Sly Concepts

Inktober Day 4 Prompt 'Murky'

Murky Inky Thoughts

My mind is a jar of midnight ink,
thick with dreams that never dried.
Each thought drifts heavy, slow,
a constellation drowned in shadow.

A quill leans in, trembling,
hungry for what the dark might give.
It stirs the silt of memory,
pulls up a shimmer,
a sentence,
a ghost.

The page waits like a tide,
white and wanting.
I spill, not knowing
which words will stain
and which will save.

Some nights the ink is mercy.
Some nights it’s too deep to reach the bottom.
But still, I write,
because even murky water
can mirror the stars.

Inktober Day 3 Prompt 'Crown'

Crown of Life

She wears the sun like a promise,
roots of faith woven through her hair.
Gold meets leaf,
and grace takes form in green.

Her strength is quiet,
endurance grown in secret soil.
Every breath a prayer,
every trial a bloom.

She does not grasp at glory,
it grows toward her,
gently, like morning light.
And when the world falls silent,
she is still crowned with life.

Inktober Day 2 Prompt 'Weave'

Wonder Stitched into Rhythm

She learned early
that words could shimmer.
That stories could soften
what life refused to change.

So she sat at her loom,
a tangle of thread and ache,
weaving worlds from scraps of sky.
When the house was too loud,
she painted it quiet.
When the night was too heavy,
she stitched in a moon.

She could spin sorrow
into silk if given time.
She could take the truth,
ragged and cold,
and wrap it in color
until even grief felt gentle.

They called her imaginative.
They never saw the cost,
how every bright thread
was pulled from somewhere tender.

Still, she wove.
Because the loom listened
when no one else did.
Because the stories she made
were kinder than the ones she lived.

And maybe that was her gift,
not escape,
but endurance.
Turning pain to pattern,
and fear to form,
until even the breaking
sounded like a song.

wonder stitched into rhythm.















Clearly, I am not off to a great start this year, already behind, but I am determined to complete Inktober, even if I am a little late. I really enjoyed participating last year and met so many amazing artists here. It has been a privilege to watch you all grow and push yourselves and your art even further over the past year. I'm excited to see the rest of this Inktober unfold, you all are so talented! Keep up the great work and hard work!

Inktober 2025 - Day 1 "Mustache"

The Datasets We Choose

We live in a world of inputs.
Images, headlines, voices,
each one a data point
training us to see,
to want,
to ignore.

The feed never stops.
It pulls our gaze from the very things that matter.
And we become complicit,
numb, scattered,
more machine than human,
hearts alive yet barely awake.

But what if we chose differently?
What if we trained our gaze
on mercy,
on love,
on prayers whispered in the dark?
What if we turned our attention
to the neighbor,
to the stranger,
to the ones they do not want us to see?

For one day
all the data will vanish.
The world will have tried
to reprogram us,
to steal us from the original Author
of our code.

Did we love?
Did we live awake?
Were we salt in the earth,
light in the dark?

The Study Sesh