Velli > Velli's Quotes

“I look at you and see all the ways a soul can bruise, and I wish I could sink my hands into your flesh and light lanterns along your spine so you know there's nothing but light when I see you.”
― Shinji Moon

“I almost miss the sound of your voice but know that the rain
outside my window will suffice for tonight.
I’m not drunk yet, but we haven’t spoken in months now
and I wanted to tell you that someone threw a bouquet of roses
in the trash bin on the corner of my street, and I wanted to cry
because, because —
well,
you know exactly why.

And, I guess I’m calling because only you understand
how that would break my heart.

I’m running out of things to say. My gas is running on empty.
I’ve stopped stealing pages out of poetry books, but last week I pocketed a thesaurus
and looked for synonyms for you but could only find rain and more rain
and a thunderstorm that sounded like glass, like crystal, like an orchestra.

I wanted to tell you that I’m not afraid of being moved anymore;
Not afraid of this heart packing up its things and flying transcontinental
with only a wool coat and a pocket with a folded-up address inside.

I’ve saved up enough money to disappear.
I know you never thought the day would come.

Do you remember when we said goodbye and promised that
it was only for then? It’s been years since I last saw you, years
since we last have spoken.

Sometimes, it gets quiet enough that I can hear the cicadas rubbing their thighs
against each other’s.

I’ve forgotten almost everything about you already, except that
your skin was soft, like the belly of a peach, and
how you would laugh,
making fun of me for the way I pronounced almonds
like I was falling in love
with language.”
― Shinji Moon

“There is a shipwreck between your ribs and it took eighteen years
for me to understand how to understand your kind of drowning.
There are people who cannot be held quietly. There are screams
that are never externalized. If I looked at the photo albums of your
past twenty years, all I would find are decibel meter graphs of
phone calls and the intensity of your silence as you sat
smoking cigarettes in the garage.

There is a shipwreck between your ribs. You are a box with
fragile written on it, and so many people have not handled you
with care.

And for the first time, I understand that I will never know
how to apologize for being
one of them.”
― Shinji Moon

“I look at you and see all the ways a soul can bruise, and I wish I could sink my hands into your flesh and light lanterns along your spine so you know that there's nothing but light when I see you.”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“Remember,
a stranger once told you that the breeze
here is something worth writing poems about.”
― Shinji Moon

“I hate seeing poetry in everything I touch. I hate that I can no longer love you without turning you into a metaphor - that it can never be simple as looking at you and saying yes, yes, yes.”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“You will lie to everyone you love.
They will love you anyways.”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“Dig yourself a ditch, six
feet deep, and bury everything that you've ever
said, everything that you've never
meant, and everything that has
burned you and left you with nothing
but ash”
― Shinji Moon

“You are beautiful because you let yourself feel, and that is a brave thing indeed.”
― Shinji Moon

“Once, I believed in you like a poem, turned your heart into a metaphor for my heart, turned our mouths into honey and caramel lozenges.
But metaphors come and metaphors go,
and not even seasons have the courtesy to stay till dawn.”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“All you need is a twenty in your pocket and a bus ticket.
All you need is someone on the other end of the map, thinking about the supple
curves of your body, to guide you to a home that stretches out for miles
and miles on end.”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“I am a forest fire and an ocean, and I will burn you just as much
as I will drown everything you have inside.”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“You will fall in love with train rides, and sooner or later you will
realize that nowhere seems like home anymore.”
― Shinji Moon

“I don’t want to know what your favorite color is
but I do want to know what color you bleed
when you’re with me.”
― Shinji Moon

“Let the word in and sooner or later people will see the oceans pouring out of you. You'll walk down the street and someone will mistake you for the sky. You are beautiful because you let yourself feel, and that is a brave thing indeed.”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“And still,
Your mouth on my mouth
Is a thought as fresh as
Melting icicles away
With my breath”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“I should've told you that you could rearrange continents with that smile of yours.”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“Do you know how it hurts to touch you
knowing that in the morning I’ll still wake up alone?”
― Shinji Moon

“I will never fail to inflate my lungs for you when you're a hundred miles deep, heading headfirst towards a telephone pole - screaming - because you have pulled out all your own brakes.”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“I am not as strong as my words pretend to be. Not
as quiet as these caesuras promise. This heart is a patchwork quilt of people
that leave different shades of blue inside of me.”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“Hope? I don't need your strength
anymore.

Because this morning, I stood on my roof
as the sun chiseled its way into every single pore of my
body, and I realized that I am

made of flames, that if you touch me,
you will burn—that I am the only match I need

to burn.”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“I think we all speak a different sort of language
than one another, but boy you sound a whole lot like coffee on a
Sunday morning.”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“Tectonic plates are shifting beneath my skin
and there's a new continent in my chest
that I want to call by your name”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“I want for my words to be
touched gently,
as if you had never seen my sort of dialect before,
as if you never wanted to read anyone else
again.”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“You,
with your hands full of Earth and your head full of
rainfall. How many hearts do you hold in your own?”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“I touch the knots beneath the skin of your back,
trace the tree lines around your wrist,
and you smile at me and I love you
for how human you are.”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“Listen.

When the wind blows
all your candles out, when the stars
turn to plumes of smoke,
when your mother makes you watch
as the matches burn out in her eyes,

Let me hold your hand, your skin,
the stones you've swallowed in your sleep.

Let me
slip your soul out of your skin
so you can sleep in my palms
for tonight.”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“English language, my ass.
When you kiss me, my syntax hits
the wall across the room and shatters
in shards of words that scatter
across the floor.”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“When you want to fall—fall,
Evaporate and condensate,
but when you rain, come down
as a hurricane.”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“Underneath the moonlight,
we laid and laughed
like run-on sentences, kissed like ellipses, and
you held me so close that I wear my bones down smooth
against
the grain of your skin.”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being