por maurício de sousa

Hey Baby, did it hurt when you fell from my expectations?

Rachel Wiley, from Nothing is Okay (via buttonpoetry)

instagram: tristamateer

by nayyirah waheed.

My heart has returned and I am determined to love again.

Susie Anderson, Orchard, published in Shabby Doll House (via 7-weeks)

My creative writing professor told me to stop writing about love. I asked him why and he said, “Because you have turned it over and over in your hands, felt every angle, every fault, every inch, every bruise. You have ruined it for yourself.” I spent the next 3 weeks writing about science and space. Stars exploding. Getting sucked into a black hole. How much I wished I could sleep inside of that nothingness without being annihilated. What an exploding star would taste like. If it would make our stomachs glow like fireflies, or tingle and shake like pop rocks under our tongue. My creative writing professor told me that those poems weren’t what he was looking for. He tells me to stop writing about outer space. Stop writing about science. Again, I ask him why. Again, he says, “You have ruined it for yourself.” I spend the next three weeks writing about my mother, how we are told we can’t make homes inside of other human beings, but the foreclosure sign on my mother’s empty womb tells me that women who give birth know a different, more painful truth. My creative writing professor tells me I am both talented and hopeless, that everything I write is both visceral and empty, a walking circus with no animals inside but a beautiful trapeze artist with a broken hip selling popcorn in the entrance-way. He tells me to stop writing about my mother. I don’t ask why. I pick up my books and my notepad and I leave his office with my war stories tucked under my tongue like an exploding star, like the taste of the last person I ever loved, like my mother’s baby thermometer, and I do not look back. We are all writing about our mothers, our lovers, the empty space that we will never be able to breathe in. We are all carrying stones in our pockets and tossing them back and forth in our hands, trying to explain the heaviness and we will never stop writing about love, about black holes, about how quiet it must have been inside the chaos of my mother’s belly, inside the chaos of his arms, inside the chaos of the spaces in every poem I have ever written. None of this is ruined. Do not listen to them when they tell you that it is.

Caitlyn Siehl, “My Creative Writing Professor Told Me to Stop Writing About Love”  (via 7-weeks)

Alegria de pobre ..

I am eternally, devastatingly romantic, and I thought people would see it because ‘romantic’ doesn’t mean ‘sugary.’ It’s dark and tormented — the furor of passion, the despair of an idealism that you can’t attain.

Catherine Breillat (via gloomo)

…And the two of them loved each other for a long time in silence without making love again.

Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera (via wordsnquotes)

Anne Sexton - From Small Wire

By Lynda Barry  May 2016

My friend Michael and I are walking home arguing about the movie. He says that he believes a person can love someone and still be able to murder that person.

I say, No, that’s not love. That’s attachment. Michael says, No, that’s love. You can love someone, then come to a day

when you’re forced to think “it’s him or me” think “me” and kill him.

I say, Then it’s not love anymore. Michael says, It was love up to then though.

I say, Maybe we mean different things by the same word. Michael says, Humans are complicated: love can exist even in the murderous heart.

I say that what he might mean by love is desire. Love is not a feeling, I say. And Michael says, Then what is it?

We’re walking along West 16th Street — a clear unclouded night — and I hear my voice repeating what I used to say to my husband: Love is action, I used to say to him.

Simone Weil says that when you really love you are able to look at someone you want to eat and not eat them.

Janis Joplin says, take another little piece of my heart now baby.

Meister Eckhart says that as long as we love images we are doomed to live in purgatory.

Michael and I stand on the corner of 6th Avenue saying goodnight. I can’t drink enough of the tangerine spritzer I’ve just bought —

again and again I bring the cold can to my mouth and suck the stuff from the hole the flip top made.

What are you doing tomorrow? Michael says. But what I think he’s saying is “You are too strict. You are a nun.”

Then I think, Do I love Michael enough to allow him to think these things of me even if he’s not thinking them?

Above Manhattan, the moon wanes, and the sky turns clearer and colder. Although the days, after the solstice, have started to lengthen,

we both know the winter has only begun.

— Marie Howe, from The Kingdom of Ordinary Time; After The Movie

Ask any woman & she’ll tell you why Eve bit / into that apple. Why she chose the universe instead / of you.

Topaz Winters, from “Witch in Red,” published in heather press (via ainhochu)

Words from Trista Mateer’s book ‘The Dogs I have Kissed’