Latest Posts by lacexleaves - Page 3

Does anyone else have this strange compulsion to try and - in a sense - store everything you read that moves you, everything you write, as though trying to piece together a cohesive person? almost as if the pieces you’ve collected of yourself could somehow make up for all the life you leave unlived ?

Winters in Retrospect

You're my wall.

It's rueful, the smile I give

When, tired, I lean my head against your chest

Standing stock straight the both of us

In freezing December waters,

Our shoelaces tied in pretty a noose.

Monsoon eats at our hand

Rested on the windowpane

Sometimes even the cold cannot replace the rain.

- pollosky-in-blue

The wind calls, a worn tale

twisted with the wry smiles of damsels

bemused and the blossoms of enchantment a-plenty

in the hands of knights exalted.

A puzzling air settled about the spectacle,

as the child sought eternity’s ill traveled lane.

Elusive youth caught in vain at her fly-away ardor

And laid bare her fragmented joy.

The silence of the day startled her,

Frivolous and temporal. Of what poisoned lake of

transcendence had she drunk?

Morose and frightened the child grew,

Farther and farther he strayed after a wayward fancy.

Impermanence was the derisive echo of decadence

from the hearth of the abyss and

the nightfall of the heavens.

.

.

.

Eternity and impermanence are interchangeable in the verse.

Queen of hearts, bows to the fools parade, insanity is a strange thing to take comfort in. ‘Mere blood and bone’ will lure you to depths of life/hell which human hand (only) must (only) touch. Vega of the lyre and bellatrix of the Orion in a dance of lights and life, bitterness sings a frayed melody to the hearthstone, listen to her woebegone voice in the soft refrain, fold away your letters and give away your life, for its not sadness but despair that requests it. Believe in phantoms, and one as old as yourself wants to touch your windows and watch its fragile hands pass through the glass. 

in the sixth months after graduating from college, with my very expensive degree from a good college, i ate nothing but bread. i worked at a bakery / cafe / restaurant and got half off one meal per shift but it was still too expensive even then. but at the end of every night we would throw out all the bread loaves that hadn’t sold, which was most of them, every night. we would fill up ten boxes to give away to a shelter and then we could take anything we could carry, and i couldn’t afford a half off deconstructed sandwich, but i could fill the cabinets of my apartment with bread. everyone who worked there was just like me, subsisting on discarded, overpriced bread. 

(when the managers’ backs were turned i was taught to leave the trashbags of bread behind the dumpster rather than inside it, because it was locked after everyone left to prevent people from stealing from it. we would say we were going out to stack chairs and instead stack prepackaged salads prepared that morning in the narrow space between wall and dumpster, but that’s not what this is about.)

we were working valentine’s day, a little bit miserable about it, because customers are somehow worse on a holiday about love, and even if we were single we didn’t want to be here, and most of us had people we’d rather be spending the day with, and the snappish, hardass manager was working that day, and everyone could not wait for the day to be over. 

we had a boxes of those bakery tissue sheets around and i was twisting it in my hands and i thought about how the first night my uncle spent with my aunt he had to get up early for work but didn’t want to wake her and the whole thing hadn’t been planned, exactly, so he (a roofer by trade and a golden glove boxer by sport) went into the kitchen and took some paper towels and twisted them between his big, scarred hands until it formed a sweeter shape and when my aunt work up it was to a paper towel rose on her pillow. 

so i used a couple sheets of bakery tissue to make a rose and walked up to my coworker who stared at me with a rictus smile and i gave it to her, trying not overthink if it was a weird thing to do. her smile slipped and she asked “you made this?” holding it carefully, like it wasn’t something her two year old son could have made with his pudgy hands, and i shrugged and got more milk from the back. 

then another coworker held the steamer too long when frothing milk, not on accident but because he was irritated, so i rolled another rose and tucked it in his apron pocket as i walked by. then it was just one more of us up front and it was nothing, thirty seconds of twisting paper to take the stack of cookies out of her hands and hand her a tissue paper rose, her lined face lifting into a grin as she proudly tucked it into the chest pocket of her shirt and i may as well have been standing in front of the ovens for how hot my face felt. 

it was such a silly thing to do, i felt ridiculous, giving away hastily constructed tissue paper roses on valentine’s day, clumsy artful garbage. then one of the servers walked by and noticed and so i made her one too, and then other servers came by, leaning over the glass, and complimenting the flowers with big eyes, and i laughed and made more, still not sure if it was sincere, but even if it wasn’t, i figured making them one and handing it over was better than saying no. 

then i went to the back again and the dishwasher yelled out “where’s mine? what about us?” and he was too sweet to ever be anything less than sincere, so someone kept an eye on the door to the manager’s office as i stood in the sweltering kitchen and rolled clumsy tissue paper roses, enough for everyone 

and by the time the day ended, everyone had one, everyone wore one, tucked in their shirt or their apron or stuck in their hair or taped to the top of their pen. everyone was a little less miserable, smiling like we were all on in on the joke, although i don’t think any of us knew the punchline 

this story doesn’t have a punchline either. i just sometimes think of how much better some crumpled tissue paper made things and think that it can be that easy, sometimes, if we’re sincere and don’t overthink it too much

As punishment for his sins, a human is sentenced to battle endlessly against hordes of demons with nothing but a knife. Satan’s court laughs at him for a few thousand years… until he starts winning the battles. Then they start screaming in terror.

*goes to the top of a cliff and and whispers to a bird which obviously doesn’t care, “It’s my birthday today” and is met with a blank stare and an indignant ruffle and is left with the words echoing emptily across the hillside*

today has been very pleasant

What is it called when certain moments of intense stress or panic cause you to fixate on a certain aspect of a thing and distort everything surrounding it in a very negative way and it’s as if that certain distortion changes almost everything thing about your perception itself? As if you have no tangible correlation to whatever is happening at the present moment and you are forced to observe yourself involuntarily perform an action you might not actively want to? A very persistent incoherence in your mind? Complete inability to concentrate on anything for more than ten minutes at maximum? Casually suicidal? As in overdosing on metformin because of a comparatively very trivial event?

who needs a social life when you have followers who don’t talk to you and you run a blog no one cares about

“...what is the point of looking at things which must always be viewed in so crude a light? When there is no softened angle of memory, nor is there gladness of anticipation? I’ll carefully choose flowers from no mans garden through the frost, all for them to be displayed as accolades on the dusty precipice of another’s understanding...”

ok from what i can tell there have only been like 4 moderately widespread memes on this site in the past month or so (1. pokemon go meme 2. taylor swift copyright meme 3. “you gotta” 4. halsey lyrics on spongebob caps) which others have noted is a remarkably reduced rate of meme production for this trash site. 

while i think the fact that the majority of tumblr’s user base has gone back to school definitely contributes to The Great Meme Depression of 2015 (TGMD 2k15), it cannot be the only explanation. if it was we would see the same Meme Stagnation every year around the same time, which has not been the case. september 2014 gave us unavoidable site-wide phenomena such as madden gifferator, “what’s better than this? guys being dudes,” the rebirth of loss.jpg, steal her look, what are we?, etc. 

i propose that the rapid rate of meme production we grew accustomed to in 2014 and early 2015 deflated the staying power of individual memes. our hyper-awareness of memes and the fact that our metatextual analysis of said memes became a meme within itself (”memeology”) conditioned us into constant vigilance in our search for “the next meme.” i mean, for fuck’s sake, the first meme of 2014 was “what’s going to be the first meme of 2014?” and the last meme of 2014 was “is this the last meme of 2014?” with garbage pseudo-intellectual meta we sowed the seeds of our own destruction.

deflation of individual meme value led to an even more dramatic increase in meme production (for evidence, just look at how many memes the blog memedocumentation has explained. and of course, those are only 2015 memes. the fact that memedocumentation does not document pre-2015 memes is another fucking 2015 meme) this lead to an even heavier reliance on what could be referred to as Meme Credit–we were borrowing and resurrecting old memes like pepe and the aforementioned loss.jpg to satisfy the Meme Demand in the absence of concrete, original memes. we were destined to crash when that credit ran out and the vaults of the Meme Banks were emptied. 

even now as i reflect on how meme hyper-vigilance and overproduction has destroyed the meme economy, i cannot help but wonder “but what will be the next meme?”

only some kind of……….new deal………a New Meme Deal, if u will, can save us from this Great Meme Depression. in its absence we shall continue to suffer.

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.

my activeness on tumblr directly correlates to how much i should not be on tumblr in this moment

cym as fav lyrics

Aaaaaaa anon you must forgive me for being so late about it, I had one hell of a ride choosing song lyrics *pants as if I'd been running*

But eeee it will be a long post-

• @shecriesalonemp3

"Listen close and don't be stoned

I'll be here in the morning

'Cause I'm just floating

Your cigarette still burns

Your messed up world will thrill me

...

Alison, I'll drink your wine

And wear your clothes when we're both high

Alison, I said we're sinking

But she laughs and tells me it's just fine

I guess she's out there somewhere"

- Alison (Slowdive)

• @its-toasted

"Take everything you have in front of you

Make every movement, do it to the groove

You will not be happy for long if you're working

And what would be the point if it did ever surface?

...

Wake up to the rhythm of the city and I try to remember

Even my brothers have some trouble with

Each other since since those things fell apart

It's the way that things are

It's the way that it is

...

Even when you split me up, groovin' to the sound of the laughter

And if I listen to it closely I can

Still hear all the love in his heart

Every time I take a look at the skyline it makes me feel better

'Cause I just miss you down here where the other people try to move on"

- Blue Coupe (Twin Peaks)

• @deviocat

"Oh, you can't hear me 'cause I sing to a different age

And you should fear me 'cause I believe in a different age

But I live in the city that lives in a different age

Oh, I live in a city that lives in a different age

Where all the poets are writing memoirs

And I'm still singing songs

Oh, all the poets are writing memoirs

And I'm still singing songs"

- A Different Age (Current Joys)

• @lacexleaves

"I used to think of ferris wheel light sounds

The Friday hum of neons and blue

But now they're like circular cages

Of grated tin and rusted wind

Hey, now, who really cares?

Hey, won't somebody listen

Let me say what's been on my mind

Can I bring it out to you

I need someone to talk to

And no one else will spare me the time"

- Hey, Who Really Cares? (Linda Perhacs)

• @francesco-bernoulli-gang

"Angels smoking cigarettes on rooftops in fishnets in the morning with the

Moon still glowing

And here comes Jesus in an Astrovan rolling down the strip again

He's stoned while Jerry plays

Life ain't ever what it seems

These dreams are more than paper things

And it's alright mama you're afraid

I'll be poor along the way

I don't wanna see those tears again

You know, Jesus drives an Astrovan

Yes, he does (I say woo)"

- Astrovan (Mt. Joy)

• @pani-puri

"Pulling up, getting down

This whole place is crazy town

Music bumping and the lights gone down

Never felt at home in any place I found

Oh, I live in a cold, white wind

And I feel the chill coming over me again"

- Butterfly (Adrianne Lenker)

• @anjo-umbra

"Put your hands on the wheel

Let the golden age begin

Let the window down

Feel the moonlight on your skin

Let the desert wind

Cool your aching head

Let the weight of the world

Drift away instead

These day I barely get by

I don't even try

It's a treacherous road

With a desolated view

There's distant lights

But here they're far and few

And the sun don't shine

Even when its day

You gotta drive all night

Just to feel like you're ok"

- The Golden Age (Beck)

• @roseusnoctua

"Satellite, headlines read

Someone's secrets you've seen

Eyes and ears have been

Satellite dish in my yard

Tell me more, tell me more

Who's the king of your satellite castle?

Winter's cold spring erases

And the calm away by the storm is chasing

Everything good needs replacing

Look up, look down all around, hey satellite

Rest high above the clouds no restrictions

Television we bounce 'round the world

And while I spend these hours

Five senses reeling

I laugh about this weatherman's satellite eyes"

- Satellite (Dave Matthews Band)

• @sidereusimber

"And though I may be getting older

Know that I'm going with you

Know that I'm hanging on

to the things that you said

The things that you said

...

I've felt my soul

Rise up from my body when

I look into your blue eyes

...

If cosmic force

Is real at all

It's come between you and I"

- Some Things Cosmic (Angel Olsen)

alright gather round, enthusiasts of shakespeare’s words words words. i’m gonna learn you a fun research exercise you can do in lieu of switching between the same four websites or even include in your research for essays and creative stuff. 

step 1. first up, you’re gonna need a play you like (or literally any work written between 1450 to let’s say 1700, but i baited you with shakespeare so.)

step 2. get you a word. it doesn’t have to necessarily be a difficult word that needs glosses. actually, it’s more fun if you take a word you think you know.

step 3: go here. see, you keep being told that the first dictionary was invented by samuel johnson in 1757. which isn’t wholly incorrect, this guy did set out to define all words. but lexicons and glossaries wayyyyyy predate johnson. the catch is, these were for difficult words. or words specific to a trade. this is actually interesting and tells us more than if all words were defined like the OED or smth. more on this soon. now type in your word and hit enter.

step 4: you will see a list of old, digitized, searchable lexicons. and it lists every instance your word is used. holy shit, you think. 

step 5: now here are some things you can assume. if your word occurs in the headword (the word being defined), then it’s a difficult word. for speakers of that time. if your word is used in definitions and explanations of other words, they were common words that didn’t need to be explained. easy words may also be on spelling books for children but again, not defined. 

step 6: okay, now what? you’ve learned the meaning of the word in context and its usage. now it’s time for conceptsssssssss. click on some translating dictionaries where this word occurs. these are more likely to have synonyms. now take a deep breath because you’ll see some wild connections. why is virginity the same as honesty of life? why does enjoy mean “to possess” something but also TO FUCK? co valences are so fun because essentially ON PURPOSE. THESE WORDS WERE CHOSEN ON PUPRPOSE.

step 7: wonder, and go back to your play. 

[just to put my credentials on the table, this is my field of research. so it’s 100% okay if you have objectively a better idea of fun. but one of my friends said this was like carbon dating words, so i’m operating under that illusion, baby.]

Memorial

Sometimes is enough for one wish.

And a walk from the corner

And back under the trees and light

Is often enough for a thought to perish

And a million others to be born

From their graves

The way shells explode

Under the hills of tin men and grass

Long after the blood-bath is but an anecdote

A story for a hot summer's evening on the porch

Or a tale told on idle winters

Through the dislodged teeth of the old ones.

- pollosky-in-blue

For those of you who asked, here’s a list of some of my favourite poems:

Soleil et Chair (Sun and Flesh), Arthur Rimbaud Litany, Rebecca Linderberg A Myth of Devotion, Louise Glück L’Après-Midi d’un Faune (The Afternoon of The Faun), Stéphane Mallarmé Fever 103°, Sylvia Plath It’s No Use, Sappho (tr. Barnard) Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes, Rainer Maria Rilke The Glass Essay, Anne Carson Alchimie du Verbe (Alchemy of the Word), Arthur Rimbaud I Will Wade Out, E. E. Cummings Mrs. Beast, Carol Ann Duffy Elsa au Miroir (Elsa at The Mirror), Louis Aragon To Fanny, John Keats The First Elegy, Rainer Maria Rilke Persephone The Wanderer (I), Louise Glück Mad Girl Love Song, Sylvia Plath He Seems to Me, Sappho (tr. Carson) F. de Samara to A. G. A., Emily Brontë Pietà, Rainer Maria Rilke (and its many translations) To Proserpine (Orphic Hymn), Anonymous The Unicorn, Angela Carter Saying Your Names, Richard Siken Apparition, Stéphane Mallarmé The Tiger, Pablo Neruda Lady Lazarus, Sylvia Plath Clair de Lune, Roland Leighton I Like My Body When, E. E. Cummings When We With Sappho, Kenneth Rexroth Look On This Picture and On This, Christina Rossetti Nacciyar Tirumoli, Andal (tr. Sarukkai Chabria) Zuleikha, Rumi Marathon, Louise Glück The Red Poppy, Louise Glück The Concert of Hyacinths, Odysseus Elytis (tr. by Kimon Friar) Song for an Ancient City, Amal El-Mohtar Prayers in a Temple, Yusuf al-Khal (tr. by Abdullah al-Udhari) The Convent Threshold, Christina Rossetti Letter to Husband, Emily Berry my love, E. E. Cummings Glanmore Sonnet X, Seamus Heaney Plead for Me, Emily Brontë

Indigo roses, idyllic nights and stolen almosts’.

Winds of Hy-brasil fondle softly the body

stretched on the grave of the buried gods of music

and forlorn hands over the field of forget-me-nots,

held lovingly at the chasm’s precipice.

Forget your thorns, mon amour,

and you’ll see why you mustn’t gather dreams—loves—

that have been left to get lost and embedded

in crevasses between thwarted desire and the wistfulness of

a childhood unspoken. Your wandering eyes on the evening star

and your tired hands in my reluctant hold.

And for once the night isn’t marred by children entwining

and entangling her silent melody with their laughter.

.

.

.

…

Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place // Chen Chen, When I Grow Up I Want to be a List of Further Possibilities // Warsan Shire, Conversations About Home // Fatimah Asghar, Partition // Aysha, Diaspora Defiance // Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous // Kaveh Akbar, Do You Speak Persian? // Safia Elhillo, Date Night With Abdelhalim Hafez // Gustavo Perez Firmat, Bilingual Blues // Scherezade Siobhan, How to Welcome the Dead

Nights in Winter Smell Pretty Great

I got a shivering hand and wet

Hugs from the clothes still hung

On the wind-up clothesline.

And it's night under the lamps,

And the moths are beating

Themselves up against the stars.

Three verses and I've run out of smoke.

Three verses and it still ain't been told.

We're tripping over each other,

Waiting for the other all the time

To ask for a light and to dig in.

There's not enough air for crickets

To bite into, so the chill bites into them

And me, always me. Watching

Them live from the window.

Yesterday evening they cut a cake

And someone brought a wreath.

It bled into the white-washed walls

Like my month would for some days,

And the baby was there when

The plates crashed and the sobs broke

After the party curled up to leave.

See, it unrolls like a film or a die

With the edges cut lose from hinges.

Tell me a number, gypsy, and I'll tell you

Why I would still see you snaked into it.

In the crook of seven, in the curve of two,

And a laced soixante neuf printed with

Brilliant blue - the sodium pricks

Like chalk in eyes when you close them

And an ultramarine demon is the halo I have

Beside me when I walk the path that

Is never there at daytime. Even though

Little squirrels have left mud-paw prints,

I doubt they trod the ground alive.

Tell me again, a line this time and I

Will roll it up and give you a light -

The smoke will incense the moon

So eat it up dear, served with the basalt

Hanging over the ravine.

I thought I could go through it like one

Slips to the bottom of a cumulonimbus.

And eventually there will be the earth,

Ready to take your bones and skin

And swallow you whole, as if they'd been

Starved of the seed a lover plants

To carve up another Matryoshka doll.

Empty to the very last case and cold

Where the tired paint flaked off.

Tell me a word and I will make a cloud

In the night with your breath.

- pollosky-in-blue

She tightened her hold of the hand dearest to her and uttered in a tone of quiet contempt, ”No rose shall e’er bloom over my grave, god forbid!”

“And you wonder why the eternally vague intentions of mortals morph into creatures as alluring. Will thou not cast away thy pretence lady?” Enquired back the night. The song of the Cicadas rung as soft as church bells through the veil of silence that clung to the earth, among which lay the echoes of unheard laughter and the tears of unseen eyes. Thought held in open hands slipped away, away into the river of time, into the sweetness of lost memory. Wherein is the difference? Futile words and futile life clasp hands/together to form sculptures of forsaken gods on earth and heaven, they can but stretch their hands out and sob at the foot of the aspen poplar and look in terror at its shuddering leaves as it pierces their hearts with the arrow of ichor, the mortal blood was said to be poisoned from that day on, for the indifference of the deity was a luxury ill afforded by the child lying under the sparkling night sky beset with a gentle gray drift, behind which lays life, held off, locked up. Always with the promise of far away, the far away that is permanently entrenched in the distance/the fragrance of neverland.