and I have been, physically, for the most part.
But things between Emerson and I have been a lot less tempestuous and a lot less stressful since he had his surgery, to such a degree that I’ve been able to work through my own emotional backlog for what feels like the first time in years, and I would LOVE to stop having soul crushing realizations for one day. Please.
-Allēna
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#writingcommunity #amwriting #amwritingpoetry #punk #cripplepunk #disabilities #survivor #cptsd #spilledink #spilledwords #trans #poetsofmastodon #gay #queer #queerwriter #rebirth #healing #rest #NEISvoid
One of them is autism, one of them is ADHD, and the other is the desire to not do anything productive at all. I think the dogs that are fighting are autism and ADHD, and the woman screaming is my desire to not do anything productive at all. The woman just wants to sit and watch more trash TV until some form of inspiration hits, and then she’ll do something. Except there are two huge dogs going goblin mode in front of her 😭
This is my current mood. I’ve been resting a lot because my guts still hurt off and on, and honestly watching TV that I like is helping my brain rest and get more inspiration for my writing in the long term. Plus, as Laz has said before, it’s nice to be able to be a fan of things again. It’s been years since we’ve been able to do that.
Aside from this post and talking to people, will I get anything else productive done? I’m not sure. But I’ll do my best if I’m so inspired.
-Allēna
Your bitch applied for an artist residency to work on shit this summer.
Why?
Why not.
The worst they’ll do is turn me down.
At best? We get a stipend to work on cool shit like this here website and other things and we meet other artists and work with them.
Fuck it. Let’s ride.
The fucking kicker was the bio I wrote:
Ashley Halliwell (they/any) is a 27 year old neurodivergent, disabled, and chronically ill multidisciplinary artist. Their they/them is, in fact, plural, as they discovered in their teens that they were a DID system after surviving a massive stroke in infancy. The stroke cost them roughly an eighth of their brain, most of the use of their left hand, but in return, they got synesthesia, a foul mouth, a near photographic memory, a heaping dose of stubbornness, off the charts pattern recognition and intuition, and the ability to play instruments by ear. On top of that, they deal with AuDHD, CPTSD, an as of yet undiagnosed set of chronic illnesses, and even more genetic mutations. And that was only the second time they almost died.
They often joke that whatever god(s) made them made them sick because if they were abled, they’d be too powerful.
Much of their work is wry, chock full of dark humor, inspired by their life, and as bold and colorful as they are. They’re unafraid to fail their way forward, paint everything in vivid colors, and use the strongest language you’ve ever heard.
They’re a four time published author. They released their first poetry collection The Caesura and the Silence in 2016, followed by their second poetry collection To Dance with a Cyclone in 2019, their first play script Lavender and Scissors in 2020, and their third poetry collection Singing Molten Gold To The Morning in 2021.
They’ve also produced, engineered, released, and recorded 15 albums under the name Candy For Trees, the most recent being 2023’s Hardshell. Pretty impressive for having functional use of only 1.333 hands, right?
When they aren't sleeping or eating a galaxy's worth of food, they're trolling bigots on the Internet, telling stories about their roller-coaster of a life, or working on their current project, their chaos haven/online art collective in the making, Open Sorcery, which can be found at vince.opensorceryy.co/.
We’ll see what happens. Results arrive shortly…
-Allēna
We appear to be sleeping better over here now. I have no clue why we’re sleeping better since he won’t be out until the end of this month, but he does seem to be around much less, and when he is, he’s far quieter. So we sort of fully collapse when we’re here now for the first time in years. Hell yeah. -Allēna
So here y’all go. She can yell at me later, I don’t care. It’s worth it.
I eat, I sleep, I feel my grief deep
I want to cry, I want to scream
But there are times it seems
I can't remember how to speak anymore
One time I dreamt you stared at me
Slack jawed as I was carried
On broad shoulders through a revolving door
And I hate to say it but I think
That's the kindest I can recall
Your eyes ever beholding me
And I don't ever want more than
The simple vindication of your
silent cry matching mine
All those nights years before
You don't know me, you never did
I never wanted you to
You were more in love with the bathroom mirror image of me
Than who I really was at my core
But I go on, I mock you now
The jokes practically write themselves
You're snowed in while I fly free
Not yours, never yours, not even close -
Not anymore
-unnamed notes app poem by Lēna, posted by me (Castor)
I made my first zine today because I was bored and needed a vent. If you want a copy of your own, it’s free to download over here!
I hope you enjoyed this zine! I had a lot of fun making it.
-Castor
Hey, everyone. Lazarus here again. I have been in a sort of soupy atemporal sea of time and space in my brain. I busted one of my phones a few days ago, so I was running things exclusively off my laptop for a bit there, but I cannot wrap my brain around blogging on my damn laptop for some reason after integrating, hence the lack of posts. I don’t know why. For some reason, I just couldn’t post from there. The thought of typing a thousand or more words on there just seemed fucking impossible after getting so used to typing huge volumes on a phone. So I suppose laptop typing in large amounts is Banned for reasons unbeknownst to me.
I know a lot about how my mind works, but I don’t know everything. I am slowly learning, however, that when I’m too tired to even think of approaching a task, I probably shouldn’t push through the fatigue and instead let it rest. So that’s what I did. Frankly, I’m glad I did, too, since I started chronic pain flaring properly from stress and how damn cold it’s been in Milwaukee of late. So I had to mentally play ER doctor and decide what was important to take care of right the fuck now, and what could wait until later. Well, it’s now later, and here I am, haha.
The phone I’m using now has phone PTSD of some kind, I fucking swear. I dropped it in the tub back in late May/early June of this year, and even though it was only partially underwater for maybe ten seconds tops, it acts as though it was waterboarded in some top secret facility someplace and often outright refuses to charge, only semi reliably cooperates with a single fucking cord, and only fucking charges AT ALL when my relationship with my partner Zelda is going well. So there’s that. Temperamental little bastard. I normally like a challenge, but I do not enjoy challenges of the phone PTSD variety. But hey. At least it’s working… For now.
Speaking of Zelda and challenges, their blog was down for the count for a while. So a few emails back and forth with the web hosting people later, their blog is back up and running and they are writing beside me. Sheik, an alter in their system is out and about currently, and this babygirl is pressed up against me to share body heat because our ancient furnace that heats the place bit the dust sometime last night.
So she’s been in talks with the property manager that manages both the Zelda System’s place and Emerson’s to hopefully send a guy out to fix the damn thing as soon as possible. It was supposed to be fixed this past spring, but that never happened. It’s beginning to sound a lot like people need to get their shit together in here. There’s a lot that needs fixing in both places.
Relationship wise, things are.. Stabilizing more, I think. I made some breakthroughs on my side of the ongoing Zelda/Emerson/me polyam drama during the past few weeks while I’ve been sick and flaring and have had little to do but rest and think, so I’ve been doing a lot of resting and thinking. I realized during this period of One Big Long Fucking Think that I tend to not really feel many emotions of my own that I can describe until they’re so fucking big and obvious that I can’t help but put a name to them and they’re sort of exploding out of me in some way.
It’s not that I repress them, they’re just always six feet to the left, so to speak, and remain so small and vague until they are a big enough hairy ass deal that they’re so obvious that I HAVE to do something about what’s causing them.
And by then, externally, the thing that’s causing them has brought me halfway to a nervous breakdown from the sheer stress of it. And I have an even harder time attempting to explain WHY I am feeling a certain emotion because I can’t really trace an emotion back to its origin when it’s so damn small I don’t notice it’s there or it’s so vague I have no language for it.
Emotions also hardly ever happen at random for me. Like I will almost never sit there, even if I’m not doing anything else, and start feeling an emotion randomly that there’s no explanation for. It’s gotten to the point with my inner work that if I’m alone for long enough, I can shape my emotional state with precision with playlists. And I have a playlist for damn near everything.
What I do pick up on, and feel all the time, however, are other people’s emotions, often far stronger than my own, especially if I know them well and we are very close. So if Emerson, whose emotions are very strong, is upset, I will hear him out and want to take his side instinctively. Same thing with Zelda, etc.. So this has created an interpersonal three body problem of sorts, to use a metaphor from astrophysics, with myself as the third body in the emotional middle getting tugged back and forth.
So I’ve had to consciously start learning how to pull back and sink back into my own body and energy and do shit that recharges me when I notice myself getting emotionally burnt out or stressed, which happens a lot, and actually feel through the situation myself to get a read on how I actually feel about the situation at hand and figure out a course of action that will cause me the least amount of stress or headache. Since I’ve started doing that, shit has gotten way better in all of my relationships. I’ve gotten better at judging when I have the mental or emotional capacity to handle a situation in the moment or if it needs to wait.
All of that has lead to me taking a sort of soft break from posting on social media, as well, and I only really go on Facebook and Instagram to check messages and occasionally grab memes and shit. I’ve rarely been posting on either due to information overload, which was contributing heavily to my stress.
So… Magic. Huzzah.
I think that’s enough for tonight, y’all. My brain is starting to get tired. Stay tuned for more magic, beloved entities of various voids. I’ll be around when I can summon the energy again, haha. This flare is kinda kicking my ass.
-Lazarus
Hey, everyone. It is I, your trusty, if batshit sorcerer guide, Lazarus. I was talking with Lumine about all manner of things both magical and mundane today, and I have decided It is Time to Have Words With Y’all, and by Words I mean poetry, after the grumpiness of yesterday’s post. Y’all deserve bread AND roses, y’know?
The three pieces I’m about to share make up the backbone of my third poetry collection Singing Molten Gold To the Morning, published at the tail end of 2021 under the name Perzival DHC Dunn-Blackthorne. I’ve noticed some typos in the manuscript, including in the final poem I’m going to share, so I think it may be high time for a reprint once I have the energy.
A lot of this collection deals with my sense of time. I’ve never had a sense of linear time, and it often slips both backwards and forwards in the form of flashbacks, seizures, dissociation, and straight up visions and premonitions of all kinds. I was medicated for several years in an attempt to get this to stop, as my mother, Hera, thought I was crazy because of the little I told her about my mental health and inner world, but the problem here is that no matter how many meds I was put on, up to and including doses of lithium and other drugs that should have probably killed me, the premonitions never fully stopped and I never fully lost my sense of who I was.
And I never stopped writing, either. During the roughly 13 years I was medicated and psychologically tortured alone, I produced an enormous body of work across several creative disciplines that I largely kept between myself and my close people. I simply stopped confiding in her about most of what was going on in my life and mind and worked towards building a life of my own.
Now, I’m on a different medication regimen for the slew of chronic health issues she caused or exacerbated, seeking diagnoses for the rest of them, and have accepted the nonlinear sense of time as… my medicine of sorts, something intrinsically as much a part of me as my neurodivergence, my lack of a gender, or the natural dark brown color of my hair, and will seek medication for it if it starts causing more harm than good. The following poems are meditations on how I experience time, autonomy, and how they are inextricably entwined for me as their own form of magic. Enjoy, let me know your thoughts, and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do in the comments section 🤣🤌💛
“one: the end. texas + points east”
somebody,
somewhere…
i remember my heart burning
as i longed for the leaves of the east
count up all of the hours in the day
execute plans with no emotion
execute emotions like they are enemies
i am nothing anymore, completely hollow
such that
all you see is your reflection
it makes no sense to pick up the pieces
of who i once was
she was weak and afraid
i killed her
i am electricity
born from the ashes of my home,
my hell
do not presume you can put a label on me.
you will not learn to hate me.
you will learn to be afraid of me.
to drink about me
and worship me (posthumously)
and eat ash because it’s the closest thing
to who i was
who you thought you had
who you once were
and who you wish you could still find
i was a child then.
i learn things with the wonder i did when i was younger
you grew up too slowly for your taste
i miss the boy you were
even then
even though i was a teacher
you taught me everything i know
i was odd and you were even and steady
my eccentricity was my salvation
and the universe loves irony and wordplay.
“two: the beginning. chapel hill, north carolina”
i had a waking dream last night
someone moved the indigo fabric of spacetime itself
wrapping themself in inky cloth
in chapel hill, north carolina…
the dream told me it wasn’t time to go there yet
i would know when my marching orders come
i have not learned enough to be able to see
what i am looking for for what it is yet
would i see it as a prison now?
or would i see it as coming home?
what if i chew through the bars
of what i am supposed to love?
i fell in love with points east before
and all signs are pointing to that
as my home
you may remember me as a season
a time of day, a concept -
i think of you as places i have yet to walk
i see beginning as end as beginning
i see you as who you are, who you were,
and who you will become
you are resplendent and sweet and beautiful
you are soft and tender and strong
you are cosmic in scope and
infinitesimally small at once
you are that you are.
“three: the endless cycle. pennsylvania and all it contains”
i told you once when i was elsewhere that
buddhism seemed round
you agreed with me, saying it was like a wheel
i used to be scared of going forward
i thought it endless and vast when it is truly
cyclical and you can return to where you
were as easily as listening to your favorite song
some revolutions just take longer than others
the last watch of the night is deep and rich
and sweet like a plum
indigo like the deepest sea
this is where i make my home
i tell my stories after dark
comfortable in the space
between ending and beginning
you remind me of different paths
the road not taken
but all roads lead home
some are just longer than others
more winding -
and home is where you will find me
i’ve burnt and rebuilt so many times
i know great and terrible things
i’ve asked the void questions
and she has answered me.
who is out there?
where are they?
her answer?
go back to the end.
I hope you enjoyed this sampler of poetry and I hope you have an amazing day. Stay tuned for more magic, glorious motherfuckers of assorted genders and persuasions. I’ll be around. This has been your esteemed sorcerer, Lazarus, signing off. ✨