scrapofpaper | I twist like a corkscrew, the sweetness rising (Reply)

"Patrick actually used to be popular before Sam bought him some good music."
--Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

"Any man who would change the world in a significant way must have showmanship, a genial willingness to shed other people's blood, and a plausible new religion to introduce during the brief period of repentance and horror that usually follows bloodshed."
--Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

"One Kashmiri morning in the early spring of 1915, my grandfather Aadam Aziz hit his nose against a frost-hardened tussock of earth while attempting to pray. Three drops of blood plopped out of his left nostril, hardened instantly in the brittle air and lay before his eyes on the prayer-mat, transformed into rubies. Lurching back until he knelt with his head once more upright, he found that the tears which had sprung to his eyes had solidified, too; and at that moment, as he brushed diamonds contemptuously from his lashes, he resolved never again to kiss earth for any god or man."
--Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

"Overlay"
I was tired of the shouting and the celery,
the ignitions and navels and telephones.
I moved to a country where everything happened abstractly.

I had heard about this place in some translated poems:
a country filled with suffering and death and hope
and politics, and minds to ponder them constantly.

But I was shocked by the new place, which proved to have many actual things:
mating turtles, good cheap bread, homeless four-year-olds walking the streets,
a museum filled with gold objects worth more than all the governments of South America,
and clouds that offered fog four months per year, though never rain.

I learned that the translators were not there,
but back in my own country amid sofas and taxis and loud music
and slaughtered chickens, wishing for the misery and chance
this other country's poets might provide by turning
dusty shoes to sorrow, potatoes to faith,
loud music to notes that would lay over ours--
doubling our worlds or canceling them out.
--Stephen Corey

"Tenderness"
Back then when so much was clear
and I hadn't learned
young men learn from women

what it feels like to feel just right,
I was twenty-three,
she thirty-four, two children, and husband

in prison for breaking someone's head.
Yelled at, slapped
around, all she knew of tenderness

was how much she wanted it, and all
I knew
were backseats and a night or two

in a sleeping bag in the furtive dark.
We worked
in the same office, banter and loneliness

leading to the shared secret
that to help
National Biscuit sell biscuits

was wildly comic, which lead to my body
existing with hers
like rain that's found its way underground

to water it naturally joins.
I can't remember
ever saying the word, tenderness,

though she did. It's a word I see now
you must be older to use,
you must have experienced the absence of it

often enough to know what silk and deep balm
it is
when at last it comes. I think it was terror

at first that drove me to touch her
so softly,
then selfishness, the clear benefit

of doing something that would come back
to me twofold,
and finally, sometime later, it became

reflective and motiveless in the high
ignorance of love.
Oh abstractions are just abstract

until they have an ache in them. I met
a woman never touched
gently, and when it ended between us

I had new hands and new sorrow,
everything it means
to be a man changed, unheroic, floating.
--Stephen Dunn