THESE VIOLENT DELIGHTS - A Few Ways You Remind Me of Everything I Will Never See Again

Sep 28, 2026

Uploaded by Ophelia

Poetic, confessional verse explores love as obsession and betrayal, repeatedly casting the beloved as both refuge and danger. The speaker collapses memory into vivid, violent imagery—turning travel, family rituals, and encounters with oceans and deserts into metaphors for grief, addiction, and loss. Across multiple sections, desire is framed as something that bleeds through the body, while faith, time, and “American Dream” ideals fail to contain the speaker’s hunger for freedom, knowledge, and self-transformation.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryStory & Novel

FormatPDF

Pages44

Reading Time1 h 8 min

AccessFree to download

A Few Ways You Remind Me of Everything I Will Never See Again

The Night We Stole Your Father's Drugs

Life Is Not a Paragraph

I Can Not Rest With Such a Ravenous Heart

If You Gaze Long Enough into an Abyss, the Abyss Will Gaze Back into You

# THESE VIOLENTDELIGHTS Dominique Bonten Digitized by the Internet Archivein 2022 with funding fromKahle/Austin Foundation https://archive.org/details/isbn_9781511432382 T H E S E V I O L E N T D E L I G H T S # A Few Ways You Remind Me of Everything I Will Never See Again I want to tell you that your hands look exactlylike the back roads in Colorado, but lately my mother has been begging me to stopturning people into metaphors. Yesterday she found ink scrawled onto my thighs and complained about how I never open the journals she buys me.She doesn't understand how poetry bleeds through my poresand I could never tell her I use your skin as a canvasinstead of her blank pages Our family vacations remind me of the dreams I have with you in them.Like the time our car explodedon the interstate in Nebraska and I tripped over the skeleton ofa deer.I desperately dug up the rest of the carcass;Wrapped the spine,skull,teeth,and antlers into my skinso I could learn how to better harbor the dead. When I saw the ocean for the first time it was raining so hard that I could see your wordsdripping in the rain.I ran out into the ocean to seeif it truly did taste like you,because since the dayI met you,you've bragged about the way you were borninto the Pacific Ocean,and maybe if I swim long enoughI'll finally find your latitude and longitude. Because of all the things I have lost,you’re the oneI've been searching for;In the valleys of the hillsof Montana and in the freezing glaciers of Canada,where I swear I saw your fingerprints somewhereunderneath all that ice. # The Night We Stole Your Father's Drugs Remember the night your dad passed out from all that booze,and feeling like tragedies we wanted to see if we could do the same?We took all his Bud Light and those pillsthat make you forget your name. That night,I wanted to forget allthe roads I had been on.I wanted to forget all the foreign,desperatefaces I've seen walking down the street orin the grocery store.Before I knew it,you were running through your front yardwith a 4o ounce in your left hand and you weresinging the blues.That's the first time I rememberhearing you sing and I sat there on your front porchtrying my hardest to pull off a laugh because at this pointI felt like I was vanishing.And as my feet began to disappear,I didn’t panic.And when my fingertips began to dissipate,I wondered if maybe you were running because you were tryingto outrun time,or your Christian mother who begs youto take those holes out of your face.Or maybe, you're trying to outrun the father that is unconscious on your couch and only comes around when he's inebriated.And I saw you running out there withthis huge fucking grin on your face and everything was dark except for the moonlluminating shadows.And for that night I put away the thought of fathers and church pewsand I ran out under the moon with my best friend andwe ran and ran and ran untileverything was gone but us. # Life Is Not a Paragraph I woke up to you reading me like a paragraph.You kissed my indentions as I begged you to stop comparing me to literature.Howmany times do I have to tell you that this love is not just a poem.Yourheart is stuck between quotation marks and I'm exhausted with youbreaking down my body into chapters that are easier to read. You keep complaining about the way my thoughts bleed through myskin and I can tell you're bored with finding the same metaphorstucked inside me. “Stop turning our arguments into poetry.”I’m sick of taking out all my anguish on my pen. This love is not a novel and nothing about us will ever resemble amasterpiece.Kissing you feels like I'm relapsing and I wish someonetaught me when I was younger that life isn't as simple as ink on paper.You can't turn these bruises into a poem because there is nothingbeautiful here anymore. My English teacher once told me I'm burying my sorrow in all thewrong places.Life is not a

FAQs

What recurring theme connects the poems in this document?

Love is portrayed as consuming and destructive, constantly reshaped into metaphors tied to loss, memory, and bodily experience.

How does the speaker describe poetry and literature in relation to the relationship?

The speaker rejects turning the relationship into poems, novels, or chapters, arguing that love and suffering cannot be reduced to readable text.

What role do family and religion play in the speaker’s outlook?

Family scenes involving drinking and drugs mirror cycles of trauma, while church and moral structures are questioned as the speaker tries to outrun time and conditioning.

Sep 28, 2026

Uploaded by Ophelia