"Young" by Anne Sexton

A thousand doors ago
when I was a lonely kid
in a big house with four
garages and it was summer
as long as I could remember,
I lay on the lawn at night,
clover wrinkling over me,
the wise stars bedding over me,
my mother's window a funnel
of yellow heat running out,
my father's window, half shut,
an eye where sleepers pass,
and the boards of the house
were smooth and white as wax
and probably a million leaves
sailed on their strange stalks
as the crickets ticked together
and I, in my brand new body,
which was not a woman's yet,
told the stars my questions
and thought God could really see
the heat and the painted light,
elbows, knees, dreams, goodnight.

It's not quite finished

We built a civilization. We first found this plot of land that needed some tending. There was a murky dust that almost choked us, and I guess that drove us to put a roof above our heads and a floor beneath our feet. There was a lot of structure that way, a certain hardness, and it gave us walls to lean on; the dust outside didn’t seem quite so real. Our faces were pale and weather-beaten, we were shaking with scratches on our hands from holding on too hard. It was dark outside when we went, when we stumbled, in. The stars were out, but they were far away, you couldn’t quite reach them. So it seemed as though they didn’t really exist, they were glinting and impersonal, to tell the truth. They watched, they listened to the dark, but they didn’t tell us what to do, or change anything at all really. No, you go ahead, work this out for yourself, they seemed to say. You got this. But we didn’t.

We built this thing, it wasn’t all that sturdy, but it suited our needs, for the most part. It was the kind of place you could crawl into, take shelter from the biting wind that seemed to gnaw at your skin, left you bleeding all over the place, half dead and bruised. In here, there weren’t wounds or scars. We repaired each other, touching and saying, oh, it isn’t so bad, you are beautiful, we kissed and made it better. Let me push the hair out of your face, let me into the spaces that might be painful. Somehow, a hand running down the length of my side healed, mended the bones glowing beneath the skin like magic. You built this saying, “the bruises from the outside aren’t so bad, but wouldn’t it be nice to have a home?” but when you look out the windows at where you used to live, you just want to cry for the past.

From there, rooms, houses, trees, rivers spread out across the flat wasteland, with the stars silently looking down, with shut eyes and mouths. It helped, this world within a world, it was warm, full of sheets and blankets and pillows. We furnished the rooms with words, those words that you don’t repeat, only hold as close to yourself as you can, because of that throb of unmistakable sincerity in your voice. In the corners, there were songs. We spent days and nights drinking and dreaming of you, you, you, you are, are, are, are. There was also the music of laughter, the kind that wasn’t going to be muffled. And whispers, secrets, as though secrets even needed to be told, were words needed? Ears still waited for whispers and whatever else they needed, straining because of a desperate need to understand and know each other within this room.

You thought, today, it’s like I’m more of a child and more of an adult than I’ve ever been in my life. You felt yourself growing, forming roots in this place, deep and snug in the ground, covered in dirt, laughing all the way through, coming up through the ground of this civilization new and pure.

I have a lot to say, okay?

"Over the years, they both reached the same conclusion by different paths: it was not possible to live together in this world any other way, or love in any other way, and nothing in this world was more difficult than love."

When it comes down to it...

People will say that they want a partner who has opinions. I think that people like the IDEA of that more than they actually want someone who actually gives a shit and has enough guts to say something about it. It sounds great, and it sounds ridiculous that anyone would want to be with somebody who doesn't have an opinion on anything...but there you are, I see this shit.

The "coolest" girlfriends are the ones who will let people walk all over them. The "nicest" people get walked on all the time and never assert themselves, or have an opinion that might differ from what everyone else believes. They don't have opinions that might be inconvenient. If you have an opinion and you're a woman, you're probably going to be called a bitch at some point in your life.

Having an opinion isn't marketable in the dating world.

The title of this article is kind of funny. I think the guy speaks a lot of truth.

Fucking a Feminist While (Sort of ) a Feminist: A Dude's Perspective

When a man says he's a feminist, some assume he's just trying to get laid. I call myself egalitarian rather than feminist — because then people ask what it means.

Egalitarianism, for me, means treating people as individuals as much possible, regardless of their group identities. That doesn't necessarily mean treating everyone exactly the same, but it means that I try to consider things like the Golden Rule (pick your version) and John Rawls' 'veil of ignorance.' More importantly, it's about relating to individuals as individuals, rather than as stand-ins for whatever class to which they might belong. Anything else is just collective punishment (or, in some cases, collective reward, which is just as unwarranted).

But when it comes to relationships, intimacy isn't about civics. I suppose if I was truly egalitarian I'd be bisexual, but I'm not... I guess we can't all live up to the utmost application of our principles. But principles still apply. I have one I won't waver from: "enthusiastic consent." If she doesn't really want to be there, I don't want to be there at all. Maybe at base that's vanity; but if the other person isn't really, really into it, I'm not really into it. On the same note, I expect reciprocity; if I don't want to be there, I expect that she doesn't want to be there, either.

Sex is supposed to be a mutual experience, not just one person taking from the other. What I value is mutual return of affection, and I value the other person, and expect that the other person values me.

That's why I'm not really a one-night stand kind of guy, because it makes the whole relationship seem too disposable. I feel like they devalue the connection between the people involved, and I don't want to feel that way nor make someone else feel that way.

In terms of being in a relationship with a feminist is like (besides the fact that she doesn't like that I call myself an egalitarian instead), I'll relate the following story: We were out at a busy restaurant the other night, and an obviously inebriated woman came to sit down and chat at our table. (This is not as unusual in New York as it sounds.) We were talking about her boyfriend, for whom she was throwing a party in the cellar, and our check came, which we split. This did not please our dinner guest. We tried to explain that we wanted to split the check, that it was our anniversary and that's how we wanted to celebrate. The woman insisted, "...but don't you see, he wants to buy you things! He likes the pleasure of your company!" And I sort of got lost in wondering whether or not she was calling me a whoremonger, and whether she saw relationships as transactions, so I didn't say what I should have said, which was, "it's our anniversary gift to each other." Good thing Megan said it instead.

Read more: http://jezebel.com/5665734/fcking-a-feminist-while-sort-of-a-feminist-a-dudes-perspective#ixzz12exS7JRC

"...for a moment he forgot the danger he was in, grateful for the world which purposefully puts divisions in place so that we can overcome them, feeling the joy of getting closer, even if deep down we can never forget the sadness of our insurmountable differences."

You know...

Yoga is nice.

Coming home and eating a bowl of Life is nice.

Writing my many angsty feelings down in the form of terrible poetry is nice.

(Actually, I think it could be good if I could just focus.)

Running in the morning is nice.

People are nice.

Hugs are nice.

There's a lot of niceness out there.