yep, reaching for the moon is definitely in my list of things that Cannot Be Experienced Again Until In An Unmistakeably Stable State: things so depressing and powerful that watching them again will fuckin wreck me. 

“One Art”, Elizabeth Bishop

the poet & the architect

i.

she cuts (with the tip of her pen and her tongue) out

lines dictating proportions, her

eyes stripping oaks down to their weight in gold,

furnace-hands rearranging space displacing parts you’d thought would stick -

that are now tucked behind cabinets forgotten 

as slowly you are not yourself but a renovation, vignettes of brittle things that have been improved from you, 

painted over to hide the brick. 

the dimension of her lust is a cruel price

she’s paid with her lifeblood and yours to fall

head-first into the ocean of a world-worth living where finally

the scale of the tallest peak is as calculated as all her dreams. 

ii.

she observes, puts into verses. 

leaning on a man she asks to be described as the loneliest person to have ever lived. 

using heavier pens and bleeding from deeper cuts, but 

before the indulgence of feeling she has already sold these wounds for replication.

collar upturned for fear of losing more words -  

things she knows will never live to taste again

because now they read what she writes in schools, and she cannot reconcile 

herself and the woman who lives in her pages, 

reflecting the street lamps and tainting her lips with the taste of dusk and ash  

like words looking for a tune,

graffiti wanting for paragraphs within plot-lines, and land-mines 

where she will trip, hoping to fall into concave arms measured singularly to the way she loved, 

and they lost. 

 - the poet and the architect 

   (rld)