#reflective poem about life

[decaffeinatedthinggentlemen]

Vida infinita

ida infinit

da infini

a infin

infi

in

Fi

a fin

da fini

ida finit

Vida finita

[dontdieonmeyet]

now, i'm not so sure

we were friends

we were in love

we were dating

and then we became distant

and now it's like we are who we are when we first met

and when people ask me "what are you two?"

i say the three things, a fourth

and "now, i'm not so sure"

[fictionadventurer]

By the Shores of Silver Lake was my least favorite Little House book as a kid, and upon starting the reread, I could see why. Earlier books had Laura as a child observer--not engaging in or totally understanding the wider world of the adults, but still engrossed in the simple joys of childhood. In this book, Laura is neither child nor adult--she's too old to play like a child, but she's too young to take an active part in adult life, so she's stuck in this awkward middle ground.

Yet as the book went on, I started to see that that was the point. This book is about growing up, about being on the brink of adulthood and trying to hold onto childhood while also becoming someone new. Laura's growing-up is paralleled with the "growing up" of the country around her. Both the old and the new ways of life have their benefits and their downsides, and Laura has to figure out how to hold onto the best of both.

The prairie is beautiful, wondrous, free. Laura would love to just roam forever, always traveling west, always seeing new places. She doesn't want to marry, doesn't want to teach school, doesn't want anything to change about her way of life. But one can't stay a child forever. Eventually, the infinite possibility of childhood has to turn into the definite identity of adulthood. She has to take responsibility and settle down. The arrival of the town brings that adult life to the prairie, and in doing so, it destroys the innocent wonders of nature--the majestic wolves lose their home, the buffalo are gone, and the ducks no longer land at Silver Lake. Laura has to wrestle with this--is childhood, for herself and the prairie, gone forever? Does she have to let go of childlike wonder and embrace the mundane responsibility of adult life?

This theme is resolved when Laura finds Grace in the buffalo wallow. It's a place of impossible magic and beauty, a carpet of fragrant violets hidden away from the world with butterflies flying overhead, so perfect it seems like a fairyland. Of course Grace, the innocent child, is the one who was able to find it. When Laura asks Pa about it later, he explains that the "fairies" that made this magical ring were buffalo. There's a mundane explanation for the phenomenon, but that doesn't destroy the wonder and beauty of the place--adult knowledge enhances, rather than destroys childlike wonder. The buffalo might be gone, but there's still beauty left behind. Laura can move forward into the future and know that there are still wonders to find. She can be an adult and still maintain a childlike wonder, can take responsibility and still find comfort in the safety of home and family.

This thematic resonance made so much about the book so much deeper. It's the message of the entire series distilled into story form. Remember the past, children, but go forth boldly into the future. It's a message much easier to see with an adult's eyes, so I'm so glad I gave this book another chance.

[ohwaitwhatdamn]

Thinking about a night in Peterborough when I almost got t-boned by a short cisgender white man in a very large pickup truck.

He ran the red light.

Thinking about how he sped up and got out of his truck at a red light while behind me. He threw his cigarette down on the ground after taking a long and hard drag. His fist raised to my driver's door window. Scowl on his face.

I took a right turn and sped off.

He followed me.

I got away from him.

I tell myself if he would have caught up with me on a bad day. I would have psychologically ripped him apart, but with empathy.

Treating somebody with kindness when they're not very kind to you is the best.

Smile warmly

[jacksintention]

Still unwell about Rilke and PH

I love the dark hours of my being.

My mind deepens into them.

There I can find, as in old letters,

the days of my life, already lived,

and held like a legend, and understood.

Then the knowing comes: I can open

to another life that's wide and timeless.

So I am sometimes like a tree

rustling over a gravesite

and making real the dream

of the one its living roots

embrace:

a dream once lost

among sorrows and songs.

[badolmen]

Soldiers kill sheep in the streets and I see bison skulls piled high, the bullets are made in the United States.

Trees are set ablaze by tanks and I see Moses kneeling in fear and reverence, God does not speak from these flames.

The people starve and I see seaweed gathered in baskets on Irish shores, Dutch tulip bulbs boiled with rabbit bones.

When they said ‘never again’ it was never for love of the hundreds of millions murdered, nor fear of the systems that allowed such evil to rise. They said ‘never again’ to shipping lane inconveniences, to stock market woes, and to being seen for cowards.

At least a coward would sit in quiet fear, content in inaction. Now they sign over billions, condemning millions to the total destruction. Where is the shame? Where is the apathy? At least in that I can call them mere cowards. What else am I to call them but the evil they so long taught me to revile?

God have mercy on their souls. God have mercy on ours. For the body is doomed - the bombs will still fall, the blood will still spill, the graves of thousands will fill.

(How long is the queue to the pearly gates? Is St. Peter agrieved to see so many young faces? Are wives rejoicing or grieving the reunion with their husbands? Does the brother laugh or cry when he finds his sister among the crowd?)

From Carthage to Auschwitz we were warned. From Roman roads to shipping lanes we watched the weapons trade hands. And when we cry out to the powers that be, they turn away - unseeing, unhearing, unfeeling. Machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts.

But the horror is in knowing they are not machines. This is not their nature. They are men. Born with a love for humanity in their hearts, a desire for community and companionship and art. How did they lose such a fundamental part of their being? Was it beaten out of them by bitter men before them or did they discard it themselves, as though it were a cancer to be excised? Does it matter when they so zealously jump knee deep in blood and bone among bomb shattered homes?

And while it is troubling to consider that, being human, we too can have our hearts hardened, it is far more uncomfortable to consider that, being human, they may one day revert to natural compassion. And what does one do when the machine becomes man again? When he proves it was a choice all along? A choice he refused and snubbed until the bodies cooled and the graves grew grassy with age?

God forgive what I cannot.

[dykeomania]

using chatgpt as a therapist is crazy and guess what so am i

[thee-person-writes]

Do you ever stop to think about how much music is embedded in Being human?

We love music so much that we made sure Mars Rovers can sing "Happy Birthday" to themselves. Alexa products can sing random songs. We programmed music into laundry machines and dryers, 3D printers, and vinyl cutters. We made sure phones, cars, and practically every bit of technology can play a song.

Kids learn the alphabet and even math equations in song.

Whales, birds, wolves, crickets, and so, so many animals sing. We herd through calling the animals in song. Electricity hums.

We make music for books, movies, games, shows, and simply to say "I love you".

We sing in prison, we've sang in slavery and freedom, war and peace, birth and death, weddings and funerals, sex and aftercare.

Music isn't a nutrient biologically needed to sustain life, sure. But it's proof of us and we can't help but listen to it in the world

[afyerarchive]

The Weightless Road Home

It's my celestial question

Where the time went

How that little hand can revolve around a planetary being

Like a weightless little guy

I can feel that, certainly

A similar feeling through a car window

As I awkwardly stare at the polluted skyscape

Lost in market aisles

Merging to a lane of common confusion

The world keeps on living

And it drags me with

[brownsugar4hersoul]

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”

Leo Tolstoy

[dontdieonmeyet]

so we improvise

i used to fear having too much to say

but then i realised that i am without subtitles

going off script and following my own story

writing my tales and chapters beyond

[accidentalpoetsstuff]

[kijagf]

I just discovered the poem allowables by nikki giovanni and it reminds me of something I wrote myself :(

[heart-songs]

Everything I Am Not after Calla Blawusch

incomplete – without scars – fully healed – as bruised as they wanted me to be –always of sound mind – a sound sleeper – ever tired of admiring the sky – entirely at home in the raw peach of my skin – comfortable in the company of a compliment – the kind of person who lights up a room – carefree – loud – at peace in a crowd – willing to live my life like a distraction – sugar-free – untouched – loose-lipped – anyone’s first or last kiss – fluent in the language of my heart – broken as easily as a pie-crust promise – crumbling – fork-tender – in my Lover Era – a lost girl chasing her shadow through open windows at night – blinded by stars I once saw in wandering eyes – naïve enough to hope things will be different this time – capable of untangling the memory of his hands from the ends of my hair – ready to cut them off – deserving of so much pain – defined by my mistakes – my depression – in control of every expression I make – a practiced liar – (or am I?) – alone in the summer of my grief – the same as I was when I started this writing poem – tempted to forgive the past and forget the future – crying right now – sure I want to be here – unafraid of dying – finished

[dykeofmisfortune]

i want to write a play again but idk what to write it on. i run sound for this play festival that produces original student plays and oh mein gott they're so good. i NEED to get something i write produced

[bhaalsdeepbat]

just to add:

Using Poe rather than any other Dark Romantic writer that was his contemporary to pull a quote from was such a good choice. Of his sotries, "The Tell-Tale Heart" was the perfect one for Astarion, but Poe very specifically believed stories should be written in a circular manner - like a snake biting its tail - which fits so perfectly with all the little ways Astarion's story and romance references itself.

Direct quote from my source:

Poe believed in “fashioning a tale like a kind of ouroboros, with its tail in its mouth, beginning with the final effect and working backwards to that the story’s beginning is a natural derivation of its conclusion.”

It's the setting up of the Romantic Astarion in act 1, finding out he's not as fine as he keeps insisting as the narrative swings into Dark Romantic territory, the paranoia starts to really come out (relating back to tell-tale heart), and then he is literally given a choice: continue the cycle or break free. The cycle of abuse is literally a circle here. He can take up Cazador's place in the ritual and step into his role entirely, reentering the ouroboros I mentioned earlier.

The "Thank you" when he first bites the player being referenced later when they see past his paranoia and how unreliable of a narrator he is about his own feelings and seeing that he doesn't want power. He wants safety in a world that he believes isn't capable of kindness or good.

I love how Astarion quotes The Tell-Tale Heart every once in a while. It's a rarer line, and initially I thought it was out of place (Neil is very well versed in theater, so I assumed it was a riff from him), but since reading an analysis of the work I think it was pretty purposeful.

The piece is all about fear and paranoia, things we know Astarion is plagued by despite how he might act. Similarly, the narrator of the story also tries to convince the reader that they are not as troubled as they seem. In the end, the narrator is consumed by the beating of the heart of the old man he killed and dismembered, the sound growing louder and louder until in a fit of rage he reveals the body to the police to absolve himself from the persistent beating.

Except the police never heard the heart beat, because it wasn't the old man's heart at all. The narrator was consumed by the sound of his own heart beating more and more rapidly in his chest from fear. He was the owner of the thing that forced him to reveal his true nature, he is the owner of the tell-tale heart.

And what happens with Astarion after you romance him? He realizes over time that, while he tried to deny his feelings and was initially only interested in manipulating you for his own means, he actually has grown to care for you. You have done something to his heart that hasn't happened in centuries, you have made it feel as if it has started beating again.

Therefore, his tell-tale heart leads him to admit his transgressions, which were committed out of fear and paranoia for his safety.

So the line is actually very, very apt. His confession during Act 2 is his own version of "Villains! Dissemble no more! I admit the deed! Tear up the planks! Here, here! It is the beating of his hideous heart!" Except, of course, it is his own heart that he is unearthing for us (and it's not so hideous, after all).