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[blaizard]

July in the woods with a wood thrush singing.

[blaizard]

Живой огонь. Illustrated by Mikhail Romadin. 1985.

[blaizard]

100 degrees in July We drag the mattress into the living room Focus the AC and two fans on it like a lens, Make love close to the ground. Routine cracked like an egg Against this rearranging Makes us silly and happy, Blessed as birds are blessed To be crafting a home and a life together, The cat stretched across the kitchen table in the dark Languid as a meal

[blaizard]

Another from this morning. I took these for you because I figure that’s why I get these gifts—to share.

[blaizard]

Air thick and hot Smelling of sweet clover and burnt rubber From the station the train passes as a dream or a grandfather I cross some threshold into the meat of the day Thinking of you at the airport, my life, How full it is, I feel the satisfaction of a monk And could die unfinished but happy now On this Monday morning, if fate said go

[blaizard]

*cricket sounds*

[blaizard]

actually did make the stickers into magnets for my partner and i so second that! :) good creatures to greet you in the kitchen

If you ever make and sell magnets of your art, I will likely of apeshit and buy every one and have the most beautiful fridge in the land!!!

Regardless, thank you so much for making and sharing your art!!! It's beautiful and inspiring and makes me feel a lot of things

Good fucking yard 💕

oohoho I will think about that for one of these shop updates 👀

[blaizard]

praise to all the trite dumb tasks that hold the day that bind and track the sun in its coming and going that keep the stars and moon in their common course: the soap and suds in the silver sink, the press of jam, the boil of water and bone, the slide of drawers in and out of love, the rattle and clack of track and train and car, to work, to school, to home, to hearth, the overdue bills and groans and crying through walls, the shushing of dogs, the bedtime kiss, the rubbing thumb, the breath of life in pipes and straw and song and all the little motors of our love, ticking on, and on

[blaizard]

Going through old belongings in my room, thinking about moving, gettin emotional with the recycling and the little doodads and thingamabobbers your family and friends get you but that you’ll never use but that are pieces of love still and they’re hard to toss Letting go, keeping some, putting on Andrew Bird’s ‘Echolocations’ and just breathing in the cool spring night air

[blaizard]

breathing in icicle air, taking stock, recommiting to kindness and purposefulness, seeing the road of my life

[blaizard]

Surprised By Joy Explode! Celebrate! Shrapnel of joy! 10,000 eastern fire newts burst from their burrow like confetti. In 62 degrees I get a haircut, then sit naked at my desk before the window gulping down air. What a pleasure it is to be in a city, and see all the people, and imagine their lives, I said yesterday, walking between canyons of light and litigation, ancient stone and glass and steel and buttresses of knowledge flung across everything. Last night I sat on my bed and cried as I read old correspondence, jots of memory like places you have been kissed, and I could not believe how beautiful and full the world is, for all the salt, and I miss you and that's alright. In the shower today I realized in a flash, blowing and huffing like an athletic walrus, the bullshittiness of original sin, and that we are all born good, good, good and filled my heart with bombastic, slashing delight like a major's lance or a marching band of angels. Bless the world I say, god or none, you or none, bless the mundane, sacred world and its quivering jowls of life!

[blaizard]

Damn 2015 was such a year of poems for me As were 2017 and 2018, with Philly Lit Soc. Sweet gratitude to all motivators and friends of poems in this chili's tonight

[blaizard]

Try to Praise the Mutilated World

by Adam Zagajewski

Try to praise the mutilated world. Remember June’s long days, and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew. The nettles that methodically overgrow the abandoned homesteads of exiles. You must praise the mutilated world. You watched the stylish yachts and ships; one of them had a long trip ahead of it, while salty oblivion awaited others. You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere, you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully. You should praise the mutilated world. Remember the moments when we were together in a white room and the curtain fluttered. Return in thought to the concert where music flared. You gathered acorns in the park in autumn and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars. Praise the mutilated world and the grey feather a thrush lost, and the gentle light that strays and vanishes and returns.

[blaizard]

You know I worry a lot about living a good life

[blaizard]

Woo someone was angsty at 2 am lol

Lately ive been afraid Im forgetting myself. My greatest fear is that i will forget my life, who ive been, what ive done. I stretch back and try to find the milestones of the past few years. When i get this feeling i scroll back years through photos on facebook and my phone. I am grateful for that documentation, that prosthetic memory i use like a man in a dark room feeling the walls. It was like that, yes, i remember, it was like that. And remembering the goodness and the fullness, the strangeness and the mistakes and the melancholy, all leaves me with perspective and i crave it so badly, my place in things, a sense of the arc of my life. And its all ok

[blaizard]

Lately ive been afraid Im forgetting myself. My greatest fear is that i will forget my life, who ive been, what ive done. I stretch back and try to find the milestones of the past few years. When i get this feeling i scroll back years through photos on facebook and my phone. I am grateful for that documentation, that prosthetic memory i use like a man in a dark room feeling the walls. It was like that, yes, i remember, it was like that. And remembering the goodness and the fullness, the strangeness and the mistakes and the melancholy, all leaves me with perspective and i crave it so badly, my place in things, a sense of the arc of my life. And its all ok

[blaizard]

The Village Where No Men are Born

In the village where no men are born the women gather their shawls, around their feet they strap their leather sandals. In single file they walk out of the town and down the hill to the marsh.

They do not go with pomp, no perfume or jewelry is worn, but each holds a kernel of gravity in her hand, the weight that comes with an ancient chore settled like a stone on their shoulders.

The young women laugh and jostle, the first-timers joke until the mists of the morning burn away and the earth lies open like an eye. In the pools and mud they dip with strong arms up to the elbow, by the banks of the pools they clamp their quarry in a vice like the jaw of a horse.

Squalid and dull as stones the frogs sit, blinking into dark eyes with gold eyes, their legs folded into their bellies, like sickness in a body. Through the slime and dirt she feels the fluttering heart.

With a firm resolution they kiss each one on the head or slippery back, stand away as the forms fray and swell into men, lying curled into themselves, muddy souls, swallowing air like fish.

Around their shoulders they wrap robes, in robes of wool they wrap them, and lead them home like children, blinking into the sun.

From the pack she picks him, strong of limb, clumsy reach. Into her home she takes him and teaches him thought and fire, how to pray and cook. When he says his first word she smiles.

In their bed they move like dancers. He has learned grace and timing. But sometimes, holding him, she feels it: skin like rubber, webbed toes, the muscle coiled like a root, the golden eye. --------------------------------------------------------------------- I don’t know quite what this one is about? It started fantastical or fabulist, as a “what if?” fairy tale, imagining what a society would be like that reproduced not through sex but through transformation. And that led me to the gender roles in these princess and frog fairy tales, or that would be in that kind of society, and it became vaguely moral, critical, on those grounds. It’s about sex maybe? How women are expected to perform, how spiritually and emotionally gross men can be. It unintentionally seems to put the onus on humanizing/educating/making men into emotionally literate creatures on the women in the poem and that I don’t intend as a larger statement at all, just how the narrative of the poem unfolded. And then at the end, I think there’s a certain fear the woman has when she feels the shape of the frog and the swamp still in the man, the fear perhaps of some sort of emotional reversion, latent violence or threat, domestic violence. Don’t really know, sort of just trying to talk with myself about it. Definitely has sort of the feel of a psalm (the chiastic structure of “Around their shoulders they wrap robes, / in robes of wool they wrap them,”)  or Ancient Greek imagery and simplicity and directness, cuz I was reading Sappho. And as always Calvino and Le Guin, her exploration of alternate sexual and gendered realities in particular as if they were real and breathing, sneak some influence in I think.