“Someone Will Tell You That She’s Seeing Someone Someday And That She’s Happy And Your Hands Will

JAMEELA JAMIL by Chantal Anderson for The New York Times (2019)

Tracey Emin

“You are not real. You are a dream of a dream.”

— Henry Miller, from Dear, Dear Brenda: The Love Letters Of Henry Miller to Brenda Venus (via violentwavesofemotion)

I write about love obsessively but how can I call myself a poet and not find a muse in our love? in your eyes? or in your kisses?

you, my love, are Michaelangelo’s david (your head turned to the sea and your eyes alive, god you are art in the skin of a man), Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (the way your smile tells me things your words could never, the way I can’t help but stop and stare whenever your lips turn into a crescent moon), Van gogh’s sunflowers (blonde hair and green eyes, the colour palette of a man driven by the madness of love. you should sit in a gallery, honey. you’re the most beautiful thing these eyes ever laid on).

beings like you inspire the most wonderful art. and although i do not create the most beautiful words or the most stunning paintings, I am curled up in the corner thinking of you. and all my fingers can do is write. and write and write.

this is how Michaelangelo felt in the chapel, painting stories of god and trying to bring this divinity to the earth.

this is how da Vinci felt, drawing the smile of a woman he had only seen in passing. her beauty seared her into his brain, how could he not make art out of her face and call it a masterpiece?

and this is how Van Gogh felt, broken by the world but seeing all the wonder of nature in his lover’s eyes, deciding there are good things if only she exists.

you, my dear, are art. nothing less.

a conversation with sappho

a love letter as a hug, as your head in my lap, as the romance of room 56, with the lights turned off. there have been so many nights i wished i was crawling into bed beside you, so many late night library sessions where i wished you were across me, eyes glued to your laptop, days where i wished i was reaching across the mattress to rest against your tenderness, the sweet softness of you.

Lovers,Woodstock,1969.

you move & the wind moves with you, something honey, something bruised— in the way you chew on your bottom lip. nervous habit; delayed reaction. how in summer the world feels like a mirage of itself. hands that chain themselves to anything that refuses to let go: a leech, or brown muck. your teeth (grazing) the inside of my elbow. something damn frustrating about the way you give yourself up (to anything that’s foolish enough to take you) i.e the sea, the coast, where your shoulders meet, the leylines of your veins. & picture me humbly, please. picture me in evenings & earthly tones, only. & do not hold your breath when i go, slip. out the back door—silhouetted feline; precipitous, or better yet. picture (you), standing barefoot in the tall grass, picture the curve of your neck in malnourished light, & a puncture wound, in the now negative (space) you found me in: a flower bed emptied; the sun bleached out. — oh all i ever wanted / was a life in your shape // mitski