I want to locate a bit of you, cradle it,
say: this, there is no word for this.

themasqueradecrew:

The Honesty Bookshop, Hay-on-Wye by never meant to see on Flickr.

The little town of Hay-on-Wye has over 40 bookshops and is known as the “Second-hand Book Capital” of the World. The picture shows the grounds of the open-air Honesty Bookshop, which is located in the grounds of the Hay-on-Wye Castle. Its books are available on open shelves 24 hours a day. When you’ve made your choice, you just put your money into the collecting box.

(via booklover)

I have no wealth to speak of
other than this,
all this, just to praise the dry grasses
and their color that can’t be spoken
in words.

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices

I’m never going to get this right.

And I can’t go on forming
and tasting your name
or biting down in blinding pain
forever—no;

from now on I have entered
and live in our unspoken words.

And the space I took up in the world scarlessly closes like water.

The long silences need to be loved, perhaps
more than the words
which arrive
to describe them
in time.

We live in a modern society. Husbands and wives don’t
grow on trees, like in the old days. So where
does one find love?

When you’re sixteen it’s easy,
like being unleashed with a credit card
in a department store of kisses. There’s the first kiss.
The sloppy kiss. The peck.
The sympathy kiss. The backseat smooch. The “we
shouldn’t be doing this” kiss. The “but your lips
taste so good” kiss. The “bury me in an avalanche of tingles” kiss.
The “I wish you’d quit smoking” kiss.
The “I accept your apology, but you make me really mad
sometimes” kiss. The “I know
your tongue like the back of my hand” kiss.

As you get
older, kisses become scarce. You’ll be driving
home and see a damaged kiss on the side of the road,
with its purple thumb out. If you
were younger, you’d pull over, slide open the mouth’s
red door just to see how it fits. Oh, where
does one find love? If you rub two glances, you get a smile.
Rub two smiles, you get a warm feeling.
Rub two warm feelings and presto-you have a kiss.
Now what? Don’t invite the kiss over
and answer the door in your underwear. It’ll get suspicious
and stare at your toes. Don’t water the kiss with whiskey.
It’ll turn bright pink and explode into a thousand luscious splinters,
but in the morning it’ll be ashamed and sneak out of
your body without saying good-bye,
and you’ll remember that kiss forever by all the little cuts it left
on the inside of your mouth. You must
nurture the kiss. Turn out the lights. Notice how it
illuminates the room. Hold it to your chest
and wonder if the sand inside hourglasses comes from a
special beach. Place it on the tongue’s pillow,
then look up the first recorded kiss in an encyclopedia: beneath
a Babylonian olive tree in 1200 B.C.

But one kiss levitates above all the others. The
intersection of function and desire. The “I do” kiss.
The “I’ll love you through a brick wall” kiss.

Even when I’m dead, I’ll swim through the Earth,
like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.

I was teaching you the difference between I miss you
and you are missing from me
when a bomb went off

no one was harmed—
you had it in you this whole time

The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.

But you can’t give your heart to a wild thing; the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they’re strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That’s how you’ll end up if you love a wild thing. You’ll end up looking at the sky. But believe me— it’s better to look at the sky than to live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear…

You may never have proof of your importance but you are more important than you think. There are always those who couldn’t do without you. The rub is that you don’t always know who.

Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.

Unless it’s mad, passionate, extraordinary love, it’s a waste of your time. There are too many mediocre things in life; Love shouldn’t be one of them.

Whoever says “I don’t like to read”, they’re screaming “I’m stupid!” to the world.

I want to write a song
for that thick silence in the dark,
and the first pure thrill of unreluctant desire,
just before we’d made ourselves stop.