish

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i see you by phoebe bridgers

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“I forgive. Cause nobody knows us : except our mothers, and they hardly do (and also tend disappointingly to die before they ought). Or our fathers, whose failings while they’re alive (and absences after they’re dead) infuriate. Or our siblings, who want us dead too cause what they know about us is that somehow we got away with not having to carry the bricks and stones like they did all those years. Cause nobody’s the slightest idea who we are, or who we were, not even we ourselves – except, that is, in the glimmer of a moment of fair business between strangers, or the nod of knowing and agreement between friends. Other than these, we go out anonymous into the insect air and all we are is the dust of colour, brief engineering of wings towards a glint of light on a blade of grass or a leaf in a summer dark.”

— Ali Smith, How to be Both (via mabohstarbuck)

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Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

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“I don’t write poetry anymore and nothing can hurt me. I don’t write poetry anymore and every river is bleeding towards a home. All I really want is a man to put his hands in my mouth. All I really want is two stones or a sleeping dog or a dead horse. I take long walks from one street corner to another. There are so many little things that make up a life. I look my strangers in the eyes. I am almost always imagining some kind of violence. I cheated this Ramadan. I’ve cheated every Ramadan. I don’t write poetry anymore so I don’t have to think about my mother. I haven’t kissed anyone in months. I’m not as good as I hoped I’d be. Yesterday I noticed my front tooth is rotting.”

— They Named The Girl River, Yasmin Belkhyr (via wildflowerveins)

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“We love because it’s the only true adventure.”

— Nikki Giovanni (via kushandwizdom)

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thinking of revamping this blog

[compllexes]

Fernando Pessoa, from “Each thing, in its time, has its time” (edited); A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems (tr. by Richard Zenith)

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Linda Pastan, The Months

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“What they leave: not one / wound, but these: / the flowers of one thousand / wounds, within thousands more, so / small and so deep, resting comfortably / within your walls.”

— Mahtem Shiferraw, Your Body Is War; “Your Body is War (II)”

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Has anyone else been in the strangest, most indecipherable headspace of their life lately