EXAGGERATION - Scarriet Editors

You must know I’m not usually excitable,

But how long must I be calm and pleasantly glad?

I have read about love. It was sad.

The man paced outside the window. The woman

Covered her arms in folds of crimson and myrtle.

The tradition arrived every night this year.

Every woman attended. This is no exaggeration;

They crowded, they pushed ahead—even the dearest woman.

I affected learning. I thought this decision up in my own mind.

The poetry readings, seminars; failures in oak,

Scratches, graffiti, partly undressed tables, inside and outside the mind.

I affected poetry. It did no good. I was too calm;

I went on in hushed tones about my childhood;

Stood near her by the window, even laughed.

It wouldn’t do to repeat it now, even if I could.

There is a need to exaggerate, even without drama or poems,

To not flag, to make oneself happy; to pretend a woman’s figure

Will make one happy, and this is all a man needs.

Life is dull. We exaggerate. And so it proceeds.

THE POEM - Franz Wright

It was like getting a love letter from a tree

Eyes closed forever to find you—

There is a life which

if I could have it

I would have chosen for myself from the beginning

The essential - Aleksandar Ristović

I was not allowed to live my life,

so I pretended to be dead

and interested solely in things

a dead man could be interested in:

petrified reptiles,

museum bric-à-brac,

fake evidence passed off as truth.

I felt a great need to be really dead,

and so at all times I wore

a mask made of wood

on which someone occasionally drew,

with colored pencils,

the look of contentment,

impatience, desire, bliss,

or the look of someone who is thinking

about an entirely different matter.

Abracadabra Acudubillah - Warsan Shire

Everyday since that bad

thing happened, I've been practicing

                   a spell:

how to disappear

from yourself,

within yourself.

I've noticed

each time I leave,

something in me keeps

                   going.

Something in me turns

its back on me—

someone else reflected in the mirror,

someone else answering

to my name.

"I've got no romance left in me." - Henry Rollins

I've got no romance left in me. I know I once had it. I have no need

for love. You might have something to say about that, you might

have a few names to call me. I'm not that desperate anymore. That's

not to say that I've slacked off in the desperation department alto-

gether, far from it. I have less time and less things in my mind to

convince me of the need to support and perpetuate a lie.

Some will tell you that they need love to live. Well shit, people will

tell you a lot of stuff, like how you owe a stranger your life to

uphold the lie he's selling this week. Weakness is painless. Like

sliding down a razor so sharp you wouldn't think to look down on

the floor and see all the blood. The other night I looked down at her

and almost forgot her name. It's just flesh. Put your tears in an enve-

lope and send them to Hitler. They mean as much to his dead ass as

they do to me.

Lamium - Louise Glück

This is how you live when you have a cold heart.

As I do: in shadows, trailing over cool rock,

under the great maple trees.

The sun hardly touches me.

Sometimes I see it in early spring, rising very far away.

Then leaves grow over it, completely hiding it. I feel it

glinting through the leaves, erratic,

like someone hitting the side of a glass with a metal spoon.

Living things don't all require

light in the same degree. Some of us

make our own light: a silver leaf

like a path no one can use, a shallow

lake of silver in the darkness under the great maples.

But you know this already.

You and the others who think

you live for truth and, by extension, love

all that is cold.