Posts tagged submission

Whenever I walk in a London street,
I’m ever so careful to watch my feet;
And I keep in the squares,
And the masses of bears,
Who wait at the corners all ready to eat
The sillies who tread on the lines of the street,
Go back to their lairs,
And I say to them, “Bears,
just look how I’m walking in all the squares!”

And the little bears growl to each other, “He’s mine,
As soon as he’s silly and steps on a line.”
And some of the bigger bears try to pretend
That they came round the corner to look for a friend;
And they try to pretend that nobody cares
Whether you walk on the lines or squares.
But only the sillies believe the talk;
It’s ever so portant how you walk.
And it’s ever so jolly to call out, “Bears,
just watch me walking in all the squares!”
—A. A. Milne

(Source: cocophony)

last night at the joint of dawn, 
an owl’s call opened the darkness 

miles away, more than a world beyond this room 

and immediately I was in the woods again, 
poised, seeing my eyes seen, 
hearing my listening heard 

under a huge tree improvised by fear 

dead brush falling then a star 
straight through to God 
founded and fixed the wood 

then out, until it touched the town’s lights, 
an owl elsewhere swelled and questioned 
twice, like you light lean and strike 
two matches in the wind.

- Alice Oswald

(Source: xanac)

BAT EYES, a short film we’ve just produced exploring first love and the power of poetry, and using as its inspiration WB Yeats’ ‘When you are old and grey’.  Hope you enjoy!

(This is absolutely wonderful, thank you for the submission. I really loved the film. Check it out, followers!)

We are protected from so much pain. For example: graves.
The earth’s roots and brown-black blood are busy

covering the soft, violated bodies of our loves.
Death is a secret, and the rain with its many hands

washes off the streets to the gutters death’s thick surprise.
The automatic shutter of the eye never fails,

the courtesies of the tongue. What goes on in the rooms of houses
is guarded from us by the hardwood doors,

the carefully closed windows. Whatever was said or done,
night will come, eagerly, to clean up.

And death will shield us, in time,
from the sun’s megalithic promise:

Tomorrow, the same day.
Tomorrow, the same day.

For example: A flower
is the most beautiful lie.

—Arkaye Kierulf

(Source: cocophony)

The only animal that commits suicide
went for a walk in the park,
basked on a hard bench
in the first star,
traveled to the edge of space
in an armchair
while company quietly
talked and abruptly
returned,
the room empty.

The only animal that cries
that takes off its clothes
and reports to the mirror, the one
and only animal
that brushes its own teeth—

Somewhere

the only animal that smokes a cigarette,
that lies down and flies backward in time,
that rises and walks to a book
and looks up a word
heard the telephone ringing
in the darkness downstairs and decided
to answer no more.

And I understand,
too well: how many times
have I made the decision to dwell
from now on
in the hour of my death
(the space I took up here
scarlessly closing like water)
and said I’m never coming back
and yet

this morning
I stood once again
in this world, the garden
ark and vacant
tomb of what
I can’t imagine,
between twin eternities,
some sort of wings,
more or less equidistantly
exiled from both,
hovering in the dreaming called
being awake, where
You gave me
in secret one thing
to perceive, the
tall blue starry

strangeness of being
here at all.

You gave us each in secret something to perceive.

Furless now, upright, My banished
and experimental
child

You said, though your own heart condemn you

I do not condemn you.

—Franz Wright

(Source: cocophony)

which breathes and moves,since Doom
(with white longest hands
neatening each crease)
will smooth entirely our minds

-before leaving my room
i turn,and (stooping
through the morning) kiss
this pillow,dear
where our heads lived and were.

—e. e. cummings

(Source: cocophony)

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook.
Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication.
Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don’t regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the livingroom couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation. Relax. Don’t bother remembering
any of it. Let’s stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

- Dorianne Laux

My mother told me once of when

A young hare ventured from her den

And as she danced in field and glen

The world sang joy about her.

But wicked hateful things abound

And that young hare these evils found

Then whisked her up from off the ground

And glen was left without her.

The wicked power tore asunder

And with this cruel and fateful blunder

Cast her to a world of wonder

Would she e’er see home again?

And so hare flew that mournful day

Over the sky and far away

And down and down, beneath the sea

To a place unlike the glen.

A world of men and man’s design

A place where God’s light would not shine

A Hell of steel beneath the brine

Where misery’s echoes boomed.

And all around her there were others

Beasts like her, all sisters, brothers,

Locked up, all, with one another,

In deep sea-dark, entombed.

And in this crypt far from the shore

The hare lay down upon the floor

Imprisoned there forever more

And left to all her sorrow.

Her tender world was lost and gone

So joy and happiness foregone

She slept and cried and prayed for dawn

To wait the coming morrow.

The hound was still, the birds said naught,

The fox denied he had been caught,

The bear cried ‘This is just our lot’,

And surrendered to his pain.

But the cat stood up and shook his head

And rising from his metal bed

He said ‘For now, I am not dead,

And I will not die in vain!’

He cried aloud with much disdain

And tore about his stark domain

And said ‘These walls cannot contain

A force as strong as I!’

And the fox just laughed, and the birds all cried

And the bear knotted up himself and died

But the hare looked on as the poor cat tried

To break him free and fly.

He shook his chain with all his rage

And flew in anger ‘round his cage

Decrying this dark mournful stage

And the hare stood up as well.

With passion did she then respond,

She chewed her ropes and broke her bonds,

And freed the cat, they ran beyond,

They ran to flee that hell.

And what became of cat and hare?

Did they break free to purer air?

To guess their fate we shouldn’t dare

Perhaps their tale closed well.

But for all the beasts trapped in the Nether

All life from out the loch and heather

The flock that could not work together

Are sure still trapped in Hell.

 —William Murdoch/(The Weaver)

(Source: facalamina)

The town does not exist
except where one black-haired tree slips
up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.
The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die.

It moves. They are all alive.
Even the moon bulges in its orange irons
to push children, like a god, from its eye.
The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die:

into that rushing beast of the night,
sucked up by that great dragon, to split
from my life with no flag,
no belly,
no cry.

—Anne Sexton

(Source: cocophony)