jurassicstark:

If you haven’t seen it already here’s ‘Six Shooter’ (2004), Martin McDonagh’s Academy Award winning short film. As fiendishly dark a comedy as they come.

she had some horses 

bibicapella:

I    She Had Some Horses

She had some horses.

She had horses who were bodies of sand.
She had horses who were maps drawn of blood.
She had horses who were skins of ocean water.
She had horses who were the blue air of sky.
She had horses who were fur and teeth.
She had horses who were clay and would break.
She had horses who were splintered red cliff.

She had some horses.

She had horses with eyes of trains.
She had horses with full, brown thighs.
She had horses who laughed too much.
She had horses who threw rocks at glass houses.
She had horses who licked razor blades.

She had some horses.

She had horses who danced in their mothers’ arms.
She had horses who thought they were the sun and their
bodies shone and burned like stars.
She had horses who waltzed nightly on the moon.
She had horses who were much too shy, and kept quiet
in stalls of their own making.

She had some horses.

She had horses who liked Creek Stomp Dance songs.
She had horses who cried in their beer.
She had horses who spit at male queens who made
them afraid of themselves.
She had horses who said they weren’t afraid.
She had horses who lied.
She had horses who told the truth, who were stripped
bare of their tongues.

She had some horses.

She had horses who called themselves, “horse”.
She had horses who called themselves, “spirit”, and kept
their voices secret and to themselves.
She had horses who had no names.
She had horses who had books of names.

She had some horses.

She had horses who whispered in the dark, who were afraid to speak.
She had horses who screamed out of fear of the silence, who
carried knives to protect themselves from ghosts.
She had horses who waited for destruction.
She had horses who waited for resurrection.

She had some horses.

She had horses who got down on their knees for any saviour.
She had horses who thought their high price had saved them.
She had horses who tried to save her, who climbed in her
bed at night and prayed as they raped her.

She had some horses.

She had some horses she loved.
She had some horses she hated.

These were the same horses.

II    Two Horses

             I thought the sun breaking through Sangre de Cristo
Mountains was enough, and that
                                                wild musky scents on my body after
       long nights of dreaming could
                                           unfold me to myself.
             I thought my dance alone through worlds of
odd and eccentric planets that no one else knew
      would sustain me. I mean
                                          I did learn to move
                                                                      after all
      and how to recognize voices other than the most familiar.
          But you must have grown out of
                                                       a thousand years dreaming
             just like I could never imagine you.
                        You must have
                                           broke open from another sky
to here, because
                        now I see you as part of the millions of
   other universes that I thought could never occur
    in this breathing.
                               And I know you as myself, traveling.
In your eyes alone are many colonies of stars
                                                   and other circling planet motion.
                                  And then your fingers, the sweet smell
                                     of hair, and
                                                       your soft, tight belly.
    My heart is taken by you
               and these mornings since I am a horse running towards
a cracked sky where there are countless dawns
                                             breaking simultaneously.
There are two moons on the horizon
and for you
                I have broken loose.

III    Drowning Horses

She says she is going to kill
herself. I am a thousand miles away.
Listening.
               To her voice in an ocean
of telephone sound. Grey sky
and nearly sundown; I don’t ask her how.
I am already familiar with the weapons:
a restaurant that wouldn’t serve her,
the thinnest laughter, another drink.
And even if I weren’t closer
to the cliff edge of the talking
wire, I would still be another mirror,
another running horse.

Her escape is my own.
I tell her, yes. Yes. We ride
out for breath over the distance.
Night air approaches, the galloping
other-life.

No sound.
No sound.

IV    Ice Horses

These are the ones who escape
after the last hurt is turned inward;
they are the most dangerous ones.
These are the hottest ones,
but so cold that your tongue sticks
to them and is torn apart because it is
frozen to the motion of hooves.
These are the ones who cut your thighs,
whose blood you must have seen on the gloves
of the doctor’s rubber hands. They are
the horses who moaned like oceans, and
one of them a young woman screamed aloud;
she was the only one.
These are the ones who have found you.
These are the ones who pranced on your belly.
They chased deer out of your womb.
These are the ice horses, horses
who entered through your head,
and then your heart,
your beaten heart.

These are the ones who loved you.
They are the horses who have held you
so close that you have become
a part of them,
                      an ice horse
galloping
             into fire.

V    Explosion

The highway near Okemah, Oklahoma exploded.

                                              There are reasons for everything.
Maybe          there is a new people, coming forth
                   being born from the center of the earth,
                   like us, but another tribe.

Maybe          they will be another color that no one
                   has ever seen before. Then they might be hated,
                   and live in Muskogee on the side of the tracks
                   that Indians live on. (And they will be the
                   ones to save us.)

Maybe          there are lizards coming out of rivers of lava
                   from the core of this planet,

                                                    coming to bring rain

                   to dance for the corn,
                   to set fields of tongues slapping at the dark
                   earth, a kind of a dance.

But maybe the explosion was horses,
                                              bursting out of the crazy earth
near Okemah. They were a violent birth,
flew from the ground into trees
                                              to wait for evening night
mares to come after them:

                then      into the dank wet fields of Oklahoma
                then      their birth cords tied into the molten heart
                then      they travel north and south, east and west
                then      into wet white sheets at midnight when everyone
                            sleeps and the baby dreams of swimming in the                            
bottom of the muggy river.
                then      into frogs who have come out of the earth to
                            see for rain
                then      a Creek woman who dances shaking the seeds in
                            her bones
                then      South Dakota, Mexico, Japan, and Manila
                then      into Miami to sweep away the knived faces of hatred

Some will not see them.

But some will see the horses with their hearts of sleeping volcanoes
and will be rocked awake
                                    past their bodies

                                          to see who they have become.

— Joy Harjo

NINETY-FIVE GRIEVANCES TO GOD: ABRIDGED 

sierrademulder:

After Martin Luther

1. Children are capable of feeling
both shame and abandonment.

14. My father lives alone. Also,
a hawk killed his dog and you
expect me to believe in mercy.

20. Good things happen to bad people.

47. One day, every person I have ever
loved will die and the only option
you have given me is to just sit by
and watch it happen or hope
I am the first to go.

48. Speaking of love,

86. The list of artists who have
committed suicide only includes
the ones who were well known
enough to be found.

95. As a child, I prayed every night.
It felt important. Mature. Powerful.
I wish someone had told me that
it was me, that I was the powerful one.
Imagine it: fleets of six-year-olds
believing that strongly in themselves.

- Sierra DeMulder

"The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling."

Inspiration for Ophelia

When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.

#i love love love the bottom left
#i’m reblogging for it alone
#look at the way that she’s drowning
#she’s staring at you challenging you even as she drowns
#yes she’s beautiful
#her hair still delicately fans out
#but she’s going headfirst
#arms outstretched
#she’s going to die and she’s going to make you watch the process
#she’s not staring blankly out of the water with her arms outstreched
#palms empty body empty textually empty
#nope not this ophelia
#and i love it

fybenwhishaw:

“With his light tremulous voice and painfully thin body, Whishaw, then 23, was the youngest, rawest and most vulnerable of Hamlets, delivering “to be or not to be” while contemplating an overdose of sleeping pills. Electrifying.” -Charles Spencer

zombiebondage:

Some poems from “B Is for Bad Poetry” by Pamela August Russell

"

What’s Genocide?

their high school principal
told me I couldn’t teach
poetry with profanity
so I asked my students,
“Raise your hand if you’ve heard of the Holocaust.”
in unison, their arms rose up like poisonous gas
then straightened out like an SS infantry
“Okay. Please put your hands down.
Now raise your hand if you’ve heard of the Rwandan genocide.”
blank stares mixed with curious ignorance
a quivering hand out of the crowd
half-way raised, like a lone survivor
struggling to stand up in Kigali
“Luz, are you sure about that?”
“No.”
“That’s what I thought.”

“Carlos—what’s genocide?”

they won’t let you hear the truth at school
if that person says “fuck”
can’t even talk about “fuck”
even though a third of your senior class
is pregnant.

I can’t teach an 18-year-old girl in a public school
how to use a condom that will save her life
and that of the orphan she will be forced
to give to the foster care system—
“Carlos, how many 13-year-olds do you know that are HIV-positive?”

“Honestly, none. But I do visit a shelter every Monday and talk with
six 12-year-old girls with diagnosed AIDS.”
while 4th graders three blocks away give little boys blowjobs during recess
I met an 11-year-old gang member in the Bronx who carries
a semi-automatic weapon to study hall so he can make it home
and you want me to censor my language

“Carlos, what’s genocide?”

your books leave out Emmett Till and Medgar Evers
call themselves “World History” and don’t mention
King Leopold or diamond mines
call themselves “Politics in the Modern World”
and don’t mention Apartheid

“Carlos, what’s genocide?”

you wonder why children hide in adult bodies
lie under light-color-eyed contact lenses
learn to fetishize the size of their asses
and simultaneously hate their lips
my students thought Che Guevara was a rapper
from East Harlem
still think my Mumia t-shirt is of Bob Marley
how can literacy not include Phyllis Wheatley?
schools were built in the shadows of ghosts
filtered through incest and grinding teeth
molded under veils of extravagant ritual

“Carlos, what’s genocide?”

“Roselyn, how old was she? Cuántos años tuvo tu madre cuando se murió?”

“My mother had 32 years when she died. Ella era bellísima.”

…what’s genocide?

they’ve moved from sterilizing “Boriqua” women
injecting indigenous sisters with Hepatitis B,
now they just kill mothers with silent poison
stain their loyalty and love into veins and suffocate them

…what’s genocide?

Ridwan’s father hung himself
in the box because he thought his son
was ashamed of him

…what’s genocide?

Maureen’s mother gave her
skin lightening cream
the day before she started the 6th grade

…what’s genocide?

she carves straight lines into her
beautiful brown thighs so she can remember
what it feels like to heal

…what’s genocide?
…what’s genocide?

“Carlos, what’s genocide?”

“Luz, this…
this right here…
is genocide.”

"

"I suppose human nature, so emotional, so irrational, so instinctive as it is in most people, but not in me, has this beauty; this what they call “elemental” quality. One may get it too, when one is older. One may lie sobbing and yet cry “Does doctor think I shall recover?” One will not perhaps go to the writing table and write that simple, and profound paper upon suicide which I see myself leaving for my friends. One will not perhaps extend gently and break very quickly; smooth and slopping like the waves."

macbeth →  noir
the suicide king: so called because in common depictions the king of hearts appears to be stabbing himself in the head […] 

Hamlet feels (tw depression, self-harm, suicide) 

Read More

soyonscruels:

I am Ophelia. The one the river didn’t keep. The woman dangling from the rope. The women with her arteries cut open. The woman with the overdose. SNOW ON HER LIPS. The woman with her head in the gas stove. Yesterday I stopped killing myself. I’m alone with my breasts my thighs my womb. I smash the tools of my captivity, the chair the table the bed. I destroy the battlefield that was my home. I fling open the doors so the wind gets in and the scream of the world. I smash the window. With my bleeding hands I tear the photos of the men I loved and who tied me on the bed on the table on the chair on the ground. I set fire to my prison. I throw my clothes into the fire. I wrench the clock that was my heart out of my breast. I walk into the street clothed in my blood.

—Hamletmachine, Heiner Muller

Suicide Song 

rabbit-light:

But now I am afraid I know too much to kill myself
Though I would still like to jump off a high bridge

At midnight, or paddle a kayak out to sea
Until I turn into a speck, or wear a necktie made of knotted rope

But people would squirm, it would hurt them in some way,
And I am too knowledgeable now to hurt people imprecisely.

No longer do I live by the law of me,
No longer having the excuse of youth or craziness,

And dying you know shows a serious ingratitude
For sunsets and beehive hairdos and the precious green corrugated

Pickles they place at the edge of your plate.
Killing yourself is wasteful, like spilling oil

At sea or not recycling all the kisses you’ve been given,
And anyway, who has clothes nice enough to be caught dead in?

Not me. You stay alive you stupid asshole
Because you haven’t been excused,

You haven’t finished though it takes a mulish stubbornness
To chew this food.

It is a stone, it is an inconvenience, it is an innocence,
And I turn against it like a record

Turns against the needle
That makes it play.

Tony Hoagland

mydarkenedeyes:

Brooke Shaden - The Re-Imaging of Ophelia (2010)

 #ophelia walking on water oh #there are such cool doorways opened up by the interpreting of ophelia imagery as witchlike #in her madness and her flowers and her return to nature via drowning as magical/unholy/infernal processes #by which she becomes free; and the way it unsettles and sends all those who love her into a spiral #witches are women who take the story into their own hands; who exert power on the world beyond their role #witches hear what you cannot and speak of things you cannot hear #ophelia as witch; as imbued with magic in her madness #it is a basic interpretation but god i love the imagery