And Idk I Just. Get It - Tumblr Posts

tapdancing-eggs
1 year ago
a screenshot of the poem "How to Be a Dog" by Andrew Kane. It reads: If you want to be a dog, first you must learn to wait. You must wait all day until somebody returns, and if somebody returns late, you must learn to wait until then. Then you must learn to speak in one of the voices available to you, high and light or mellow thick and low or middle-range and terse. Whichever voice you learn to speak, you will meet somebody who does not like you because of it, they will be wary or annoyed or you will remind them of something or someone else. Once you have learned to speak you must learn not to speak unless you absolutely must, or to speak as much as you feel you must regardless of how many times you are told to stop, or sit, or placed behind a door—this will depend on what kind of a dog you want to be. And indeed there are many kinds. It may not feel as though you get to choose, and that too is a kind of dog. Next you must learn to relinquish all control over everything you might wish to control. You must learn to prefer to be led about by the neck on a piece of string, or staked to a neglected lawn by a length of chain. You must learn, once you have sampled the freedom of a life without a chain, that it is better to return and be chained again. Or you may learn that it is not—a fugitive is also a kind of dog. Of course you must learn to love, to love always and love entirely and to be wounded by nothing so much as the violence of your own love. You must learn to be confused but never disappointed by a deficiency of love. You must give up your children and not know why. You must lose yourself wholly in activity; you must never feel an itch that you do not scratch. You must learn how to wait at the foot of the bed and hope, silently, that somebody is drunk enough or lonely enough to invite you up, and you must learn not to show your excitement too much or overplay your hand. If you want to be a dog, you must learn to believe that you are not in fact a dog at all. [End Image Description.]
A screenshot of the poem "I'm Going Back to Minnesota Where Sadness Makes Sense" by Danez Smith. It is arranged on the page as a series of couplets. It reads: O California, don’t you know the sun is only a god if you learn to starve for him? I’m bored with the ocean I stood at the lip of it, dressed in down, praying for snow I know, I’m strange, too much light makes me nervous at least in this land where the trees always bear green. I know something that doesn’t die can’t be beautiful. Have you ever stood on a frozen lake, California? The sun above you, the snow & stalled sea—a field of mirror all demanding to be the sun too, everything around you is light & it’s gorgeous & if you stay too long it will kill you & it’s so sad, you know? You’re the only warm thing for miles & the only thing that can’t shine. [End I.D.]
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i am so upset about this how could you all do this to me to be clear i am voting for minnesota bc i live in the midwest rn and idk i just. get it but im so mad bc how to be a dog makes me feel so much ughh help poetry smackdown poetry
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