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“The universe is an event, not a place. Don’t seek to own. Witness.”

― Jarod K. Anderson, The Haunted Forest Trilogy

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oh hey @cryptonature you got an admirer!

An ant crosses your carpet. A spider weaves a pattern older than mammals beneath your stairs. Just nod, breathe, and think, ‘Good. It’s all still here. The forest, the mountains, the desert. At home in my home.’ The sterile white box is the stranger. Not the ant. Not the spider.

Jarod K. Anderson, Field Guide to the Haunted Forest

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Vultures are holy creatures.

Tending the dead.

Bowing low.

Bared head.

Whispers to cold flesh,

“Your old name is not your king.

I rename you ‘Everything.’”

[The poem "Clergy" originally published in the collection Love Notes from the Hollow Tree by Jarod K. Anderson]

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I wonder how many cycles of forgetting and then remembering I like breakfast cereals I’ll live to see.

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The first bird-ancestor to achieve flight

was just super serious about applauding

and it got out of hand.

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Monster

There is a monster that lives in my head

She throbs and stabs through vessels and capillaries

Teethed and armed in angered nerves

She pulls my life away in poisoned pulses

She pulls my loves away in wasted hours

She pulls my fun away in creeping threat

Though she is cowed by capsule sedation,

she is never vanquished.

The doctor will see me in five days

I'm afraid they'll tell me the monster was never real

I'm afraid they'll tell me the monster is too real

Above all, I'm afraid that this is a monster

that I must simply make a home for

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‘While bats can only sense the outer shapes and textures of their targets, dolphins can peer inside theirs. If a dolphin echolocates on you, it will perceive your lungs and your skeleton. It can likely sense shrapnel in war veterans and fetuses in pregnant women. It can pick out the air-filled swim bladders that allow fish, their main prey, to control their buoyancy.

It can almost certainly tell different species apart based on the shape of those air bladders. And it can tell if a fish has something weird inside it, like a metal hook. In Hawaii, false killer whales often pluck tuna off fishing lines, and “they’ll know where the hook is inside that fish,” Aude Pacini, who studies these animals, tells me. “They can ‘see’ things that you and I would never consider unless we had an X-ray machine or an MRI scanner.”

This penetrating perception is so unusual that scientists have barely begun to consider its implications. The beaked whales, for example, are odontocetes that look dolphin-esque on the outside—but on the inside, their skulls bear a strange assortment of crests, ridges, and bumps, many of which are only found in males.

Pavel Gol’din has suggested that these structures might be the equivalent of deer antlers—showy ornaments that are used to attract mates. Such ornaments would normally protrude from the body in a visible and conspicuous way, but that’s unnecessary for animals that are living medical scanners.’

-Ed Yong, An Immense World

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also a poem from the new, unreleased collection. very possibly my own all-time favourite.

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the start of a comic i was making in 2023 about a mosquitos point of view

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do you guys think jesus, the son of a carpenter, smelt the wood of the cross & temporarily thought of home

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When the human known to us as Christ arrived in the underworld, gods and shades alike were horrified. It was always a big deal when demigods arrived in the underworld, but this one had died so brutally, a young man, not even old enough to grow a beard, tourtued to death at the will of his own divine parentage, the blood dripping from his shade's hands.

The high gods of the underworld brought him up to their tower to figure out what happened. Christ had recoiled from them at first, thinking they were Devils, but had to take Anubis's hand to ascend the tower's steps, as his legs were badly wounded. The gods of the dead looked at him with both sympathy and horror, it was the first time a he had seen a god look at him with either of those emotions.

Hades swore that this was his brother's doing, but even then it crossed a new line. The description of a god impregnating a young girl in Bethlehem fit what Hades knew of Zeus, but to harm his own son in such a way, as part of a ploy to try to gain all of Rome for him alone, had proven his brother's reign growing darker. Still, he took mercy on the young man, promising him at least three days safety in the underworld without his father trying to claim him again. Hades wondered if the poor girl knew when she held her child that he was born to suffer and die, just as the mothers of great heros knew their destiny. Hades hoped Chrsit would have a chance to stay longer, his wife would return in the fall, and he had the same kind eyes as her, she would probably like to know him.

Hel came to comfort Christ once he had a chance to rest. She helped tend his wounds, and pet his head, and for the first time christ was held by a divinity that didn't expect anything from him. And she told him stories of her father to cheer him up after meeting with such a horrible fate. And she told him that no father should ever do such a thing as what his father had done to his child, that if she had known in time she would have saved him. And she let him be comforted as a human, instead of being a lord of all humanity. And for a momment he didn't have to be the son of god who felt alone while bleeding and dying, but the son of the carpenter Joseph who had been reminded of home when he felt the wood of the cross.

He wasn't allowed to stay, his father wanted him back, back to be the bleeding prince of a new and lonely kingdom. And the underworld wept for him, not because the underworld was deprived of Christ, but because Christ was deprived of the underworld.

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Mother Whale's Funeral

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thinking again about vampirism as disability

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godddd im back on my bullshit thinking about whalefalls again

specifically the whole speciation/evolutionary stepping stone thing where they allow certain species to move, adapt, and disperse in new environments through the resources that they create simply by dying. Literally hundreds of species take advantage of one when it happens. So many species are fundamentally altered by a resource oasis hundreds of times more effective than marine snow.

fuckkk all im thinking about is shit like. one body. one death. yet a body that, depending on certain conditions, could take up to a CENTURY to be fully returned to the entropy it came from.

That shit can be considered an actual fuckin. Biome. a whole biome in a single creature.

Imagine you, a single cell or near single cell microorganism being the latest in a generational line that spans back so far that your line has evolved and speciated from its origin point before the whale fell.

Imagine you, with a lifespan of days or weeks living in rotting flesh that will presumably take up to a full century to fully consume

Imagine you, your entire bloodline, your whole world living off one body. Alive off of corpse-fat and marrow, consuming your god as it transforms you into something unrecognizable

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the vulture.

a comic about cycles.

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creative notes:

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i hate it when i cant even write a poem about something because its too obvious. like in the airbnb i was at i guess it used to be a kids room cause you could see the imprint of one little glow in the dark star that had been missed and painted over in landlord white. like that's a poem already what's the point