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meridian_rose
meridian_roseIn short:
👉 Your UK passport or driving licence is a bit like a library card - you use it for one specific job, then put it away.
👉 Compulsory digital ID cards could be like a GPS tracker on your life, recording and linking everything you do.
👉 With powerful modern technology, the risks aren’t just bigger than a passport - they’re on a completely different scale…
...and far greater even than the last time Tony Blair tried to impose compulsory ID cards, scrapped in 2010 at a cost of up to £20bn to the taxpayer.
eeyore_grrl
curvy girl warning
be gentle with me, please
i deal with enough in the medical world
they chew me up and spit me out
too fat for real medicine
too big to be seen as real
too much for even the mri to see within
so who knows, really, what it is
just that i know something is really wrong
that i hurt like i haven't before
that i deal with pain on a daily basis
and this New Pain Makes Me Want To Cry
but i didn't fit
and they didn't call back
so now i have to play chase
like girls and boys in the school yard
like men and women in bars
like all the things i hate
but i'm simply a fat girl now
too big to have real concerns
cuz they'll say
"if you just lose some weight"
or
"exercise more"
as if the panacea of thinness
is enough
as if starving myself into disappearing
is enough
as if taking a shot or a pill
is enough
to stop a lifetime
of injuries and hurt
a societal epoch
of women being
(invisible)
for
(e)quality
medicine
weight
is merely the newest lie
bleodsweanGoing for my soak, she called, pinning her hair up as she made her way to the bathroom.
Their apartment had been created out of dormered attic space on the top floor of a three-story Victorian house. The dying elms stood even taller than the peaked roofline and through most of the windows one had to peer through the peeling white bark branches and the hand-sized leaves. The house stood resolute and glorious with a postage stamp backyard and just a hedge between the porch and the cracked sidewalk in front. The first half of its centuried life had been as a single-family home, the last half as a multi-family building with five units. Two on the ground floor and two on the second floor, the attic a sprawling dwelling space comprised of nooks and crannies tucked beneath the eaves, long coveted in the downtown art scene and handed off from one hipster to another whenever vacated. They had lived in it happily for three years. The first heady year of finding themselves exactly where they were supposed to be was gone and some weekends they spent touring open houses. They wanted to believe themselves to be people who could renovate their own Victorian.
She was settled into the massive claw foot tub, scented and bubbled, candles lit, her day washing off her skin. She reached over to a stool for a jar of clay mask and began slathering her face. He came in and turned on the lamp that stood on an antique table beside the door. He had a book in his hands.
What will you regale me with tonight, my librarian?
Bathtime story hour? Hmmm. Might have to pitch that at our next meeting.
She laughed.
I found this old civil engineering book in the depository this morning. It’s about designing inner townships, gridded streets, parks, dedicated shop fronts, municipalities, no mention of suburban boroughs whatsoever.
Sounds riveting.
Doesn’t it just!
Some things are not written to be read aloud.
All things are written to be read. He settled on the floor, his shoulder blades against the curled edge of the tub. The giant tome opened on his upraised knees. There’s a lot of diagrams.
As there should be. Read the poems in between.
He began at the beginning and the low sonorous sound of his voice ran along the patterned lino and individual words became hard to distinguish.
It’s putting me to sleep, she complained.
A diabolical plan when you’re immersed up to your chin in water. It’s putting me to sleep, too. Admittedly.
But
Yes
Can you imagine how we came to this. How we left our caves and discovered the meadows and then somehow devised city planning. Concrete.
Not intended as a jungle by any stretch.
No. But then why did it become so primitive?
Imagine Pan and a maenad lying on their backs in long meadow grasses, a creek burbling nearby. Birdsong and breezes in the treetops.
In Arcadia!
And somehow urbanism surfaced in their consciousness. The goat foot god must have known that would be the beginning of the end for him. The religion of the slurbs. The slow but sure death of the villagers.
Should we become pastoralists?
Too late for that, I’m afraid. Transcendentalists, perhaps?
She filled the cups of her hands with bath water and rinsed her face. You’re not joining me tonight?
I think I’d rather you get dressed and let’s walk down to the park, feed the ducks.
O’ that they were swans. The waterfowl are all asleep, my dreamer. Tucked into the bushes.
Beneath the debris of the unhoused.
You’re getting morose. From a book! I’ll get dressed. Go mix us up some drinks and pour them into our Stanleys and we will wander the city for a while and get slightly drunk. We can look for new For Sale signs.
No escape to a life in the country for us?
What on earth would we do in all that wide open space?
alycewilsonhalfshellvenusrayaso's at the top. The link to the poll is here. As always, we could really use more outside readers, so if you're so inclined, please check out the entries on that poll and vote for your favorites!meridian_rose
bleodsweanHe lay beside her
Listening to her breathe
For two
played that over in his mind and thought no
For three
For each of us
she breathes
When he fell into sleep he dreamt
He was inside the earth, inside a cave
Dark but safe
A hearth fire
Flame light flickering on the walls
Blood red and illuminating two figures seated beside it
Naked and on all fours crawling forward
The distance was exhausting
On his belly pulling
Across the floor of the earthen womb
The two were women
Mother
Crone
paying him no attention
Murmuring to each other
In voices muffled to his ear
But familiar and for a long moment
He lay content and felt the world expand
In the dream he became aware
It was time to wake
He pulled his body upward to a lotus and watched the two
Through slitted eyes as though the dim
Fire light was sun light
Here’s the secret
Keep it secret
I cannot
You must be able to
Don’t tell me
Please don't tell me it
The mother held her newborn to her breast
This is the weaver, she told him
She showed him the cord
anchored inside her body
Tethered to the child
this is the measure
the crone reached across with glinting shears
and cut
meridian_rosebleodsweanShe was asleep, dreaming. And in the dream
there was a girl child,
innocent but serious, opened but mysterious,
blonde ringlets and bare footed
Running to and fro
A forgotten joyousness ensouled
They were upstairs, in his front room, all of them
Herself and himself,
her summer girls and their goat boys,
his messenger and boatman,
and even the moon. Lounging as was their wont,
drinking and smoking, bantering and laughing
listening to the grandmother clock tick the seconds
as though each minute was a favourite song
The child a focus of no one’s attention
but her own
and she was fiercely focused
because somehow
the girl child had found her secret heart,
clutching it against her body with both hands as she scampered
Let me see, she told the child,
show me what you have there
Imploring and intentful
Aware she did not want to frighten her
When at last she heeded,
Solemnly obeying,
Coming forward, leaning against her knees,
she gently gently lifted her heart from the offering hands
and settled back into a rocking chair
beside a hearth
She opened her blouse to offer her breast
because her heart was a nursling daughter,
slick with blood and vernix and
new born.
tonithegreatgarnigal, who took on the companion topic "Oxytocin Loop." I'll provide a link to her entry at the end of mine. We wrote them to be read starting with mine.garnigal's entry here.meridian_rose
meridian_rose - Photo: Butterflymeridian_rose - Digital ID - NOeeyore_grrl - LJ Idol - Wheel of Chaos - Wk 8 - Infrastructure (HOME GAME) (though not new, newly shared)bleodswean - LJ Idol - Wheel of Chaos - Wk 8 - Infrastructurealycewilson - Week 8: Infrastructurehalfshellvenus - Ukes and Yodelsmeridian_rose - Lands of Magic miscellanybleodswean - LJ Idol - Wheel of Chaos - Wk 7 - BATmeridian_rose - Graphics - incorrect quotesbleodswean - LJ Idol - Wheel of Chaos - Wk 7 - Oxytocin Looptonithegreat - LJ Idol, Wheel of Chaos! Week 7 - BAT - collaboration challengemeridian_rose - Bulls in the City - Birmingham art trailbranchandroot