basilsart

[basilsart]

Knight and midsummer morning Dare to love, dream, and endure despite everything - happy pride and midsummer

[basilsart]

the thing about being nonbinary is that you really do start to forget that other people have such strict walls around what is and isn’t allowed for genders. i thought we all agreed that we made that up. could you climb out of the cave real quick and feel the sunshine for a minute.

[basilsart]

you belong here

[basilsart]

have you heard the little critics

that crawl through museums or galleries, collections

of the abstract, as if they were meant to read the

sights like words, and they say in every which way

they could possibly look

“rudimentary.

it’s childish and desperate.

crude,

or a cry for help.

i could do this if i wanted to

but thank god i do

not want to.“

and they drive home and look at the spider that

arrived by one way or other upon

their rearview mirror, and

dangles now from

invisible thread,

floating,

with no wings in sight,

hovering there,

a miracle of flight

before their eyes

and grabbing it betwixt thumb and finger they

kill it.

and the next morning the critic wakes

to set their favorite mug

upon the counter.

they do not know

that early-woken sort of

drunken sip of their lips

let the coffee dribble down the side,

and the ring it draws is no perfect

circle but a tendril

of longing that reaches to mark their papers and

their lives that they live by what can be written and

what can’t, or at least

put into more and more words,

and they wipe the stain from granite,

as if it were never there in the first place.

that paper that bears a little mark of a world

(the faintest brown ink on perfect white)

outside its own shape is now unworthy

for reading.

they throw it away.

they print a new one.

I turned to a friend in this museum and said

“did you know that I

once caught a crab

that looked like

you?

I asked where it learnt your face.

it said nothing, but in retrospect

the semblance was tenuous,

yet I tossed it back all the same.

I did not know how

to explain it then, nor could I

possibly now, but

something of you lives on

in the ocean.“

“you get it

or you don’t,”

they offered to me, and

I knew not

who I was speaking to,

though I saw them

reflected in

ten thousand dots that

gave me

a vision of

vermillion fields, and for a moment

I saw the wind

blowing

on a blissful

day of late summer before

the sun sets too low

and the warmth

had all

faded.

“what is beyond

our comprehension

needs no explanation

anyway.“

[basilsart]

I'm redoing Percy's ref sheet (again) with updated camp clothes and combat gear!

[basilsart]

After being released from 104 days of ICE detention for his pro-Palestine activism, Mahmoud Khalil joins his wife, Dr. Noor Abdalla, and their newborn son at Newark Liberty Airport this morning (21 June 2025).

photo via NYT

[basilsart]

Can people from the United States stop making jokes about “WW3 😜”….there are people in Iran evacuating their neighborhoods, places they grew up, and all YOU are experiencing is watching the news and a few TikToks….

You are not at war, you will most likely never see war, and if your “dark humor” is coming at the expense of others then it is not dark humor, you’re just an asshole.

[basilsart]

arvel the swift moodboard

[basilsart]

[basilsart]

native miku be upon ye

[basilsart]

Me when a character starts experiencing an agonizingly, Horrifically, painful transformation :

[basilsart]

I washed this satyr drawing in my pants

[basilsart]

daily affirmations:

i am kind

i am in control of my emotions

it does not bother me when someone is in the kitchen while i was planning to be in there alone

everyone in the house has the right to be in the kitchen

i am kind and in control of my emotions even when someone is in the kitchen while i was planning to be in there alone

[basilsart]

Rest | Inspired by Goodnight Moon 🥣 prints

[basilsart]

this the type of thing make me wiggle my fingers and say “don’t mind if i do” heheh

[basilsart]

The Gay Cowboy Po’boy Blues Manifest

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a poem in living as long as i am living and i don’t remember the difference between what happened to me or the ones i love anymore (as if there was ever a difference in the first place) but know that this is real even when it might or might not be fiction or non.

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I killed a man the first time I said my own name.

I do not know your name, and I will not know your name if you do not tell me. You do not know my name, and you will not know my name unless I tell you. You will call me the wrong name, anyway, because you cannot help yourself, and because you believe that a piece of paper that is destined for flame and smoke and ash has more say in who I am than the very words I say to you now.

What I say to you now is this: my name has never been the same as you might think it should be. The piece of paper was miswritten, anyway, because my mother had just given birth, and could not speak clearly, and the tired nurse could not care less when she misheard it and so misspelled it.

The nurse was tired because she cannot afford to work any less than she does, and because she has not eaten in days, because she cannot afford to. She is well-off, or so the governor says, at least well-off enough that she needs no assistance. The nurse can afford three meals a day, and she provides one each to her three children, whom she is raising alone. She is raising three children alone because her husband was shot by a cop in the streets, because they just didn’t like him, or at least they didn’t like the way he cared about feeding his kids more than he cared for arbitrary little lines called letters and called laws, and which are printed very neatly on a piece of vellum that is worth more than you or I make in a week. The vellum is for display, and you can look at those little lines on it, so cleanly printed, so clearly saying that you deserve to die if you even think about how worthless they really are. And so the nurse is very tired.

And because she is tired, and my mother is tired, and neither of them hear the other, there was a title imposed upon me, which was the nurse’s own designation, as if I were her fourth child. She is not my mother and that was not my name.

My own mother was not happy about this of course, and so she made them fix it, and by that I mean remove the one letter she felt was wrong and replace it with two more, even though the pronunciation of that title that I did not and would not answer to remained the same.

You call me by a name on a piece of paper, with a gap where there is a centimeter of white-out and four strokes of black ink from a cheap, disposable pen that is kept in a cheap, disposable cup on the desk of the the delivery ward of the cheapest hospital that my mother and father could find. If they called me by the wrong name, I at least give them credit for bringing me to the right place. You call me by the name on a piece of a paper I did not see until I already knew who I was. A piece of paper which you will never see, because it lives in a box beneath my bed, like a monster I tried to hide from myself, because I knew I would kill the man whose name was on it as soon as I had the chance.

I never knew that who I am, or at least am considered to be, was as malleable as a lazy erratum as this. I was never told that my name is not a fixed thing, but a matter of miscommunication. Had I known then, I would tell them not to bother to change it, to save the life of a man that does not exist, or who maybe existed when my mother knew him. I would tell them to leave it blank. I know this now.

Mother I am sorry for your dead fiancé. I am sorry that you felt the need to attempt resurrection by invoking the weight of death on an infant’s shoulders. I will not bring him back. I never could. If you see a bit of him in me, and I know you do, because you said he was a good man like you think I am a good man, and you are proud of who I have become — I will kill him twice. I will not die with a dead man’s name inscribed upon my breast.

I am a bad man in more ways than you ever knew.

I will live with the name of love and the name I call myself because I love myself, however. I will use the strength I built against my will, the weight of what or whom I am not, to lift myself up. You made me strong when you made me mortal before I ever knew I was mortal.

I am trans, as in transgressor — transgression. Transgression like I will erase the arbitrary line in the sand that someone felt entitled to encircle me with, as if I should respect them in the same way that I love myself. Transgression as in I will not respect the little lines that form a letter on my driver’s license that you have mistaken for who I am or who I should be. Transgression as in I will tear down the cell that you are desperately trying to build around me. Transgression as in if I cannot tear it down, I will learn to climb, or burrow, or fight tooth and nail against my would-be captor, because I have killed at least one man, and perhaps two, already, and I will do so again if it means I remain free to be — not to be anything in particular, but simply to be. Transgression as in fuck your lines and letters and laws and borders. Your lines mean nothing to one who transgresses them. Transgression as in I will help you escape too, if you ask me my name first.

I know this now: I am more than could ever be put into words, or letters, or sloppy lines written by a tired nurse with bigger problems than whether or not a man would die when she allowed my mother to give birth, and give a name, or two names, to that child that she birthed.

I know this now: the speed at which I have learned to love myself is terrifying to those who do not love me. I was born an outlaw, not because I ever hoped to be so egregiously evil as to be excommunicated from society, but because society did not consider that someone like me could be born, or live to adulthood, or old age, within the framework of their jurisdiction. I am an outlaw because I killed a man that everyone in my childhood knew, and I feel no remorse for that.

I am an outlaw, and I know this now: the rapidity of lawyers and legislators to write about me on a piece of vellum worth more than I make in a week is a betrayal of their fear and desperation — desperation to keep me from knowing who I am. A fear that if I know I am free as a bird, that is, free to be shot down and killed for fun, that I will tell you this, too.

The speed of love (and of introspection and identity, of knowing who I am because I love myself and I love you and maybe you actually love me too) will always outpace the speed of law. They fan the hammer desperately, because they do not want you to know that outlaw means outside the law, and if the law does not contain you, then you are already there. You have been an outlaw from the moment you met yourself and killed the person holding you hostage. You know this now.

Before they ever had a chance to call you criminal, you were an outlaw. You know this in your gut. You have avoided talking to police when or if they greeted you on the streets. You have hesitated to call 911. You have flinched at the sight of every service gun because you know it is waiting there, on their hip, and you felt afraid. You know in another life, or later in this one, you might end up dead in the street because they just don’t like you, or at least they don’t like the way you love more than the way you respect little lines called words called laws.

Do not let them corral you any further. The lasso is a recital for the noose.

I know this now: I am glad they fear me. I am glad to be the “bad man” that terrifies when I ride into town, the freak that lives in the minds of the God-fearing and the law-abiding. I am the flame that laps at the fringes of the vellum and the paper and the white out and the cheap ink.

Vellum does not burn, and so it is chosen for decree — but it will whither, and curl, and become illegible if you only hold it to the flame for long enough. This fire did not start with me and I am not the first outlaw to kill a man or kill a woman or kill anyone, and I will not be the last. The flame burns continually. They could not extinguish it if they wanted to, and they want to, but we will feed the fire when it hungers, because it keeps us warm.

And if nothing else, know this: You keep a man alive when you say aloud for the first time the name he tells you to say. You kill a man when you do not say his name anymore.

[basilsart]

THE ENTIRE WEST IS BEING PUT UP FOR SALE AND I AM BEGGING YOU TO CALL YOUR SENATORS

Trump’s budget bill has many, many things in it, but buried amongst it is the MILLIONS OF ACRES OF PUBLIC LAND FOR SALE.

This is the entirety of the Arizona state forests, the entire Cascades mountain range. Swathes of pristine desert around the national parks in Utah. On the doorstep of Jackson Hole.

THIS BILL IS BIG, BUT IT CAN BE AMENDED AND ABSOLUTELY MUST NOT PASS AS IS please.

If you have ever enjoyed the wilderness, we stand to lose it all forever.

CALLING your senators - NOT JUST IN THE WEST. ALL SENATORS, is CRUCIAL.

Outdoor alliance has a great resource for reaching out.

I don’t have a huge following but please, everywhere I have ever loved, the forests I grew up playing in, the land I got married on, is all at risk and I am begging.