Three of Cups by Marty McConnell

At some point it becomes true that all stories
are love stories. all making, love making.
I didn't make this rule. but it binds me
all the same. I wish there were a law
... against condescending against love. against
the economy of fear that says your joy
means less joy for me as if love
were pie, or money, or fossil fuel
dug or pumped from the earth, gone
when it's gone. it's just not true. the heart
with its gift for magnificent expansion
is not coal. not fruit set to spoil or the dollar
cringing in its wallet. when you say darling,
the world lights up at its edges. when mouths
find mouths and minds follow or minds find
minds and mouths, hands, hips, toes, follow –
how about you call that sacred. how about you raise
your veined right hand and swear on the blood
that branches there, yes. I take this crush
to be my lawful infatuation. I will bend toward joy
until the bending's its own pleasure. I will memorize
photographs and street maps, I will acquiesce
to the maudlin urgency of pop songs and dance,
and dance – there's a perfection only the impossible kiss
possesses. there are notes you can only hear naked
in the dark of a room to which you will never
return. anything that moves the world toward light
is a blessing. why not take it with both hands,
lift it to your lips like a broth of stars. this
is the substance that holds our little atoms together
into bodies. this sweet paste of longing
is all that binds us to the earth.
and all we know of the gods.

Bag of Mice - Nick Flynn

Bag of Mice
by Nick Flynn

I dreamt your suicide note
was scrawled in pencil on a brown paperbag,
& in the bag were six baby mice. The bag
opened into darkness,
smoldering
from the top down. The mice,
huddled at the bottom, scurried the bag
across a shorn field. I stood over it
& as the burning reached each carbon letter
of what you'd written
your voice released into the night
like a song, & the mice
grew wilder.

The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart

This has been one of my favorite poems for a while now. While the poem is still very good on paper, it is so so so good read aloud.

Poem That Had Some Difficulty With the First Line by Mikael de Lara Co

In an effort to begin posting in this new blog, I am sharing a poem I found recently and fell in love with. I stole it from here.

I will sometimes post for the bookish (poems, books, events), sometimes for the Bushwickish (photos, events, musings), and will sometimes post things that I (both bookish and Bushwickish) enjoy. I hope that you will enjoy these posts as well.

First off:

Poem That Had Some Difficulty With the First Line
by Mikael de Lara Co

I've always wanted to begin a poem
with the line, "I've always wanted
to begin." Now I have. Best to end here,

but then the universe is expanding
back into its black beginnings,
and space, aware of its own looming demise,

is singing of possibilities. I'm almost over, it sings,
it's almost over and sooner or later we'd be left
with nothing but time. If we live that long.

Sometime before then all our dialects
will have moored on the gray sands of forgetting,
all our sad words will have started

to repeat themselves, as if sound didn't dissipate
into stillness, as if not everything has been said before.
Here, let me tell you a joke: I am a man of faith.

Or a child, a tree, some living thing
that will someday be a dead thing.
What does faith have to do with it? I know;

it isn't funny. Nothing funny about mortality,
how movement bleeds into clockwork,
how clockwork succumbs to its own igneous finitude.

How we aid entropy by being born.
See? I only wanted to begin, now I'm humming
the ghost-heavy refrain of imminent endings.

In that song about possibilities, someone
is hurling an empty bottle skyward. I see you:
You're imagining it slowing towards its peak,

anticipating gravity, its ruthless duty. Stop.
Don't. Let's go. Let's not be around when it shatters.
Let's not wait for an ending.