Am finally after all these years reading the entire bloody Fukuyama book and God help us there in the exact middle of it is Havel's bloody greengrocer

Wait, the Patriots' quarterback's name is DRAKE? You gotta be kidding me

Pic of the week: Fluffy Finch birdsandbeesandblooms.com/2026/02/08/f...

Olympic Super Bowl Sunday of the second Trump administration may possibly be the most confusing day in history for non-American anglophones on social media

loot that drops from me after you defeat me: - a sweater - another sweater - OMG how many sweaters was this guy wearing - enough cat hair to knit another two or three sweaters

Makes sense when you consider that 40 cm of snow generally yields around the same amount of water as 40 mm of rain but nonetheless pretty wild that all the snow across southern Ontario in January yielded a mostly near-normal amount of total precipitation

I used to want my poems to be content but now I just hope they can turn their neurotic suffering into ordinary unhappiness

I want to write poems that do something like this does (I think I've approximated it approximately once) youtu.be/mVHv6Z_UhKo

the woods fill with chirps spring's coming to the cottage with fresh batteries

Having one of those I must be the millionth person to think of this mornings E.g.: my submissions keep getting rejected lately, gonna try switching to DOMINATIONS

Dunno how it's taken this long to occur to me that political cover for import taxes being provided by a special word must be a phenomenon exploitable in other directions "Wealth tax", what's that, we're doing a whoochum, people are saying it's the most beautiful whoochum they've ever seen

Have come across the word "orison" a couple of times in the last 24 hours, have never really known what it means, just looked it up and it turns out it simply means "prayer" according to Merriam-Webster dot com and uh oh dear

Snow angel

In the reborn @antiheroinchic.bsky.social , "Free Couch" by @jessicawhippl17.bsky.social , a great one of what I'd call ekphrastics of the everyday heroinchic.weebly.com/blog/poetry-...

Pic of the week: Hang On birdsandbeesandblooms.com/2026/02/01/h...

Have determined that having a ticking clock on my desk is bad for my teeth No, not the grinding due to angst at being-toward-death Are other people compelled to clack their teeth in time to ticking clocks or is it just me I mean probably also the being-toward-death though

Certify your content AI-free if you estimate it's 90% not AI-generated! ha ha wut Letting the AI guys be in charge of AI control would be uh *not good*, and like oil companies with carbon emissions they are really gonna want to get themselves put in charge of it

Happy Septuagesima to all who celebrate, but especially Oscar Wilde

Thinking about how the fact that I've set a personal record for poetry rejections this month without even any Poets Respond subs means there's still lots of room to break that record--like how I don't want to break my annual bird count record by so much that I won't break it again next year--

At a poetry book launch thing I went to once one of the poets said in response to some "why do you write" question that they write because it's how you get to be part of the conversation with other poets. I think a lot about how that easily sounds like some bad quiet part out loud thing to say...

Never mind the classes you took in college, tell me five toes you have on your feet 1. Big toe 2. Other big toe 3. Toe that you want to call middle toe because it's the longest 4. Actual middle toe 5. Fourth toe, most underappreciated toe, or at least unappreciated, honestly not sure we'd miss it

By my count it's 11-1 for Catherine O'Hara over X.J. Kennedy on my feed so far today. Once again, it ain't the old twitter, for sure.

It'd be nice if this is a watershed moment for the whole FAFO mindset, which has always been with us (I mean, the popular concept of hell is the ultimate instance of it) but has gained an awful lot of political traction as an all-purpose answer to everything in the last few years

This storm is currently precipitating on all contiguous east coast provinces and states from Nova Scotia to Florida

Pic of the week: Dove Wings birdsandbeesandblooms.com/2026/01/25/d...

This much storm with no pressure below 100 kPa anywhere is in itself pretty impressive

The future depends on whether or not people in sufficient numbers and in positions of influence come to understand what better things there are to do with their lives than fighting. That's it, that's really always ever it. If you want to build the long way forward, that's what you have to work on.

So today was the day that I had to get towed twice because we have reached a level of snow around here such that what look like plowed shoulders are actually plowed ELEPHANT TRAPS

Most middle-aged dudes, the life advice they want to give you is about investments and winter tires and stuff, mine is, and I can't stress this enough, get yourself some high quality sun catchers

If you'd told the Dreher-ite conservatives that inside a decade people would be invoking the Havel greengrocer stuff against the intractable hegemony of American conservatism...

Poetry New Year's Weekend as far as I'm concerned

In my list of places I might send poems to there's one my description of which concludes "possibly insane", always amuses me when I scroll down to that one Aren't we all though yes yes

Pic of the week: Snowy Finch birdsandbeesandblooms.com/2026/01/19/s...

A particularly weird instance of public goods being required to make business cases for themselves--like counting the neighbourhood parkette as "losing money" because the city has to cut the grass

Good day for seeing blue

As Burl would say back at the other place, re the second one down here from Drew Pisarra ("Factors"), I laughed

Brilliant

Also taunting: Windows informing me that today is "tulip day" for some reason

Every time I pop over to the other place to look for something I'm like geez it's awful grumpy in here and yet that guy who retweets all the poems and gives them 0.3/10 or whatever always puts a smile on my face

Was just idling thinking of saying something about Vlad Guerrero on here for some reason, thought I might refer to him as VGJr and was like OMG VEGGIE JUNIOR HOW HAVE I NEVER THOUGHT OF THIS BEFORE

Pic of the week: Pigeons Over Ice birdsandbeesandblooms.com/2026/01/13/p...

Avs dressing up as Nordiques kinda feels like taunting, I dunno

This is the coolest weather forecast thing I've never seen before that I've seen in a long time

Well "On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs", by Renée Nicole Macklin (aka Renee Nicole Good)--excerpt below, whole thing at the link poets.org/2020-on-lear...

An energetic piece by @stevensearcy.bsky.social at @newversereview.bsky.social today--when I read the highlighted bit I thought, roughly simultaneously, "I'm not sure that's true?" and "oh, you're mad at Billy Collins!" open.substack.com/pub/newverse...

Reminded of this poem of mine that was published in The Road Not Taken a couple of years ago--I guess if you want a point, a point might be that the most important questions have to do with how did we get here

One of my earliest efforts in these 7+ years now that I haven't let go of this poetry thing. Epiphany, the mystery of incarnation, wisdom sets out to see for itself, sha'n't be gone long.--You come too.

Pic of the week: Goldfinch Squabble birdsandbeesandblooms.com/2026/01/05/g...

If I'm looking for a New Year's poem this is the one I'm looking for, "New Year’s Day 2005" by Gary Lemons rattle.com/new-years-da...

In honour of the JCO NYE grouse-a-thon of whatever year that was, back in the old country