Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear   
   one more friend   
waking with a tumor, one more maniac   

with a perfect reason, often a sweetness   
   has come   
and changed nothing in the world   

except the way I stumbled through it,   
   for a while lost   
in the ignorance of loving   

someone or something, the world shrunk   
   to mouth-size,   
hand-size, and never seeming small.   

I acknowledge there is no sweetness   
   that doesn’t leave a stain,   
no sweetness that’s ever sufficiently sweet ....   

Tonight a friend called to say his lover   
   was killed in a car   
he was driving. His voice was low   

and guttural, he repeated what he needed   
   to repeat, and I repeated   
the one or two words we have for such grief   

until we were speaking only in tones.   
   Often a sweetness comes   
as if on loan, stays just long enough   

to make sense of what it means to be alive,   
   then returns to its dark   
source. As for me, I don’t care   

where it’s been, or what bitter road   
   it’s traveled   
to come so far, to taste so good.

#poem #love #friendship #grief #positivity
—Sweetness, Stephen Dunn

"Hardly need the real to banish the dream, all you need is lilttle sunlight"

#dream #metaphysical
-Webster, Greg Bear

"Need?" raising his hand off the book. "You can't love until you need, miss Regina Abigail Coats. You can not love the real, the here. You must change and make fine and well the thing you love and damn it should it echo what hides within. "

#love #fiction #need #desire
-Excerpt from Webster, Greg Bear

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I’m finally through.
The black telephone’s off at the root,
The voices just can’t worm through.

If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two——
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

#poem #parent #father #WW2 #fascism

— Excerpt from Daddy, Sylvia Plath 1965, 4 months before her death.

There were some things that simply are not mentioned - unless one wishes to be offensive and embarrassing. Religion, Art, and now this new horror - Love.

#Love
― Mervyn Peake, Mr Pye

I don't care much for religion. It never suited me. I'm a cubist - and even so I'm pretty obsolete. I can't paint anyway. I'm a thing of thwarted genius - and it's better to have no genius than to have it stillborn - my paintings are like dead children or blue babies. I've got a "blue period" too. He laughed in a hollow and rather silly way.

#melancholy
― Mervyn Peake, Mr Pye