balances

in life
one is always
balancing

like we juggle our mothers
against our fathers

or one teacher
against another
(only to balance our grade average)

3 grains of salt
to one ounce truth

our sweet black essence
or the funky honkies down the street


and lately i've begun wondering
if you're trying to tell me something

we used to talk all night
and do things alone together

and i've begun

(as a reaction to a feeling)
to balance
the pleasure of loneliness
against the pain
of loving you

Nikki Giovanni

I hated the fact that they had planned me, she had taken
a cardboard out of his shirt from the laundry
as if sliding the backbone up out of his body,
and made a chart of the month and put
her temperature on it, rising and falling,
to know the day to make me - I would have
liked to have been conceived in heat,
in haste, by mistake, in love, in sex,
not on cardboard, the little x on the
rising line that did not fall again.

But when a friend was pouring wine
and said that I seem to have been a child who had been wanted,
I took the wine against my lips
as if my mouth were moving along
that valved wall in my mother's body, she was
bearing down, and then breathing from the mask, and then
bearing down, pressing me out into
the world that was not enough for her without me in it,
not the moon, the sun, Orion
cartwheeling across the dark, not
the earth, the sea - none of it
was enough, for her, without me.

Sharon Olds

;)

destin d'Amelie

Just got fired from school, after showing my 14 y.o. students "Amelie". :))))))

the previously posted poem is the worst one i ever ever wrote, possibly.
which only proves that trying to "make art" is stupid when one's happy. when there's nothing to be altered.

i wish you all good madness and lots of tasty breakfasts in the coming week. bessytoes.

today i am home.
doing laundry, cleaning and making a cake for Mikele (which is for you, really).
by about seven pm
i want our room soft and warm, and dinner ready to have
and then you're back and fall on the bed like a star fish,
and lie there in your jeans, tired
then your smile travels slowly in direction to me and the kitchen behind (i am at the door, aproned)
and the room is suddenly lit with it, baby

time to hybernate and dream of summer

Mira, no pido mucho,
solamente tu mano, tenerla
como un sapito que duerme así contento...
Así la tomo y la sostengo, como
si de ello dependiera
muchísimo el mundo,
la sucesión de las cuatro estaciones,
el canto de los gallos,
el amor de los hombres

Julio Cortázar

These boys have never really grown into men,
despite their disguises, despite their adult ways,
their sophistication, the camouflage of their kindly smiles.
They are still up to their old tricks,
still at the wing-plucking stage. Only now
their prey answers to women's names.
And the girls, likewise, despite their disguises,
despite their adult ways, their camouflage of need,
still twist love till its failure seems not of their making.
Something grotesque migrates hourly
between our different needs,
and is in us all like a poison.
How strange I've not understood so clearly before
how liars and misers, the cruel and the arrogant
lie down and make love like all the others,
how nothing is ever as expected, nothing is ever as stated.
Behind doors and windows nothing is ever as wanted.
The good have no monopoly on love.
All drink from it. All wear its absence like a shroud.

Brian Patten

And it's only doubts that we're counting
On fingers broken long ago
I read with every broken heart we should become
More adventurous
And if you banish me from your profits
And if I get banished from the kingdom up above
I'd sacrifice money and heaven all for love
Let me be loved, let me be loved

Jenny Lewis