#been needing to do more poems.

[kaftan]

gonna bravely try my hand at napowrimo for the first time since 2019

[saints-who-never-existed]

One thing I always feel with Fitzjames is that he may well have been happier if he hadn't tried so hard to build himself that great gilded life.

He may say otherwise but clearly it's a life that does humiliate him to live in many ways - he feels forever inadequate, forever a fraud and a fake right up until almost the end of his life when he reaches the end of vanity and is finally free. Perhaps an un-gilded life would have suited him better? Perhaps he ought to have forgone much of that emotional turmoil and continued just being the fighter/deadly weapon/balls-to-the-wall adrenaline junkie madman that life and the military saw fit to make him?

I would never in a million years condone his actions or condone violence and colonialism in general. But you can't deny that he was extremely fucking good at it and derived significant pleasure and purpose from being extremely fucking good at it.

Which is all to say that I'm now thinking the same thing about Hodgson...

We know of course that the real Hodgson appeared to be cut from a similar cloth to Fitzjames - distinguishing himself under heavy fire in battle and earning his commission during the Opium Wars. And there's much to indicate that his fictional counterpart shares that backstory right from his E01 dinner-table reminiscing onward.

Hodgson in the show really does often seem to be at his best under bloody, chaotic, and extremely high-stress circumstances in a similar way to Fitzjames. We see it in E05 when he's able to stop, assess the situation, rally the men around him, and lead them back towards danger to no-scope poor Tuunbaq in the arse in the middle of a blizzard. And to some extent we see it right at the end of his life when he's once again ready and willing to charge forward and make that desperate grab for Armitage's keys, even with chaos and death all around him.

Maybe Hodgson wasn't a Captain. Maybe he wasn't 'made of that'. Maybe he was just made to be a weapon and nothing more.

[wonder-worker]

"Alice Perrers was perceived by her contemporaries to be an uncrowned queen and through an analysis of her activities it is clear she was able to utilise the practical benefits of queenship for her own ends. However, by taking on the mantle of queenship Alice fundamentally corrupted the sovereignty and kingship of Edward III. First, by her aggressively political behaviour she became the threat at the heart of the power structure that the gendered constructions of queenship were supposed to remove from a consort. Second, by taking on the practical aspects of queenship she inherently undermined the ideological role of queenship, both by the simple fact that she was a mistress and not a queen, and even more so because of her behaviour. The problems Alice caused and how she was perceived were amplified in contrast to the [...] demeanour of Philippa, who was widely respected and much loved by the people. Just as queens in their exalted position were ‘lightning rods’ for ideas about women and female power, so was Alice because of her proximity to the king."

-Laura Tompkins, The uncrowned queen: Alice Perrers, Edward III and political crisis in fourteenth-century England, 1360-1377 (Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2013)

"Alice's expansion of her power through the office of queenship was problematic for a number of reasons. First, while the queen’s power was legitimised by her marriage to the king and her coronation, Alice’s power was not formalised in this way and consequently would have been regarded as illegitimate. Second, she was not the right type of woman to share in the king’s dignity. She was not noble, she was not chaste and she was not virtuous. Instead, she was a low-born London widow and a businesswoman. Consequently, we find Alice being discussed in the language and stereotypes of queenship, but in a rather negative light. For example, while queens are routinely described as noble, beautiful and virtuous regardless of what they actually looked like, Walsingham is quick to emphasise that Alice was of low birth, and that, almost implied as a consequence, she ‘was not attractive or beautiful’. While we do not know what Alice looked like it seems unlikely that Edward III would have taken and kept her as a mistress for so long if she had been physically repellent. Third, and most significantly, not only was Alice an inappropriate mistress exercising illegitimate power, but she also broke all of the gendered rules that queenship was constructed around, inverting the ideal form of queenship to her advantage."

[crossbackpoke-check]

Why I Am Not Coming In To Work Today [abridged], Jess Zimmerman

part one | part two

[poems-from-around-the-world]

counting posts in the queue right now, I have collected poems from roughly 60 different countries already

[vulpinesaint]

good news everybody i’m writing poetry again :D

[skrunksthatwunk]

physically incapable of taking notes in a way that doesn't make a 6 hour reading out of a 2 hour reading

[ereborne]

Song of the Day: June 7

"STFU!" by Rina Sawayama

[thethingything]

"why do I feel so weird and awful" says man who already made a post half an hour ago that included the reasons he feels weird and awful

[dailyeca]

sometimes i think that i should be putting him in more complex compositions and dynamic poses and cool outfits and color palettes and pretty rendering and detailed backgrounds and more characters and story-driven comics and personal meaning

and then im like. that's the fucking devil talking. dailyeca is and always was supposed to be a low maintenance blog where i draw an eca a day and this eca can be the most scribbled motherfucker in da world but as long as there's a daily eca then i've succeeded. when i have time to add cool shit i can absolutely do that but even if he's just a sketched up bust shot at 11:59, i'm doing enough because that's just dailyeca babey.

[mineral-poetry]

THE WORLD MOVES ON

Protest. An interesting form of community. A form where the voices of the few are projected by the voices of the many.  Amplified louder, and louder, and louder, until the change they are screaming for comes to fruition. Or until the world moves on. Until something newer is printed out and placed in front of the news anchor in a script they have no choice but to follow. Until something more devastating happens. Or, let me rephrase. Until something more profitable happens.

The voices of the few may continue crying out for the change that everyone seemed to be so invested in mere moments ago, but without the voices of the many to amplify them, the voices of the few become far too easy to ignore. 

Object permanence is a concept that many learn as they mature.  The notion that something still exists even when we are not directly perceiving it is considered exceedingly common knowledge. 

Your house doesn't disappear when you are not inside it. A glass still exists if a jug is placed in front of it. The sun does not go out when you close the blinds.  Just because something is suddenly out of view, doesn't mean that thing then ceases to exist.

So why then do matters that were being so loudly protested mere moments ago seem to vanish the moment the news stations move on?

Why then do we pretend that the problems disappear the second something new is on the news anchors script?

If we know with utter certainty that the glass does not disappear when the jug is placed in front, then how come we seem to believe that an issue vanishes the instant there is a new one to commercialise ?

Problems do not disappear when we close our eyes. Just as the sun doesn't disappear when the blinds are drawn. 

The voices of the few, once amplified by many, are slowly becoming quieter, as the many choose a new few to raise up. The same hands that once tenderly laid a megaphone into the palms of the few now seek to pry it from their grasp, instead opting to offer the gift of voice to a new protest. 

But who decides who holds the megaphone?  Who selects one group out of the countless in strife at any given time? What devine figure decides what problem is worthy of being amplified by the voices of millions who seek to make whatever difference they're told is correct? 

The truth is that there is no one person.

We as a collective mind move on from one problem to the next with almost horrifying synchronisation.  Leaving each one behind once there’s a new one, whether or not the change we sought was actually implemented, and if the change actually ended up making a significant difference. It almost never does. Even if change is made there are always new problems.  There is always more to fight for.

But fighting becomes a chore as our attention spans grown shorter, And acting purely in your own self interest becomes the newest trend.  And suddenly making a difference isn’t just about making a difference anymore. 

Then slowly people begin bringing cameras to protests. They begin taking selfies with posters, They vlog themselves marching, And they post the videos for the world to see. They announce what protests they’ll be at next and it almost sounds like they’re announcing a meet and greet.  They change their bios, add flags for places they’ve never been, and call it support.

And all this would be fine, wonderful even.

If at the end of every video, and in the caption of every post, there was not a simple phrase that throws the sincerity of everything they have done into question.

“Like and follow!”

But it gets the word out I guess. 

Or it will for a while.

At least until the world moves on.

[boy-cow]

Safe

I burrow down into her soft, deep sand,

Housed like pipi, in the cool dark of her.

In her grainy fingers, I am worn smooth.

She slips me from her palms, a new creature,

Wet and naked, glistening like a pearl.

My body staples the sea to the shore.

[heartoflesh]

I want out of this pain... I want out of this mental torture that suppresses my mind. I've wanted to die. How do you medically induce amnesia?

The only thing worth going through this pain is the gain of heaven some day.

[crossbackpoke-check]

Substance, Shadow, and Spirit [remixed, abridged] by Tao Yuanming

[tittysuckersworld]

THE PEOPLES LIKE MINE ARTTTTT AAAAAAA

[izzy-b-hands]

First notif i see after getting out of the shower i forced myself to take:

Button's (the poetry group, not the pirate lol. tho i would happily be a part of his poetry group too) chapbook contest opens up in November

do i dare dream and try to put together another chapbook again