Magdalena O!

My friend Safia writes/composes/dreams up these incredible worlds of perception and sensation.

(i will not tell you)

They mutilate they torment each other
with silences with words
as if they had another
life to live

they do so
as if they had forgotten
that their bodies
are inclined to death
that the insides of (wo)men
easily break down

ruthless with each other
they are weaker
than plants and animals
they can be killed by a word
by a smile by a look

(Translated by Czeslaw Milosz)

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

I was talking to a friend about poetry a few days ago. Moreover, they were just listening while I went on and on. I don’t have many poetry-lovin friends.

9:22:33 PM Number 6 (Magdalena): Poetry is difficult to love. I love it. But I can understand why people don’t. It’s often looked down upon as a lesser art even though sometimes it is through poetry that the most intense truths can be articulated. That’s why most people are drawn to artists, cos they are drawn to people who can express themselves, imo, and articulate desires because everyone has desires, but often do not have the vocabulary to express or even understand them.

Then today, I started Erica Jong’s Seducing the Demon (I specifically linked this review because it’s only fitting to Jong to be both, lauded and laid into always) and she talks a lot about poetry, and considers herself a poet first. I think about poetry as the most potent fantasy you can have – the most amorous hands can seek you out in poems. I give myself to poetry, writing and reading it. I’ve grown to be more weary about losing control in all parts of my life. I took pride in relentlessly giving into my passions and my politics, and standing my ground loudly. I’ve become louder in some ways, and have turned meek on others. Jong talks of Lawrence, no doubt, one cannot talk of sexual pleasures and books without Lawrence.

“Sex is everywhere in the media, but ecstasy is absent. Many literary novelists shy away from sex because it’s become a pornographic cliché. But it doesn’t need to be. Lawrence was a master of ecstasy (Jong, 78).”

“Sex has the unparalled power to make us absurd to ourselves, It also has the power to make us understand transcendence. When it it ecstatic nothing is more powerful than sex. And nothing is more difficult to capture into words than transdence. It’s not only because sex is embarrasing to many people, but also because ectsasy implies loss of control. This is difficult to acknowledge. Nobody seems to talk about ecstasy these days. Sex is always talked about in terms of control (Jong, 76).”

“Ecstasy cannot exist without a complete loss of control (Jong, 77).”

That complete loss of control is what we’re constantly after, isn’t it? Yet, we shy away, unable to completely surrender. Surrender always ends up in hurt. How much risk is enough? too much? That ecstasy is missing from everything it seems. It’s all just sex. Being seduced and seducing simultaneously should be on sex’s pedestal. Sometimes I worry I sound so superfluous or teenage when I go on about my lust of love. Why is trying to unravel your demons characterized of youth, moreover of immaturity? I once threw myself on a street after a rainstorm, rolling around in dirt until I was completely covered to show my devotion, to give the person a tangible sign of what they meant to me when their doubts rose high because their own love for me was more than they were ready for. Was my act immature? or is it the articulation of it in words seem lame? Part of me never sees any act of love as lame, because I have the hopes that everything that comes out love is as true as it could get. If anything, the doubter would be lame, because they never doubted my love, but doubted their own capacity in handling their love, not mine.

I still have doubts though and reservations about poetry and the lust of love. I wonder if I am a lesser being because I am easily caught up in all of it, that it takes me along and I lose sight of other things. I’m not sure what these other things are though, or why they are more important than living out fantasies. Is it all get filed under ‘self-absorbed, self-involved narccisism’? I’ve never been good at being organized anyway.

I like to stay up late into the night and dream. Photo and design by me.

I like when my friends send me txt poems:

Magda cat in a
magda hat is not
magda fat laying on
a magda mat
- Jul 9, 6:26 pm

To love another is something
like prayer and it can’t be planned, you just fall
into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.

- “Admonitions to a Special Person”

I am stuffing your mouth with your
promises and watching
you vomit them out upon my face
- “Killing the Love”