iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

If I ever publish a book of my work, this will be the brief for the cover design.

Cover art for Simple Headphone Mind by Stereolab / Nurse With Wound

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Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Same energy 🤘🏻😝🤘🏻

Cover art of Loveless by My Bloody Valentine

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Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

“Tante Miele” looks like she’s about to drop this year’s most hotly anticipated analogue rhythms

A totally sick 1920s print advert for Miele washing machines

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Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I treated this little swan family to some oats earlier today on an Amsterdam canal 🦢🦢🦢🦢

Photo of four swans eating oats on an Amsterdam canal

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Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

New #micropoem by me inspired by... something.

Text of a micropoem by Ben Blench, it reads:
The sun
The dread sun

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Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

Mo’ pages, mo’ ‘rasures.

Photo of a paperback with words and word fragments circled in pencil to create an erasure poem:

All your importance - nothing
Your eyes
Your anxiety
A sense of water
Then breath
You sink into shadow over and over
We're far from the light.

Text of an erasure poem by Ben Blench:

All your importance - nothing
Your eyes
Your anxiety
A sense of water
Then breath
You sink into shadow over and over
We're far from the light.

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Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

I picked up a paperback from a street library. I didn’t like it, so I turned it into erasure poems. Here’s one! #poem #poetry #erasure

Photo of a page of a book with selected words and word fragments circled in pencil to create an erasure poem:

Everything is terrible
We watch loops
Allow ourselves our certainties
A dour life
The arrival of hell.

Text of a poem by Ben Blench:

Everything is terrible
We watch loops
Allow ourselves our certainties
A dour life
The arrival of hell.

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Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

Still buzzing from last night’s extraordinary, transcendent gig by Sunn O))) at @paradisoadam.bsky.social Many thanks to the EHBO lady who tweezed the earplug from my left ear afterwards LOL

Photo of the stage in the main room of the Paradiso, Amsterdam l, set up for a performance by Sunn O))) Thirty amplifiers stacked and arranged like an amp-henge. Red stage lights.

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Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

Here's Willie Thorne (RIP to a real one) having his lunch with a budgie on his shoulder. Plate of selected biscuits. Bottle of salad cream. Massive bowl of sugar. And what's going on with that tiny, glass fronted cabinet on the wall above the kettle?

Photo of snooker player Willie Thorne having his lunch with a budgie perched on his shoulder.

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Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

“I had never seen poets before, one poet yes but not poets.” From The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein

Photo of a page from the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein.

The text reads: I can so well remember the first time Gertrude Stein took me to see Guillaume Apollinaire. It was a tiny bachelor’s apartment on the rue des Martyrs. The room was crowded with a great many small young gentlemen. Who, I asked Fernande, are all these little men. They are poets, answered Fernande. I was overcome. I had never seen poets before, one poet yes but not poets.

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Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

I visited the British Library the other day. Of all the books and all the pages in the place, this one presented itself to me.

Photograph of an art book featuring a quote from Anselm Kiefer. The text reads “Art is longing. You never arrive, but you keep going in the hope that you will.”

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Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

I'm super happy to be able to share this link to one of my poems, just published in the "Featured Creators" section of the @fullhouselitmag.bsky.social website. Go there! Read it! Or listen to me reading it to you, if that's the kind of thing you're into. www.fullhouseliterary.com/poetry/how-t...

Screenshot of a page on the Full House Literary website featuring a poem by Ben Blench, entitled "How to survive the apocalypse"

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Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

Having a great time getting stomped into a pulp by the monsters in DEVASTATION SONGS, the @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social anthology of Kaiju writing. Too many good ones to highlight so here's an especially stomach-turning monstrosity by @poetbex.bsky.social

Cover of DEVASTATION SONGS, an Anthology of Kaiju Writing on Broken Sleep Books

Text of a poem by Bex Hainsworth, entitled Globster:

Something has washed up on the shore.
A mass of greying flesh, a lumpy silhouette,

with one string of carcass that could be a tentacle,
or embedded kelp, or a plesiosaur neck.

With the gravity of the uncategorisable,
saltwater is drawn around its chthonic body,

retreats, then returns for cyclical scrutiny.
Barnacle stars scattered across a sky of black skin

lead to a translucent flap, like the bulb of a jellyfish.
It could be an eye, or some other bloated organ,

slumping above a clump of jagged shells,
maybe teeth, maybe swallowed bones.

A curved tool, like a beak or a claw,
jabs two briny points into oozing sand.

The stink of death keeps the gulls wary.
There is a net, orange, obscene, wrapped

around its slender end. Blubber bursts
through tight diamonds of woven chains

stretching back into the sea, like Genesis.
One flabby island bears scars, perhaps a predator,

perhaps a propeller, and another is frothy
with plastic loops, squeezed by canless ripples.

Its dark, sleek hide shines like a mirror.
We should recognise monstrosity.

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Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

Legends, both. This bit from John’s autobiography will stay with me forever LOL

Text from John Virgo’s autobiography: Once I got to the This Is Your Life studios they handed me a glass of champagne and I felt a bit better. Finally, the time came for us to do the show. My daughter and son came out, then my siblings and other relatives and friends came in one by one. Next up some of my snooker friends joined us.
Alex Higgins was one of them. When he walked on we had a big hug but as he shook my hand he whispered into my ear, 'You're still a cunt'

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Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

Found poem in an English language transcript of a Dutch voicemail

Garbled English transcript of a Dutch voicemail. The text reads: The heaven is a belt in for bumpness..,...•.
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"...... Still to it,
nit tango, price of the fear, telephone contact, if you can, Duncan Jahir, achheif, not that you need me, telephone is
more.....
111•
So, it's ain un feder to hand.. The heaven is a belt inf

Garbled English transcript of a Dutch language voicemail. The text reads: hand.. The heaven is a belt in for abundance, you'll be talking about.
Some a meton, spray for a muyer virodna, and it's spray for name, incident, yo, contact, and of maniram, from stone, and onsimisi.. Spelt to it, need long ago, priced of a fear, telephone contact message, you can..! going here you need me telephone

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Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

No reason, just LOL. Prints of this @daveyjones.bsky.social banger are available from philiplarkin.com/product/lark... #poetry #philiplarkin #viz #space #doom

A cartoon by Davey Jones for Viz Comic.
The title is "The Collected Poems of Philip Larkin in Space"
We see a starship pilot warning: "Captain Larkin, our ship is caught in the gravitational pull of Doom Planet... moment by moment, we are inching inexorably towards oblivion!"
Larking replies: "Tell me about it."

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Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

"A hedgehog in a thicket" 🦔 Really lovely poem, this. From Jo Matthews' debut chapbook, Sunlight Later: www.cathexisnorthwestpress.com/product-page...

Text of a poem by Jo Matthews, entitled "Birds":

The branches above are breaking into the sky —
as birds like ink on air swirl from trees to flight
great black lungfuls of them freewheeling across
the white winter sky, humming the secret rhythm
of fragment to solid, then loosening into dance.
Look up.

I wonder what it is in me that still fears my light
turning instead to the sharp inhale of darkness —
and I keep thinking: don’t let me mess this up
me, with my gaze skewed down to tangled ground
missing this quiet kindness, this wild mess, this show.
Be still.

The sky is still mine if I want it
the ground doesn’t care if I’m a poet or a mother
the birds don’t care if the words fly out of me
or fester on vein branches in my mind
waiting for the perfect moment to be set free.
Let go.

Fear comes when you have something to lose.
Once, I was a puffin on a cliff-face, a hedgehog in a thicket,
a terrapin watching shadows blur on faces in the morning sun.
Once, I was the white on the wave and the notes on a piano
playing until the dark in my heart became a song taking flight.

Under the light of a single star, I waited blindly
for the call, for the hair-breath moment of arriving
looking at the light for the first time shining —
and a mother not sure if her child had survived.
Once, I squeezed through a star-hole to be here,

once, I hopscotched across the dark glass sky
to claim my name, once I was the wind and the light
riding hidden eddies to a freedom I didn’t know was mine.
Once, I counted tears until they became stars in the sky —
or poems: blossoming, or birds: laughing.
Take flight.

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Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

New side quest unlocked: keep the numbers in sync FOREVER

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Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 26/10/2025

Yes *farmers* but also this prick: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William... - "I'm awake so everyone else should be too. Also I want to play more golf". Fucking *golf*!

A screenshot of a Wikipedia page about Daylight Saving Time, highlighted text reads "Many publications credit the DST proposal to prominent English builder and outdoorsman William Willett, who independently conceived DST in 1907 during a pre-breakfast ride when he observed how many Londoners slept through a large part of a summer day. Willett also was an avid golfer who disliked cutting short his round at dusk."

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Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 15/10/2025

Sharing this little beauty by Jo Matthews from her debut poetry collection "Sunlight Later" on Cathexis Northwest Press: www.cathexisnorthwestpress.com/product-page... - ten years of love and loneliness, birth and motherhood, grief and grace, and the search for the sacred in the natural world

Text of a poem by Jo Matthews, entitled "Sometimes, who I am"

Sometimes, I smoke one cigarette in the park, hiding behind
the Indian restaurant, listening to poems spoken in a soft Irish voice.

Sometimes, I wish those words were mine, watch daisies vibrate in the wind
write down the words ‘feather’ and ‘crossable’ and ‘raven’, just in case.

Sometimes, I silent-shout into my pillow at night pleading to the shining god
I half-remember just to send me back to sleep, just sleep – that’s all.

Sometimes, I ride my bike fast into wind as trees lean into a tunnel –
a great green Mexican wave for my arrival, my heart fast and on fire

as the who I was then and the who I will be race to catch up with me.
What I would say to the who I was then is this: Tell the truth.

Tell the truth to that gleaming cluster of wanting you lugged around:
That the world will tilt and burn and smash your heart

But afterwards come feather cracks that leave room for light,
such light that clusters and rages in uncatchable pools.

Sometimes, the heron seems to know who I am, lone hunter
his blinking eye scorching forests for secret forage, knowing

sometimes I wish for a freedom that will never be mine
that once crossable river now a white wash of love and tethering

to raven hair and wild newness, soft-cell aliveness inching
with such light into the shadows that kept me safe for so long.

What I would say to the who I will be who races me through
the trees is this: the world tips, scorches, shatters, but anyway -

now it’s too late to let go.

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Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 02/10/2025

If you're really curious about the poem you can scroll back through my posts here and find it. Here's a photo of a swan to inspire you.

A photo of a single swan chilling out the back of the RAI exhibition centre in Amsterdam

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Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 03/09/2025

"...what the computer people don't realize..." #dancinganimals #vonnegut #fart

Kurt Vonnegut tells his wife he's going out to buy an envelope:

"Oh, she says well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet?
And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.

I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know. The moral of the story is, is we're here on Earth to fart around.

And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals."

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Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 02/09/2025

Obviously fuck what Twitter has become but thank you @matthewmcsmith.bsky.social for doing the TopTweetTuesday thing on Bluesky. Here’s one of mine. #writing #poetrycommunity #writers #poet #poetic #poetrylovers #writingcommunity

Photo of Ben Blench sitting on a swan bench wearing a Powell Peralta Vato Rat baseball cap and a black shirt.

Bio for poet Ben Blench:

Ben Blench writes poems, hymns, and incantations about life and love. He has been published by Broken Sleep, Full House, Lamb, Rough Diamond, and Visual Verse. He lives in Amsterdam and mostly just wants to go back to bed.

Text of a poem by Ben Blench, entitled "Recycling"

Into the bright, wet streets
To meet a friend
Take a laptop for repair
Light from the sun blessing

Lampposts, 5G masts
Tram rails, power lines
Bus shelters, drain covers
Cordoned-off roadworks

Wardens in hi-vis suits waving
Me through the junction
Blue jays in a cherry tree
Coming into blossom.

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Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 14/08/2025

I regret to inform you that I am back in an office, writing corporate hate poems again.

Text of a poem by Ben Blench, entitled "Seamless omni-channel experience"

That was an interesting meeting
You lie over lunch in the communal kitchen

Some fuck has microwaved a fish curry
Or something
Stunk the whole place out

You chew on slide after slide
Of neat bullets

KPIs
Initiatives
Learnings

A drone carefully
Reads each line aloud

Customer delight.

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Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 05/08/2025

Micro-targeting at its finest

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Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 10/07/2025

I found this micropoem in a weirdly written iMDB synopsis of Jurassic World: Rebirth

Screenshot of four words from the iMDB synopsis of Jurassic World: Rebirth. The text reads: "Within them, a drug."

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Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

New Le Guin bike basket sticker: “There is no end… all we have is means” for the special attention of @julie-phillips.com

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Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

I’m rewatching Breaking Bad so heeeeeeeere’s Walt!

Text of a poem by Walt Whitman, entitled “When I heard the learn’d astronomer”

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

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Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 28/05/2025

I wrote a poem about this a few years ago.

Text of a poem by Ben Blench, entitled "Career opportunity my arse"

Your jobs are gone but it’s OK
you can retrain says the Chancellor
What he means is banking is
more important than music

I retrain as a blackbird
Eat worms, sing
I am weightless
Like the markets

I try again, reimagine myself
As a chevron, pointing
To an expressionless sky
I retrain as an astronaut

I retrain as dat boi
I become a guillotine
I become a dead meme
I become a stick figure without hands

I get so good at it — retraining —
I feel called to share my gift
For a fee of course,
I’m not a fucking charity.

Now I help others find their way
I tell them: your job now
is to turf these pricks
out of their ministries

And when they whine
We can all sit in our bedrooms
Smashing the F button
On our battered keyboards

The channels hum with
Our collective crowing:
Your jobs are gone, now you
Rethink! Reskill! Reboot!

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Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 28/05/2025

I wrote a poem about this a few years ago!

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Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 22/04/2025

And then I think to myself "so what?" — killer art stuff from Joe Brainard

Text of a poem by Joe Brainard, entitled "Art"

Looking through a book of drawings by Holbein I realize several moments of truth. A nose (a line) so nose-like. So line-like. And then I think to myself "so what?" It's not going to solve any of my problems. And then I realize that at the moment of appreciation I had no problems. Then I decide that this is a pretty profound thought. And that I ought to write it down. This is what I have just done. But it doesn't seem so profound anymore. That's art for you.

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Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 21/04/2025

This is what happens when I'm trying to work but the snooker's on

Text of a poem by Ben Blench, entitled "Transcript of a YouTube video about hotel art"

I'm staring at the wall
and I’m thinking
about painting
a Japanese street scene
rainy night in Chiba
all neon
all reflections
all the light
and I'm adding in

the deferential gaze
of a hot kawaii girl
sort of overseeing
sort of looking like
she’s feeling
kinda tired of being human
and I’m getting the impression
that I’m not really present
in the room

walk around
lie down on the floor
in the air conditioning
with the light coming in
and it’s beckoning the city
that I’m thinking
about painting
out of me
and I'm staring at the wall.

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Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 30/03/2025

"If I'm up, everyone else should be up too. Also I should be able to play golf more." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dayligh...

Screenshot of a Wikipedia page with the following section highlighted:

Many publications credit the DST proposal to prominent English builder and outdoorsman William Willett, who independently conceived DST in 1907 during a pre-breakfast ride when he observed how many Londoners slept through a large part of a summer day. Willett also was an avid golfer who disliked cutting short his round at dusk.

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Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

"She knows he means well, but, eventually, he'll leave" Ryan Teitman being all nebulous and stuff

Text of a poem by Ryan Teitman, entitled "A Cloud and a Ghost Walk into a Bar"

The cloud orders nothing; the ghost orders nothing. The bar has been empty for years. The cloud begins talking about time: how it's a social construction, how it's malleable in relativistic physics, how waking up one minute before your alarm goes off is a sign of good sleep hygiene. The ghost nods and smiles, even though there's no way for the cloud to see she's there. She thought they would have so much in common: an incorporeal ontology, expertise in both floating and hovering, an appreciation for the films of Jean Renoir. But she knows he can't get over the fact she used to be human. If you go back far enough, that dirt used to be human, he says, gesturing out the door toward the bare patches in the highway median. You're just you. She knows he means well, but, eventually, he'll leave: become rain, fall to the ground, and vanish into the water table. So, that night, she leaves instead. As they float over an abandoned rail yard, she unwinds her fingers from his and flies west, for dozens of miles, before stopping under a clear, dark sky. The starlight moves in and out of her like a needle through fabric. She doesn't feel a thing.

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Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 23/03/2025

Warm, in love, letting go of nothing

Text of a poem by Ben Blench, entitled "Best before"

The boys have all unbuttoned their shirts, but the busy people
Are still bashing away at the world on their escalators and trams.

Not us. You rub your cheek on my shoulder and I drop my arm
Around your waist, loose and lazy in the heat of the day.

My left hand is fiddling with an empty scrap of cellophane
Holding it up to the sun and idly turning it over in my fingers

And it's nothing, really nothing. But look — look at how the light
Glances right through it, and glitters in its creases. It's pretty enough

To make me forget everything, and just as I do, you
Hold out your hand, and I surrender it without a word.

I have never felt so happy.

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Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

"I tell you I could speak again" Louise Glück OMFG

Text of a poem by Louise Glück, entitled "The Wild Iris"

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.

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Ben Blench @benblench.bsky.social · 15/03/2025

"...the earth a little darker than the sky at the horizon," a comforting death poem by Carl Adamschick. Posting in memory of my bike guy, Jeroen Kreeft. Rust zacht Jeroen 😭