#I can’t get over the poem

[monicaalexandraaa]

👏👏👏

THE COUNT | {vamprry} a preview

Series Summary: Count Styles lives on an island you’ll not find on any map. He’s lived in relative solitude for ages and is happy to have the rare occasional guest who accidentally runs into his small slice of the world, though they may not be as thrilled by his intentions once they find out what he is.

When Y/n's weather vessel crashes into his island one stormy night he greets her and offers her shelter in his castle while she waits for someone to help repair her boat. She soon comes to adore the strange and charming man and grows a worrying attachment. But she cannot help herself. No matter how much she learns about the Count and how strange her world has become she cannot seem to pull herself out of the haze of his alluring spell.

Even when her life depends on it.

..

Short preview below.

NOTE: this preview is from part 2

. . .

Pressing her ear closer to the door she closed her eyes and there was a distinct male voice, a sobbed moan that, after a loud thud, turned into something like a pitiful crying. But then she heard another voice and there was something familiar in the way it cooed and teased almost. She could not make out words but the sentiment was clear. There were two people in that room having sex and one of them was Harry. The other sounded to be a man.

Stepping back from the door she realized her mouth was hung open in surprise. Perhaps the Count was into men. Well, he was quite pretty. She could imagine that she supposed. Before she could even turn around the sounds behind the door stopped and the silence that suddenly surrounded her had her heart picking up a beat. Had she made a noise?

She swallowed and turned her head to see her door open down the hallway and wondered if she could make it quickly before anyone knew that she’d been listening in.

But the moment that thought popped into her head the door opened up and there was Harry in a long white cotton pijama, the top unbuttoned and nearly draped off his shoulder. She glanced over his frame and back up to his eyes but he was different. His irises were almost black and his mouth was set strangely, like he had swollen gums, “Would you like something, Y/n?”

Shaking her head she stepped back, “No. Sorry. I… heard something… nothing. I’m going back to bed. Sorry!”

She turned to move away but he stopped her, his hand wrapped around her upper arm, making her twist back to face him, “Are you sure don’t want anything?”

She darted her eyes behind him to the room he’d been in and it appeared to be lit by a fireplace. She saw something move across the doorway but couldn’t make out what (or who) it was.

“I’m sorry for disturbing you. That… I was just worried…”

He smiled, his lips covering his teeth as he closed the door behind him and stepped in dangerously close, holding her arm to keep her from inching away. He looked down at the dirtied material tucked under her arm and he grunted softly, “Oh my. What is this?”

Letting go of her arm he plucked the defiled sheets and nightgown from her and dropped the sheet to the floor, his hands crumpling around the white fabric, thumb dragging into the slippery wetness where her arousal had dripped.

She felt herself flush hot with embarrassment as she watched the Count inspect the damage she’d done to her nightgown. It was obvious what it was he was looking at.

“Poor, Y/n,” his dark eyes met hers as he lifted his thumb to his mouth and ran the pad of his digit against his tongue, eyes fluttering closed when he swallowed.

All of the breath in her lungs was caught and now the flush of heat was forming in her tummy as she watched him enjoy the taste. Her taste.

His jaw clenched as he opened his eyes and looked down at her, dark irises raking over her frame and then back up to her face, a deep exhale escaping his chest, “We’re all carnal beings, Y/n. There’s no shame in the body’s natural reaction to an arousing dream. All you have to do is call for me next time and I’ll make the emptiness go away. I’ll do whatever you ask.”

She couldn’t blink or look away from him. She was trapped by his haunting gaze as he drew a finger from her jaw up to her temple and then back down until he’d gently scraped his nail over her pulse point, pressing in just enough to make a small indent bite into her flesh, before lifting and pushing his nail in crosswise against the same spot.

“X marks the spot. Doesn’t it, Y/n?”

She gulped, “What’s that mean?”

Harry lowered his face close to hers. He was so close she could feel his breath on her cheek, “If you ask politely,” he wrapped his hand around the side of her neck, thumb dragging against her jaw, “I’ll show you what it means.”

. . .

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xoxo

[geryone]

The Father, Sharon Olds

[significant-narratives]

some day, when the hockey gods deem fit, they will crown this freak of nature, they will wrap his body in newspaper and carry him to the museum. but tonight he is alive and in the north field with his team. it is a perfect winter evening: the moon rising over the stadium, the wind in the trees. and as he stares up at the scoreboard, there are thrice as many goals as usual.

[thedndgoblinwholivesinyourwalls]

does a spin

hi lark i warned you

i love josh so much,, so have yet anohter poem about him,,,,,,,,,,,, symbolism 👍👍

yeah im just making stuff up now (WHEN ADELE COMES HOME AFTER MEETING JANETTE FOR THE FIRST TIME, SHE BRINGS HIM FLOWERS. I DONT KNOW WHY, BUT IT JSUT FITS EVEN THO SHE WOULDNT APOLOGISE, EVER, EVEN IN A ROUNDABOUT WAY LIKE THIS SO?? IMAGINE A UNIVERSE WHERE ADELE FEELS SLIGHTLY BAD ABOUT IT??? BUT KEEPS CHEATING??? or like, she doesnt want him to find out so its like,, lovebombing??? dont fucking know, whatever, SHE JUST GIVES HIM FLOWERS ONE TIME. OKAY? THANK YOU.). like, flatout making stuff up lmao. barely any of this poem is canon but its okay, its character-accurate (in my mind)

im so fucking normal about josh i swear, i SWEARRRRRR

---

You came home early today. The smile on your face is stretched thin, but you press a bouquet of yellow flowers into my hands. “What for?” I ask you. You don’t reply.

I put the flowers into a vase, place them on the dining table. ‘They’re beautiful,’ I think. I try to ignore the feeling that they wilt every single time I look at them.

You tell me, “Take them down, It's been weeks.” I feel bad for them. for their wilting and falling petals.

I take them and press them in between the pages of a book, leave it up on a shelf. The vase goes in the sink. You don’t notice its absence.

You find the petals inside the book by their yellow. “Why did you keep them?” I explain, “I felt bad for them, they didn’t deserve to be thrown out.” You laugh and toss them in the trash.

I rescue as many of the petals as I can, when you’re not looking. They’re dry and falling apart by now, but I hold them together as best I can. I put them in the back of my phone case.

You never really see me in the first place, so you never learn about my small act of defiance. They’re still pretty to me, even in their brokenness. My mind never lingers on why you brought them in the first place; an apology for something that I never knew about.

(I’m pouring them out into your (her) grave before long, wishing that it were enough to cover the crisp blue flowers.)

LIME WHEN. LIMEEEEE I’M. I CAN’T OUGHHHH

NO BUT YOU’RE RIGHT SHE WOULD BUY HIM FLOWERS. Since she stayed over at Janette’s- she would return home early OH MY GOD!!! LIME YOU GET THEM LIKE NOBODY ELSE FRFR ALSO THE LAST PART. SHAKING YOU BY THE SHOULDERS AUDGDJFHKS

like. the timeline. her getting the flowers-and then him pressing them in a book and putting them in his phone casesrjehdjsgdofhfhd LIMEEEE

[medusa-was-innocent]

Wow this sucks

[iliveinprocrasti-nationn]

i don’t have words on it really because that would take more brain power than i have before breakfast but seeing people react to “Boots” by rudyard kipling with “wow they should have put this in a magnus archives episode” is. hm

[agoldengalaxy]

[twentyfivemiceinatrenchcoat]

if i say getocoded

[weaveintheends]

Ylfa Faces Death

When Ylfa stands before the wolf, his body expands and shrinks with each snarling breath. His eyes, deep orange flames like the sun, engulf her on the inhale then pierces her on the exhale. His face is the sky, and then it is beside her, paw lifted to press her shoulder. She bows under the weight, then presses her forehead against his chest. His heart is thunder, then it is their heart thudding deep in her chest.  

“You’ve taken everything from me,” she says into his suffocating scruff.  

The wolf peered across the battlefield and saw the truth: Mother Goose’s fingertips in a final reach for a book left muddied and forgotten; the puppet’s severed strings no longer tied to fate and a cricket squashed beneath a glass boot; a princess left without her head; a frog willingly battered as tear droplets caress his cheek; and a cat missing his boot as he hung from a noose made of hair.  

“You’re right,” he observed. “And I still have one more to take.” His claws pressed into the child’s shoulder, snipping at the seams of this tired preteen girl.  

Ylfa takes a deep resonant breath. She hears the glitched edges of this world, and recognizes a voice muffled by time and stories.  “You’re not my Red.”  

“If it weren’t for me, she’d be here,” the echo of this wolf says. 

Ylfa doesn’t flinch at the sound of popping bone, slurping blood. She doesn’t flinch as the drool slides down long, dagger canines, soaking the red hood that hides her.  

When she feels the claw pressed sharply into her spine, Ylfa steps back. She does not look down as the tip of Cinderella’s blade sheers the fabric of her dress.  

Instead, she meets the steady gaze of the Big Bad Wolf.  

“Death fed me, so I could live. I will see you again,” she says, ignoring the way her legs go numb, the taste of copper flooding her mouth as her punctured lung wheezes blood.  

Death nodded, pausing to study this child in her dying breaths.  

“Do you regret it?” he asked, head tilted, ears perked toward Ylfa and Ylfa alone.  

Ylfa falls to her knees, but she uses the final reserves of her energy to flex her clawed hands covered in soft, downy fur.  

When she looked back at the wolf, her golden irises engulfed him on her ragged inhale and pierced him on her stuttering exhale.  

“Never,” Ylfa replies.  

Then she fell off the end of the crystal blade to land face first in the mud. 

Death allowed her a minute, head bowed as the princesses walked away, leaving the girl’s body behind. He cared nothing for the flurry of discussion, the panic of what to do next in this world.  

It all gets snuffed out when Ylfa wakes in another world—more degraded, more hopeless.  

And when she smiles, drool drips from canine daggers that can’t be contained by a child’s mouth.  

[beeffie69]

my roman empire is how girls on tiktok have such depressing roman empires.

“My Roman Empire is what would happen if I were prettier or skinnier” “My Roman Empire is my ex-best friend” “My Roman Empire is when my ex told me all guys watch yk because they need to ‘relieve’ themselves. And seeing their girlfriend is too repetitive and they need something new”

is the only thing we’re allowed to think about how we’re so sad all the time? our trauma? how society deems us as commodities or sexual objects?

is that the only thing we can think?

how come men get to sit on the toilet and get reminded how awesome them and their ancestors are by the plumbing they take advantage of, yet when we look around, we see nothing but sadness, think nothing but sadness.

my other roman empire is musicals and how a plot through music makes me feel so much more.

[gooberhopper25]

you made me raw and unworthy,

like i was the stem of a carrot; useless.

you’re like a stew,

one that i’m in

i’m the carrot, you’re the broth

you can substitute me

but you cant substitute the broth.

[javierduffy]

if i don’t draw javieran dancing when i get home from work i fear i may die

[insignificantstrawberry]

[oceans-and-prose]

My chest aches

I see the sleeping form of my new puppy

I brought him home just yesterday.

All I can think is how much I miss you

Was it always easy with you or was I just a child

This will take so much time

I saw it in his eyes today

It’s almost as if you came to visit and said

“That one.”

[borntochasethewind]

The anguish i felt,

finally realizing that you couldn’t love me they way i needed.

it felt as if someone had stuck a red hot iron

in my stomach, creating this big black hole.

this void follows me everywhere,

threatening to collapse me at any moment

just like an old building that needs to be felled.

All i can do is hold myself tightly,

not letting the lose pieces slip from my grasp.

some days it’s easier, i can breathe around the hole and smile.

most other days i’m in agony,

desperately clawing at the edges, trying to pull myself back together.

all i’m left with is bloodied fingernails, and less energy than i had to begin with.

I like to hope that maybe the hole will close, with time.

but the bigger part of me isn’t convinced that it’s possible.

~time will tell

[dostoyevsky-official]

The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

[...] Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

No comprehensive data exist on this trend, but the majority of the 33 professors I spoke with relayed similar experiences. Many had discussed the change at faculty meetings and in conversations with fellow instructors. [...] Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.

Failing to complete a 14-line poem without succumbing to distraction suggests one familiar explanation for the decline in reading aptitude: smartphones. Teenagers are constantly tempted by their devices, which inhibits their preparation for the rigors of college coursework—then they get to college, and the distractions keep flowing. “It’s changed expectations about what’s worthy of attention,” Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at UVA, told me. “Being bored has become unnatural.” Reading books, even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.

[...] Mike Szkolka, a teacher and an administrator who has spent almost two decades in Boston and New York schools, told me that excerpts have replaced books across grade levels. “There’s no testing skill that can be related to … Can you sit down and read Tolstoy? ” he said. And if a skill is not easily measured, instructors and district leaders have little incentive to teach it. [...] The pandemic, which scrambled syllabi and moved coursework online, accelerated the shift away from teaching complete works.

[...] But it’s not clear that instructors can foster a love of reading by thinning out the syllabus. Some experts I spoke with attributed the decline of book reading to a shift in values rather than in skill sets. Students can still read books, they argue—they’re just choosing not to. Students today are far more concerned about their job prospects than they were in the past. Every year, they tell Howley that, despite enjoying what they learned in Lit Hum, they plan to instead get a degree in something more useful for their career.

[...] For years, Dames has asked his first-years about their favorite book. In the past, they cited books such as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Now, he says, almost half of them cite young-adult books. Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series seems to be a particular favorite.