Thanks, Peter.

A wolf with bloody muzzle and two different colored eyes, one blue, one brown

The #‎wolves near our camp. We check them with fire, with nets and with spears. They fear nothing. We keep vigil through the night, yet blood will spill. We are tired, and the threat is unrelenting. It has always been so, but there is never a time when we feel innured to them. #vss365
‎

‎Along the river, #Jade sat weaving the many strands of amethyst into a cloth of a thousand night blooms. When it was finished, she would attach the pennies she earned at the Chrysanthemum Fair, and drape it across her shoulders to call good fortune. Her fame increased with the seasons.
#vss365

Take me to the #undersea. Be our father and mother, where we can find you, hidden under the ferns with the octopus and the damselfish. Stay until the boats are gone. In my cave I will paint the stars and birth a culture; you will recount the legends, so we do not forget who we once were.
#vss365
‎

Also, Station Eleven...❤️

Today's thought on craft: Overwriting doesn’t just add noise—it competes with the voice.
#writingcommunity

Thanks. 🙏

There was #trickery in his clever response to my reply. Slippery words in an argument set on deflecting the point I was making. I spent days thinking about it. Yes, it was telling, but of what exactly? Bias, cowardice, laziness, petulance, belittlement—I ran out of synonyms, fruitlessly. #vss365

A bunny with an acoustic guitar plays in front of a half-dozen frogs in a pond, while another bunny plays the bongo drum, and a third buny collects tips in a hat.

Daily bunny no.3292 knows some froggy music

‎The motive for their divorce read 'irreconcilable differences.' To her, it was the expectation that their wedding day doubled as his #investiture to an office unilaterally voted for. In his fantasies, he would rule justly, but what he called just, she would take a Molotov cocktail to.
#vss365
‎

Wind rakes across the sky and kisses the quivering #seafoam.
‎I walk the sands and hum the plinkety tune of the box where my secrets hide from the world. I am happy for reasons I share with no one, not even the waves that break and are gone. A plainness marks my footsteps with mystery.
#vss365

thanks a lot

Sorry, what's this about?

Thanks!

‎We came through the winter as if slaying a monster. On the other side of it, we sang and smoked and drank Mort Subit. With longer days and #hammer swinging, I built the summer place up in the trees. Now comes the good hunting, but without the ice, we watch the horizon for marauding ships.
#vss365

The #word was stol'n. It was hot. Where can you bring the vocabulary you've boosted? There's a demand for this kind of lexical larceny, by the barrel and shovelful, even subscriptions for the taking. You can roll around in them. Those detection apps don't work. Go ahead. I won't tell.
‎#vss365
‎

The Wreck Diver · Chapter 7 I need you sharp.

Some things are better left unsaid.
He says it.

7 is live. 🔥

The Village Message Board Its authenticity was discredited because of his reputation, but also because he was quick with gin at the time and wearing an item of knitwear back to front.

www.tom-cox.com/the-village-...

‎She cried until a fruit #loop flew out of her nose. How it got there is a mystery of fluid dynamics. I took her out of the high-chair; breakfast wasn't working out. She sat on the living room floor, and the dog licked the snotty mess off her face. I threw cereal on the rug.
Both ate it.
#vss365

to all
which i might succumb

the feral rhythms
of heretic verse

the calming lilt
of soft sincerity

the delicate
and the devastating
in equal eloquence
and exquisiteness

i am here
open

like a wound

like a lover's arms

aching for you
to make me more

#UnchainedSymphonies

"Burn the #letter, burn it." These were his last words, his last wish. Yet no, in a locked wooden box inlaid with the silver sigil of his house it lay unseen and untouched for two and twenty years, until I caught the wasting fever. "Don't burn it," said l, but they put flame to everything.
#vss365

Substack these days is all bad taste, bad faith and performative bullshit, whinging, grandiosity, scamming, and fake drama. Seriously, I'm contemplating going over to some other long-form site.

‎Salt cakes myriad paths to what water is left. Cracked lips whisper what we can't hear out loud: this is all there is. ‎We tried to create it from air, but no child has ever seen a cloud. Precious #water we squandered, or 'they' I say, because we've always, though powerless, known better.
#vss365

Me too; one thing after another.

Pope Francis: Died within hours after meeting JD Vance

Viktor Orban: Lost within a few days after meeting JD Vance

Middle east peace negotiations: fell apart within 21 hours of Vance’s arrival

Welcome to the JD Vance Effect™

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.

Octavia E. Butler, 1998:

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin

With the passing of my wife, the birds came. I didn't let them in but they came nonetheless: the thresher bathing in my #sink when I wash my hands, a flurry of hummingbirds in the kitchen glinting in the morning sun, a family of swifts nesting where my wife used to lay.

#vss365

love this.

The act of killing is not finished until it is fixed somewhere outside time.