Lavender Haze by Taylor Swift (Aeseaes Cover)

 Do you ever get that feeling where everything feels… kind of hazy? And then it’s gone. That’s called the lavender haze -Mad Men

Staring at the ceiling with you

Oh, you don't ever say too much

And you don't really read into

My melancholia

I've been under scrutiny 

You handle it beautifully 

All this shit is new to me 

I feel the lavender haze creeping up on me

Surreal

I'm damned if I do give a damn what people say

No deal

The 1950s' shit they want from me

I just wanna stay in that lavender haze

All they keep asking me

Is if I'm gonna be your bride

The only kinda girl they see

Is a one-night or a wife

I find it dizzying 

They're bringing up my history 

But you weren't even listening 

An excerpt from the Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai

If you don't have love, you don't properly exist. If you don't properly exist, you don't have love. One morning, after the rains had passed, Sunny woke into a memory of being half asleep just the way he was now, of waking into the bloom of affection greater than himself. It was greater because it no longer existed inside himself and Sonia- they were encased within it, the countryside was colored by it, the news was shaded by it, maybe one day even their deaths would be small matters within it. He turned to tell Sonia this, but she was not by his side, nor was she at her desk. He walked down the path that shuffled to the ocean and searched for her amidst the waves. The waves subtracted his thinking. He launched himself into the water and swam straight out to her in the manner of a seabird joining another seabird. 

The Third Act

 When you with me, it's a good day

- Gunna 

You are the third and final act

The denouement, the resolve

The round of applause, the crowning

The descent of the heavy velveteen

... the last word

the deliberating silence

following a spell-binding performance

lived on its own terms

... the blinding lights

flooding the theatre 

catching the sparkle of sweat trickling 

down a face made-up

... the walk to centre stage

my bow to the audience 

I take these steps with Chekov's gun

my heart to you I offer

... mensa, predella, 

sanctuary of return

I kneel in the chancel to God

the nave may call to me

How Deep My Love Goes by Andreya Triana

Love is the heart of the matter. When all else has fallen away, love sustains.

-Bell Hooks 

I'd walk the earth 'til I fall on my knees

Through heaven and hell on my bare feet

I sold my soul to be with you, baby

If I got your love, I got all that I need

On top of a mountain

I'll build you a kingdom

So, you can see rivers

As far as they go

No matter the distance

I will be near you

I'll be your river

Reaching high and low

That's how deep my love goes

I would go crazy, out of my mind

If I can't see your face, I would rather go blind

'Cause when I'm with you, something about you saves me

Now I just can't live without you by my side

When the thunder and lightning come

When you think you got the one

I will shelter you

Shelter you from the storm

When the dark clouds are raging in the sky

And the tides are moving up high

When you think you got the one

I will shelter you

Shelter you in my arms

A Long Way Down by Zebra and Giraffe

A bad thing doesn't stop happening to you just because it stops happening to you

- Tommy Orange 

The joker's on the left of me, the vulture's on my right

It seems to me that there's no end in sight

My quiet den is crowded with the screams of rescue me

But I am hoping no one else will see

The lion in the basement starts to sing its somber tune

Warning me that confrontation looms

Brittle bones and sticks and stones the weapons that I choose

It's a fight I can't afford to lose

'Cause it's a long way down

As I lose my grip I slowly start to drown

But you're my saving grace

Through the water I can almost see your face

And it gives me hope

And I've never felt, like this before

And my nerves are wearing thin

But I know you're here, somewhere within

I know we'll see the end

Sorites Paradox

 Are we trapped inside of Plato's cave/ Are we fooling ourselves?/ Just dancing shadows to be named

- Msaki, Jessie Clegg and Sjava

Running the coarse grains of sand through my fingers

The hands of time, this love a pile of roughness

A heap of uncertainty from shorelines immeasurable

This potentiality of silica, of transparency and clarity

Weighing heavy under an impending critical mass

An alchemy still brewing, in the throes of articulation

Of catastrophic collapse and caving in on itself 

Revealing itself as mundanely human-all-too-human

Will it build itself anew with a taller architecture 

Or will the wind deracinate from the geography 

Of my left breast grain by all-too-significant-grain

Ceasing all hopes and attempts to heap into love

Tracing the edges of the finite, these intermissions

Scale the slippery sides of these dunes dangerously

We may lose our footing and take a fatal fall out of love

A hardening of ground is required to take the leap

But I am all cried out, I cannot water these grains

And pat them down kindly into unshifting sediment

The sun? She turns her back on us in disappointment

Having given us many days of hot sunshine to build

Our intentions are exposed to a frigid harmattan now

How will the excavated sand from a sunken place

Be erected into a safe secure cave that harbours hope?

An ever-fixed mark that dispels dispersions and disunity

But caves are the duplicitous dens of tricksters 

Cast a light on the walls, is it begotten agape we see

Or bewitching shadows beguiling us with dancing

Perduring in illusions of our own foolish making 

Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange (an excerpt)

 

You are from a people who survived by making their surviving mean more than surviving, who did their best to stay together. But you will not know if the people ahead of you will be capable of the same. And they will not know if they will be capable of the kind of love that survives surviving, that holds bullet shards in a body, doesn’t let it poison the blood, the kind of love that chooses the harder way, the way that includes more and not less, the way away from selfishness. No one will know if anyone is capable of making this place more than its accumulated pain. That you don’t know, that you can’t know, that the only thing you do know is that this means you have to believe if you expect to stand a chance at doing more than surviving, and this belief, despite not knowing, this belief because you can’t know, it is the reason the story has to be lived in order to be told, it is the song being sung, and the dancer in midair. It is the child, with miles and years of hard road ahead, running up a paved street at top speed with no shoes on, feeling she must outrun even the running, feeling she has already overcome gravity, feeling with her feet the kind of victory belief alone can claim, and so feeling she is absolutely about to lift off the ground, to take flight.