Someone Once Told Me There Is No Demon More Frightening     Than A Good Man     Who Has Gone To War.

The Rotted Man

When I was a child of only three The Rotted man came for me late one night from my open door he slowly crept across the floor he took me by the hand and said I’ll save you from this life of dread we left the house in the early morn and took his carriage of blackened thorn we rode for hours through thick dense fog to a darkened unlit swamp filled bog where top-less trees with hanging moss were shields from the unseen winter frost the thick wet heat from the dense cool air crept up your back and through your hair he took me to his house of bones on a path laid with cobble stones upon his door hung a head of a child with hair of fiery red his hall was bathed in blood red tile the walls were stacks of flesh in piles He told me of his protective view and begged that I should join him too He smiled and through his rotted lips I saw a thousand children’s fingertips He promised me the world would pay and told me that I could stay Then we entered a smaller room and the rotted man gave me a red balloon Then I saw my mom through tinted glass The man with her was talking fast The tears were pouring from her eyes The man then held her while she cried Then the Rotted man did the strangest thing, He sat down with me and began to sing. A soft nice tune that filled my head With puppy dogs and fresh baked bread It was then I notice that the rotted man Was simply old and had a tan, And then my mom burst in the room The feel of warmth, her sweet perfume She hugged me tight and swore to me From here on out, Dad would let us be. No more bruises no more fights, No more screaming in the night, The rotted man had saved our lives, By taking those who beat their wives, And children that cry when they’re dropped, And are beaten senseless until they stop, I thank the Rotted man a lot, And never have I forgot, That the thing I feared, saved my life, They had found my father with a knife, There are real horrors on this earth, Some are subjected to them at birth, We were saved by a man made of rot, I was lucky, but many are not.

by thelirivalley

John Singer Sargent (January 12, 1856 – April 14, 1925) was an American expatriate artist, considered the “leading portrait painter of his generation” for his evocations of Edwardian-era luxury. He created roughly 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors, as well as countless sketches and charcoal drawings. His commissioned works were consistent with the grand manner of portraiture, while his informal studies and landscape paintings displayed a familiarity with Impressionism.

When summer evenings feel like this gif it’s beautiful and it’s worth it

i think we should be talking about the semi-recent advancements in cystic fibrosis treatment like all the time every day. there hasn’t been a drug like this since AZT medications for HIV infection it is truly fucking miraculous and very important

Are fedoras really that bad?

YES YES THEY ARE

truly some people have no genre savviness whatsoever. A girl came back from the dead the other day and fresh out of the grave she laughed and laughed and lay down on the grass nearby to watch the sky, dirt still under her nails. I asked her if she’s sad about anything and she asked me why she should be. I asked her if she’s perhaps worried she’s a shadow of who she used to be and she said that if she is a shadow she is a joyous one, and anyway whoever she was she is her, now, and that’s enough. I inquired about revenge, about unfinished business, about what had filled her with the incessant need to claw her way out from beneath but she just said she’s here to live. I told her about ghosts, about zombies, tried to explain to her how her options lie between horror and tragedy but she just said if those are the stories meant for her then she’ll make another one. I said “isn’t it terribly lonely how in your triumph over death nobody was here to greet you?” and she just looked at me funny and said “what do you mean? The whole world was here, waiting”. Some people, I tell you.

euripides (tr. anne carson) / sade andria zabala / anne carson

Burning Your Boats The Collected Short Stories, Black Venus, Angela Carter / Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery / Unknown / Tell Me No Secrets, Joy Fielding / Stop the World and Get Off, Peggy Toney Horton / Grief, Barbera Crooker / Unknown / A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf / Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery / William Stanley Merwin / Maurice, E. M. Forster / Dear Would be Wife, Gala Mukomolova / Unknown / Anne of Avonlea, L.M. Montgomery / Anvita Bhogadi / Peace Like a River, Leif Enger / Unknown / Unknown / The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Elizabeth George Speare / @honeytuesdy / October, Robert Frost / The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot / Georgia Grace / Alexander Smith / Unknown / Insta: sarahkjp

how many times can you live through the apocalypse?

when you were little there was this beach that was free to go to. you didn't really like it on account of the litter. at one point, a white bag caught around your ankle, and for a moment (fish child), you panicked about jellyfish. on the foam, the red-pink words read thank you, stacked on top of each other, tangled in the kelp.

they have a new program (three thousand american dollars) to send your dead relative to the moon. there is a lot of evidence that our local orbit is becoming ever-more dangerously populated with "micro" satellites - debris in a round miasma becoming a thick web above us. maybe angels cannot hear us through the pollution.

you used to picture deep space like a thick membrane, or a blanket. someone said to you once the universe has no edge and that fucked with you for a long time, trying to picture what shape infinity has. your coworker is writing a short story about ecological collapse, which she is submitting for a little side-money so she can survive the current economical collapse.

the birds haven't gone to sleep this winter. that is probably bad. something that actually freaks you out is the natural temperature of human bodies versus the survival temperature of certain fungi. there is a podcast called s-town, in which a man kills himself over climate anxiety. he was probably meant to seem sort of unhinged. it just seems like it is becoming increasingly clear he was being honest.

space is not empty, we have put our dead into the stars. at some point they will figure out how to put ads into our sleep. you need to pay for the greenlife subscription service to be able to save the world.

there is a lot of ways this poem ends. but you have been wearing the same jeans and shirts since you were, like, 18. it is a hard life, sometimes, watching the entire foundation crack. there was this one moment over the summer, where you were shaking with heat exhaustion and dehydration. you were offered a nestle water bottle.

for three thousand dollars, you can send your ashes into space.

instead, you wash out the peanut butter jar. you put the avocado-toothpick spiked seed ball into water (even though they never grow very far). you borrow what you do not want to buy. you pick up any litter you find. you do not have a lot of control, really. but where you do - if there is one thing you can do, you do it.

something about that. you need to believe that must be true for the rest of humanity. or maybe - you need to believe that to be true, or else there will not be a rest of humanity.