(Source: sadieorion, via fuckyeahpsychedelics)
It’s funny how you can forget everything except people loving you. Maybe that’s why humans find it so hard getting over love affairs. It’s not the pain they’re getting over, it’s the love.
— Melina Marchetta, On the Jellicoe Road (via atavus)
(via out-catching-clouds)
Salamander Boy
We called you a salamander;
You moved with the fluidity of a reptile.
And today you told me how you and your brother used to catch salamanders:
“We’d go out by the river bed and try and catch them. I found out years later they’re actually really poisonous.”
And I wonder if you are too.
The night air was cool and unassuming.
Thrumming with possibility the blue warmth
wraps itself around you.
We walked through a curtain of lavender.
Were assaulted by jasmine
and bombarded with lilac.
You smell the ocean during the day, but the flowers more at night.
Kathleen’s front yard had soft green hedges
obscuring us from the drunks that walked by
even on a Tuesday.
A spindle of a palm tree climbed up towards the moon
but it’s roots were near our feet now.
She talked of growing up in Colorado:
“Our parents would dress us in big puffy jackets and send us to school. Then our teachers would have to help us get out of big puffy jackets.”
Passing a glass pig pipe around
I’m more aware of the distance
from here to where I’m from
than I ever was before.
I want to stretch out my branches
and home seems as far as the moon.
You called asking for a lighter, of course
because I am the kind of girl who’d have one.
An hour ago the night air had been soft and warm
comfort hung bottle blue in the sky.
But now sitting with you, the air is black and cold.
I look up at the stars as you rest your head against my shoulder.
“Don’t be sad Moll” you tell me, and I watch your smoke
crescendo into the evening.
“Where are the others?” I ask.
”I don’t know.”
”That’s fine, I don’t really care” I say sheepishly.
“Yeah honestly though I don’t care either. People kind of suck.”
I took off the jacket you had lent me,
thinking that
if you hate people
am I people too?
I kissed your forehead, then your lips.
I still have no answers,
I wasn’t really looking for any.
I’m either going to have to get better at video games, or become a full lesbian.
Sometimes I think we’ve evolved too far.
Meals come, vacuum sealed and plastic wrapped
dinner in under ten minutes.
We were once a hunter and gatherer society, or at least
that’s what I was told
by textbooks that take the gelatinous heap of existence
and boil it down to “facts”.
“Neolithic women began cultivating plants around 9000 BCE, thus beginning the transition to agriculture…”
We have come so far
from the smoldering, lean,
war ration faces
of the early 20th century.
Now we are swollen
weighed down by our own consumption.
What can you say about a people
who alter things so much
their bodies reject the food they digest?
“The consumption of trans fats increases the risk of coronary heart disease.Trans fats are rare in living nature, but can occur in food production processes…”
Our lives are so resolutely sedentary
that we have to set aside time for physical activity.
Strapped to a conveyor belt
we burn calories guilt ridden
like it’s an obligation.
Sneeze
and your phone will be outdated.
Planned obsolescence.
In his grave, Steve Jobs is chuckling.
How can we grapple with the mystery of life?
When the answers to our most trivial of questions
lies on tiny screens in our pockets.
We live in an age of sensory and information overload.
Every moment occupied, every silence filled.
My insecure blue eyed World history teacher used to say: “Emperor Vespian was the man of Bread and Circuses. He commissioned the creation of the colosseum to boost moral and distract the Romans from the horrors of Nero’s reign. Construction began in 72 AD…”
And I can’t help but think that that’s all our ipods are
just really tiny Colosseum’s.
(Source: baldolleonart, via xinafieldofpoppies)
