wordsliketides

[wordsliketides]

The rain brings to mind a warming peace. A timelessness of self that suspends me in a web of past calms. The world exists and it is a place where it rains. And when it rains the sky is reborn and lives again to tear up again to rain again. The sky is a phoenix and its rain is the fire that pains it and cleanses it. 

In a world like this where it rains, and beings are free to be new and old at the same time, I am at peace with me.

- y., a warming peace

[wordsliketides]

once more, with feeling? why does it take shutting a door to hear the rattling of the wind that suddenly has nowhere to go? it blows and creates a maelstrom of dust and those specks are glittering in a light that now no longer spills out and maybe it warms.

once, with feeling? the 'it' even that once had been dripping in tears measured by a dropper trailing and ready, like Hansel and Gretel, to catch up with us and eat our hearts out I know that now

- y., once more, with feeling

[wordsliketides]

i lost all my words and all the strings i need to say i lived chaos and they left along the way they left in droves late at night, no goodbye words feeling hard done by by my clumsy empty cry i deserted me as they did

y., how i stopped writing

[wordsliketides]

Look, she said, I just wanted to live like paper and poetry.

y., snippets #2

[wordsliketides]

i find it daunting to start something new and even more daunting to start anew at something old.

y., coming back

[wordsliketides]

Do you think that in Washington there is a dry-cleaner's, or a laundry's, that's called Washingtown? Because that would make me very, very happy.

y., quotes by someone I could love #1

[wordsliketides]

my love is like a pool of water on the sidewalk, after rain: reflects the whole of the endless sky, too shallow for a penny, for a wish. my  love fills and lives quickly borrows images from the lights, the stars; but the rocks underneath poke out sometimes, when it's windy, when it's dry.

y., this isn’t how it’s supposed to go

[wordsliketides]

let me break you down tear you apart with my spit for enzymes

y, snippets #1

[wordsliketides]

trap our laughs in empty jars like so many butterflies make them breathe in chlorine gas until they are fossilized pin them up by their wings to look at through fogging glass they won’t move, and we won’t laugh, but maybe we’ll remember how.

y., butterfly laughs

[wordsliketides]

and you said,   I could never be so perfect   so perfect as how you see me and that was when you left

y. 

[wordsliketides]

The first day I walked into this school - and this is a true story, it’s not just for this speech - the first day I walked into this school, young and dreaming of being a writer, the first thing I saw was a boy floating on air. I watched him and watched him. His limbs moved like the wind was part of them, and the whole time I stood there with the music swaying around me I swear his feet never touched the ground. I fell in love for the first time that day. Not with the boy, I lost track of him quickly. No, I fell in love with dance. I fell for it hard like it was meant to be, and I wanted it. So I followed it, I followed it for years. Then in a normal classroom with long desks, I learned about the world from a dry, witty teacher. The more of it I learned the more there was. The whys, and the cogs behind the motion of the stars, I saw it all in a small room with four walls. And every day, I fell again, slowly but surely this time, until one day I thought about my life and realized the world was what I wanted. Perhaps more of you will understand my love for dance, the rooted thunder it was, than the one I feel for physics. Because after all dance is a whirlwind, a moving sculpture of the rawest self. But you see, physics is the background, the canvas, the setting. It is a mesh of invisible strings I can follow to see patterns in emptiness. And follow it I have. So this is how I learned that before falling in love with people comes falling in love with things. Each time I fell for a potential future me. Perhaps my greatest wish for us is that we all walk out these doors we’ve spent so long in, and then find someone to look at, something to yearn for. Maybe find something that no matter how long you look, you swear floats in the air.

y.

[wordsliketides]

It’s not that I’m unhappy. No - happiness for me is a constant static energy, so predictable it’s background scenery, and that was the problem. I was always on the same frequency, constant tonality - but when nothing’s out of the ordinary then nothing is all there is. I didn’t have bursts of blissful ecstasy like they describe them, where you’re so joyful you could live forever. I didn’t have those memories of high feeling where everything seems in fully-saturated tones, bright as can be, and never fading. No, I had nice scenery, and guarded smiles, and about as much color as that could buy, because being blandly all right is not the same as being alive.

y., alive is not like living

[wordsliketides]

She opened and bared her heart to him, All deserts and rivers and tundra skies: She wanted his fire, or his ice. She took her eyes and made them mirrors, To the tears and the good and all his self: She spoke of the garden that grew in him. She asked for his ice, or his fire, Frost grew on sand, but was carried in the current: She knows, at least, and knowing forgets.

y., to my friend L.