Showing posts with label defense mechanism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label defense mechanism. Show all posts

3/26/20

Traveling - Stephen Dunn

If you travel alone, hitchhiking,
sleeping in woods,
make a cathedral of the moonlight
that reaches you, and lie down in it.
Shake a box of nails
at the night sounds
for there is comfort in your own noise.
And say out loud:
somebody at sunrise be distraught
for love of me,
somebody at sunset call my name.
There will soon be company.
But if the moon clouds over
you have to live with disapproval.
You are a traveler,
you know the open, hostile smiles
of those stuck in their lives.
Make a fire.
If the Devil sits down, offer companionship,
tell her you’ve always admired
her magnificent, false moves.
Then recite the list
of what you’ve learned to do without.
It is stronger than prayer.

1/28/19

Entry in an Unknown Hand - Franz Wright

And still nothing happens. I am not arrested.  
By some inexplicable oversight

nobody jeers when I walk down the street.

I have been allowed to go on living in this  
room. I am not asked to explain my presence  
anywhere.

What posthypnotic suggestions were made; and  
are any left unexecuted?

Why am I so distressed at the thought of taking  
certain jobs?

They are absolutely shameless at the bank—
You’d think my name meant nothing to them. Non-
chalantly they hand me the sum I’ve requested,

but I know them. It’s like this everywhere—

they think they are going to surprise me: I,  
who do nothing but wait.

Once I answered the phone, and the caller hung up—
very clever.

They think that they can scare me.  

I am always scared.

And how much courage it requires to get up in the  
morning and dress yourself. Nobody congratulates  
you!

At no point in the day may I fall to my knees and  
refuse to go on, it’s not done.

I go on

dodging cars that jump the curb to crush my hip,

accompanied by abrupt bursts of black-and-white
laughter and applause,

past a million unlighted windows, peered out at  
by the retired and their aged attack-dogs—

toward my place,

the one at the end of the counter,  

the scalpel on the napkin.

12/15/16

when the one you thought, finally, wouldn't, does, - Marty McConnell

where do you go? the hole in your hands
keeps getting bigger. first a pencil falls through.
then your teacup, then entire bodies

like light, like you’re made of nothing stronger
than tissue, than sugar heated and spread
to look like glass. not the real thing. not you.
your atoms sit so far apart, your lovers

walk right through. one might say, over
the top of you. but no need for that, when you
can bend around their many departures, the most
porous door. she came back. they always

come back. why not. you are not a creature
of consequences. one way to survive a fall
is to believe very strongly that you
do not have bones. another

is to watch the hole in your body grow
until you are nothing but hole, and who
doesn’t love a hole. you’re the great circle
they can write their lives inside, a flat

unused womb they can crawl into. in this
way, you are useful. this way, you can sleep
in the house that raised you.