Rec | VARIATION ON THE WORD SLEEP

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By Margaret Atwood. My favorite love poem 🌹 I would like to watch you sleeping, which may not happen. I would like to watch you, sleeping. I would like to sleep with you, to enter your sleep as its smooth dark wave slides over my head and walk with you through that lucent wavering forest of bluegreen leaves with its watery sun & three moons towards the cave where you must descend, towards your worst fear I would like to give you the silver branch, the small white flower, the one word that will protect you from the grief at the center of your dream, from the grief at the center. I would like to follow you up the long stairway again & become the boat that would row you back carefully, a flame in two cupped hands to where your body lies beside me, and you enter it as easily as breathing in I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed & that necessary.

@arimar

Oct 22, 2024

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i have many favorites but here is "the first dream" - billy collins

The Wind is ghosting around the house tonight and as I lean against the door of sleep I begin to think about the first person to dream, how quiet he must have seemed the next morning as the others stood around the fire draped in the skins of animals talking to each other only in vowels, for this was long before the invention of consonants. He might have gone off by himself to sit on a rock and look into the mist of a lake as he tried to tell himself what had happened, how he had gone somewhere without going, how he had put his arms around the neck of a beast that the others could touch only after they had killed it with stones, how he felt its breath on his bare neck. Then again, the first dream could have come to a woman, though she would behave, I suppose, much the same way, moving off by herself to be alone near water, except that the curve of her young shoulders and the tilt of her downcast head would make her appear to be terribly alone, and if you were there to notice this, you might have gone down as the first person to ever fall in love with the sadness of another.

@wmd

Jul 1, 2024

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a poem i wrote in 2018

How do you sleep so easy after putting me down so hard I told you I was worried And you said you were too but that you loved me and I would have believed that but you didn’t look up from your phone when you said it Enchanted and in love with the video playing on your screen The one that had your attention and affection while I laid in bed next to you salivating like a dog waiting to be noticed and touched by a kind-looking man on the street Do you remember what you were watching? Me either. But I know where I stand you say it’s always about me it’s always about me It’s always about me But it isn’t it’s about us And it’s upsetting to know that we don’t exist anymore

@kareem

Feb 3, 2024

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lee rhymes?

i’ve honoured this our bodies are beneath us, naked and sleeping my hands have honoured this carried you high over the ocean one eye open doesn’t have to mean anything, but look i’m reaching for you mid-dream i’ll honour my promise our bodies are beneath us, naked and sleeping can you take me home? one eye closed in your shoulder room so cold i can almost see your breath i’ll honour this keep it light, make it soft, make it easy