If your armor against the world is laziness and excuses, you’re not protecting yourself from battle and injury — you’ve trapped yourself inside with them.
—Terri Guillemets
favorites
It’s personal
There is no timetable for grieving —
Grief is a snail
It’s a shooting star
A walk around the lake
It’s eternity
Or frost ’til bloom —
Memories coursing through the heart
It lasts as many heartbeats as it takes;
sometimes all of them.
—Terri Guillemets
Why we can’t let go
Regret is the glue that makes grief stick around for a lifetime.
—Terri Guillemets
What I do
altered prose by Terri Guillemets, 2019
from The Man Who Loved Jane Austen
by Sally Smith O’Rourke, 2001, page 53
Book party!
Let’s get drunk at the library
and have a book party!
“What a good time!” she said
in an excited whisper.
—Terri Guillemets
scrambled blackout poetry created from F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Girl-heart
her smiling girl-heart danced
behind the grey, grey hair
—Terri Guillemets
scrambled blackout poetry created from Enid Bagnold,
Weariest old work horse
“A horse loves freedom, and the weariest old work horse will roll on the ground or break into a lumbering gallop when he is turned loose in the open.”
—Gerald Raftery (1905–1986), Snow Cloud, 1951
Precarious
Aging is millions of moments
stacked upon tumbling years
—Terri Guillemets
Abrupt
When you’re used to seeing someone day after day, for years on end, and then suddenly they’re gone, you
—Terri Guillemets
Insomnia ticking
three o’clock —
anxiety, regret
in the depths of worry
swept away in the
whirlwind of nothing —
a horrible nothing
—Terri Guillemets
blackout poetry created from Octave Mirbeau, The Diary of a Chambermaid, 1891–1900
None excluded
Prayer is for the grateful and for the
—Terri Guillemets
Whole body, whole spirit
We thank
on our knees
with folded hands
for full bellies
and fuller hearts
—Terri Guillemets
Literary LOL
This tweet from a guy named Ben had me laughing harder than I have in a long while. —
Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” has perhaps the most memorable opening line in all of Western literature:
“I hope you [møtherf*@%ers] like reading about whales.”
—Ben, @pixelatedboat, 2018 August 12th, onegianthand.com