Rust covered every inch of the pickaxe's head; eating away at the iron until only the ancient core remained. The handle had separated from its partner many years ago, kicked aside by some angry teenager after some failed exam. An orange aftermath coated the ground beneath - disguising the sharp gravel as gentle dirt. Real flowers had forced their way through the corroded metal and loose pebbles. Dandelions smiled brightly at the sky, and daisies cowered in their shadows.
At this marker - just beyond the skyline - lay a secret. Thick foliage sheltered the area from prying eyes, lashing out at anyone who dared to approach with twisting brambles. Thistles lay in wait for unsuspecting limbs to bite down on with glee. To enter this place took thick skin.
It was worth every moment.
Dappled light filtered through the leaves overhead, sprinkling golden sunshine across the earth. Moss crept over the rocks here; it blanketed them with its cooling comfort. Deep green moulded around sharp edges, softening the boulders' harsh corners and rounding off its aggressiveness.
Deeper into the hidden haven, walls of earth surrounded a small clearing. worms wriggled through the dirt, resurfacing every few minutes as they blindly felt for food. The outside world still moved; it sent its warbled voices through a funnel of clattering branches and muffling leaves. Sounds echoed off the walls, despite not resembling the creature or person who made it at all.
Nothing could reach the clearing. Nothing could poison the scattered tools and collapsed archways. Nothing. It was untouchable in its serenity - a constant anchor of safety within the chaos of the real world. Nature was reclaiming this place everywhere the eye could see. Vines curled and climbed around forgotten poles, squeezing relentlessly until nothing of man remained.
A HANDY CHART FOR THOSE OF YOU WONDERING WHAT THE FUCK IS UP WITH THESE. NOTE THAT THESE ARE ALL THE INFORMAL AND YOU IS THE FORMAL SO LIKE YOU WOULD ALWAYS ADDRESS YOUR SUPERIOR/ OLDER PERSON/ SOCIAL BETTER WITH YOU BUT WITH YOUR BUDS YOU CAN USE THESE.
The important thing about wool is that it continues to keep you warm even when it’s soaking wet.
Other natural fibers don’t do this. In fact, quite the opposite. Campers and boaters are usually familiar with the phrase, “cotton kills.” If you’re wet in cotton or linen, your clothes actually sap heat from your body.
If you sink in a lake in late October like I did today, staying warm is important. I was rescued long before I would’ve actually died, but cold makes your muscles seize up, which isn’t good if you have to swim to land.
Which brings me around to life jackets. If the water’s cold enough, you may only have five-ten minutes until your muscles seize (today I probably had 40-60, more than enough time to get to land if I hadn’t been picked up), and you’ll drown.
In a life jacket, even in extremely cold water, you can float semi-conscious for perhaps another 30 minutes or so before you actually freeze to death, which is usually when someone rescues you.
What’s more, you probably know that moving around on land warms you up. Jumping jacks, jogging in place, etc.
In water, moving actually makes you colder. You need to stay still curled up in a ball, which you can only do in a life jacket.
In wool AND life jacket, you’re warm, and your head’s above water, which is pretty much your only and entire goal.
If you’re allergic to wool, synthetics are available specifically for this purpose. I know I always say natural fibers are the way to go, but when it comes to safety, wear what protects you!
Yep! A really simple “experiment” I learned as a kid and now use in my own courses is sticking your hand in ice water. Compare moving it around in the water to curling it up in a fist. The contrast is stark!
To increase your survival time in on cold water, you want to curl up! If you’re with others, you want to huddle!
Again, both are only possible when wearing a life jacket!
I know a lot of people are reblogging this for writing reference, but I like to believe that 7,000 people on this site were actually continually living in fear about this specific situation and that when the time comes, I’ve prepared them with what they need to know to survive.
Do any of u have decent recipes that are like 5 ingredients (not including spices) and take 45 mins or less to prepare i gotta stop eating sandwiches for dinner
ignore the title of this google doc because it's a long story but it's a really solid recipe for southwest chicken alfredo
this is a vegetarian potato curry recipe that's about 75% spices; once you get the potatoes in there you can really do whatever you want with it
this is literally just pasta, broccoli, and cheese babey and you can live off that shit for DAYS it makes such a big portion
bro this spinach/pesto/3 cheese flatbread is so fucking tasty bro
also you can make the flatbread yourself it's super quick!!
oh hey I'm eating this white chickpea chili right now, much like the curry it's mostly spices and you can do p much do whatever you want with it
don't let the name fool you these potatoes are delicious any time. not just breakfast.
this is slightly more than five ingredient when you add them together but if you have time and really wanna fuckin treat yourself I recommend these chicken strips + this cornbread + either these potatoes or these buttered veggies on the side.
this recipe for gogumabap (sweet potato and rice) saved my life when i couldn't eat hardly anything for a long time. the recipe itself calls for a heavy bottomed pot but you can absolutely use a rice cooker and put the rice and diced sweet potato in together and just let the machine do its thing
If you have a crockpot, I do a really good pulled pork carnitas that is:
Pork - any cut boneless
Onions- chopped anyway you like
Orange juice - about one cup (you can use about 2 tablespoons of the condensed frozen stuff if you have it)
Root beer, pepsi, or other cola soda - about one cup
Preferred chili mix seasoning - 1-2 packets depending on how intense you like your flavoring and how much pork you put in
Garlic - as much as you wanna, specifically smashed not cut
Canned or frozen corn - to your preference
Dump all that into your crockpot in the morning (or the night before) and let it run on low until dinner. Cook some rice if you feel like it, or just serve over tortillas.
Let’s not forget that he was played on screen by a white man. And the fact that he was black is barely ever mentioned or the book he wrote inspired by his experiences.
chose to take on his slave grandmother’s last name, Dumas, like his father did before him.
grew up too poor for formal education, so was largely self-taught, including becoming a prolific reader, multilingual, well-travelled, and a foodie, resulting in his writing both a combination encyclopedia/cookbook (which just— is fucking outrageous to me) AND the adaptation of The Nutcracker on which Tchaikovsky based his ballet
he also wrote a LOOOOT of nonfiction and fiction about history, politics, and revolution, bc he was pro-monarchy, but a radical cuss, and that got him in a lot of hot water at home and abroad.
even beyond that, he generally put up with a lot of racist bullshit in France, so he went and wrote a novel about colonialism and a BLATANTLY self-insert anti-slavery vigilante hero (which he then cribbed from to write the Count of Monte Cristo, the main character of which, Edmond Dantés, Dumas also based on himself).
(…a novel which also features a LOAD of PoC beyond the Count, and at LEAST one queer character, btw, bc EVERY MOVIE ADAPTATION OF ANYTHING BY DUMAS IS A LIE; seriously, at LEAST one of the four Musketeers is Black, y'all.)
famously, when some fuckshit or other wanted to come at Dumas with some anti-Black foolishness, Dumas replied, “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.”
for the bicentennial of his birthday, Pres. Jacques Cirac was like, “…sorry about the hella racism,” and had Dumas’s ashes reinterred at the Panthéon of Paris, bc if you’re gonna keep the corpses of the cream of the crop all together, Dumas’s more widely read and translated than literally everybody else.
and they are still finding stuff old dude wrote, seriously; like discovering “lost” works as recently as 2002, publishing stuff for the first time as recently as 2005.
when this post first went around (a year ago apparently) I was like BUT WHAT ABOUT DADDY DUMAS THOUGH because basically
daddy general dumas was an immense fierce french warrior who was a 6 foot plus, stunningly gorgeous and charismatic Black gentleman
he invaded egypt
the native egyptians said “is this napoleon? this must be napoleon. we for one welcome our majestic new overlord”
then napoleon showed up
napoleon has all the presence of yesterday’s plain Tesco hummus
the native egyptians were like “… no… no, we’ve thought very hard and we’ll have General Dumas actually”
this did not make napoleon happy
in fact it made him jealous
napoleon felt so emasculated that he launched a campaign of revenge against General Dumas, including taking away his pension, that probably inspired a lot of Alexandre’s rather satisfying scenes in which fathers are nobly avenged and the money-grubbing villains are rubbed in the mud
His stuff is in the public domain, you can find them on Project Gutenberg here:
Project Gutenberg offers 73,007 free eBooks for Kindle, iPad, Nook, Android, and iPhone.
And for those of you who would like to try audio versions, this is what is on LibriVox, the free, volunteer run audiobook version of Project Gutenberg:
friend is trying to sell her car bc shes moving to a state with vehicle inspections and her prius lives in defiance of god. anyway so shes cleaning it out at my apartment complex bc we have dumpsters and her roommate forgot to pay the trash bill. i will be liveblogging my experience watching her do this and you will understand why i refuse to help her
guys theres a pile of chicken bones down there from wingstop im so scared
AND i hear "hey dude can i use ur washing machine real quick" and she pulls out a pair of pants from, i shit you not, 1940 and theyre moldified into a SOLID. those pants survived a war and couldnt last a year in her fucking shitbox istfg
i swear to god im not exaggerating here. anyway heres an incomplete list of everything we found inside:
-axe (stolen)
-earrings made out of dentures
-flavored condoms
-a quilt
-hello kitty sweater (stolen from a DIFFERENT ex-friend with a felony charge)
-deer spine
-baseball sized wad of human hair
-""sex apron""
-uranium glass plate
-pile of non-uranium non-car glass
-rollerblades
-complete phantom of the opera cd set
-magic the gathering cards mold-ified into a brick
-lego millennium falcon
-a CUTLASS??? (for "self defense")
-the back bumper of the car
-an entire fucking ant colony
and finally, perhaps the most disturbing,
-a pack of vanilla wax melts, inexplicably unmelted and intact despite sitting inside this terrarium-with-a-prius-wrapped-around-it in 100 degree heat for god knows how long
i must stress: before today she DID NOT KNOW about the ant colony in there . she thought ants just really liked to climb inside anytime the car was parked.
bringing this post back bc i found a video of her offering me the phantom cd set and i said no because the box was coated in a syrupy mat of human hair and she was confused because "we know whos hair it is" ???? as if the origin of the hair was the only fucking holdup
The other night husband and I were watching a documentary about the yeti where they were doing DNA analysis of samples of supposed yeti fur, and every one of them came back as bears.
Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.
So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.
Bears. They’re everywhere. Be wary. Anyone or anything could be a bear.
As the OP of this post, I’m going to threaten that if this gets to one million notes by the 10 year anniversary on 1 June 2026, one year from today, I will get a lower back tattoo of the loch ness bear monster.
If you use Firefox, you can go to the about:config page, search for "media.mediasource.enabled" and double click on it to set it to false. After you restart Firefox, all youtube videos will load entirely even when paused! This also affects other streaming websites :)
go to About:config
find media.mediasource.enabled and toggle it to false
find media.cache_readahead_limit and change it to 9999
find media.cache_resume_threshold and change it to 9999
additionally if you'd prefer mp4 to webm
also in about:config, find:
media.encoder.webm.enabled
media.mediasource.webm.audio.enabled
media.mediasource.webm.enabled
media.webm.enabled
and toggle them all to false
note!
this will limit video to 1080p
and use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dont-accept-webp/ to kill WebP
Fuck Google
stop. analyse that text through the lens of its author's intentions and original historical context. okay now take the author out back and kill them dead and analyse that text as though it were published by your mutual yesterday and is in direct conversation the contemporary discourse that's most relevant to your life. okay now pick your favorite angle of interpretation and come up with the strongest possible argument against it. now imagine that the text is your best friend and that it means you well and that you naturally give it every benefit of the doubt because you're on its side and you want the best for it. now imagine that the text wants you dead and it'll eat you if you don't eat it first. now pretend that you found this text locked away in a cave with no evidence of when or where it came from and you have to divine its meaning solely through its internal coherence and nothing else. okay now address the elephant in the room aspect of the text you've been ignoring because you find it boring or confusing or uncomfortable and become the number one expert on it. now spend forty minutes assigning all the characters dnd classes with at least three sentences of reasoning each. okay now do the cha cha slide.
So you can avoid them stealing things from you, the artist/writer, etc.
Pro GenAI websites/Programs:
Facebook
Instagram
X/Twitter (Remember, Grok gives people cancer)
Threads
Pro Writing Aid
Grammarly
Duolingo
Google Docs
Microsoft Word/all Microsoft products Takes from and will feed their machine.
Youtube (taking advantage of people who are hearing impaired. ==;;)
Adobe Products. All of them. If you HAVE to use them (Some businesses require it), save offline because there is a film of at least some privacy protections there, so if you have to sue, you can say it violates US privacy law. Remember, contracts do not circumvent US law.
Corel won't feed the machines, but still uses AI stolen from other artists. Which sucks since Corel Draw is the second best overall for vector programs. (Plus I love Painter, but I bought the offline version to avoid AI). (Canadian company)
Canva Takes and feeds their machine.
Deviant Art Not only supports AI, but put a tool in and said they are going to steal your work if you like it or not for their machine.
Sketchup went Pro-GenAI. The thing is that you can do the same thing in Blender these days with precise measurements.
Autodesk has stated they are Pro-Gen AI here. It is not clear if they will use your models to feed their machine. But be on guard. They make Maya and 3Dmax. You can replace it with Blender.
Neutral ground:
Tumblr (there is a way to opt out [Link] and they don't have an active AI machine.) https://www.tumblr.com/dookins/743519550598987776/heres-how-to-disable-third-parties-like-ai
Etsy allows GenAI, but still has some (minor) restrictions. I'd still be cautious. (Also be cautious of drop shippers). Complaints about too much AI and AI images+patterns made by Ai still exist on the website. They lean slightly more pro-AI, but still won't let it run completely amok, say like Facebook. They won't feed your work into a machine, but also don't ban it through robots.txt.
Bluesky They don't use an AI algorithm except for in the "Discover" section of their website, but while they are anti-GenAI strongly, they don't seem to block the Gen AI bots from entry, so you'd still have to use Nightshade or Glaze (links below). There is no opt-out because they don't need an opt out. (Leaning towards strong position on AI, but I wish they would block GenAI bots).
Searxng- If you super want to screw over Google, in general, and have some tech savvy, you can set up your own search engine through searxng. It's easier on Windows and Linux than it is on a Mac. (Mac you need Docker), but if you're determined on privacy, Searxng adds a layer of privacy. Some of it sometimes uses bits of AI, but most of it doesn't and you can fuss with the settings so it doesn't spit out AI results. At sheer minimum Google will stop spitting out weird videos on Youtube at you because in your private browsing, you searched for the origin of ball bearings while not logged in for a book and Google likes to break privacy laws.
Strong positions against AI:
Scrivener (Creator vowed against AI) Writing program. There is an active forum, and versions for Mac, Linux and PC. It is paid, but at ~60 USD, it's cheaper than most programs. There is usually a holiday sale around Christmas. It has a learning curve, but with an active forum with the programmer of it there to ask obscure questions it's not a dead zone. They often take suggestions and implement them over time. (Especially if you rank the importance, applications, etc) US company.
LibreOffice Open source and free Spreadsheet and Word processor program that can replace Microsoft Word. Some people might have seen older versions where it was called Neo Office (now extinct) and Open Office. LibreOffice is still populated, plus the forums are super helpful if you get stuck. The UX is pretty intuitive if you've used Microsoft Word. Scrivener, BTW, supports exporting to odt (the native file) as well as .doc, and this can open both. The slight thing is that sometimes it doesn't export to .doc smoothly. And I DO wish more magazines, and agent (big clue here) supported .odt files since it is free. Part of the reason .odt isn't as supported is because Microsoft and Adobe have a deal with the devil with each other, so Adobe's Book formatting program InDesign doesn't support ODT. (BTW, if you have a good open source replacement for InDesign that supports ODT, let me know.)
Dabble (as suggested by SF stories, see reblog) is a writing program. Similar to Scrivener. Has vowed against AI and to resist it. 108 dollars a year for Basic. It is almost twice the price of Scrivener who lets you update for fairly cheap. 29 dollars a month, v. 59 dollars for the whole program (Scrivener) for the same features of Premium. You choose.
yWriter is a free Writing program and like Scrivener, and has vowed against AI Last I looked it had some UX issues, but some people swear by it. The learning curve is higher than Scrivener which is saying something.
Ellipsus is an online writing program and vowed against AI. The main feature I like (which Scrivener doesn't have) is the ability to change spellcheck based on region/language. It is a requested feature of Scrivener, but lower priority. So if you have a Brit, you can get the spelling for the character. They are a British-based company.
Cara.app (The creator of the website sued GenAI there is no chance they'll convert) is an artist website. Cara is trying to institute an auto Glaze/Nightshade into the website if given enough funds. People see it as a soft replacement for deviant art. (which went fully AI) If you believe in human art, please donate if you can. Zhang Jingna, the Creator,is Chinese-Singporean. She lives in Singapore.
Clip Studio Paint added AI, but saw the light and decided to protect artists instead because of protest and removed it. There are tutorials and a good forum if you get super stuck. Based in Japan, so the UI and UX is really clean.
Davinci Resolve Pro is a film editing software that's super good. There is a free version and a paid version. The forums are responsive. The programmers aren't always present. There is a healthy group of tutorials. US company. Clean UX. It does take a little bit of time to remember the shortcuts.
Tahoma2D is anti-AI and open source animation program. Takes a little getting used to, but is good for animations and doesn't crash as often as Animate. Programmers are in the forums and some bugs are fixed within hours. The forums are super responsive and helpful.
Krita open source and free, no AI. I'd rank it secondary to Clip Studio Paint (which is paid) I haven't tried the forums, but it's pretty intuitive and can stand for a lower level replacement for Painter, and do a lot of the basics of Photoshop. It's usually ranked higher than the equally open source Gimp.
Writer P AKA Writer+ (app for when you're on the go) is a simple word processor app for your phone that doesn't use AI. The original programmer stopped updating, so Writer+ person took over and isn't out to make a profit since it's free in the spirit of the original app. It has subfolders you can use. Since it was programmed before GenAI it doesn't have AI. Intuitive, easy to use. Fairly easy to upload the files through three dots->share. The files can save to your card or phone with some settings fussing. Simple word processor.
Inkscape is a free vector program and no AI. It is harder to use than illustrator and has less features. But if you're doing smaller vectors for one-offs with less complexity, it'll do you after some learning curve. Best of the lot. I hate Affinity Designer which is the same thing, only paid. (Neither Affinity program was worth the money paid)
Affinity (Designer, etc) swore to be AI-free and does Vector and Photos. The UX is messy, I dislike the program and regret paying for it. Inkscape and Krita are better UX and do the same thing. The forums aren't as friendly since there has been an onslaught of people seeing it's supposed to be a replacement for Photoshop and Illustrator, but the programmers aren't present. The people on the forums are often on edge about this assertion. And the capabilities of the program don't outshine basically Krita or Inkscape capabilities (both free). What is usually intuitive is not. UK company. If you're going to pay for a program, go for Clip Studio Paint which rivals Corel Painter.
Blender is a 3D art program and does not use GenAI. It can do 2D animation, but Tahoma is easier to use in this regard. It's open source and free. Plus there are plenty of tutorials. The forums can be touch and go sometimes, but there are plenty of sub Blender communities that might be responsive. It can also do animation.
Handmade vowed against AI and promised to never sell itself for stock prices to prevent AI (as a replacement for Etsy.)
Discover a world of creativity and craftsmanship through Handmade, an innovative platform connecting passionate artisans with discerning buy
Proton (to replace Google Suite) as suggested by SF Stories (see reblog) Vowed against AI. They are missing a spreadsheet, but have online and offline capabilities, plus a built-in VPN.
But you need a pro website...
Look up robots.txt and AI bots: https://www.cyberciti.biz/web-developer/block-openai-bard-bing-ai-crawler-bots-using-robots-txt-file/
Use cloudflare:
Use Nightshade:
https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html
which will poison the algorithm
Use Glaze:
Take Away:
The thing is you think you doing it alone will do nothing, but the more AI feeds on itself, AI images, the worse they become, and the less detailed so, denying it the images, adding poison or not being able to read the human text is eventually going to lead to an AI collapse.
Analysis shows that indiscriminately training generative artificial intelligence on real and generated content, usually done by scrapi
And why not help that along?
I don't want to give cancer to poor people [Link] or make the planet burn faster [Link]. So GenAI collapse is everything I dream of. GenAI apocalypse is not.
“Love Languages” are just common couples therapy techniques mangled and repackaged by an unqualified homophobe. Relationships generally need all 5 love languages to be fulfilled, which is to say, everybody needs to communicate with, spend time with, and do things for their partners, and that’s got nothing to do with any special way you communicate affection.
MBTI has been proven completely ineffective at predicting anyone’s success at a particular job, and half the people who take it twice will get different results. Reputable psychologists do not recognize it, and the company that owns the rights to it uses it to scam people. People don’t adhere to strict binaries in basically anything. Very few people are going to be exclusively introverted or extroverted. It’s just astrology repackaged as pseudoscience. Shockingly enough, you can’t boil the complexity of the human experience down to a dozen Types of Guy.
The concept of IQ is flawed from the start— “intelligence” is an abstract concept that encompasses many different skills, from social intelligence to emotional intelligence to the very narrow kind of problem solving intelligence IQ tests generally measure for. It cannot predict how fast you learn, how much you know, or how logical and well read you are. It mostly measures how good you are at solving puzzles. Coincidentally, it’s also a pretty good predictor of income and education level, take a guess why. Most people’s IQ will change throughout their lives, because it’s inconsistent bullshit we’ve only held onto this long because we’re still kinda hoping we can breed the ubermensch. IQ tests and the way they attempt to categorize people are explicitly eugenicist and racist.
BMI was developed by a man known as the grandfather of eugenics, who first of all was a mathematician, not a doctor, and second never intended the formula to be used to categorize individuals. It’s intended to give a rough estimate of obesity in populations, and it’s not even good at that. It hangs around because of fatphobia and insurance companies who want it as an excuse to charge fat people more.
The study which determined people’s prefrontal cortex was still developing at 25… stopped measuring at 25. Evidence suggests your brain probably never stops developing. Stop infantilizing grown adults. This is a branch off from the larger mess of misinformation surrounding fMRIs.
If you haven’t put together what all these things have in common yet, here’s the moral of the story: STOP TRYING TO CATEGORIZE PEOPLE. STOP TRYING TO PUT PEOPLE IN A GODDAMN BIOLOGICAL HIERARCHY. EUGENICS IS BAD, AND WILL ALWAYS BE BAD, NO MATTER WHO’S DOING IT.
Every Time I Ever Said I Want to Die
Andrea Gibson
—I meant I am willing to do anything to live.
Even leave this world forever.
Even build a new home atop a nebula, stick a straw
into a buried lake on Mars, get tipsy on anti-gravity
and invent new constellations walking the lines
between undiscovered stars
When God pulls me over and asks,
Can you touch your nose? I could say,
What nose?
I’d be bodiless, a shadow in reverse,
a patch of light made by the darkness
I escaped.
The psychology manuals say no one really wants
to die. They want relief. They believe they will never
find it in this world. That belief could be right.
Or wrong.
One would have to stay to find out.
Friend, if you stay, at least we will be
together, and I have an extra straw.
I could show you where the lakes on this planet
are buried. How you did not need light-years
to reach them. The dark years work too.
Sometimes better. Sometimes grief
is the fastest route to truth.
In addition to the straw,
I also have a slingshot that fires rock
bottoms directly at the sun until change
spills from its golden pockets—
that’s how I got my hands on this
summer afternoon. We can do anything
with it. Sunbathe or scream or forgive ourselves
everything, most especially the thread we could not
convince to close our wounds.
If your wounds are still open, trust
they are doors to an answer,
and walk through.
What if we don’t have to be healed
to be whole? There are holes in every inch
of the fabric that makes me who I am,
but pull the string on my back
and I’ll say I LOVE YOU and mean it
whenever you want.
Come flood my home
with your eyes. I’ve read that people scream
when they are in pain because screaming
actually lessens the pain—
anyone who asks you to hold your tongue
is asking you to hold the heaviest thing
in the galaxy. Forget them and remember you
can tell me anything about how hard it is
to stop flirting with your expiration date.
I understand being wooed by the finish line
of sadness. Infinity still sends me nudes
every day. I won’t deny she looks amazing,
but I’m taken. My hand now promised
to writing every page of my story
except its end. Friend, you are
who taught me that a difficult life is not less
worth living than a gentle one. Joy is just easier
to carry than sorrow, and you could lift a city
from how long you’ve spent holding
what’s been nearly impossible to hold.
This world needs those who know
how to do that. Those who can find
a tunnel with no light at the end
of it and hold it up like a telescope
to show that the darkness contains
many truths that can bring the light
to its knees. Grief astronomer,
adjust the lens, look close. Tell us
what you see.