Ocean Vuong | Richard Siken

I am caught on the wind adrift

bound by a grieving sky

still within a restless storm 

buried beneath its striking fire

“I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams.”

— Virginia Woolf, from ‘The Waves’

I am more a fool for thinking, wiser for feeling, as if my head had ever the chance of hiding this from me 

smoking cigarette & sipping mango, watching the world spin: fighting the urges, my mind is a maze, a cage of contradiction, lost in addiction, losing to my misery, life presents me blessing, good things, in which candid moments of bliss, lie awake & alive, alive as essence, greenery is all I need, nature's naked gifts of life, breathe breath into me, ouroboric wandering idol, cosmic ghost; inward & outward, great thing of wondrous depth, not in death.

I don’t know where I’m going. Where I came from is disappearing. I am unwelcome. My beauty is not beauty here. My body is burning with the shame of not belonging, my body is longing. I am the sin of memory and the absence of memory.

Warsan Shire, from Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head; “Home”

Keep reading

“I hate solitude, but I am afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction.”

— Iris Murdoch, Under the Net  

—Ocean Vuong.

—May Sarton.

This deafening cacophony 

creates a solitary peace

encompassed in small rooms

rippling a quiet release

I was a gifted child. Until I wasn't. I was the golden girl. Until I couldn't burn anymore.

My parents expected me to build wings of gold and fly further than anyone could ever try. I don't blame them, having a child to raise is like sculpting a clay pot, you can shape it the way you like, paint it the colour you fancy. To raise a child is to play God. To raise a child is to be God.

But to be a child is to fall, to make mistakes, to fail. The thing about being too bright at an early age means you burn out by the time you're 16 and suddenly the world around you becomes more gray and terribly, terribly lonely. The fire is never warm enough, nothing is ever enough. And one day you find yourself begging to a godless sky, begging for a new spark.

I was a gifted child once. I was the golden girl. And one day, I burned out.

-Ritika Jyala, excerpt from The world is a sphere of ice and our hands are made of fire