Aspen Writes Poetry

it does not require a degree in politics to recognise a dying child stop dressing terror in diplomatic silk name the grief before the grief erases us all.

  The Guild of Builders did not,  as a rule,  admit pigs.  This was not due to speciesism, Ankh-Morpork was a progressive city where trolls ran banks and zombies were respected members of the civil service, but rather because pigs had a somewhat cavalier attitude toward load-bearing walls and building permits. Pig One (whose name was Barnaby,  though in the heavier,  noisier music venues around the Mended Drum he answered to  Swinestock ) stood back to admire his masterpiece.  It was a house made entirely of straw. It is an established fact across the universe that straw is a wonderful material for hats,  scarecrows,  and farm animals to sleep on,  but a distinctly suboptimal choice for keeping out atmospheric weather or hungry apex predators. “It’s organic, ” Barnaby grunted,  tuning his three-string bass guitar.  “It’s sustainable.  It’s got a real earthy, cosmic-folk-thrash vibe.  Plus,  I saved four hund...

euphemisms are designed for the comfort of those holding the pen not the ones under the rubble. Love and solidarity,  Aspen 

when you call a murder a  tragedy of fate you excuse the hands that built the bomb give the truth its sharpest edge speak the word they spend billions trying to hide.

A Note for Readers: In Aesop’s fable  The Sick Stag , an ailing beast lies weakened in its pasture, hoping for quiet recovery. Well-meaning and opportunistic forest animals visit to offer sympathy; yet while staying in the meadow, they graze upon every blade of grass, leaving the stag starved and destitute. It is a stark classical allegory for how external intervention, humanitarian theatre, and resource plunder often destroy those they claim to observe or assist.   The meadow bleeds into the stone. You lie beneath a sky of white-hot steel, your ribs mapped thin beneath a dusty coat, your breathing shallow as the falling night. And across the sea, the visitors arrive. They arrive with cameras and with heavy boots. They talk of  self-defence  beside the wall, then graze upon the grass beneath your head. They call your broken legs a  complex clash , they urge  restraint on both sides  through the smoke, while quietly pocketing the offshore gas, the ...

A Note for Readers: This piece takes its inspiration from Aesop’s classic fable,  The Leap at Rhodes  (often remembered by the Latin phrase  Hic Rhodus, hic salta ). In the original tale, a boastful athlete returns from foreign lands claiming he executed a world-record long jump on the island of Rhodes with countless witnesses. A weary bystander, unimpressed by the rhetoric, simply draws a line in the dirt and tells him:  “Here is Rhodes; jump here.” He tells it from the podium, every night. How down in Mar-a-Lago, on that sun-bleached isle, he took a running start against the fake, rigged wind and cleared the harbour in a single, perfect bound. A leap so vast, he says, the generals wept. A golden arc across the wine-dark sea. He wears the story like a heavy, gilded ring, turning it on his finger till it shines. You should have seen it,  his small, pursed mouth mouths. The crowd size. Millions. The sheer, impossible height...