—I CAN’T SEEM TO GET THROUGH THESE SONGS ABOUT YOU

 

 

 

Padraig O Tuama

 

 

Disappointment is the cost of love.

 

When we share something we’ve created, we’re usually hoping for an echo that says, I see you.

 

The qualities of listening and sharing are reciprocal.

 

It’s really the living who live with the dead.

 

The only way to get through it is to go through it.

 

A myth can last a century, or a week.

 

The assumption that everyone shares the same myth isn’t accurate. We all have our own vision.

 

When it comes to racism, or harm in general, you might think, I didn’t personally do that. But you should ask yourself, Did I benefit from it somehow?

 

There are all sorts of ways to recognize, or unrecognize, people.

 

It’s a form of art when you read your poem aloud and the tension in what you’ve written makes your voice crack, catch and rise.

 

I’m not in a room of belief, but I’m next door listening.

 

I think Jesus respected those people who didn’t give him the answers they thought he wanted to hear.

 

True eroticism is following an urge, without one person dominating the other.

 

I’m trying to develop the capacity to hold ambivalence.

 

We don’t tell “we” stories, we tell “me” stories, and that’s what we always have to remember. Each story we tell is ours, and ours alone.

 

Pay close attention to the strains of tension you feel.

 

Your privilege is entirely yours alone, and the only person who doesn’t seem to know that is you.

 

When someone claims something to be true, I always want to ask, Says who?

 

What is the place of envy in your life?

 

Performing guilt only benefits the performer.

 

Art will always defy any one singular emotion. Always.

 

Emily Dickinson had the gift of noticing things just to notice them.

 

So often, when reading poetry, the voice in your head will say, I don’t get it paired with But I should get it when really the important thing is, What do you feel about it?

 

Believing less helped me believe in something else more.

 

Persona is the Greek word for mask.

 

Really, nothing is solid. Nothing is sure.

 

There’s always the arrogance of time to consider. 

 

Poetry doesn’t belong to poets. Poetry belongs to the public.

 

There are lots of opportunities to be lonely this week. 

 

It’s important, when reading a poem, to try not to get it as correct as the poet wants it interpreted, but to notice where it draws you to, and why, and what does it reveal about something in your life. 

 

What is it that I see now, that I never wanted to see?

 

What do you want, and why, and to whom is your desire directed?

 

It’s worth paying attention to the dynamics of desire. Desire means wanting something you don’t have. Some desires go unfulfilled—some are sexual, of course. Some are about relationships. Some about the world. Essentially, desire is the space between control and absence, a missed yearning, the absence of absence.

 

Desire reveals ourselves back to us.

 

When it comes to desire, the only thing we have is how to deal with it.

 

Sometimes it’s good to ask, “What world is this language making? Breaking? Mending?"

 

Hello everyone. Hello nothing. I’m Douglass. 

—I’VE GOT THAT SUNSHINE

  

Regina Brett, God Never Blinks

 

1.   Life isn’t fair, but it’s still good.

2.   When in doubt, just take the next small step.

3.   Life is too short to spend time hating anyone.

4.   Don’t take yourself so seriously. No one else does.

5.   You don’t have to win every argument. Agree to disagree.

6.   Cry with someone. It’s more healing than crying alone.

7.   Make peace with your past so it won’t screw up the present.

8.   It’s okay to let your children see you cry.

9.   Don’t compare your life to others’. You have no idea what their journey is about.

10.        Life is too short for long pity parties. Get busy living, or busy dying.

11.        You can get through anything if you stay put in today.

12.        A writer writes. If you want to be a writer, write. 

13.        It’s never too late to have a happy childhood. But the second one is up to you and no one else.

14.        When it comes to going after what you love in life, don’t take no for an answer.

15.        Over-prepare, then go with the flow.

16.        Be eccentric now. Don’t wait for old age to wear purple.

17.        The most important sex organ is the brain.

18.        No one is in charge of your happiness except you.

19.        Frame every so-called disaster with these words: “In five years, will this matter?”

20.        Forgive everyone everything.

21.        What other people think of you is none of your business.

22.        Time heals almost everything. Give time time.

23.        However good or bad a situation is, it will change.

24.        Your job won’t take care of you when you are sick. Your friends will. Stay in touch.

25.        Believe in miracles.

26.        Your children get only one childhood. Make is memorable.

27.        Get outside every day. Miracles are waiting everywhere.

28.         If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone else’s, we’d grab ours back

29.        Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you need.

30.        The best is yet to come.

31.        No matter how you feel, get up, dress up, and show up.

32.        Take a deep breath. It calms the mind.

33.        If you don’t ask, you don’t get.

34.        Yield.

35.        Life isn’t tied with a bow, but it’s still a gift.

36.        Don’t audit life. Show up and make the most of it now.

37.        All that truly matters in the end is that you loved. 

38.        Burn the candles; use the nice sheets; wear the fancy lingerie. Don’t save it for a special occasion. Today is special.

 —IF I COULD FLOAT AWAY IN THE BLUE, I MIGHT JUST FLOAT FOREVER

 

Animal

 

It was the summer one brother came home from prison and one fought in Nam and Mom fought Dad and I fought every demon inside me, hurling rocks at the moon, shrieking at the moon, wanting nothing more than to eat the moon’s still beating heart.

It was the summer I became a werewolf, changing seamlessly from one animal to the next.

 —I DON’T WANNA GO ON WITH YOU LIKE THAT

 

 

Pepper

 

 

Unlike us, she was too loud, barking entire nights until Mother had Pepper’s voice box removed, so she’s silent now like us, unable to report the horrors of our childhood. 

—WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? 

 

 The New Dark

 

        after Charles Simic

 

 

The stars know everything, even that there’s a sluiced tear in your heart, and that you will die before we turn twelve.

But the stars are secret-keepers, the very best kind, which is not always optimum, for I won’t learn any of this until after you’re dead.

Tonight, though, we sit on the roof, a pair of ragtag twins. Even up this high, on rusted trailer tin, we can hear the bull thrashing around below—swooped flings, and crashes, and shattered glasses, ridiculing and annihilating the things he professes to love. 

“Do you ever wonder what would have happened if there had only been one of us?” you ask, in your quavering, almost-grown-up-girl voice.

I have, of course. A million times. “I would have wanted it to be you,” I say.

You kick my lower shin harder than you mean to, all heal, hangnail and callus. “Because you wanted me to live in torment, listening to this,” you say, slapping an open palm downward, “dealing with this shit?”

“Come on.”

You take a drag from one of Mom’s Tareytons, blow a funnel toward the Canis Major Dwarf, and hand the bone-dry butt to me, so I do the same, puff, inhale, exhale. You’re older, brother’s big sis, so I’ve always followed your lead.

“Life is cool, but it’s also bullshit, you know?” you say, facing the aurora borealis, the moon’s half-face shadowed over one cheek. 

I kick a pine cone into the dusk, boot it all the way up to Venus, Jupiter or Pluto, toward every real or excommunicated planet, and because gravity isn’t a thing there, the cone never falls back, but just disappears in the plum, dust-colored air like a last wish that never gets granted.

You haven’t told me, but I know. I have ears, it’s a trailer we live in. Plus, we’re twins, and that is its own unique taxonomy.

“This is going to sound super corny, but I think you’re going to do some really great shit when you’re older,” you say, your chipped fingernails clicking, cigarette butt fading into twilight ash.

Quickly I say, “What? Like, without you? But what about you?”

You chuff, half-laugh, as if caught in a vise, like an axe blade scudding off a boulder. “Be real. Always. You and me, we don’t have anything, but we’ve always been honest.”

That’s what I should have said, what I wanted to say, but you beat me to it, like you beat me being alive by nineteen minutes and thirty-seven seconds. 

The night is leaky black. A roadkill crow.

For some reason, I feel brave enough. I reach out and take your hand, and hope to hell you can’t feel my stampeding pulse, or shaking fingers, though I know you can.

You take it, like a handout, and squeeze softly.

In the distance, a star nods off, looping glow, a yolk smear over your savage-looking blonde shag, and it’s as if you’re an angel sitting next to me, both real and unreal.

“You’re going to be astronomer when you grow up, just like you said,” I say, because I need to say something, and because I actually believe it for once.

You puff, suck, exhale, puff, suck, inhale. And then the moment turns into a charcoal smudge, same as the smoky trailer below

A deer tiptoes out of the brush, and then one more.

“You see that?”

Both lift their snouts toward the tree that grows the bad apples. They each rip one off, then spit them out, trampling away in the new dark.

 “Hey,” I say, straightening stiff, “you know you can tell me anything.”

“God, really?”

Below us, inside our trailer, the bull overturns a table, or sofa, or a life, like it’s something meant to be destroyed and punished, as walls collide.

You hold a finger to your lips, and then to mine. 

“Shhh,” you say. “Look at that star,” you say. “Right there. I mean, really, really look at it. I think it sees us back.”