writing prompts for the broken hearted - eden robinson

https://brickmag.com/writing-prompts-for-the-broken-hearted/
In this dream, you can breathe the frigid water. The weight of the ocean flattens you. A jellyfish glows firefly-yellow, pulsing above you. / You will rise when you’re ready.
Grief brings us to a burning field. Whether you run through it or stand still, the flames rake you with agony.
The person who comes back is you, but transformed. What do you see with your new eyes?
Text and subtext: your writing is both the stars and all the things unseen in the churning darkness.
This world exists because our sun is remarkably sedate, because our moon is an attentive lover exciting the oceans, because Jupiter eats asteroids and comets all day. You’re allowed to be sad.
Maybe there’s nothing after this life. Maybe you’re surrounded by angels. Maybe we simply come back until we learn enough. Our universe is so wide and wild; it’s hard not to feel insubstantial, forgettable, alone.
The heaviness that permeates your life is all the little sadnesses unmourned. All the dead planets, all the silent moons—our radio signals singing into the void.
You can put your strength down. I’m sitting here with you at your kitchen table. You don’t need to say anything.
You stand on the beach by yourself watching a tsunami roar toward you. You sing in the face of your own destruction.
Your grief is an honour song. This is your testament to what has been lost. This is the most gruelling song you’ll ever sing.

your hands are graceless - joyce chong

your hands are hurricanes, or / I mean that I am lost already & this / is rubble already.
There’s no one / to shoot the starter pistol, to yell / go, to set the timers, to decide / beginnings when we are / always ending, anyway.
what I mean is, / our hands are volatile; and they / only know deconstruction.
I mean that / we are destined for destruction, / clumsy & corrosive; that these hands / don't know how to build, can't mend / themselves the way starfish regenerate / departed limbs

sheer and camber - jessica bixel

https://readwildness.com/4/bixel-camber
a blooming so violent it could only be / abandonment
I want to be more / than my repetitions / but I miss you. / What kind of wound have I made \n for myself?

stop bath - kirby knowlton

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/58227/stop-bath
in a room i’ll never see again / your face develops right in front / of me.
soon i will be new again.
in a room i’ll never see again / parts of us have begun to die.

to the dead - frank bidart

Is this wisdom, or self-pity?— / The love I’ve known is the love of / two people staring / not at each other, but in the same direction.

poem in the stanza of the rubaiyat - frank bidart

Child, when you learn that the laughing ghosts who live shadowing your steps in forty years give substancelessness to stone, is this night one more thing you’ll try to kill in you to live?

guilty of dust - frank bidart

LOVE IS THE DISTANCE / BETWEEN YOU AND WHAT YOU LOVE / WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE
WHETHER YOU LOVE WHAT YOU LOVE / OR LIVE IN DIVIDED CEASELESS / REVOLT AGAINST IT / WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE

for mary ann youngren - frank bidart

At the Resurrection of the Dead, / the world will hear us say / The phone is plugged in, please call, / I will answer it.

elegy - frank bidart

You’re real; / and smile at me no less woundedly, dead.
Mother, I didn’t forgive you. Conceal / unreal forgiving. Show me your face in fury—
I feel too much. I can’t stand what I feel.

beautiful short loser - ocean vuong

How come the past tense is always longer? Is the memory of a song the shadow of a sound or is that too much?
Stand back, I’m a loser on a winning streak. I got your wedding dress on backward, playing air guitar in these streets.
Inside my head, the war is everywhere. I’m on the cliff of myself & these aren’t wings, they’re futures.
Now I’m a beautiful short loser dancing in the green. You think I’ll need a gun where we’re going?
See, officer? Magic is real—we all disappear. Why aren’t you laughing?

hum, hum - mary oliver

You are going to grow up / and in order for that to happen / I am going to have to grow old / and then I will die, and the blame / will be yours.
He wanted a body / so he took mine. / Some wounds never vanish.
I think there ought to be a little music here: hum, hum.
The resurrection of the morning.
The mystery of the night.
the words of poets / a hundred or hundreds of years dead — / their words that would not be held back.
Oh the house of denial has thick walls / and very small windows / and whoever lives there, little by little, / will turn to stone.

another working dawn - franz wright

The dreamer was still soaring high above an endless city. / (The whole place could go in the time it takes a struck match to ignite.)
Music told me early I should be filled with joy. / The sound of someone crying woke him up and it was him— / the exceptional instrument who took very poor care of itself, / the leaf who thought it was a tree.
Lover of words, illumination’s death-mask.
What did not in time become a source of suffering?

baudelaire - franz wright

Evil isn’t hard to comprehend, it is nothing / but unhappiness / in its most successful disguise.
Evil is hated and feared at least. / It is possessed, unlike mere misery, / of a dark glamour nobody pities.

day one - franz wright

We should examine your life, the one you bought, and what happened when you got home and attempted to assemble it: that disfiguring explosion no one witnessed, no one heard, which you yourself cannot recall, and by whose unimaginable light you seek to write the name of beauty.

will - franz wright

But this: one / strange alone / heart’s wish / to help all / hearts, this / was real. / This / was indestructible.

sketch for a novel - franz wright

each time she breathed: this obsessively honed / and devotedly mutual hatred and hissing / contempt,

with a child - franz wright

Words. Once / they did to the world what love does! Now, / to quiet and conceal my sorry terror, / they’re going to have to do.
A sudden wind blows / through the new leaves and they are gone; / time blows through your hair, / the river of the dead / whose name’s forgiveness, very / small, a blue vein / in your temple.

pediatric suicide - franz wright

Being who you are is not a disorder. / Being unloved is not a psychiatric disorder. / I can’t find being born in the diagnostic manual. / I can’t find being born to a mother incapable of touching you. / I can’t find being born on the shock treatment table.
Putting your head down and crying your way through elementary school is not a mental illness, on the contrary. And seeing a psychiatrist for fifteen minutes per month is not effective treatment for friendless and permanent sadness.

the problem - franz wright

a power over you steadily increasing in direct proportion to / disbelief in it, / to the very evident fulfillment of your greatest fear: / you’re going to live.
When you wanted to quit / you could not, and when you could— / When you could you weren’t about to.

günter eich apocrypha - franz wright

I have seen / my end / and it is someone else’s / body, breath, strange / inspiration.

east window: little compton - franz wright

And the second hand slows, and your pulse, and the avalanche waits, every terrible thing in the past, for the time being:
nothing in itself was ever good enough.

unwritten - franz wright

Winter, thank God. I will wander from room to room, window to window, a fictional person gazing at fictional skies.
One theory says / we won’t remember dying any more / than being born. / Where can you go at this hour, / stay with me.

the world of the senses - franz wright

What a day: I had some trouble following the plotline; however, the special effects were incredible.

abuse: to my brother - franz wright

There’s a gladness in everything when it’s first breathing, a bright naïveté and a will to be well— / They’ll kill it and then go have breakfast.
Just what the world needs, another world. / Just what the world needed, another / sad child— / another tortured mind. / (No one is born sad.)

wheeling motel - franz wright

It’s twenty-five years ago: you went to death, I to life, and which was luckier God only knows.

bumming a cigarette - franz wright

Sooner or later, I’m telling you, even the pity will cut you down.

irises in rain - franz wright

What have I ever done but leave— I only came to leave.

rien ne va plus - margarita karapanou, translated by karen emmerich

—Do you love me? I asked. / —More than anything in the world. / —But you don’t love anything. / —That’s why I love you.
And so hate and pleasure became one. And I, nothing at all.
Alkis, you never gave me anything. You’ve only taken. In death as in life.
It’s human nature to forget, especially the unpleasant things. / There isn’t a single flower on your grave anymore. Only dust and ants.
Alkis, I still love you, a little. For fleeting moments. But most of the time I hate you. As much as you hated me while you were alive, maybe even more.
Alkis, the marble of your gravestone is cold. I press my cheek against it and listen to make sure you’re not still alive. I haven’t stopped being afraid of you.
The game starts again from the beginning. The end is always another beginning. / This nightmare of eternity in time, this is our fate.
What can I say? And why should I say anything? I’ll never speak again, I’ll sew up my mouth with a golden needle and golden thread. / My tongue sticks in my throat, and slowly I swallow it. My soul has moved, I can’t find it anymore. / I don’t care.
To forget is the great secret of strong people. / To remember, to rehash, is the worst of human weaknesses, one for which others always pay. / Though of course you, too, always pay.
My God, so distant and close: —If I come to hate you, it will mean I have finally begun to believe in You.
The thing I fear most is stillness, silence. I want permanent marks, life. What’s love for you?
Love, he told me. Love everything from the grass to the first person who walks by in the street. Love it all.
You were always leaving. I always picture you with a suitcase in your hand.
So right from the first moment I met you, my lies were always the truth: in telling them I unveiled the world for you—the hidden world, the true world.
You wanted everything to remain untouched, paradise to be paradise, and me an angel.
But is there any word more ambiguous than the word “love”?
Alkis, I would have preferred if you had loved me less and understood me more.
You know something, Alkis? I hate you. Because you’re so good, and yet such a fool.

dear sara - ocean vuong

you slam the book shut look out at the leafless trees doused in red April rain where none of us are children long enough to love it

dear t - ocean vuong

all I have to do is write / the right words & I’m / beside you (again) but / all these letters & / nothing / says your face—
maybe / we should go home now you say my father / will kill me I haven’t told my father / I’m on it / I’m on it all / it’s all / over now stay / a little longer I say but your voice / is already pieces / your grin peeling off / in dusted sheets & I saw this coming:
you write the letter dear you & it doesn’t work so you write the poem but the birds are just holes in the gunshot sky
maybe I can build a boy out of the silences inside maybe we can cease without dying fuck without tears falling into the truck stop urinal & we’re just too tired to walk home
we’re / just two boys lying / in the snow & / you’re smiling because the stars / are just stars & you know / we’ll only live once / this time

nothing - ocean vuong

But to live like a bullet, to touch people with such intention. To be born going one way, toward everything alive. To walk into the world you never asked for and choose a place where your wanting ends—which part of war do we owe this knowledge?
It’s warm in this house where we will die, you and I. Let the stanza be one room, then.
I know, we’ve been growing further apart, unhappy but half full. That clearing snow and baking bread will not fix this.
I know, too, as I reach across the table to brush the leftover ice from your beard, that it’s already water. It’s nothing, you say, laughing for the first time in weeks. It’s really nothing. And I believe you. I shouldn’t, but I do.

ars poetica as the maker - ocean vuong

Yes, I aimed / for mercy— / but came only close / as building a cage / around the heart.
So I dipped / my fingers back / into the fire, pried open / the lower face / until the wound widened / into a throat, / until every leaf shook silver / with that god / -awful scream / & I was done. / & it was human.

not even - ocean vuong

I promise you, I was here. I felt things that made death so large it was indistinguishable from air—and I went on destroying inside it like wind in a storm.
The way we look up and whisper Sorry to each other, the boy and I, when there’s teeth. When there’s always teeth, on purpose.
When I threw myself into gravity and made it work. Ha. I made it out by the skin of my griefs.
What’s wrong with me, Doc? There must be a pill for this. / Because the fairy tales were right. You’ll need sorcery to make it out of here.
Unlike feelings, blood gets realer when you feel it. / I’m trying to be real but it costs too much.
I can say it was gorgeous now, my harm, because it belonged to no one else.
How you say what you mean changes what you say. Some call this prayer, I call it watch your mouth.
I caved and decided it will be joy from now on. Then everything opened. The lights blazed around me into a white weather and I was lifted, wet and bloody, out of my mother, into the world, screaming and enough.

american legend - ocean vuong

I walked from the wreck till the yards became years, the dirt road a city, until my face became this face & the rain washed the gasoline clean from my fingers.
I found / a payphone in the heart / of the poem & called you / collect to say all this / knowing it won’t make / a difference, only / more. So hello, hi, the blood / inside my hands / is now inside / the world.
Words, the prophets tell us, destroy nothing they can’t rebuild. I did it to hold my father, to free my dog. It’s an old story, Ma, anyone can tell it.

if see no end in is - frank bidart

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/49826/if-see-no-end-in-is
You cannot see what is there to see — not when she whose love you failed is standing next to you.
The end achieved by the unappeased is burial within.
Something in you believes that it is not the end.
The finite you know you fear is infinite: even at eleven, what you love is what you should not love,
The future will be different: you cannot see the end. What none knows is when, not if.

the old man at the wheel - frank bidart

Measured against the immeasurable universe, no word you have spoken brought light.
You let all the parts of that thing you would cut out of you enter your poem because enacting there all its parts allowed you the illusion you could cut it from your soul.
Dilemmas of choice given what cannot change alone roused you to words.
As you grip the things that were young when you were young, they crumble in your hand.

self portrait, 1969 - frank bidart

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57107/self-portrait-1969
Sick of being decent, he craves another crash. What reaches him except disaster?

song - frank bidart

Columbus is dead / so try as you will / you cannot make me feel / embarrassment / at what I find beautiful.
awake I am the moment between.

like - frank bidart

Your hands were too full, then / empty.
a spectre / so like what you watched die, the unique / soul you loved endures a second death.
You dread loving again, exhausted by the hungers ineradicable in his presence.
You resist strangers until a stranger makes the old hungers brutally wake.

queer - frank bidart

Lie to yourself about this and you will / forever lie about everything.
For each gay kid whose adolescence / was America in the forties or fifties / the primary, the crucial / scenario / forever is coming out— / or not. Or not. Or not. Or not. Or not. / Involuted velleities of self-erasure.
The door through which you were shoved out / into the light / was self-loathing and terror.

the enterprise is abandoned - frank bidart

I’m not a fool, I knew from the beginning / what couldn’t happen. What couldn’t happen / didn’t.
But half our life is dreams, delirium,
Each time we must / mourn, we fear this is the final mourning, this time / mourning never will lift.

as you crave soul - frank bidart

when the as-yet-unwritten / poem within you / demands existence / all you can offer it are words.
You mourn not / what is not, but what never could have been. / What could not ever find a body / because what you wanted, he / wanted but did not want.
Ordinary divided unsimple heart. / What you dream is that, by eating / the flesh of words, what you write / makes mind and body / one.

for the aids dead - frank bidart

Without / justice or logic, without / sense, you survived. They didn’t. / Nothing that they did in bed that you didn’t.

that the sun exhales - orphan_account

https://archiveofourown.org/works/2322083
He nicknames them Romeo and Juliet ironically at first, but it very quickly becomes a terrifyingly accurate choice; their passionate, overdramatic, completely devoted romance leaves one of them half-dead and the other half-alive, in the end.
Trevor loves Michael. Michael accepts that. Anywhere Michael goes, Trevor will follow. Michael may be a performer, but Trevor is the spotlight, and without each other, they are pointless.
It puzzled him then and it puzzles him still that a man who is clearly so capable of emotion and tenderness and love could be so wrecked and ruined and ill.
Trevor’s feelings are like natural disasters: beautiful and consuming and mighty enough to destroy whole cities.
There is a weight that hangs between them now; their desires and emotions, unspoken and otherwise, have grown so tangible in the air around them that that burden alone deserves it’s own damn cut of their scores.
Michael thinks of himself as a gritty action hero who has to do bad things for the sake of the greater good. He cannot face the truth: he is a bad man, and he loves it.

the storm that is - crowscrow

https://archiveofourown.org/works/1108412
The thought was disheartening. Michael could see himself getting older, and Trevor, man, Trevor somehow grew younger.
As soon as he witnessed that sallow, sickly little kid firing off a flare into his pursuer’s eye, it was, to put it jokingly, love at first sight.
Trevor was that storm. A fucking tornado. A typhoon. And Michael felt—as much now as he did then—that he would never survive, would never make it past the torrent of wind that blew everything within its path to rubble. Yet he did—every single time.
No one had ever ripped the truth from him so heartlessly and laid it out in front of him as plainly as Trevor had. It was overwhelming.

to myself - franz wright

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47565/to-myself
and the catastrophic dawn
and the others all around you, and the loneliness you love, and the universe that loves you specifically, maybe
and when you begin / to cough I won’t cover my face, / and if you vomit this time I will hold you: / everything’s going to be fine / I will whisper. / It won’t always be like this. / I am going to buy you a sandwich.

postcard 2 - franz wright

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/55544/postcard-2
The blizzard I visit your city disguised as will never be over and never arrive.

dedication - franz wright

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/53137/dedication-56d2322af15f1
It’s true I never write, but I would gladly die with you.
before battle we would do each other’s makeup, comb each other’s / hair out / saying we are unconquerable, we are terrible and splendid—
it is easier this time, I promise— / I am already waiting in your personal heaven, here is my hand, / I will help you across.
Remember / me. Do you / remember me?
although I never write, secretly / I long to die with you, / does that count?"

transient - nooshin ghanbari

https://readwildness.com/6/ghanbari-transient
consider this— / nothing is permanent. / someday, the place we call / home will be emptied / from the inside out— / skinned from within— / filled with foreign heartbeats / and people who don’t know our names.

sixteen nights in sandy shores - avalise

https://archiveofourown.org/works/20593589
Michael seems to wince at the name too. It’s like an unspoken boulder wedged between them, buying time until it rolls to crush one or the other.
Michael’s repression knows no bounds and God help anyone that brings that to his attention.
Trevor’s chest tightens, collapsing in on itself, and his anger slowly slips into something else. Something desperate, overwhelming, and bordering on panic. He’s going to be alone. Again. They’re leaving him, just like everyone else.
He needs familiar footing, so he clings to rage.

Edit

Pub: 04 Aug 2022 23:40 UTC

Edit: 26 Oct 2022 21:26 UTC

Views: 184