I hate that it had to be done in memoriam instead of normal celebration, but I love that Nathaniel Parker read Wilfred Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth" (1917) for Derek Jarman, from the first edition he was given when he played the poet in Jarman's War Requiem (1989). He made his feature debut clutching its holograph ink in his cold hand, laid out like an effigy with the mortal candle-flicker pinpointed in his dark eyes until the greatcoat he would no longer need against the slither and freeze of the trenches was flung furiously across him like a shroud: the author who has always been dead. He was perhaps more beautiful than the real-life Owen, but he had the mustache and the patent dark hair exact. I never remember him as the living man at work on his poems by the lantern-light of a dugout or kneeling beside the barbed-wire snarl of the friend he brought to his death, but on the other side of a fire-sheeted abstract of towns shelled to skeletons when the parable of the old man and the young has already killed him, his face a ghost-powder of lime and his notebooks and tin hat springing with the green turf of war cemeteries, the sacrificial Isaac himself led to a tomb of waste ground and slaughtered by a diabolical cardinal in a butcher's apron to the applause of a crowd of pantomime-rouged profiteers. The image haunted me, the poet telling his own death, writing his own ghost poem. It got into "Red Is for Soldiers" (2013), which I wrote for Armistice Day in a year the living links of memory had finally snapped. And Jarman who was already HIV-positive at the time of filming died younger than he should have, no government's hand stayed by a child-poet's angel to spare him, either. Any number of poems could have been read for his memory, from Christopher Marlowe to his own words, but this one had so many echoes. It makes me think well of Parker that he thought of it. He was not one of Jarman's muses, but he didn't forget.

I did not get out of bed until after noon. Hestia was curled at the foot of it to make sure. It was the first real sleep I'd gotten all week. Outside in breezy contrast to the last couple of days of November for May, we seem to be having a kind of spring-rinsed, sunshowery day. I have eaten a peanut butter granola bar. Hestia has wrapped her tail possessively, temple-cat-fashion, around my mug.

Because the internet is hazardous to the human condition, within the same five minutes I read some evolutionary psychology on atheism and ran into a reminder of the persistence of ace discourse and experienced a similar resurgence of antipathy. Any discussion of atheism predicated on a framework of faith would always fail to find purchase on me, but even when expounded by a self-identified atheist it grinds my gears to find the state explained only in terms of lack: an inability to imagine, a disaffection with religion, a failure to be socialized to it, a decision against it, all negative paths of arrival, no neutrally variant initial condition. Basically just replicate most of that complaint for discussions of sexuality, since if there is one thing the human species does seem to be majority-wired for, it's sloppy othering. It has occurred to me before that I was shielded from a lot of damage by coming at so-called normality from such an angle that not only did it make too little sense to me to feel aspirational, I didn't recognize for years what much of it was supposed to look like. But I'm also just kind of starting to have it in for the alpha privative. Defining by not still lets the thing it isn't set the terms.

WERS has been playing Jesse Welles' "Horses" (2025) on a near-daily basis for weeks now and because I too belong to this conflicting species, I feel that generally I agree with its message of letting go of self-defeating hatreds and divisions in the bigger picture of stellar time and at the same time the government of my country is pursuing policies of active harm to just about everything which seems to limit the degree to which I should be reasonably expected to let down my guard. Now I suppose I get to worry that finding a popular folk song naive means I have just flipped into the last verse of "Love Me, I'm a Liberal."