bogged down in the valley-o

I came across this little gem of a website today:

http://derailingfordummies.com

and oh man. Rage so good. It’s every tooth-grinding, cavilling fly-away argument anyone has ever shot back at you in a conversation to avoid having to think about a position of privilege they occupy or just a way in which an idea they have about a larger identity they don’t belong to (women, POC, queer folk, disabled, etc.) is wrong or hurtful. 

(my father is especially bad for Devil’s Advocate. I am the better debater, and he knows it, so as soon as he cottons on the conversation isn’t going his way he’ll pull out the ‘I’m just kidding, you’re so sensitive, I was playing devil’s advocate the whole time!’ card. asakjjshialhjhjjhhh)

collatingfires:

It was not a remarkable conversation.
You wanted to talk, but not about yourself
and not about me, either. You wanted to tell me
about otters.

I listened, wanting to be somewhere else,
someone else,
with better places to be.
I listened and I understood a peculiar sort
of poetic and unmitigated truth, the sort
we cannot stand without growing thicker skin,
stronger stomachs.

An otter, you see,
carries around within its sleek, water-slick girth,
a mass of cells, recombinant, ripe with potential.
Amalgamate, might-be shapes that will one day,
when conditions are right, become otters
themselves. Otters, separate and alive
in their own right.

‘Delayed implantation,’ you parrot, your face alight
with science and wonder and I think,
how very like words – set to tumble about between neurons,
floating, proto-vocabulaic, as-yet unassembled
into the grand tales and poems I wish
they would one day become. Stories,
alive, in their own right.

Proper writing, then,
not this gallimaufry stew of syllables
waiting between breaths
to be borne.

Unfathomably, they bide their time, content
in the space between synapses,
until conditions (such as they are) are right. Rhythms half-formed,
lingering, loitering just out of reach - this fulsome aggregate
of sound and wayward neurotransmitters. They wait,
an importune cacophony of dreams spent half awake, caught
between the panicked friction of beginning and the sly, quiet
satisfaction of becoming.

Becoming.
A poet, in my own right.

How very like words we are, my dear, lives caught between
the catchpenny and the rubbish bin. Tangled
in the spaces held gingerly between moments, awkwardly
knowing what we must become without understanding
the how or why of it.

We are the acorn, the seed ranged far, carried wild
and rambling across the earth to lodge in just the right
soil, distant and unfathomable. We are
the formless mass of cells, recombinant, adrift
on disappointingly common seas of almost-was and might-have been.
We are the dandelion seed, released into the wind
with chaotic certainty instead of hope.

I am impatient, awash in the tide of soon, love, soon.

This is you?! ahsaobafhgfkhot damn. I think I’m in love with your vocabulary. I may have to abscond to the coast of France with it. (I especially love ‘caught between the catchpenny and the rubbish bin’, love love love)

(Source: wordwracked)