My Jewish Summer.

My Jewish summer moved me-and I was moved.
Sitting by the lake with my grandfather, Abraham,
we sang songs of past wars, remembering our ancestors.
The darkness came full force, and I could not waken
the spirit that was sleeping in me.  So my grandfather
made me a cup of hot chocolate and sang "Dance For Peace,"
which made me get up and dance-it wasn't a Jewish dance,
but Abraham laughed and poured me more hot chocolate.
By then I was getting full, but I drank to please him,
just as I did everything to please him every single day.
My job was to please him.  I married my wife to please him-
even though she has physical beauty, she does not have
my heart.  I opened my mouth to speak, but no sound
came out-I didn't think he would be interested, anyway.
The quietness came over me as the last of the flamingos
scored away over the sparkling water of the bright ocean,
and I could see their wings flapping and wished I could fly.
"The bird is the word," he'd said, and I didn't know what
it meant.

The Night Sky.

In the sky, my heart flows with the stars,
stirring at night, flying high above us.
I twirl and twirl until everything spins,
faster and faster, like the eyes of the world.

You said to me, "What greatness is vast,
as the ocean itself?  What patterns are immaculate?"
Then, a meteor appeared, so large it took over
the entire sky, and there was an eclipse,

and it was vast.  The vastness was immaculate.
Everything was pure.  Everything grew dim.

notes....

PARHELION CHRONICLES:

THE EXPLODING SUN DOG

ROOM WITHOUT A VIEW

OVERTURN DRIVE

NIGHT WITHOUT A DREAM

WE SEEK WHAT WE FIND

Characters: 

Rash Sightings

Ariel Chance

Commander Michael Rexford

Forrest Warren

The Exploding Sun Dog. Story.

PARHELION CHRONICLES:

THE EXPLODING SUN DOG

ROOM WITHOUT A VIEW

OVERTURN DRIVE

NIGHT WITHOUT A DREAM

WE SEEK WHAT WE FIND

Characters: 

Rash Sightings

Ariel Chance

Commander Michael Rexford

Forrest Warren

THE EXPLODING SUN DOG

            The Hall of Trinity echoed with his footsteps, and the generator hummed outside of the orbiting space station.  It was dark out, and the Space Man went down the hall, opened a door, and went inside.  The room was painted with blue, and it had a blue trimming.  He went forward slowly, his mind sweeping the room, and he sat down, hard, on the recliner.  Within minutes, he was asleep.  His head leaned back, his mouth parted, revealing spit.  His eyes were blue, a deeper blue than the bluest ocean, and everything about it was as vast as the Universe itself.  For, he was the First Born of the Sun God, Minerva, and they were in a different part of the Universe, conversing with space bugs and creating stars.  The Space Man’s first Naming Day had come and gone, and his name was Rash Sightings, a human name.  The Space Station was old, and clips of it were stored in the memory banks.  He had come here after his parents decided to kick him out of their house, which was the House of Snow and Rain.  There was ice and rain in space, but it was mostly filled with oxygen.  Oxygen in space was not known before by Earthlings, but was such discovered by Jupiterians in the 23^rd Century.  Sometime during the Third Cycle of Trahn, two beings floated into his room-they had gray skin and black eyes shaped like almonds, their mouths just thin slits in their faces.  Their hands were long, like tree branches.  He had been in many parts of the Universe, and he had never seen aliens like those before.  He wondered dimly what they were in his sleep.  He thought he must be dreaming.  He felt he must be. 

            “What…?”  he said sleepily.  He turned his head sideways.

            The female Grey moved forward, her feet pattering on the cold floor.  “We’ve come to see you, Rash,” she whispered sweetly, like a nightingale’s song.  She didn’t have any hair.  He thought all women must have hair on their heads. 

            “Why?”

            “Because you’re the Last One,” she responded.  “We need to warn you.  Danger in the Universe.  You aren’t safe.  Your parents sent us, a long time ago, and we were forgotten.  We won’t forget what the humans did for us-what their sacrifice is.  Nothing matters to us but peace and serenity.”

            “I don’t want to talk about peace now,” he murmured.

            The male leaned forward earnestly.  “You will be fine,” he said anxiously.  “If you believe.”

            “Believe in what?”

            “Oh…everything.  Nothing.  Logic.  Yourself.”  He waved his hand away.  “It doesn’t matter.  We’ve said all we had to say in your DNA.”

            “What does that…?”  He started, but they were gone, and he was alone, again, in the simple room with the recliner and the television set, and the recorder that sat on the table.  He jolted himself awake and stared at the recorder, and got up and left the room.  He didn’t know what it was for, but he could probably guess.  The aliens must have wanted him to recite poems.  He didn’t want to do any of that.   

*          *          *     

            “What are you doing here?”  he asked his parents, bored.  They had come from a party; his mother wore a blue party dress, and his father, Sin Sahn, wore a red suit.  He thought it was ugly. 

            “My boy, can’t a father see his doting son?”  he questioned.

            The large sun orbited around a smaller, celestial star.  The star was cold, and vast, in the depthness of space, and it hummed methodically.  Finding a star that hummed was an impossible find, and it was written in the records at the Hall of Trinity, where the Hall of Records were stored.  It was not the human race; it was the race of Ellinians, who dwelled in the coldness, and its divine eccentricities. The light from the star had gone; the scientists watched it from the large telescope in the midst of space, spinning consistently, and humming.  The scientists wrote down the information and it was sent to more Labs, and they gave the star a name-Mr322xxz.   

            Rash Sightings was not an ordinary being.  He had a consistency of being in trouble, and although he tried very hard to be normal, everyone could see that he clearly wasn’t.  His overzealous need to succeed, was undefined, and other people thought he was stupid and cocky.  His mere presence drove women to tears; sometimes, when they cried, their tears turned to diamonds and fell, shattering, to the ground.  He collected a lot of the diamonds and sold them on the black market and bought a bicycle with the money.  On the planet of Ellin, where he was born, it was always cold-the coldness was in his bones, for he was a cold-blooded creature, and his people crash-landed on the planet several millenia ago, back when the dinoplads still lived on the planet.  The people were simplistic in nature, and did not have any craft except for submarines and bicycles.  Most people lived in trees, for their arms were long, like spiders, and their mouths were thin.  The trees were long, thin, gray, and had crooked branches, and the shadows from the trees fell upon the ground every sunset.  Unlike Earth, the sun was very close to the planet, and many of the people were lazy and rude and did not want to work.  They complained every single day about their jobs, and some often quit, without warning, and disappeared forever. 

            They were enticed by adventure, and went to go on vacation in submarines and ended up dying because they didn’t bring enough provisions.  They were stupid creatures, stupid and needy and relied on technology instead of their own brains.  It grew so tiring, that the President of Ellin, a human being, wanted to end his life.  His name was Maruc Kerin Andon, and he was fifty-three years old.  He had brown eyes and brown hair and he lived in the Embassy, because human beings could not live in the domed cities with the Ellinians-it was against Ellinian law.  All human beings on the planet were criminals; being human was their only crime, because that was the cheapest law they could put into practice.  The building was very large, and made entirely out of gold, for they had sent satellites to distant planets and brought back different chemical components and turned them into something useful, like a television set, a car, and a broken radio. 

            They did not understand the ways of human beings, and copied some of their ideas, but they were used in ways that did not help them progress to where they needed to be.  They had sent satellites to Earth and had seen the images of human beings at work.  One of the scientists built a teleportal, which allowed beings to travel from one place to the next.  The President of Ellin ordered several human beings to be kidnapped, and after they arrived safely on the planet, the teleportal was destroyed, and the scientist disappeared.  Maruc’s real problem was his bald head.  He wanted to have long hair, like the other Eillinians, and he had many surgeries to fix the problem and the hair always fell out. 

            Most of the time, he spent his days at the office looking at himself in a holographic mirror that could shape his face into any way he wanted.  Sometimes, he chose to have blue eyes; one time, he made his nose so big he looked like a horntensheik.  He called many businesses and asked them if they had real wigs; they always called back, and shouted they didn’t. 

            Businesses on Ellin always shouted at each other, because they thought that was how things were supposed to be.  The businessmen usually only worked until lunchtime, and then they went home to be with their partners. 

            Maruc received a call from the smartest man in the world, a scientist/doctor/lawyer. 

            His name was Ariel Chance, and he had blonde, curly hair, and pointed ears.  He was two hundred years old.  He said they had found a planet that was made entirely out of an ocean, and did they want to inhabit it.  He replied, “No, we don’t,” for he represented all the beings on Ellinian.  He was chosen by a group of beings called Elected Representatives. 

            Maruc did not like Ariel, and thought he was a busybody-he was always calling about something or other, and it drove him crazy.  He paced back and forth in his office, stroking his beard, and looked out the window.  He wished he could get off the planet, but there was no way out.  The man who invented the teleportal was missing.  Maybe he went to another planet; maybe he was dead. Maruc decided to find out.  He called his secretary, and asked her to find the information he needed, and she called back and gave him the address where the scientist lived.  Maruc put the piece of paper in his pocket, took his bicycle-he got one with rockets on either end-and pedaled down the street, happy to finally have found something to do.  He was going to go to the scientist’s house and find information, if he could.  He stared down at the paper in his hand, and returned his attention back to the mansion.  It was old.  Spooky.  He swallowed hard, and walked up the stone steps to the front door and rang the doorbell.  No one answered; maybe he wasn’t home.  He put his hand on the doorknob and the door swung open, inward.  The door creaked when it opened.  He scuffed his feet on the carpet in the doorway, and went through, down the hall.  The door swung shut behind him, with a loud bang.     

            He went up the stairs to the second floor, and looked around.  The mansion looked empty, as if it had not been lived in for years.  He went into the second room on the right-it was Ariel’s office.  A computer was on the desk, and it was still on.  Maruc went over to it and pressed a button and the computer flashed.  “Stop it!” it screamed.  “I’m busy!”  It was a talking computer.

            Maruc crouched in front of it.  “Have you seen Ariel?”  he asked it.

            “MAYDAY, MAYDAY, MAYDAY!  Intruder alert!  Intruder alert!”  The computer was sobbing.  Maruc expected it to break into tears at any minute-he didn’t know computers could do that.  Maybe it was a new invention.  Ariel was an inventor, also. 

            It took a few minutes for Maruc to realize the computer thought he was the intruder.  He reached over and flicked it off.  He rummaged through the scientist’s desk, and pulled out a map and several files, tucked it into his shirt.  He went down the stairs.  It was nice and quiet.  He hadn’t had a lot of peace and quiet.  His mind was in a muddle.  Where could the scientist be?  Last week’s mail was on the table in the kitchen.  Maruc looked around the place once, twice, and hurried down the front steps to his bicycle and went home.  

Dancing.

Today we danced.  It was wonderful

to have

someone in your arms, moving slowly to the music,

letting it drain in your body, letting the waves move over

you, and the feel of your love in your arms.

Then, her arms became twisted, like the trunks of a tree

that shiver in the morning light, its arms raising to the sun,

the beginning of warmth that encompasses you,

and your lover.  I have found dancing is the best way to

let someone know you love them-and I like all kinds of music,

rap, hip hop, rock and roll, and we'd rock and rolled all night,

dancing, swaying, thinking of the glory of the sun and

everyone in it.

No One Wants To Hear Them.

The flowers are blooming in the yard.
My sister is singing to her two-year-old sun,
who is rising out of the ashes in a song.  Tomorrow is never
coming, but today is always here.  I make chocolate milk.
Yesterday I walked into the door.  It wasn't the first time,
but not the time before that, and the time before that,
I too, woke up into a song.

I don't remember how I got there/
someone must have drove me.

I eat chocolate all the time.  It makes me less fat,
it burns calories.

I try to change myself for myself, but still I am angry
at the death of my father, my brother's poorness,
the inequality of a country.  Not sure which country,
maybe all of them, because we still have poverty,
we still have the poor trying to sing for their supper,

when no one wants to hear them.
I do.
But I dare not say.