I love turning off the lights and lying down on the floor, bathing in the quiet and the darkness and the calm, because there is no better way to align myself with my cat's frequency, and, sooner or later, he will come, a vibrating shadow, and clamber onto my chest with his barbs of affection.

A belated nod to Poetry Day, in bluesky-sized chunks. More in comments.

This web of streets worn warm and bright by footfall,
Blazing as brass, by hope's plump fireworks gilt annealed,
Threaded as veins replete with blood to keelhaul,
Singing of bonfires, eddas, slit tongues and spells revealed.

That feeling when an entire new creative universe blossoms out of nothingness and you know it will take years, rich, bountiful years, to milk its full potential.

Exulansis, n. The tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people cannot relate to it.

From John Koenig's 'Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows'.

Today, let everyone be celebrated whose soul speaks as a woman.

Today's weather feels like an encouraging metaphor: after the bleakness and murkiness of this week, there is dazzling sunshine ahead, and with it come energy and movement and rebirth.

My brain blossoms with the viscerality of my cat. He is barbed in the wriggling expression of his love. His weight goads my tendons. He crackles with an unsoured life that scrubs the gleaming artificial lacquer of the battalion of machine-monkeys hammering at their typewriters. May his banner fly.