i asked you and you replied but only through your sorrow each word once a wound worn out by knowledge it was the old dance and a new one moments taken apart you could name ever part of a watch but not the reason for your distance and i am where you were staring into a precipice between hope and a knowing looking both to you and away not wanting to carry a burden whose name i do not know

we were searching toward an ending in games we played too long ago - a tree of life in our hopscotch game the tetherball a cold test of fate

the playground we knew is gone iron bars and wooden railings extinct they say it is safety-focused inclusive more terms about fairness - but nothing engages the senses like pain i do not know what we are without fear i explain the blood and terror the Ways kept closed by iron, wood and faith

where the teeter-totters was is gone the binary of life and death broken i can only plead that the old ways return by claiming they are so cheap to make

Imagine if @randomlyjay did do April fools: Jay claiming to leave Tumblr….

“Truth is a fire that burns us all.”

“Only the unworthy.”

“As I said.”

the wind howled a warning yet was called a storm as well hatches battened down defending against only air as the true storm followed after

Remembered history was the lies you didn't forget from high-school textbooks.

We walked around the corner and I let out a breath, opening myself to the gloaming. Colours shifted, the sounds of the world getting quiet. Tenzen a solid presence and light beside me as I turned my head slowly toward the closed off room. No weirdling in there. No twisting in the world. But something drew my gaze toward the room despite that.

Not for the first time, I wished my Art had some kind of manual.

I drew Sight, and Heal, and Help, weaving a single rune from three. Not speaking it aloud to avoid attention, the rune forming as my fingers ached with pain, the world going slightly grey around the edges that had nothing to do with the gloaming and everything to do with the cost of my Art.

The world dissolved, or at least the walls between me and the room did.

A room in the Pearly Gates Rest & Retirement Home converted to something like a hospital ward. Curtains between hospital beds. Ten beds with seven containing bodies, unmoving but not sleeping. Anchored into the world proper, locked in some fashion I did not know. Not touching the gloaming; voids in liminal space. The rune sank into them, and my strength sank with it.

The rune I’d crudely fashioned pulled on me for strength, and it felt like being a hose trying to put out a fire I could not even find.

I made a noise, or tried to.

The world snapped back into focus as Tenzen shook me gently, breaking my focus and the rune with it.

Still one of the most amusing messages I’ve received :)

we tried to find a common ground but it was neither loam nor sand and clay turned softly into mud but the truth was simply that every piece of ground is different and nothing common after all

"Your honour, I request a new client as this one only communicates with me in memes and I don't understand most of them."

and circumstances could not be solved by words not answered by fists but that never stopped them from trying so hard to see the world as this place of complex problems with quite simple solutions

The poetry magazine got bombarded with 1-star reviews for not sending out rejection letters in the form of constructive haiku.

in the silence you waited loudly until i was brave enough to speak

The king waited in the ways of kings and autocrats the world over, signing orders for executions between meetings.

"Hay there," he said, but sadly for him the centaur joke only worked in print.

and we were moving betwixt shadows just a little twixt waiting for the other to break

there is a war on someone said but there is always one and today you, and I

making friends pawns our pets into weapons bribing the veterinarian with our death threats

trying to hold onto everything falling apart finally feeling alive for one last bruising kiss