never never

Perhaps not to be is to be without your being,
without your going, that cuts noon light
like a blue flower, without your passing
later through fog and stones,
without the torch you lift in your hand
that others may not see as golden,
that perhaps no one believed blossomed
the glowing origin of the rose,
without, in the end, your being, your coming
suddenly, inspiringly, to know my life,
blaze of the rose-tree, wheat of the breeze:
and it follows that I am, because you are:
it follows from ‘you are’, that I am, and we:
and, because of love, you will, I will,
We will, come to be.

— Pablo Neruda

Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,
London has swept about you this score years
And bright ships left you this or that in fee:
Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things,
Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price.
Great minds have sought you—lacking someone else.
You have been second always. Tragical?
No. You preferred it to the usual thing:
One dull man, dulling and uxorious,
One average mind—with one thought less, each year.
Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit
Hours, where something might have floated up.
And now you pay one. Yes, you richly pay.
You are a person of some interest, one comes to you
And takes strange gain away:
Trophies fished up; some curious suggestion:
Fact that leads nowhere; and a tale or two,
Pregnant with mandrakes, or with something else
That might prove useful and yet never proves,
That never fits a corner or shows use,
Or finds its hour upon the loom of days:
The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work;
Idols and ambergris and rare inlays,
These are your riches, your great store; and yet
For all this sea-hoard of deciduous things,
Strange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff:
In the slow float of differing light and deep,
No! there is nothing! In the whole and all,
Nothing that’s quite your own.
                         Yet this is you.

— Ezra Pound

Phosphenes n. the stars and colors you see when you rub your eyes.

I can’t focus on what’s important.

Perhaps, I was tired and half-awake, half-dreaming too, and mostly pretending that what I was doing in that moment wouldn’t account too much. But it did. As I scrolled through my contacts, with the heavy rainfall in front of me to the patio we’ve met and fooled around two summers ago, and without thinking or any conscious intention to do so, I called you. More importantly, you answered—groggy but surprised, or at least, it sounded like it when you said, “Hello?” Simple. Sweet. And I smiled even though you couldn’t see me. I missed you too.

Lonely and drowning myself with useless distractions.

Rose with dark eyes, 
mirror of your nothingness, 
rose with dark eyes, 
make us believe in the mystery, 
hypocrite flower,
flower of silence.

Rose the colour of pure gold, 
oh safe deposit of the ideal, 
rose the colour of pure gold, 
give us the key of your womb, 
hypocrite flower, 
flower of silence.

Rose the colour of silver, 
censer of our dreams, 
rose the colour of silver, 
take our heart and turn it into smoke, 
hypocrite flower, 
flower of silence.

By Remy de Gourmont

{via mrmonst3r}

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

— Ezra Pound

When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider

that birds’ bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest

swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue

bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no
way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider

that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the

leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark
work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes
and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.

— A. R. Ammons

A bad habit of mine lately. You prattle around and I never interrupt you. Shallow, sordid yet always bursting with energy. I’m not going to stay by these unruffled waters. You’re mad and so am I.