Oh! do not attack me with your watch.
25/f/NC
After Persephone
At a certain point, it didn’t matter.
I commanded him to lead.
Farther. So far I was no longer me
Long before I was no longer safe.
I shed everything, save being.
There is a moment, even in the face
Of defeat, when the chase alone
Is enough. I lived quickly,
My whole life disappearing
From around me like a sound
That rises into the air and is gone
Without even an echo. After song
There is a pang. The heart in clench.
Then memory. Then retreat
Into the present. That silence.
Not emptiness, but weight.
I felt my steps marking the space
Where I must tread. Then it was I
Who led. Dragging us both
Into his world. It was real. More real
Even than what came after.
- Tracy K. Smith
Jane Springer — “Pretty Polly”
Who made the banjo sad & wrong?
Who made the luckless girl & hell bound boy?
Who made the ballad? The one, I mean,
where lovers gallop down mountain brush as though in love—
where hooves break ground to blood earth scent.
Who gave the boy swift words to woo the girl from home,
& the girl too pretty to leave alone? He locks one arm
beneath her breasts as they ride on—maybe her apron comes
undone & falls to a ditch of black-eyed susans. Maybe
she dreams the clouds are so much flour spilt on heaven’s table.
I’ve run the dark county of the heart this music comes from—but
I don’t know where to hammer-on or to drop a thumb to the
haunted string that sets the story straight: All night Willie’s dug
on Polly’s grave with a silver spade & every creek they cross
makes one last splash. Though flocks of swallows loom—the one
hung in cedar now will score the girl’s last thrill. Tell
me, why do I love this sawmill-tuned melancholy song
& thud of knuckles darkening the banjo face?
Tell me how to erase the ancient, violent beauty
in the devil of not loving what we love.
“She’s as bad as that fucking cat.” - “Moonlight,” by H. Pinter
(Source: drunkonstephen, via aproperchat)
FACIAL DISGUISES. Work in Progress.
(via mountstnobody)
Founder of a free school for slum children Rajesh Kumar Sharma, second from right, and Laxmi Chandra, right, write on black boards, painted on a building wall, at a free school run under a metro bridge in New Delhi, India. At least 30 children living in the nearby slums have been receiving free education from this school for the last three years.
Dude
(via thejessbeast)
