you surely had whispered
“long time no sea”
and i am still searching
for what precisely you meant
because well, the blue void
never even left and well
i know you didn’t mean
the other sound of sea,
i have been here
as long as the ocean,
a little quieter maybe,
not so persistent
to encroach your boardwalk
but i let you stand
against the wakes
and be as exactly you,
beautiful as clemency,
graceful as sea mist.
so here we are,
two buoys swallowed
by the gaping mouth of squalls.
one wondering how to
protect the other from such storms
and the other drifting off
trying to enjoy the soft pelt,
the slick love of hurricanes

- slade gibbs

(Source: sladegibbs)

clarev:

i told myself if i could remember what it felt like to be held still

altogether effortless to imagine you
curled up like a cannonball
whispering hey or sweetheart like
a fuse that just can’t wait to burn
the breeze of a stray curl sneaking downward,
ivy tracing up my ribs
(all along I’ve been seeking you ancient)

in the summer we wear fruit juice and jump into lake michigan
sprawled outward like the cities we thread between our fingers
and I let your cantaloupe smile swoop in,
swear your eyes change colors when you look at me
if there was any color but the floor beneath us 

somebody forgets the key so we make a run for it
half shout half sing
olly olly oxen free
can’t hold back our hands, can’t imagine morning in a place like this
nothing but the sky in our eyes,
the taste of fake sand crunching in our mouths
  like what does it mean to know better

highways at dawn, our fingers out the windows
splitting air to fight the way the wind is slipping your
“don’t stop til morning”
begging to break the no take-backs rule,
something like the first secret you ever had

all along i’ve been seeking you ancient

coolchazine:

It took me a while to realize this, but I think I now know why it is that I dislike The Book Thief and Homestuck among other things. It’s because journalism school has made my brain analyze writing differently. As a journalist, my job is to get stories across in an easy way. Not a dumbed-down way necessarily, but using words that ordinary people (like myself) can read.

I am growing to dislike flowery language, words that not every person may know. And I realized that my main reason for not liking Homestuck is that it uses a lot of this flowery language, and that jars with my journalistic sensibilities.

I don’t mean to say flowery language is a bad thing by any means- it’s just not my thing anymore, sadly.

As a postscript to this, I try my best to stick to George Orwell’s rules of writing:

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never us a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

All of this.

There’s a big difference between self -promotion and promoting yourself as a writer.

Self-promotion is the guy at the party who keeps trying to impress chicks with his gnarly hot rod and mullet (never mind that he thinks it’s the 1980s). Self-promotion is the high school football player who’s willing to rough up some nerds to help his campaign to be prom king. Self-promotion is that lady at work who won’t stop talking about how much harder she works than everyone else and how awesome she is.

But you are not promoting yourself—in a sense. When you create a social media and Internet presence, you create a persona—whether you mean to or not. That persona is not you. It’s a representation of you (your brand). And your brand is just the “face” of your product. And your product is your writing. And that’s what you’re promoting.

READ MORE: The Eleven Deadly Sins Of Online Promotion For Writers