Posts tagged "courage" — Page 8

Poems / August 2, 2017

Sing at Unnatural Hours in the Presence of Artificial Light

There are times I have to remind myself
that a bridge is a way to travel over water
not a diving board for suicides. That airports

aren’t just places for departures, but places
for arrivals, and hospitals aren’t only
where we go to die, but where we’re born.

I’d like to think not a single bomb
was dropped on anyone today, not a single
person was diagnosed with cancer.

Somewhere someone misses you.
A friend remembers something
you once said. Somewhere someone

thinks you’re beautiful. A man holds
a guitar in his hands. A couple dances behind
the living room couch mouthing words

they’ve longed to share with each other.
At this hour only astronomers
and insomniacs find natural,

as the blazing red lights of an ambulance
flicker fear past the window,
I have to remind myself:

it doesn’t always mean somebody’s
dying in there, sometimes it means
somebody’s being saved.

~Clint Margrave

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Quotes / May 18, 2017

Sovereignty

I only know that I will never again trust my life,
my future, to the whims of men, in companies or out.
Never again will their judgment have anything to do
with what I think I can do.
~Toni Morrison, Paris Review Interview

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Thoughts / December 7, 2016

Sour Grapes

I have been locked out of my blog. The tragedy lies in the identity of the culprit.

I cannot join the chorus of complaints about middling web hosting services and technological glitches; not even can I lay the blame at the corporate feet of the perennially incompetent Time Warner Cable. I haven’t any tales of Prim infiltration by Putin’s Russian hackers. No, I am the problem. My choking perfectionism precludes me from even making a start.

I soothe the pain of procrastination, of abandoned passion, with mental manipulation, my favorite being that I am not meant to be a writer. Negating my history—my absence of memory sans the written word, my first grade story writing, the engraving of words upon my mind—I tell myself that this writing thing is but a folly. Worse, I may even want to be a writer purely for ego gratification, for the cool and the cred of the writer image.

My excuses are but crippling untruths.  I am sad living without writing.

I want to let myself back in.

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Excerpts / May 23, 2016

My Blue Period

So you mustn’t be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus Prim, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall…

In you, dear Mr. Kappus Prim, so much is happening now; you must be patient like someone who is sick, and confident like some one who is recovering; for perhaps you are both.

~Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

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Thoughts / January 2, 2016

Afterthought

A motley of Yule paper promises lay rent in revelation, a fraction of their former wrapped dignity preserved by the stubbornness of iridescent bows that remained dutifully attached. My family lounged content as cats, their desires full from their holiday haul (a fullness their bellies were soon to replicate), while the aesthete in me cringed at the plight of the mutilated wrapping papers, torn to shreds as if by a school of piranhas. As I lamented the long hours spent in the perfection of pretty presentation, I wondered, “Is it worth it?”

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