nothingkept

[nothingkept]

[nothingkept]

[nothingkept]

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

[nothingkept]

Last week I accidentally took an edible at 10x my usual dose. I say “accidentally” but it was really more of a “my friend held it out to my face and I impulsively swallowed it like a python”, which was technically on purpose but still an accident in that my squamate instincts acted faster than my ability to assess the situation and ask myself if I really wanted to get Atreides high or not.

Anyway. I was painting the wall when it hit. My friend heard me make a noise and asked what was wrong—I explained that I had just fallen through several portals. I realized that painting the wall fulfilled my entire hierarchy of needs, and was absolutely sure that I was on track to escaping the cycle of samsara if I just kept at it a little longer. I was thwarted on my journey towards nirvana only by the fact that I ran out of paint.

Seeking a surrogate act of humble service through which I might be redeemed and made human, I turned to unwashed dishes in the sink and took up the holy weapon of the sponge. I was partway through cleaning the blender when it REALLY hit.

You ever clean a blender? It’s a shockingly intimate act. They are complex tools. One of the most complicated denizens of the kitchen. Glass and steel and rubber and plastic. Fuck! They’ve got gaskets. You can’t just scrub ‘em and rinse them down like any other piece of shit dish. You’ve got to dissemble them piece by piece, groove by sensitive groove, taking care to lavish the spinning blades with cautious attention. There’s something sensual about it. Something strangely vulnerable.

As I stood there, turning the pieces over in my hands, I thought about all the things we ask of blenders. They don’t have an easy job. They are hard laborers taking on a thankless task. I have used them so roughly in my haste for high-density smoothies, pushing them to their limits and occasionally breaking them. I remembered the smell of acrid smoke and decaying rubber that filled the kitchen in the break room the last time I tried to make a smoothie at work—the motor overtaxed and melted, the gasket cracked and brittle. Strawberry slurry leaked out of it like the blood of a slain animal.

Was this blender built to last? Or was it doomed to an early grave in some distant landfill by the genetic disorder of planned obsolescence? I didn’t know, and was far too high to make an educated guess. But I knew that whatever care and tenderness and empathy I put into it, the more respect for the partnership of man and machine, the better it would perform for me.

This thought filled me with a surge of affection. However long its lifespan, I wanted it to be filled with dignity and love and understanding. I thought: I bet no one has hugged this blender before. And so I lifted it from its base.

A blender is roughly the size and shape of a human baby. Cradling one in your arms satisfies a primal need. A month ago I was permitted to hold an infant for the first time in my life, an experience which was physically and psychologically healing. I felt an echo of that satisfaction holding my friend the blender, and the thought of parting with it felt even more ridiculous than bringing it with me to hang out on my friend’s bed.

[nothingkept]

[nothingkept]

[nothingkept]

i woke up one afternoon to discover my body was transformed into that of a pig. though it was shocking, my family loved me despite this, and fed me lots of yummy slop. I lost pieces of my humanity with every day that passed, and I began to lose my sense of shame as well. This resulted in me often shitting where I stood, and blatantly going into erstrus when the time came. My parents, still believing me to be a real person, and not swine, were disgusted, and ashamed, and scolded me any time I "misbehaved". Until the day came along, one day, when my mother looked deep into my eyes and could not find a single trace of the human soul within them. I saw her turn around to the other room and heard her sobbing, though it elicited no response from me. Heartbroken, she had a conference with the rest of my family, and they decided to spare themselves the pain of having to look at me, and sell me to the Farmer as a meat pig. I went with him peacefully, aware of my fate, but not caring. The farmer did not know that I used to be human, so after I became fit to slaughter, maybe even substantially larger beyond that, he did so without ceremony. I was butchered as part of a special order, with my entire carcass shaved and washed, organs washed and placed back within, and sold to one man, who paid a hefty price. He brought me to his house after a long time spent in a, somewhat dingy ice chest in the back of his pickup truck, dragged inside, and cooked me in a large oven. My meat looked tender on the inside, yet was perfectly browned and crisp on the outside. Potatos and other starchy vegetables were cooked in the same pan, with a good amount of butter, as my body, the fat that was rendered and dripped off of me treating them well. When I was done cooking, instead of dressing me up, and putting me on a table, he put me and the cooking dish on the floor. This made me curious. I figured that he would be eating me, or a group of people, but thinking back on it, I heard no other humans than him this whole time, nor any footsteps. He whistled and called, and after some time an extremely large pig slowly slid itself along the floor into view. When it reached me, it didnt hesitate to begin eating as fast as it could. The man looked on. After about 15 minutes, the other pig had eaten all of me, even my bones, the vegetables, and drank all the remaining fluids from the pan, and my conscious had reawoken inside of its mind, all my memories intact, seeing things from its perspective, though I couldnt control its actions, and it's inner thoughts weren't aware of my presence. I felt my share of the pleasure that comes from eating ones own kind, and the pig sluggishly both in speed and manner made its way back to its pen, and fell asleep. I did too

[nothingkept]

Hilma af Klint (1862-1944, Swedish) ~ Paintings for the Temple - The Large Figure Paintings (De stora figurmålningarna), No.6

[Source: opensea.io]

[nothingkept]

Mary Magdalene's hair suit in art. [x/x/x/x]

[nothingkept]

[nothingkept]

[nothingkept]

[nothingkept]

she would do numbers on tumblr.com

[nothingkept]

[nothingkept]

WHY ARE YOU HAUNTED?

A survey

[nothingkept]

this is a poem from my book: the pause and the breath, out Jan. 25th from Atmosphere Press, listed on Lambda Literary's Most Anticipated for January! it is a collection of sonnets using the form in dialogue with my experience of black transness viewed through the lens of chronic illness and black madness.

you can find it on bookshop.org, barnes & noble's site, amazon, or if you want to support a local bookstore, The Ivy Bookshop in Baltimore is carrying it! you can pre-order from there, too.

"As I read Kwame Daniels' collection, I was reminded of Keats' definition of poetry as 'the vale of soul-making.' Daniels' project of soul-making--of finding authentic selfhood--is urgent and ambitious. It involves a reckoning with trauma, illness, racial injustice, and systemic homophobia. It also involves a radical re-envisioning of that most venerable of poetic forms, the sonnet, and for Daniels the sonnet is both a talisman against iniquity and a vehicle for hard-won celebration. As xe write in a poem entitled 'ars poetica - ars trans - black poetica,' 'It exists in space--the pause and the breath. / It is the almost-thought, the precipice / from which feet dangle. Hands hover. Fingers / press. Words tumble out.' Kwame Daniels is a poet of unusual promise." - David Wojahn, author of World Tree

Praise for the pause and the breath "Daniels has a truly unique poetic voice. An artistic blend of topics related to the self with its societal ramifications as a whole makes the poems feel personal yet universally relatable." --Readers' Favorite

check out my website for content warnings and other writings: www.kwamesounddaniels.com

[nothingkept]

My Manic and I // Laura Marling