When You Get This, Please Respond With Five Things That Make You Happy! Then, Send To Your Last Ten People

when you get this, please respond with five things that make you happy! then, send to your last ten people in your notifs (anonymously). you never know who might benefit from spreading positivity♡

Thank you for the ask!

1. Walks alone with no destination where I can gather lots and lots of weeds and ferns and just wander as I please.

2. Keeping all the doors and windows open during rain.

3. Some odd songs that are just so dear and impossibly sweet that you want to throw your arms around them.

4. Old chocolate wrappers.

5. Finding silly notes written in book margins long ago.

keep thinking about that richard siken interview where he's talking about simplifying the metaphor, by removing the "is" — and the moon, terrible. the distance between the object and the thing to which it is likened to falls away, it feels [it reads], smoother, unhindered by simplified vocabulary. and so, it becomes alive, breathing.

its the same way sally rooney has removed quotation marks, and her writing feels smoother from it, subtler, a more coherent story where there is no stepping in our out of characters. everything falls in line, the veil draws back: the distance between character/reader is removed and instead of having the feeling be cut up by speech marks – there is a greater intimacy. the boundary is gone. the feelings of the character no longer at a distance to yourself, the reader is immersed in the skin of the character. no longer a book away.

i see the same thing in the internets refusal to Capitalise. (realise how you just read that word differently? your internal tone of voice heightening at that C?) thats again, removing the distance [!], keeping a hold of that intimacy with the reader. cherishing that tender bond.

its interesting, because siken says he needs to rely on the reader to make the associative leap when the "is" is left out. the same is true for rooney, i think. the lack of quotation marks demands attention. with an unfocused an divided mind, the lack of speech marks can easily be more annoying than smooth, stopping the flow of which the text invites the reader into. the capitalization of words is a stop too, a poem with uneven syllables: an irregular heartbeat ruining the pulse of the rhythm.

comparative words, quotation marks, and capitalized words – they all stop the blood-flow of the text. disrupt the rhythm. cut the flow short. maybe im simply very sensitive to these things, maybe i think too much about literary devices, but i love this style of writing. this stripping down – this removal of boundary and convention. the moon, terrible [how incredible!!] more please <3

🌼 poems that held my hand in may 🌼

Nocturne, Li-Young Lee

Your Name, Vahan Tekeyan

Sonnets to Orpheus 2;29, Rainer Maria Rilke

I stopped going to therapy, Clementine von Radics

Miyazaki Bloom, Nina Mingya Powles  

The Quiet Machine, Ada Limón

When we two parted, Lord Byron

Fragment, Amy Lowell

The Want of You, Angelina Weld Grimké

When Did It Happen?, Mary Oliver

Alone, Sara Teasdale

Peace XVIII, Khalil Gibran

The distance between us and the stars

Stardust, (2007) / Lady Windermere’s Fan, Oscar Wilde / Starry Night Over the Rhone, Vincent Van Gogh/ War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude/ Great Expectations, Charles Dickens/ Starry Night, Edvard Munch / Stars, Mary Oliver / Never Alone (an Expressionist interpretation of Starry Night), Mas.s 

I’m reading a book on Fermi’s paradox and the author points out that even if we detected intelligent life on a planet somewhere, it wouldn’t solve the paradox—given the enormous scales of space and time involved, “Why are there just two planets harbouring intelligent life?” is as great a mystery as “Why is there just one?” Though, finding one other civilisation might solve the problem if they are more advanced than us (and able to communicate with us)—they might have a better idea of what the astrobiological landscape is like and just be able to explain to us why life isn’t more common or why we can’t detect it. The author quickly adds that this would feel like cheating. Being given the explanation rather than figuring it out ourselves. We don’t really want that, do we. I just love scientists. Imagine being a member of an older and more advanced alien civilisation thinking you’re doing these “human” creatures a great kindness by finally putting their minds at ease and explaining why they couldn’t find more signs of life out there—and having them react like “Oh!!…….. we wanted to find the answer ourselves :( ” I would be very charmed.

i had an idea for a poem a little while ago but it got lost in life, in time, under a chair, under the blankets, outside a frosty window, beneath a quiet floorboard, under my tongue, inside your eyes

White roses, it has always been white roses, with their inscrutable faces and slender thorns, the grotesque so beautifully encompassed in the lovely.

Sigh, anyways no one can deny Calvin and Hobbes is the best Sunday strip comic.

Some people never observe anything.  Life just happens to them.  They get by on little more than a kind of dumb persistence, and they resist with anger and resentment anything that might lift them out of that false serenity.