Dorothea Lasky Quotes

There are things you want to say but don't
There are things I want to say but I already said them
A year ago or two or five, when we first met
There were times I thought you knew I loved you
You never knew
We never were
I died
You died
That's it

To get rejected so vehemently
Over and over again
Until some said it was the rejection I was after
No it wasn't
I wanted the intensity that you sometimes promised

There have been times love has made my human Instincts into animal ones. Once in a dark lit bar, my love said my poems were shit And I, in the light of the candles, Pushed a sword into myself and fell over a cliff Into a neverending ocean. Once a man 5 years my younger Loved me and then gave me up. I raged around him like a bear. I once cheated on a new boyfriend with an old boyfriend. I cheated on an old boyfriend with a new one. Love has the ability to make the world kind, The specifics of one man always blends into another And turns back into my mother's kisses on my cheek. It is I who loves, but it is in turn The world that loves me back. The world loves And I love back, the specifics of it Once in tune. Once we kissed and I was Mesmerized by the blondness of his cheek With the light on it and the sweet smell of the earth. But still the light on the cheek is the desert lizards Who will eat us in the afterworld and in the light of the moon Ther is the exhaust of love falling over everything

And forgot about me
You forgot about me

And what I meant to you
And then it was over

The Process of Explication"

I

Students, look at this table
And now when you see a man six feet tall
You can call him a fathom.

Likewise, students when yes and you do that and other stuff
Likewise too the shoe falls upon the sun
And the alphabet is full of blood
And when you knock upon a sentence in the
Process of explication you are going to need a lot of rags

Likewise, hello and goodbye.


II

Nick Algiers is my student
And he sits there in a heap in front of me thinking of suicide
And so, I am the one in front of him
And I dance around him in a circle and light him on fire
And with his face on fire, I am suddenly ashamed.

Likewise the distance between us then
Is the knife that is not marriage.


III

Students, I can't lie, I'd rather be doing something else, I guess
Like making love or writing a poem
Or drinking wine on a tropical island
With a handsome boy who wants to hold me all night.

I can't lie that dreams are ridiculous.
And in dreaming myself upon the moon
I have made the moon my home and no one
Can ever get to me to hit me or kiss my lips.

And as my bridegroom comes and takes me away from you
You all ask me what is wrong and I say it is
That I will never win.

It is as if I had made you believe
In me once again
It is as if you knew I was your true love
It was as if I didn't have to know

In this life
All you were to me
Was that flower

What's worse
To never have them
To have them only in part
What's worse
To be endlessly waiting
To be endlessly waiting
What's worse - nothing or nothing
What's worse

Now you come to my street in the sunrise
and hold me
There are things you want to say but don't
There are things I want to say but I already said them

Not sure what of this you did offer me
Never did amount to anything
So with this
I go

I never noticed anything but you
But you but you
So that I couldn't sleep

In every scene I am waiting for you
To be with me in dreams

The blue night with trees
Everything told me to feel something

And yet everything you said was a lie
And all my emotions were for nothing

There was a lonely summer

Where I took the string and unraveled the magic circle from everything

It was because of you, and what you did to me

I reached deep in you and pulled out a cardinal which in bright red flew out the window.

I never knew what feeling was
I only felt the pain

A monster
Someone who left me in the dark
Someone who darkened me
A million times over

And I am so alone
And I am alone here
With the idea of ghosts
And the idea of humanity, which is a cruel idea

Emily Kendal Frey's The Grief Performance is a book that condenses a journey of finding and re-finding loss into beautiful packages. The packages are the poems and they sit shiny and new on every page of this fabulous and generous book. I want to go into the world that these poems create, just so that I can be given these terrifying presents again and again. I know you will, too. See you there.

When people talk about poetry as a project, they suggest that the road through a poem is a single line. When really the road through a poem is a series of lines, like a constellation, all interconnected. Poems take place in the realm of chance, where the self and the universal combine, where life exist. I can't suggest to you that going through a line that is more like a constellation than a road is easy - or that the blurring of the self and the universal doesn't shred a poet a little bit in the process. The terrain of a poem is unmapped (including the shapes of the trees along the constellation-road). A great poet knows never to expect sun or rain or cold or wind in the process of creating a poem. In a great poem all can come to the fore at once. It would be worse yet, if none are there at all.

I've only fucked seven guys in my whole life
But I've watched more porn than you ever will
Hours and hours