See Ya, Substack.

Remember how I made a post a while back saying I was going to keep this blog site but would also be moving to Substack? But also they’d previously platformed Nazis (as well as COVID deniers and QAnon types) so maybe I wouldn’t be there that long? That’d be keeping an eye on it to see if they refused to clamp down on those kinds of blogs and making a decision about whether I’d stay accordingly?

Yeah, they started promoting Nazis.

This is just a little something to say that I’m no longer there, and if you are, it’s not a great idea to stick around.

Being aware that companies and people we support are doing bad things takes work, and thus takes energy. In the case of Substack, I didn’t do that work as diligently as I should have, and I was made a fool as a result.

I know there are a lot of folks who have blogs on there that are brilliant that you probably enjoy, and I know I have a lot of friends who are also writing incredible work on there too. I also know that if you read anything I write, you’re probably not real keen on supporting a company that is making money off platforming and now promoting Nazi blogs.

If you have a Substack account, consider joining me in deleting it. You can still read the free blogs without an account, and if a writer is savvy, they’ll also have a tip jar available for you to drop cash into if you’re so inclined.

Contact your favourite writers and tell them the low down on how Substack has dropped the mask on how rotten it is. Suggest they join a different platform – my favourite former Substacker David Farrier’s Webworm uses Ghost now, and as far as I know, WordPress hasn’t been too gross in their own dealings. (Though if they have, I’d very much like to know.) If you’re a writer yourself, take a look at your other options – there’s plenty around – and consider starting up a newsletter through other means so folks can still follow your work without using socials. If you have a blog on an unpaid platform, set up a tip jar so that folks can contribute without subscribing.

There are some reports that Disney has lost over a billion dollars this week for cancelling Jimmy Kimmel over the tamest of jokes at the expense of Trump. (Some other sources dispute the number and the cause, but the boycott is definitely underway.) If you feel like that it’s justified to boycott an international conglomerate of that size with such a stranglehold over our cultural lives over one show, then I’d expect you’d feel that it’s reasonable to cancel an account with a website that hosts multiple Nazi blogs, and has previously refused to de-platform them under the excuse of “free speech”.

But that excuse? It’s bullshit.

-Mike Masnick, founder of Techdirt

Substack isn’t just letting Nazis come and speak in their living room. They’re giving them a cup of tea and a megaphone.

I don’t make much money. I have bugger all reach. But I can still say something.

Today, that something is: Fuck Substack. Fuck Nazis. And fuck anyone who thinks they have a right to be heard.

Nicotina

I smelled her before I saw her,
Tobacco remnants heavy in the air.
A waft of the taste of Dickensian smog,
So dense it was almost sticky.

I’d never seen anyone with a mouth like the proverbial puckered arsehole before
But there she was,
Smelling of nicotine and bonfires,
Grey eyes circled in wonky blue liner.

I couldn’t help wondering
How does someone fit a cigarette
Between lips as tight and tense as those?
It must be a hell of a squeeze.

***

I remembered writing this poem and desperately wanted to publish it but couldn’t find it in any of my diaries or notebooks. I turned my room upside down to find it. I hope it was worth it. x

Photo by Koa’link on Unsplash

3:59:59 17/6/24

It’s a small thing
To see one hour tick over into another
The 59:59 turning to noughts
Another second in the arbitrary measuring of time.

Stop and think
About all those hours in your life
That ticked over without being observed,
Thought about,
Recognised.

Suddenly that one little second
Feels so incredibly miniscule
Yet so immensely momentous.
What an honour to have been one of only so many
To take note of that exact moment passing by.

*****

Poem by me. Photo by Laura Chouette on Unsplash

Two posts in a month! Crazy.

– N

How To Feel Sexy In A Flood

Step 1:

The ground around here is saturated, but the hair on my head is dry as straw. I should go and get it cut, but the only hairdresser in town intimidates me, so I leave it limp and box-dyed with split ends hanging lower than they have in a decade.

I should have used more conditioner.

Step 2:

I can’t even shave my legs, because to even point a razor in the direction of the topographic map of itchy, pink mosquito-borne welts that passes for skin from my thighs down would be to invite a half dozen Krakatoas to burst their aggravated peaks, running lava-blood races down my calves. (They’re already doing that enough, purely thanks to my constant unconscious scratching.)

In an unexpected boon, however: I have gotten surprisingly good at smashing the life out of those bloodsucking little bitches mid-air, so at least my hand-eye coordination is improving.

Step 3:

Spend far too much of the money you were meant to be saving on stockings and suspender belts, only to find that your legs really are the wrong shape for that style, and after all, they’re too sheer to wear on unshaved legs, and we already know how well that crusade is going.

Step 4:

One thing I doubt I will ever learn is How Not To Lust After Incredibly Interesting and Attractive (And Thus Utterly Unattainable) Men, minoring in Especially If they Live 100’s of Kilometres or More Away.

Here is another night spent annoying my dog with the sound of my fanticising about someone so far out of my league that we’re basically playing entirely different sports, while I simultaneously wish he were just a little or a lot less handsome so I could stop worrying that the desire for friendship might be driven entirely by lustiness and hopeless romanticism instead of a genuine interest in the actual human being in question.

How can it be that someone so incredibly besotted with the notion of Happily Ever After-style love can be so utterly bewildered by the idea that it could ever fit in her own brain? That the feeling of warmth and hope for a special person’s future could comfortably reside with a physical attraction and be reciprocated? Sir, I am pretty damn certain that triangle is only permitted two corners in this story.

In conclusion, god damn it, I want to fuck him so bad, but also get to know him, but I’m pretty sure my fate is just to be a weird spinster with a dog.

Also: if you want high quality, ethical porn, you need to pay for it.

Step 5:

Be isolated. Notice that the last time you felt human touch was when you hugged your mum goodbye weeks ago, and with all the roads out of town closed, you have no idea when you will again. Worry that you’re forgetting how to be intimate, or even just how it feels. You stress that you don’t mean “intimacy” in a sexual sense, but rather that aura of cosiness shared with another human being where you feel like they might actually be able to see you, like a dust particle in the thinnest ray of sunlight. Ache from the loss of it, grieving to the point where you could cry, and you desperately want to, but the path your tears would take stays dry, because there’s no water left to fall from your eyes.

It’s all in the river.

Like The Ocean – a spoken word poem

Fuck me to the sound of the ocean
In a cottage on a cliff
On a big brass bed that creaks with each ragged breath
We push from our heaving lungs

Fuck me to the rhythm of the tides
We won’t be making love
We’ll be making waves
As high as mountains
That will make the rivers jealous
That will wash away the rockpools
And send uncertain sand dunes into the sea
To travel beneath the water line
Until they settle on a new shore
Building islands out of our sweat and touch and heat.

Fuck me to the sound of the ocean
Release the nereid within me
Send her back to her home in the spray
Away from this feeble human body
Let her run with the horses
Rushing at the shore
Before she catches the riptide out to the wide blue yonder
To the Pacific, swallowing half the world
The Atlantic, unforgiving and violent
To the Antarctic, cold and full of secrets
Until she returns to Poseidon’s arms
For their sabbatical on land
Where they will fuck on a noisy bed
In a house by the sea
Until the waves roll them out again.

*****

This poem was written at 4am, recorded at 3pm, with production completed at 11pm, all on Friday July 24, 2020.

I’m not certain if it might be something, but I’d love to see if I can get some other poets to write and record a new poem in under 24 hours, and then make a podcast out of it.

Working title: Pantseat Poetry.

Whether something will come of it remains to be seen. (I shan’t hold my breath.)

x N

Downstream

The rains had come
Upstream
The twins expected thunder
But the river always
Refuses expectations
Instead
The air was still
Save the warbling of the magpies.
Cicadas, light and scorching heat,
Like the rains would never come.

Then we saw it
Slinking slowly
Like the story of the snake
The First of Us have been telling
For thousands of years.

The kids chased its head down the creek bank
As it slithered down the waterway
And I beamed in wonder
At this long withheld blessing.

I saw the twinkle of dew in Mum’s eye.

I took her hand,
And tried to forget all the days
The water had been too late for.

I whispered to her,
Maybe he had to go
Because he knew they wouldn’t listen
Unless he asked in person.

Her grip became a vice
But there was no sound
Despite the streams staining her cheeks.

So that’s how we stayed,
Hand clasped in hand,
As the kids pointed and laughed and raced
The rainbow serpent around the riverbend,
Downstream.

 

*****

This poem won first place in the Open Own Composition section at the 2019 Dubbo Eisteddfod. You can find the adjudicator’s notes on my Instagram.