Do you know about the cable cars in San Francisco?
Sometimes I like to think our love is like them.

And I don’t just mean it
like
I want to ride you over
and over
again
.
.
.

but I’m getting carried away,
like the cars
carry so many people away.

It’s not the cars themselves that do it,
you know —
there are steel cables underground,
and enormous grinding gears
pulling them always
up and forward,
through years and years.
And people come
smiling from all over the world
to see them
and to be moved by them
to impossible heights
on impossible hills.

I think our love is like that.

I think
sometimes
that 964 miles could be a hill
too steep
if not for the strength
of those deep running cables.

And maybe our love can be
like a national monument
that makes people smile
just at the sight of us,
and the sound of the way
our bells ring together.

I like to think of all the impossible hills we can climb.

Guh. One of my favorites. </3

(Source: poetree-house, via ex-waif)

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
by John Donne


As virtuous men pass mildly away,
    And whisper to their souls to go,
While some of their sad friends do say,
    The breath goes now, and some say, no:

So let us melt, and make no noise,
    No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
‘Twere profanation of our joys
    To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears;
    Men reckon what it did and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
    Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers’ love
    (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
    Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,
    That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
    Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
    Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
    Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
    As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
    To move, but doth, if th’ other do.

And though it in the center sit,
    Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
    And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
    Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
    And makes me end, where I begun.

My problem is,
time and again,
failing to acknowledge
the more important
of the two words:
“hopeless romantic”

(I wrote this a long time ago. It is no longer relevant, but I still like it so I’m sharing it.)

By Richard Brautigan

As the bruises fade, the lightning aches.
Last week, making love, you bit me.
Now the blue and dark have gone
and yellow bruises grow toward pale daffodils,
then paler to become until my body
is all my own and what that ever got me.

eating-poetry:

Do you remember when we met
in Gomorrah? When you were still beardless,
and I would oil my hair in the lamp light before seeing
you, when we were young, and blushed with youth
like bruised fruit. Did we care then
what our neighbors did
in the dark?

When our first daughter was born
on the River Jordan, when our second
cracked her pink head from my body
like a promise, did we worry
what our friends might be
doing with their tongues?

What new crevices they found
to lick love into or strange flesh
to push pleasure from, when we
called them Sodomites then,
all we meant by it
was neighbor.

When the angels told us to run
from the city, I went with you,
but even the angels knew
that women always look back.
Let me describe for you, Lot,
what your city looked like burning
since you never turned around to see it.

Sulfur ran its sticky fingers over the skin
of our countrymen. It smelled like burning hair
and rancid eggs. I watched as our friends pulled
chunks of brimstone from their faces. Is any form
of loving this indecent?

Cover your eyes tight,
husband, until you see stars, convince
yourself you are looking at Heaven.

Because any man weak enough to hide his eyes while his neighbors
are punished for the way they love deserves a vengeful god.

I would say these things to you now, Lot,
but an ocean has dried itself on my tongue.
So instead I will stand here, while my body blows itself
grain by grain back over the Land of Canaan.
I will stand here
and I will watch you
run.

By Karen Finneyfrock

(via ex-waif)

fuckyeahspikemilligan:

blogut:

If I could write words
Like leaves on an autumn forest floor,
What a bonfire my letters would make.

If I could speak words of water,
You would drown when I said
“I love you.”

Spike Milligan

There is some nasty imagery below, just so you are warned.

It took me over 15 years to start writing this, and then a little over a year and a half to finish it. It’s extremely close to me, and I feel like I’m exposing something very ugly in myself by posting it. I also think it’s the most honest thing I’ve ever put into words.

I guess that’s all I have to say about it.

Read More

jscottgrand:

Nestled in my lap, your knees tucked beneath you
in a worn shirt that smells of me.
Me, drowning in you. 

There is a hint of thigh there and creamy white leg,
marred with the imprint of rough hands
and fingers still slick with excitement.

You read me a story, as we share a cigarette
and a jelly jar filled with whisky.
My fingers keep rhythm with the lilt and meter of your voice,
as they run through your hair and the peaks and valleys,
that hide in the glorious space between your neck and shoulders.

I close my eyes, so as to let your voice carry me away.
It is a voice so sweet it could be mistaken for that of a child,
if only it did not speak of murder and loss,
and the sorrow of old bones turned to dust.
It is the voice of the orphan, the hustler, the hooker and the pimp.
A voice filled with vinegar and spit,
and the laughter of drunks who find humor and life,
in the cracks between everything.

It is a voice that is hundreds of years old and so familiar,
that it finds me in all of the places in which l hide. 
I could listen to this voice forever. 

(via jscottgrand-deactivated20121223)

ohheygreat:

For Justine, because:

I Feel Horrible. She Doesn’t (with thanks and apologies to Brautigan), 2008

I feel horrible. She doesn’t
love me and I wander around
like a sewing machine
that’s just finished sewing
a turd to a garbage can lid.

—Richard Brautigan

(via sniffyjenkins)

libraryland:

Photo: “30 Cents, Two Transfers, Love” by Richard Brautigan, embedded in a Muni station near the ballpark in (naturally) San Francisco, by Flickr used Marcin Wickery, used under Creative Commons license.

(via sniffyjenkins)

Even giants shake and fall,
echo thunder crashing,
when winds storm unrelenting
through their blessed peace.

There is no shame in your leafy tremblings;
My love
you are not made of steel
nor would I have you be.

theivorytowercrumbles:

Praise Song to Stone:
For My Father

Praise sternum
cracked like mica after
truck’s impact

Praise teeth in
lower jaw sheared clean as
marble rushing
down his throat

Praise ghosts watching from
behind granite graves across
the street at the Rosebud Cemetery

Praise body arched like
sandstone illuminated by
headlights as it flashes through air
before landing on the other side

Praise dust that surges
as he hits earth
scatters like crows and disappears
quick as the car’s driver
into the pre-dawn
dark

Praise the crack of vertebrae as it slips
like a fault line
the schism of spine that cleaves
like feldspar
Flecks of shale that glint like witness
embedded in his side

Praise the cleavage of ribs
jagged as a saw
as they pierce through lung tissue

Praise the lungs

Praise the ghost who leans over his
body gentle as breeze through muslin curtain
shouts through gurgle of jugular Go away. This graveyard is full.
Praise the dead

Praise blood
slow as lava
beating from skull
onto the road’s shoulder
Praise gravel
warm and full as
a mosquito

Praise the blood

Praise the quartz crystal
in the man’s cell phone
who stopped his car
dialed 9-1-1
covered my father with a blanket

Praise the diamond
the size of a tear
on the wedding band of
the doctor who declared
He might live
even after the machines
confessed there was no brain activity

Praise mercy

Praise the heart of red jasper
that stopped beating
and beat again
that stopped beating
and beat again
inside the helicopter
as it buzzed over the valley

Praise diamond edge
of the scalpel as it
slices skin like silk
to fit bone back inside
right arm

Praise the bone
Praise the arm

Praise the ghosts of children
who played hopscotch
on the beige tiles of intensive care room
who laughed because of impossibility

And praise the living
Praise the living
Praise the living

This marvel of bone
revelation of marrow
awe of skin that knits
itself back together

Praise this miracle of the quick and the dead

—

Qwo-Li Driskill

http://connotationpress.com/a-poetry-congeries-with-john-hoppenthaler/1019-qwo-li-driskill-poetry

Ohhhh.

Wow.

(Source: inkstainedqueer)

besound:

Love’s not the way to treat a friend.
I wouldn’t wish that on you. I don’t
want to see your eyes forgotten
on a rainy day, lost in the endless purse
     of those who can remember nothing. 

Love’s not the way to treat a friend.
I don’t want to see you end up that way
with your body being poured like wounded
marble into the architecture of those who make
     bridges out of crippled birds. 

Love’s not the way to treat a friend.
There are so many better things for you
than to see your feelings sold
as magic lanterns to somebody whose body
    casts no light.

- Richard Brautigan 

A toxic sneer:
a hard facade
a thick and pricking
shell of artifice
to mask a fear
and guard against
a deep and dark
and shaking, weeping place.