Matthew King

This is how the robots can save us, actually: see what the robots are doing? Look, you're doing it too, stop it

I don't think anyone is as well prepared for chatbots coming up with reasons that it's absolutely the case that there are three b's in blueberry as those of us who cut our online teeth on usenet

A black and white photograph of a young John Cusack staring with a vaguely penetrating blankness

BIRT John Cusack invented the Gen Z stare

YOU MUST CHILL! YOU MUST CHILL!
Where's the Lloyd Dobler for our times, that's what I want to know

CHOOSING WELL Worms move by eating. Imagine every verb arriving past your open mouth. Imagine the world is what you hold inside. An equal constant pressure to hold the loosening you are, imagine that. To not decide but nourish on each path you make, to choose dirt verdure with just motion, to know your worth by the earth you take, that your worth coincides with you, so you can't lose it except to lose you, when your stillness gathers you from making ground to be it. Imagine, every other's every right turn passing through your every move.

Sealey Challenge 2025, Day 10: from Derelict Bicycles by Dale Tracy, "Choosing Well"

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Not a big fan of any team's little dance moves when they get a hit but the Dodgers' uncanny valley robot-toddler wiggle is just too much

OTOH he has arguably invented minimum wage and set a pretty decent one, just with a convoluted penalty mechanism for companies that fail to comply

Got stung by a yellowjacket or something and I must say this searing physical pain is a nice distraction from the soul-crushing weather
Look MEN you don't need to go joining fight clubs or whatever just get yourself a box of yellowjackets and once a day reach in and close your hand on one

Evidence increasingly suggests you live at the Mallorytown ONroute

It's times like these I wonder most what in the world the probability of precipitation numbers in the weather forecasts are supposed to mean. Math gone on holiday. Maybe 10% means there is a 10% chance that it would ever, in all of time, rain, just once, given what's known of the current conditions

Skipper Butterfly with Zinnia Disc Florets Skipper Butterfly with Zinnia Disc Florets. Photo taken near Marmora, Ontario. Copyright Matthew King. E-mail birdsandbeesandblooms@gmail.com to inquire concerning use or purchase.

Pic of the week: Skipper Butterfly with Zinnia Disc Florets
birdsandbeesandblooms.com/2025/08/09/s...

The tour guide showed our group the local sights. I am the tour guide. He pointed overhead. That is the sky. He pointed to the past. That was long ago. The tour went on and on. Eventually I was the only one left in the group. He pointed to an unfamiliar house across the street. Hey, that's where you live. I followed him inside. He pointed to two people I'd never seen before. This must be your wife and child. My child smiled. He showed me his sore tooth. According to the brochure this was the happiest I'd ever been. My wife played our song and danced with the guide. I took it all in.

Sealey Challenge 2025, Day 9: from Like a Trophy from the Sun by Jason Heroux

That's it, I am now the poet laureate of a kind reminder that the average person who has worked with an elephant barfing berries and cream cheese softened by getting a lot of people outsmarting themselves to be in a row is not available until the robots are already in place to live NEXT DOOR TO MARY

VISIT TO TORONTO, WITH COMPANIONS The streets are new, the harbour is new also; the lunatic asylum is yellow. On the first floor there were women sitting, sewing; they looked at us sadly, gently, answered questions. On the second floor there were women crouching, thrashing, tearing off their clothes, screaming; to us they paid little attention. On the third floor I went through a glass-panelled door into a different kind of room. It was a hill, with boulders, trees, no houses. I sat down and smoothed my gloves.

The landscape was saying something but I couldn't hear. One of the rocks sighed and rolled over. Above me, at eye level three faces appeared in an oblong space. They wanted me to go out to where there were streets and the Toronto harbour I shook my head. There were no clouds, the flowers deep red and feathered, shot from among the dry stones, the air was about to tell me all kinds of answers

Sealey Challenge 2025, Day 8: from The Journals of Susanna Moodie by Margaret Atwood, "Visit to Toronto, with Companions"

Gotta give a nod to Fred McGriff's trade-mate from the Yankees, Immaculate Grid hall of famer Mike Morgan

Thanks, Christine, very happy to have this poem at Autumn Sky!

On a Beautiful Afternoon in August by Matthew King Editor’s Note: This musical sonnet carries the reader into the speaker’s reluctance to face that most difficult of weather—oneself.

Grateful to @chrissiemkl.bsky.social for running this anapestic tetrameter sonnet of mine--very much based on a true story, and as painfully pertinent now as when the first line popped up in my head near exactly three years ago--in today's Autumn Sky Daily!
autumnskypoetrydaily.com/2025/08/08/o...

FORTY WEEKS Whatever we do the news keeps coming. Any day can be any day now. Changing the channel only a tuning inside ourselves, a search for a signal. Whenever your mother presses the bulge of your feet, you press back. A reflex and a game. A conversation. You talk us through long days. What a distance we've come we could say at the end of each night. Some minute loss of life. Another small cobble of weather and wealth. That's the thing about news— you've heard it before. At this point you could almost write it yourself.

Sealey Challenge, Day 7: from The News (@gaspereaupress.bsky.social) by Rob Taylor (@roblucastaylor.bsky.social), "Forty Weeks"

YouTube video by Hawksley Workman - Topic Smoke Baby

Song of the summer
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THE GHOSTS OF THE SPACE DOGS Everyone is their friend in cosmic darkness: Sweeping under the capsule, miles of oceans, Dancing trees full of little mottled birds, and Somewhere there is a meadow, huge and windy. Waiting there are the patient, smiling People, White coats billowing, waving giant sticks and Shouting, Honeybee! Foxy! Laika! Get it! That is, maybe, what all those Space Dogs thought of. Lying flat under starlight, we know they're up there, Circling: science's cheerful lost explorers, Suited, pressurized, bully beef and biscuits Ready; now, with the booster rockets silent. Not the dizzying swell of rising heat and Not the carbon dioxide building slowly, Filling dog brains with thoughts of clouds and rabbits, Words of gentleness, belly-scratching fingers; Not the creeping parades with jeeps and banners, Farm girls stirring the air with hoes and rifles, Nor the rapturous sighs of stamp collectors, Pausing thoughtfully over Laika's image, Placed with tweezers on mats of royal velvet, Green, unfurled, like the best of all intentions, Like an arm with a stick cast forth to orbit, Like a heavenly meadow flush with rabbits. Watching. All of those dampish noses pressing Porthole glass, as the moon emerges perfect, Hanging there, like the face of someone loving Passing over the water bowl's calm surface.

Sealey Challenge 2025, Day 6: from Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway by Alexandra Oliver, "The Ghosts of the Space Dogs"

iii The city is a desert with water on every side And strong working people Pushing along. Soon I will be one of them. X forgave Peter three times three Then went into a nearby garden to cry. A rejected gesture turns to syrup. It has a sickening taste And its color is maroon. It is a substance you carry around like an island. I told you love produces more love Until it is marooned in its own dark hands. Then it knows something.

Sealey Challenge 2025, Day 5: from Fanny Howe's chapbook Tramp, which inaugurated the @vallummag.bsky.social chapbook series in 2005

In this paper I will demonstrate that it is morally obligatory for the sky to rain, a lot, at my house, immediately

Ha, well, it's a Jessica Whipple classic!

I was never a Computer Guy but I was fortunate enough to be hanging around the internet for the last five minutes of the time when you couldn't help picking up enough stuff to not completely miss some decent jokes for the rest of your life

Poem in Which I Am a Cartoon Character I am a bright pink blob with long eyelashes  but no genitalia. When a part of me falls off, I’m whole by the next scene. My squeaky voice  annoys parents, but toddlers get a kick out of me. My name is Denise Peace and in every episode I try to mend broken friendships by asking  feuding cartoon characters to see both sides. I mediate between a dog and cat who in the end see eye to eye. I get purple parents to accept their yellow child. I help the do-gooders convince corporate polluters to go green.  I’m namby-pamby to the max. The little ones love my fuchsia cheeriness but get bored  with me by first grade. Some kids even regret liking me in the first place and pull the threads off the plush doll made in my likeness. They retire  their Denise Peace merchandise—sippy cups and picture books a mainstay of yard sales. Making peace is stupid, for sissies, they say. Or it works in cartoons but not in real life. Middle schoolers despise me, deny they ever watched my show. They call me fat and wonder why I have no tits, why I am always naked, and how, for fuck’s sake, I could be so naïve.

Sealey Challenge 2025, Day 4: from Denise Duhamel's @rattlepoetry.bsky.social chapbook In Which, "Poem in Which I Am a Cartoon Character"

YouTube video by Ace Records Gil Scott-Heron - Whitey On the Moon (Official Audio)

Nuclear reactor on the moon? Who else but
youtu.be/goh2x_G0ct4?...

Weather Underground hourly forecast showing questionable probabilities of significant rainfall over the next several hours

I WANT TO BELIEVE

Ayup

What an illustration of Plato's tyrant as the supremely *erotic* person, where eros is the principle of unboundedness, both transcendence and transgression: boundless appetite and boundless thumos, obviously, but boundless reason?? Yes, of course, endless (not only verbal) logorrhea!