THE PINING POET

s j ä l v f ö r s t ö r a n d e m ä s t e r v e r k :

I got lost in the art again. Perhaps I love art so dearly, I mistake it for love itself. So is the reason I had found myself captivated by you. I have fallen so deeply, I cannot be redeemed. I cannot be saved from it. It’s irreversible. Art and I are inseparable. With you being art itself, it’s the same. I had fallen in love with you, you with your hands moving as bird wings; elegant, graceful, ethereal, dreamlike. Your neck as elegant as a swan’s. Your body as finely crafted as a work Michelangelo had slaved over or Bernini had calloused his hands to produce. No. God, only God could. And so, I had treated you as such, as marble turned to flesh, my djur-ängel.

You, as muscular as an owner’s most coveted show horse stud; your neck heavy with auction tags. Priceless. The crowd shouts their offers; their screams, crazed. Your hair done by Vermeer, the color shown as brightly as those intricately crafted paints, the strands reflected metallic-golden by the fondle from the sun’s light. Blinding. Your words, a score arranged by Stravinsky, sopping with all the otherworldly alchemy imaginable and yet your voice haunts somehow; there’s something as unutterable as a curse that courses through your blood.

You are nothing but a beautiful work of self-sabotage. You curse your Maker. You spit on the ground you walk on. You leave your marble pillars for vandals and cast your silver and gold before thieves. Your brass pots they use as urinals. How can such a beautiful work lay itself to ruin as you do? I would cry in pity if you left tears for me to weep. But you have drained me as a thirstful man in the fields does the canteen after a long day’s work. I have cried my last tears for you. But I fear God hasn’t. I pray God redeem you one day. To watch you is to spot an elegant elk trapped by its antlers in a shepard’s fence. I pity you. God, I pity you. I warned you of it, but you in your lust, cantered to those open fields of long grass, wanting to have your fill. Now you’ve had it. You’ve had it more than you could’ve ever imagined. But I didn’t join you, djur-ängel. Thank God, I didn’t join you. This is how art dies. But in some small way, thank you for revealing to me I had wings.

- k. a. h.

Kerub

“Också du, som våndas under allas klander,

också du är kallad till din plats bland keruberna –

med lejonfötter, med solvingar,

med vördnadsbjudande människohuvud:

djur-ängel.

De ropar efter dig: "Oren, oren!”

Därför att de aldrig drabbades av renhet.

Låga, samla dina gnistor ur vråarna,

ässjan väntar, och hammaren som smider dig till blixt

skall lära dig blixtens snabba renhet

och ditt namn bland keruberna.“

- Karin Boye

maryolive:

Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente

literaturequotesblog:

— Sarah Kane, from ‘4.48 Psychosis’

weltenwellen:

Ugochukwu Damian Okpara, from “Notes on Desire”

feral-ballad:

Alejandra Pizarnik, tr. by Yvette Siegert, from Extracting The Stone of Madness: Poems 1962-1972 ; “The silent sky-blue woman at the edge of the swamp”