ghostfromthemachine | a library.

What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable Will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield

Edited 2018-02-12 08:38 (UTC)

Come see what I’ve found, my very own bones,
that when alive were full of worries,
but now are shorn of their filthy flesh,
washed white by the rain,
sticking out of the ground, my splintered bones.

But they aren’t glistening,
it’s only an illusion of white.
Having soaked in the rain,
been blown about by the wind,
they reflect the sky in fractures.

It’s strange to think that
when they were alive,
these bones sat
in crowded restaurants
and ate boiled honeywort.

Come see what I’ve found, my very own bones —
and yet I’m looking at them? How bizarre.
Was my soul left to linger
so that I could return to my bones
and see them for myself?

Beside the little river in my hometown,
standing in the dead grass,
my bones — and yet I’m looking at them?
They’re as tall as a signpost
my white, white bones, splintered in the ground.

O! I care not that my earthly lot
Hath — little of Earth in it —
That years of love have been forgot
In the fever of a minute —

I heed not that the desolate
Are happier, sweet, than I —
But that you meddle with my fate
Who am a passer-by.

It is not that my founts of bliss
Are gushing — strange! with tears —
Or that the thrill of a single kiss
Hath palsied many years —

’Tis not that the flowers of twenty springs
Which have wither’d as they rose
Lie dead on my heart-strings
With the weight of an age of snows.

Nor that the grass — O! may it thrive!
On my grave is growing or grown —
But that, while I am dead yet alive
I cannot be, lady, alone.

May this be the last misfortune that you will ever suffer! Live, and be happy, and make others so.

Edited 2018-10-14 01:05 (UTC)

Are you to be happy while I grovel in the intensity of my wretchedness? You can blast my other passions, but revenge remains—revenge, henceforth dearer than light or food! I may die, but first you, my tyrant and tormentor, shall curse the sun that gazes on your misery. Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful.

Everything changes; nothing perishes.

Edited 2018-02-12 08:57 (UTC)

To live well is to live concealed.

Edited 2018-02-12 09:00 (UTC)

When a monster stopped behaving like a monster, did it stop being a monster? Did it become something else?

Edited 2018-05-27 02:18 (UTC)

I trust you to find the good in me, but the bad I must be sure you don’t overlook.

Imagine that you are more than nothing. Evil made you, but you are no more evil than a child unborn. If you want, if you seek, if you hope, who is to say that your hope might not be answered?

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

What
did I do with all
the rage he gave me?

How much did I eat,
did I swallow?

What hell did I crawl out
of?

What did I do with all his
flaming tongues?

I burned.
I burned.
I burned.
I burned through the
sheets until I was
clean and new
and strange,
and the fire never
followed me again
after that.

After my new name,
my new face,

my new glowing body
next to the grave that
couldn’t have me.

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

every hit you’ve ever
taken
cannot build
the hands
that you have now
you are pure
like a palm
with nothing
in it
pure as the nightmare
you walked through
to stay alive
no fist
will ever
be big enough
to touch the girl
who survived

I will survive my grief, amen.
I have run into the darkness and arrived in the morning still living, amen.
I have made my home anywhere I still have a name, amen.

I swear that they cannot kill us all
amen.

what do you do
when there's no hero in your story?
simple.
you kill the monster
and crown yourself.

I take great care of myself by carefully shutting myself away.

The only thing I know is this: I am full of wounds and still standing on my feet.

Why do the young
poets
all write
about Persephone?

Maybe it’s because
we can relate.

To a goddess?

To being half
sunshine
and half
grave.

(source)

I sat with my anger long enough until she told me her real name was grief.

Let's say something happens, right? And, from a certain slant, maybe it's tragic. Even a little bit shocking. And then, time passes. And you go to the funny slant.

Now that very same thing can no longer do you any harm.

If my life wasn’t funny, it would just be true. And that is completely unacceptable.

(HOW DID YOU SURVIVE?) they ask.

how much did they have you bleed;
how long did they make you suffer;
how low did they force you down;
how dark did they tint your dreams?

—until you had their blood glistening on your teeth;
—until your suffering paled in comparison to their own;
—until it was their throats pinned under your boot;
—until you learned to enjoy the sounds of screams.

(I DIDN’T.)
you reply.

Edited 2021-01-12 22:20 (UTC)

Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form—no object of the world.
Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing;
Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain.
Ample are time and space—ample the fields of Nature.
The body, sluggish, aged, cold—the embers left from earlier fires,
The light in the eye grown dim, shall duly flame again;
The sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual;
To frozen clods ever the spring's invisible law returns,
With grass and flowers and summer fruits and corn.

I said: 'The wonder that I feel is easy,
Yet ease is cause of wonder. Therefore speak:
I may not comprehend, may not remember.'

And he: 'I am not eager to rehearse
My thought and theory which you have forgotten.
These things have served their purpose: let them be.

So with your own, and pray they be forgiven
By others, as I pray you to forgive
Both bad and good. Last season's fruit is eaten

And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail.
For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.

But, as the passage now presents no hindrance
To the spirit unappeased and peregrine
Between two worlds become much like each other,

So I find words I never thought to speak
In streets I never thought I should revisit
When I left my body on a distant shore.'

We are like a religion.
We, the tired ones. We,
the middle of the night ones.
We, the howl at the moon ones.
We, the aching.

Our bodies are like prayers,
like a pair of hands held out,
waiting for the rain
to come and fill them.
We, these burned bridges.
We, these altars.

If God is gone, then we are our own churches.

We, the abandoned. We,
the holy, arching like
the gates of heaven, finding
forgiveness where we used
to find nothing.

If God is gone, then maybe he
has hidden the light inside of us.

We, the hallelujahs.
We, the amens and the
amends.
We, the dirges.
We, the absolutions.

Who’s the real you? The person who did something awful, or the one who’s horrified by the awful thing you did? Is one part of you allowed to forgive the other?

all is not lost,
but let's be realistic here

all is not lost,
so at least I am alive enough
to be mad about what is

all is not lost,
so taste my fucking fists

(source)

Edited 2021-03-29 04:27 (UTC)

the spring came back
and the fox you killed
found my heart again

the two of us, the fox
and i
sat with grape juice mouths

and i asked:
fox,
where do we go when we go numb like this

but where does a ghost go when it
has burned down its own home,
when it lives in a river, a wheel, a wagon

there are things the fox knows i don’t:
when it comes back from the dead it just
licks off the grave dirt

i am able to laugh
once in a while
without being surprised by how good i am at faking it

it’s spring and i am chewing a new day
one where a poem doesn’t ring with your name
and the secrets we planted are no longer rotting

they’re flowering in our garden -
i no longer cry to water them, i use the salt
to rub wounds until i no longer feel them

the fox and i come back from the dead again
he and i,
and the whole world is an ocean.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

You will burn and you will burn out; you will be healed and come back again.

We survive by surviving.
We do it unconsciously,
the way our bodies remember to breathe even when we're asleep.
The first step is always deciding to take the first step.
The second step is miserable
and we usually trip down the stairs,
then wait months before climbing back
and starting again.
What I'm trying to say is, be patient.
What I'm trying to say is, I don't have the answers.
My bones tell me to sing when I'm lonely, so I do.

...

There will be months that try to swallow
you whole, with fangs that pierce your chest like a bullet.
Look for the exit wound.
Look for the Hallelujah chorus at the other end of your skin.
It has come and gone and now everything is a symphony.

I wanted the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,

whoever I was, I was

alive
for a little while.

The world, in its rage,
did not break me
And I, in my rage,
did not break it back.

It ends or it doesn't.
That's what you say. That's
how you get through it.
The tunnel, the night,
the pain, the love.
It ends or it doesn't.
If the sun never comes up,
you find a way to live
without it.
If they don't come back,
you sleep in the middle of the bed,
learn how to make enough coffee
for yourself alone.
Adapt. Adjust.
It ends or it doesn't.
It ends or it doesn't.
We do not perish.

a library.

paradise lost - john milton

bone - chuuya nakahara

to m - edgar allan poe

frankenstein, or the modern prometheus - mary shelley

frankenstein, or the modern prometheus - mary shelley

metamorphoses - ovid

the trista of ovid - ovid

graceling - kristen cashore

ella enchanted - gail carson levine

dead and alive - dean koontz

wild geese - mary oliver

fire - caitlyn siehl

love after love - derek walcott

fist - caitlyn siehl

sunday, I-80 - hanif willis abdurraqib (an excerpt)

happily ever after - o.q

vincent van gogh

nikos kazantzakis

untitled - grace babcock

c. s. lewis

carrie fisher

to defeat monsters: become the greater monster - m.a.w

continuities - walt whitman

t.s. eliot - little gidding (an excerpt)

we - caitlyn siehl

goodbye stranger - rebecca stead

so sayeth john milton - a softer sea

untitled - inkskinned @ tumblr

the summer day - mary oliver (an excerpt)

the brothers karamazov - fyodor dostoevsky

survival (excerpts) - caitlyn siehl

dogfish - mary oliver

untitled - caitlyn siehl

it ends or it doesn't - caitlyn siehl