20 Soul-Stirring Passages From Shinji Moon’s Poetry That Are Hauntingly Beautiful

Shinji Moon is one of my favorite poets and such a beautifully talented writer and I’m always shocked when more people don’t know about her. Her poetry and words are all over the internet but I thought I’d create a collection of some of my favorite passages from her poetry. Read the lines below and check out her poetry book The Anatomy of Being here.

1.

“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”

2.

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

3.

“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.”

4.

“You were the one that I wanted to feel the earth rotate with.”

5.

“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.”

6.

“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.” ”

7.

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

8.

“You will lie to everyone you love.
They will love you anyways.”

9.

“You were the first word that I ever wanted to write.”

10.

“I’m running out of things to say.
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.”

11.

“Let’s call it social hemophilia.
Someone touches me and I bleed for days.”

12.

“I couldn’t tell you which is more difficult-the physical loneliness or the draft that I feel between my heart valves like I left a window open somewhere in the third story of my soul, a candle blowing in and out, swaying with each of my breaths.”

13.

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

14.

“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.”

15.

“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.”

16.

“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.”

17.

“Remember: you are not the skin that you were born into, but something tenfold, a thousand leagues deeper than that.”

18.

“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.”

19.

“I am a forest fire and an ocean, and I will burn you just as much
as I will drown everything you have inside.”

20.

“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.” Thought Catalog Logo Mark

Former senior staff writer and producer at Thought Catalog.

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