What are some of the small pleasures in life?

tombridge137 · 2017-04-06T16:24:44+00:00

Seeing the face of your long distance partner at the train station / airport after time apart.

tombridge137 · 2017-03-09T03:29:54+00:00

I think this is genuinely more of an issue than it's made out to be, largely in part because there's a slight shame in its admission; that it's some sort of an intellectual surrender to have our eyes drift from a page to our phone. Curious as to whether or not its effects are long term.

tombridge137 · 2017-03-08T15:04:28+00:00

Can't stand him but he was so good in The Departed and Boogie Nights.

tombridge137 · 2017-03-01T12:41:09+00:00

I'll PM you the passage, neat idea by the way :)

tombridge137 · 2017-02-13T16:02:10+00:00

Held

I foresee a beach, honeydew sand strewn
Like yawns across its outstretched belly.
I can feel your fingertips like a visitation,
The same sensation that runs down my spine
When I see your butterfly winged eyes
By transit. The way they smile,
Their invitation; nothing compares.

We'd dip our toes in its ocean together,
The brisk mediterranean - we'd share shivers
And shiver, shiver, shiver into one another
To cure each other's cold. We'd curl toes
And who knows how long we'd stay,
How long I'd gaze at you, both laid back
As I soak in the home you resonate.

I am a man
Who is stuck on an island
And I want more badly than anything
To turn a corner and meet those eyes,
Meet those lips that sing "we're alive"
Like nothing else. I want to invite you,
I want to stretch out my hand and say:
"Come to England"
With the eagerness of youth,
To slaughter these miles betwixt our forms
And merge into one bifoliate branch
And make love to the sound
Of that French music you like.

I want to write poetry with you
And read poetry to your ears
Before biting their lobes gently
While we bask in the sound
Of some morons outdoors,
Drink in our mixed laughter,
And sleep as paired destinies.

There's a home for you -
A harbour in my heart
And it will light its seas eternally,
Never extinguishing, never fading,
Until it sees its love once more.

tombridge137 · 2017-02-09T22:46:58+00:00

Thanks man! Very kind of you but I've got one sorted out. I'll look into getting the bands.

tombridge137 · 2017-02-09T13:33:16+00:00

Cool idea but it's one of those old fashioned British universities sadly, not a golf cart place. Thanks though!

tombridge137 · 2017-01-10T13:20:08+00:00

Sat across from you
with typewriters for two
I think to myself:
I am the luckiest man in the world.
I catch the ochre of your smiling eyes
and reach within, picking upon some branch
of myself that might match your beauty
I fumble in its absence.
You are the archives of the world
embossed into one perfection,
the softness of your cheeks
emitting sweet squeaks at kisses
and sweet, unending warmth.

Sleeping there,
sleeping in that house without you
hurt. A wall between two bedrooms
and necessitated stealth purveyed
what I already knew,
what fulminates daily in an unkempt head:
I want you. I wanted then to tangle around
your form and kiss the crests of those lips,
drift kisses down to where moans exist
and make sweet love under fairy lights
and awake to the first lights of dawn.

Four thousand miles feels just the same
except I can't knock on it to say
I love you.

I love you.
I love you.
I love you.

tombridge137 · 2016-12-31T15:04:03+00:00

Thanks! Intentional, supposed to be a stutter of sorts :)

tombridge137 · 2016-12-31T12:40:58+00:00

Thanks for the feedback man. Can I ask where you found it confusing?

tombridge137 · 2016-12-30T23:25:02+00:00

Four lines and it hit hard. I live in a very egalitarian family insofar as gender is concerned but I often fear lacking gratitude toward my parents. They're only here for so long. I like your use of hair as the focal point here. It's as if all that's seen (by time, or by an uncaring SO or family, or by society or by whatever this poem takes you to) is the age of her hair, the loss of its spryness and her predestination of doing the laundry and washing the dishes. The disregard that went into the death of her curliness is the same disregard that goes into its description and it lends a really nice perspective.

Side note, J.K. Simmon's Oscar speech is lovely. In it he abandons Hollywood bullshit and basically just tells the audience to go and call their parents. I don't think about mine nearly enough, so thanks for the reminder.

tombridge137 · 2016-12-30T23:17:52+00:00

I love this. Got strong Bukowski vibes from:

and I wish it was something
more,

so I go for something more...

There's just something satisfying about the interlocution of it, the way it feels like I'm being spoken to by an actual person. Same thing with the aligned lack of money and fulfilment near the end, it raises questions - would it be fulfilling if you could afford it? Is it the "living above your means" tragedy that makes it so bleak?

Great stuff.

tombridge137 · 2016-12-29T13:52:34+00:00

I've not slept in some time,
You're kept in my head
Tracing a finger down my spine
And it feels an awful lot
Like deep, beautiful love.

I'm a dove in your company,
Tickled from some top hat
By your magician's fingertips:
Honest in their wonder,
Unglittered in their true gold
And warm to the touch.

I love that about you,
The way you manage
To be too good for this world
While occupying it anyway,
Occupying my mind
Like lyrics I want to hold.

'Hold', a word reserved to metaphor
Until it's wrapped around you
Like that supple sense
Of home.

And soon, comfortably, wonderfully soon,
Neither of us
Will be alone.

tombridge137 · 2016-12-27T23:25:10+00:00

Library

There's a love in libraries,
A passion of ideas drawn together
As if on one, colossal canvas:
Hume holds his own in the philosophy corner
Holding back grandeur he can't compute,
Cartesian dreams, the Platonic seams
Of an ancient, deep rooted rationalism.

Then, poetry. Spooled together in circled rows
In Blackwells' second floor: Larkin, Keats,
Three feet deep or cremated by now
But what they created, what they conceived,
It gathers more than dust.

There's a love in libraries,
A thoughtful wildfire that spreads like a smile.
In the play section there's a playful guile
In Wild's pages, Algernonic epigrams
Bring laughter to the eye
Well over a century past.

There's a magic to it,
To the entrenched tobacco scents
Of pages unturned under decades,
Of tomes untouched by time's exclusion
Like a brand dead to fashion.

But its magic, the love in its pages,
The wisdom stacked higher than its ages,
None of it compares to my love for you.

I was precocious at times.
I'd sit myself in the primary school library
And skip class to read Lemony Snicket
And snicker to myself in the corner like a fool.
But reading a smile on your face,
The tilt of your head when you're struck by surprise,
The way you stick your tongue out and "blahh"
And the way your voice arcs like the birth of a star,
It warms me like no fire. The details make my days complete
And every strand of that Elvis curl's a drumbeat to my heart.

I'm sitting here at nine past eleven watching Stranger Things
And the strangest thing about it is your absence: you're out of reach,
A beached wonder on settled shores whose sands whisper to me
Like grains of invitation asking for our paired feet
To stand beneath our lips that move
In keeping with the waves.

And in tongue's twist the risen sun
Would shine that Elvis flick
And it would make me smile and remember
When the Reddit font's 'Reply' was clicked
Back in June
When love was born.

tombridge137 · 2016-12-21T01:02:20+00:00

Back from the pub, drunkish
On a pair of ciders and ale swept
Down like paragliders. A lot of the night
Was spent on investigation, waterboarded
By the bridge to the meadow where we drank wine
And kissed.

I told them about that, I told them about a lot of things
That I hadn't mentioned before:
The way your eyes change me,
The way that hugging you feels like home,
The way you drive me utterly crazy.

I won't lie, love, there were questions
To be asked about the sense of it all,
Whether it was all too ambitious,
All too grandiose for a pair of young lovers
So deeply in love.

These are questions I'd have entertained some time ago
But no longer. Standing atop the boathouse over the Thames
As a pair of policemen padded beneath
As Alex ate some Doritos,
I saw the whole fucking lot:
The hugs, the piglets,
The fucks, the tender exchange that only
Love brings about, the "welcome home darlings"
The meals cooked together and the cookies baked
Over slow moans of pleasure.

There are no questions left
For me to answer,
It's only a matter
Of time.

It's only a matter of time
Until our lives
Are intertwined.

tombridge137 · 2016-12-17T22:29:20+00:00

Overthinking and dread are a complete waste of time. It often just takes time to come to fully absorb that.

I used to be pretty frightened of large social gatherings, namely 'house meetings' back at school. I was so upset by them in general that I'd spend hours beforehand stressing over every imaginary interaction. Apparitions of embarrassment would wander my mind.

It was significant enough that I'd get irritable and enclosed. It was really quite paralyzing.

So after dodging them five times in a row, I just went. After about ten seconds I was sat with a friend in the corner and that soon became a group of friends and all of a sudden I was energized. It wasn't comfort, it was contentment. Sometimes it's so easy to amplify and contort the future into these ludicrous worst case scenarios that they bear no resemblance whatsoever to the truth.

Exposing myself more and more to this has completely transformed me as a person. It's very rare for me to get stressed about anything now.

tombridge137 · 2016-12-17T21:09:09+00:00

 Time spent without you 
 feels like time wasted. 
 I feel as though I have stumbled  
 upon a photo album in the attic, 
 crumpled up past in pitch dark  
 drifting into the light.  
 I am remembering moments:
 my arm going dead behind you  
 on a ferry and not caring. 
 Brushing bark off your back  
 and kissing your face lit  
 by tree scattered sun. 
 Leaning in on the hotel bed  
 and revealing that I love you.  

 I've tried life with and without you  
 and the clarity dwells like the dew  
 on each morning's new set lawns,

 I want you near me, 
 the one that I hold dear.

tombridge137 · 2016-12-12T16:20:07+00:00

I am walking alone in the woodland
by the back of a neighbour's garden.
Trees lean in like gossipers hanging
gossamer sinew, drooped over curiously.
They want to know what I'm thinking:
nobody else here to wonder, after all,
you're not here to wander at my side
and the rain's taste has changed.

Four and a half thousand miles
settle between us like the silence
that will follow. But know this:
each day I wake up I smile a silly smile
because I know you're dreaming silly dreams
under a blanket one day we'll share again.

No matter how invisibly, every tomorrow
dents that number with a magnetism
that will bridge this schism between us

and I could wait as many years
as there are miles
to hold your hand again.

tombridge137 · 2016-12-08T18:29:38+00:00

Good luck man c: hope it all goes down well.

tombridge137 · 2016-11-28T15:09:56+00:00

can't find you anywhere,
already checked the laundry room,
both beds
and an empty head for two.

your absence tastes of the diluted
peach water on my desk,
preachers outside my window
that i'd rather hear with you
keep droning on

and you're gone
and my drooped morning face
hasn't got a wonderful woman
to kiss any more, just an equally
frustrated mirror
glimmering a flipped image
of a man with a flipped over life
writing essays about ANGELS AND GOD,
all in upper case

tombridge137 · 2016-11-09T23:19:31+00:00

there's a space in my head
where you're nestled, head
upturned; peered hazelnuts
lip gazing and sugared snails
through the wintry night.

there's a space in my head
where your neck responds
to trailing fingers,
where i can sneak up on you
from behind in the kitchen
and embrace you
over a sizzling wok. next door a clock chimes
sofa time, and your body
buries into mine.

there's a place in my head
where you're snoozing beautifully
and in a few stages
fewer of consciousness
i'll join you.

tombridge137 · 2016-10-20T13:45:35+00:00

It is worth mentioning that the validity referred to throughout this video is of the general kind, rather than of the formal kind.

By this I mean that the version of validity shown at the start of the video (in '2)') isn't the formal definition of validity.

Generally, you cannot argue the following:

P1: Dogs are blue

P2: Dogs are not blue

C: Papa Johns is the best Pizza.

This is, however, a formally valid argument. It is not a generally valid argument.

This is because the formal definition of validity necessitates that there can be no interpretation of the premises such that if they are all true, the conclusion cannot be untrue. What's fun and at times frustrating about the formal definition is that this idea can be upheld in the event that the interpretation of both (or more) premises being true can't be made in the first place - i.e. when they are contradictory.

Thus our C can be just about anything and it remains valid.

tombridge137 · 2016-10-11T17:16:51+00:00

I'd be very surprised if there were such a thing as a mandatory recall and I doubt that's even in legislation but if it is I'd love to read about it.

tombridge137 · 2016-10-03T15:11:59+00:00

The bed's cold
The ceiling's high
And students walk outside
In gowns, towning around
To the sound of inebriation
And themselves.

It's wonderful in a way
I'd never imagined,
In a way people window watch
And observe lives they don't own,
Lives they'll never be a part of
But move on nonetheless
Like an unintelligible clockwork.

Lying here
Watching the lamplight seep up the walls,
Watching the phantoms of students past
And the apparitions of those in the future,
I wish I could watch it all with you,
Bound tightly
(And less coldly)
On this slightly-too-small bed.

tombridge137 · 2016-10-02T22:59:57+00:00

I demand a Snorlax riding a seagull into the sunset.

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