The Thing Is
by: Ellen Bass
to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you've held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.
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my friends. :
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are life. mrs. dalloway - woolf lolita - nabokov on the road - kerouac crush - siken wuthering heights - bronte too many more to list
poets & writers of all sorts.
namely anne sexton; adrienne rich; gabriel garcÃa márquez; jack kerouac; sylvia plath; pablo neruda; odysseus elytis; margaret atwood; emily bronte; virgnia woolf; ernest hemmingway; vladimir nabokov; richard siken.
i will not be unfaithful;
but i will stray.
NOTHING IS PERFECT ;
BUT IT HAS TO BE SOMEDAY.
"I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, or actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. All of it inside endless and beginning emptiness. Pitiful forms of ignorance." -Jack Kerouac
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