Salinyay-blog - Bananafish

Reading list for my travels through Italy: - War of the Foxes by Richard Siken - Life On Mars by Tracy K Smith (rereading it <3) - The New Testament by Jericho Brown - A Season In Hell by Arthur Rimbaud any suggestions?!!!

skin the poet

skin open the poet to find out how books have been deceiving you: not all hearts pump blood; some, expand in rhymes & contract in line breaks.

skin open the poet to confirm the rumor that between the liver & the spleen lives a tiny being; an imp, absent in daydreams -a social drinker- & a lover of the sax.

1.- take the poet’s arm, & rip off a tear of skin. behold a waterfall of metaphors soak your shoes in summer’s breeze.

2.- on a surgical table, lay your poet down in such way that his pointy nose threats to drill into the ground.   & with the help of a sharp knife, split the meadow on his back into two nations that might have lost it all in war. proceed then to spread open these lands, & discover that a poet’s spine abides as marble columns once did in falling rome: oh the burn or the glory? 3.- light a match & heat the poet’s earlobes to 95 °. careful, the smoky smell of blue winter shades might stupefy your brains   whilst the poet’s head gets caught in flames. if so: no stress, your poet’s mouth muscles might stretch into a smile, but do keep in mind it’s just an involuntary contraction. or not.

4.- once the fire’s out & the buzzcut’s ready, grab your baseball bat & crack the poet’s tibia by the half. hollow bones & secret chambers. see that rolled up paper hidden in there? take it out & read it to the skies; correct, it is nothing but the transcripts of the poet’s conversations with the moon. tally marks for bleeding hearts.  

5.- as a final act of this medical extravaganza, severe the poet’s head & hold it between your hands. do you feel it slowly floating, as if being drawn toward the clouds?   stitch the head back in place using a silver needle & a thread of slurred speech. remember poets heal on empty illusions & broken things.

that is all for poetic anatomy 101…   …now wake up the poet.

- @skinthepoet 

You’re standing in a room you used to know so well, a hand on the doorframe when it starts. The walls blur and your shirt’s off; there’s a hand reaching for your waist. Almost an invitation. Almost something more. How many times has this body been almost touched? The world rights itself and you’re past the first exhibit. You move inside, past the books, the poems, the lists you almost finished. You’re sitting on the edge of a bed when it hits you again: a mouth on your mouth, a hand on your thigh. Almost an argument. Almost a mistake. You could call this the exhibit of personal significance. You move toward the window, making note of the sideshows playing out around you. The time you almost saw the streets of Spain. All the nights you almost saw the sun rise. All the times you almost reached out to someone but didn’t. Your mind’s moving someplace else now, to a series of snapshots. Eyes in different colors, blurry faces thrown back in laughter, hands poised around drawing pencils. Freckles on shoulder caps, tattoos in small corners of the body. Tell me, how many people have you almost loved?  Call this the art gallery. Call this the main attraction.

Kelsey Danielle, “Call Me a Series of Almosts” (via pigmenting)

I’m currently rereading Life On Mars by T.K Smith & I swear my feet might be grounded in this old city but my head is somewhere in between a burning star & the edge of a distant galaxy. 

″One was a book thief. The other stole the sky.“

- Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

Both colour and language have their mundane, pragmatic, adaptive functions; we use colour to recognise objects in our environment, and we use language for everyday communication. But in painting and poetry, colour and language become as it were aware of themselves; it is indeed as though they know themselves better than any human being possibly could.

Elena Maslova-Levin, ‘Rainer Maria Rilke on Colour and Self-Awareness’  (via thebluesthour)

note to self: don’t stop fighting

by Herr Bohn