lovepowerpoetry

[lovepowerpoetry]

[lovepowerpoetry]

Anybody can love you when it is easy, 

when they love the very idea of you

that they have cultivated to entertain

them, but can you love me when the reality

is different from that which you expect?

Can you love me even when I am a mess

or is your love incapable of expanding

beyond the shallowness of the depths

in which you choose to cautiously wade?

Can you only love me in the colors

that you have painted with the brush of

your own eyes that hides the truth of

this flesh because I am not the heaven

you have made of me, but the cosmic dust

of the reality of this earth and the breath of

the hope of its last prayer?

- J.Wool, Can You Love Me Then, Breaths of the Soul

[lovepowerpoetry]

— serena crane, girls girls girls

[lovepowerpoetry]

Hi, not poetry related...but, I do have a new article live on The Gamer. Pls check it out if you can :) 

#dungeons and dragons #notpoetry #Alex's Poetry

[lovepowerpoetry]

If the forest won’t keep me, let it devour me.

Consumed,  I will belong. 

[lovepowerpoetry]

Seaglass

I read the poets I wish I could be.

All my edges are blunted by the waves smashed beer bottles smoothed to seaglass

so all you can see is diffused light and not the carelessness or rage that led

to these fragments. I write poetry like  seaglass. The crystalline points of break

that first caught the light have long since been stolen, made soft. I value softness

but yearn to recapture that clarity  of light captured on a new-shattered

edge. I can’t arm anyone with blades, I can only dole out glimmering worry-stones

of glass, meant for a pocket, meant to be held as a reminder that the scarlet will fade.

I am the way I’m meant to be, I know, the gentle result of cruel storms, but the storms

churn under my skin again as  I read the poets I wish I could be  again. 

[lovepowerpoetry]

Awestruck, I stare at the night sky. Pinpricks of light burn and twirl and dance as I stand here, playing with my hair, on the knifepoint of understanding the universe. I keep quiet. I have to keep quiet. I can't explain that the stars are tiny to me and I am tiny to the stars to the strangers at this café. I have been scolded for my tendency to burden others with awed and awful observations. Social graces are a delicate dance; I prefer stellar choreography.

[lovepowerpoetry]

[lovepowerpoetry]

Alain de Botton, Essays in Love [transcript in ALT]

[lovepowerpoetry]

Writing Prompt #2163

Allies are just enemies who haven't stabbed you in the back quite yet.

[lovepowerpoetry]

berry

Berry blue memories pressed between pages of a book you gave me- unread

Stained like my carpet freshman year of college where we played spin the bottle,

just the two of us with blackberry wine on our breath

Sitting three pages apart

Refusing to kiss

Or laugh

We look at eachother that way and you just sigh

I grow old in ways now

Wanting my lovers to beg

For anything at all,

at all,

At all

Love is mourning, painful and tired

Ached over breaths on sheets

Unfurled at the edges

But tight like my fists

Knuckles brazen

Sometimes all I think about

The way you used to sigh

So we would kiss other people other times

Until it hurt so good

But you and I

We’d just sit alone in my apartment

In that corner under the stairs

Spinning green glass in the blurred light of my tv

Playing some static weather program

Snow is falling outside

I play ‘Raspberry Beret’

but you don’t know Prince

Don’t know shit else just

songs from films and punk rock

You look at me that way, like a million times before

And like a million times before I return glances

At all, we refuse to kiss or laugh or touch at all, at all

Angst is agony is sacrifice is more

And so you spend another night

Laying beside me on the floor

Writing poems about me

And emailing them to me to critique

I dye my hair about it

One of those times we play

You forget which bottle is full

And so

Your love lives vicariously through a plum colored circle on my brown carpet

Unremoveable even by dish soap

At all, permanent long after we don’t know eachother at all, at all

You used to give me books for gifts

And I would picture myself

Thumbing through the pages

In a coffee shop

waiting for someone else to sit down

Someone I love, someone else at all

Because it is easier that way

Missing you vicariously through

Never reading those books

You were one of those people

Never forgot a birthday, never forgot a moment

Pressed between lips

Three pages apart

You kiss me vicariously through

Other people

It hurts so good

At all, we don’t love eachother at all, at all

I never get my security deposit back

I never forget your birthday

I never read your books

I never think about you

At all, at all, at all

[lovepowerpoetry]

I have tried already three times To sprout wings and shout hollow from my disrepair A lust I am so far lost in I decorate the inside of my own casket twice Each time differently Once with Roses that I hated and Violets that you loved Once again with sheet music for Beethoven’s fifth and a poem I wrote that never saw the light of day about Gram Parsons burning body at Joshua Tree I wrote you a note asking you to put a can of lighter fluid in the lapel of the suit I’m buried in So I can pretend we’re good enough friends for you to Strike up a match and Set me ablaze in the desert under a billion stars You didn’t get the message Because we aren’t anymore I have this knack for leaving people sad voicemails Good enough to be song intros I remember once trying to tell you about Gram Parsons and Joshua Tree I tried to ask you if you thought it would be possible to imagine how the sky probably looked like A Kinkaide painting In my head you said no Maybe Matisse Maybe VanGogh Maybe it just looked like Whatever the sky looks like to you Here but better But you didn’t really answer then Did you? I don’t remember that part I just remember the last time I ever saw you you fingerpainting the poppy field From Wizard Of Oz On the side of the shoebox we buried my fish in I poked a bunch of holes in the top and taped a flashlight on facedown So that Oscar might pretend Heaven is a sky full of stars But I really just thought It might have been one more night Staying up late on the phone with you

For The Angels Rejoicing On The Streets Of Baltimore- Alex Castillo (via lovepowerpoetry)

[lovepowerpoetry]

living in the aftermath

[lovepowerpoetry]

Excerpt from “Writers & Lovers” by Lily King

[lovepowerpoetry]

I develop this ritual: I get stoned and ride my bike for hours, listening to Toni Braxton’s Secrets on loop. It’s hard to eat, even when I’m high, and craving that album is the closest thing to an appetite I have. But after a few days, the album gets tainted by my grief. Every song I’ve ever listened to reminds me of the last time I listened to it, which is a time that has passed, which is a death. I try to put on new music but it all makes me dizzy. It’s like having to learn a hundred dance moves in a foreign language under gunpoint. New songs don’t understand me. Their hands don’t know the shape of my head. I run out of weed and decide it’s best I don’t buy more. I keep riding my bike. My knees ache, and in the mornings they are Frankenstein-stiff.

…

from “Grief Services” by Maxine Stoker, published in Chestnut Review

[lovepowerpoetry]

berry

Berry blue memories pressed between pages of a book you gave me- unread

Stained like my carpet freshman year of college where we played spin the bottle,

just the two of us with blackberry wine on our breath

Sitting three pages apart

Refusing to kiss

Or laugh

We look at eachother that way and you just sigh

I grow old in ways now

Wanting my lovers to beg

For anything at all,

at all,

At all

Love is mourning, painful and tired

Ached over breaths on sheets

Unfurled at the edges

But tight like my fists

Knuckles brazen

Sometimes all I think about

The way you used to sigh

So we would kiss other people other times

Until it hurt so good

But you and I

We’d just sit alone in my apartment

In that corner under the stairs

Spinning green glass in the blurred light of my tv

Playing some static weather program

Snow is falling outside

I play ‘Raspberry Beret’

but you don’t know Prince

Don’t know shit else just

songs from films and punk rock

You look at me that way, like a million times before

And like a million times before I return glances

At all, we refuse to kiss or laugh or touch at all, at all

Angst is agony is sacrifice is more

And so you spend another night

Laying beside me on the floor

Writing poems about me

And emailing them to me to critique

I dye my hair about it

One of those times we play

You forget which bottle is full

And so

Your love lives vicariously through a plum colored circle on my brown carpet

Unremoveable even by dish soap

At all, permanent long after we don’t know eachother at all, at all

You used to give me books for gifts

And I would picture myself

Thumbing through the pages

In a coffee shop

waiting for someone else to sit down

Someone I love, someone else at all

Because it is easier that way

Missing you vicariously through

Never reading those books

You were one of those people

Never forgot a birthday, never forgot a moment

Pressed between lips

Three pages apart

You kiss me vicariously through

Other people

It hurts so good

At all, we don’t love eachother at all, at all

I never get my security deposit back

I never forget your birthday

I never read your books

I never think about you

At all, at all, at all

#poem #poetry #poems #lovepowerpoetry #lpp #spilled ink #spilled thoughts #nostalgiacore #nostalgia poem #love #poets of tumblr #poetry on tumblr #love poems #lovepowerpoetry blog #Alex's Poetry

[lovepowerpoetry]

SEPTEMBER

song of the simple truth: the complete poems - julia de burgos / a september day - george henry / excerpt from a letter to aurelia plath - sylvia plath / french autumn - artem tolstukhin / earthquake weather - janice gould / blue shutters - kim english / a girl ago - lucie brock-broido / little women (2019) dir. greta gerwig / september garden party - jane kenyon / constanze saemann and charlotte foubert photographed by ryan brabazon / september 1st - dante émile