“the not quite love”, Yrsa Daley-Ward

The last two lines of both stanzas hit hard. And it’s not so much that this is currently in mind, as it is that I wonder how many people are falling into this, and how many people I love are battling this but don’t know they’re battling it. Or something like that. The final bit reminds me of Langston Hughes’ “Final Curve”. Catching up with oneself. We ought to hit that more often, not that one wants to.

“Goldenrod”, Maggie Smith

Funnily, this isn’t really even one of my favorites of her poems. It strikes me as weirdly gentle. I like this idea of letting an other name you though, and being okay with that. Even loving it, perhaps, how I should like to be named.

“[i wasted my teenage years shrinking myself into bite sized pieces]”, Muskan K.

This is good. Some random young instagram poet. Contributed to the thoughts that there are a lot of people writing good poetry which further helps dispel any competitive bone left in my body, any ambition related to writing I might have. Back to the poem. I stop trying to reduce myself into a quaint elevator pitch, and let me splay out all over. As Walt said, I contain multitudes. I think this is generally kinda meh poetry, maybe it’s just not entirely my style but I feel like lyrically it’s not crazy and then actual detail there’s not a ton but it is a nice piece. Perhaps I just like specificity as a sign of explicit vulnerability. And I kinda like the last line, ambivalence, saying how im both better and far worse than I was before.

There was another somewhat nice poem I found from a random instagram poet that wasn’t enough for me to type it out here since she’s not online either and even made some unintentional typos in the poem and such. And then there were a few lines from Hanif Abdurraqib’s What a Miracle That Our Parents Had Us When They Could Have Gotten a Puppy Instead, which I also couldn’t particularly find online, but I’ll put them below. And many days, I think my parents probably should’ve gotten a puppy instead, or at least first, long enough to realize they weren’t for each other nor would the kids they raised have a particularly happy childhood. Puppies sound kinda expensive though. Anyhow:

i am back to wearing sweaters in the summer.
it’s a question of intimacy.
that which will do the work of love
for those who have grow weary of loving me.

I like the sweater image, and now that I have AC again and actually fell asleep a little chilly last night, I wish I had brought my favorite water polo sweatshirt from high school with the drawstring missing, and sadly, funnily, how decent of a stand-in a sweater actually can be?

Well, you can’t find a poem to love every day. It seems you can find some writing though, and I liked the sweater and little bits here and there throughout these. Wasn’t compelled though. To be compelled every day, really in a general sense, seems like one of the biggest hoaxes of our generation.

EDIT: I lied. It turns out I completely forgot to include a poem that I read on my computer and very much loved. Here you go.

“Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out”, Richard Silken

Okay, a good title to start things out; Litany. But I mean, just read this, I love the conversational but cyclical nature to it, the way we go back and forth and predict each other and end up being the moster anyway and still tenderness throughout even when the other emotions come through and just good good good I like. Very kinda spew shit style of poem, what I would perhaps refer to as a phrase salad, which actually, I think Eve tends to write somewhere on the spectrum toward.