She hears the house first. It cries like a hungry bairn. It belongs to Quality but seems familiar. Inquisitive like all urchins, she slips in through an inviting window that shafts a sunbeam over the floorboards. When she steps on the light, she trips. Into a life where Ma and Pa never died.
My new therapist thumbs her velvet lapel continuously as she exposes the source of my anguish. Seems I’m betrayed by an obsolete belief in a culturally-engendered fantasy of soul mates. I don’t care why she stole my husband and broke my heart. My pistol has no time for bullshit.
The origin myth of infant stars on the asteroid posits our coming in the weft of thread of gold and the warp or rainbow silk woven on the blind cosmic loom. In turn, we spin out to feed on the love and light of dying suns, our fate to shine on good and evil alike.
A cruiser brakes close by the broken-back trees framing a rickety tin-roof shack that emits an eye-tearing pungency. It was never a home–it’s a set from a low-budget Breaking Bad knock-off, and lashed to the porch are 2 sorry meth heads sitting in their own blood. (58)
So many dragons return from the interstellar deeps to lay claim to their stolen planet, their wings hide the light. As spaceships launch with their human cargo, dragons part to permit their exit & Sol paints the scales of his prodigal lovers in auroral glory.
Shelves of the museum gift shop tremble in the lights-out. Picasso’s bust humps downstairs & Van Gogh’s saws off a plaster ear. Mondrian’s print daubs his w/ red while Manet & Gauguin models stare coyly from their frames. Dirty dead artists recall the time no one gave a fig.
He’s a quick-switch human grenade, transforming in a flash from a gung-ho Navy Seal to an explosive center tackle on astroturf. He doesn’t keep up with official rules and can’t stop the slaughter when the ineffable deity of sudden death pulls the pin (49)
They’re on the run, but the wind makes parachutes of their jackets and scours their eyes with grit. Jack clings gladly to Amber’s warm hand but he’s shocked by its strength when she yanks him underground, out of the draft and into the dark.
New crop circles are magnets for pop-up parties that warp us back to Flower Power, when consciousness was on a high, free love on a roll, & none danced to the Man’s fiddle. No anarchists, these field barbers are only reminding us to re-imagine peace (w/ pop art peace sign).
Negative population growth closed the fertility clinics & birthed the age of the Bot-Babies, warm-body infants designed to deliver only the coziest parental experiences. Upgraded shells & education with real kids simulated maturation–A.I. monsters demanding human rights.
A nightfall hush of snow and shadow lays the canvas of a minimalist epic, a pregnant doe inscribing her creaking tread in an endless quest for some other perspective and scene where acorns drop like manna and her fawns dapple the sunlight. (pic of hoof prints in snow)
(Suzy Beezer): My step-mom’s an octogenarian maybe 75% rebuilt. She was a jail-bait starlet in the 20s and still stars in the ads she writes for her own beauty business, tho it’s more a hobby flirting with the red than a going concern. She enjoys her hobbies. Mostly men. (65)
New crop circles are magnets for pop-up parties that warp us back to Flower Power, when consciousness was on a high, free love on a roll, and no one danced to the Man’s fiddle. No anarchists, these field barbers are only reminding us to re-imagine peace. (Ban the bomb pop art.)
The vampire’s ghost sporting a whole new look with the bloody wooden stake appurtenance approaches from behind and whispers ‘Let me show you my coffin, little one.’ The pale girl shivers. But not in dread. She’s a ghost gourmet and hasn’t eaten for days.
Invincible was Ozymandias in his own mind. In the desert he built a colossal monument of his image, now broken by time and forgetting, though his carved words persist. If we look upon his sneering visage that spoke them, we despair for he is the future promised.
The casino’s smoke & mirror ambiance is the playground of the ultra-rich. In a global milieu of tiger heads, ivory & top-flight golf clubs, the spinning slots and roulette wheels capture the fattened souls. These are served hell-fried with aioli and bubbly.
She hefts the Hoover down the winding steps. Moans of the homeless sound as skeletal arms reach from the tents. She vacuums up bones, rags, sprung sofas, voices, empties. Time for a new class of cellar tenant: ghosts may be short on welfare checks but they’re clean.
Wary of love, a chef & a wine maven collide at a hospitality convention, when he douses her with a glass of Boisson Meursault and she showers him with Spicy Shellfish Melange. Serendipity cooks up a perfect pairing until he needs AA and she goes vegan.
Who murdered our VSS365 regulars, or swept them into space, or crashed their devices, or siphoned their words into the analphabetic vat beneath Manhattan, adjacent in fact to the wonton soup, said to be available for global distribution?
A drugged oblivion would black out the startling reality and halt the intricate, endless play of motive, action, and thoughtlessness. She’d needed sleep, only meant to shake the crying out of her baby. His tiny specter incites her to swallow every pill.
I linger in the liminal state of having read a book wherein realities blurred like ink on buried love letters & a stranger’s mind-gulped prose clamored for my time & did its best to suspect my disbelief. Inevitably, I slip away.
Periodically, he makes his way to the tavern and orders two 3-olive martinis. The glasses on the table scarred with memories weep condensate. It crystallizes when she appears, a comet rider with hair long and dark as history. She always shows on anniversaries.
Tainted souls disappeared from the city, and tracker pigs found pits of them, chewed and torn asunder. The de-souled are insouciant but theories abound. Were-spiritwolves, an atheist Manson cult, self-medication. My guess, Satan’s preliminary culling.
For his last birthday, honey cake. The honey is crystallized, but she microwaves it to liquid form & follows Ma’s recipe, precise even to the measure of rat poison. Married 7 years. The perfect commonplace for his disappearance into her wildflower plot.
Eternal Disco, haunt of veterans and youngsters, hormones thrumming to the rage of music fever: dirty dancing, furtive sex where the strobe light ended. Lilith collects the nightly residue & spins ‘I will Survive’ as she sips the tincture of forever.
At the end, Mom became Mrs Malaprop, syllables tangled, meaning swallowed by her desperation to confess. Frustrated, she weeps & we reach to hold her. We know she kidnapped us from foster homes. She’ll never know how we kept her safe.
A poet ejects from the brouhaha of a slam to find Keats on the peak of Darien gazing at the surging Pacific, panther trails, & the flight of the mighty condors. Nature glorious. Boring. He ejects to 1950s San Francisco & grooves to Ginsberg’s howling.
Like an autumnal movie-set, smoke clogs the streets and night things creak and rustle in the dark. We need to get out of this city patrolled by man-hunters and sniffer hogs. Our truck died. We’re on foot and exhausted. We gather around an abandoned car. A trap?
Cigarette smoke drifts into his eyes as he rereads her goodbye letter for the last time. An onslaught of rain and tears gush down to wash out her words. To unmake her decision he’ll wait forever. // She comes to take him home, and his heart catches when he balls up the blank page.
A hot flash through my grotto evaporates every molecule of water & strands its denizens on my bedstead, a Titanic memento. A flounder flip-flops underneath, a squid inks my quilt, & an albatross eyes the catch of the day. Me? I jump on an old mermaid ship.
The monster muse crawls out my eyes clad in the queenly weave of Aristotle’s art. She upends a tumble of words & metaphors & flavors them w/ saucy dollops of character, plot, & device. “Commence,” she commands, and my fingers type: In the beginning …
Palsied & grown bitter with pain, the ancient empress demands, ‘Whose ungodly mind figured & disfigured me, granted me powers & crushed them every one? I would fain have borne fruit like a summer blossom and scattered my seeds for the songbirds.
A bottled torrent of rain and river hurls itself into the gully in a flash flood of thrashing trout and minnows. She drops her backpack and runs as the cascade pounds down. When its sheet-steel relentlessness overwhelms her she opens her mouth and swallows death. (50)
The elderly couple wears fig leaves with dried-apple garlands. HR guy checks their application. “Adam, you spent ages delving. Why?’ ‘Digging an escape tunnel. God’s on our case.’ ‘Ah, and Eve, you span?’ ‘Yeah, knees gave out from ages of spinning.’ Guy scribbles on application: ‘So, jobs in fruit-picking OK?’
Mum’s mind’s gone but her reputation in the nursing home verges on saintly. That’s saints, right? Easy-going. No point waking her, she won’t know me as I watch her propped up in bed, her stiff fingers over the covers, twitching, remembering the bootees she knit, tiny buttons fastened, and tears dried.
Wise poet Thomas Gray wants a food fight in his mansion’s folly & invites Ignorance and Bliss. They drink gin fizz and gaily toss green-gooseberry tarts at each other until they collapse. Turns out, Ignorance loves Bliss, and Wise passes out in the folly.
Her job is inserting trait bundles into the DNA of newborns coming down the conveyors. Sassy, feisty, & classy always pick for themselves but she injects the runts w/ brains, cunning, & stamina. Shift’s end, she jabs herself with equanimity. It keeps her going.
They put 1 drop of courage & 1 drop of pain-killer under my tongue and unlock the gate because I’ve slaved since childhood & claimed my right of final liberty. I step into it. As expected, the landscape’s an arid stretch of bleached bone, the paradise where I choose to die.
She stakes her liberty on a new identity with a name like honey on her breath & no place for over-sized shoes to trip over or abraded knuckles to trip into. A cruise-ship croupier, she flashes million-buck smiles at fellow gamblers & floats alone in a turquoise sea.
In this epoch we are prey, and my inanimate bones will soon molder under layers of this river’s silt. The birds’ brouhaha at gray dawn clarions their hunger, but no raptors yet. A bare chance I’ll survive if I slip back into the water now. (River scene image.)
He warns her she’s spoiled the party mood as he yanks on his shirt jacket and says he’s ready. Sheathed in black, she smooches his neck and tucks silk under his shirt collar. She purrs “You forgot this.” He caves & knots the tie. No choice: her kiss is Kryptonite.
A Bistro in Society Hill, bouillabaisse and brie, and a sultry buggy night under a retro streetlamp. Below a table, a puli impersonates a dropped knit coat of tangled yarn. On the bus shelter, an ad for ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime.’
My kid’s eyes start leaking but the rain bleeding from her skin worries me most. She wakes on a soaked mattress, puddles on the floor. Doctors can’t treat her: she’s a water nymph, not sick. In winter, we hurl snowballs out the window & embrace with every bullseye.
In a malfunctioning god’s landscape the air’s a kaleidoscope of toxic particulates & the life forms surreal: acrobatic trees, turf a mile high, & ant-sized humans without ant strength, and warlike. Pleased, he stretches a new canvas & fashions tiny demons.
Zephyr breath stirs weeping branches over 2 cane chairs & a small table set with crackled willow-pattern china. Cucumber sandwiches curl at the edges and tea leaves spell futures already come to pass. The moon bequeaths its shattered reflection to love’s drowned eyes.
As he dug up the gladioli for storage, the scent of hyacinths made him sweat. It was the phantasm of spring, to be followed by lilac & privet right thru winter. For 30 years he’d re-limed her grave, but she lay within as he’d buried her, blood seeping from her wounds.
Often she’s tortured by the least sound, daylight through the curtain, a whiff of coffee. At her dresser, she avoids her anguished reflection, swallows the migraine pill, and burrows into the aphotic cocoon of her bed. Thunder at the door. ‘Mom? You better yet?’
Whether from the planet’s toxicity or mutations in the human genome, engineering expertise was in grave decline. So much so, Corsairs initiated the vile deep-space navigation technique of fusing their ships’ AIs to the brains of kidnapped Lander magicians.
An effervescent soul repressed by censure, a sweet inquisitive consciousness burbling in her mind with no outlet but dreamscapes of love, supernova, & volcano–the inevitable fission of atomic detritus that finally sets the world ablaze.
Jasmine ladles its pungency over the dying susurrus of the meditation gong as nightjars suspend their song & moonshadow dances to his heartbeat. He waits for love to elope into the fullness of his life but still she lingers, unready, in the chrysalis of her bliss.
In GAME OVER, an absurdist play, the characters appear in gossamer shrouds & lecture the audience about cleaving to hope. When the lights fall, the audience is startled awake as the actors, all out-of-work wait-staff, die in agony.
We’re all born with voice & capacity for language & self-consciousness, tho these manifest differently & can take shape in love or loathing. I am cursed with words that punch, a tone to shatter teeth, and tongue-twisters that kill.
It was a revolutionary, if bloodless scheme, to vacate the planet and allow the re-ascendancy of dragon-kind but feasible only if the illusion that Jack was his wizard twin lasted long enough for him to absorb every last shred of arcane dragon-rune lore.
A face ravaged by nature’s casual violence, crags & valleys seemingly carved in the brow bone, sagging cheeks, & runnels that once channeled hot tears from rheumy eyes. In a white room at death’s door, she knows she paid full price for admission.
In the vivid streak of sun down the slope of Dragonspire, the mythic tale of the Great War seemed but an infancy in dragon/human relations, a tantrum of inexpressible desires. O for beginning anew with heroes of diplomacy instead of flame and blade.
So mesmerizing is the mortician’s recent visitor that he silver-bolts her coffin during the day. On the sun’s demise, he burns with ardor & lifts her out. Frail as blowing smoke, the undead lady respectfully begs a dram or 2 of his hot blood.
He gazes rapturously at his verdant garden, the colonnade of magnificent pear trees, & moonflower beds spelling his daughter’s name, more or less. Until an orgy of fairies tumble from the sky, all glitter & sparkle, intent on amorous chase. How he despairs of his flowers!
Some violence against her person is marked indelibly, a laparoscopic surgery & a dog bite on her forefinger. The true scars still suppurate in her prefrontal cortex, unpredictable & eternally punitive for her failure to have deserved protection, to have known.
Psyched about my future in physics, I found a darknet app to help me write my thesis, ‘Star Composition.’ Keys tapped but not those I chose. They wrote a novel, lyrical & wise. Next a galaxy of bestsellers that won me a Nobel Prize. I smashed my laptop with the medal & wrote my thesis by hand.
She travels until bittersweet sprouts from her toes and twines upward. The vines braid into a delicate latticework that pins her arms to prevent flying and binds her throat in a necklace of 2nd-guessing. Foliage shades her from worldly flurry but birds stop by in spring.
Eternal love is illusory, a blade wielded by inept butchers of faith, an evisceration of the heart and spirit. It cuts through the entrails of spirit and the sinews of promise until blood drains from the arteries of desire to torch the skyline.