Don't be polite.
Bite in.
Pick it up with your fingers and lick the juice that
may run down your chin.
It is ready and ripe now, whenever you are.

You do not need a knife or fork or spoon
or plate or napkin or tablecloth.

For there is no core
or stem
or rind
or pit
or seed
or skin
to throw away.

I bear equally with you
the black permanent separation.
Why are you crying? Rather give me
your hand,
promise to come again in a dream.
You and I are a mountain of grief.
You and I will never meet on this earth.
If you could only send me at midnight
a greeting through the stars

А́нна Ахма́това

A fragment of Corinna's poetry

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful –
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

-Sylvia Plath

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times…
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, it’s age old pain,
It’s ancient tale of being apart or together.
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,
Clad in the light of a pole-star, piercing the darkness of time.
You become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.
At the heart of time, love of one for another.
We have played along side millions of lovers,
Shared in the same shy sweetness of meeting,
the distressful tears of farewell,
Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

- C.S. Lewis

Funeral Blues
W.H. Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.   

Space
Tals Diaz


There is a space
Between eyeblinks
Between breaths between fingers on a hand
Between hands clasped in prayer

There is a space
Before laughter becomes a sigh,
An infinite excitement
Within the space of a soul-kiss

There is a space
Between a devil’s horns
And an angel’s wings

A space between
The slivers of rain
And the rays of the sun

Between words
Between sentences
Between chapters
And volumes
There is a space

Between the left and right side
Of the brain
Before the thought and the action
Between today and tomorrow

There is a space
Before a high
Between atomic songs
Between neon light streaks
Painted on walls of hedonist palaces
Between Friday night and Saturday dawn

When you think about it
Love letters mean nothing
If there is no space, no distance
Between two people
Two lives
Two worlds

And there are no dreams
If there is no space between heaven and earth
Between stars
And constellations
Between planets
Between galaxies

And there is no growth
Without the space
Between pain and risk

There is a space
Between you and I

What is space, then, but nothing---
It means nothing
Nothing at all
Without the entities that create it.


I don't think I need to explain how this relates to me right now.

Love Song 
Rainer Maria Rilke 



How can I keep my soul in me, 
so that it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise 
it high enough, past you, to other things? 
I would like to shelter it, among remote 
lost objects, in some dark and silent place 
that doesn't resonate when your depths resound. 

Yet everything that touches us, me and you, 
takes us together like a violin's bow, 
which draws one voice out of two separate strings. 
Upon what instrument are we two spanned? 
And what musician holds us in his hand? 
Oh sweetest song.

It's interesting how one poem can articulate my thoughts for two people.

Last Night Walking Away
-Vincenz C. Serrano

No pain.
Not even trying to feel. Just this dark sky without a sound.
Just these gray cirrus clouds,
like ash.

Walking away I think
of the flowers you had given me,
fallen flowers you would pick from the sidewalk
and wear on your hair: such flametree delight,
such buttercup joy. Now the flowers
are in a wooden box. The last time
I opened the lid, the petals were brown
and scentless but I could not throw them away.

Now I can think
of everything: seashells, sunset love,
how your hands held me,
how your mouth took me in so deep. A slate blue
sea. Books. Falling stars.

But nothing falls tonight,
nothing is thrown away; the July leaves
are asleep and the saddest stars are in place.
The clouds do not breathe. The sky refuses
to sing. Even the dust is calm,
does not suffer.

Strange. I can't feel
a thing. I've hidden myself
in my words. Can build a strong fortress,
really, these things. Wordbrick upon wordbrick -
yes no ask me tomorrow and maybe I'll love you
and I know how safe I am. Images, what mortar.
Walls, how high. Flowers can't enter. Seashells
are shut out. Kisses can't get in.
I can't get you in.

My drunken delight with the moon. I've lost you in the safest syn-
tax somewhere, in that Gehenna between me and the moon.
I've shut everything out with
so many words. So safe.

Nothing moves. Not even
a whirligig pain. Nothing moves. Not even the memory
of your tears. Your cry frozen on your face,
like in those victims of violent deaths. 3

Sorry. I must
destroy my fortress of words and finally learn
how to speak. Hate be the battered ram.
Maddest skies be th armies to raid me.
Footsteps bring me no pain. Now the night
comes and I am a bruise passing through -
not a slash, not a welt -
blue-gray and bitter.

Not even lightning. Someday
when this is all over and I am in pain,
I can love you again.
Someday, when I'm feeling better, I'll return.

But tonight, falling out of your love
and walking under the trees,
I am mostly silence,
mostly real and empty,
mostly like the moon.

How I wish you could wound me.