In The Evening,I Heard You Listening To Music,it Was Hollywood. Cool Music And You Enjoyed It Without

You look like the killer,I look like the lamb.

Would you kill for me or kill me?

harmony

i write poems to the moon

you sing to the stars

and it matters so much

especially when we're miles apart

i hold the starry night around my neck

you see it in real life

our harmony must make

such a wonderful sight

i hold my cousins close

you smile at every child you see

so let's watch our children grow

under our garden's tree

i think coffee is a waste

you say it's too bitter

let's drink our cocoa, my angel

and make life sweeter

i write poetry to piano keys

you dream to flute's gentle blows

the whole orchestra to ourselves

so let's meet in contrabass lows

angel, apart and close

are we an eternal dichotomy?

but maybe in another life we are

in perfect harmony

~astraeye

"I rather like to be slugged, to walk away from the poem with old wounds reopened.... let the poem bruise me."

- Anne Sexton

LOVE, DESIRE, HURT, KNIVES, BLOOD.

Richard Siken / 红月 Red Moon (Detail) - Huang Guangjian / x / can’t we just leave the monster alive - TXT / ’Ariel’ by Aneleh, published in the tide rises, the tide falls journal / Yves Olade, from When Rome Falls; Bloodsport, 2017 / Jane Hirshfield, Assay Only Glimpsable for an Instant

arabic poetry is so beautifully yet painfully romantic, i mean “they asked “do you love her to death?” i said “speak of her over my grave and watch how she brings me back to life" and “because my love for you is higher than words, i've decided to fall silent" could have got jane austen crying and shaking

"Even the moon cried for him to stay with me,but he left."

(lovers don't exist/siyah)

“Let us be misplaced together. Like short walks through big cities. Like hard work on Sunday mornings.”

—

‘Try’ is all we have.

-D.K.

(via doekent)

cooking is one of life’s greatest evils….cooking for 1 hour just to eat for 5-15 mins….i’m so sick

In short, how would you define 'gothic' ? for someone who has read some very basic gothic stuff but is trying to arrive at a good overarching descriptor.

This is difficult— I have yet to read a definition that encompasses the Gothic genre. Patrick Kennedy defines it as “writing that employs dark and picturesque scenery, startling and melodramatic narrative devices, and an overall atmosphere of exoticism, mystery, fear, and dread” but this doesn’t ring quite true— yes, the Gothic deals with dread, but it does not always have dark and picturesque scenery, and it does not always rely on exoticism. James Greaver and Ginna Wilkerson define it as “a style of writing that is characterized by elements of fear, horror, death, and gloom, as well as romantic elements, such as nature, individuality, and very high emotion” and while this comes closer, it doesn’t necessarily encompass all of Gothic. Enclyclopedia.com defines it as “a literary movement that focused on ruin, decay, death, terror, and chaos, and privileged irrationality and passion over rationality and reason, grew in response to the historical, sociological, psychological, and political contexts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries” which isn’t wrong, but also is missing slightly.

So, I can’t really offer a good defintion, but I can tell you about issues the Gothic is concerned with.

the sublime : a combination of awe and terror. Poets.org has a good article on this concept. and in relation to the sublime:

the unexplainable : the Gothic was very much a response to the enlightenment’s attempt to realise and create explanation— the questions the Gothic poses are Are there things beyond science? How do we react to what cannot be explained with scientific and logical means?

excess : emotion and stakes are high. Consider the impassioned love confessions of Wuthering Heights (“You said I killed you— haunt me, then!”) the debauchery and decadence of Dorian Gray (see also: the decadent movement, which was intimately related to the Gothic). Gothic lovers are lovers who often have potential to destroy one another because of their excess of emotion and desire. It’s like opera: everything is heightened by the experience of the sublime surroundings. The human spirit is expanded, often until it bursts.

boundaries and trangression/violation of those boundaries : boundaries of death, boundaries of gender, boundaries of social class, boundaries of race, boundaries of desire, boundaries of mind and reality. In Frankenstein this might be Victor creating the creature; it may be Carmilla’s lesbian (and thus transgressive) desire for Laura: it may be Will Graham’s desire to enact violence as an independent agent rather than as an agent of the law. I mentioned the sublime before, and I want to note that the sublime itself is transgressive: it’s beyond normal human experience. and in this regard it’s also about:

setting : setting is never just setting: it’s also psychological, a reflection of the characters. Brontë compares Catherine to the landscape she inhabits;

the horror of imagination and the psychological interior : Emily Dickinson: “one need not be a chamber to be haunted”. Consider Freud’s idea of the unconscious mind. I don’t know if you’ve seen Stalker (a film by Andrei Tarkovsky) but one plot element it has is called the “Room” which grants the wishes of anyone who sets food inside. but it’s not about what you actually wish for— it’s about your innermost desire, one you may not even be conscious of. There’s the story of a man who went with his brother to the room, and his brother died along the way. And he entered the room, and then he inherited a lot of money, which led him to commit suicide. Why? Because it revealed that his greatest desire was not to bring back his brother, but to be wealthy. The horror of that realization compelled him to kill himself. The Gothic is very much about people confronting their interiors: the horrors they have committed (willingly or unwillingly), the horrors their family committed, the horrors they discover that reveal the darkness someone close to them (Bluebeard), the horrors of history (consider Toni Morrison’s Beloved), etc. The interior is often the historical, and the plot of Gothic novels can almost only end when it is confronted.

As for the difference between the Gothic and Horror, horror often deals with a concrete terror. In Gothic literature, the monster may be real, but the monster is not the sole source of terror: the source of terror is also often psychological. Horror is resolved by confronting an outside force: the Gothic is resolved by confronting ourselves.