“Resources for writing realistic injuries” no. I want to beat my characters to shit and I don’t care where the blood they’re coughing up is coming from. Like in anime.
random bitter aspiring authors on "writing advice" blogs: Don't make your main characters super special mary sues. don't make them better than other people or more interesting. your main characters should be boring average guys with the personalities of wood pulp
the Epic of Gilgamesh: Gilgamesh was objectively the best man ever. He was the hottest, sexiest, most gorgeous hunk of pure manly awesomeness that ever lived and he used a sword that weighed 120 pounds.
On top of the Yankees field cat there was a praying mantis on top of the nationals players hat tonight. Huge night in baseball
I accidentally deleted the ask, but anon basically said “do you have any more florist anecdotes?” And YOU BET I DO!!
-
So one day this girl walks in, wet rag to her face, and rushes over to me, phone in hand. “HAVE YOU HEARD OF THIS….eey-low veer-uh plant??”
I had. As we’re headed to the succulents, the story comes out. She’s heard that aloe vera is good for soothing pain and….she leans close, super embarrassed, and whispers that she just went and got her mustache waxed off, and….she shows me her lip. Huge, swollen, little red bumps. She’s tried to cover it with makeup, and that’s made it worse. She’s getting teary, because she’s scared, but she’s lucky because she’s talking to me!!
We talk about a lot of stuff, skin care, hair removal, I won’t bore y’all since it’s not flowers, but I was able to give her some advice on it, and I’m thinking “okay she might not need a plant, but whatever” but she’s DETERMINED TO COMPLETE HER MISSION.
We get to the succulents, and I give her my whole aloe vera spiel (I love these plants!! My mom has a huge one that’s almost 25 years old!!) and the girl nods very very seriously, and buys one.
Before she leaves, she comes over to me, dead ass serious and informs me that this plant is her “super buddy” now, and she’s named him Ralph.
-
In my previous post I mentioned a nervous husband with his wife on their first Valentine’s Day. Here’s that story:
So the guy, for a mental image: mid-30s black man, very well dressed in a nice work suit, leather laptop bag. Normally I’m MILDLY wary of v well dressed men, because a lot of them are uh…Difficult.
This wasn’t one of them! He was super nervous, looking through all the mason jar arrangements Very Seriously. He looked super focused and was having trouble picking through them, so I went over to help.
This nice man has four ladies to get flowers for. His wife, and their three daughters. He wanted to get mason jars for the girls (all under ten) and he was hoping to find them in their favorite colors.
I realized what he was doing, which was trying to find jars with predominantly pink, red, and purple themes. And since it wasn’t super busy, I just smiled and told him we could rearrange the jars in the color themes.
He was so BLOWN AWAY. I think he wanted to cry when I busted out the ribbons and made big bows for each jar! (Appropriately colored!!) (also while I was scavenging for flowers, he whipped out his phone and showed me some of their pictures. They’re so cute!! These girls are his princesses, for sure.)
So now His Wife. We were already on a roll, so once his jars were ready we started patrolling for The Perfect Bouquet. And as it happens once you start talking about personal stuff, his story came out!
So the girls are from Wife’s previous marriage. He married her last year, and he really wants to show them that he Really Loves Them. Like, these girls are His GIRLS. His phone still has their entire wedding album!! He shows me her bouquet, and he wants to get flowers that are like the bouquet, but MORE.
So we have the choices down to three big bouquets. He legit stands there for a solid FORTY FIVE MINUTES, just comparing and thinking about it. (I left him to it, obv.)
He then comes up, very serious, and asks what it would cost to combine the two bouquets he’s picked. He’s also picked out a vase and a card, and some chocolate.
I quoted the price (Not Cheap) and he just nods, dead serious, and walks away and pays for it. Like up front. And I’m like, well shit, this needs to be the most amazing thing I’ve done. So I clear the counter, because this is a man on a mission, and we put those flowers together into a MASTERPIECE.
It’s hard to explain size, but these flowers were big enough to hide behind!! I got him a nice box and we carefully packaged this sucker for safe transport in his tiny sports car (the jars for his girls all fit in the drink holders, which was hilarious for reasons I can’t explain. Also hilarious is that he had to manually take the top off of the convertible to fit the flowers and was totally willing to drive home IN THE COLD with it down if he had to, luckily he didn’t)
I sent him on His Odyssey. He was SO HAPPY, and I was so happy because I love good experiences that have triple digit sales, and he was so patient and nice!! Love is real.
(He came back with his friends about three hours later, and they got nice flowers as well! They were all calling me Miss Hexalene by the end, and their good moods infected every other customer in the store, which is the best infection we get in flu season)
-
One of my favorite customers is this nice old lesbian who comes in and has one of our potted orchids in hand, big smirk on her face.
“My wife hates roses, so I’m getting her thi—“ she breaks off and her eyes go HUGE.
So she’s carrying this normal orchid, about a foot and a half tall, purple, v cute. She has just spotted our cymbidium orchids behind me, which GOOGLE THESE PUPPIES!! Ours came in, they’re THREE FEET TALL without the pot. Half of the plant is bloomed into these big beautiful brown/orange flowers, and the other half is still growing. They’re massive and I love them.
So this old lesbian (she’s about 60, cute boycut with all white hair, nice mom jeans and one of those balloony pico shirts) very deliberately sets her Lesser Orchid down, and points to the cymbidium orchids. “THAT. I need that.”
She’s got the absolute best shit-eating grin on her face, btw. She can’t stop laughing. She’s even crying with laughter a bit and while we’re strapping These Beasts (SHE BOUGHT FOUR OF THEM??) into her truck, she tells me about how her wife hates roses because she got a thorn tip stuck in her hand permanently as a kid. So every Valentine’s Day she goes on a hunt for the weirdest flower/most out of season flower she can find. These orchids are the best find she’s had since the 80s, when she brought home a massive Silver Vase Plant that’s still alive 30 years later.
-
So I’m gonna stop with these three before I obliterate everyone’s dashes!! 8) thank you for the ask!!
Just thinking about their tiny sleeping nook and Grogu’s lil hammock 😭
i’m thinking tonight about masterpieces. michelangelo looked at the sixtine chapel and saw; nothing to preserve. virgil wanted his aenid burned and forgotten; only to be saved at the behest of an emperor who thought it flattery. kafka instructed his friend to burn everything he’d ever written - too personal was it, too unfinished.
they were ignored.
instead, their work was taken and held and published and thrown to be gawked at. instead, an emperor, a pope, a friend, took from within the cavities of them their choices; their art.
tumblr rolls out post+. twitter rolls out tip jars. youtube takes half of what creators earn. on social media, there is a ko-fi or a patreon and a polished face in every bio. i show my poems to my mother and she asks if I will publish them before she says anything else. emily dickinson instructed her sister to burn her poetry.
her sister did not listen.
we are a community, says tumblr, we should give back to creators. my last poem had 50 notes. six of those were reblogs that weren’t mine. i lie in bed at 2am and stare at my bright phone screen and the way netflix’s library grows thinner and thinner. the first ad on tumblr that i can reblog is for amazon. amazon takes more than half of what authors earn.
kafka’s friend took barely finished work and hammered it into structure. he is the only reason we know of him.
my father wrote a book and a play when I was barely big enough to reach his knees. when i try to talk to him about writing, he shrugs.
no one wanted to publish it, he says. so i don’t write anymore.
i am filled with poems I have never published, books I haven’t written. There are little snippets of them scattered throughout my life. I link to my ko-fi on my tumblr.
-
asked capitalism of the artist: what is art, if not for consumption? who does art benefit, if it is not consumed? why create at all if you do not market it? who are you, frothing at the mouth about someone publishing someone else’s poems? who are you to hate your magnum opus? what is art, if not in relation to its reception? if no one sees it, how is it art?
said the artist, baring their teeth: it’s mine.
“I am aware that this request is fundamentally selfish. I can offer no justification for it, no argument in its favor. It is simply the outcome I desire to see the most.”
HEYhowdy, so,
lacking context right now, but I’ve been getting intrigue on this Gordon design but haven’t shared him yet just bc I have no idea how to introduce him :’]
I keep drawing him too much tho so here he finally is (and others bc im hopeless dsfkjhsfd)
guys. guys. oh my fuckin god guys
there’s a full version
The best lines of @fragiledewdrop / @versesforthedew
Don’t hide from humanity the most human part of yourself.
Don’t you have feelings? Feelings are but whispers of stars.
A body so cold it unfolds in Siberian winter.
Trembling I light up with dusk: with a sunset for a heart.
Bringing flowers to the graves I dug within myself.
How many times have I said I cannot when I could, although bruised and bleeding?
I am done seeking acceptance and forgiveness for sins that are not sins from spiteful children who hate things that fly.
They just think I’m the mad girl that plays with flowers in Autumn and swims in the sea in December and sings strange screeching songs to the moon and dances in the cold rain until her hair is soaked.
I have reached that point beyond pain and joy where everything is grey, nothing hurts anymore, I am numbed by the ice of interplanetary abyssess. How can a measly eruption hurt me? I persist.
I will make love to the flames.
The real marvel is that there should be such a thing as YOU.
The moment I touched you became the Song of Songs
How strange it is that you think I would drown in the depths in which I bathe daily.
Here I am, torn between apathy and the faraway echoes of yearning.
I travelled from horizon to horizon until east of the sun a woman with the dawn for a cape reached her hand out to me and said my name..
I am nothing but a shivering body: my soul has fled to realms unknown to humankind. It has gone where the red of corals bleeds away leaving marble-white skeletons behind. They look beautiful, don’t they? Until they look as dead as they are.
Without feet I run, and with no wings I fly. Without faith I pray, and with no wit I am wry.
My eyes shut against the noise and dig inside until they find fossils of colours bright that explode behind my eyelids.
Am I not enough? A soft thing that bruises too easily, a sharp thing that cuts too often, a wild thing that can’t be tamed, that can’t be loved?
I am Atlas’s rage when, racked by the weight on his shoulders, he tries with all his might to cast the earth aside into the whirlpool of galaxies and darkness. I am his futile spasms that rend continents in two and bring down the skies and kill men like flies until he bows his head under the burden and whimpers in defeat.
You may slit the rabbit’s veins, but by lightning and thunder, never lay hand on a living being just to tear the world asunder.
After all nothing is darker than the body of a seraph lit from behind by a million dawning suns.
I swim in endless seas and in the desert cry. I dig a home in stone and in the air I fly. I cry all of my tears, and my laughs reach the sky.
I am the scream of thunder that leaves the mouth of the air after lightning’s lacerating lashes. I am am the helpless fall of rainy tears. I am the clouds that mask the wound.
I see a Sulphur Moon hanging over my head, a dragon’s egg that will hatch in fire only.
I am a fir tree with needles sharper than daggers, yet I still breathe heady perfume that makes fairies drunk.
And for my art all this I’ve to go through, for rhymes some madness I must dip into, for this I bade my sanity adieu.
Yellow flowers are a treat for fairies who sip dew from their golden chalices.
I would like to paint my walls, the colour of an elf queen’s halls, the colour of the smell of cut grass, the colour of things you hope will come to pass.
My dreams are shards I can’t glue back together
I flew too high, fell too hard, I hope I will wake, and the waves within me sing “you are lost, girl, you are lost”
I do not stumble blindly on and on just because I found myself here, I did not wait for a hero to save me, did not cry like an orphan might when realizing we are each of us alone in the world
Remember: hope lives in outstretched hands.
Toil and rest will both count as my leisure. Pain and bliss are both part of my pleasure. Diamonds and dung are equally a treasure.
I am the darkness myself, I lead the dance that lasts forever, although it’s ending soon.
Why wish upon a meteor then you can wish on them?
I found a withered tree and unaware of the meaning of my gestures, I watered it with tears, I sang it to new life…
Even the darkest clouds cried under lightning’s lacerating lashes, again and again without pause.I am a pale sunset.
White garments snatched by branch and thorn, Till naked I entered a glade and barefoot on the midnight dew I danced a wild dance to the moon, then I collapsed on the wet grass and slept with cobwebs as a sheet.
They talked of God and I just laughed saying that we are but specks of dust and only sweet and cruel Nature Is the mistress of this Earth.
I want to build a shield around you so that evil words may never touch you.
I spilled from a celestial chalice.
You think Hell is screams and fire, but it’s freezing silence and stillness.
I am damned, and saved; my virtue married vice.
I thought the angry comets were tears of the gods, that the universe was cracking down the middle.
When I take the highway to the stars, when I float in cold and the fires are far, when I touch the moon with my fingertips, when I unravel the secrets of every eclipse, when I go, do not forget me.
A black cobweb of scars where my heart should be.
Study black holes and the space between galaxies and the songs of the broken-hearted.
I am naked and writhing, reborn at the core of a star.
I was flying. A thousand butterflies were carrying me. I recognized the one I saved once, as a child, from drowning in a puddle, and named Moses. Maybe Moses was saving me too. Maybe I was drowning in the half frozen lake after all.
Even light is harsh enough to bruise you, even night is bright enough to blind you.
Dark dark remembrance: a faded image, a stark white feeling and then the sea again.
The frost has been seeping inside my blood for a while now. I am more icicle than woman, yet still more human than I’d like to be.
A weight drops off my shoulders and only when I stand, trembling and free do I realize I was bearing Atlas’s burden.
A dew-drop hanging for dear life to the point of a blade of glass, stabbed by the sun, attracted by gravity, knowing I will join the ground in seconds and be gone, I persist.
I love so much I’d give my blades, my petals, my fragrance, I would give all that I am, but only the wind is there to take and take and take until there’s nothing left.
Sappho’s jealousy thunder through my veins.
Because I’ll be too full of the colour of marvel. I’ll have reached a cave of serpentine marble and brushed my hair with a comb of light jade, then braided it with seaweed sweet and slow to fade.
I see the colours of the Aurora Borealis. They are forever reflected in the black mirrors of my eyes, forever burnt on the part of me that never dies, that never dies.
There is a tree with its roots in mist. There is a tree with its roots in dreams. There is a tree that the moonlight kissed on winter nights when its leaves were green, on summer nights when its branches were bare and everything was upside down. Trees like this are magic and rare and wear their nudity like a crown and wear their richness of leaves like nakedness.
One day, a sun came along, so warm and so bright my mouth watered for the first time in centuries.
I turn the night into the inside of an eggshell. And I might be bruised and tender, but when the moments comes, only white-hot flames will be enough to hatch me.
Don’t ever wander off in your daydreams of sea foam, in your forgetful thoughts a shade too light for life, because I need you near me, Flesh and bones and hurt. I need you like the gauze the blood, like the blood a heart.
The happiness all gone, silence remaining, and in the silence crazed atomic whirling, maddened electrons, dizzying protons, positive negative positive negative in a frenzied dance that will shake the foundations of existence.
I murdered the child within me and she has come back to haunt me, she will haunt me all my lif, in every park, on every swing, moved by the wind, in every patch of blueberries and frosty night.
The flower started playing a melody of murmurs: the trumpet of the daffodil, the harp of blooming nettles, the bells of blackberry bushes, the lullaby of poppies, the low hum of new roses. My favourite? The white flowers on the gate-surrounding hedge. They sung “you are home, you are free” and I believed it then.
You left the nest I made you out of shadows and whispers, out of soft touches and warm silences.
I baked flan with the memory of dreams, I made myself into sweets to forget the sourness, the bitterness, to forget the less pleasant parts of me.
Behold the statue of the bleeding virgin, who was no virgin, and bled only with the moon, yet made herself a sculpture for the desperate, for those who suffer from wounds unseen.
A god bet their love would break in pieces like the waves upon the rocks.
I couldn’t offer forever. I offered fireworks in the night and hints of perfume on a summer evening and jasmine flowers that lasted a season and sandcastles at the edge of dreams.
And the moon seems to tremble like her reflection in a lake, the moon seems about to fall, and we roar, and we roar,
I fly with wings of ash that were once fire, my love is a wild thing that belongs to the black.
Sometimes I think I am the gale, a lightning storm of rage, of pain, the waves running like tumultuous horses towards the end of things, and oh, what a beautiful ending would I make it be.
Stay here, keep learning, keep transforming, keep living in the change that never changes.
I will weave it from the beams of a full moon. I will temper it in the blood of a hundred sunsets. It will be light as a whisper, but stronger than steel.
Keep a hug in store for me: I love you and it is my privilege to know you love me too.
My life cuts into me hour after hour,
Something is lost between us. In the way foam disappears between ocean and sky. In the way heat doesn’t reach freezing snow. In the way falling leaves aren’t either the tree’s nor the ground’s.
I am a cherry tree that doesn’t blossom and so I cannot cry my innocence in spring.
I don’t remember life without you, nor do I want to. I want to keep on going with you voice in my ear telling me of wild adventures and calm afternoons spent baking.
They say only a true love’s kiss wakes princesses from their enchanted sleep: well, my friend, kiss me on the forehead when Queen Night has claimed me for too long.
They do not know that Nature is my spouse, to Nature I have given my hand and all my thoughts and all my body. Nature gave me my wedding dress, nature waited for me under the waves and ‘till death do us part has no meaning when you are reborn every spring.
How many times have I said I love you when ice was already eating away at my heart?
I awaken every day knowing I’m being reborn from my own womb.
And every sad soul that crossed the threshold would be treated like the First Guest. I would cure their maladies, make sweet cream of forgiveness out of the sour curds of guilt, turn the rotting grapes of depression into red wine with notes of melancholy, take the mouldy wheat of old betrayals and bake fragrant loaves of trust. I would suck the poison of regret out of their marrow with my own mouth and spit it three times on the ground cursing it to the deepest pit of hell. I would toss salt behind my shoulder to banish their bad luck, wash the gangrene of lonliness with my ernest tears, bandage the wounds left by cruel words with gauze woven with my hair and apply the balm of prescious silence crystalline with rare attention. I would give them my bones to exchange for those made brittle by too much time spent in darkness, I would replenish with my blood the veins of those who have given and given and never received.
The world is cold and hard and cruel, like snow on naked feet, like the hand that tore hope from your heart and fed it to the flames.
I find no hope, yet here no sorrows bite. I find no strength, yet I have all my might. I find no light, yet stars and moon are bright.
We come into this world hungry, ravenous, insatiable, and daytime is not enough and nighttime is not enough to sate our monstrous appetite.
How many times have I said I am all right when clinging to the edge of precipices?
If I can’t bloody by knuckles on their cheekbones, I’ll bite into their soul’s jugular with my eyes.
I look at the night sky from my window and I think of the expanding universe, of the multiverses beyond it, of infinities within infinities. Compared to the vastness of what’s real and unreal compared to all that’s known to man and all we can’t begin to comprehend what am I? What is humanity? What are our whole history and our world but a single beat of wings of a mayfly close to a flame? It all comes from nothing and it means nothing, so why live at all? Why act, why choose, why suffer and despair when we could just be nothing ourselves and find peace?
Turn to the sun like newborn sunflowers If you are ever lost in the dark. Dig deep inside yourself, and if you find no light Follow a black cat.
And as I run I turn into a wolf, white lighting through the endless blaze, until I reach the fae-blessed place where I will plant my roots and burn without burning.
I move. I am calm, the dress is ready for my grand entrance in this plane of existence.
I have enough strength within me to last a hundred summers in this hell.
Pearls for eyes and raven feathers for curls.
Go out in the rain and dance, go into the sea to swim. Never let go of the chance to bite life’s ripest fig.
Mother, oh mother, remember our bond? Remember me inside of you? You are now inside me too, for I have your eyes your hands your smile…
The bullet or the slow, slow drowning…
In all this pain I cannot lose more than what is lost already….
More than anything, you want wings to fly away, to find places where the sky is as blue as it is in your books.
Each leaf, though never falling, is a tear. Each branch sings the most touching dirge, yet all this grief brings no sadness here, just light melancholy…
I hope in the hue of moss on a stone covered with dew, for fairies a trone.
My heart is a dark red leaf in the belly of a crow, the crow is in a golden egg, the egg in a deep well, the well in a castle with no windows nor doors, the castle on an island in the middle of a lake, the lake on the west side of the Moon.
Say goodbye to the time of the rose: It’s fading petal by petal. Welcome the time of the jasmine: get drunk on its perfume until you are laughing with your eyes closed, until you are diving in the sea under the moon, until your hair is frosted with salt and you can taste the sun on your lips and wine and honey and the kiss of the cherries.
And rose petals are never without swords that draw the blood of those foolish enough to touch.
Keep knocking on the window pane, little one, keep laughing and accusing me, because at least this way I haven’t fully lost you.
There’s a wisdom beyond language In this eternal sharing of marvels: the constant metamorphosis of everything existing, the horror and the hope and the mystery and knowledge, the constant wonder, the constant asking “Why?” that are the core of who we’ve always been.
That falling from the highest precipice will feel like flying if only for a moment.
I’ll put together my hell shattered, love torn heart with tears and whiskey.
The moon is a white tulip and both of them are you.
The wings of butterflies carry my dreams from my sleeping mind to the resting place of the sun.
My eyes are no gems, but they are not afraid to look up.
I couldn’t see the moon. Were the stars enough to go by? I couldn’t remember my constellations, only the myths of how they had ended up there, death and terror and dismay, and maybe I was a constellation myself, watching the earth go round, and that was why nothing at all was still.
The shadow of a running child who almost takes flight in her joy and leaves me behind, who twirls this way and that with such velocity I am about to lose myself, let alone her, I cling to her dancing feet, I refused to be let go, although I am but a child myself and I miss my shadow home. I persist.
A bleak masquerade with no end but the black end.
You know life is like lead on my shoulders. I don’t know how to breathe, the air smoulders and every step is on a carpet of thorns.
I close my eyes to dance in the dark forever.
I lie, and I don’t admit I lie, I never would: I lie. This is my most selfish truth.
When the day around me is but the shadow of a dream. Let me step into my boat and sail towards the moon.
Give me the impossible, and I’ll give you all of myself.
Caravaggio is a caricaturist compared to whoever painted my soul.
I am dark magic and imperfection and unbridled nature.
In a thousand ways in a thousand lifetimes, in a thousand worlds in a thousand incarnations I see the end a breath away. And still I persist.
I am breathless and I am reckless and I dare
Her kiss was like the first drop of purple dye that robs the pristine white silk of its “purity”, but in doing so makes it precious beyond anything worn by a king.
Why does his hand in yours make a sun ignite in your chest?
Let me dress myself in starlight.
A landscape once dreamt that lives through my own body.
And I am steel, yet my soul is spider’s lace. And I am a wanderer, my feet well firm in place. And I am brave, but dangers I won’t face.
Whole gardens will bloom thanks to this curse, whole expanses of dry land turn into meadows, and I don’t care about sorrow and salt when I am surrounded by new roses.
I am the lion’s roar after the tamer’s hundredth blow, I am his claws that try to shred steel, I am the rattle of the cage, I am the tail between his paws and his desperate eyes that were meant to be proud.
As I shake all through the winter through the ice and through the snow, I look at the black crows of Fate and wish the swallows to return.
And suddenly your eyes fill with tears that are not yours. Your mouth curls in foreign laughter. You feel kisses meant for a stranger’s lips.
She dreams she sees her lover’s eye, her lover’s merry laughter, and she goes on collecting shards of her happily ever after.
They are voices of a world where the top is the bottom, where sunlight is freezing, where the snow is too warm, sit down and watch how they always transform.
But I do not beg myself for mercy: my decapitation feels like a kiss.
I couldn’t see the moon, but crescents of blood blossomed on my palms, unwanted stigmata of a pain that was anything but holy, of a sacrifice that still haunted me with the eye of the lamb looking at the silver knife, and I had been holding the knife, and the lamb had been me.
A tempest rebellious plays with my pale body, winds toss me and turn me, amusing themselves..
Here is no rest to be found in love: Love is something sleepless since the day we are born and cry out for it in the middle of the night.
I am a hollow tree that roars during storms, I am an impossible tree that grows above abysses, I am a submarine tree with salt for sap, I am all this and I am more, but I can’t be a pretty flower without thorns, I can’t be your daisy or your iris, I could be your rose, but a black one, one that grows in wilderness near raspberry bushes, one who doesn’t want to be picked.
I dive into the wine coloured sea. I swim, and every stroke brings me closer to your thundering glory.
The dew glimmering on meadows to make fairies drunk.
Are you going to meet me on the spider’s silk thread between madness and sanity? I’ll wait for you there.
Still lost in the violet sea of the day’s last goodbye.
I lived on fallen hopes and on dry leaves, but now the crocuses tickle my dreams
Nature teases us with symmetries, yet chaos makes universes dance, and flowers fly.
Who put a black hole where my heart used to be?
Lying in a field of forget-me-nots looking at the sunset, giving my whole soul to the gentle wind.
So I open the doors of my heart insted, cautiously, just to a few, (It already feels too reckless) and I’ll fashion stitches out of shared laughter, surgical thread out of shared tears, ointments out of seconds, minutes, hours spent listening and being listened too. I have plasters and disinfectant, not a surgical table, and I can’t save your life, but I will care for your scraped knees until you walk again with a smile on your face
Dreams that lost their sparkle near my soul’s antarctic circle where my last hope took flight.
I dive into the night and look between the stars.
Every sunray scarred my eye, every moonbeam drowned me in silver waters of strangled hope.
I sing in the colour of echoes through mountains, of coins left too long in the embrace of a fountain.
Poisoned, mouldy and rotten, weakened by the darkness, hemorrhaging hope.
Let my bleeding heart become hard to withstand life’s pointed shards.
I don’t have the words to convey my suffering, so I scream.
And all I have learned is that I know shadow better than anyone else.
Everything here is a dream, you won’t find anywhere truer than here.
You choose if life is worth the pain it carries on her back, you choose if death is peace’s reign or torture on the rack.
Under the tree is a spring of clear cool water that comes from somewhere deep, divine as some would say, though I don’t think it has father or mother in the heavens. It’s in itself the source of all lives lived, living, to be lived.
Step by step by step you put green where they would say green doesn’t belong, yet you and I both know the world should be a forest.
Without ears I hear, no hands but touch the sky
There was unrest between sea and shore, a frenzied dance of foam, an angry give and take.
But people like me have to fight for dawns. We are sunsets, bloody and burning, the farewell of the day, the first evening star appearing. We are the blackness between constellations and the last purple line left by dusk above the mountain ridge.
I think I am Icarus. I tried too hard to touch the sun, and myth and reality are one and the same in the dream’s misty labyrinth that has no centre nor door.
If you are ever locked in a tower I’ll give you my hair to make a rope and if you have lost all hope, I’ll reinvent it from starlight and willpower.
We are each of us a siren, singing ourselves hoarse to quell our famished soul, then devouring what we desire most, then again singing under sun and under star.
The jingle of shells in my pocket Is the echo of mermaid’s laughter.
When will the day defy the night, when will the flowers bloom again, when will the night be full of crickets that serenade the moon, when will I walk on sunlit roads among the drowsy bells of poppies, among the winking of the daisies, among the newly born green leaves?
One day I will run away to the woods and the thundering cliffs and the night sky under a new moon.
Here I am nothing and forever and no one and everywhere, I am in every crevice, hidden under every bed, held by the bare branches of trees when there’s no moon…
You may be shipwrecked here, but do not fear: you cannot drown in dark dark waves on the wide wide sea of memory.
I entangle words like red thread, one knot after another until I am in a labyrinth, until I am the spider trapped in its web.
Mother, oh mother please don’t ever leave me, the sun is way too strong a guide, the stars alone deceive me
I seek the darkness like a moth seeks the flame:. I don’t care if I will be burned.
I was the strength of the wreck that takes centuries to be consumed, the strength of the lamb that does not close his eyes, the strength of the stars that suffer and make that pain into fire.
My hair fights every comb, poisonous or not, but it dances in the wind and gathers enough leaves to be a living forest.
I dream in the shade of the song of a cricket, hidden in shadow in a dark secret thicket.
I hope in the hue of a timid frog diving into a pond of ripples rebounding.
How do I unlock these memories of memories to put them on paper? I have tried chasing them like the last notes of perfume kissing goodbye to the skin at the end of a long day, but I failed.
A melodious drumming of guttural syllables from a throat that is not yet fully human…
Are…are you Death? Death is my name, reaper of souls What do I have to be thankful for? For eternity you will rest under my black wings. Should I come? Come with me to whispers of stars.
Even in sorrow there is laughter figure skating in their depths.
My future is the maw of a monster, it’s a ship sailing to the edge of the world, and I try to stop it from tumbling, but who am I to fight gravity?
The lightning mauled the sky one scorching claw-mark after another and the world waited with baited breath for the sky to scream in agony, but the thunder would not sound
I see dark eyes, the remnants of a starless night, old wood rich in forest magic, thunderstorms trapped behind sweetness, Eve’s eyes. Hungry eyes. Not beautiful, but starving for every scrap of knowledge under the moon.
I miss the key to decode souls, but I know how to marvel at them.
Spring laughed the frost away and crowned herself with raindrops and let the winds carry her round in a crazy carousel.
I thought my Jerusalem was collapsing into hell, my dark forest had no end in sight.
And I walk naked into the waves towards a mirage of future until the foam crowns me Queen of the abyss.
You know how good I am at getting drunk, and even your sorrow is sweeter to me than the finest of grapes.
How many times have I said I love you when ice was already eating away at my heart?
In this torturous prison I am free of every lie, naked in front of nature, and as the sun goes down I laugh with tears in my eyes.
I banged my hands on the steel wall of your stubborn conviction. My blood on it wasn’t enough to move you against your will.
Never let it be said that I settled for dandelions. Every flower in the world was offered to me, warrior roses, timid violets, dreamy poppies and sighing baby’s breath. I didn’t want a rich bouquet, I wanted the strength to grow through cracks on asphalt.
Your voice makes crickets sing and raspberries ripen and I don’t feel the sting of thorns when picking them with you.
I don’t know if the sky flirts with the ocean or the ocean with the sky, but for sure they dance together. A dance of freedom and open space and hope.
And I cradled my treasure like wild beasts cradle prey.
Tell me, have you shattered yet? Beneath the secrets and the lies, beneath the love that was not love and the love that was, beneath the nightmares and the truth, are you still whole?
For nothing is darker than the centre of light, nothing as light as the deep core of darkness.
I would carve runes of blood on my body to make you understand, I would paint with ochre on cave walls, I would howl at the moon with no restraint.
I am an ant, no, I am a goddess, don’t you see the stardust on my fingertips?
There’s torment deep beneath my skin and violent storms behind my eyes.
How glad am I to be alive, with scars to prove it was a choice.
I am carried by the impetuous river of life.
Dark dark waves of relentless thought, of relentless questioning, you won’t find truth here.
I am the tail-strike of the white whale with a harpoon embedded in her flank. I am her frantic flight with a cloud of blood in her nostrils. I am the fury that sinks ships and tears legs from bodies. I am the exhaustion that settles in and the slow, torturous drowning.
I wear modesty well, and grey submission, bland conformity and empty contentment, all sealed by a perfect fake smile, lips painted a dull red. But underneath the mask is a stallion of fire, passion untamed by the tepid reins of your rules, underneath frailty is strength that breaks chains with a flick of her wrist, underneath my smile are tears and screams and a howling laughter whose home is the wilderness, underneath submission is rebellion sky-shattering, a dagger at the throat of your norms.
With every shiver you think of a flower until you are in a sea of poppies.
In the darkness, orchids kiss me. In the darkness, I become.
The moon’s high in the sky, I can’t escape her eye.
I gave my soul to the night stars.
I dream in the shade of summer sunlight seen through the leaves in fresh shrill delight.
A broken mirror that reflects a thousand eyes, a thousand souls, a thousand impossibilities.
Let my love be set ablaze.
Give me dark orchids to remember ecstasy, give me dark orchids to forget dismay.
To the dreams the breezes brought me from frozen lands beyond the moon.
Skeleton hands grab me through the fog like old roots sprouting from the ground and a voice whispers: “Why did you leave me to die alone?”
Ravens tell your destiny in their flight.
Twelve are the shells in my glass jar that still have the sea in their heart.
It is so hard to stay awake when the weight of planets pulls my eyelids down, when the moths of dusk liss me on the mouth, when the day around me Is but the shadow of a dream.
I wipe a tear more bitter than bloodshed,
Even as prisoner of apathy, as puppet without strings, I won’t till last forsake my dignity, I shall be wretched, sure, but free.
Make way for a wounded creature branded by Hope: no matter what happens next, I will bring its mark to the grave.
Your laughter is sunshine yet I know you know shadow.
Sometimes I think that after death I’ll only sing some more in the way stones and flower sing beyond the graveyard’s gate.
Nothing dawns within me, I am decay, beautiful though it may be.
They chain me with their words, crucify me with their stares, pick me apart like a pinned down mayfly, tearing my wings away with their whispers until I am but a worm under their feet, until I am a curiosity made harmless behind glass.
I smell your sacrifices, and I send my thoughts ss holy smoke from the earth to worlds unknown.
I have seen dawn on a thousand planets. Who dares say I don’t deserve to watch this one?
You see me rigid and cold, tears frozen on my cheeks, lips sewn in a thin line, and you ask me where my heart is.
A tears falls in the middle of the crowd. Forget shame. Doesn’t the sky cry to give the earth new life? Let it fall, and water the barren asphalt with secret feelings: improbable flowers will bloom.
The moon drips honey on my head. I heard of nights it drips hemlock too, of flowers that drink the poison and are dead within mere seconds, sent into a world of light far darker than this one, a world of darkness where light forever shines.
Can a landscape correspond to my deepest feelings or it is I who correspond to what my eyes perceive?
And I know with certainty for Nature I would be a willing Daphne without Apollo to chase me.
Arise, arise, from your wintry beds, spring has come! Don’t you want to get drunk on fairy wine and make love under the moon on every April night?
I put on a cloak of shadow to shield me from the gazes of the world.
The first laugh of a child, the last sunset of an old man.
To be naked need and naked joy to live, to be right here. Something more than a kiss imprints farewell on my mouth, someone more than person lights a single fragile match and I am alone in a room without a single flower. I am alone in a room as my breaths catch out of exhaustion.
To catch the train that leads to tomorrow.
Oh, but angels making nests for their human partner when they’re feeling amorous. Nests of the finest silk blankets, their own feathers, luxurious pillows and satin sheets. Angels wearing the flashiest, gaudiest garments to catch their human’s eye, polishing armour to within an inch of its life and puffing their chests out whenever they travel together, shooting glares at other angels, inviting a challenge.
Makers getting growly and possessive of their human partner. Showing off their strength to impress them, building immense sculptures in their partner’s image, even building houses for them to prove they can provide a safe, warm place for their human to live. Gigantic, burly makers utterly melting under their human’s gentle touches and feather-light kisses.
Demons positively draping their human partner in expensive jewels and golden finery. Demons spending hours sharpening their horns and claws to scare off other demons who might get too close. Touching their partner at every chance they get to leave their aroma behind, then getting huffy and frustrated with their human when they have a shower and wash the scent off.
part 3 | 2 | 1
edit: part 4
Today I learned that Lockdown is about as tall as Optimus Prime
So that’s something
The intro of Transformers series (1984 - 2020)
glenn dean, landscapes of the west / user @petrichara
st. george and the dragon (1908-9) - briton rivière / the vigil (1884) - john pettie / vanitas still-life (1705) - evert collier / david garrick as richard iii (1745) - william hogarth / micro sff stories tweet
IT’S FINALLY DONE-
What was supposed to be a quick sketchy barely-a-comic became… this lmao.
Anyway, I wanted to do something based on this feral Optimus sketch I did a bit back, and may or may not have thought up a story surrounding it that I may or may not write properly in the future.
Explanation/backstory behind the cut!!
Keep reading
Self-protection spell.
I'm embarrassed of how long this took to make
@hizukkahere wrote an amazing poem about Zukka and I had to make a melody for it. “The boy from the south gave his kiss to the moon And lost her again to the sky The boy from the south gave his heart to the earth And had to forgive her goodbye/ And with nothing to give the sun gave his hand The boy from the south asking why With a laugh like the rain and a dragon behind The sun promised he’d show him to fly”
I kind of imagine if becomes a folk song that people sing in the four nations and most people think it’s a myth or a metaphor but it’s actually about the Fire Lord and his Ambassador husband.
“i am a monument to all your sins” is such a fucking raw line for a villain it’s amazing that it came from halo, a modernish video game, and not some classical text or mythos
Zombie setting where the undead are drawn towards unhygienic scents, so survivors constantly bathe to avoid being eaten.
Zombies are docile when adorned with flowers.
Settlements overgrown with herbs and flora.
Barely any banditry; everyone is focused on farming and gathering.
Different human factions and towns named after flowers like Lilies, Orchids, Roses, etc.
Instead of immediately killing an infected survivor, they’re given special funeral rites - the zombie is covered with flowers to keep them calm, and allowed to walk out from the settlement to join the hordes.
Most of Binks no Sake is just pretty descriptions of sailing an ongoing journey, but the last line stuck out to me. (I looked up the English lyrics, and it looks like they kind of didn’t translate the last bit all that accurately for the sake of making it rhyme?)
It goes: 果てなし あてなし 笑い話/hatenashi, atenashi, waraibanashi.
-nashi as a suffix means ‘without,’ while hate is ‘end’ and ate is ‘aim/purpose’ so hatenashi, atenashi means basically ‘never-ending, aimless,’
But the word that REALLY caught my attention is the last one, waraibanashi. It means ‘funny story.’
Or, to be a bit more literal-
...laugh tale.
Anyone else think that Ultraman King is technically Laiha's grandfather by way of saving her life when she was still an infant? I mean, if Zero is allowed to call Mayu his daughter than it isn't farfetched for him to call Laiha his granddaughter, if for nothing more than because she's the Little Star of Ultraman King, like Mayu is the Little Star of Zero.