I am not a withered flower I am not a cool, blue background I am not a head of smoke I am not a cartoon rain cloud I am not a beflowered gilded cage – beauty? I spit on it. I am the tsunami that crushes you and the earthquake that squeezes you and the …
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Category:All Posts
Today I Feel Like A Sculpture (Another Place/Time Horizon)
Inorganic. Not grown – made. Placed – and out of place. Here – but not of here. I am a hundred separate splinters scattered across a single flat plane, each in the same different location. I am a fundamental stasis. Touch me: you cannot be stopped. Caress the barnacles, fondle the lichens: I have been …
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Embroidered
I am stitching. My shoulder hurts. I’ve used it too much. Nevertheless, I continue to stitch. I will persist until I am destroyed. If I were brave enough to stitch through my skin I would bandage myself in thread tight like a Pharaoh’s wrappings. (Perhaps I am like them – a tragic, inevitable consequence of …
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Butchering
Peel off my skin – unmarked, whole, pale. A near perfect hide, ready for the tanner’s dye. Scrape off the fat and boil it down, burn it hot to light your way. Or if seeing with me disgusts you utterly – whisk it with lye, and wash me down the sink. Pluck out my nails, …
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Laziness Isn’t Real
Several months ago I began to expunge the word “lazy” from my vocabulary. I still use it in limited circumstances, primarily for describing cats. But I no longer use it to describe myself or other people, in single or in aggregate. Where I would previously have used the term “lazy”, I now use one of …
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Maybe Your Treatment Resistant Depression Isn’t The Problem
You’re depressed. You’ve been depressed for a while. You’re probably kind of anxious. Maybe you’re a bit over-friendly with a substance or two. You have all the classic depression symptoms: you can’t concentrate; you’re exhausted but you can’t sleep; the things you used to love no longer bring you joy (can you even remember what …
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Beyond Consent: a framework for playing without safewords
The biggest piece of advice that people new to kink get is “use a safeword” – a special word to mean “no, stop”. Safewords are extremely important for most scenes, but for people who fetishise power exchange, especially those who fetishise it intensely, safewords can… get in the way. Having the power to stop play …
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Consent Is Impossible (but we should aspire to it anyway)
Consent is the bedrock of healthy sex. There are many different frameworks to consider consent in, but my personal favourite is FRIES: Freely given: consent is given without pressure, coercion, or manipulation Reversible: consent can be withdrawn at any point Informed: you should know what you’re consenting to Enthusiastic: if consent is reluctant, it is …
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