“i chew the dawn, i eat the day. i sink my teeth into every goddamn piece of cake and shove my nose deep into the roses. i swivel on the dance floor and slide around on ice skates. i hoard sunbeams and star constellations. i’m gonna be happy even if i gotta fight monsters with my bare hands and my tired feet. i’m gonna love me until people get uncomfortable to see it. i’m gonna squeeze every last drop out of life until it begs for mercy. i’m gonna get to the place where i stop feeling empty, so hand me a slice of that party, that art piece, that beach. call up good memories. tell them i’m perched like a hawk on the horizon. tell them i’m riding with a bullwhip in one hand and a sword of fire in the other. tell them i’m coated in brilliant armor. i don’t care if the night’s dark, i got a lantern of the people i love. i don’t care if i make mistakes because everyone does. i don’t care if i gotta punch my demons right in their sharp teeth and strong jaws. i don’t care if the battle’s bound to be bloody and tough and terribly long. i am ready. bring it on.”— I CHEW THE DAWN, I EAT THE DAY // r.i.d (via inkskinned)
(via rapid-trap-castle)
“sisyphus, if you can hear this, it’s 2015 now and the boulder’s on my shoulders too. somewhere beneath these heels you’re slaving up a mountain while i sit in spanish class and pretend i don’t remember the conjugations of my father’s language because then I won’t have to speak up. is the boulder your name, sisyphus? or is it just your mother’s sad smile when you tell her, “no, i didn’t get that project done. i don’t know why. i just didn’t.” is it your friends on a friday night pouring you a shot and saying, “please, just take it, we want you to have fun, you think too much.” is it the blunt edge of a spoon at the bottom of a bowl of ramen noodles, your face reflected back unto you while your lover on speakerphone begs you to just leave your room for once, or is it just the single red eye of a hand-rolled joint that you don’t want to inhale. is it the “missed call” alert where your sister who is growing older is begging you to come back home, or is it just your dog, underfoot, and the leash that is somehow of too great a weight to use. sisyphus, i have a rock too. my mountain should be worn down now for want of climbing it. sisyphus, you and i: we watch everything roll away from us. we stare at the bottom of the glass and we think about ripping ourselves apart with only our teeth. we think about how good it would be to walk on the peak and see the world open up for us like a wound. but we don’t ever get there, do we, sisyphus? the top is not for us. we are only ever bleeding palms and long nights and endless struggle, or else we are chasing our lives as quickly down the drain as our feet can carry us. our dreams aren’t up there anymore, sisyphus, and we wouldn’t recognize them anyway. they’re the old ex-girlfriend with her beautiful lips like rose petals - you kissed her once and felt your heart leave this planet - and how she laughs on the arms of someone new now with her new haircut and expensive nail polish. when you think about her, doesn’t that stone just weigh a little bit more - but she’s happy, sisyphus, we’re supposed to be glad about that, remember. our dreams are dead, sisyphus. they’re your fifth grade english teacher who believed so much in you and thought you could write the book that would change the face of literature. how do you face her, sisyphus? how could you tell her that you never amounted to very much? sisyphus, our dreams are our lover’s beautiful green-blue eyes and small freckles and smile so kind it tears us open. sisyphus, he is waiting to be crushed by our burden and one of these days, we will slip and fall and he will be the one at the bottom with his arms open and his body broken. sisyphus, it doesn’t do to dream. it is better to imagine you’ll never be there, that you don’t deserve it, that success is only given to the best and we were only liars and half-baked poets. we don’t belong there. i don’t know we’d even feel full if we got it, anyway. sometimes i think we’re trying and sometimes i think we’re just addicted to the heartbreak. i don’t think we know how to live with our hands empty. we’re scared of being made light suddenly: what if we’re really just the rock and the mountain and who we are as a person means nothing? what if this is all there is to us: no ending, just journey? maybe one of these days we’ll break that hulking mass down into small parts and digest it in the pit of our stomachs. we’ll make the friends we always wanted and speak up when our opinion matters and publish our writing and finish what we’re doing. we’ll make a life on a flat plain where there’s nothing but grass and room for running. we’ll make plans for the future without wondering if the future is even coming. i promise you. i’m gonna snap all of my fingernails and all of my teeth chewing this thing down so it is no longer heavy. but for now, sisyphus, i carry it with me. keep pushing, sisyphus. keep pushing.”— atlas would say we have it easy // r.i.d (via inkskinned)
(via rapid-trap-castle)
“It’s a beautiful thing to have lungs that allow you to breathe air and legs that allow you to climb mountains, and it’s a shame that sometimes we don’t realize that that’s enough”— (via honalie)
(via rapid-trap-castle)
“Can you write about a good girl losing her innocence for the first time?” // r.i.d
(via rapid-trap-castle)
“Brother, is the cave as dark As your insidious heart? Burn her, you said The world smells of skin half-baked and little girls’ tears Sugar, spice, half beasts and beautifully aged wine Forest trails of half eaten candy hearts Do you remember the warmth of your arm inside my chest? Brother, you were born to destroy and carve Axe hands swinging harder than a knight’s sword Magnolia trees and pigtail braids, all mere game (Papa said beauty can turn a man’s blood mad) Hyacinth limbs and smiles darker than the crescent moon The shadow of a lily; wolfsbane and wolf’s scream Brother, I too was born from the axe I too was born bear; oaken jaw and a waterfall mouth Complete forest, all dead and brilliantly burning Like a storm tossed ship we came out of mother Don’t believe a word when they say the witches have all been burned Monsters exist, brother, and not all live in gingerbread houses”— Camillea (via maelinoe)
(via rapid-trap-castle)
“Brother, is the cave as dark As your insidious heart? Burn her, you said The world smells of skin half-baked and little girls’ tears Sugar, spice, half beasts and beautifully aged wine Forest trails of half eaten candy hearts Do you remember the warmth of your arm inside my chest? Brother, you were born to destroy and carve Axe hands swinging harder than a knight’s sword Magnolia trees and pigtail braids, all mere game (Papa said beauty can turn a man’s blood mad) Hyacinth limbs and smiles darker than the crescent moon The shadow of a lily; wolfsbane and wolf’s scream Brother, I too was born from the axe I too was born bear; oaken jaw and a waterfall mouth Complete forest, all dead and brilliantly burning Like a storm tossed ship we came out of mother Don’t believe a word when they say the witches have all been burned Monsters exist, brother, and not all live in gingerbread houses”— Camillea (via maelinoe)
(via rapid-trap-castle)
“you are pacing your room in your slipper feet and you need something to chew but not something to eat and your skin is all ripped up by your fingernails and you feel like a train that has slipped off its rails like a child who has gone skating for the first time in their life and you can’t catch your breath like a groom who has just seen his wife and your heartbeat is chasing that car down the road but it hurts more each time it hits a pothole and then suddenly you’re sitting with your head on your knees and trying to slowly remember what comes after three and you look at the clock and forty minutes have passed and your phone is still blank, not like anybody would ask, and the faster you rock, the worse that it gets and the tears that fall on the carpet are hot and they’re wet and you think maybe you should sleep cause nobody would understand. you don’t know that you are bleeding until you wash the blood off your hands.”— panic attack monday (k.p.k)
(via rapid-trap-castle)
(via yungfireninja)
I respect the opinion of my elders, but just an open query about the charges brought against my generation:
For not working hard enough: where is the evidence. When we were younger you told us you started from a small job and climbed your way to the top. When we are flipping burgers it’s because we didn’t apply ourselves. When you did it, it was shouldering the future by suffering in the present. When we ask for the money to buy bread, it is shameful. When others went on strike in the name of labor conditions, it was heroic. When we ask for more, we never deserve it. So how did you get here? Did you never sit up and demand the world give you what was rightfully yours? How hard working is hard enough?
We are illerate, use slang instead of language, shun poetry: did I just imagine the “rad” bloom of the 70’s? Is it because you can’t catch our tongues in your hands? Is it because our poetry is now published beyond books, beyond the control of one voice, beyond you? That our language doesn’t need your approval to evolve? When you drew political pictures of us asking how to turn a book on, you laughed at our ignorance. When the tables turned, when we were shown to be the most literate and well-read generation on record, you scratched the mirror. You said it was our lazy nature. A body rotting. Because we read trash, or we read into things, or we write loudly and it bothers you. Why does it bother you?
School is too easy: What was it like going to school without being worried about a shooting? Did you ever cower like we have, like I did, like our friends, crying muffled in your hands because you love your parents and now have no time to tell them? What was it like, dear, in a world where my standardized testing scores would have broken your curve and I didn’t even get perfect. What part is the easy part. Is it the highest recorded level of anxiety? Is it the rising teenage suicide rates? Is it the eating disorders, body dismorphia, self harm, self destruction? Tell me, have you seen - there’s a show called “Are you Smarter Than A 5th Grader.” It’s very funny. In it, bright young kids show adults that what we’re learning didn’t even exist in common knowledge while they were in school. Tell me. If you were up against our 5th grade curriculum, who would win? No, I’m sure you’re fine. You learned it all in high school.
We want too many free things: What was it like to want for nothing? What was it like to have a certainty that hard work leads to a bright future. What was it like imagining being rich instead of imagining just being rich enough to eat good food. What was it like, not being worried that a broken leg would cost you an entire apartment? Do you know they hate us so much they would rather see us die than bring down the price of an EpiPen. And since I know you love the idea of us abusing the system, tell me, where do I go to expose the lie about my life-threatening allergy? How do I fake it, because I’d like to opt out of it, and while I’m at it my mental illness, and while I’m at it can you take my chronic pain please. And since I know that the answer is to go to school and get a degree so I can be worthy of not dying, just another question: are you aware fifty thousand dollars a year is equivalent to a house. I could buy a house instead of going to college. Since you’re good at this, while we’re talking, I have two siblings. Which of the three of us gets the money? Go on. Look at us. Choose. Who goes hungry?
We’re entitled: yes, please, give me a deed, give me land, give me better than winning the lottery. What I’m entitled to is life, liberty and the pursuit of profit, am I not? So where are any of the above? Where did the jobs go? Why do you jail people for small crimes but free the criminals? And my life? This life? I end where my body begins, I am cut off from the nation’s decisions about what I can put in or take out of me. And me? I’m safe because I’m white-passing. Don’t the bodies pile up? Aren’t we entitled to justice? Aren’t we entitled to an answer? A response from the government? More than just speeches about how riots won’t solve things? Aren’t we entitled to a fair trial? To freedom of speech? Was it not our common fathers who fought for these things?
We’re lazy: Where? Who has the money? I’ve been working since I was 12, am I just an anomaly? Or do you just ignore those who don’t fit your story? All those student-run engineering projects that are changing history. All those protests. The art world, shifting. All these adults who demand more - do they count as lazy or as entitled? What were you doing at our age? Did it really look all that different?
We don’t listen to real music, don’t like real art, are loud, are too busy partying: We changed and you didn’t keep up. Is that’s what’s so startling?
We are sucked up into the Internet, wouldn’t drop the phone if the apocalypse was happening: my phone has my family on the other end of it. Do you not save pictures from a burning building? Do you really care so little for others you’d stick to the old ways entirely instead of texting? Oh sure, yes, a letter is pretty, I love them. But just asking for a friend: What do I do in an emergency with only a pencil. And I don’t mean to downsize the problem because I mean it’s not like you took Polaroids of your friends at sunset - right? - and it’s definitely wrong of us to want memories of a really nice night, but, just curious, did you post that opinion on the Internet? Was seeing others on the Web what made you upset? Maybe - this is just a crazy idea that popped up into my head - you should go take a walk, go outside, disconnect.
We do everything different: Yes. Because we were raised on the cusp of the next great Renaissance. We are in somewhere new, a galaxy of expansion that doesn’t rely on you. That knows more than you do. That doesn’t function the way you expect it to. How rose-colored is the past to you? The place where you erase AIDS and drug abuse in an effort to tell us we are a terrible youth. Where you don’t talk about the marches that happened around you. How painted do you picture it, simply because you had to physically look in a book to learn something new? How do you turn your eyes to a world where war sits on our necks, our earth melts, our populations swell, our people starve, and we are powerless in it all - and say, “It’s your fault.”
It’s our fault. The housing market, somehow related to our obsessive need for safe spaces, I’m sure, because our dreams no longer lie in yards but rather something big enough for at least a bed, and hopefully with tasteful curtains, and you have no idea what a safe space is. The certain failure of the two-party political system, maybe somehow due to our political correctness - we are, after all, rude enough to never open doors for old ladies or just let you be racist - how we controlled the media, how our desires drove this. Our request for trigger warnings and correct pronouns is a burden, and I see that now, because our special snowflake syndrome really does hurt you as a person; while your ongoing use of torture in corrective therapy is only a problem if you’re actually looking. You’re so right about so many things. When you beat us to correct us, it’s your child and it’s your right; when it’s our bodies we ask to have rights over - well, what did we expect? It’s our fault. The crushing debt, the companies that own our government, the privatization of prisons, the unrightful searches, the human trafficking and abuse of sex workers, the gun violence, the pharmaceutical industries which control our doctor’s choices, the climate change you only just started to admit is happening, the extinction of species worldwide - we are responsible for both pollution and poaching, the lead in our water, the death in our streets. So what do you get from it? From dismissing us? From quitting on us before the race begins? From forgetting who exactly raised us kids?
Now, I was told that the problem is that we too often point to bigotry. That we hide behind pointing out your sexist comments instead of realizing the truth your words wrought. I was told we are so focused on our victories, of a world that rallied for marriage equality, for gender expression, for the safety of survivors, for a healing nation - we call out instead of calling on. So I’m calling on you, Generation X kids. Here’s your free one. No bigotry spoken of. So speak. Explain what exactly you mean.
I get it. We asked for a country. The land is borrowed from your children, they tell me.
Now why are you so afraid when we show up and start collecting?
(via inkskinned)