love is a liquid substance
it takes the shape of the container in which it is stored
this week’s Thought (singular)
the faster i get at calculating square roots, the more powerful i become. beware. √(144) = +/- 12. bam.
a very warm welcome to all new readers. i love new readers so much that whenever i get an email about a new reader, i manifest that they always have a reserve black gel pen when their in-use black gel pen runs out of ink. thank you for joining us. may you never again be caught unawares and have to watch in horror as the sentence you’re writing becomes lighter and lighter, knowing that you have no pen of the same colour on your study table.
hi
i recently came across this poem, titled Love Poem for What It Is by rebecca hazelton. the following lines spurred this thodi (but do read the full poem) -
There's no word for loving more
than you should, just the feeling of excess,
as if your tongue burst in a rash of red sequins,
as if everyone can see your stutter in the air,
staccato love you, love you, and nothing in the world
standing in that space to receive it.
it got me thinking about the flip side of whatever i had spoken about here. rather than the container in which love is kept, the fact that love itself needs something to keep it at all.
i found an old tumblr draft titled ‘some words on friendship breakups/or the uncertainty of where to put my love now’. it’s predictably very morose and hopeless and wretched, but i love the idea of putting love. the physical and deliberate act of wrenching it out from within, letting it travel in your cupped palms, and carefully placing it in somebody, with something, somewhere.
what happens to the love that doesn’t find a container? what does the person do after they’ve extracted it, after they’ve held it for so long that their hands feel stained with it? what does the lover do when their love begins to slip from between their fingers drip drip drip and now there’s less of it in them and less of it in their hands to give? i can’t stop thinking about somebody walking around with their love in their palms. there’s so much of it, there are no containers that want to receive it, there is nothing to do but to keep walking and looking and drip drip drip. is this loneliness?
it reminds of one of my favourites from Letters to a Young Poet, the one in which Rilke says ‘…Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude, and bear the pain which it causes you with euphonious lament. […] …but believe in a love which is stored up for you as a heritage.’ there is a love stored up for me. everybody walking and looking and drip-drip-drip-ing, and bearing the pain of being lonely, but is their love not still stored? in their palms? for other people?
in the poem above, the word that kicked this off was receive. somebody, something, somewhere receives the love i carry. with intent, with joy, with a precise contraption to ensure nothing leaks in the transfer. without leftover space and without overflowing. love is kept in a long hug. love takes the shape of the container in which it is kept.
English Recitation Competition
This Is the Honey, Mahogany L. Browne
Soil creates things Art births change This is the honey & doesn’t it taste like a promise? Where your heart is an accordion & our laughter is a soundtrack Friend, dance to this good song— look how it holds our names!
Autopsychography, Fernando Pessoa (translated from the Portuguese by Edouard Roditi)
The poet is a man who feigns And feigns so thoroughly, at last He manages to feign as pain The pain he really feels, And those who read what once he wrote Feel clearly, in the pain they read, Neither of the pains he felt, Only a pain they cannot sense. And thus, around its jolting track There runs, to keep our reason busy, The circling clockwork train of ours That men agree to call a heart.
This is something new in me: I have sometimes wished death, where I hadn’t before. While I wasn’t looking it left me, some of my tenderness, and in leaving something tensed where it had been. Like A., praying for the man to get hit by a car who yelled at me so loudly, for so long, followed us to keep yelling. There is malice in the world, and maybe some of it is ours now. “Why should I cater to you” he said to me, so loudly, in my white high-waisted shorts and my clogs like my mom’s with my hair piled on top of my head, and this word, “cater,” it made me laugh. Sometimes a poet can tell when a word is not a speaker’s own.
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this week’s Song
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thank you for reading, and see you next week <3
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