A fevered lip burns with a passion and pepper of the moment. After a thought, it bites itself with teeth coated like the candy-stripers who ply their infectious good cheer and reticent good wishes before the imprisoned souls in torments unknown. A pinch -- that's all -- and then again the swirling carts go flying off to the next room. One penitent who sits wearily waiting for the extreme pronouncement lies mournfully gazing at the ceiling tiles, tracing the lineage of despair in the coolant soaked panels above his fixed gaze. This stain, he muses, looks like the missing coastline of Guyana, some millennia after the birth of Christ. That one, can that be the peninsula of freedom where General Custer caught up with the Yukon Jack that left behind the masses of privacy and emptiness? Ah, well, another moment has passed, and there will be another, and another. Always dripping slowly in molasses from cookery not bought or paid for but stirring slowly before the time eventual memory chooses to despise the words of flight.
Once he cried, "No hope! No hope exists before the awesome tableau of an unthinking, spittle-spitting, grub-chewing god of madness and infinite loneliness!" But now even that rejection seems limited in scope and the ticking of clock hands against the flowers falling over against the dying bicycles outside sounds an even more ominous note than the prattling voices inside his head. He starts to gesture towards his head, the thumb-and-forefinger pistol to receive the coda of suicide, but his arm is still in a cast, his other unlearned in butt-wiping, gun-shooting, change-picking up from the floor. Staring at the useless appendage, and then the other, one in its strait jacket of fear and the other dopily smiling in its ignorance, a snarl of anger soothes his irritated spirit.
The bent straw is praying. Leaves outside decide not to fall. Later there will be another procession of comets and miracles, his eyes fixed upon the ceiling interposed between. Somewhere a horse is shrugging off a feeling, a trickle of the butterfly wings of longing. The horse dreams of the last great stampede, across the sedge grass hills towards the sea. The powerful loins chew the dirt under his hooves, and at the precipice, he leaps and falls up, up, up into the sky.
Friday, August 7, 2009
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Make of It What You Will
Laughing at the paradigm of elephants, my throbbing kneecaps speak of the pain and suffering of the great angels we have heard on high. No more time for this sacred pretence of dreams, the latter-day thrombosis is felled with two strokes of the upside-down cake. Pelicans on patrol keep watch on a quiet city, though troubles have been known to eclipse both sun and moon in the before times, in the bad times. Latest news from the front leaves no doubt. We must all be ready to stand and defend our freedoms or the enemy within will consume us in her sweet, oh, so sweet madness.
Later the time started setting back two principles upon which we can all agree. This place is a shambles. No parking tickets can ever make up for the joy left unlived behind the clover on the soul patch of the giant goddess who rises from the oatmeal in the morning. No doubt that's the way she intended it. All powers and praises to the stations of the cross. If any man here has left undone business before him, let him speak now of the ocelot's ramblings in the city of the dead.
For time will spin backwards until the eterminty of silences bows down at her feet like an octoroon gamboling before the pool hall, though neither pool nor halls frequent this quaint little village as they did formerly. A fishing expedition with dynamite and the repressed dreams of salmon falls by the wayside as our guide seeks some semblance of dreaming stumps from the blasted land before us. In the distance, small gunfire craters disturb the pastoral beauty of the scene only with their unblinking gaze and the severed limbs of professionals who no longer practice their craft. The pronoun is rather late to the game, finding its way into the otherwise sound processes which have been hallowed since time immemorial, though those, too, are not so seeming as once they were before the breakfast of the gods on the day Valhalla rose and declared itself sleepy from the constant bickering of travel. No suitcases before them, they plunge mightily into the abyss of savings, never to return, at least not in this timeline.
We suffer less and less well than our ancestors, distanced from both the pangs of regrets and the red time of mother's hemorrhage. The seascape littered with floating corpses of fish and porpoises leave us hollow, though only a fragment remains of the song sung at our birth by the great sky and the dark night that swaddled us into this mangy world of depression, recession, and desperation. Later on, things got solid again, but the change had come and no time was left to recapitulate the somber madness of the initial spark of joy and meaning that ushered us into this plane. We slowly make our way back to the car, happy to be once again on solid ground, though our moral convictions strain against this oh so golden lariat. Justice? Nay, say rather that a band of black-haloed angels went out into the night to wreak vengeance for the epistles left unread and the roads not taken, though it seems they lost their way mush as I do. No answer cries out through the night, though the ravening dog's spittle bespecks the landscape of the lonely moors, we find no parallel tracks to assay in the undying, unwinking night. If ever there were to be a search for missing children, this valley has claimed them all, named them all, and no more account can be had of leftover spunk and sweat besides the lazy creatures which feed on the charcoal bricks of former souls left for dead by the highway. It may be that their remains are a lost chance, or a chance meeting in the parting ways of sunshine and night. Will it ever burn as blackly as that morn when the sun stood green before the world and he turned to you and spoke the magic words you so longed to hear, words which now you cannot remember, even at the cost of your immortal soul?
Later the time started setting back two principles upon which we can all agree. This place is a shambles. No parking tickets can ever make up for the joy left unlived behind the clover on the soul patch of the giant goddess who rises from the oatmeal in the morning. No doubt that's the way she intended it. All powers and praises to the stations of the cross. If any man here has left undone business before him, let him speak now of the ocelot's ramblings in the city of the dead.
For time will spin backwards until the eterminty of silences bows down at her feet like an octoroon gamboling before the pool hall, though neither pool nor halls frequent this quaint little village as they did formerly. A fishing expedition with dynamite and the repressed dreams of salmon falls by the wayside as our guide seeks some semblance of dreaming stumps from the blasted land before us. In the distance, small gunfire craters disturb the pastoral beauty of the scene only with their unblinking gaze and the severed limbs of professionals who no longer practice their craft. The pronoun is rather late to the game, finding its way into the otherwise sound processes which have been hallowed since time immemorial, though those, too, are not so seeming as once they were before the breakfast of the gods on the day Valhalla rose and declared itself sleepy from the constant bickering of travel. No suitcases before them, they plunge mightily into the abyss of savings, never to return, at least not in this timeline.
We suffer less and less well than our ancestors, distanced from both the pangs of regrets and the red time of mother's hemorrhage. The seascape littered with floating corpses of fish and porpoises leave us hollow, though only a fragment remains of the song sung at our birth by the great sky and the dark night that swaddled us into this mangy world of depression, recession, and desperation. Later on, things got solid again, but the change had come and no time was left to recapitulate the somber madness of the initial spark of joy and meaning that ushered us into this plane. We slowly make our way back to the car, happy to be once again on solid ground, though our moral convictions strain against this oh so golden lariat. Justice? Nay, say rather that a band of black-haloed angels went out into the night to wreak vengeance for the epistles left unread and the roads not taken, though it seems they lost their way mush as I do. No answer cries out through the night, though the ravening dog's spittle bespecks the landscape of the lonely moors, we find no parallel tracks to assay in the undying, unwinking night. If ever there were to be a search for missing children, this valley has claimed them all, named them all, and no more account can be had of leftover spunk and sweat besides the lazy creatures which feed on the charcoal bricks of former souls left for dead by the highway. It may be that their remains are a lost chance, or a chance meeting in the parting ways of sunshine and night. Will it ever burn as blackly as that morn when the sun stood green before the world and he turned to you and spoke the magic words you so longed to hear, words which now you cannot remember, even at the cost of your immortal soul?
Sunday, June 14, 2009
A Difficult Spot
As if the appliances didn't demand more and more stories though I'm sure they've heard them all a dozen times or more, the toaster pops out a request for a story about Lady Lydia. "Please!" he says, "a Lady Lydia story?" But there's always something else in the way. Today it was a pogo-stick and a garage full of pancake batter. The river of trolls that migrated from the northern mountains finds sweet solace in the maraschino cherries stored in the cupboards above the washer. Having sat through the Christmas season unused, it was surprising how much fight they had left in them.
It's not a dream she had. Not a waking reverie of castles and clouds that sustained her across the many lonely days. For sustained she was not; her evil bargain no bargain at all. Doomed to each day forget once more the revelations of the night before, and slumping cold-shouldered into the uncaring grey world off dawn, to lose the heart anew. Each day's dawning sounding the knell of a graveyard elegy, with its poetry removed and a checkbook in its place. And as if the cement walls were not solid and solemn enough, even the dreams grew ashes and confused and pointless, no safe harbor for the wracked wreck of lives not worth living, and not worth leaving.
A sponge fell between the stove and the counter. Left alone it sat cataloging the dusty, hair-wrapped small change and food jetsam beneath the stove. A pen cap lay mute under the gas line, its dead gaze fixed forever upon the tube above. The sponge imagined that back in the darkness, away near the floorboards, past sticky dusty unknown masses, imagined she saw an old, once shiny key. Though she knew it must only be another coin dropped carelessly to roll behind the stove, she pretended it to herself to be a long-lost key. Would it ever be found, to unlock friezes painted in Atlantis millenita before? And every day, in her dreaming, the dust settled on her porous surface and soul, until one day she dried completely away, leaving only her filthy abandoned shell, still staring at the ill illuminated shadow that might have been a key, but that was almost certainly a wayward coin.
It's not a dream she had. Not a waking reverie of castles and clouds that sustained her across the many lonely days. For sustained she was not; her evil bargain no bargain at all. Doomed to each day forget once more the revelations of the night before, and slumping cold-shouldered into the uncaring grey world off dawn, to lose the heart anew. Each day's dawning sounding the knell of a graveyard elegy, with its poetry removed and a checkbook in its place. And as if the cement walls were not solid and solemn enough, even the dreams grew ashes and confused and pointless, no safe harbor for the wracked wreck of lives not worth living, and not worth leaving.
A sponge fell between the stove and the counter. Left alone it sat cataloging the dusty, hair-wrapped small change and food jetsam beneath the stove. A pen cap lay mute under the gas line, its dead gaze fixed forever upon the tube above. The sponge imagined that back in the darkness, away near the floorboards, past sticky dusty unknown masses, imagined she saw an old, once shiny key. Though she knew it must only be another coin dropped carelessly to roll behind the stove, she pretended it to herself to be a long-lost key. Would it ever be found, to unlock friezes painted in Atlantis millenita before? And every day, in her dreaming, the dust settled on her porous surface and soul, until one day she dried completely away, leaving only her filthy abandoned shell, still staring at the ill illuminated shadow that might have been a key, but that was almost certainly a wayward coin.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
A new hope
Once again taking up pen to virtual paper, agonizing over the first scratches against the unforgiving blankness of the truest messenger of God, we prepare anew to launch into the black seas this small craft. Too little for true sailing, yet disdaining to hug the shoreline, we take bearings a last moment, and then set out...
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