I garden my heart. The weeds get pulled and composted. Fair weather friends and Toxic waste family Give off an herbal order when You let them rot where they belong. #vss365

The angels have died in heaven And the demons are running earth While God is nostalgic for The days before saints became Burned out bureaucrats Too busy to process The paperwork of metaphysics. I want to join them in The welfare state Where the purified have jobs Leaving hell to the poets. #vss365

I am here now I believe what is is I hear no commands I have no missions I live as a human But on bad days I miss Inhabiting imagination Being right regardless Listening to invisible friends Following a quest Transcending humanity But I renounce those lies And prove there is a truth. #vss365

Nurturing should not be controversial. You are either born good Or forever bad, Calvin’s ghost says with A feline smile in his tone. But fate is much cleverer than Philosophers it always outlives. Nurturing is virtuous. Leave ideas of goodness to the eternals And just do good here now. #vss365

A recokoning is rarely welcome. One is overdue and Its undue delay undermines My faith in a benevolent faith. When karma comes for The cruel scary clowns running This sick sad country, Will it be in this life or the next That justice arises from the dead? #vss365

I am hungry for hunger. Bored with patience, I long to Rediscover my unreasonableness, But between demands I once demanded And ownership of What I can’t forfeit Without forfeiting my honor as well, I strive for virtue. The best of me is involuntary. #vss365

What is passion if not The weak force that dissipates, leaving Love to do the work called love Or revealing no work to do. You know you have gotten right when The strong force of faith Is the only plan that doesn’t end as The opposite of love: Nothingness. #vss36

When I embarked on my odyssey I was 17 and wrong about being right. 29 years in, I am still adrift But have been lucky enough To find my crew while getting lost. If the journey is the destination, I am there now, and That is enough. #vss365

The weather within Storms without warning, leaving you Manic Psychotic Depressed Obsessed and Distracted At once. The only hope is love, And that is cold comfort Due to the distance of most from it. But I have you. #vss365

The #conflict within bores me. Nobody wins in a voices matchup. I need a fantasy sports of the mind So that even as I lose in all ways, I score points off the performance of The competitive shards comprising me. #vss365

I #marvel at the comic books I drew when I still had enough time to be talented. Decades after my potential expired I regret only not being a has-been. #vss365

An #easter message: a feather rises under spring wind’s hope. Our wings are not plucked bare-yet. #poem #poetry #lifequote

#vss365 #dream

#vss365 #grief #poetrycommunity

#vss365 #time

Alan had an #insatiable thirst for cryptography. When young, he stared at white noise on an empty TV to make a plan for hacking randomness. Everything turned when he got his graphing calculator as a teen. A math degree followed. Then a PhD “break.” Now he watches white noise again. #vss365

Fran’s #desire for Bob was complete. Sure, he didn’t wrap yarn around his windows to keep evil thoughts out or always drive with a wool banana in the trunk, but he said he understood the fears that drove her, so she knitted him a shielding scarf. Then he moved in, protecting his thoughts. #vss365

Today I quit vaping. Day 0. Need something to do with my hands. So: Ty saw love: @aoc.bsky.social on @msnbc.com Dead ringer for a bartender crush from his Union Square days. She #inspired him to blog daily on bartending. He so hoped this muse AOC resembled would find him, now in Vegas. #vss365

What if civilization is all just a #fart that will fade, and we will all go back to singing by caves where we paint deer on the walls, and everything will smell like campfire again? #vss365

#Disarmed by a breakup, Ann thought nothing of dating an alien. They’d been around for decades and cross-species romance had been normalized. Humans never did right by her anyway. But her taste for cheaters persisted, and the alien had side pieces that broke her heart. Only her dog was true. #vss365

Bo was a #cyclone in lovers’ lives, a burst of furious chaos that spun and upended any semblance of peace. Twisting hate into ardor, Bo raged and made love in a whirlwind of pathos. When his third wife left, he moved to Texas, and the lithium in the water calmed him into a thunderstorm. #vss365

Tyler’s nostalgia was a #thoroughfare of record jackets, scratched DVDs, and dog-eared novels. Everything existed in a pop context. The radio was the only way this was ever fed to him against his will anymore. The day his mom died, he heard “Free Falling” and smiled. He had tuned to God. #vss365

The 7-11 pay phone was the #nexus of 1996 teenage society in Ty’s hometown. Kids would call and let it ring until someone answered and said what was happening that day. Ty used to man it like an operator until he escaped a drug bust, at which point the nexus moved to a smoky Denny’s. #vss365

They made love in a #bathtub. They made love in a cave. They made love on a plastic slide. They made love in the dugout of a college baseball field. But meds sapped Ed and Sue after addressing their depression, and they broke up content in the awful world that drove them to antidepressants. #vss365

“Jay+June” carved into an #oak tree, the couple kissed. Just after, diving into a river, Jay dove too shallow. Their college romance moved to a hospital room. June was true until he ended it. “You have too many places to go,” he said. She thought of him in place of every lover after. #vss365

Jean and Ty shared an #umbrella at a bus stop, strangers starting a marriage. When they split, Ty reminded Jean how that day, she said she couldn’t love someone who put himself first. “I need to love myself again,” she replied. “So do I,” he said, and they hugged for the last time. #vss365

Jed and his dad did #rockets together and nothing else. Jed’s rage toward the abusive man led him to say, “I won’t go to his funeral.” When Jed did go, he asked for the ashes to put in a rocket. Then he poured them out the window on the drive home, singing, crying, and laughing at once. #vss365

Crestfallen, I said, “Can I stop this procession?” But no one answered, and I was left to feel sonder for Those in Purgatory with me. open.substack.com/pub/dylanjam... #vss365 #mariannefaithful

Marianne Faithful Harmonizes with My Wife

Canto 8 of "Purgatory Paradise. In which I learn my dire fate for grave sins before a graceful shade.

open.substack.com

I’m not defending #Elon. I am enraged at the politicization and amateur diagnoses to defend his worst acts. His #autism doesn’t lessen his cruel culpability, but in opponents mocking it, there is malignant kernel of #ableism. I believe everyone deserves a measure of #sonder or nobody does. #vss365

Trying to please everyone is like walking around wearing an invisible #collar that can be wrenched backward painfully whenever someone’s views conflict. Break free and bite when it matters. #vss365 #prompt