writing with my eyes closed

Today is Charles Darwin’s Birthday, and I am walking-

2012-02-12T18:02:00.000-08:00

Kroger’s stands tall like a sentinel in the distance.
The yellow sun rises.
It is morning and I am walking to work, my hands swaying
At my sides-they sway to everything, the rising sun, the moon,
And I think about the distance from here to there.

I think about bacteria and how it was formed. I think about Charles Darwin on his
Birthday, he was born over three hundred years ago, and how he recorded
A sparrow’s song.

This song is for Charles Darwin, and his fascination, and his notes that he left
On his mother’s dresser. She was the one who found them, you know, not
The sailors, or the ones who seemed to think they were his colleagues.

I am walking, and thinking, and I think when I walk and the thinking is in the grandness of walking,
And I think about all the people who have work, and who walk, and who think great things
And change the sorrows of the world. This is more for Charles Darwin, because it is his birthday,

And I am waiting for my birthday to arrive and how the flowers bloom on walls-
And how the bacteria moves, and how poetry is moving, and finches are singing.

The Face In the Water-CHAPTER 1.

2012-02-12T17:56:00.000-08:00

1
John Shubbard remembered the first time he saw someone else’s face in the water. It was nearing the end of August in 1978, and he was out fishing with some friends. He had just caught the end of a net and was bragging to James how many trout he was going to catch-James, getting angry as he always did, almost pushed him into the water; he stumbled, and righted himself; his ankle throbbed with pain. He twirled around to face him, his expression one of anger-the anger on his face was intense, and it made John cringe inside. He wasn’t used to the anger he saw on his face. James was usually a very mellow guy.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing!” he spluttered. “I could have fallen into the water! Don’t push me in!”
James Wilcox laughed-he guffawed and slapped his leg. “You’re such a wuss, sprout!” he declared. His grandma always called him sprout. John shoved him. James glared at him, his nostrils flared.
He looked like a fish who had jumped out of water and was having trouble breathing.
“Don’t talk like that about me!” he exclaimed. “I don’t know why you’re being so rude! We’re supposed to be friends!”
“Friends is as friends does.”
“What are you talking about?”
James winked at him. “You know what I’m talking about,” he gloated.
He glanced down into the water. He thought he saw the shimmer of something just beyond his reach, but he wasn’t sure. He shook his head, and frowned. Maybe it was nothing. John had a tendency to turn a lot of nothings into something. Scott Morrow put a hand on John’s shoulder, as if to steady him.
“It’s how he is,” Scott said softly. “Remember his sister? He ain’t right adder the car addident.” Scott had a little lisp and didn’t pronounce certain words correctly-d’s, and f’s, were always difficult for him. Jim’s parents abandoned him when he was a baby. John got a feeling it traumatized him to this day and he didn’t like to talk about it, but he knew how to relate.
Scott was lucky. His aunt took him in. John had gone to his cousin and then to foster care. It was a tricky passage. His relatives didn’t like him and he didn’t want to sound like a baby and ask for help. He had been homeless as a teenager. John’s parents used to hate him to death, and wish he were dead-they’d said so on many occasions. John nodded and stuffed his hands in his pockets.
He narrowed his eyes, in remembrance. He didn’t like it, though. He especially hated the remembering part. How he was always to blame for the problems. How his parents hated him and wanted money to go on a vacation and how they didn’t have enough money and this and that.
He glanced into the water again-something strange shimmered on the surface of the ocean, then it was gone, like a flash of lightning or a piece of string that had drowned. He needed to get laid, but his mind was playing tricks on him again-he must be tired because it looked like a woman’s face had been in the water.
He was thirsty. He needed to get something to drink.
He said goodbye to his friends-they were fishing again, and James had calmed himself down, that’s how it always happened and James was calm again and able to think rationally.
James didn’t have any problems in his family and John wondered why he acted like that but he did anyway and it wasn’t anybody’s fault but his own-he jumped into his car and drove downtown to a bar called Sherman’s. It was an Irish/Country bar. He didn’t have many friends there, but there was a woman named Hope Peppersen who was always flirting with him and he enjoyed the attention. He wanted to sleep with her, but she confessed she was married and although she liked John, she thought it was unnecessary.
“Maybe I’ll see you outside of the bar,” he’d said, winking at her.
She’d nodded happily, laughed and tossed her hair in his direction. He’d winked back. That was how it always was when they were in the bar together. The bartender laughed at him about it. John’s mind drifted back to reality. He had walked at the bar and was sitting down at the booth and looking at a large menu. The stools were red and brown. He pushed his hair back behind his face and sighed. He was tired. He didn’t realize how late it was. He should have gone home, but he wanted to see if there were any women tonight and to get a few drinks inside him. Maybe he would get laid tonight. Maybe he wouldn’t. He was hoping for the best. He looked around for Hope. He didn’t see her at the bar tonight. At least not yet. It was still early. He thought she said she still worked, but he wasn’t sure. He raised his hand and snapped his fingers and the bartender waddled over happily. He was an overweight, balding man and had beady eyes and curly hair. He was married.
John sneered at him. The man was pitiful. He needed a weight loss program and some dentures-his teeth were yellow and crooked. John knew he was married because he had a ring on his finger. He thought the woman must be very fat and desperate in order to marry someone like that. John fantasized about marrying for money, but it didn’t please him. He could make his own money. He was going to marry a supermodel and live in a large house and have 12 sports cars. He wanted 12 sports cars because he saw a comedian with 12 sports cars on television and thought it might please him if he had some, too.
“What do you want, man?” the bartender asked him in a slow, slurred speech. John thought he had learning problems.
“I want a slice of pizza and a glass of Diet soda,” he told him.
The bartender raised his eyebrow. “Soda? In a bar?” he said.
“I’m waiting for someone. I can’t drink when I’m irritated.”
“Irritated?” he’d said, and laughed.
John didn’t know the bartender’s name and wasn’t about to ask-he just called him the bartender. John waited, tapping his hands on the table. It was brown and made from plastic. The chairs were plastic, too. This was a high-scale place.
Hope came in and sat down next to him. “Hey, guy,” she said pleasantly. “How are you?”
“I’m fine,” John replied. He eyed her skimpy pink dress. “You’re wearing pink.” He sounded sarcastic but he was pleased.
She tossed her hair in his direction. “Yeah, so?”
“I thought you hated pink.”
“I like it, now,” she laughed.
“Why?”
“Because my husband and I are going on our second honeymoon.” She winked at him. “No imaginary sex for awhile, I’m afraid.”
John smiled at her and didn’t respond. That was when John realized he didn’t like Hope anymore. But, he still wanted her and it made him even more angry than he was before and he didn’t know why. He suddenly realized he got angry-a lot. And he liked it. He put her out of his mind and decided to concentrate on work. Work didn’t have heartache in it. Work didn’t have pain. He barely glanced at his female coworkers. It was for the best. He was going to have to get used to it.
* * *

The Singing Woman.

2012-01-17T15:21:00.001-08:00

The woman sings in an open doorway.
Jealous is round like a key. The skeleton clatters to the floor;
A clock chimes. The government is shaken about anything.
We don’t know where we will go. Only that some houses
Have stairs, and others don’t. I thought everything was round
In the middle, and sometimes, the yellow daisy breathes-
I don’t care about the gentleness. I only care about the stiffness,
And the shadow that crawls on the table. She thinks she owns everything,
The world, and her children are in moldy, brown colors.
The rules are made from everything. She loses sight of everything.

She sings in an open doorway. Her hand is rotted, like flesh. She thinks
Things are getting broken again; and a man is walking on a roof. There are windows
In the house, and the house folds over, down-like caskets falling from the sky,
And landing on a blade of grass. The grass is like the cold in winter. The winter
Is swift. Everything is dry.

She has the pages of her book in front of her. She likes to sit still and count the craters
In her hand. Everyone stares, including the gold lion.

The woman is singing, she doesn’t sing.

The Mouths of Nothingness.

2011-12-12T20:28:00.001-08:00

She puts words together, one by one,
In sentences brown as bone.
She goes walking, down one street, and up another-
She limps.
Her eyes are like pools of nothingness. She bends and breaks.
She opens her mouth and calls out to the morning,
In the ancient winds of time.
Burdened by the years of hard labor, she cries out to her dead lover,
The skull Hamlet left behind.
It was not hers. It was not his. They were gentle in his wake.
Death was not something to take, to bring back.
The spirits were left behind in closed doors. Someone thought she was
Wrong, that she couldn’t stay away from the broken doors.
Someone thought she was jealous, and refused to give her any bread.
The bread comes from the oven.
It is the soothing sound of her father’s voice that wakes her up, every morning,
In time for school.
She acts like she wants the world. She acts like she owns it. She knows nothing,
And pieces words together on a string-one drop after another, a pebble falls
In the water, and sounds are dripping everywhere.
It is the rain, the color of the rain, and the mood that is everywhere. She doesn’t talk
About open wounds, only the rape, that was cold, hard, bitter, and filling in her
Mouth. She doesn’t keep her promises. She is the echo of lies in the hearts of everyone,
In nothing, everywhere.
Her mother is dead, and living, breathing-
Her father gasps on a table. She is dead, and nobody moves. The lies sing like the lions.
Sometimes, things knock on the doors, like skulls, and hatred is ripped from flesh.
She hates the people who move her, and the sorrows are like tears gone dry.
She is dry as a diaper. The lion weeps from far away. A star falls from the sky.
She thinks most people are morons.

Broken Time.

2011-12-11T11:37:00.001-08:00

The night has been broken into the minds of us.
We dismiss the shadows that move like grass.
In the wind, the whistling sound comes again-
Like a ghost that wanders in the willows.
Emotions? Are like a sieve, that waves.
A daisy is on the windowsill.
A hand taps on someone’s window glass.
The panes are like tears that come like rain.
Down the mountain, the wind comes.
Down the mountain, we don’t know anything.
My mother is a little hectic. She watches her mother
Go upstairs, falls down the stairs-one by one,
Legs twist with hands. She is like a water current.
Time goes, it slows-things move like shadows.
There is the dark place, the place we can’t go to.
The place in the heart, beyond all time.

Why is there so much hatred? Why is there so much sorrow?
I went to the library this afternoon-the woman’s eyes narrowed
At me, as if she wanted me to leave. I held out my hand,
And she took my money, but her hand was not my hand-
My hand was hers. She didn’t understand the way of the world,
How it was for young men and women in the army,
In the navy, in places that are foreign as the mind. The mind is all
We have. Like a creative fox.

WHY BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE

2011-11-03T11:33:00.000-07:00

“You’ll get forty dollars.”
She pursed her lips. “I don’t know,” she confessed. “All I was doing was looking at the paper for a job-” She shook her head, dizzy and confused. She didn’t know why she was dizzy, only that she was. It irked her. The irkness was in her mind, and it quieted her.
“Shut up. You know the paper regulates those things, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’re one of the few who still know about them.”
“I am one of the last,” she confessed. “That’s what they told me in fifth grade.” Her mind traveled back to the time in her real school, the real school she had before she found out about computers and what they could do. It wasn’t a good idea to talk about the aliens. How they crash-landed on earth and destroyed the dinosaurs. It was an accident, they said in the papers, long after it happened. They wanted to help fix it. Well, the wars came, and everyone knew the wars started because of the dinosaurs.
“Well?” the pimp was staring at her expectantly. “You’ll get a lot of money.”
“A lot of money,” she said. “Yeah. Forty dollars, first, then-”
“More than you have now, that’s for sure!” he said gleefully, and chuckled behind his hands.
It had always been like this. Ever since her mother had been taken away-she refused to call her mother a criminal-strange men had approached her and offered her money. She tried to go to a community college for three months, until the feds found out and took away her credit cards. She got several credit cards, and bought a small car with it-she thought she was going to get a job right away, and didn’t. She fumed at her family for forcing her to be in this situation. It was forced upon her because of the crime rate. Forced upon her, she insisted to herself. Forced upon her; it was not given to her. No, it was never that.
“Okay,” she agreed. “I’ll do it. I don’t got a choice.”
“None of us do,” he said. He led her down the street and into an alley. Shadows crisscrossed across the pavement. Pain in her feet, and the painful memory of trying to block out all those other times…the times when she was weakest. She didn’t know why, even though her daughter asked her why. She thought about her daughter in a half-bored, half-amusing, distracted way, the way a neglectful mother would think of her lonely daughter while she was fucking some dumb man.
She was alone in the enormity of herself, in the largeness, the grandness of herself. She was an overly large woman. Her daughter was an almost nearly byproduct of a rape, because the man didn’t want a fat wife-he wanted a skinny wife, he put emphasis on the word, she remembered with a sneer. She wanted a daughter and had one.
She couldn’t go that one route, what’s it called, artificial insemination, she couldn’t born her baby in a test tube because that was supposed to be a secret. She knew a lot of secrets. She understood how the world worked in her own special way-the psychologist said she was special. But, she wasn’t. She was trapped. It was in the Before-Time that Reanna thought about suicide, before she was born as a Hybrid, when she was floating in space in a test tube-that was how they made humans now, in a test tube, and put them down on a manmade planet that suited the aliens purposes, to be looked upon, and studied in such a way that was credible. She didn’t know what the aliens looked like, but they planted what they looked like in her dreams. She could feel them when they did it and she was being born in a test tube, feel it creeping on the edge of her mind.
The only thing that was outside of free will was forcing their thoughts upon hers. She thought she could feel their thoughts sometimes, in the way that their thoughts moved fluidly like water, slow and unearthly like the glowing of the lights. Sometimes, she thought about It-the thing that was more horrible than actually committing suicide, the actual thinking about it. She didn’t think of suicide in a way that she was going to actually do it, but she thought of it in the way that she actually wanted to do it but wouldn’t go through with it-she thought about the how and why and the liking of it and what other people would say about her after she passed. The darkness of suicide was always there, and the anger was there, fresh in her mind.
She didn’t approve of anger. She thought it was bothersome. She remembered once, her mother said she never got angry at anything, ever, that the anger was not how she expressed herself. It was, what they called it, the Remembering, the Time that was Before-After the Before time, and how it was sequestered in the rhythm of her life, the life that was half-lived. She had a half-lived life. She knew it now, could feel it in her bones.
The taking of one hundred pills or more, and dying in the living room, was romantic to her when she was living in the cold place underneath the floor boards in the man’s house, and the man called Todd came and fed her twice a day. She soiled herself. She was his pet; he was called a pimp, and she had been fourteen when she came To the Bad Place, and would be nineteen now. She always thought of her life with her parents as Before; this was Now.
The Days passed, longer more than ever, and everything seemed like a dream, or stepping stones on top of one another. Her face was streaked with dirt and tears; her ears were covered in crusted blood. She’d had a few ticks, and a few bruises. Her eyes were blue. She stared at them in the mirror in the bathroom in the basement.
Made faces at herself in the mirror, and squinted her eyes shut tight. She knew what the days were because they had left a computer in the basement and she turned it on and watched it hum to life, and she wrote stories and played poker and War, but she could not connect to the Internet to ask for help. The Internet would have been a great deal.
She remembered, a few years before she was kidnapped, she and her classmates had been learning how to use the computer and she was a fast typer, typed almost 50 words per minute.
It was the strength, those memories of good times that kept her alive, and everything inside her mind was shut off when the kidnappers came and made her strip for money.
They let her go outside, but someone was always with her-Ronnie or Howard or Denni, she was the worst, she was always getting guys’ phone numbers and wanting to do them and she took them down to the basement and sent her, stumbling, up the stairs to the living room-Boner was there, and Clyde. Clyde wanted some, but Boner said she was too young for the job-said the cops would come and find them, cos she was missing for a long time.
“You a missing girl?” Clyde asked her.
She nodded. “Yes,” she whispered.
“You wanna come home wit’ me?” he asked her. “You won’ be missin’ no mo.’” He chuckled, and Boner slapped him upside the head, and they glared at each other. Clyde snorted and stomped out of the room.
“Look, girl,” Boner told her. “I know you think I want some. You ain’t getting none from me. I’m in a committed relationship, okay? You safe wit’ me. I don’ need you, but you git some bones on you, gi’, you be a good one for my clients.” He smiled, as if proudly. “You be her dodder.” He nodded matter-of-fact like.
“What does she look like?” She sniffed, and wiped her hand on her nose.
“She real big,” he told her. “But, she pretty. She has red hair, kinda dirty, but not pimp dirty like Wanda.”
Reanna’s lips curled. She loathed Wanda; she was a terror.
She remembered Wanda, and how the woman didn’t know she was in a Dream Capsule. Stupid woman. Everyone knew that. How come she didn’t know it? She needed to talk to her counselor. She never did anything without talking to her counselor. Everyone was against her. She knew it. She couldn’t put her finger on it.
“I’ll take you, gi’,” he promised. “I gotta take somethin’ home to my wife-otherwise, I ain’t getin none o’ dat from her-nor you,” he added quickly, as an afterthought. She rolled her eyes. He grunted asset. “Get in, girl.” He shoved her in. the car sped away. She was tense. She settled against the seat and tried to enjoy the ride. The car stopped. He pushed her out and the car sped away. She watched it go and went inside the tall, nondescript building. It was a pale brown. The windows looked dirty. Everything about the place was old, drab, dirty.
“Are you Reanna Chanceitt?” the counselor woman asked.
“Yes,” she managed to whisper.
“We’ve been looking for you,” she replied.
She promptly burst into tears.
“Who was looking for me?” she asked a few minutes later. She wiped her hands on her jeans. They were dirty. Most girls didn’t wear jeans anymore, they wore the plaid dresses that were authorized by government officials-the aliens, she was told.
The woman looked surprised. “Why, your parents, of course!” she replied.
She blinked. She didn’t know what to say. No one was allowed to say parents. “What do you mean?”
She looked away, a little embarrassed. “You know. Parents. You look like you don’t know what I’m talkin about. Like it wasn’t implanted in your brain like all dem odders.” Reanna was amused. She didn’t know counselors talked in that way-most Foreigners spoke eloquently.
“I don’t. We’re not supposed to talk about that.”
“Oh, yeah, well,” she fumbled. “They changed the rules, now. We got some bad peoples coming in, the Pope had to act fast.” The pope was big and had a big chin.
She frowned. “Who’s in charge around here?” she asked. “I thought it was the Mayor, now, after the little problem at the post office.”
She nodded. “Yeah, the scientists are trying to bring the dead guys back to life-as zombies.” She shook her head and tsked. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. The good lord’ll fix it, I’m sure.”
“Yeah, sure you’re sure. You were sure three thousand years ago, weren’t you, during the Civil War.”
The counselor was shocked. “You’re not supposed to talk about that!” she said in a hushed voice. “We’re not supposed to mention War-the aliens are listenin’ now, what if they do th’ hangin’?”
The girl looked down at the floor. “I forgot.”
“I figured as much. We’re going to have to fix you, girl.” She nodded her head. “We’ll take care of it, right away.” Her eyes looked distant, sad, as if she were staring at some great distance, far away. She sniffed. Reanna sniffed, too. It was going to be a long day.
The paperwork was filled out, and then the parents came and took her away-to the Dream Time, the reality that was more based on reality than actual reality, based more on a calming realization of fictional thoughts being pressed against hers. She was being brainwashed, it was certain.

THE FORCE THAT MOVES.

2011-10-19T15:42:00.000-07:00

I am not the force that moves inside of me.
The hatred flows in my heart.
It is the heart. The heart that is the word.
The love is casual as glass, like a spider when it comes down
The mountain.

No one knows about dates-this date, that date, everything is about reason.
The reason that is the wind, that blows in imagination down the mountain.
We talk about pine apples into the night. You steal kisses with a glass eye.
Shadows are dark, steeples are dark, darkness is dark in everything.

She is going to be fullgrown. She is going to be a lion.
Those are my predictions, I wrap them in soft hands.

Metaphors In Clouds.

2011-09-28T16:13:00.001-07:00

He thinks she is the woman in the tomb.
I don't know the name of the tomb.
Someone brought me a newspaper and stuck it in the mailbox.
The wildflower lays broken on the sidewalk; people tiptoe through these lies.
I have ideas, they whisper in my head. Some people think they know what they don't
know, that their wives and husbands adore them. Then, changes shift forms,
things are moved to change-someone gets a job; someone loses a friend; a new one comes
into focus, comes into the picture. This is the picture I didn't know about,
I couldn't understand about that was looking back at me right from the start.

All of these people are like lawn gnomes. Things are gifts in the dark. I am not
a miracle worker, a slave, a Barbie; I am not your politician, someone to strike the dragon in the throat-
I am the one who saves the dragon, I am the shadow in the gust of wind that moves
through the trees, the apes are free, they have come to seek their revenge.

I don't know where my father puts his glass towns. I don't know where the light
is as it shines through the trees.

I know the forgiveness, in my mind. It is not in my heart. My anger is vast,
like the ocean, the night sky is flung away from me.

I look out of my window. My hair is flung back from my face. I close my eyes,
and think soft things. Sometimes, I think about what it would be like,
if the government actually fixed things, read metaphors in the clouds
and the sidewalks of the world. How large the world is. How real. It is not safe from my father, my lover, my enemy. Some people are enemies. Usually, they are small like bulbs of flowers.

Sometimes, a person jumps out from a bush to scare school children.

Life mocks everyone.

Then, the tomb is brought back out again. My mother is no longer here to take my hand. I don't remember her hand. I remember a blank wall, staring time, memories are latched to ghosts. Ghosts that I have not seen, the tomb is like a word.

I don't want people to talk about me behind my back, to fuel hunger in my veins-
these veins are red, distorted as time. Time comes back.

IN-BETWEEN DREAMING.

2011-09-12T19:45:00.000-07:00

And then, people like me, are thrown from dust,
to dust-and then crows are called in for a murder trial.
I am awake to the sound of the trilling of birds out my window.
Destruction is like misery. It is hard to see, to hear-
a telephone rings, and begs goodbye to me. He is a wanderer,
the sound of summer in darkness, the sound of hands moving back to me.
The ghosts are woven in strands of summer magic, as if I believed in magic at all.
I am nowehere, Ohio, I am the state that drifts outside of who I am. My mother
ignores me. My father is distant in my mind.

Time does not become me. It is not who I am. My friends are not my friends. My friends are set in stone statues. It is the sadness that brings me. It is the rape
that is fresh in my mind, how tired I am. Some people read and speak in English,
other people eat their daily supply of bread. He was not my friend. He is the betrayer. The speaker of solemn words. Of pretend condolences. He is equipped with
nothing. His mind dreams about nothing. I wake up and the birds chirp in my window. Everything is like it was. He has his children. I have my bread. It is supposed to be okay, I am not reminded of anything in between dreaming.
From my father, I forget, from my father, I have forgotten. The shadow lies in the windows of time. The windows of destiny.

It is what it is what it is. It is from a far off state I have never heard of,
the place that is wrapped in paper chains. The sky that is colored and dipped
in red, the sky that is translucent in its wake. We are woken. All things are woven,
including despair, and the darkness that lingers here is strong like lions,
and beauty is written away with a colored marker. I am accused; I am the accuser.
I stand before the trials of the court, and shadows whisper to me like spiders,
in broken things.

2011-09-11T10:41:00.000-07:00

Different things in the news tremble like a collage of voices.
I don't spit. I move like wind and tears.

The voices of the wind
call through the trees-this is the memory, this is the yesterday.
This is the time that isn't mine.
Sometimes, I think about when I was little,
and I was fishing with my father. My father, with the big blue eyes,
and face stained with tobacco and tears.
He spat on and on about the war,

how stories were woven from stars, and musicians sang for their food only.
That they never had any families, or spoke their minds freely.
War is not
free. It stems from the dinosaurs,
from science, from the act of being alone. I am alone in my grief, alone in the way I look at things.

From seventeen years ago,
I let you go, and my basket dropped in the snow.
I ran, looking ahead,
backwards again, and forwards-then, I was in prison, and my neighbor with the flaming
red hair set me free through his destruction.

He went on, and the memories of pain screamed in my mind,
I was like ghosts, and truth was destroyed.
Marriage destroys things.
It destroys whole families.
It turns humans into balls of mistrust, lies, hatred.
No one can see my pain, see my memories, my tears, or why people want me dead. They ignore me. I am homeless, the one whose innocence was kept silent. She moves on, in her grief, and doesn't know me, wants to steal my things. She has everything. I am a ghost, I fall in myself. People will never fix their problems. They will always enhance them, become them, and the dying will be sent to the scavengers.

Bad Behavior.

2011-07-08T19:53:00.000-07:00

I tried not to be in love with lightning-
the way it tiptoes across the sky, and dashes into the clouds.
The clouds are angry, like lions, they are selfish and unnerving.
They are not petrified. I think our ancestors were petrified,
that they were unified in the realizations that all things are kept unturned.

My words are not my sorrows. They are not thrown into the piles of rocks
on the ground, they are not the brokneness that my life has become.
I try to make up new things for children to play with, and keep the thoughts to myself.
A young girl in Spain tries to take my boyfriend; tries to open a can of worms.
She is selfish in her reasons, as planes fly into buildings and heads are buried
in the sand. She moves like lightning, her thoughts are fluid as water running through
the stream. She thinks she is home. She writes fake letters and puts them in jars
and sends them out to the ocean, hoping to find some peace, some serenity, some inner
home.

She is turmoil. She is the sound of the ocean that rings with the voice, the sound of
summer.

This is summer. Things are in summer. A man and a tan and a pile of rocks-
he jumps on his engine, and turns it on, it sounds like firecrackers in the stillness.
She says goodbye to her words, to the night that is dark. She is like a ghost.

Apes Are Angry, Jealous-

2011-06-17T19:33:00.001-07:00

I am a ghost that moves in a mountain.
No one speaks and no one is heard…
All around me are the shades of colors,
Locked in a dream. This is like my nightmare.
I type and I type and the words are thrown like shadows
Across an empty page-this is war, the war of temptation.
I spoke of yesterdays. They are like golden days,
My father is in Canada, my mother is far away. My wife
Doesn’t know how to talk to me anymore. My neighbor thinks
He knows me, but he doesn’t know that he makes me cry at night,
He makes me wet the bed. I look out the window and stare at a stream
Of flowers on the broken lawn. I think about our ancestors,
Who were not our friends-they are animals, and the animals speak to
The sky, the ground, the meadows filled with flowers. He doesn’t think about
Anything but his own selfish ways, the ways that are the center of the self.
He pretends he cares. He is the pretending. He makes mistakes on purpose.
He tells me lies, lies, and goodbyes. He doesn’t know anything about
The whispering of the pines, or how the ghosts of apes move through the
Mountains, through the colors and the cold and the dark and I have to tiptoe,
To try and understand, to not be in love because I am forced to.
He didn’t move on. I forgave him, but that thing is still undone. People move like
Tombstones, like shadows. He thinks he knows, he doesn’t know.
Only time will tell. Only time will move back, and forth. The reading is in the
Fire that burns selfishly. He is dead to me. Dead to my ears. My ears are
Burning as the night is burning and the lies burn in every fire place in every household
In the country. People force me to procreate, to be with nothing. Why? Why?
Why are these things happening to me, why can’t I stop them, why am I forced to write
In a diary that doesn’t understand me, that has blank pages?
You’re the ones who force me to be this way. I sit quietly in the dark and tears spill down my
Cheeks. The wind moans; no one hears me.

What Is In Riddles.

2011-06-17T19:26:00.000-07:00

You said words are hard, they wrap around things unseen-
That distance lies in riddles, and things in between.
Nothing else will work out, quite well in the end.
This is the world we’ve been trying to mend.
I don’t know about the other ones, only we play pretend-
The flowers in the garden don’t want to grow,
Nothing is a seed that will be forced to overthrow.
I don’t understand the negativity or what we comprehend,
Why books have to have middles, or antiques are what we send-
Through the shadows, and the lies, and the hurt and goodbyes,
You tried to make me see something in a mystery.
I don’t want to go where you will go, except in time it will show,
And tomorrows are sorrows wrapped in a vine wrapped in misery.
You went to the ocean, and the ocean sent you home,
Your life was like something we weren’t even shown.
We fly like a flock of birds, and speak in sad rhymes,
The lion uses its wings to hear of unheard things.

THE KNOWING.

2011-04-27T06:29:00.001-07:00

Of all the things that were created,
And the hands of clocks are turned backwards.
The guitar player plays at a pub in London,
And wildflowers bloom on the darkness and mist.
I thought we weren’t going to be here more than usual,
That things are tempted and not created-
That the fields and wildflowers are in full bloom,
And nakedness dances like urchins in the living room.
Light bounces off the fireplace. The night has come,
And shadows march across me, around me, through me-
People forget time, forget watches, forget bread,
The eating is not sinful. We are ghosts running against
Time, we are respectful, and we are dead. We are clocks
That spin around and around, and the sun melts into
Shadows. Someone sleeps in his cave, a dog barks at night,
The wind whistles like a train in a shimmering light.
My mother is awful, my father is dead-I have no home to call my
Own, only the night lingers like mistakes. The moon
Burns brightly, a lamp shakes, and bones shake like lightning.
We run away, and we run, and we keep running until guilt
Keeps us back.
No one sees me, no one knows.

SOCIETY.

2011-04-01T19:57:00.001-07:00

WHAT IS SOCIETY

And this society, the one we live in, where people in wheelchairs
Are thrown into the trash;
And people named Mikel are picked on in public,
Carry picket signs down foreign-sounding streets, like Pickled Eggs;
Deviled Hands; High Street, the name rolls off your tongue.

The words are like plastic sheets put on a brown couch.
How autumn quickly changes into summer, and summer and winter
Are both entwined,
And monkeys are both riveted by words that are spoken from old vowels;
That the sounds of summer rain drift softly through the dark,
In the dark of the night, and the night

Drops like a monsoon out of Japan; and the Emperor was angry,
And the entire Atlantic Ocean was angry, and it was angry with its voice.
How people think they are not in a society, and how the society
Gets back at the smart people, and the dumb people get everything,
Especially the blondes and men interested in art.

Sometimes, the museums whisper softly at night, and the night
Calls down to the dinosaurs in the museums;
How the museums are like parts and ghosts wander around
In the dark, like softly moving shadows,
And how some people are homeless, and not breathing,
And breath comes out of me, and is me and NOT.

I don’t know what to make of this, what to speak of this,
In the words that pour from my lips, the lips that speak the poetry-how kings
And queens mock me, and think I am grand, but no one sees
Me stand in the shadows, unless I destroy entire empires…
My mother thought it was a bad idea, not a good idea, that ideas
Shouldn’t be put in society, shouldn’t be spoken of in classrooms.
Sometimes, even the walls are dim, and sometimes I can hear them.

"I'm Hungry!"

2011-04-01T19:49:00.000-07:00

My eyes are like wildflowers wrapped in straightjackets.
Lions sleeping in cold cages; falcons walk on the tips of lakebeds.
Sometimes, when I dream, I can’t speak, I can’t see,
Anything but the blindness of my eyes staring at the back of me.

I hear about the soldiers in far off Guam, the country with the name
That sounds like twin cities;
And how we live, and the things we do, sound like list after list after
List;
Sometimes, we read magazines; sometimes, wives take cereal to their
Husbands in boxes,
And how old men named Marc and Liam think themselves better
Than others, and waste their money on the tracks, on gum, on
Whispers in the dark-

The stars, late at night, are like eyes that stare down on the world,
And watch over it, watch over it, waiting, and how Michael and Charles
Are like shadows that pour down stone walls,
And we think and we think but we can’t find the words to say.

“I’m hungry,” she said, and he brought her cheese and wine on
a gold tray,
and the bird outside wouldn’t chirp,
and the room refused to breathe.

GATHKA'S PROMISE.

2011-03-24T08:25:00.001-07:00

Gathka said she wanted a normal daughter-one who was without physical perfection. A scientist would call it a genetic mutation; the regular population called it something else, they called it Normal. The word itself has been around for more than two thousand years; it was only in the last five hundred years that the definition changed. Gathka supposed aliens had something to do with it. Aliens had been visiting the Earth for hundreds of years, even before the birth of Jesus; they’d made claims of the cavemen, the dinosaurs, the wooly mammoth. They even admitted having something to do with global warming. Their ships ran on fossil fuel. Gathka supposed other races lived in the universe, but the kind they met were intelligent, smart, fast, their minds were faster than any computer. It was amazing to watch. Gathka sat behind the desk, nervously stroking her fingers. She always did that when she was nervous. She was a tall, blonde woman and had large, blue, cat-like eyes. The human race mutated after seven thousand years; the only things that changed were the length of their earlobes, and their eyes, which was more cat-like in appearance. Gathka was an anthropologist major in college, and had studied ancient humans-humans from the Electric Age; the Golden Age; etc. 10,000 years before that, the saber tooth tiger and other animals roamed the earth. Gathka highly suspected a meteorite did not kill the dinosaurs after all, but it was simply a genetic mutation that span over time.
She turned. A whisper of sound. The doctor entered the room. He was tall, muscular built, and had broad shoulders and thick, brown hair. Gathka couldn’t help but stare. He looked almost identical to her husband, except he had blonde hair and was much taller. He ran a business in New Jersey. They were from New Jersey. She smiled thinly and rose to her feet. She straightened her dress nervously. “Hello,” she said. “It’s nice to meet you, doctor.”
“You’re one of the few,” he began.
“One of the few, what?” She raised her eyebrows questionably.
“One of the few who aren’t going to go by Artificial Insemination. We have a huge sperm bank. We even have some celebrities, some politicians. Quite a few writers. Still no?” he asked.
“I promised my grandparents,” she explained. She hesitated. She thought it was silly explaining this to a doctor. She didn’t have to explain anything to a doctor! It was her body! It was her decision-and her husband’s, who was eagerly awaiting their first child.
“You promised your grandparents what?” he asked. He wasn’t being impatient or condescending. He was being kind, generous, and offered input on the best way to take. She had made up her mind. She was firm in her revolution, in her decision.
“I promised I would be a Norm,” she replied. It was a strange thing, to be a Norm when everyone else wanted to be Abnormal. It was weird. It was ludicrous. It was hard to imagine, but it happened, very rarely, every so often. In society, being different was wrong. She knew that now. She suspected it for a long time, but humans were conditioned to think and feel a certain way, and everyone went with what everyone else was doing. If someone did it differently, they were considered a Normal-or, a Norm, for those who wanted to know. It was something that happened, changed over time. It was ridiculous. It was absurd. But, it was how society had changed. They were different. They were a lot worse. The crime rate, especially, was ridiculous. A few murders among the Abnormals; the Norms had good behavior, but there were few of them left in the world. Few and far between.
“I want to have my baby the normal way,” she told her husband the next day, over tea. He had come home, and he stroked her shoulder. He was home after a dozen meetings at the office. He was a lawyer, one of the best in the state.
“I know, dear,” he answered. “I do, too. I’ve been doing research. Many couples gave birth in hospitals. Can you imagine such a thing? That’s where they performed surgeries on people! Can you imagine!”
Gathka could. “What about their genetics?” she asked. “Their genetics just appeared out of nowhere, like magic.” She shook her head. “I can’t believe people lived like that. It’s so funny, seeing how they dress, and what they wore-”
“How they made their food,” he finished, giggling.
She nodded. The Norms ate food, still; the Abnormals lived off of energy from the sun. The sun was a large thing, and radiation was recycled. Always recycled.
Gathka gave birth to her daughter on September 8th, 3443. It was midnight. She decided to give birth at a hospital. The building was virtually empty, save for a few Abnormals who were having their regular check-ups. Some Abnormals liked to act out their lives, and pretend they were something they were not-many Abnormals begged to have a disease, even though disease was wiped out 900 years ago. She sighed. Being human was very difficult work. A lot of thought went into every day activities. Her thoughts were slow, muddied. She had trouble breathing. She brought home her daughter after being three weeks in the hospital. The doctor was puzzled because the baby had come out of the womb. Most mothers who were brought in to the hospital born babies in a test tube. It was how it was, how it shall be-she suspected he thought she was slow, numb, dumb. Maybe all three.
Her husband was gone again; gone to a business meeting. They decided to revive businesses after the last of the wars, due to the wishes of the government. Her husband laughed every time he heard the word, government, like it was some kind of great, colossal joke. One of his ancestors had died in Vietnam. That could be the reason for his case of the giggles. Maybe it was genetic.
“Hello, sweetie.” Gathka sat on the floor next to her daughter. She was broad, bold, insidious. She was eager to learn more about her Norm daughter. She would take it one at a time, however.
“Hello, Mom,” she said, smiling broadly. “Look what I’m doing.” She pointed to the toy animals spread out on the floor. “It’s Noah’s Ark, Mom. But, I don’t have a boat for them. Can we buy a toy boat next time?”
Mom was an old-fashioned word. The Abnormals called their parents “rent” or “rents.” It was an old trend that span generations. She smiled at her daughter and watched her play.
“Sure, honey,” she said, smiling down at her. “We’ll see.”

THE RELIC BORN OF ANCIENT LINES

2011-03-21T09:24:00.001-07:00

Characters:

Anwon Price, magister
King Wandron, ruler
Delila, troll
Egg, male troll
Anwon Price was a great magister and used magic to heal others. He was not well himself. He had large eyes and a beaked nose. His mouth was long and thin and frowned a lot. He walked down a dark, shadowed road. The moon was out. It was night. The wind moaned softly. A creature darted up to him, and grabbed his hand. “Sir,” he said, breathing heavily. “Sir, may I request your service?” he asked quickly. He was trembling.
“What?” he said, with a start. “What’s the matter?”
Anwon peered closer and realized he was talking to a troll. Trolls were strange creatures. They had wide foreheads; dark, parched skin; and eyes as black as the midnight forged from darkness. They were strange, idiotic creatures, and Anwon wanted to avoid them at all cost. Tonight was no such luck. “What do you want?” he demanded. “Money, time, playing cards?” He was impatient. He wanted to get back to his job of buying and selling brooms. But his conscious refused to let him.
The troll thought about the last gift. He shook his head. “No,” he spluttered. “My friend stuck his head in a tree-”
“You want me to get him out,” he finished, nodding his head. He rubbed his hands together eagerly. He was greedy, greedy about the money he was going to make. “I would like seventy shillings, please.”
“We don’t have any money, but, hurry, he can’t breathe!” He threw back his head and howled. A long, emerald tear squeezed out of the corner of his eye. He sniffed. He was about to throw a tantrum.
Anwon Price nodded his head. “Okay,” he said. “I guess you’ll want me to be a hero, then, huh?” He didn’t like it. He didn’t like it at all.
“Yes,” he said. “Please.”
Anwon looked into the troll’s eyes and saw what he saw in them. He picked up his bag and hurried down the path towards the darkness that swallowed them. They were in the darkness for awhile; it was almost black around him. Dirt crunched under his feet. He was not wearing any shoes, he had sold it for a broom back in Oddscreak. He shook his head. No one wanted to pay him for his services. He was worried about food, because he was getting low on funds. He had a magic bag and he could pull a seven-tenths shilling out of it every few weeks. It worked, but it would not do to sustain his current need of food. An apple cost almost a whole shilling. “Where is this troll?” he asked him. “Where is this dummy?”
“Over there.” The troll pointed to the edge of the woods, and tugged at his hand. He had claimed he was a teenager. “He’s stuck in there.”
Anwon couldn’t help it. He burst into peals of laughter and shook his head back and forth. He hadn’t realized how much he liked trolls until now. He slapped the troll on the back. “Okay, runt,” he guffawed. “We’ll get him out.”
And Egg couldn’t understand why he was laughing.
He slapped the troll on the back. “Let’s get this show on the road,” he exclaimed. He rubbed his hands together gleefully. “Okay, first thing’s first, how did he get his head stuck in the tree? Were you playing a game, or did you put him in there?”
“We found some honey in it and he was trying to get the beehive,” Egg explained.
He nodded. “I see, I see. Well, stand back, and let me do my work.” He pulled a long stick out of his robe. Anwon wore a robe because he thought it made him look cool. The other kids thought he was cool. They asked him to perform at birthday parties sometimes; he hadn’t done it in at least four months. He tapped the tree. Nothing happened. The wind still cried; darkness swirled around them. He tried again. Still nothing. The branches of the tree shuddered. He decided a better tactic was at hand. He banged the troll on the side of the head. He howled and the tree bulked but did not release the troll. Egg was getting impatient. He hopped from one foot to another.
“Hurry!” he complained. “We need to be home by sundown.”
Anwon was confused. “Why?” he asked.
Egg shrugged his shoulders. “Because,” he answered. “It’s when we eat.”
Anwon thought he understood. He took hold of the troll’s legs, and pulled. The troll fell back on top of him. His breath was nearly knocked out of him. The troll stumbled to his feet, gasping and clawing for air. “Thank you!” he exclaimed.
“What’s your name?” Anwon asked him.
“My name is Delila.”
Anwon raised an eyebrow. A female troll. It was almost unheard of, especially in this part of the country, which was called Graywhereland. Anwon thought the name should be changed. He didn’t understand why the king allowed such a beautiful place to have such a terrible name.
“Thank you,” the trolls exclaimed. “Thank you, very much. Would you like to join us for a feast?”
Anwon’s stomach rumbled with hunger. He rubbed his stomach. “Okay,” he agreed. “Okay, I will go to your feast. Where is it?”
“At Captpot Hall,” Egg explained. “In the Rion Forest.”
Delila took his hand and tugged him deeper into the forest of trees. The stars appeared in the sky above them; it must be well past midnight. Delila was skipping. She wasn’t bothered by the fact they were in a magical forest. It was a magical forest and many creatures lived in it. Including the Waggabeast; the Biggabeast; and the Trilyabyte, they are kind of like lizards without a tail.

ARE BROKEN LINES.

2011-03-10T07:06:00.000-08:00

ARE BROKEN LINES

The night is full of stars.
What I see, is what I see-
In it is what darkness brings.
The highway is full of cars.
And the night is full of stars,
The wind constantly sings-
Silver things are lined with trains.
The sun is dry when it rains.
I’m all for money, when I got a honey,
And it is what night will bring.

There are lines in the broken road,
That goes on forever-
All the things we remember,
And sand through hands that are poured.
Like dreams and shadows, moving on
Night beams,
And sorrows are woken in a dream.
There are lines in the broken road,
And it goes faster and faster,
Like a shadow in the night.
The sun is filled to brim with light.

All the sadness in the stones,
Are broken, at last, and we go home-
We see the tides that are coming in
The ocean.
They are broken, and the lines go on forever.

What the Boy Knew.

2011-03-08T11:04:00.000-08:00

The boy did not understand the importance of books. His mouth turned downward in a slight grimace, and he looked at Teacher. Teacher had gray hair and green eyes, they seemed to stare at nothing, a lot of times. Brian wondered if he was well. He did not look well. He looked very sick. He climbed off the stool, and looked at him. “What are you doing here?” he demanded. “I thought I sent you home. I told you not to come back. I dismissed you!” He clenched his fists. It was not a good idea to anger the Prince of the Emperor of Jennsen, but it was important. The Emperor had taken him aside, and told him to tutor his son. He was bound to obey. Obeying was what Teachers did; that was how they survived in the universe that was harsh and cold and cruel.
Teacher waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. “I understand you do not take things seriously, my boy,” he chirped. “I have come to help you.”
“Help me with what?” he asked. His voice trembled like the Western Winds that rose from the South, and settled in the East, and everywhere in between. He owned everything on this planet, from the vast forests of Straighte, to the Inland of Eucalydies. The planet was monstrous, far larger than anything the Settlers had ever found. They settled on the planet thousands of years ago. The oceans were large-there were only two, but the water was angry, choppy, epic. Yes, the word would work. His father was gone most of the time. He wanted his father to be at home, so he could play with him. The maids and servants and the neighbor boys were not fun to play with, they made fun of him because he was rich, and he did not have shabby clothing. His clothes were made from the finest tailors in all of Jennsen. It was ideal for the prince of an Emperor to wear such fine clothes, and he definitely was made of money.
“You are the son of an Emperor,” he said in a thick voice. “You are supposed to be educated, elegant, endearing-you are none of these things! Look at how you walk! You walk like a duck! A duck!”
He looked around in abashment, and a sword hung on the wall. He grabbed the sword, and started swinging it in a clockwise position. “This is what you are supposed to learn, young student!” he cried. “You are supposed to learn how to duel!”
Brian shook his head. “I do not understand,” he said. “I am supposed to be married, and breed-that is what is in my Histories.”
Teacher stopped cold. He put down the sword, and stared at him, his face bold. Brian thought Teacher looked a lot like a duck. His hair was long and gray; his face was long; even his hands were like webbed feet, they stuck out tremendously. “How do you know about them, boy?” he demanded. “How do you know about the Histories? Only adults know about them, not children!”
“I followed my father.”
Teacher nodded thoughtfully. He saw it now. Brian was one of the Oddities, they were the ones who always had to make trouble, who didn’t appreciate Order, or anyone who could lead. Teacher cocked his head to look at him. He had to help him, before the Empire fell around his ears-or, his throat, for people who did what he did usually had their heads cut off. Brian was not like the Others. He was special. He was the son of an Emperor, and his life was spared. “Listen carefully, boy,” he said. “I know you see things, you think things that are different. I want you to listen to me. Do not tell anyone what you think. Ever. If you want to live.”
Brian’s eyes widened in fear. “If?” he echoed. His voice sounded loud to his own ears.
Teacher nodded. “We are at war. We have been at war for a long time. Real war stopped a long time ago, when the Emperor’s son, Temptess, discovered Magic. Not the real magic, but…close enough.”
Brian wished he would elaborate. He did not. He continued, “I am your Teacher. I will teach you how to read.”
An hour passed, and Brian still did not understand books.

Bitter Salt.

2011-03-05T07:58:00.000-08:00

There was a three-story window that looked out
At an abandoned parking lot, and the faces looked in

At a crowd of spectators, all mouths open, all smiling.
The people were like rounded things, and the noise of the party
Was loud and translucent, and the Shadows of stone
Moved and no one could move.

The speeding train on the subway, was like the wind,
And it moaned like the wind, and the sound was awful-

And the teacher threw his temper out the window,
At the running cars, and the sound of the night was like
A whisper of trees that pounded on the forbidden grass of
Things,
And the silence was like a firecracker in the night,

And all reasons were not like shadows in the grass,
On the edge of things.
Some people are born bitter; and die a bitter death,
And people are too demanding, and bitter.

This salt is like the ocean, and the ocean is bitter because it
Holds all the fish, and sometimes, the fish die,
And the Gulf of Mexico is like a round circle in the middle of
The ocean.
Everything is treated with respect, and respect is in anything,
And all we have is our bitter bread, and the salt it came from-

Wings, His Mood.

2011-02-28T09:02:00.001-08:00

His mood is like a shadow, that moves swiftly on
Its wings-
On abled beast, his harp it sings,
Like shattered, broken things-
In the dark, we weep like stars, and the night
Is a spell of words, and sorrows are broken,
And time is gone.
My mother said she was not a part of anything,

That she is not the part of the world that is between
Things. She speaks better than me, her thoughts are
Relinquished; she said she gave away medals once,
And a harp, to her next door neighbor, who had three
Cats, and seven pigeons that pooped in a well.

It isn’t like me to beat around the bush, and not say what I
Am supposed to say, it is not like me to speak,
When no one speaks, and everything is spoken in
Blades of grass, and Nature is wrought with the churning
Of the wind, and the clouds are taken like sorrows.

In and out, the harp sings like sorrows, and everything is folding
In the grass, and the spring is folding, and the light is folding,
And everything folds with it. The fear is there, the fear is sharp
And bitter as blades of grass, and we are far away, and far
Away is close to us, and everything around us is sharper than
The eye, and what we see like burnt pieces of wood.

The forest, the trees, the eyes see from far away, and everything
Is far away, like the roaring of the ocean, and the shadows
Pound at the doorway of the old house we lived in when I was three,
And the mother, and the father, and the brother, the tallest of the elms,
Sits back and watches everything drown.

The water is like Shadows, and the serpent opens its mouth, and
Everything moves with it, and in it, is the tongue of the beast,
The night time that speaks of stars, and wisdom, and trees.
My mother thought my life was not supposed to be like yesterday,

That we are above what we are, and death is not the end. Only the beginning
Of a forgotten war, the fiendish fiends, and all hope brings. Everything is what
It is, and nothing is what it seems. We are not the warriors of the night,
Of the screams of children as they play, and the pigeons scream from far away;
We are gone, and we decide, I open the front door and let the sunlight seep in.
Guilt eats me alive, like something that is a tree that stands tall, and guilt is not.

I Dream of Chromosomes.

2011-02-23T11:52:00.000-08:00

These times, I see, in reverie,
And shadows march like stones-
Things belch like chromosomes,
And I walk alone.

Shadows move like songs that sing,
In the heavens and the tide-
In this light, we will abide,
And tender-light will bring.

I think we are not what we are,
That the light is near, and we are far-
We travel now, and walk a mile,
As the elephant will docile smile.

The night is like a walking song,
And we move, we move along-
All we have is all we are,
And the light is near, and we are far.

The squire is moving like a birch,
And the birds will chirp like lonely things-
Temper is what it brings,
As we move about, and wander, search.

I am gone, and you are not done,
And the light is over and the coldest stone,
Moves again, and moves again,
Like a willow in a dream.

Orphans At Midnight.

2011-02-15T07:57:00.001-08:00

They said I could not write. That I am not here.
That things are not things and we have no rings.
I am not haunted by the depths of things, that move like
Water and shelter and are not gone-
The barking of the dog wakes the farmer, and he rises out
Of his bed the next day; and sometimes I sit and stare out
The window and think about the rising and falling of the ocean,
And nothing is sharper than stone; and nothing becomes
Nothing, and everything moves and is stiller than the shadow.
I do not remember my childhood, only the memory of it
Is still and wide as the nightmare that makes up my life,
And I am forced to realize I am not dying, that I have not
Lived up to my name. Everywhere we go there are speakers
Of oceans; everywhere we are, the words are quick like
Stones, and my name is on the lips of everyone in Italy because
My friend is the Chancellor’s wife; and I try to pretend I don’t
Care, but I care about the flowers and the hills and the trees
And how everything is nothing, and nothing is everyone in between
These rocks and crevasses and people think I do not have anything,
That I am an orphan like midnight.
They said I could not write. I could not spell words. I could not spell
Thoughts that are meshed inside oneself; no one represents me,
Because the tectonic plates are gentler as stones and nothing;
And I am this nothing, and people give me funny looks because
Of the scar on my forehead, that I did not do, and now my mother
Is in her house; she thinks it was my fault, and I was a child,
And I am not greedy about anything.
They said I could not write, and it is not midnight, either, and skeletons
Walk like birds.

How Dragons Are Not Here.

2011-02-14T10:20:00.001-08:00

I talk about dragons in books; and books rhymes with nooks
And everyone hates me because I am a strain, and my voice is
Like a crocodile and I have sharp teeth and the bones melt with bones-
Sometimes, things are broken, and promises are made, and people
Weep, and the canyons are deep as oceans-
Sometimes, I do not know where the canyons are made, or why
They are made, only they are there, only the opinions of things
Are driven out of the land like coyotes, and some Americans
Do not like take-out food, especially not Canadian, French,
Canadian Bacon-I think I like oranges on certain days; I think
I like this or that; and the snow falls down on the Himalayas and sometimes
I look for Big Foot or someone else, someone who is not quite so simple
In his words, or for men with big trucks and yellow gardens,
And how they sod the fields, how they grow corn-some of the corn
Is shaped like diamonds, and some men break their backs on them;
Some of them are tall; others are short; others are like children in their way
And as ghosts; they tell me I cannot speak for them, but I end up writing
About them, how they troll, how they move, and their movement is simple
Like the tides are simple and the ocean is larger than itself-
And how wallabyes look up to us and badgers look up to us and the sounds
Of summer is larger than our eyes, and my teachers expect me to pick up
Their paychecks and not spend it; and how Mr. Millan, the man from the Bronx,
Was shot at the grocery store and he had a limp and it makes him cry every
Night, including on weekends-I do not know about words, only about the spelling
Of them; like the Spelling Bee I won in sixth grade.
These dragons are kind of sort not on my heart or mind and I am forced to realize
Something I have come to know,
That humans are not humans at all, just plants, maybe, like talking trees,
Or words that come out of books, and birds sing their song,
And I am paler than lightning, and lightning is quick and brown and moves like
Sand-
That some sands rise out of nothing, and nothing has become of it. I tiptoe this nothing,
And people don’t want to hear me speak. I ask myself why, and thoughts
Linger in the dark.

People Are Not.

2011-02-14T10:10:00.001-08:00

People who do not like others do not like
Books.
People who do not like others do not like flowers,
Specifically daisies, wildflowers, roses-
Some roses are purple and red;
Others are sworn into strategy; that communication
Is not who we are, and we do not know about
Tomorrows.

Some men and women do not walk standing
Upright; some men and women make amends by
Seeking out the truth;
And the nozzle is turned off, spit out of a valve;
Greenland and Ireland are all wisdoms that speak
When others speak,
And ghosts are adventures of the forbidden seekers
Of this night-
Sometimes, songs rise out of the night, and shadows
Are shadows and Nature is Nature, all wrapped in a riddle.

The riddle begins to speak and communication is what
We speak, and sometimes the words fall in rhymes
And rhymes are spit out of worlds. Some things are not left
Unsaid, some things are left unbroken, like a watch
Dangled from a chain, and other things that we do not know,
Are forced not to know-

Nothing is the matter, but all is made of matter, and wives
And dolls are pretty much the same, and trees stand tall as the sun.
Some people speak. Most do not.

People who do not like others do not like books or birds or songs
Or strains of grass, and people who do not like words are moving
Like mountains, sad and remained like bitter waves that
Break on the shore of an ocean, and sometimes people have problems
With death and poverty and we know it not,

That ghosts stand on oceans and look down into them. That some ghosts
Do not live, others die, and warriors and knights are stiller than the night.
Some people do not like other people, some people do not like poverty.

Something Taller Than the Sun.

2011-02-14T07:47:00.001-08:00

You’ve got nothing but the sound of your own voice
Reaching to the infinite, reaching to the sadness that
Lacks in your grace-
We are tall as buildings, and everything emulates inside of it,
Outside of it like the falling and rising of the wind-
Everything is the wind, and yesterday is the wind also.

That the shades grow taller than the sun,
And the moon is round the sun;
That these words are round, and we are not afraid,
And temptation lacks creation and everything in between.

That people do not force realization upon the politeness of us,
And the grandness that is tall and pure.
And the country rises from ashes, and speaks to us of ashes,
And we are not what we speak, that we are not weak,
And nothing is weak. That the world is not round,
And we are not round, and we can talk to the words on our lips,
And everything is insistent, that nothing is whole and sacred
And the words are emotionless things-

With the Rest of The Dreams.

2011-02-13T10:58:00.001-08:00

In the dream of redemption, the harshness of the dream is withered
And remains on the vines-on the herald of dreams, we walk among
The tall trees, and teach the Elk to stand proud and strong-
We teach them to communicate with the rest of the country that is
Not the country, and these houses are not tall, and stand tall as wildflowers;
Moving in the grass, the trees are barren and grown; this is the system
That is not known, all we have are other pieces of shadows made from
Taller things; all we have is the lack of speaking, and the speaking of
Shadows that delve further into the being; that these tides begin to move,
And everything moves in it and outside of it; that they do not understand
The swift, moving tide, and sparrows are fallen on the ground near my feet;
That the language of redemption is torn from roots and grain, and I talk
To the warriors who bend and strain and everything is ridden of the light
And pain;
The moon pours into the window; that shadows are lutes, and words are nothing
More the strain of colors; that people are stupid, nothing more than shadows,
And society is not what is meant to become,
We have our secrets and they are not the gold and the cold and the words
Are like whispers in haunted castles;
I live in a castle, it is outside of these walls, and reading things is nothing
More than the temptation of being-
That the temptation of being is a language of something that is something else,
And people are eager, and force other dragons to shape and move and turn;
That the shadows and tides yearn tomorrow, and we go with the moving train-

On Metaphors.

2011-02-13T09:27:00.000-08:00

The metaphor is spying on me,
In the classroom, outside of the classroom.
Mr. Cortez is in the living room of his house,
He is afraid to go out-
He teaches Spanish to ninth graders, to college
Students, and gets a lot of money.
All he cares about is the money,
The feeling of money in his hands, the feeling
Of the wind through the mountain.
He knows about destruction; the destruction of
The rain forest, he knows about the peace,
And the beginning and end of it.
He has given the land to the man in the black
Hat, who looks like Abe Lincoln, but is not;
The metaphor is spying on me, and is jealous
Of my accomplishments, but accomplishments
I have none, and so she is after the fruit
I harvest in the winter.
Without food, the human race will perish,
Dissolve into the big nothing because it cannot
Love, cannot die; is forced to wonder why.
Old men walk around old coffee shops;
They are only old because of the telling of it,
The teller of tales, the redemptions of things.
Everyone is a bully, they like to bully and be reminded
Of a time when bulls and deer and the antelope were
Free, and not chained as they are now;
That they are not chained to film, that they are not guilty,
That they do not wonder lonely down barren
Marshes in the summer, and the summer is not wet
With dew, and that goodness is nothing, means nothing;
Everything is a language, spun of spider webs.

LIKE THE WIND.

2011-02-01T17:27:00.000-08:00

All your heart belongs to me like the wind
That moves in the sea.
Your eyes look at me like glass,
The sorrows fade and do not pass.
I like to see what I can see, in love’s enchanted beauty,
All these sorrows we do not grasp,
The words are felt and do not turn.
Like the sorrow, we will yearn,
And are trapped forever in a wheelbarrow.
The sky is yellow. The harp is yellow. A bird hangs
From a brush in the sky.
A tear drops from your eye, and you sob and cry,
And you cry.
I know you’re stuck in a rut and can’t get out of it.
Your life is in ruin and nothing can be done about it.
No one wants me here, the life is what I fear,
And the tables are stacked up together like the birds of a feather.
I can’t hold onto life anymore. I’m stuck in a dimension,
Another door. It’s just another day, another word on
The floor. Like a carpet stuck full of pine needles.
We don’t speak without discussing it first.
We don’t have a memory of anything outside of us.
The first day begins and the next one ends and it resumes
In the middle, and life is not felt, and the sorrow is
Gone with it.

A Face In His Memory.

2011-01-30T12:53:00.000-08:00

“How about you fluffin’ muah pillah, sugah?” Those were the first words out of Drudd Hennessey’s mouth when he saw the nurse. She was the most beautiful sight he had ever seen, next to his last ex, may she rot in Hell and die a horrible death forever afterwards. Long legs, face like eye candy, very skinny. Most nurses were very fat, or bigboned, his Grandaddy liked to call it.
The other thing-the second thing-Drudd Hennessey saw when he woke up from a coma were the bars of his hospital bed. He blinked again. The soft murmuring of nurses in the background, the soothing sound of someone who would care for him. He didn’t know her name, only he liked to call her sugah. He didn’t even know she was a nurse. He thought he was dead, or married, whatever came first. Time slowly ticked by. Maybe she was his wife. He continued to grin at her. She was very beautiful. The nurses thought he was stupid or high. The doctor gave him a drug test while he was asleep, and hadn’t alerted the nurses. Before the car accident he was relatively normal. The sound of cars rushed by on the street. The mood was calm. Everything was in place on this cold, cool morning.
The nurse left for a few hours; and returned, carrying a bed pan. “Go to the bathroom,” she ordered, her voice crisp like October wind. She didn’t make a sound. Why not pick up someone while he was in a hospital bed. “Well,” he said. “How you doin?” He smiled surreptitiously. Was it his imagination, or did she roll her eyes in his general direction? She liked him, he knew it.
“You’re a very lucky man, sir,” she told him. “You were going to die. Do you remember anything? We put a tube in your throat.” She chuckled. He didn’t think it was funny. Not funny at all.
He grinned at her, admiring her long legs. He was having trouble focusing. She just gave him meds. Maybe that was it. “How about you fluffin’ me pillah, sugah?” he asked again, in a smooth, New Orleans drawl.
She chuckled. “How about I hit you over the head with a bat?” she suggested.
He ducked his head. “It’ll be worth it, ma’m,” he whispered. A tear trickled down his cheek. He didn’t brush it away. The conversation was getting interesting.
She tsked. “You got pain in your back again, I see,” she said, cocking her head to look at him. “You taked out your back in the car accident. We will put a tube down your throat again, you keep talkin’ like that to me.” She chuckled, trying to make up for the empty threat. She didn’t mean it. Actually, she liked the man, he was very sweet and brave, didn’t wake up at all through the brain surgery. It was a funny thing. The heart monitor went off for one second, went back on again. She had to get him to remember some things about the accident. Some thing they could use. There was the other couple, the ones who caused the wreck-they were in the local jail, the husband was threatening to kill Drudd, but they didn’t know his name. She wondered if they understood what was going on, that criminal charges were being pressed against him.
“When do I get out?” he asked.
“First, tell me what your name is.”
He scrunched his face, trying to remember. He couldn’t concentrate on anything,
especially not the words that poured from her lips like wine over water. “John,” he said at last. “John, Berry.” He smiled triumphantly.
“We found your driver’s license,” she said in a clipped, disapproving tone. “That’s not what it says on your driver’s license. We are sorry, but we have to take precautions. Those are hospital rules, son.”
Son. The words popped in his mind. They hurt, the pain was bright and it was hard to see. He grasped his sides. He was in love. With her, or with pain, he didn’t know. The pain in his back was enormous. He didn’t say anything. She was in it for the money, that was it, the little bitch. “I don’t know,” he gasped. His eyes watered. “Are you happy, you…you stupid old witch?” He was off-base. She wasn’t really old, just skinny, and tall, and had an attitude problem. Where was his damn wallet? Jesus H. Christ, he had rights, didn’t he? He needed to call his parents. Or his lawyer. He wanted his damn wallet. He wanted to get out of here. This damnable place.
“Tell me your name, and you may leave,” she replied.
He thought quickly. He couldn’t remember anything. His mind was a blank wall, full of old flowers. “Mick,” he replied at last. “Mick Smith.” He smiled triumphantly. He hoped it suited her. Not much suited her, from what he saw.
“Tell me, other things,” she urged.
“My parents real names are Sarah and Jean. My mother’s maiden name is Watson.” He smiled. “She likes daisies.”
She frowned, and scribbled something on her damn clipboard. She left the room. The surgeon came back, sometime later, murmured something to the nurse, but he was asleep.
The surgeon’s name was Roger Johnson and he didn’t understand what the man’s problem was. They did a CT scan on his brain; it didn’t show any current problems. He didn’t need surgery of any sort. He was perfectly fine, after the surgery.
The nurse’s name was Hannah. She was a good nurse. She even won an award, once, a long time ago, back in the good old college days. He was much older than she was. He thought he was someone named Mick. Not Mick Jagger, Mick Smith. He imagined Mick Smith had once been overly tall; overly handsome; and a football star. There was a Mick Smith who went to Iraq and died there, but that was another story. The doctors couldn’t understand why he dredged up the name Mick Smith. He was a college football player, one of the best on his team.
“What do you make of him, Doctor?” she inquired. “He thinks he’s someone named Mick Smith. Maybe he really is Mick Smith. Maybe he’s a criminal and stole someone’s wallet. Maybe he’s a sniper!” She gasped, and her eyes widened. “We should call the police.” She didn’t even have her cell phone on her. Her hands quivered.
The good doctor shook his head and frowned. Hannah was a good nurse, but a definite idiot, slow and stupid. “No way, woman,” he snapped. “I checked with the police station and the prison. There is no one by the name of Mick Smith. His real name is Noah Watson. What I can’t figure out, is why he keeps saying his name is Mick.”
She shrugged. “He was in a coma.”
“He woke up from it! Most patients wake up. Most remember things within a few seconds.” He snorted. “He ain’t got no family, or he’s a criminal, can’t say which. Dumbass.” He didn’t normally swear. He swore when he was angry or afraid. Not in front of nurses, it wasn’t called for.
“Remember what you said: most. Maybe he has trauma problems. Some patients do.”
He sighed. “The optimum word. I guess I better go tell the fool to leave.”
She frowned. “We can’t send him back home and he doesn’t know who he is,” she protested. There was worry in her tone. “It’s not safe, for him, or us. What if his family wants to go back and sue us?” she asked.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea to bring that up,” he replied, waving his hand in dismissal. “If they want to sue us, they will sue us-there is no use around it.” He shook his head and sniffed. Hannah was a funny lady. She didn’t have any friends, but she helped people all the time. He frowned at her. “Go home, sweetie, and take a break-you’re becoming overworked.”
She stomped her foot. “I am not! I have to work night shift!”
“Not right now, you don’t!”
Dr. Johnson paced back and forth in his office, wondering what to do about Hannah. She was a good enough nurse, but she was getting to be rather tiresome. She was always trying to out of her way and help others far beyond what is necessary. Doctors and patients shouldn’t converse outside of the hospital. He could get sued. Well, he did date Wendy the nurse outside of doctor’s rules-and Dr. Sarah Cunningham-and Bridgett the janitor-he grinned. She was good in the sack, he had to admit. Red-headed and gorgeous, long legs, model figure.
* * *
Hannah went home for an hour. She ate a light dinner-a tuna fish sandwich, she gobbled those up fast-and she did the dishes and folded last night’s laundry. She looked around her small little apartment. She’d had it for ten years. It was something to be less desired for. It was what she could afford. All in all, she got a good deal out of it. She did God’s will, and she got to live. Being a nurse was very hectic. She had seen three deaths in her time. The surgeon had seen many more in his time. She thought about it long and hard and decided she didn’t want to take a break. She didn’t have any family, no friends. Certainly no love life. The surgeon was very good-looking, as far as surgeons went, but she had no desire for him and none for her. He was seeing someone, three years ago, but that fell apart. The good surgeon didn’t hold his anger very well. There was never any violence, but he had a mouth on him and it got him in trouble. She shrugged her shoulders, grabbed her coat, and headed into the cold night air.
It was very windy.
She walked down the street, holding her purse like a shield. Shadows crept across the sidewalk; the cement was cold as winter in December. She looked left and right. She looked down the street. A cat was walking by, creeping on its four paws. The hospital rose ahead, tall as a sentinel in the dark. Stars sprinkled above. She opened the door and went inside. The security guard wasn’t there. She grew alarmed. She walked down the hall. The lights flickered. They couldn’t afford better lights. Sounds flew all around her; the sounds of doctors talking to patients; nurses chatting; machines grinding in their little crypt. She went down the hall and glanced at Dr. Johnson’s door. It had his name on it. She tapped on the door and opened it. He was gone. Probably to lunch. He ate a late lunch. His mind was constantly occupied by things around him. She sighed and closed the door. She rubbed her face warily and trooped up a flight of stairs. She figured she better go visit Mr. Mick Smith. He might wonder where she was.
His back was propped up with a pillow. He smiled at her. A tray was placed in front of him. “Hello,” he chirped happily. “What are you doing here? I thought you were laid off.” He chuckled at his own joke.
She smacked him on the shoulder. “Quiet, you,” she said. “I came to see how you are doing.” She cocked her head to study him. He was very handsome. She didn’t notice it before. She wondered why she didn’t notice it. She looked at his hands. She wondered why she did so. They were smooth hands, like an artist. “What do you do?” She wasn’t supposed to ask him anymore questions. He was supposed to remember on his own. He was trying. She’d heard from the surgeon last night he could remember the alphabet and was very good at math. She’d checked his records. He didn’t have an arrest warrant. He was clean, but very mysterious. She liked helping him.
“I’m a painter,” he answered. “I paint houses.” He smiled.
She smiled back encouragingly, but she was worried. What part of what he was saying was a lie, or the truth? She shook her head, trying to rid the memories that threatened to surface over the water. The night was upon them. She was supposed to be at home. She couldn’t stay away. His head drooped on the pillow. She glanced at the door on her way out. His file wasn’t on the door. She returned to Dr. Johnson’s office. Knocked softly on the door. “Sir,” she said. “Sir, are you in here?” She had a habit of calling him “Sir.” It was an epitaph she would have to forge over. It didn’t suit her. She should call him “Doctor” but he was far too friendly for any doctor she had ever met. She opened the door. It was very dark. She went inside, and shut the door behind her. It made a little sound. She looked around. His desk was untidy. It surprised her. She would have expected it to be much neater. She opened the filing cabinet and poked in, and didn’t find what she was looking for. She closed it again. She saw several files on the desk. She sifted through them. Picked up one and dusted it off. The name on it was Noah Watson. She was surprised. She opened it. It was his birth certificate, and-an adoption certificate. Sarah and Jean Watson were not his real parents, they were his adoptive parents. His real parents went by a different name. That could get confusing. They hadn’t changed his first name. It was still Noah, but his real parents and his adopted parents were not the same. He didn’t know he was adopted. She stole a piece of paper, made a copy on the copying machine, and slipped out the door and into the night.
She decided she would consult a lawyer. She called him on the telephone. “Hello, Bruce,” she said. “May I talk to you?”
“Yes,” he replied. “How may I help you?”
She went on to explain her current problem, and he listened intently. “That’s an interesting story,” he said. “Does the boy know?”
She bit her lip. She didn’t want to correct him. “No,” she informed him. “He doesn’t. I asked the surgeon to tell him-he did brain surgery on him, and he woke up calling himself Mick and it says Noah on his card-but, he said he doesn’t like getting involved.”
The lawyer was getting curious. His full name was Bruce Ducking and he was forty-three years old, once widowed, and never remarried. He had three children and a home in Sweden and a garden he never watered. His poor, dead wife would be turning in her grave if she knew. His lip quivered. He should get out. It was a beautiful day. The sun was like a large coin in the sky.
“Okay,” he said at last. “What are their real names? I can look up their address.”
“Joseph and Josephine Berkley,” she informed him. “His birth certificate was in his files. He had an eye surgery at age three, for temporary blindness. I don’t know how on earth they discovered he had an eye problem. I guess they gave him up after that.”
“Why?”
“Of course it wouldn’t say.”
“Of course it wouldn’t.”
Joseph and Josephine Berkley were very curious people. They did not live far away, over in New Jersey. It was convenient. She thought it was, anyway. They lived in New York. Bruce pulled up in a cab and she got in and smiled at him. He was very handsome in his suit-he always wore suits, it was a part of his interesting personality-and his black hair was slicked back. His blue eyes shone with excitement. He liked helping people. Most lawyers didn’t. They just handed out money. Most of it wasn’t warranted. She told the taxi driver the address. It was a long ride. They spoke very little. She smiled, fidgeting in her blue skirt and blue blazer. She was going for another job interview on Sunday. She was going to try to get another job in real estate.
Joseph and Josephine Berkley were very fat people. Josephine was very round; Joseph had more bulge in the neck. Josephine’s hair was dark brown, Joseph’s was completely gray. She had to smile. She didn’t want to giggle at their austerity, but she couldn’t help it. They lived in a white house and had a white picket fence. Their mailbox was a drab gray.
“You look nice,” Bruce said. He blushed.
They had gotten out of the cab and hadn’t gone up to the house yet. Hannah was suddenly shy. Not because of Bruce, but because she was meeting more strangers. She didn’t like strangers. She stayed inside most of the time. “Thank you,” she replied. “You look very handsome. Kate must be proud.”
“We got married the year before,” he answered. “I was going to invite you, but you were at your sister’s-”
“Jan.”
“Yes, Jan, that’s her name. I’ve completely forgotten.”
“It’s okay, you’re not friends with her. We are.”
“That’s good to know.” He straightened his tie. “Okay, now we got to do this right.” Sometimes when he was nervous, he got very shy, and slipped back into what Hannah called his “gangster” talk. He was from Detroit. Moved to New York City. They met at NYU and became friends. He went off to law school. Hannah didn’t want to stay in school that long, but becoming a nurse seemed like her only option. She went up and rang the bell.
“Hello,” she said. “How are you?”
Josephine smiled. She had a pretty smile. It lit her entire face. “I know what you’re here for,” she told her. “I talked to your lawyer friend last night. A police officer also stopped by, to make it official. They found my baby.”
Hannah was startled. “He was not considered missing, ma’m,” she apologized. “You put him up for adoption. I want to know why.” She blushed. She didn’t mean to sound conceited. It came out like that. “Did you know who you gave him to, after he went to a new family?”
“No. The adoption agency knew, but they never told us. They shut down. We contacted the police. They went bankrupt, and the papers were sent to Social Services. They were in a different county and we couldn’t get them. We tried, many times, to find him. We got good jobs now, making carpet. Is he here?” She peered over her shoulder, and Hannah had to inform her he wasn’t. She said she was going to talk to him tomorrow, afterwards. She told him about the car accident, and how she found the information.
“Oh, my!” Josephine looked like she was going to faint. Joseph ushered her into a chair.
“Do you need anything?” she inquired.
“No,” Hannah responded. “I’m fine, thank you.”
“So, you’ve seen my boy?”
“Yes, but he left the hospital and I have to get the address, too.”
“It’s no worry, ma’m, well find it. We’ll be all right.” Joseph was the talker of the two. Josephine fidgeted every time she spoke. Her eyes were large. Everything about her was enormously large. Hannah wondered guiltily how she managed to walk or sit up. It seemed most difficult for her to do. She had seen pictures of Noah’s adopted parents. They were much more attractive.
She rose to leave. “I better go find Noah’s address,” she quipped.
Joseph nodded. “We were just about to make dinner.”
Josephine looked harried. “You may stay if you like,” she told her. “We’re making pot roast. Joseph makes a mean salad, he does.” She looked like she wanted her to leave. Hannah couldn’t stay, really. She had decided to take morning and night shift. It would do her good to get out of the apartment. It made her feel stifled and claustrophobic, trapped like a ghost. Hannah didn’t have friends. She didn’t have much of anyone. Her parents were in Greece. She was stuck in New York. She liked it, except the people were mean and overly stuffy and rude and rich. Hannah was not rich. Most nurses were not. They were very poor. Some did a poor job. Hannah was not one of them.
* * *
The next morning, Noah was gone. He left the night before. Gladys, the Head Nurse, told her. Gladys was very bigboned. Nobody messed with Gladys.
She spotted Dr. Johnson outside, smoking a cigarette. She thought he was avoiding her. “What do you think you’re doing?” she demanded.
He was surprised to see her. “What are you referring to?”
“You know what I’m talking about! Noah is gone! I was trying to find some information for him! Useful, information!” She couldn’t help it. A tear squeezed from her eye and she tried not to let it drop. She didn’t want to let it drop. She didn’t cry in front of doctors. It was one of her rules. She didn’t show emotion at her job.
“He remembered his name,” he replied, shrugging in a half-distracted, half-bored way. “Doesn’t remember much else, like where his parents live, but that’s okay.” Amusement in his gaze.
“Did you know about this?” she asked. She clenched her fists. She was angry, beyond angry, and hurt. She didn’t know why. She wasn’t attracted to Noah Watson in any way. She didn’t love him. She wasn’t infatuated by his good looks. He was downright mean. Spoiled, like.
“Whatever do you mean?” The innocent look again. She could wipe it off his face. She wanted to. Her fists begged her to. She shook her head. She clenched her fists; unclenched them.
“That his adoptive parents are not his real parents.”
“Yes, I did. Surgeons know important things about their patients, especially genetics. Especially if they can’t find the next of kin.” He smoked another puff, and smiled. “Well, I better go back inside. I have to do gallbladder surgery in an hour.”
She grabbed his arm. “Stop. Aren’t you going to tell him who his real parents are? He has a right to know.”
“Yeah…uh, no.” He smiled, and put his hands over his head and stretched. He winked.
“That’s wrong!” she protested. “You can’t do that! What are you going to do to fix it?”
“Look, it’s not my job to barge into people’s lives and mess things up. I’m just the surgeon. I like to sew. I knit at home, even. Right now, I’m making an afghan. If you want to tell him, that’s fine, copy his birth certificate. Why his parents had a forged one, I’ll never guess. Maybe they were involved in something shady.”
“Or the mafia,” she murmured.
Some parents were weird. They protected their kids to the death. They protected their children the way they were supposed to, and got nothing out of it. It wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Things like war and mistakes were not supposed to happen. That was why they had erasers on the end of pencils, she supposed. She was going to have to think about it. Damn Dr. Johnson, it was his job-but, maybe, really, it was hers. Or someone else’s. She wished she were somewhere else. Maybe some place, far away. She didn’t want to think. She had to sit down. She put her head in her hands and cried. She didn’t know why, but she was crying for Noah.
Noah was not dead. He was gone.
* * *
It took Hannah two weeks before she decided she was going to tell Noah. She found out at the police station where he was living-at a small, rundown apartment in the Bronx. She could take a cab over there. It wasn’t that far from the hospital, or her apartment. She sized up the apartment complex. It was small and drab and the windows stared at her like closed eyes.
“What is your full name, Hannah?” Noah Watson sized up the woman who stood on the porch in the rain. She was drenched. Soaked with rain.
Her teeth chattered. “My…my name is Hannah Smith!” she replied, shivering.
“What did you come here for? You didn’t have to tell me anything. I didn’t know I was adopted.” He leaned on the side of the door, his thoughts blank.
“Because I thought it was wrong you didn’t know,” she sniffed. “I debated whether or not to tell you. I thought some relatives, like your adoptive mother, would get mad, and sue the hospital-I can’t afford to lose my job. I found out she’s like, fifty-seven now, going to go on Social Security soon. Dr. Johnson is the best surgeon I’ve ever met! Only three patients died in his career! Can you imagine! Only three! One went into cardiac arrest after the surgery, but that couldn’t very well be his fault, could it?” She shook her head. “I don’t know about those things. I don’t play God’s work. We tried to save that one, we really did. He was a chiropractor, not exactly a doctor, but still-” She trailed off. She was thinking about something else, something long ago in her memory, far away, like a flower folding. “Anyway, I thought I would tell you,” she finished. “I’m sorry I didn’t before. Dr. Johnson said it wasn’t his place to tell you. He’s a real rat sometimes, but good, nonetheless.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “Do you want to come in?”
“No,” she replied, shaking her head. “I will stand out on the porch, and talk while you listen.” She fished in her handbag for the papers, including the one she copied at the hospital a few weeks ago. She took it out and handed it to him. She studied his appearance. He hadn’t shaved in weeks. He’d had a razor at the hospital, one of the nurses bought one for him, said he was pretty cute and would make babies with him if she could. She was twenty-nine. He was in his thirties. She realized she didn’t know that much about the people she worked for. She sniffed.
“What’s the matter, are you catching a cold?”
“No.”
“Thank you for telling me. I suppose I should talk to a lawyer about this.”
“You should,” she agreed. “What are you going to do now? Do you remember
anything else?”
“I do not, but that doesn’t matter. I’m talking to a counselor now. I didn’t want
to at first, I was ashamed. It’s the best course of action to take, I guess. Giving my current state.” He chuckled. It wasn’t really all that funny.
“Goodbye, Noah. Your parents real names are Joe and Josephine Berkley. I talked to them myself. They said you can still call yourself Watson.” She smiled in amusement. He was a lot like a woman with a maiden name.
“Goodbye,” he said. “Thank you for talking to them for me, making sure they are all right. I’m glad they are not drug dealers.”
“No,” she replied. “They sell carpet.”
She turned and stared at him for a single instant and he vanished back into the house and was gone. She glanced at the welcome mat. A shoe print of water formed where he stood, like the disappearing of a ghost.

The Hatred of Wildflowers.

2011-01-29T10:04:00.000-08:00

He knows some things outside of what he knows-
Outside the heart of the forest, where things run smooth
As stones. The tides go in and out, in New Orleans, in Mississippi,
In places I have never been.
Words are things I have never been.
The words are translucent, run smoothly as water, and water skips
Like stones.
This is my love. This is my life. This is the folding of symmetries,
The occasions of man and miracles-
People are upset about the hurricanes in Greece, in Malasyia,
In countries I cannot pronounce.

This is the man I love, abashed by the hatred of his own self,
Like flinging stars to the moon-
He insists I should not drive cars, he insists, I should not buy things,
That he will buy things, that this love is not grand. Grand total,
Grand shark, grand anything.

The forests grow and everything grows with it and he says his ex is like
A sister, that he knows how to rhyme words with blister.
The tree speaks, and shimmers in the sun.

His sister is a genius. She spins tales on wildflowers, sunflowers, forget-me-nots.
The earth spins with the sun, and the eyes are distant, vast as the sadness
In his heart, that waves and bends like mountains-

Roses, Kindly, Petals.

2011-01-19T08:33:00.000-08:00

The roses kindly force petals on moving ghosts.
We move with ghosts and we are of ghosts.
Words are spoken and move with hosts.
We vanish and the last one remains what was left insane,
And no one speaks, and nothing speaks.
Today we speak and are of tears,
And love lasts these most tender years,
Everyone thought what we would become,
Just like a night in a forbidden tomb.
You said I was a demon; you said I was the devil,
I don’t know what is more afraid than being level.
The rose was in a thorn of roses and nothing more
Than I supposes,
Than all the riches of the earth,
And those who live and die in birth,
Are forced like memories of our worth.
You taught what you were taught in midnight thought.
Everyone told us what we were told.
The last night disappears in tarnished gold.
For all our worth is never sold.
The roses kindly force petals and fade-
The light is gone and night abade.

You Walk In the Dark.

2011-01-19T08:32:00.000-08:00

You walk in the dark of the night.
A light is underneath the moon-
It is the shadows that glow in a spark at noon,
And heralds Time, which slows the light.

This night is the evil, this night is of frost-
Tomorrow, we will yearn, and seek,
All this time we bend with the lost,
And shatter old war wounds on a mountainpeak.

Old memories wrapped in roses wrapped in cold,
Nothing is more forsaken than the tide-
Our heart is a memory of what is bold,
And the darkness is what leaks and coincides.

Tonight we are of memory and most right,
The dreams of yesterdays and bend with old hands-
We make what is darkness, out of the night,
And tarnish the bold in tarnished lands.

This is old. In night we seek, in the night we burn,
Like broken old bicycles and moving wind,
We are caught in shadows and force to learn,
What we know is what we know in kind.

MME.

2011-01-18T10:24:00.000-08:00

MME

The robot didn’t know where he was, only that he was falling.
He was falling and he couldn’t stop it. Darkness whizzed past him. Darkness everywhere, even underneath him. He didn’t understand why he was falling or why he felt like he was falling, only that he was, and he couldn’t do anything to stop it.
He stopped.
It was bright again and he could see.
See in front of him, see behind him, see before him.
He was unscathed.
“What is this place?” he wondered aloud. His eyes whirred.
He remembered the Scientist, Dr. Scabborth, he made him. He made a robot and the robot could not remember his own name.
He saw something shiny on the ground. He picked it up and put it in his pocket. Next to the shiny thing, were three letters written on the sidewalk: MME. That must be my name, he told himself.
He decided to go into the building. It was a very old building and a sign was on it, it said: Dr. Jean Crawford. He opened the door and went inside. A light breeze followed him in. It was spring and it was nice and the sun shone like a giant diamond in the great, wide, open space.
A man seated behind the desk. He had a broad, sloping forehead like the valley; his hair was red as wine, and like the river. The river was cold, and spring was cold also.
“You think you’re a wizard, correct?” the old doctor asked. His face was hardened with lines, and his eyes were velvet. He wrinkled his forehead. His eyes were piercing blue. He had a mustache.
“I think so,” he said, his forehead wrinkled even further.
“You think so? Or, you know so?”
“I think so,” he insisted firmly, “and I know so.” He shook his head. His eyes were frightened; he didn’t know why he had come to this place, of all things. He remembered wanting to run, wanting to get away, far away from everything. He wanted to just go.
“I am a wizard.”
“You think you are a wizard.”
“What kind of wizard do you think you are?” he asked. He leaned forward in his seat. He tapped his fingers on the desk.
“I think I am…a good wizard.” He smiled. His eyes smiled in his face; everything about him smiled. He didn’t understand what was going on, only he was talking to a nice man at a desk.
“What do you remember about your old life?” he queried.
The psychologist was a nice man. Some women said he was good-looking. Other women thought he was a chimp, a man of mean demeanor.
The wizard looked out the window as the last light fell into the room, and it grew very dark. The psychologist rose to his feet. At last, he said, “I think a storm’s coming.”
For many years, the psychologist grilled the wizard. He had become very interested in what he had to say. He became very interested in what the man did. He checked at the local hospital and there was no birthday for him. He called himself MME, and that was all. He insisted his parents named him MME. Their last name was Sidways, or something like that. He thought it was a very unusual last name for a man to have. He had seen more unusual last names, like, Colcitcher, Ashwake, Merlin. The names rolled off his tongue, as he went through them in his mind, one by one.
Everything about his story spoke of treason, and he was very disturbed.
“I think you ought to get your head checked,” the psychologist said one day. “I think you ought to get your head checked, and go away from me.” He smiled at the man, expecting him to comply. Instead, he closed his eyes and nodded off. The man, MME, had fallen asleep.
The psychologist could not rouse him for anything. He could literally hear the man’s heart ticking in his chest, and knew he was alive. He ate lunch. He made a few phone calls. At five, he shook his shoulder and could not wake him. His eyes were slightly open.
“Well,” he replied. “I don’t know how you get away with it, but I envy you.”
He smiled, tipped his hat, and left the office.
The door swung softly shut behind him. It hardly made any noise at all.
* * *

THE MOON.

2011-01-13T19:37:00.000-08:00

I remain, shattered, in your memory.
The eyes of a wildflower, the ears of a goat-
Lost in a field of smoky mirrors,
The eyes stare at me, reach to tomorrow.
My nose is a symmetry, and everything is gone.
The words are mine, like heaven’s remains.
In the endless dawn, the caribou sing,
And convert to the words that listen, and remain.
Ghosts are mistaken, we are lost in the void,
Spirits are broken, on the eyes of a coin.
We flip them and zombies poke out of
The dark,
And no one can see us, and shelter the pain.
Hear the cries of the sadness that comes,
The refrain, the lost voice, that echoes in the
Still silence-
There is no other word, but the sounds of our
Voice, and we are alone,
All alone in the world.
I am alone in the heel of my own thought.
I am alone with my voice.
I am truth.
Truth becomes me.
We are the flesh, that heralds the light.
The night is broken,
I am situated upon a table, the smile of a lamb
Is the heart of a lion,
I focus and things become much clearer.
We want to buy something, we want to spend
Everything we can.
Night is the man.
I am shattered, you told me I could not speak.
You are lost in yourself, you are lost without a voice.
The glumness is not the emotions we seek,
I didn’t make it-it was not mine to announce.
Everything is woken, and we are shattered.
I found you in the void of darkness,
In the island that is not who we are,
The sadness heralds the lion,
And in the place where we are,
We see like shimmering eyes, the pale glow,
The moon.

Pendant.

2011-01-06T07:14:00.000-08:00

“You are a bastard, Anwon. One of the very few left in the world.” Anwon Price sighed and closed his eyes. He did not like how Kent was so dramatic it made his head spin and his eyes water. Sometimes, he felt like melting into a puddle on the floor, which was wet and slick and hard as anything. The days felt like they were going by, slower than the winds that rose from the North and echoed Across the Ages-Across the Ages was a term coined by King Wandron the Ninth, in 45 A.D. It was a miracle they survived the Ice Age. It was a miracle, with what all the wars and all, they survived anything. He started to quiver. To shiver. He didn’t think anything could be done about him. He wanted to sit down. He wanted to rest his eyes. His mind wandered, and he saw his Uncle’s magic mirror. The man had taken him in after his parents died in the mysterious fire, and he had had nowhere else to go. It was logical to go to the next of kin, but his Uncle Kent was not all there. He was a wizard, one of the few left in the world, and his head was not on right. Anwon had seen it happen many times. Magic destroyed people. Destroyed lives. He only hoped he would not go to Hell, the place Beyond the Gates. It was another saying. They had a lot of sayings these days. War was growing more and more prominent in the East. They had to be careful, watchful. Considerations were to be had, and his Uncle was not paying attention.
“Uncle Kent,” he said. “May I go outside and play?”
He shrugged his shoulders nonchalantly. “You can go outside and play, or you can work, but in the end, you must work. Give regards to your mother.” He threw back his head and laughed harsh laughter, the bray of a donkey. Uncle Kent was very bitter after his wife, Tatina, left him. He said it was the boy’s fault, even though Tatina loved children and baby-sat him often. He was used to the neglect, the patronizing attitude from his Uncle. He sneered in his direction most days. He ignored the sarcasm on others. He was bitter about the way he was being treated, bitter and misguided, and nothing could do to sustain the reason for the pain and suffering his Uncle caused. It was day after day after day.
“Go outside, boy!” he scowled. He threw a dish towel at him. Anwon ducked and headed outside, into the bright sunshine, and the light fell in through the trees and he walked a ways and came to a very old tree in the middle of the woods, it was a strange tree and it bore of a different color from the other trees. It was so dark it was almost black. The other trees were mostly brown. He shook his head and rested his hand against the tree, and a burning sensation entered his body, and he jumped back, nearly stumbling on a tree trunk. He sat down, hard, and fell onto a rock. It was sharp in his back. He picked it up and was about to thrust it into a bush. He looked at it and saw it was not a rock, but a strange pendant dangled from a necklace. He put it around his neck and he couldn’t remember anything for the next few hours, except the sharp sound the wind made as he ran through the trees, he laughter echoed in the twilight forest. The trees were like sentinels in the growing dark, and at long last, he stumbled, and collapsed, and his breath was knocked out of him, and he crawled to the barn and slept in the hay.
He had a dream.
He had a dream they said he was the boy With the Thousand Wishes, but it was more like, the boy With a Thousand Dreams, all stacked up, one after the other. The dreams were slow, and moved through his mind, slower than syrup. He loved making pancakes in the winter. He had been cooking since he was five. His Uncle left him alone in the big, wide house that was full of dark places and cold corners, and the open windows made it even colder even though it was nice outside. He looked at himself in the tall mirror in the bathroom, sometimes, and saw his pointed ears, his glowing face. His eyes were blue. Sometimes, they turned brown. It was not noticeable, and anyway, they did not have very many neighbors. Most of his neighbors were crows, and he found himself drawn to the animals.
School was different. He was the biggest nerd at school, and the kids poked and prodded him and jeered at him and called him names, and he did not know how to fight back, and tore his shirts and his eyes were bloodshot, most nights. His Uncle barely noticed, but the maid was kind and gave him cookies and soothed his hurt feelings and sent him out to play. He ran through the woods faster than lightning and did not know it was the pendant, making him soar like dragons.

Freeways and Highways.

2010-12-22T08:43:00.000-08:00

I design things from old wash cloths,
from cars on freeways.
The clouds spin solidly through space.
Being polite is the way to being polite.
This is not the part of being polite that annoys me,
the part of leaving me out is the thing that annoys me.
Writers are a lot like readers, and they cleanse
themselves of words-from shopping, to making clothes,
to playing video games, and playing outdoors.

I throw a tennis ball on the freeway,
and the tennis ball comes back to me-
people are a little too polite to me,
and dance in their reverie.
I like to think for myself.
I like the words that threaten other words.

This is the art of being polite, of molding things
out of paper-of paper mache,
and rhythm and rhymes.
He said he is not angry, but he is angry.
He said he is not ashamed, but he is ashamed.
There are ghosts in your words,
and we speak like ghosts and hosts.

A Dance of Demons.

2010-12-21T13:10:00.001-08:00

1

The book glowed in the bookstore window. It was actually a pawn shop, and sold books along with everything else-furniture; lamps; jewelry; and old toys. Sarah Whittier stood with her face pressed to the glass. She was looking at a glass figurine of a rocking horse, next to the window. It was silver and had diamonds for eyes, but she didn’t think they were real diamonds, nobody would put real diamonds in a glass horse. It was very beautiful. She also saw a porcelain ballerina. She went inside. No one was around. She went up to the ballerina, and touched it. It was smooth as glass. She shook her head, and bit her lip. The porcelain rocking horse cost twenty-five dollars; she had twenty dollars on her, for buying Christmas presents. She wanted the glass figurine. She couldn't stop thinking about it.
"May I help you?" a pleasant voice asked.
She turned to look at an elderly woman standing in the middle of the shop. She wore a flowered dress. Her hair was long and gray. She looked like a picture in a book, one of those Fairy Godmothers. She smiled. "I was about to leave," she mumbled at the floor.
"Why don't you stay awhile?" she asked. "See what you can see." Her face was very pleasant. Sarah's mother died from tuberculosis last month. She was still mourning. She wore a black washcloth over her face at dinner, she didn't know why, it made her feel better. She thought.
"I wish I could," she said.
"Your grandmother died recently, didn't she?" the woman asked her.
She stopped cold. She stared at the woman. "How did you know that?" she whispered.
"Your eyes," she explained. "Your eyes told me."
She didn't offer any other information, other information about what was going on behind those gray-green eyes that stared straight at Sarah's soul. She shivered. She wasn't cold. She went out into the night.
It was bedtime, she was in her bed, thinking about the glass figurine. Her thoughts succumbed her. She could think of little else. She smiled. Her hair was brushed, and shone, and the light from the hallway nightlight lit up the room. It was very bright.
"Mother?" she said the next morning.
"Yes, dear?" she asked.
"What do you know about glass figurines?"
She laughed cheerfully. "Not much, I'm afraid. Some of them are very old. Some of them have just been made, but they are crafted with loving care."
"Oh." Sarah wasn't sure she understood the answer. She looked around the kitchen. It was nice and cozy. She wanted to take a nap, but her mother was making breakfast, and she wanted to go exploring.

*
“I want something to do.”
Jack Crenshaw was eleven-years-old at the time. He turned and scowled at his mother. She was ironing, near the stove. It was winter, and it was very cold, and the wind howled and shook the windows of the old house. He shivered. Hits boots quaked.
“Are you cold, dear?” she asked. “Here, have a biscuit.” She handed him a biscuit, and he wandered away, down the drafty hallway, to the bedroom, chewing it slowly. It got earlier in the winter in Alaska. Earlier, and colder. It was going to snow. The forecast predicted it.
He sighed and bit his lip. The hallway made him afraid. He didn’t want to walk down it. He wanted to stay in the nice, warm kitchen with his mother. He shook his head. Some people had told him the old place was haunted. He never believed it. He didn’t believe in much, nowadays, except for school and Mrs. Sharpton and going to the bathroom and lunch, and the collie-he was out back, sniffing the yard. He giggled. She loved to sniff the ground-he wasn't sure what was under the snow in Alaska, but it was probably something nice. Once, she found an old baseball cap.
He went into the bedroom, dropped onto the bed, and put his head in his hands.
Sometime during the night, something moaned from the attic upstairs.
The wind cried and moaned, a sad, lonely sound.
* * *
“What are you doing here, Jack?” the succubus glared at him with glowing, wild eyes. Red as the sands of Mars, red as an apple.
“How did you know my name?” he asked nervously. He was looking for a way out. He shouldn’t have come for the book-the book could fall off the face of the earth, for all he cared.
“I know everything.” The succubus laughed.
“I’d…heard you escaped from the book.”
“I didn’t escape. I was released. We succubus are slaves of our trade. The trade of evilness, of darkness.”
“Who let you out?”
She moved closer, towards him. His mind screamed inside of him. There weren’t any thoughts. Just a shallow, cold pool. “You did!” she rasped, her voice like moving October wind.
He threw his hands up and covered his eyes with his face. He swallowed hard, and the darkness overtook him, and he couldn’t remember. Anything.
* * *
The darkness swirled around him-Jack Crenshaw was in a cemetery on Halloween night. It was dark. He clutched a flashlight in his hand, and he looked around him, and swallowed hard. Tears came out of his eyes, and he couldn’t see two feet in front of him-he thought he could, but the seeing was tough, and he wanted to scream, to run away, but he couldn’t. He had to find the ghost of Lenore. It was a stupid thought, but the thought stuck in his mind, and he couldn’t make it go away. It was the stupid story. The stupid story drove him out here, in the middle of the night, in his blue pants soaked with water, and his white shirt, and his hair was wet, too, like he’d just taken a shower, but nobody was here except him, and he could feel the eyes on the back of his neck-
Alone.
The whisper of wind was beside him and he screamed and he clutched at his heart, his heart thumped loudly in his chest and he couldn’t think of what to do. He had left his cell phone-where? Something bulged in his back pocket.
2
The raw pain of breath was in his throat. He clawed at his throat, trying to reach in the back of his throat to get it out, but he couldn’t. His eyes smarted. His nose was running. He thought he had a cold, but he wasn’t sure. He ran through the forest, tripping and falling over roots, his wind in his hair. It was cold. Everything about the night was cold, and he was feeling down, down in the dumps. He’d had the dream, the dream about the weird creature who looked human.
3
“Get out of my crypt!”
“I’m not in your crypt! This is just a stupid old house!”
4
Jack Crenshaw had the dream again-the dream of floating in space.
It wasn’t space, really, it was more like floating in nothing, and the nothing was his life. The nothingness shook him up and he awoke, panting and sweating, his face turned towards the pavement, and the flashing lights made his head spin. He blinked once. Twice. His eyes adjusted to the sudden change in brightness, and another face was in front of him, and sweat poured from his forehead. “Hi,” he croaked out, and the face smiled down at him-at first, he thought it was the face of Death, and Death had come to take him. He realized it was a man, and the man was a police officer. How could he have thought Death was a police officer? It was almost laughable. He shook his head and his vision cleared, and he could see again, and the outline of the police officer was closer to him, asking if he was all right. Jack wanted to say, “No, he wasn’t all right, his head ached and his butt ached and his face was cold from being on the pavement, and he wanted something nice and hot down his throat, he wanted to eat, but he couldn‘t quite get the words out.
The police officer’s name was Drew Arlens. “What are you doing here?” he asked him.
Jack looked around him stupidly. His mind was deaf and dumb. Nothing around him except darkness and the flashing lights of the police cars, and the moon, bright and full, and his wet jeans-he was not a happy camper.
5
A voice whispered in the darkness-the swirling darkness, calling his name, or maybe they were calling another Jack, from another time and place, from some place far away. It was dim in his mind. It was dim, and he was seeing, and he looked around and he blinked once, twice, and the darkness was still there-he couldn’t see anything, except himself, and himself was not awake.
This was no ballpark.
There wasn’t anything here.
6
He woke. A nurse’s face floated in front of him and he jerked and nearly knocked over the food tray in her hand. “Get out!” he rasped. His entire body shook. “Who the hell are you?”
“My name is Jenkins,” she chirped, smiling down at him with a wide smile. Her teeth was like gigantic slabs of white bread. “Jenkins, Amanda.” She laughed heartily. “More like, Amanda Jenkins-Jenkins being my last name. I’m married.” She tossed her blonde hair, the lipstick was bright red.
“I don’t care. May I have some water?”
“Why, aren’t you a polite young man!” she exclaimed. She scurried out of the room, and a doctor showed up.
“Well,” he chirped. “It looks like you had another spell.”
“Another spell? What do you mean?”
“You had a stroke, young man-well, your status is leukemia, it says on your charts.”
He propped his elbow up on the large hospital pillow and stared at him with bulging eyes. “What do you mean, leukemia? I’m perfectly normal-perfectly healthy.” He sputtered out the words.
“We ran some tests while you were asleep-”
“While I was asleep? What kind of hospital is this? I didn’t give you any consent to do that!”
“You didn’t have to. Your wife did.” His voice clipped out the words, one by one, like stones falling in a pool of cold water. Water always reflected the sky-life was a lot like that, a reflection of one thing turned into something else.
“I’m not married.”
The doctor glanced at his hand. “I can see your ring is gone, but a police officer found it at the scene. He was kind enough to bring it in for you.”
“Oh. Thanks. I guess.”
“What do you remember?”
“Nothing. Not really.”
“What do you mean, nothing?”
“I don’t remember anything about myself. I don’t even know why I’m here. Nothing hurts.” He frowned. He was confused about something, just something, not really anything, or maybe he was and he didn’t see it, couldn’t see the plain thing in front of his face, the something that made up his life and-the last of the thoughts flitted from his mind, and he couldn’t think. He was dumb again. That was the last thought he’d had before she spoke again.
“You broke your arm and your collar bone. You almost died. Your stomach was practically in knots, not to mention the leukemia. You’re lucky to be alive.”
His eyes narrowed. “What do you mean, lucky? I don’t remember my own name.”
“Your name is Jack Crenshaw.”
Something jarred his thoughts-something in the back of his mind. A stirring, final note. His mouth twisted in a grimace. It wasn’t even a smile.

Still Life, lyrics.

2010-12-19T19:23:00.000-08:00

Still Life.

This is my spirit.
This is the way I’m going to show,
All of these fields of flowers, to the water
Below.
This is what I hold in the midnight sky,
And these tears I shed I want to cry.
The words I pour from my pages,
And cry these tears,
And we’ve been gone for all these years.
My life is at a stand-still, and still you’ve gone,
All these messages I am alone.
I stand on the mountain and look into my grave,
I’ve been out of the picture for a long while it seems.
You thought you could mess with me, and turn
Me into what I am-
Now I’m cold and I’m broken and I can barely stand.
You think I’m a liar I saw you bleed on the page.
You don’t know anything about the forces of rage.
This is my spirit this is my war cry,
Like the wind and the rain and the shelters we deny.
My heart is on a page.
I am homeless and broken and I cry your name,
The sky is above us, and we are here to receive,
These tears are our sorrows and on the pages it bleeds.

The Real Misery, lyrics

2010-12-19T14:22:00.001-08:00

The Real Misery, lyrics

Don’t judge me about what I can be,
The rhythm of my life is not a matrimony-
You think you know everything,
But you don’t know me,
All you give me is misery.

You take my heart and squeeze, squeeze it,
You think you are my rock, but I’d rather freeze it.
You talked to me in school, but you didn’t know my name,
All you gave me was years of pain.

You told me you loved me, but you never knew,
About what I was going through.
You thought I was a leader, but you never know,
Why these years of being down, are yours to fix now.

Don’t judge me about what I can be,
The rhythm of my life is not in harmony-
It’s all your fault, we can’t do anything about it,
We don’t have enough tools in the world to fix it.

Who I Am, story.

2010-12-19T13:35:00.000-08:00

It worried me. I was Death, and Death wasn’t supposed to feel pain-Death was above pain. Above hatred. Above mankind. A fallen angel, like.

My name was Death, and I am the bringer of Death.

I found the cloak in the middle of the road late one night, and it was so dark I couldn’t see three feet in front of me. I had just stopped at a coffee house two blocks from the rock quarry, and my mind spewed hatred in every direction, in all directions I couldn’t see. I thought to myself: “You almost got hit by a truck.”

The inner demon inside me almost laughed out loud, and as painful as it was, I had to stop at a hospital. It worried me, the pain in my right shoulder was very sharp, and I laughed loudly again, because I was getting hungry. I had bags of money back at my hotel room, for they were left behind by unsuspecting victims, somebody I didn’t know. I didn’t know anyone, now, no one would befriend Death.

* * *

It was the void that disturbed me, in the sullness and the darkness, that void that called to me in a song-that I was by myself, that I was blessed with the death of a song. I was the song. The car accident changed me in a way that was both temperamental and hard to transcribe, indeed, on the back door of a song, my life was dramatically changed. I became the singer, and the sinner was estranged, and the heart of my life was broken, unfeeling, like the wings of an angel. I thought about death and dying and everything in between and the miracle of being alive, of being temporary insane, since I could see what I could see at that very instant the car struck me, ahead of me, sort of to the right-almost as if I wanted it to strike me down, dead. My mind felt a sharp, intense pain, a hatred that defined me, and the wholeness of hatred was what refused to succumb me to the succubus that was my life. The succubus of the self, the innermost hatred of being dead, then being flesh, and an escape from death.

I walked from the car accident without a scratch-except there was a small one on my right arm, a jagged, scratch that went almost up to my elbow. I thought bitterly of jumping off the jagged rocks into the highway below, that there wasn’t anything worth living for. My daughter, Gloria, was dead, had died from tuberculosis when she was three, and the mortician said she’d hadn’t suffered. It wasn’t very important, this small transgression, the part of me that was the great unknown, being devoid of life, the unknowing of the self, the temper of the self that was within me. I was not a guardian. I was not a god. I simply co-existed, floating through time and space, thinking about my own death, and then there were three bright lights and I woke and a man stared down at me, bug-eyed and looking placated.

“What are you doing here?” he screeched down at me. “You’re going on the highway too fast, you were going to break your neck!”

I tried to talk, to speak to this angel that was my life, my shining star, the glimmer of hope in the distance. It was night, and the darkness was around me, through me, in me, swirling and swirling forever in a void. I was the void. I couldn’t remember anything about my life.

The med shielded my driver’s license from me. “What are you doing here?” he screeched once again.

“I’m death,” I answered, and laughed, and he looked down at me and narrowed his eyes, and I thought he was probably insane. He probably thought the same about me.

“Can’t you get up?” he asked me. “All you got is a scratch-an old one, from the looks of it.”

“It’s an old scratch,” I agreed. “I was hunting two weeks ago, in Braum Park.”

“Good,” he replied. “Why don’t you get up?”

I scrambled to my feet, and looked left and to the right of me, and the police swarmed around me and started jotting things down. I insisted I couldn’t remember my name.

Mixed-Up World.

2010-12-18T21:47:00.001-08:00

All these drugs don’t got me mixed in with this feeling
I’m living on a dream I’m reeling
in the scene this is the miracle
I’ve been waiting for you’re my angel

you drop-kick me out the door,
I loved you with my all, my heart was beating for you,
my love is a rhythm and it beats true.

I look out the door and you’re standing
in the rain, my love burns like
fire and I swear I’m going insane, I‘m going insane.

No one is looking out for me, I’m here on my own, my heart thrums like a meadow, and locks in the pain.
Don’t tell me you need me, don’t tell
me goodbye, my heart is on fire, I don’t ask you why.

You’re a world’s away
from my heart, and it was all my fault,
I let you down, let you down, let you down…
no one can dry these tears away.
I’m gone again, but your love will stay.

reflection of quiet.

2010-12-17T21:21:00.000-08:00

My advice is this: stay on the outside, looking in-
don't forget to think about the past.
Look about the words that are inside of books,
and try to shelter us, when we speak about dinosaurs,
and Egyptology, and find ghosts in old buildings.

They think they are sensitive. They don't know anything
about words, and how they are spread on pages-
they don't know anything about geniuses, what they think
and why, because they can't think, they can't bleed
like open flowers-

some things are left unsaid, and the nastiness, the badness
that is inside most people has been quieted, and the old man
who is my teacher has risen from the ground, from the distant
grave, the silent that is his name-

The Out of Water Metaphor.

2010-12-17T21:16:00.000-08:00

The surgeon who saved my life walks inside a subway,
not the subway that sells subs, but the subway in New
York, a train that takes him from one station to
the next. Not one place to the next, one station,
these are the nouns that reside outside of nouns,
words hidden inside one another-

the hospital on the end of the street rises like
a sleepy animal at night, and the windows stare
at me like eyes.
I walk every day past it, look this way and that,
trying to find shelter out of the storm,
the crying and howling of being a nurse.
My surgeon saved me first, when I was two,
and my love saved me second-not the love of a man,
but the love of my calico cat, my one red slipper,
and my pink umbrella, which I carry during a storm.

I think about my surgeon, and his family-his family in
Pakistan, Canada, Tokyo, the place that is bright with
lights and the Chinese who bid on jobs back in China.
There are places with bright lights, but I have to walk
by the hospital, the old hospital that sleeps and bleeds
a bed of worms,
and I think of my surgeon, and what he eats for breakfast,
and what he might do after that-
the words come, and my mouth opens and shuts like a fish
out of water.

THE BOYFRIEND.

2010-12-17T21:11:00.000-08:00

The fruit sits on the table-my boyfriend, the guitar,
sits on the chair at the other end of the table-
his eyes are like steel pools of cold, blackness.

He thinks to himself he is not gone for good,
that he is not a radio, a star, a piece of fruit-
the fruit that is on the table, in the middle of himself.

He is not myself. He is not a hole inside myself.
He is the world, and the world is growing large-
large inside my belly, that feeds another world.

He sits in the green chair, all by himself, and molds
tomorrow out of clay-clay that melts between my fingers-
and sings out a world.

My heart is in my hands. In between dreams, thoughts are
things, and everyone is ecstatic about the fruit of trees.
People mold, and life continues-but not for disease.

For people with disease, life ends, bitterly, and it is the
end of all worlds-the worlds that spin between time and space,
and the stories we make real.

John's Advice.

2010-11-19T17:10:00.000-08:00

1
“What'll it be, mister?” the skinny eleven-year-old boy asked him. He wore a baseball cap and torn jeans.
“It'll be three trout, son,” he answered, smiling.
“Why don't you go fishin'?” he asked.
“I don't think I'd rather like fishin,” he answered, using the southern, outlandish drawl of New Orleans. He missed the state and wanted to go back.
“What do you mean?”
He leaned across the counter. The boy looked nervous-and he should. No one knew he had been in jail when he was nineteen, for stealing a television set from Mr. Rawls. Mr. Rawls was big and fat.
John Blanchard was a short, stout man and had a bumbling mustache. He walked with a limp and his forehead was wide as the sea to the left of him. The smell of the ocean drifted to his nostrils and he looked small against the backdrop of the water behind him and it sparkled like a mirror. He glanced behind him and the water shifted and folded over itself, and everything about it was close to him and he could touch it with his bare hands, touch the sparkling diamonds.
“I don't go fishin' because my hands don't work so good,” he replied.
“How come they don't?”
“I was in the war, boy. The one in the Persian Gulf.”
“That wasn't such a long time ago,” he scoffed. “You must be jokin.' We never lost that war.”
“No, sir, but some people did.” He straightened his shoulders, and smiled at the bratty boy. He picked up his purchases and left.
John felt awkward, going into places like that. Most people didn't talk to him, and it was no wonder. He was small and swift like a bird and had a hard time going, especially in the winter and his bones creaked and he realized the creaking of his bones was the passage of time, in between the reluctance of time. John didn't understand the concept of time, and never wanted to. Time was nothing more than an hour glass folded in on itself. He thought of all his favorite authors, how they died and how they lived and how he would like to live like that, as swift and barren as the folds of clothing after it was dried. John didn't think it was a good idea to think about it. He went home and made himself dinner in his small, quiet apartment and he heard the screams of the traffic outside. John never did get his license, and never bothered to care. He didn't know why. It seemed like too much trouble, trouble was something he could do without. He went home and put the trout on the cupboard and washed it and skinned it and delicately took out the bones and threw them in the trash. A dog barked outside, startling him. He loved to read in the summer and it made him think of all those special days his mother brought home a book or magazine and let him read it and then she would walk back to the five and ten and she would bring back some more. More happier times occurred before John's father died, faded away like a flower rooted from the ashes-faded away in the midnight sky and left them alone, alone in the sea of blackness and stillness below them. John remembered at nine years old, sitting on the porch at night and looking out at the pond in the yard that shimmered like a mirror and everything was grander than it was. John's innocence left him the next year, after Morgan McFad socked him in the stomach for no reason at all and John punched him in the back of the head and was sent to the principal's office. That was the summer he realized people were different, and when they started talking about the Holocaust.
He didn't know anything about the Holocaust, only that it had something to do with some Jewish people who were killed a long time ago before they were Jewish. John didn't know they had ways of finding things out that happened a long time ago, after Jesus was crucified on the cross, or before the French and Indian war or the American Revolution or World War II or all the other wars that happened in the world, maybe the universe. John didn't think about the universe much. He was more concerned with baseball.
His most favorite baseball player of all time was Babe Ruth. Babe Ruth was one of the most famous baseball players of them all, and a poster used to adorn his walls, back at the old house before Mom died. Mom had gotten cancer and his grandmother came to take care of him. She died and then his mother died and he was left alone, and he had nothing to eat and stole food from his neighbors and in town. One day, they caught him and took him to the sheriff and the sheriff didn't throw him in jail, but he gave him a spanking. John scowled at the man and rubbed his behind and ran home, hopping and then skipping and jumping. He was alone, but he was himself, and that was the best part, the only part that ever made sense to him.
Babe Ruth had become a valuable part of his life and it got him through some many rough times. He didn't realize things were that bad until his mother passed away and he was left alone for almost a year before Social Services came and carted him away in a blue Volkswagon and he was left at a local government agency until the social service's woman came back and told him he had a new family, the Spurts. They sounded like really nasty people and it turned out, they really were. They locked him in his room and fed him once a month, and the kids made fun of him at school and poked and laughed at him. John did exceedingly well in math and dreamt of being an engineer, but his dreams were shattered by so many difficult things in life, the dreams of suffering, and the dreams of food, and the dream of shelter and a loving family.

Your Dialogue has turned its back on God-

2010-10-05T13:38:00.001-07:00

On my heart of creation, your dialogue has turned
Its back on God-
The life is not worth living, in the eyes of man.
You take out the life and watch it strand by strand,
Like I really need you to let go, and burst into song.

You think you know the color of the wind,
The cool lips of trees that kiss and reverse the heart of
wind songs.
You think you know the cool wind in dark trees,
The times of spaces,
The times of beginnings-you steal my dialogue,
And toss it into the unknown.

The stars are bright tonight, here is Jupiter,
Kissing the moon-
Go ahead and kiss the planet,
She won’t be back, she won’t return like yellow
Daisies in a field of broken flowers.

She won’t return, on the back of creation-
You think you are the sinner, the sinner
Is the speaker.
You reap what you sow.
I am not a farmer, I do not bend over in the bright sunshine,
I do not eat anything.

You think you have respect, respect is in the giver,
The giver of the planets, who steal my dialogue.

LOST.

2010-08-20T11:33:00.001-07:00

I am lost,
And you are gone-
The night is over and done.
The sunlight fades with the sun;
I am here, and you are gone.

Tomorrow is not what it is today.
Darling, I don’t know what to do or say.
My heart soars when we are in flight-
I see your eyes on this starless night.

Don’t forget where you came from;
Don’t forget where you will go.
Listen to the water as it recedes,
And darkness will be reborn below.

Darkness will be reborn,
And the sky is tempted on a dewless morn.
My heart is not aching tonight,
The bird soars when we are in flight.

Diamonds fall into the river,
And my soul is aching-it goes on forever.
This isn’t what we remember,
You cross the endless tide my love will abide
On this endless river.

THE TURNING STATION.

2010-08-18T12:35:00.000-07:00

“You got some smokes?” Manuel Rodriquez’s voice drifted from the cold stillness that autumn morning. I was getting my newspaper on the front porch-the paper boy had come earlier and collected his funds for the newspaper, and I looked out and saw my friend pleading with a white guy wearing a red bandanna. His chest bulged. His eyes bulged, and were hollowed out. They hung from his sockets and he looked half-dead. I don’t know anything about him. I didn’t know where he was sleeping. It bothered me. A lot of things bothered me.
“Manuel,” I said sharply. “You know better than to talk to them.” He was seventeen. “Come inside, brother, I will feed you.” His clothes smelled like smoke. He had been buying cigarettes instead of spending it on food. He was an idiot. I knew a lot of those.
“No, Mama,” he said, and shook his head. “I don’t take nothing from women.”
“Nothing?” I raised my eyebrow. “How long you been skipping school, Manuel?” I glared at him. He deserved better than what he got. He didn’t really have anything. No parents, no other family, no siblings. Well, a half-brother in Detroit, who wouldn’t speak a word to him. Everyone was afraid. Everyone was offensive. It would never change. Like this was the way to be polite. I shook my head sympathetically.
“Years,” he answered. “You got a problem with that?”
I nodded. “I do. You need to be learning to read, Manuel.”
“No time for books,” he scoffed. “Making money from drugs-that’s where it is at.” He nodded as if he knew all about living in the streets. I’d been living from day to day, barely surviving on rent enough as it was. No one was polite anymore. Perhaps we didn’t know how to be.
He left. I went to work. It was a slow day. Only sold two dozen socks; and we were getting a workload of baby hats this week. It was getting to be cold. The wind was blowing.
Halloween was around the corner.
I thought about Manuel often. Once, a cat came up to my steps and I patted him and offered him a glass of milk. He skirted away, yowling down the street. Manuel was a lot like the cat-afraid of everything, too afraid to admit to the fear.
I had enough money for rent and I was happy. I wouldn’t be pushed out of the apartment like the Robertson family was upstairs. I could hear them yelling as they packed. The oldest son, Bartholomew, was graduating from high school and was getting a job at the deli down the street. He had black hair and pointed ears.
I saw Manuel the next night. He was smoking with his buddies-it wasn’t cigarettes, it was pot. That was the kind of thing that made me afraid, made me wonder what the government had gotten us into. It was like no one had a will of their own, that they couldn’t think for themselves. The human race had been flopping for a long time. We didn’t know how to stop.
It wasn’t the fact that Manuel did drugs that bothered me-it was the fact that he didn’t have a college degree that really irked my tomatoes.
I ran a small business shop that sold baby socks online; and had been for seven years now.
I lived in a small, but moderately furnished, apartment on the West Side of Missouri, and had a boyfriend named Maxwell who had an obsession with music. He dreamt of becoming a superstar one day, but as he became older and balder and fatter, he realized his dreams were to be smashed into a tiny million pieces by the big name businesses of the Upper East Side. I didn’t have a best friend, or any kind of friend. I used to have one, a long time ago, named Margo Westley, but she had become too interested in potheads to be of anymore use to me. I didn’t want to give her anymore money. I didn’t want to become a part of something I was trying to fix-the inability to overanalyze current situations. The current situation was my money problem. I borrowed money from my grandmother and from the bank; I stopped eating fast-food.
No one understood my need to sell socks, but it was there, quick and sure, and undetermined in its realizations.
I didn’t know what it was that I couldn’t know, but the score had to be settled between me and the Big Bad Government. My uncle is said to have died in Vietnam, and later it turns out he turned up in Vegas, always on the slots. I didn’t like gambling. It didn’t suit me.
Everyone had a problem with my need to be good-this was in ‘87, and I had a lot of thinking to do.
In the far back corner of my mind, I remembered school. I remembered nasty Nathan Holligan; I remembered the elementary school principal; his fake mustache and eyes like glass.
He was interested in cars, they were his favorite thing to talk about and he mentioned them to the students as much as he could. Being a principal copped some bad mojo.
The teachers and students and everyone shunned him, but he had his gang of friends and his business outside of school. I loved business and wanted to own a major corporation one day.
Manuel did drugs. He smoked pot and sometimes I saw him at the Pizza Train outside of the apartment building late at nights, pleading for drugs, trying to sell his cocaine. I asked him multiple times where he got the cocaine, but all he could do was stare bug-eyed at me, his Adam’s apple bobbing and a strangling sound protruded from him. He wanted me to buy his drugs.
I said no way, no thanks. He vanished a month later, probably found some gangbangers to cling to. He had no parents.
His mother abandoned him when he was three. His father was a druggie. All the teachers ignored him, and he was a whiz at math. He tried taking a college course but failed because he had panic attacks and they wouldn’t give him SSI. His main job was selling drugs. I offered him a job, but he refused to take it, saying he didn’t want to intervene in friendships. I guess I saw it from his standpoint. I guess I saw it from his point of view.
Politics were getting worse. They were far worse than they ever had been, in the fall of ‘89. Nothing was good as it should be. George Bush was president. I didn’t pay attention to that bullshit, but then again, I didn’t have a television set.
“Manuel,” I said. I saw him again that afternoon. He had bought a suit; his hair was slicked back till it shone. “What you doing? Where are you going?”
“I’m leaving the state,” he answered, smiling at me. “Leaving the state, finding a new job-one without drugs.” He nodded happily. “I’m getting a job, you’ll be proud of me. You’ll see.”
“What about your family? They could help you.”
“No,” he answered. “I’m going to live with my cousin. She had a baby when she was fifteen and she’s real happy. I’m going to live with her. She’s going to help me. Thanks a lot, thanks a whole lot.”
He stuffed his hands into the pocket of his jeans, and went off down the street, whistling a tune I hadn’t heard before.
A door swung open and the whole street was quiet again.

Toilet Paper And...

2010-08-17T19:02:00.001-07:00

Toilet Paper and Palm Trees

I sit on the palm of my hand. My mother said that
Days and nights are like forgetting-that we are afraid of
Being who we have become. I haven’t becoming anything
Other than a lighthouse on the ocean,
And the waves bend with the veils of time-
Time is translucent, and coverts over itself and everyone
Seems to think they are forgetting, forgotten.

Sometimes, my young collie dog looks at me as if to say,
“I wish you could speak to me, I wish you could say hello
In doggy talk.” The writer down the street says he can
Speak in Doggytalk, that is the language of men-
The rhythm is the bowing of the trees, and the young man,
My lover, plays drums on Saturday nights in the depths of
The night, the depths of everything…

I am more afraid of losing my poetry. The words in which
I speak to the sky, the ground, the trees, the wind.
The wind moans my name-
I call to it and it will not answer me.
I sing to it and it will not speak.
I am wasting paper. I am wasting the flowers of the paper.

The Sun Dog.

2010-07-21T09:01:00.000-07:00

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. 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.

In the Doorway.

2010-06-28T19:24:00.000-07:00

Time is in what we tell,
and it waits, floating above shadows above,
in a doorway, on wingless arms,
reaching to the still winds of grace,
the sadness of forgotten and mine.
In the wasteland, the old man toils,
and turns and mutters in his house.
The stories are forgotten in minnows;
and the places are mapped out on walls.
The seeds are for granted.
We are not what we do.
No mistaken is for the shadow,
the place beyond the grass-grown walls,
and the temple that overflows.
Ask them, and ye shall receive.
People waking and people sleep.
We wake and we dream and the dreamer's
wake,
shadows mask rinds of time,
space is continual as a drum.
A drumbeat of yours and mine,
continuous in its tomb.
We use imagination as a quarter,
and our face is veiled in the midst.
We use no forms of communication.
We drill holes in West Virginia,
and Fox Mulder pops out,
quick as a rabbit.
We have not given into ourselves.
The rest mock dangerous exits,
and swift movements are mistaken.
We go and we come.
We exit and we leave.
I am not educated. I am not the working.
I am not the dumb and the worried.
I am the heart that is the heart.
I am the door that is left unopen,
the place between sunlight and the daisies,
that rise out of the darkness of nothing,
into the midnight sun.
It is like being something and nothing.
It is like being an orphan when no one speaks.
The sadness is in the silence.
Our hearts and thoughts are quick as lightning bugs.

It's About Conceiving.

2010-06-20T20:13:00.001-07:00

The darkness itself is not my friend-
my house is my only haven.
I am trapped in the barbs of wire,
lost on winds of time.
I keep myself isolated.
Trying to permeate through the fences of
confusion,
I have become a master at the art of being alone.

Alone. Everyone wants me to be alone-
from bakers to Irishmen,
who turn and toil in their moss beds.
The wind moans quietly.
Some people are angry because I eat.
Some people are angry because they tell lies.
Some people are homeless-dead, and
broken.

My friends drink. Everyone drinks every single day,
and don't know what is happening to their bodies.
Only the fools know.
The rest conceive.

The Nature and Nothing Else.

2010-06-19T15:03:00.000-07:00

The long drawn out marches,
bridges on solid grounds.
A black cat in white mounds.
A tree on blue birches.

A finch sits on a warm rock,
and tweets to the wind-
the sound of the rhythm,
is in each crack and bend.

The grass waves in the wind.
It weaves around the trees.
Everything we seek, is sheltered in the breeze.
Nothing else is what we seek, and in what we find.

A finch warms itself on a rock.
Everything around it is empty and lonely,
and the houses at night are botched-
everything in the dark is a phony.

A sparrow flies and sits on a rock.
It dances and moves in a graceful arch.
He is a brother to the finch; you don't want to pick up the block,
and put it down and on you march.

I sing chorus to the wind.
And in your naked eyes.
You weave and you bend,
and tell permanent lies.

Nothing else is broken; nothing else is the same.
We took the lies out of distant cries,
and in the end its in the name-
we say our last goodbyes.
The wind moans its own name.

You told me you wouldn't find the trail
of the sparrow-
that you wouldn't let on, you wouldn't wail,
and you would see me again, tomorrow.
I guess I tried to let it fail.
You hear the naked demons wail.

That's what they call finches and sparrows.

Tears of Magic, Tears of Bone, beginning.

2010-06-17T10:48:00.000-07:00

Prince Edward had wild brown hair and blue eyes. They were fixated on his father this time, and his mouth was twisted downward in a frown. He didn't like the way things were going at this current point in time, and was defiant in all ways possible. He thought he would show it by cursing at his mother, his grandmother, and the doctor who came to call upon him. “What are you doing in my room!” he snarled. “I beg of you to be gone!”
The man loomed over him threateningly. “You know you are not to curse at your mother! How many times do I have to tell you that!” He shook his head. “I have a half-mind to send you to a boarding school, you no-nonsense, egotistical boy!”
“I'm not a boy.” He straightened his shoulders. “I'm nine.”
“Nevertheless, you are my son,” he replied. “I must protect you from the bad things that are out in the wild, in the world, in the great vast unknown that permeates this land. The kingdom is becoming more and more civilized. The next time you act out in public, may be your last.” His eyes gazed down on him, and the boy shivered. “Mark my words.”
He turned and left the room, slamming the door behind him.
The boy jumped up on his bed and howled at the night. Outside, a wolf howled along with him.
In the morning, the king's messenger pigeon was found dead on the ground, buried by a snowdrift. He didn't think a wolf had something to do with the pigeon's death, but wolf tracks were around the bird and he had plucked away some of the feathers before skirting into the night. The wind moaned. The sky was dark and cloudy above them, and everything looked surreal in the fallen winter light. It was mid-morning, and the archers were getting ready for practice. Prince Edward was not ready. He was eating a piece of baked bread in the kitchen, sprinkled with pumpkin seeds. The butcher had gone to the vegetable patch and had gotten a pumpkin and brought it to the cook, Mildred. She was an overly large woman, and had large, glassy eyes and a wide, smiling mouth. Her nose was long and crooked and she had been hit in the face with a ball when she was seven-years-old.
“Hello, youngin',” she said pleasantly. “Whatever are you doing, eating that bread, for? Your archery class is about to start.”
“I don't want to play right now,” he replied.
“But the king...”
“The king is my father,” he said firmly. “I do not have to listen to what he says all the time. Unlike some people.” He sniffed, and shook his head. “Really, Mildred, I think you ought to have more sense, listening to my father like that.”
“He does pay me,” she reminded him with the tiny hint of a smile.
He shrugged his bony shoulders. He was small for his age. Most of the boys in his class at school were heavier, and had bonier features. “I'll pay you from now on!” he vowed.
She couldn't help it. She burst into peals of laughter. Tears squeezed from her eyes and she wiped them away with her apron. “You know, you are a bright lad, but you don't have much sense!” she gasped, doubling over in pain. “You go on now. Go outside. You don't have to play archery, but I have to make dinner for the soldiers coming tonight. They are going to be a hungry lot.”
He raised an eyebrow. “I never knew you to follow the rules, but all right.” He picked a cookie off the plate and scurried out of the door. It slammed shut behind him. A gust of wind nearly blew her over.

The Forgotten Bedroom.

2010-06-05T13:41:00.001-07:00

The anger was a rotten fruit.
Caught in a spiral of forgotten things,
That dreamt of lowly spirals and soft movements.
She said she wouldn’t come. That she should never stay.
Her thoughts were distant and parched as dreams.
Her mind would gently sway.
Back and forth, she left on the perched top of
Branches and trees,
The freedom of thought is a circumference of images,
And things bending in the mile.
The sea turtles have come out to play-
Waving softly their green hands.
It is my month, and I am picking grapes. The sun has come out
To play and the spirals of golden centipedes
Are free of thought and my hunger isn’t aching,
It is aching and homely and my thoughts twirl downward.
The anger is in everything. The anger has sheltered
Great wisdom and my face is not gently scorched nor showered.
And the wanting takes me and shakes me and I am diseased.
The disease is of the mind.
I am forced to make choices between myself and the bed,
Between my eyes and my head.
You are the trees that sway in the wind. I am forgotten.
I am a dream that is dead.
We are cotton candy clouds.
We are things that cannot be seen.
We are a table in a bedroom.

THE EARTH AFFECT.

2010-05-31T21:18:00.000-07:00

The man in the tavern had a balding head and eyes like glass. It was a nice night. He tripped on the front stoop as he entered the tavern. A man glanced him up and down, by the front door. His mouth twisted downward, in a frown. He did not like to frown. He had nothing to smile about. Everything was going good in his life, except, everything was not. Such was the ways of the world. Such was the ways of nothing, and things that were shaped. The frown was brighter than the night outside. To say, it wasn’t much of anything. “You’re good enough,” he said gruffly, and beckoned him to a shadowy corner in the tavern. The building was cracked. Old. Had been riddled with use of wear and tear. He ordered the man a drink and ordered him to look at the moon and the stars through the barred window. He touched the window. The window was cold, just like the moon was cold.
“Who are you?” he asked. He gasped. His eyes bulged like a fish. His skin was parched. Dry. The smell of cigar smoke hung deathly in the air, and the air swirled, and was warm. His skin was tanned. He had been tanning in the sun, and everything about him was colorful, careful, carefree. The words hung steadily in the air and things were tarnished, and the wooden table was bronzed. He could see his face in it.
“My name is Hash,” he answered. “That’s all you need to know.”
He grunted. Drank a swish of scotch; poured it on the floor. The waitress gasped, and fainted. A woman waved her face with a fan. She looked half-dead. Maybe starved. She was one of the Falcons, the Peoples who gave Freemen a second chance. The Others were called Robots. They were the second ones, the ones who bred robot dogs and robot houses. The houses were the ones in the middle, set in the middle of the great, wide, place, in stone. The houses were colder than the sun.
The sun blazed heavily above them. It was not going to be long now, the reports said. They said everything was going to blow up. They were going to become obliterated. The scientists were not prophets. They were stating educated guesses. Degrees in facts. Mankind was dying. Strangely enough, the animals were thriving. An extinct peacock was found in a flower bed in Mexico. Pigeons and blue jays were becoming extinct. Man had lost his way. It was the end of time. The end of all times.
He yawned. He was getting sleepy. He had been drinking a lot. The man gave him three beers-imagine that! Three beers for nothing. It didn’t even taste funny. It tasted normal. The strangeness was not in him. He had not returned himself somewhere deep within himself, to the unhappiness found there. Unhappiness found at the bottom of a broken bottle. The bottle glistened and gleamed in the sun.
The hardships were nothing more than a simple trampling of fact. Of figures and nature and bygones. The simple fact of it. The human race was not simple.
The man swiveled in his chair in the command center of the ship. He was balding; rather fat; and had intense blue eyes and a long, pointed nose. His ears were rounded at the tip, and his face was flushed pink. He was not a kind man. He was not one to get along with. It was said he used to stowaway Prime Soldiers who didn’t get along with the whole lot; and his anger stemmed from the loss of his daughter, Eliza, at the age of five in a tragic house fire on the planet called Earth. Earth was far away, a distant memory, something as dim and dark as a dream. The universe was colder than anything and nothing more was dispersed than the shadows of night that stretched over an Eternity of Blackness. His meanness didn’t stop there. He was supposed to update his Logs every day, and send it to the Galaxy Council for inspection. The ship was his only home. He didn’t like anybody. He never liked himself. He was a man on a mission: to obliterate each and every solar system that contained Soid Bugs. They were ugly, crawling things that lived in distant suns, and created them to explode. They were intelligent. Conniving. Hideous creatures. Had nothing to hide, and everything to gain.
Eiffel Horner was not a man. He was an Earthling. It was written in the Chronicles of the Biosphere-the place where planes came and went-that the universe created at the beginning was that none other than the planet called Earth. Eiffel was not born on Earth. He was born on Jupiter 4.3434th, which meant there were ten thousand other Jupiters that bore the same name. The first Jupiter was in the galaxy, Sol, that was a neighbor of the first Earth. Now, the planet tripled in quadripillions. The Chronicles contained a summary of the planet Earth, and it said thus: “A planet.” It was a vague description, at best, caught between a truth and a lie, for Earth is not said to have existed or if it was just a myth. There was never really one scientist to look up to, but a zillion of them. These planets were the ones that were so old they were hard to track.
Eiffel was a Logger. His job was to Log his experiences, and report them back to the Chronicles-that was all. The Biosphere consisted of a man named Chronicle, for he was born and bred by a Strange Race that were never seen, and were only shadow images of beings once called “Earthlings.” Perhaps they were from the planet of Earth. Eiffel would ask them if he had a chance. He would never have a chance. The Chronicles told him where to go. He would never find his way back home.
He had a vague memory of some distant place that started with an “E” or an “H.” He could see it in his mind, in the far back corner, where nothing lived, except the consciousness. His mind was not whole. He was not well. That was why he had no job to do. His ancestor, a man named Biggs, was sick; he knew this from a dream he had, and was inspected by the prophecy council and it was dubbed legit. The next week, he got a rash. No being had ever gotten a rash, or a sickness. The human brain was always well. As well as could be expected.
The starship went deeper and further into the universe. It zoomed on its own course. It was robotic. Nothing could deter it from its intended destination-which was Earth, in actuality. The council programmed the planet into its system, hoping to help heal Eiffel and make him well. It was a silly dream, and one he would try to uphold.
Now, back to Biggs. Eiffel got the feeling he was from Earth-he was broad-shouldered, good-looking, and had a goofy grin and large, gray eyes. He could not think very well. He thought about “McDonald’s,” “Mara,” “sickness,” “home.” That was all he thought about, and nothing else. Eiffel thought the man was very stupid, very stupid indeed.
Eiffel was very heavy. He worked out in the exercise room once every other Cycle-a cycle lasted 27 hours. He sweated a lot. He was not used to sweating. He was not used to much. He was hungry. He got up from the exercise bike, and mopped his brow, and went down the hall to the kitchen and sat on a stool and asked the oven for a baked potato. The oven gave a strange, gurgled sound, and jumped and heaved and produced a hot, steaming, baked potato in seconds.
“Sour cream?” it asked.
He laughed a little. It was all a little too crazy. “Yeah,” he answered. “I guess.” He smiled at the oven, and the oven chuckled again, and sour cream appeared on the baked potato and it was thrust to him on a plate. He picked it up and found a fork in the drawer and scrounged around, looking for it.

THE WOMAN LIVES FOR BUN CAKE.

2010-05-28T08:52:00.001-07:00

My mother loved to scrapbook. She had drawers full of scrapbooks, and they were all filled with pictures of cakes. It was funny because we never ate a lot of sweets. My mother said it was bad for our health, and she made us eat vegetables instead-usually boiled or chopped, whatever she preferred. We lived in a small apartment above a laundry mat, and we were lucky, because most apartments in those days didn’t have laundry mats. We lived in a small city in Kentucky, and a lot of cities back in those days were dirt poor. My mother dreamt of owning a garden. A garden or a farm, whatever we could afford. We couldn’t afford much. We got buy on bread and cabbage water and lettuce. We got by on little or nothing at all. We couldn’t find our way through the dirt-lined streets, the slowly crumbling democracy. The politicians didn’t have a clue. We listened to them on a radio. The radio was the only means of communication we had at the time. We didn’t even have a phone. We were far too poor for that. My mother said Johnathan was going to go through college, and that was final. My mother said lots of things. Lots of things didn’t matter. Johnathan-or John for short-got in trouble, sometimes. Usually, it was about a girl. He got in line with the bad guys and spent his days smoking behind bleachers at the high school, and getting chased away by the principal or Mr. McGreggar.
My mother was a superb cook. She subscribed to all the latest cooking magazines and happily watched all the cooking shows. She was a fanatic about cooking. She loved Starbuck’s. It was her favorite place to eat. We ate mostly brownies and cakes and cookies, and of course coffee. I was working nine to five at my job in San Fernando, and it was hard to go out and see my mother and hear her heartbreak about how no one came to see her. She said the magazines kept her busy. She was sixty-five and used to be a schoolteacher and now got Social Security.
To my intense horror, I found out she had a new boyfriend.
His name was Sam Simmons and he worked at a catering company out in Alcapolco Drive.
I met him and we didn’t hit it off right away; he suggested we go fishing together. I asked him what kind of fishing, and he said salmon. He loved salmon. It was his favorite fish. He had silver hair and blue eyes. They were bright as the sea, maybe even brighter, and my mother enjoyed talking to him, she said. His son died in Vietnam and he was lonely. He was fifty-nine and they hit it off very well. I wasn’t sure I liked it. I wasn’t sure about anything at that point. In the summer of ’89, my father bought a boat. Things were going smoothly in the marriage. My oldest brother, Johnathan, loved fishing and my father won five thousand dollars from the lottery. Mom was outraged he bought a fishing boat with the money and he told her to relax. That was the last straw. Mom kicked him out and he was left on the porch, with one suitcase, the fishing boat, and the car. Johnathan went to help Mom. I went to help Dad. That was the summer of ’89. I wasn’t born, yet. In ’91, I packed up my stuff and moved to Columbus, Ohio. My mother threw a fit. She whined and cried and had a big meltdown. Dad didn’t bother to care. He had a new girlfriend and was living in a trailer out in Saline, Michigan. He said he didn’t want to go back to her. They still had the boat and went out on it every day and watched the sun go down over the trees and he said he was real happy, for the very first time.
Dad said Mom liked his cakes too much and should shove them up he knew where. I thought Mom should open up a bakery. She insisted she wouldn’t be able to borrow the money; that the banks had a quarrel with her and refused to lend her money. When I asked her about it, she refused to tell me why. She was living off of Social Security, too. She said she couldn’t work because her back hurts. She said some people talked about her behind her back where she used to work at the peanut factory and they said they always had a job for her. She insisted the boss secretly hated her and refused to go back. I never knew why. I didn’t really know what she was talking about and nodded and smiled in all the right places. I lived in a nice little house. The house was white and had white trimmings and the grass was taller near the front door. I had a little car, a Volvo. It was blue. I got it for my graduation present from graduating from Stanford. I got a degree in law and child education-of course I chose neither. I don’t really know why I didn’t want to be a lawyer. Most lawyers were, at best, a mixed blessing, and nothing good could come of that. It was nearing Thanksgiving and Mom said it was about time I met Sam, her beau. He was an avid golfer and a tennis player and the apartment he lived in had a tennis court and a volleyball court.
Most of the apartments were empty; they built them in the early 90s and Sam said they were going to add on to them.
Mom said she was getting along with his daughter-her name was Amanda and she had blonde hair and blue eyes and a daughter named Arabelle.
Arabelle was bright-eyed and loved jokes.
Her mother got one of those joke books from the mall and was telling jokes to everyone she met-even people on the streets. Amanda said she had to make Arabelle stop telling jokes.
“I think we should all have dinner one day,” Mom said one morning, her face breaking into a smile. I had come over to help fix her garbage disposal. It was always on the fritz. It had just rained and a nice shimmer of rain was on the grass. The grass was green and it was spring and they were growing.
I quirked an eyebrow at her. “With who?” I echoed. “Some rock star pop group?”
She giggled and blushed. Mom put her hair up in a bun and puttered about in her garden. The wind blew. It was cold for spring. She hadn’t had time to garden in awhile; she let Mother Nature seed the grain; seed the wind; the lightning and the rain. “Sam and his family, of course,” she said, smiling. “I’d love for you to meet them.”
I shrugged. “I guess,” I replied casually. I didn’t really care. I was too busy thinking about Mom and Dad being separate-it was hard to wrap my mind around. I wanted to dig my heels into the carpet. I wanted to ball my fists and shout, “No! No! No!” I couldn’t do anything. I stood there, feeling numb. I didn’t feel anything at all. “Don’t we have to talk about politics? You know how avid you get about politics.”
She made a face at me. “The president is such a coot!” she declared, and shook her head. “I don’t know what Americans see in him.”
“We voted for him fair and square.”
“Don’t be silly, you never vote.”
“Right. Didn’t think about that one.” I snorted, and shook my head.
I had a hard time keeping up with my mother. I agreed to come to dinner, and brought my wife with me. Her name was Anna. We met in our freshman year of college. She got a degree in biology and was a biologist at the local aquarium. She made sure the fish were fed. And the algae was kept at bay.
Sam came over to the house the next week.
He brought Amanda, his daughter, and her daughter, his granddaughter; Arabelle was only five. She had some bubble toys and was blowing bubbles with the bubble blower. I didn’t know what those things were called. I took the toy away from her. She laughed. That was odd. Most babies cried when I took their toys away. Good for Arabelle. Don’t listen to what everyone else says. I set her in the high chair and she blew bubbles in my face and giggled and laughed and squirmed, trying to get out of her high chair. Her mother gave her a cup of pudding and she laughed and banged her spoon on the tray. I forgot to mention, Johnathan was here, too. My brother. I forgot if he was still married. I was going to have to check on that. Maybe he wasn’t. He was getting bald and fat and his art store was going under. I bought a rocking chair from him last year because I felt sorry for him.
“Charming child,” I muttered, and made a face at her.
She abruptly burst into tears.
“Isn’t she, though?” Johnathan banged me on the back and hacked another cough. Yeah, my brother was good with children.
Good smells wafted from the kitchen. My brother didn’t bother consoling the child. He assured me she was fine, and plopped on the old brown couch in the living room and turned on the television set. Yeah, right. That’s my brother, Mr. Sensitive.
I loved the smell of food. The smell of hamburger frying on the stove; of mashed potatoes being fried in a sauce pan.
Sam was watching football in the bed room-Johnathan was watching golf.
The smells were intriguing, and the heaviness of the smells filled inside everything. The food was ready and all at once, everything was put on the table-the mashed potatoes; the roast beef; the baked beans; and, the lemon cake. My mom’s famous lemon cake. Everything smelled delicious, and I told her as much. She beamed at me and patted my head. I didn’t like.
My head. Being. Patted.
We started to eat dinner. Salad. She said it wasn’t the only thing she was serving. She wanted to prepare us for the meal.
Conversation was light at first; Johnathan mumbled to Sam about politics around a mouthful of mashed potatoes; my mother talked about the quilt she was sewing. Normal family conversation, except we weren’t really a normal family. Not yet. She and Sam weren’t married, and we weren’t really getting along that well. It would change, I was sure. We would do better.
Johnathan tried to smile at me. Well, that was a first. My big brother never offered me a kind word. A consolidation. Or even eye contact.
Arabelle babbled about Aladdin and the princess. Her mother talked to me about cheese, but I wasn’t listening. Finally, my mother broke the silence.
“Nathan,” she scolded me.
I looked up from my mashed potatoes, a weird expression on my face. I wanted to be anywhere but there, no offense to my family. I felt left out. Misplaced. Used up like an old car at a lot. “Yeah?” I said, trying not to wince.
“Don’t you have something to say?” she asked gently.
I looked startled. I looked back at her, incredulously. “What do you mean?” I asked her. I was an adult. I didn’t have to be talked to like a child.
“You’ve been quiet all evening,” she said, her mouth turned downward. “You’ve been frosty towards Sam, and his daughter and granddaughter. I think you owe them an apology.”
Sam waved it away. “Nonsense, we were having an engaging conversation.”
“No!” she insisted. “I don’t like how things are between you two. I want it to stop. Now.” She put down her fork and glared at me. Boy, when she wanted to, she could glare a whole ocean. Whatever.
I wasn’t sure how long I could stand these people another minute. Sam was okay if he didn’t talk. His daughter was okay if I didn’t see her. And his granddaughter was just a crazy nut. She was five. What did I expect from a five-year-old?
“I’m sorry,” I sighed.
“Guess what else I’m serving!” Mom exclaimed, her cheeks a bright pink.
She came in and put a big plate full of hamburgers on the table. She used her expensive china for the event.
I frowned. “I thought we were eating salad,” I said, frowning.
She laughed. “That’s not the main course.”
Since when did we start eating main courses? Oh yeah, since Sam. I remember now. That guy.
Arabelle burst into tears and threw her spoon onto the floor. It made a loud racket; her mother laughed and patted her on the head. I didn’t think she liked being patted on the head. Her mother thought she did.
Dinner was a terror. Arabelle cried the whole time. Johnathan argued with me about politics. I was surprised he even came to the dinner-he usually spent time with his girlfriend, or at work. He didn’t have time for the family. Anna was quiet through dinner, I patted her hand and she smiled at me and said later she didn’t feel like talking, that Arabelle seemed to do it for her. My girlfriend was a real sweetheart. She took care of the kid through most of the meal. Mom was impressed, afterwards.
Johnathan said Ross Perot should never have been elected; all I asked was for him to pass me the ketchup. Mom said I shouldn’t waste the ketchup, and wondered how she could make her own. I didn’t think you could make ketchup at home. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could make. Mom brought out a store bought cake and Sam threw a fit. “You mean you didn’t make it yourself?” he asked. He sounded disappointed, and maybe a little annoyed. Someone annoyed by Mom’s desserts, I couldn’t handle it. Mom made excellent baked goods. She was really good at it, too. She loved to cook. It was her favorite thing to do, besides scrapbooking. I was surprised she was still with
I stared at him incredulously.
I couldn’t believe he would say such a thing to my mother. It was very rude and insensitive. She thought it wasn’t a bother. She let him say whatever he wanted, it seemed. I didn’t know if I liked it or not.
Johnathan said I was being insensitive about Mother’s needs and wishes, when I told him that. I wanted to punch him in the face. Big brother.
“I would have,” she said sadly. “But, my favorite recipe is gone. It’s the only kind of cake I like to make by hand.” She sniffed and looked down at her hands. They were faded; worn; very smooth and almost pearly white. She used to be a carpenter. Those years had faded, too, leaving nothing behind but memories. She wanted to pack everything up, start a new life. I could see it in her eyes. It hurt, but it was the truth.
He looked startled. That really changed his tune. He didn’t like it when my mother was sad. “Recipe?” he asked, leaning forward. “You have your own recipe? That’s great!”
She made a face at him. “Yes, sweetheart,” she said in exasperation. “Don’t you remember how we met at the cookie bake-off and my cookies won third place? I had a whole stack of recipes. I don’t go anywhere without them. The only cake I make for my family is bun cake. Everything was going fine. Poof. Then, I lost my cake recipe.”
“This changes everything,” he said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “We’re going to have to move heaven and earth to find it.” He glanced with me. “You with me on this, chubs?” He laughed and clapped me on the back. I wanted to punch him in the face-no one had called me chubs since high school.
* * *

“Well,” Mom said, and yawned. She stretched her head over her shoulders, signifying her tiredness. “That’s it. We called all the people we know-no one has seen my recipe.” It was the next day. Johnathan had gone home to Brunswick. I lived right near her and could come over whenever I wanted-a son’s dream come true.
“Tony seemed weirded out by your call,” I pointed out. “He hung up the phone after you mentioned bun cakes.”
She winced. “Actually, he was giggling the whole time. Tony’s gay.”
I raised an eyebrow at her. “Oh? What does that mean?”
“Gay means unusually happy,” she explained, wincing. I snorted. It wasn’t what I meant, but I’ll take it.
“Do you remember anything about the night your recipe disappeared?”
She frowned, thinking hard. “I’d just gotten home from a date with Sam-” I ignored the comment, it was the jealousy in me this time-“and I was watching television in the living room. The telephone rang, and I went to pick it up. It was Anna. She was talking about her tax return; she said they didn’t give her nearly enough.”
“That’s my Anna,” I said fondly, and reveled in wonderment. “Always thinking about others. She wants to be Mayor one day.”
“That’s not what I said at all!” Mom snapped, glaring at me.
I shook my head. “I was just joking!” I scowled. “Go on.”
She continued to stare at me. We sat cross-legged on the floor in the living room of my apartment, looking through her scrapbooks. I felt like such a sissy, looking at pictures of cakes. I was intensely disturbed. I shouldn’t be scrapbooking. It was a woman’s thing. I should be out hiking, or bike riding, although bike riding was not a man’s sport, at least it was a sport of some kind. Geez.
She hunched her shoulders. “I don’t want to,” she muttered. “There’s nothing else to say. I talked to Elisa, hung up the phone, and looked for the recipe in my scrapbook. It was gone.” She spread her arms, looking sullen. She looked like she was ready to fly away.
“Really,” I said.
She nodded. “Yes, really,” she said. She rose to her feet; a piece of paper fluttered out of the scrapbook she held in her arms. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to make dinner.” As an afterthought, she added: “At home, I guess.” She patted my head. “Sorry, son, but your kitchen just doesn’t do the trick.” She laughed. It was an interesting sound, like a tickle at the back of the throat.
I reached for the piece of paper and picked it up eagerly. I studied it eagerly, hoping for clues about the whereabouts of Mom’s missing recipe. The clue gave me nothing-it wasn’t the recipe, anyway.
It looked like somebody’s grocery list, either Mom’s or Sam’s.
The handwriting looked like my mother’s, but I hadn’t seen Sam’s yet, and assumed it was Mom’s. I tucked it into my pocket and helped Mom pick up the scrapbooks and shelve them in the bookcase. I smiled. I was getting hungry, myself. She made raisin muffins-it wasn’t homemade, she told me she didn’t have time to get the ingredients. That was odd in itself. Mom always had time to go grocery shopping. It was one of her favorite things to do. The only thing she did, nowadays. I was comforted by Mom’s routine.
Comforted, but not put out. I ran a hand through my hair and looked around the living room. It was small, but comfortable.
Dad got a lot of money after he was in the army. He’d had a hard time getting a job, and got a house, instead. Mom got the house; Dad got the boat; and the car. Sam had his own car, a silver ’93 Oldsmobile. They weren’t married, that I knew of. Mom had the tenacity to do things outside of the norm, because it was fun to do, and she would have told me if they were going to elope. She didn’t know anything else besides routine.
Her father was a businessman, and an artist-he was known for his eccentricity and had sold quite a few pieces to local museums. Nothing big, not really.
“Mom,” I said. I got up to look at her. “What do you think happened to the recipe?” Her face was worn and had wrinkles. Her eyes were a piercing blue, and had a depthness to it that was like the bowels of the ocean. That reminded me, I hadn’t gone fishing with Dad in awhile.
She frowned and looked at me. “I must have thrown it out by accident,” she answered. “That’s the only thing that makes sense, I guess. It doesn’t sound like me, but you never know. It’s not a big deal.” She stretched and yawned. I was upset by our loss of my mother’s famous recipe. I wanted to get it back for her. I vowed to search the end’s of the earth for her recipe, and return it to her. I guess it could be her Mother’s Day gift.
I watched her waddle out the door and get into her car. The engine started. She drove away. I stumbled to my feet and decided to give Anna a call. She was never reluctant to talk to me-it was one of the reasons why I was attracted to her. We were both talkers. We talked about everything. Things that didn’t make sense to other people made sense to us.
“That’s sad,” I muttered.
I picked up the phone and called Alan D. Patterson (he liked to use his middle name), my lifelong friend. We met in elementary school. I moved in high school, and turned out his parents moved him to the same city as I had moved to. It was the perfect coincidence. “Alan,” I said.
“Yeah, buddy?” He had a thick Hispanic accent. He was from New Jersey.
“What do you think about helping me with something?” I asked. I thought he would laugh when I told him about Mom’s missing recipe, but he didn’t laugh. He was right on board with the entire thing. “I’m not trying to give you something to do. I have an actual problem.”
“Which is?” He sounded interested. Good. I was glad he was interested in helping me. I knew I could count on Alan. Alan had been my friend since college-we lost touch off and on, but we always managed to find our way back.
“My mother lost her recipe,” I replied. “I think we’re going to have to go her house and look for it. You game?”
He thought about it for a minute. “I have to make sure the neighbor’s dog stays out of my garden,” he began. “We’ve been having trouble with him again. He just won’t stay out. Leaves muddy paw prints all over my driveway. It’s a heinous crime. Such a tragedy.”
I rolled my eyes. “We have bigger things to worry about,” I assured him. “You can come over and we’ll go in the same car.”
“Your car?” he asked me suspiciously. “Don’t you have a clunker?” My car had been totaled three times in the past seven years. It had to get fixed five times. It was my baby, next to Anna. Anna and I were planning a date later in the evening. We were going to play golf. We were going to go to Starbuck’s on the weekend, after she got out of work.
I nodded. “Yeah, the very same.”
He hung up the phone, and a few minutes later, Alan’s beat-up truck pulled into my driveway. He stumbled out. He had red hair and a stubble of a beard. He knocked on my door and we got into my car and drove to my mother’s house. I knocked on the door. It took a few minutes, and she finally answered. She wore a pink shirt and blue pants. She smelled like dough.
“Mother.”
She smiled at me. “Hello, dear,” she said absently. A wisp of hair curled around her ear. She didn’t bother to push it back. “I see you’ve brought a friend. I haven’t seen you in ten years, or more.” She chuckled. “Come in, come in. We already ate. No leftovers.”
“Where’s Sam?” Sam, her boyfriend, had moved in three months prior. He was probably at work, or out with his granddaughter.
“Nice place you got here,” Alan remarked.
Mom chuckled, and patted his hand. “Thanks, dear,” she said, smiling. “We’ve worked on it for quite a long time. Haven’t we?”
“Mother.” I cocked my head to look at her. She wasn’t listening. She continued to knead the dough-her hands were covered in the stuff. She wiped her hands on her apron and smiled at me.
“Yes, dear?” she asked, smiling.
“Are you sure nothing else happened on the day the recipe disappeared?” I was trying not to sound too impatient. Alan looked bored. He wandered over to her cookie cutter and started picking at the dough. I looked at him and blinked, wondering what he was doing here. It wasn’t for show, that was for sure.
Mom hit his hand. “Stop that!” she scolded, and made a face at him.
Alan chuckled. “Just hungry.”
She glanced at him, raised her eyebrows, and started kneading the dough again. “Why didn’t you say so?” she demanded, scowling. “We have cold chicken in the fridge. Had chicken salad last night. You can make a sandwich or eat it plain. Sam eats it plan.”
“Mom,” I urged gently. I put my hand on her shoulders.
“What? Oh, right. The day the recipe disappeared.” She put her hand to her temples. A smudge of dough stuck to the skin. She frowned. “I was making brownies, I remember. I put them in the oven and then wrapped them in the fridge. They were nice and cold in a couple of hours. I love cold brownies. They aren’t the same as my bun cake recipe, though. I add cinnamon and spice to make it extra good.” She pursed her lips. “I went into the living room because the telephone rang. I picked it up. It was Elisa Johnson, my very best friend. I turned back and the recipe was gone. The window was open-funny, I thought it was closed.” She shook her head. “You’d think I’d remember that. I thought I would.” She put her head in her hands and sniffed. “I didn’t think I would lose my recipe. I’m always so careful.” She wiped her face with her apron. Tears sparkled her eyes. It was a stupid thing to cry over. She couldn’t help it. She missed the recipe. It was in her mother’s handwriting. Her mother, long gone. She missed her mother, I could see it in her eyes.
“Sorry, Mom,” I said. “We’ll find the recipe.”
She looked up at me, her eyes bright with tears. She rubbed her eyes with her apron. “It’s okay, honey,” she babbled. “We can always get a new recipe. It’s not a big deal.”
I vowed to find the recipe. She was happy about it, and was glad I was going to try, but she warned me not to hold my breath. It was an unsolvable case.
“It’s a mystery,” I told Jacob Simmons later that afternoon. I was talking on the cell phone, and paced the brightly-lit kitchen. A clock hung above the oven, and ticked softly. The ticking of the clock. How quaint. The ticking of the hour upon the hour, and the hour was at hand. Jacob Mospry was my other best friend, next to Alan. Jacob and Alan had never met. I would like to see that. It would be interesting, no doubt. Probably more interesting than first thought.
“Neighborhood Watch is tonight,” Jacob said. We sat on the sofa in my living room, watching ESPN. I don’t know why I watched the shit. I didn’t particularly enjoy sports of any kind.
“Why are you telling me that?” I demanded.
“Because of your mother,” he explained. He shifted his gaze to the television and wouldn’t dare look at me. He knew the talk of the bun cake recipe was very sensitive for me. I didn’t want to talk about it. I looked down at my knuckles. They were turning white. I unclenched them.
Realization dawned on me. “You mean, maybe they saw something the day the bun cake recipe disappeared?” I asked hopefully.
Jacob nodded seriously. “It’s not a sure-fire answer,” he explained, “but, it’ll do. We could check it out tonight.”
“What time is it?” I asked quickly.
“Eleven-oh-clock, at Peter Warhall’s house. Do you know where his house is?”
“Yeah, it’s down the street. It’s right near my mother’s house! Maybe they did see something. I wonder why they didn’t say anything.”
“Maybe they only saw somebody,” he corrected me.
“How long do we have to wait?”
“About three hours.”
I hunched my shoulders. “Okay. Wanna play Parcheeze until then?”
“Yeah, I guess. Unless you wanna get some icecream,” he said.
“I may never eat dessert again.” I couldn’t believe it. Bun cake was my favorite. We would find the recipe. Soon. I made the promise to myself. My mother was devastated without it. It was her pride and joy. Her baby. I pulled out the board game and placed it on the floor. Jacob scooted over and we played Parcheeze for about two hours and watched tv again. Mom called once. I didn’t tell her we were going to Neighborhood Watch. Everyone in the neighborhood was invited. Most of the time, I didn’t go. I thought it was boring. Everybody else said they understood. I hung up the phone and we put on our jackets and headed outside to Peter’s house. It was getting chilly, and it was spring. I rubbed my hands. We were supposed to get spring storms. A lot of them, from the looks of the sky. We walked up the driveway to Peter Warhall’s house and knocked on the door. The house was small and pink and lilacs burst in the corners of the yard. An elderly old man opened the door-I was surprised he was so old. He had dentures and messed up hair. He looked like he had been sleeping, but I peered around his shoulder and realized the living room was full of people. I swallowed hard. I didn’t expect an audience.
“Howdy,” I began, and blinked.
“Howdy,” he returned. He glanced up at the sky and back down at me.
Peter Warhall was chewing his gum, and popped it. He looked at me up and down. Studied me expectantly. I noticed his wide forehead, piercing eyes. His ears were round like saucers.
“We wanna know somethin’,” Jacob said.
He quirked his eyebrow. “You’ve come to join Neighborhood Watch?” His voice was gruff. He ran a hand through his thick, dark hair. He looked mean, but he wasn’t. He was from Ohio.
I shook my head and laughed. “Too much work for me. My joints aren’t what they used to be.” I pointed at my kneecap to prove a point.
He frowned.
Jacob leaned around the man’s shoulders and looked into the living room. He didn’t recognize anyone.
The man out of place wore a black hat-he thought it was strange. It wasn’t a baseball cap. It was a hunter’s cap. He frowned. “Anyway, we were wonderin’ if you heard anything weird about two weeks ago. Some strange man come by? Or my friend’s mother’s house?”
“Why?” He used the gruff voice again.
“Her bun cake recipe is missing,” I explained.
We both watched his expression. It was an exclamation of surprise.
“You don’t say!” he exclaimed. He took off his hat and wiped his forehead, then put it back on again. “I’ve had it before. It tastes delicious.” He smacked his lips to prove a point.
He scratched his chin and shook his head, and frowned. “Can’t think of a thing.”
“Oh,” Jacob said. “Sorry to have bothered you.” We turned around to go.
“Wait!” he said.
We turned back around. I raised an eyebrow. “Yeah?”
“We did hear somethin’ around six at your mom’s house two weeks ago, on Tuesday, the sixteenth,” he answered. “I forgot about it because somebody’s car alarm went off. We’ve been having trouble with the horses on Hoarch’s ranch-somehow, they keep getting out of their stalls. We’ve been trying to figure out how to keep them in their stalls.”
“Leashes,” Jacob muttered.
I nudged him in the ribs and told him to hush.
“Anyway, I looked outside and saw somethin’ in your mother’s front yard. I thought it was the shadow of a tree, turned out, there was a tree right near the window. It looked like a person to me. Tall, and long.” He shrugged. “Dunno if there are any footprints. I didn’t look. Might be. I hope she finds her recipe-let me know if you need help.”
He shut the door.
I turned to look at Jacob in excitement. “You hear that? Something did happen around the time her bun cake went missing!” I said, doing a dance in the driveway. “Let’s go see if there are footprints.” We left Peter’s house and hurried down the street. I waved at Peter’s neighbor, Jenni Morgan. She was planting lilacs in her garden. She waved back and blew a kiss.
Jacob said she had a crush on me. I doubted it. She was being nice. We walked across the road in the dark. The lights in the street lamps were on. Shadows stretched long down the road. We went up to Mom’s house and didn’t knock on the door. She wouldn’t care what we were doing-she and Sam were at bingo night, anyway, and I knew where the extra key was. I wasn’t looking for no darn key. I was looking for evidence.
Jacob squatted next to a begonia, and squinted his eyes. “What are we lookin’ for?” he asked casually. He had a thick, Southern accent, a smooth drawl. I liked it.
I shrugged. “Clues.”
The man didn’t know how to shut up and think for a bit. He was always yappin’ about somethin’ or other, about stuff that wasn’t important.
“You think somebody let the horses out?” he asked me.
I shrugged. “I think it’s just a coincidence,” I replied, shaking my head. “Don’t make no sense.”
“You’re right.” He nodded and looked at the sky, then back down at the ground. “We need to look around before night comes out.”
We walked further, closer towards Mom’s window. It was right next to the kitchen counter. Someone could have easily snatched it. I peered into the window. The house was dark. She was still gone, even though I already knew the car wasn’t in the driveway. Sometimes, she lets Sam borrow her car. Don’t ask me why. He has an old clunker. Probably for that reason.
“Look!” Jacob exclaimed. He squatted below the window, frowning. I bent close to him. His clothes smelled like cologne. I was surprised. He didn’t seem to be the type.
“What are we looking at?”
“Fresh footprints,” he replied.
“I never saw those before. I’ve been here the whole time.”
“I know.”
“What kinda shoes are they?”
“How the heck should I know?” He threw his arms up in exasperation. “I’d say they’re sneakers. We can’t tell who it is by the shoes. They don’t look like a woman’s. Not your mom’s. A stranger.”
“It could be anybody.” I rubbed my face. I was tired. Very tired. “Maybe my mom misplaced her recipe.”
“Could be.” He frowned. “It just don’t seem right,” he began.
“What don’t seem right?” We were talking like fools. I snorted. I hated being foolish. Didn’t seem to have any point to it. We could get her another bun cake recipe. The Internet was full of them. Did I mention I had Internet access? A real laptop.
Jacob answered my question. “That she would misplace somethin’ that important to her. I never lost my most favorite baseball card of all time, and I got it when I was in ninth grade.” He scratched his head. He was gonna get a bald spot with all that scratchin.’ I decided not to comment. It was for the best. Sometimes, when I really wanted to talk, I could be mean-not intentional. Just on accident.
I shook my head. “You must know my mom better than me,” I said musingly. “I never would have thought of that. We’ll add the footprints to our list of clues.”
“Okay,” Jacob said. He was looking tired and stressed and I sent him home. Jacob had diabetes, and it meant his blood sugar don’t work right. I felt bad for him. He was hungry all the time, and couldn’t eat sugar, not even my mother’s bun cake. She vowed to find a sugar free bun cake, and was looking for one online. Hadn’t found the right one, poor girl. Didn’t need to.
We were gonna find that recipe and have it in her hands by the end of the month-I hoped.
“What are you doing, Jacob?” I asked him the next day. Did I forget to mention? He lived across the street from me. Mom lived down the street. Sam lived downtown. Anna was in Brooksville. Everything was going real fine, except for the missing recipe. We were doing our best. Trying to help people and find somethin’ important all at the same time.
“Nothin’,” he answered. “Thinkin.’”
I looked around. “I don’t see your truck nowhere.”
“I sold it to two men who came to town this mornin’,” he explained. “I didn’t want to. I had to.”
“Why did you have to?” Jacob asked, scratching his head.
His lip trembled. He wiped a tear from his eye. “I’m behind on my house payments. I thought I could afford it. I thought I could get over this nonsense from college. I paid back my college loan. I’m a car mechanic on the side, don’t got no good business.” He sniffed.
“I don’t even have a car,” I said, still staring at him. “Otherwise, I would pay you to fix it. I walk everywhere. Take the bus. Got me a bus card.”
He patted my hand. “I know you don’t. I know you don’t.” He was having trouble seeing through the tears in his eyes. He wiped it away.
I patted his hand. “We’ll fix things,” I told him. “We’ll be okay. We’ll find the recipe and we’ll find you another job. You’ll see. You wanna get some dinner out?”
He shrugged and nodded, ran a hand through his shoulder-length brown hair. He was one of those men who let his hair grow out. We piled into my car and we drove downtown and got out at Paula’s Diner. The place was jumping. I spotted Carla Robbins, my old beau. She was looking fine in a pink sweater and blue pants. She smiled at me. I pretended I didn’t see her. I didn’t want to start anything. I grabbed a menu from the waitress and stalked to a table and sat down. We ate dinner and went back home. The next day was the same-and, the one after that. Not a lot was happenin.’ We talked to Peter again. No more news. Someone stole somebody’s car, no one we knew, a William Somebody. The sheriff took care of that sort of thing.
One early day in May, something happened.
Peter banged on my door. “We caught him!” he crowed.
“What?” I was startled and pulled open the door. I was taking a nap. I wanted to make an apple pie. Mom had gotten herself a new recipe-an apple pie, instead of a bun cake. It made me sad to think about it. It couldn’t be helped.
“We caught him,” he repeated. “He confessed to the whole thing! We got her recipe back. It was on the ground behind a man’s shack. We found footprints and followed them and caught him.”
I stared at him. “A man was living in a shack in Hope Springs?” I asked him. “That’s weird. I’ve never heard of that before. Take me to him.” I peered at the man standing in the driveway. “Who’s that?” I asked him.
“Todd Simmons,” he answered. “He saw you at the Neighborhood Watch the other day.” He looked apologetic. “I was so excited, I accidently told him what was going on.”
I frowned. “It’s okay, I guess. Just don’t let it happen again. Let me call Jacob and the sheriff.” The sheriff’s name was Biff, and he was real nice. All Southern.
He waited inside my living room for Jacob and Biff to come. Biff came first, in his rumbling old truck; Jacob hurried over. He led us to his house. It was a small shack, in between two fields. It had one little room and a toilet. The toilet was old, cracked. A cot was in the corner. A man in a hunter’s hat sat on the cot, his head in his hands. We stood in front of him, real quiet. I had my arms over my chest. I looked down at him, my face stern. He needed a talking to. “Well,” I said.
“I didn’t mean it,” he said.
“What’s your name?” Todd Simmons asked quietly. He was a part of the Neighborhood Watch and asked to come to the shack. The sheriff begrudgingly obliged.
“Harper Roe,” he answered.
“I ain’t ever seen you before, Harper Roe,” Jacob said, cocking his head to look at him. “You new in town?” He was suspicious. Jacob decided to come along. I figured it was okay. Jacob was not too bright in the brains department, but he did all right. He was quick enough, anyway. Could draw a gun faster than I had ever seen a man.
“Yeah,” he answered, a smile flickered across his face. “I bought the Towner ranch.”
I glanced at Jacob. If he bought the ranch, what was he livin’ in a dumb old shack for?
“You did?” My eyes were wide. I shook my head. I couldn’t believe they actually sold the thing. The ranch was a million years old-at least three hundred years old. Somethin’ of the sort. I wasn’t paying attention when the sheriff told me. It was a big house. Gray and had forest green shudders. “Why’d you come all the way over here? Just to bother my mother?”
He ducked his head. “Actually, I guess I was. I wasn’t thinkin’ straight. My wife left me and I wanted a new recipe. I’m really a cook and wantin’ to open a restaurant.” He looked down at his large, brown hands. A tear squeezed out of the corner of his eye. “You know, I think maybe I did a bad thing. My last restaurant closed. I lost my house. My father died and I bought the old house. It was my first piece of good luck since gettin’ the money.” He sniffed and wiped his eyes. “Sorry, partners. No harm done?”
The sheriff frowned. “You stole a recipe,” he scolded, shaking his head like he couldn’t believe someone would do such a crazy thing. “That’s first degree theft, on my account.” Biff McBride put his hands on his holster. He wasn’t going to use it. I knew the sheriff well. He liked to scare criminals into doing the right thing. It wasn’t always right, but it was his way. Some people had their way, and the sheriff had his way.
I stood up. “Let’s leave this up to my mother, Biff. She was the one who thought it was lost-in a way, it was lost. If you look at it closely. He didn’t do no real harm. Didn’t hurt nobody.” I glanced at him. “Right?”
“No, sir,” he answered, shaking his head. “At least I got that much sense.”
“Where’s that recipe?”
The man pulled it from his pocket and handed it to him. “Here you go,” he said. “I gave it to you before, but you dropped it.”
Biff had clumsy hands, from arthritis. He called them clumsy fingers.
Jacob took it from his outstretched hand. I was afraid to touch it. Afraid it wasn’t real. As strange as it sounded. “It’s her handwriting,” he reported.
I nodded, pleased. “Good. He can’t be too bad of a lot. Smart and quick, that’s for sure.”
“Not to mention dumb as a brick,” Peter muttered, shaking his head.
I stared at him in surprise. I forgot he had come with us-after all, he was President of the Neighborhood Watch’s Association. Catching somebody was a big deal for him. Making criminals pay was even a bigger deal. I clapped him on the back. “Be nice,” he warned.
Peter nodded. “Sure as heck will,” he said cheerfully.
Biff stared at him. He wasn’t totally convinced. Neither was I. He was going to chew the man out as soon as he got to my mom’s house. “You should be a sheriff,” he said to Peter.
He shrugged. “I was thinkin’ about it. Thinkin’ about it real hard.”
“And?” Biff asked. The sheriff scratched his head. He was bald around the ears. His ears were bright pink. His eyes a pure green.
“What else?” His voice echoed. “Nothin’ else but the truth. And to take the recipe back to the woman. She was missin’ it.” He looked around the shack. “She needs it back.”
“Why can’t she just get a new recipe?” Harper asked.
I glared at him. “You’ve done enough damage!” I scolded him. “You shush. We’ll do the talking. Maybe we can get you out of prison time.”
“How much would that be, five years?” His voice was sarcastic. I had the urge to punch him. I massaged my knuckles. I didn’t want things to go down like that. Especially not when my mother was concerned-nobody hurt my mother. Especially not me.
I smiled brightly. Or tried to. “Let’s go,” I said. “Mom’s house isn’t far. We don’t want to be talkin’ in this creepy shack all night. It smells like piss.”
Harper couldn’t help it. He chuckled.
“I’ve been there,” Biff replied, smiling. “Had her apple pie.”
“It’s good, isn’t it?” Jacob asked.
He nodded in agreement.
We trooped out of the shack, one by one, and the door swung shut. That was the last time I’d be in the shack. The last time I’d be anywhere near it. It smelled and it was probably most likely haunted.
* * *
All four of us went to my mother’s house. It was a ten minute walk, and the sky was bright and full of stars. The stars were big and beautiful and the wind was loud and haunted. Jacob knocked on the front door. Mom opened it, wearing a flannel pink shirt and blue pants. She looked surprised to see us. “What are you doing here?” she exclaimed. Her cheeks flushed. She was pleased.
“We’ve found your recipe, Mom,” I said. I held it out to her. “It’s for you.”
“You found it!” she exclaimed. “That’s wonderful.” She took it from my outstretched hand, and examined it. “That’s the recipe all right-sugar-molasses-flour.” She ran her hand over her mother’s handwriting. “That’s my mother’s handwriting. The very same recipe. I copied it a dozen times.”
I looked surprised. “I thought that was your handwriting.”
She blushed. “No, I have copies. This is the original-the one she made up on June 9th, 1987.”
“Why didn’t you tell us this before?” Jacob asked in exasperation.
We went outside. Harper stood motionless on the front stoop. Sweat dripped from his forehead. Good. He should be sweating. He was with Peter. The sheriff had gone back to the station to get the papers ready.
“What on earth could you possibly do with my mother’s recipe?” I asked Harper Roe, looking incredulously at his balding head and shining eyes inside his spectacles.
He smiled primly. “To sell, of course,” he answered. He paused for a second, withdrew his handkerchief, and patted his forehead with it. “I was having trouble making money for awhile. I went from bank to bank, friend to friend, until finally I just had it. I was able to get unemployment for awhile. I was able to scrap by, but not enough. I got skinny. I was eating little or not at all. It was hard. I saw your mother’s recipe through the window. She was talking on the phone to somebody. I saw the perfect opportunity. I climbed in through the window, snagged the recipe, and quickly left again.” He smiled, and chuckled. “It was the perfect crime.”
I wanted to slap him. I didn’t. I clenched and unclenched my fists. My knuckles were turning white. I looked up. “Here comes Biff,” I said excitedly. A police cruiser turned into the driveway and the police officer-Biff was in the passenger seat-turned off the engine and stepped out of the car.
“It was just a recipe,” Harper protested. His cheeks were pink. He was just like me, and yet, he had stolen something important from someone I cared about. It was a two-way street. Be kind, or get the hell out of here.
The police officer, whose name was William Jones, looked at him. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s not a major crime. You won’t even have to go to trial.”
His eyes bulged. He gagged. “Trial?” The words came out in a strangled squeak.
After the police ushered Harper to the police cruiser, Jacob and I went into the house. Mom sat on the couch, hands folded in her lap. “I didn’t go out with you,” she said. “I didn’t want to see him.”
“It’s okay,” I assured her. “He’s not a bad guy, once you get to know him.”
“Thank you for finding my bun cake recipe,” she told me.
“It wasn’t me. It was Jacob.”
“Oh, that changes everything,” she said. She looked at Jacob. “Thank you for finding my bun cake recipe,” she told him. “It was such a sweet thing to do.”
He blushed and looked down at the floor, scuffing his toe. “Tweren’t nothin’, ma’m,” he muttered, blushing. “You would have done the same thing for me.”
She chuckled. “A little old lady like me?” she asked him. “Hardly.” She smiled with her eyes. The smell of bun cake filled the entire house. I was glad to smell that smell again. It filled my nose. My entire being. I felt all warm and teary-eyed and Jacob was looking at me like I was crazy. Maybe I had somethin’ in my eye. I pretended to wipe it away. Jacob grinned at me. He was startled; he had never seen me cry before. “Tell you what. I wanna do somethin’ for you, since you’ve been so kind to me and my boy,” she said.
“Mom!” She didn’t need to get all sappy on me or somethin’. It wasn’t what I was lookin’ for. I didn’t know what I was lookin’ for, but it wasn’t that.
“I was thinking of gathering up all my recipes and opening a bakery with the inheritance money,” she began. “I got a call from Uncle John’s lawyer. He died in his sleep last week. He gave me twenty thousand dollars.” A smile fell on her lips. “I was thinkin’ of runnin’ it myself, but I’m a little old lady. I’m tired. I need to rest. To hang out with Sam and his granddaughter. I wanna do that more than anything in the world.” She wrung her hands nervously. They were covered in dough. She had been different since the lawyer called and told her about the inheritance money. Not better, just different-I kind of liked it. I got up and hugged her around the middle. I kissed the tip of her nose. It was cold.
“It’s okay, Mama,” I said. I rested a hand on her shoulder. “You don’t have to say anything.”
She pushed me away. “Yes, I do,” she insisted. “I want something to be done with the money. Something good. Opening the bakery will help. I’ve heard of Jacob’s money troubles and I want to give it to him. I’m tired of seein’ him sad.” She glanced at me. “With your permission, sweetheart.”
I was surprised. I didn’t know what to say. I got all teary-eyed and tried to wipe the tears away. Oh hell, I let them fall anyway.

THE DOOR.

2010-05-27T20:01:00.000-07:00

The dawn of your arrival-
Was cold, the spotted daffodils grew
On the windowsill.

Tired of reading by the window,
I got up and surveyed the mantel.
A picture of my godfather;
An old coin from England, 1928.

The books were faded and dusty.
I was alone in this harsh winter,
The summary of your years were behind you.

The light was faded and new.
Dust behind us grew softly;
The wind fluttered in the breeze.
War was a light thing,
Made of sauce and mixed with
Berries.
Nothing makes me feel better,
Not even death-
Long and faded,
Death was he.

You entered through the door.

my teacher was not quite so good,

2010-05-25T07:52:00.001-07:00

My teacher was not quite so good,
To see the torrid day.
All through the evening, he played bagpipes and
The fiddle,
And his intelligence grew.
The bird sat on the window,
Whistling-
The mailman whistled, too.
We were caught in a downward spiral.
His anger was vast.
Everything was more vast than what
Proceeded before it,
The color of the trees,
The temper of the whirring blades of the fan.
I’m sitting in my office,
And the fan blades whir,
And the sun flower fades in and out of
Colored clouds.
My feet are propped up on the desk.
You come in, and ask me for a drink.
You said you hated me.
You said you hated everything but your daughter,
Who worshipped you,
And spoke to you about her taxes.
She didn’t do very well with taxes.
Didn’t have a heart to say she didn’t know
Anything about math.
Didn’t have the heart to talk about anything
Other than her black sunglasses,
Made of different colors.
The pain was surreal. Everything flashed in red.
The ghosts flocked tomorrow,
And tomorrow was dead.

Close To Summer.

2010-05-25T07:44:00.001-07:00

The sky fills me with tired grace.
I am driving in the sunshine towards work,
And the sky is on my mind.
I can’t gain anything from the sky.
The putrid flesh; the rotting bones;
The honey of dew.
A hurricane is off the shores of South Carolina.
The winds rip and roar and graze through
The clouds,
And everything is putrid,
Smells of rotted meat.
The rainbow mars my perfect view of the sky.
Everything is full of grace, everything
Is translucent.
Everything is everything,
And nothing is whole and sacred.
Words are to the wise.
The words are templar.
Things transcend up a marble staircase,
And I walk, my nose sniffing the daisies.
The daisies wake in summer.
It’s not summer yet.

The Snow Fell In Their Rhythm.

2010-05-21T09:02:00.000-07:00

The snow fell apart in the winter room.
The bitter nights were cold and lonely.
The snow fell into my shoe
And I bent to pick it out with my thumb,
My eyes bright they see stars.
The sky is gray;
I am going kayacking.
I tell myself words I wouldn’t want to hear
Any other time.
I sing myself words I don’t want to understand.

You told me you wouldn’t sing to me.
You told me the banjo plays softly in the other room.
The words creep softly across the page.
I sing gently and cry about the woman on the stage.
They are reading scripts again.
They are seeking resolution when there is none.
They are crypting phonographs and turn styles and
The cake is burning in the oven.
I make myself a sandwich.

This morning, you told me you
Would not go out for a pack of smokes.
Of heartstrings plucked and riddled with doubt.
Of the snow that is both cold and debates
That the clock that has been strung has stilled.
The hills are wrought in colored snow.
The rainbow is stinted in silver rays of rain,
That splice through the clouds,
And onto gentle meadows-
The man’s boots are covered with dew.
You told me you would not go out.
You had gone out yet again,
That the morning dew is full of bright
Colors.
The stores are open. We talk about this or
That.
A sparrow chirps in the trees,
Its singsong voice loud in a green meadow.
The field is covered in snow.
I didn’t know sparrows could sing in snow.
That dancing was their rhythm.

The Shifters Come Home.

2010-05-15T15:53:00.000-07:00

The garden was in full bloom. Erisos stepped past the blooming lilacs-the smell was overwhelming, and made her dizzy-and gazed up at the stone walls of Castle Heydin. She was going home soon, and she had to say goodbye to someone. She swallowed hard. It was difficult to swallow. She forced herself to breathe inwardly; she needed some time to think, to contemplate her next move. Rein Lynn said she would always have a place at her house, but Rein was a commander, and had a clan to contend with. They looked down upon clans and Rein had been thrown out of his home about half a dozen times, maybe more or less, depending on one’s perspective. Erisos was disappointed she would not get to see the flowers opening next year, but she would have a whole new house to live in, a whole new garden to grow. The tears threatened to spill over her cheeks, and she wiped them away with the back of her hand, and moved forward, one step at a time, timidly, without reason. She glanced behind her. The crows circled in the sky overhead, watching her, protecting her. She knew they were shifters. Shifters all over the kingdom. A war between the ravens and the crows had become full-blown, and her brother, Shilo, was forced to fight them in the west. She wanted to fight, but she was the daughter of a queen. Princesses were not allowed to fight.
She had trouble reaching the front door of the castle. Yes, castles did have front doors. She had trouble going through them. She wanted to see Antt In, the woman who raised her from age five, after her mother died. She could not thank the woman enough. She did not know how to thank her.
“Antt,” she said. Tears spilled down her cheeks, and she leaned down to reach her. Perhaps she would be her last link on this planet. There were other planets; her schools taught them to her. “Antt, are you awake?”
Her eyes were open. The nurse said she rarely spoke, that she didn’t have anything to talk about. She had no one to blame but herself. Antt always reached out for her more than anyone else. Always talked to her, always helped her through everything. She was not gone yet. She was seventy-nine, going on eighty, and would have a birthday in September. At last, she would get to say what she wanted to say. She would say goodbye.

A SULLEN DEATH.

2010-05-15T11:05:00.001-07:00

A Sullen Death

Africa in wilderness has
Forsaken black crayons.
We are less than what we are-
We speak what we grieve.
The shadows of night are spun
From golden grain;
The snow falls steadily on the plains.
The hills roll and echoes have come
To pass,
The oceans litter and glitter
And destiny remains.
My grandmother died in her faded
Brown rocking chair,
The clock turns and turns in its dial.
I haven’t been here for less
Than a while.
Nursery rhymes poke us through
Pieces of felt.
We rock back and forth
On glimmering grain.
Nothing is what we see-
It is not anyone else.
The struggle of the death.
The struggle of the heartland,
The beginning of us all,
The end of the beginning.
We are rude in awakening.
The sun shines down on us.
Everything is broken,
Even the old tricycle.
I remember, I remember.

Yesterday, you looked back at me.
You were walking down the front porch step.
Your hands on your hips.
You locked eyes.
Everything was a struggle.
Everything was a struggle.
You said you couldn’t remember writing
It on the back of your jeans.
Everything was the same.
Everything was a memory,
Distant in your grief.
The tired hands move around and around.
The tired hands are put in blue jeans.
We don’t know what it is we know.
I am tired, I want to sleep.
I sleep in a hammock in the garden.

IN THE COURT OF THE SONG SLAYER.

2010-05-14T08:39:00.000-07:00

IN THE COURT OF THE SONG SLAYER

Characters:

Arianna Arabelle Erisyn Eros
Commander Rius Andros, Space Marines, Veryona

Planets: Veryona, Earth

The word “Marine” was generally inclined more towards that of distant oceans on the planet Earth, but, in relativity, the word was concocted to that of the planet Earth, and not of oceans in the universe in general. The term “Marine” derived from Old English; Middle English.
She was the song slayer, the woman from Veryona.
It was the world beyond worlds; the world beyond time and space. Or, rather, it was situated between the 32nd galaxy and the 43rd galaxy. Her mother said there were over three hundred thousand trillion galaxies in this universe alone, and it spun endlessly. Her father was Commander Rius Andros, of the 31st Space Marine Corps. “Marine” was a strange word. She didn’t know it could be applied to space, as well.
Her full name was Arianna Arabelle Erisyn Eros. She had flowing blonde hair, piercing purple eyes, and a ruby in the middle of her forehead. She demonstrated interesting abilities when she was five. She had the gift of telekinesis; and Cat-pathy, the ability to communicate with felines in space. She generally bent spoons; then, when she realized spoon-bending was an old art, she lifted entire tables off the air and sent them spinning out the window. She almost destroyed her neighbor’s backyard with a brown wooden table from Earth. Earth and Veryona were on good communication terms; they agreed to have skirmishes every three hundred million years, when Mars, the god of war, thought it was necessary to put the universe back on balance. Which was whenever he felt like it.
In the dictionary, war was described as “the ability to harness powers in an evil manner.”
Arianna smiled primly. She had been studying her primer. She was three hundred seventy four years old, and barely reached adulthood. Her hair was long and flowing and her best friend was a manitee. A manitee was an animal that had brown fur and bristly hair. The bear’s eyes were pools of blackness.
Arianna held the book out in front of her. The book was old and the pages were torn in two. The pages were torn in two and she couldn’t ask for another. Her Mentor, who was also called “William,” was a very stern teacher. He had seen a lot of battles and went to Tyn to fight in the wars. Tyn was a long ways away, and Arianna dreamt of leaving her castle. Did she forget to mention? She was a princess. She hated it. She was stuck inside all day and had nothing to do. She felt like crying all the time. The boys from her school came to visit her and played cricket and handball. She watched, sitting under the tree, reading a book. She wasn’t talking to any of the boys. They only played games. They were ordered to by her father; she wasn’t supposed to talk to boys, only girls. She could play with the boys, though, but she didn’t feel like playing.
One day, a young servant came to deliver a set of hand-washed clothes. He said his mother was a Ljnn, someone who could weave magic from nothing. Her father only hired the best. It was all he could do. He had so much money he didn’t know what to do with it. He had so much money, he was greedy and thoughtless and slept with woman after woman. Arianna was studying in the kitchen. She liked to study in the kitchen with the cook, a Khr Sa’in. She was not Earthling. She was from a planet called Iare. She said people lived on the world and they were very small, tiny. Their eyes were usually gold or purple and they lived their lives singing songs. Arianna didn’t believe her. The servant left, and Arianna paid no mind. She was used to people coming and going. She was used to people doing odd things in her presence. She was, after all, a princess. She collected her homework and went up to her room. Exhausted, she fell onto the bed, and her mouth hung open. She looked out the window and the clock tower was in the distance, shorn of silver and stone. She had never been to the clock tower. Old Man Niles lived in the clock tower. He was very cranky and had a big nose and narrowed eyes. She wanted to visit the clock tower one day.
The next morning the sun was a brilliant blue, and Arianna went outside to practice bow and arrow. The target was an apple in a tree. The leaves of the trees were very big, broad, and green. The sun shone through the branches. The sun was fierce and hot. A man wandered over to her. It was her teacher.
“What are you doing?” she asked him.
He frowned at her. “I was studying astronomy!” he replied. “Looking at the stars. Don’t you ever wonder about the stars? Don’t you ever dream? Don’t you ever think, be? Are?”
She frowned. “You’re not making any sense.”
He spread his arms wide, as if to embrace the entire castle. In fact, he really hated the castle. He despised it. It wasn’t something he enjoyed, spending time in the castle. He was happy doing other things. Off having other adventures. Off doing things he wouldn’t normally be doing. Sometimes with her, more often by himself. She worried about him spending more time alone, by himself. “I found a book,” he said, his face brightening.
“What book?” she asked him. She was interested now. She put down her bow and arrow, and everyone complained. She made a face at their backs. So, let them complain. It would do them good. She knew about doing good and complaining. They were both among her favorite pastimes.
“What kind of book is this?” Arianna asked with interest, flipping through the pages.
He shrugged. His shoulders were small and bony. He had always been small for a teacher, and had big eyes and brown hair. He was born on a space station that orbited Earth, and confessed he felt out of place. He wasn’t happy with the way things were going in his life, and spent more and more time absorbed in his books-usually, magick books, or books about spells and sorcerers. Recently, he had come across an old book and had given it to Arianna for inspection. She found the pages were blank except for the last page. The words, “Iresyn Litte” was written across it in gold, bold ink. The lettering was like magic, but it wasn’t exactly so.
“What does it mean?” Arianna asked quizzically.
He shrugged his shoulders. “Damned if I know,” he replied. “Where do you think it came from?”
“I thought you bought this thing.”
“No, someone gave it to me. He said it belonged to the song slayer.”
“Who’s that?”
“Someone who can pen songs-songs from magic,” he reported. He frowned, and added: “I think.” He rubbed his temples warily. He hadn’t been getting a lot of sleep lately. He had been working all day and all night, his temper was flaring. He didn’t want to take it out in front of her. She was his buddy.
“I don’t know anyone like that,” she said, pursed her lips while she thought. She didn’t know why he was interested in such a book. She had better books in her father’s library, large books with large words and written in script. Men came from all over the world to give her father books. She was very proud of him. He had a large collection.
He cocked his head and winked at her. “Maybe you do,” he replied, and chuckled. “Maybe it’s you.”
She shoved him. “Or it’s you!” she said sarcastically. She made a face at him. “Always making fun of me, huh! I don’t like the turn of events!” She crossed her arms over her chest and glared at him.
“It is you,” he said seriously, and shoved the book in her hands. He laughed and hurried away. She stared after him, and shoved the book into the pocket of her cloak. She had better things to do. It was time to go to the Midnight Ritual. The Midnight Ritual was a union, an elite, of a group of girls from the castle and they gathered around and paid homage to fairies. Lydia was the first one to think of it. She was her Uncle’s next door neighbor and was home schooled and her mother worked at the castle as a teacher. The city didn’t have a real school and they were trying to get her father the money to give the workers to build a school.
The four girls clustered around a large, silver tree. The sun was red, now; it only turned to blue once every full cycle. A cycle was a half a year on Veronya; they didn’t go by Earthtime. That’s was what they called a year on Earth, Earthtime. Veryona had no government; no intricate system of webbing sand from stone. The clouds hung in the sky, and it was a lazy, lazy day, and then midnight was an even darker night. Lydia crept closer and threw a flame into the fire. She was a flame-thrower. Most people shunned her. She was from Veryona, which was very curious, because Veryona did not possess the gift of magick. Magick was an old, ancient art. People did not have magick here. It was forbidden, and no one knew how to use it, besides, and decided to make it forbidden. The forbiddenness came from within the heart; the heart was where all Darkness and Light had lain. Her father told her this many times, after her mother died. She was the one who told her first. She missed her mother dreadfully, and life had become dreadfully dull and boring.
Lydia was a spot of bright sunshine in her otherwise dull life. She had black hair and blue skin. She was from Earth, but her mother was XCryick. A planet three thousand light years away from Earth, she was often lonely and desolate, until she discovered magick and other girls who harbored it. She was surprised Veryonians did not have magick, and Arianna explained women on Veryona were not gifted in magick, her abilities were flukes. She said William told her it was not so, that she was different, brilliant. Her magic was different. He called it “magic” without the “k.” She was surprised. Most of the time, he sounded like an Earthling and wondered about his parents.
The Midnight Ritual started out fine. Lydia chanted about the moon and the stars and Brooke talked of her mother, on the Other World, the Ghost World. Veryona had a real world and a ghost world. The ghost world was three hundred light years away, in the universe. The universe was vast and Brooke wanted to visit it one day. She planned on building a star shuttle to take her to the place.

Radio.

2010-05-11T19:21:00.000-07:00

I found out you were not listening,
That the sound of you listening
Was the sound of the paper moving
In the doorway.
The sound of the coffee being made
In the other room.
I found out a lot of things.
I found out you like cell phones,
Especially the ring tones-
Your favorite is a song by Lady Gaga,
Whom I haven’t familiarized myself with.
I don’t fancy any particular musician.
I used to play the cello.
I don’t fancy anything other than the wind
And the movement of the trees,
And the smell of bacon frying in the oven.
I never thought I’d piece together things
Things that were in-between.
The in-between that was nothing
And seemed to fight with me,
The wings of movement,
Of destiny and the simple promise of
Dictating.
I never thought I’d find you with the phonograph
Machine,
Your back whirring.
Or the sound of the harp playing
In someone else’s backyard,
Or the sound of your voice in the silence.
I don’t fancy I’m good enough.
Good enough for anything other than making
Breakfast for strangers,
And the lilacs blooming on the porch.

THE WOMAN LIVES FOR LEMON CAKE

2010-05-10T15:12:00.001-07:00

THE WOMAN LIVES FOR LEMON CAKE

My mother loved to scrapbook. She had drawers full of scrapbooks, and they were all filled with pictures of cakes. It was funny because we never ate a lot of sweets. My mother said it was bad for our health, and she made us eat vegetables instead-usually boiled or chopped, whatever she preferred. We lived in a small apartment above a laundry mat, and we were lucky, because most apartments in those days didn’t have laundry mats. We lived in a small city in Kentucky, and a lot of cities back in those days were dirt poor. My mother dreamt of owning a garden. A garden or a farm, whatever we could afford. We couldn’t afford much. We got buy on bread and cabbage water and lettuce.
We got buy on little or nothing at all. We couldn’t find our way through the dirt-lined streets, the slowly crumbling democracy. The politicians didn’t have a clue. We listened to them on a radio. The radio was the only means of communication we had at the time. We didn’t even have a phone. We were far too poor for that. My mother said Johnny was going to go through college, and that was final. My mother said lots of things. Lots of things didn’t matter. Johnny got in trouble, sometimes. Usually, it was about a girl. He got in line with the bad guys and spent his days smoking behind bleachers at the high school, and getting chased away by the principal or Mr. McGreggar.
My mother was a superb cook. She subscribed to all the latest cooking magazines and happily watched all the cooking shows at my Aunt Rachel's. She was a fanatic about cooking. She loved Starbuck’s. It was her favorite place to eat. We ate mostly brownies and cakes and cookies, and of course coffee. I was working nine to five at my job in San Fernando, and it was hard to go out and see my mother and hear her heartbreak about how no one came to see her. She said the magazines kept her busy. She was forty-five and used to be a schoolteacher and now got Social Security.
She had a new boyfriend. His name was Sam Simmons and he worked at a catering company out in Alcapolco Drive. I met him and we didn’t hit it off right away; he suggested we go fishing together. I asked him what kind of fishing, and he said salmon. He loved salmon. It was his favorite fish. He had silver hair and blue eyes. They were bright as the sea, maybe even brighter, and my mother enjoyed talking to him, she said. His son died in Vietnam and he was lonely. He was fifty-nine and they hit it off very well. I wasn’t sure I liked it. I wasn’t sure about anything at that point.
In the summer of ’89, my father bought a boat. Things were going smoothly in the marriage. My oldest brother, Johnathan, loved fishing and my father won five thousand dollars from the lottery. Mom was outraged he bought a fishing boat with the money and he told her to relax. That was the last straw. Mom kicked him out and he was left on the porch, with one suitcase, the fishing boat, and the car. Johnathan went to help Mom. I went to help Dad. That was the summer of ’89. My sister wasn’t born, yet.
In ’91, I moved to Columbus, Ohio. My mother threw a fit. She whined and cried and had a big meltdown. Dad didn’t bother to care. He had a new girlfriend and was living in a trailer out in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He said he didn’t want to go back to her. They still had the boat and went out on it every day and watched the sun go down over the trees and he said he was real happy, for the very first time. Dad said Mom liked his cakes too much and should shove them up he knew where. I thought Mom should open up a bakery. She was living off of Social Security, too. She said she couldn’t work because her back hurts. She said some people talked about her behind her back where she used to work at the peanut factory and they said they always had a job for her. She insisted the boss secretly hated her and refused to go back. I never knew why. I didn’t really know what she was talking about and nodded and smiled in all the right places.
I lived in a nice little house. The house was white and had white trimmings and the grass was taller near the front door. I had a little car, a Volvo. It was blue. I got it for my graduation present from graduating from Stanford. I got a degree in law and child education-of course I chose neither. I don’t really know why I didn’t want to be a lawyer. Most lawyers were, at best, a mixed blessing, and nothing good could come of that.
It was nearing Thanksgiving and Mom said it was about time I met Johnathan. He was an avid golfer and a tennis player and the apartment he lived in had a tennis court and a volleyball court. Most of the apartments were empty; they built them in the early 90s and Johnathan said they were going to add on to them. Mom said she was getting along with his daughter-her name was Amanda and she had blonde hair and blue eyes and a daughter named Arabelle. Arabelle was bright-eyed and loved jokes. Her mother got one of those joke books from the mall and was telling jokes to everyone she met-even people on the streets. Amanda said she had to make Arabelle stop telling jokes.
“I think we should all have dinner one day,” Mom said one morning. I had come over to help fix her garbage disposal. It was always on the fritz. It had just rained and a nice shimmer of rain was on the grass. The grass was green and it was spring and they were growing.
I quirked an eyebrow at her. “With who?” I persisted. “Some rock star pop group?”
She giggled and blushed. Mom put her hair up in a bun and puttered about in her garden. The wind blew. It was cold for spring. “Johnathan and his family, of course,” she said. “I’d love for you to meet them.”
I shrugged. “I guess,” I replied. “Don’t we have to talk about politics? You know how avid you get about politics.”
She made a face at me. “The president is such a coot!” she declared. “I don’t know what Americans see in him.”
“We voted for him fair and square.”
“Don’t be silly, you never vote.”
“Right. Didn’t think about that one.” I snorted, and shook my head. I had a hard time keeping up with my mother. I agreed to come to dinner, and brought my wife with me. Her name was Anna. We met in our freshman year of college. She got a degree in biology and was a biologist at the local aquarium. She made sure the fish were fed. And the algae was kept at bay.
Johnathan came over to the house the next week. He brought Amanda and her daughter; Arabelle was only five. She had some bubble toys and was blowing bubbles with the bubble blower. I didn’t know what those things were called. I set her in the high chair and she blew bubbles in my face and giggled and laughed and squirmed, trying to get out of her high chair. Her mother gave her a cup of pudding and she laughed and banged her spoon on the tray.
“Charming child,” I muttered, and made a face at her.
She burst into tears.
“Isn’t she, though?” Johnathan banged me on the back and hacked another cough.
Good smells wafted from the kitchen.
I wasn’t sure how long I could stand these people another minute. Johnathan was okay if he didn’t talk. His daughter was okay if I didn’t see her. And his granddaughter was just a crazy nut.
“Guess what I’m serving!” Mom exclaimed.
She came in and put a pot of roast beef on the table.
Arabelle burst into tears Arabelle burst into tears and threw her spoon onto the floor.
* * *
Dinner was a terror. Arabelle cried the whole time. Johnathan argued with me about politics. He said Ross Perot should never have been elected; all I asked was for him to pass me the ketchup. Mom said I shouldn’t waste the ketchup, and wondered how she could make her own. I didn’t think you could make ketchup at home. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could make.
Mom brought out a store bought cake and Johnthan really had a fit. “You mean you didn’t make it yourself?” he asked. He sounded disappointed.
I stared at him incredulously. I couldn’t believe he would say such a thing to my mother. It was very rude and insensitive.
“I would have,” she said. “But, my recipe is gone.”
He looked startled. That really changed his tune. “Recipe?” he asked. “You have your own recipe?”
She made a face at him. “Yes, sweetheart,” she said in exasperation. “Don’t you remember how we met at the cookie bake-off and my cookies won third place? I had a whole stack of recipes. I don’t go anywhere without them. Then, I lost my cake recipe.”
“This changes everything,” he said. “We’re going to have to move heaven and earth to find it.” He glanced with me. “You with me on this, chubs?”

* * *

Creation.

2010-05-09T16:36:00.001-07:00

The water is livid as the grass.
We don’t dawdle; we let it pass.
Before us on the waves that swell;
And the horse that will not dwell;
Forever, we are adorned by witching hour;
The pan is rinsed, it will not scour.
Shadows are torn and rotten at the planks.
We don’t know what we feel-we let it stank.
The night shines down like a burned moon.
Destiny settles gently down; we rise in June,
And set upon flowers in their flower beds,
Waves wash gently over sea shell heads.
Dawn is an array of color-
Something along those lines we cannot sever forever.
Your eyes are intelligent; they cross tides like dreams.
And gently fold at the seams.
The cloth is hand-washed,
And is dipped in wine;
We can’t find sixteen bottles to let them shine.
Happiness is weathered against the water.
We fill the void, and cross sons and daughters,
The night is barren, we force against the season,
It won’t go past for any reason.

Poem.

2010-05-09T07:13:00.001-07:00

Oh, the rivers that will flow-
And the faces that will go.
All the way pass the door,
And out into the void.
The void is in another room.
We tiptoe past the field of gloom.
I see your eyes, they light with grace,
As they move about any place.
The rainbow in the sky has grown;
Falling faster than we have known.
The weeds grow in the building lot,
A glass of lemonade will hit the spot.
The wind roars through the shade.
I look at all the art I have made,
A collage of words, a still of voice,
This is what I did, it is my choice.
The art is in mountains,
It is in fountains.
It is in the air-
Or walking down the stairs.
The colors of the void are dark,
We can’t begin to light a spark,
Of the night that surrounds us all,
And leaves again in the fall.
Oh, the rivers that will flow.
And time will stand still.

Pages. Grew.

2010-05-06T20:13:00.000-07:00

On the foliage, grew from great wisdom.
The tiptoe of a cat on forest water;
Blue boats shimmering in the sea.
Grief stricken, the man rowed to shore;
The salad was taken out,
Put back on a plate,
And surrendered again to the infinite.
The thinking sometimes takes
Many times to go over and over,
Without and within.
The period of everlastingness
Is not without seasons
That tiptoe through different seasons,
Different times,
Things that are different.
I experience things in your grief.
You experience things in mine.
The minotaur raises its claws
In surrender;
The wind refuses to shine.
His eyes are brown.
Brown as other worlds.
The other worlds tiptoe over
Other great things.
The greatness is vast.
It is all vast.
The vastness in it is rage-
The rage fills the page.

KNIGHT LIFE.

2010-05-05T19:04:00.001-07:00

The krying spider was a spider and lived in the mountains. The wind whistled and blew and everything was around it; and the wind was whistling and singing. He loved to eat and went to the river and fished in the river and the river was full of fish. The spider winced and dropped the pole into the river and tried to catch a fish. He could not catch anything. He did not want to go down to the city, for someone would see him and he did not want to be seen. Everything around him was deathly still. So still, he could not breathe-his eyes blinked, flashed madly. Everything was perfect. Perfect and still. The snow fell. The wind whistled. His mouth opened and he sang:

We are of mountain/of burdened snow,
We do not know where we go-
We haven’t found a way behind,
We push past darkness and deep we find,
Nervous now, nervous yet,
Look for the shadow of the silhouette.

The Power of the Six had been protecting Merlin for several thousand millennia-beyond the grain of sand, of wind and rain and lightning, the world spun and the magic spun with it; delved short of nothing of the cold that was in it. The magic delved further into the heart of things; further into the greatness that was the abyss, and made up of everything. Further than the eyes of Torn; the breath of speak; the light that wove through anything. Everything was shattered. Everything was in ruin. The man stood among the ruins, his hands stuffed deep in the pocket of his jeans. He looked ready to bolt from the spot at any minute. He grunted. The wind grunted back.
“Well, old gal,” he told the krying spider. “What are we to do with you?”
“Feed,” the spider said pitifully, and skittered under his feet. He forgot to mention he was terrified of spiders. Beyond terrified. He wanted to kill it. He remained calm. The spider’s eyes reflected sincerity; depthness; intelligence. He had seen spiders before. Spiders were not intelligent.
“Why do we call it krying, anyway?” he continued, his lips trying to part into an almost half smile, the smile of something that had never wavered, had never been worn-the danger was in it all, was in everything. The danger was everywhere. He could smell it. Could smell the way everything was. Everything could be. “Why not have a different spelling? A different sort of spelling in the name, the way the name is shaped. The way it is.”
“You’re babbling,” the spider reminded him.
The man laughed. His laughter rolled across the dust and the spider winced. He was afraid, he feared man, as well as everything else. Everything was to be feared. He did not know why he was afraid; only that it comforted him, and he wanted the man to go away. He said it aloud.
He rose to his feet and nodded. “I’ve come this far, and seen ghosts,” he told him. “I saw many ghosts.”
“They scare me.”
“So, leave, old man.”
“Why’d you call me that?” the spider asked sharply.
His name was Harper. He was a harpist. He was an orphan and had been living in the Red Plains his entire life; it was nowhere near the Great Plains, but the Red Plains were close by. Harper loved to sing. He loved to fiddle. He could do almost anything. He squinted down at the krying spider. “How many of you are there left?” he asked pleasantly enough.
The spider sniffed. “I don’t right know,” he apologized. “I only know of cold; of loneliness; of the mind and body. That is all.”
“What of your god?”
“God?” It laughed bitterly. “I don’t know about God. I know about magic.”
“Are you a magician?”
“Very funny.”
The krying spider rolled over on himself. And straightened.
“What was that for?” Harper couldn’t stop laughing. His insides were tickling. He hoped the krying spider hadn’t drugged him.
“Nothing,” the spider protested. “I was just…rolling over. I do that sometimes.” If the spider could blush, he sure would have.
The night was cold. The man went away and the spider crawled into its little home, and slept; and the stars broke out, full and beautiful, in the sky; and everything was bright. The color of brightness was everywhere. The color of brightness was inside everything. Everything was still. The man woke up in the middle of the night, his dreams sharp as a tack.
The dragon rose tall as the mountains-the mountains were tall above it, and the wind was sharp and whistled. The dragon’s name was Kustka and he snorted cold air. It was winter. He had no trouble finding shelter-caves were all over the place-but he wanted one that was close to a river. He scanned the landscape, the rolling hills that rose and fell against the sky, and the sky was breathtaking and the sun was falling, fell fast. It was going to be night soon.

Blue.

2010-04-26T11:55:00.001-07:00

Blue

The earthly nest swallows me whole-
It gulps me down, I’m bottom’s up,
I buy new pants at the store and refuse to wash them
For days.

You said you never had the chance to say goodbye
To the man you loved,
All those years ago, in late October,
And the sun was going down and the hearts were
Moist, and tears were moist, too-

Sometimes, the words get muddled and forgotten;
Sometimes, forbidden hearts are stilled,
And we drink down water in a cup,
And the cup is half-filled with water.

We pray that the time is right. When is the time ever right?
When is the hands of the clock forgotten,
And hands are not forgotten?

The bread is rising in the oven.
No one told me this would take awhile.

The birds chirp in the trees.
The wind has stilled; the cold shivers;
An airplane drones.
It is like being in a field of flowers.
It is like the silence is everywhere.
You are quiet in your waking.
You are quiet in your grief.

Never mind, you say. Never mind.
You shake your head. The sky does not bleed.

To a woman that has the personality of an Angel, remix

2010-04-26T11:13:00.001-07:00

To a woman that has the personality of an Angel

You walk the Earth so peaceful, so graceful

Your soul gives off warmth like fire on a cold winter’s night

You care so much for others, into your heart you invite

Heaven protrudes in the sparkle from your eyes

The light protects from darkness, trust it implies

The heart you possess gives off a radiance of love

Like the romance that is felt from the release of a white dove

In God’s graceful presence, we are heart adorned;

Love’s destiny’s reason is a night that is scorned.

The smile on your beautiful face lights up a room-

A breath of fresh air like spring roses abloom.

To a woman that has the personality of an Angel.

2010-04-26T09:55:00.000-07:00

I found this on my computer...I don't know if I wrote it or if someone else wrote it, but I think it's probably mine, not sure! Sometimes I write something and then forget.

*******

To a woman that has the personality of an Angel

You walk the Earth so peaceful, so graceful

Your soul gives off warmth like fire on a cold winter’s night

You care so much for others, into your heart you invite

Heaven protrudes in the sparkle from your eyes

The light protects from darkness, trust it implies

The heart you possess gives off a radiance of love

Like the romance that is felt from the release of a white dove

The smile on your beautiful face lights up a room

A breath of fresh air like spring roses abloom

August Hue Thunderstorm.

2010-04-26T09:53:00.002-07:00

Thunderstorm

The trees stand tall as skyscrapers,
Bow down gracefully under a thunderstorm.
Raindrops fall below; tears splatter the ground
Like unforgotten rain, thunder sounds
Like the beat of drums.
I am not here, I am not moved; my heart
Beats like drums, fast and steady.
Houses stand tall against the storm;
Bears and rabbits hop out of their hiding places,
Make beds behind old shrubs.
Nature is catastrophic, cataclysmic; a farmer
Shells out a truckload of eggs from the hen house,
Sells them to the county store.
A woman yells at her son, who is carrying home
A bushel of apples; an old maid tries on a new outfit.
She hates living in the country, hates being poor,
Misguided, and judged; but she loves country
In the wintertime, when the snow falls prettily
On the ground, and the old woman down the street
Gives her a ripe new plum and a basket of
Wash cloths she knitted herself.
The storm lessens; the wind heaves in and out,
In and out, sounding like a harmonica.
Clouds slowly melt from view, into the August hue.

Flowers.

2010-04-26T09:53:00.001-07:00

I forgot the sound of the grandfather clock, the way it mesmerizes in small doses. The doctor came in today to check on Bradley Shaw, who broke his hip in two places; his mind revels at the flower that was stuck between two pages, the sadness imbedded in the dark. The sound of her voice is the only thing that will soothe him; the sound of madness fills his soul. It is a sickness, a journey of words that flits through the midnight air and drops down on peppermint oceans; a sickness that has no words or sound or color, an odorless gas that is forgotten in waves-sounds are outside of sounds; light flashes in a bit of color, a hatred that is putrid and moves like steel and flame. Someone forget me; please forget who I am; please forget I ever existed. A ghost calls to me from the depth of the dark, it is me, who I have become. The sunlight falls in through the window; makes gold bars on the floor of the cold room. The woman makes Kool-Aid for the old man. And brings it to him in a paper cup. The sound of flowers fills the room. And lights the world with its gloom.

Make the Canvas Bleed.

2010-04-24T13:12:00.000-07:00

A torrid voices of imagery
A fresh green crown in the grass.

Dapples lightly in upturned voices;
The birds sing songs in summer
Cows low to the low red moon;
I walk solidly on ghost footsteps.

Old doorknobs bend in June;
A baby suckles on a mama’s breast.
The cattails select John’s choices,
We don’t know if it’s a bummer.

I try to rhyme; we won’t let it pass.
The meadow is green in the cold snow.
Volcanoes spout ash from below;
The cold wind blows.

You are the picture of a photograph.
We realize the still sound of the
Brownstown.
Tomorrow is not a bent spoon.
I am alone.
Birds flock on heels in June.

The wind is a sixteen bottles of symmetry;
You aren’t mad, but you aren’t walking quietly.
A torrid voices of imagery,
Talks to me and the cold wind blows.
You don’t know that I am angry.
You don’t know that cattails bleed.

OK.

2010-04-23T12:26:00.000-07:00

I never had a father who bothered about me.
We whisper words of wisdom; and shelter where we speak.
I never had a family that wanted me,
Never had a shoe to wear, or anyone to care;
I found my way through the uncertainty,
And laid my head on the floor.
Whispering words of wisdom,
I can barely speak anymore.
All the meanness of the dark,
And the shadows of the dawn,
My head I still hold it high,
When life is overdrawn.
The birds speak gently to the sky;
There is no one who hears.
We force ourselves to live our lives,
Without knowing why or where.
The planet is a memory, of spinning voices
And doubt,
We try to speak the words are bleak,
And I can’t scream or shout.
All the roads we walk upon,
And all the greed,
Are turned out in a whirlabout,
And we don’t say what we need.
I lay my head upon your shoulder,
And we walk on the grass.
I don’t think what we speak,
And the crowds are rolling fast.
I never had a father and he never had one, too,
The sky is molted; the volcanoes erupted;
In a field of blue.
He never said what he didn’t say,
And then he went away-
I look outside and stars collide,
And we are all OK.

I Am the Electric Guitar.

2010-04-18T09:59:00.000-07:00

I am the electric guitar.
I strum you down a field of flowers.
I strum you when the harp has stilled.
I take you home and fill you with music;
The sound of your crying wakens my cat,
Shadow.
I found him in an abandoned lot late one
Afternoon,
And the sun was shining on a brick wall.

I am the electric guitar.
The words flow fast from my lips,
And the river flows and the sun shines
On the tabletop,
And my heart declares that I am in dire
Need of showering.
We are the news.
We are the apologetic.
I bought you at a pawn shop in Brooklyn,
You spewed songs from your lips.

You said you weren’t naïve.
I didn’t believe in naïveté.
I don’t believe in anything other than
My truthful words,
Burnt brown from ashes.
She said you would not melt.
That the cheese would melt the
Sandwiches,
That the landslides of commerce
Have not been broken into.
That our house was not put up for sale.

I am the electric guitar.
I speak words and worlds are tuned into shades.
We turn down the bright blankets
On the bed.

Don't Dwell.

2010-04-15T17:41:00.001-07:00

A gazillion stars you said were words,
Wrapped in your arms, the flowers you picked
Strewn out into the relentless universe.
You said you would be home by noon.
You said you were not done working at Walmart’s,
Two women named Diane as cashiers.
You bought a package of cigarettes;
You spoke to the woman who spoke Spanish.
I called my mother on the telephone and she
Wrote down special names;
Specific dates and times related to Vietnam.
She said she didn’t like Vietnam War
Anymore,
Didn’t like the old ghosts living in her closet
And shooed them away.
She said it was long past their time.
She said nothing was more flushed than
The familiar face of rage,
Spilled out lonely and naked on dirt rags.
We bought a couple of washcloths at Walmart,
And everything was coming into place.
Her mind was good, and destiny was not done.
She knocked on the doors of nursing homes,
And told us we couldn’t walk,
Couldn’t talk, find things in a lily of the field.
My mind was made up.
I would work on Broadway. I would sing and act
And freshen myself up to live daily,
My mouth pursed slightly, singing
A bad song.
You said you would come to bed.
You said a lot of things.
You were working on your backswing.
You were pacing up and down the stairs.
The house was old and seemed to swallow people.
The house was old and it seemed to swallow horns.
A gazillion stars you said were words.
Broken and plucking on strings.
The stars are pinpoints of eyes.
They are of the old worlds.
The laughter that is beaten dead.
The man that could not find the time to make others
Laugh.
The calmness of it; the other side of the ice,
The earth that spoke to people who listened,
And sighed quietly as the world slept.

On Iceland.

2010-04-15T17:34:00.001-07:00

She sighed and the still of her voice
Was a boom box on center stage.
Her words burn like torrid images,
Of sultry lanes and burning microfilm.
She spins through the galaxy;
The planets twirl and whirl
And we are walking on water.
I plant rhododendrons; geraniums;
White lilies and broken bells;
The cold is in the cold,
The wind hollow and we find our way
Through the nakedness.
You said you wouldn’t find me
Anywhere to sit;
Buildings sit like islands on crabgrass.
The wind is whispering,
Sad and lonely songs through the trees.
We cut the grass and the grass is watered daily;
We cut down trees and they wreck havoc
On Iceland.
The sun is shining on the shore, our shore,
The place where we met and dreamt
Big dreams-the place where we found
Inner turmoil and broke through the acid
Rain that flocked the clouds.
We talk to the clouds-
Sing and clouds are reborn,
In the bitterness, the simplistic
Time,
The houses were reborn and given
New names.
A new star was born in the sky,
Purple and veiled as a promise.
The still of her voice moved mountains,
And the West winds was stilled.

First part, Dragonbane.

2010-04-12T09:30:00.000-07:00

The light was bright.
The soldier wanted to be in it.
They left him alone and put his body in a big brown box. The soldier saw this from where he stood, swallowing hard and making sure his mind was ready to accept the consequences of his actions. Everything was so bright, it hurt his eyes.
A man walked into the room. This was not Death. Death did not wear robes; did not have purple eyes. Death was nobody’s business; nothing else was nobody’s business. His eyes were wide and afraid. His heart was lit with a gentleness that couldn’t be described. His mind was calm. He was forced to think about different things.
“You can’t leave,” the man said, weeping.
The soldier put his arm out to touch him. His hands went right through him. “Well,” he declared. “I’m dead.”
The man chuckled and nodded. “You were tortured when you were alive, forced to do something you didn’t want to,” he said. “Now, how do you feel?”
He was having conversations with a Shadow. One of the Shadowmen. They rose from the depths of the night and overtook the dawn; light spilling onto the grass. Gosh, the light was bright. Brighter than anything. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “I want to yell. I want to run. I want to jump and play. I saw the light. There is much work to be done.”
“That is why I stay,” he replied. “I stay here, hoping for something else that isn’t what I am. Hoping for a glimpse of redemption; a glimmer of peace. I go around, and speak to others who have the Noise-this is what they call those who are wicked.”
“The ones who see the dead?” he asked patiently.
“Yes.”
“I have so many questions.”
“I know,” he replied, honestly.
“Are you always looking?”
He was startled. Shadowmen never got startled. They just were. “Looking for?” he pressed.
He shrugged. “Things, ideas,” he replied. “Nothing that I know about. Nothing tangible, nothing real.”
“What is real?”
“The sky. That is all.”
“Are you almost ready?”
The soldier smiled. His eyes crinkled. “Almost,” he answered harshly.
The white wizard stood over the soldier’s grave. His shadow overtook the entire length of it, and his mouth twisted in a snarl. “I tried,” he told him. “I tried, Harry Barrow, I really did. I tried to bring peace and prosperity; all I could bring was chaos.” His face was shiny with tears.
The wind picked up. He looked up at the sun, his eyes still shining, and something dark crawled across the sun and everything shimmered in a weird, shimmery haze. The white wizard had never seen anything like it before in all of his life.
A soldier appeared in front of him. He said, “It’s Harry.”
The white wizard swallowed hard and reached out to touch him. His hand went right through him. “Hello,” he said. He let his hands dangle to his sides. “Sorry, Harry, but you’re dead.”
“I know,” the soldier replied. “They told me after I went into the light.”
“How is it?” Ellerhynwyn asked. He cocked his head to look at him.
He shrugged, bored. “No difference from being alive,” he answered. “The only difference is, we don’t have to eat a damn thing-it’s not mandatory.” He chuckled. “I can make a pretty mean soufflé, though.”
Ellerhynwyn nodded. “I bet you can. You feel weird about death?”
“No. I felt more weird about life. Being a soldier taught me to appreciate life. To live again. I thought I would never live again.”
“Because of what?”
“Because of things I couldn’t change. Because of whatever was happening in the world. The darkness. The evil. I can see the relics from here. They’re not so tough; they were Merlin’s, that much is for certain.”
Ellerhynwyn smiled. “We wondered about that,” he said. “Goodbye, soldier.”
“Goodbye.”
The man shimmered once, again; and disappeared.
The sun was high in the sky. Everything had color around it. Everything was beautiful. Ellerhynwyn felt like magic.

Wasps and Clocks.

2010-04-07T15:29:00.001-07:00

In tales of old worlds, we are strong and relentless-
A chord that struck the heart.
The worm is made from flesh and flesh is spoken
From strings like balloons. In the old death,

My heart is made from corn melted from flesh-
The words are spoken in tales spun from old
Wives,
The hearts beat like gilded black wings.

A cloud of angry wasps.
A tourniquet that is spun from old dials.
We hear the world, the whispers of words;
Our eyes lock, and the bell bangs twice.

I am waiting, forever waiting.
Sentinels bleak and relentless.
Follow sad rhymes, ancient as anything.
We creep across the marsh of old hands.
I can’t do anything.
I can’t say anything.
We locked eyes and couldn’t find anything hidden
In the shadows,
The shadows marched from strands of wool.

This is not the age of redemption.
This is not the age of old worlds.
Crossed out, we move on-
Old ghosts are hung from silver doors.

The windows are spoken of anything,
Anything is derived from flesh.
You told me we wouldn’t go back.
You told me you were tossing and turning
In your bed,

That your tears were not fresh and burning.
The wildflowers burned.

Everything was burning from shadows and
Spots of shadows.
I looked at the sky and a rainbow appeared,
Stark and naked and full of wings.
The grace was not in anything.

Things Etched in Stone.

2010-04-05T20:21:00.001-07:00

Hunger is not my middle name
You are not my face, my brother-
You are etched in my dreams

Eyes are burdened by colors
You tell tales and spin wreckless dreams
I fear not the face of anger
I fear not the face of redemption

Torn apart by weathered hands,
Hands are aching and bleeding,
Red and golden as dreams.

We fear not, the corn,
The hunger is temptation.
The temptation is greed.

Greed is unified.
Unified in our grace.
The stem from the rosebud
Glows downward,
Empties out into the world.

Hunger is not me.
I followed the woman down
The stairs,
She hisses at me like a snake-
Her eyes are bloodred,

Mouth is twisted.
I model myself after JFK,
The man who was destroyed.

He said, Fear not the temptation;
The eating of chicken.
Fear not destruction.

The commerce of it.
The letting down of it.

The letting down is easy.
Everything is destroyed.
We were all in the middle.

Resorted to Something.

2010-04-05T20:20:00.000-07:00

I pick myself up and dust myself off.
The poem is in the oven.
It is about to be taken out.

You tell me the bow looks pretty in
My hair; you tell me you are here for me.

The ghost snakes around closed doors and
Old windows,
The flower blooms bright on the windowsill.
The silence is in it all.
The way you walk. Your heart moves in

And out, painstakingly slow;
I look at you and time slows to a
Screeching halt,
I look at you and I can’t speak any words.
The words are not my words.
They are the words of the wind;
The light and the dark,
The sunrise and sunset;
The last man did not appreciate me,
Would not tell me I was beautiful;
I don’t like to speak in past tense.

I didn’t want to speak to him at all.
The worlds in old houses say goodbye

And transcend upon, up on slow mountains.
The hills and goldenrods are made pretty.
The doorway to heaven reaches up the stairs.

The beat of my heart heats up the
Night,
Achingly slow and the moon shines down.
His face is smiling like a penny;
His heart swells like a balloon.
I don’t want to make you breakfast.

Overtakes The Sky.

2010-04-02T16:45:00.001-07:00

I am the last. The wildflower runeth.
The dawn overtakes the sky.
The clouds rush sad as rivers,
And the cold is deep in things.
I wish I wasn’t the rushing tide.
The wind moans still in autumn.
You told me you wouldn’t speak
To me of mountains, rivers-
Blessings run coarsely through
Matted hair.
People are jealous of
Things that I say,
Jealous of my written words.
I can’t climb inside and outside,
Back and forth-
Your friendship means nothing
To me now. I never learned how
To speak. We don’t know what
Words are spoken,
In the language of suffering,
The commerce of suffering-
We yell at everyone,
And speak in songs,
Words too broken to be heard.
People are envious of my scars.
They bear the burdens of passion,
Of Zeus and his wings.
The light is heavenly in the sky.
We are aching in our words.
My thoughts are flightless.
My mother sleeps in her bedroom,
And a cat yowls outside.
No one hears me screaming.
No one hears the words, like blood,
Pouring from my echoed
Soul,
The long-lost soul of someone
Who says goodbye.
Goodbye to this world.
Everyone wants to fight, anyway.

The Woman Has Flabby Arms.

2010-04-01T14:25:00.003-07:00

I told my teacher what all the
Fuss was about.
She mentioned climbing stairs.
She mentioned stirring potatoes in big pots.
She mentioned old homes,
Withered weather vanes.
Knocking on closed doors.

The woman has flabby arms.
Her hair is gray, wild, shattered from
Rocks and hard veins.
Blue veins swim like rivers.
It is not a hard thing to comprehend.
She told me she liked to walk on the water.
That noises were too much for her.
She couldn’t take the criticism.

The mouth is open into a song.
A sob, the wind moans.
She walks on happiness.
Her friends move the world.
The world is movement.
She sees noise.
The movement is in the noise.

She is not an old woman.
The house belongs to her.

Sometimes, I sat out on the patio,
And looked at the mountain behind
The backyard.
My mother’s voice comes in my mind
Sometimes.
My Uncle Stan, a teacher, said
The river lacks movement.
Everything lacks movement.
The movement is everything.
Her words are sharp; they carry no momentum.
Everything is white in the quiet night.
Her heart is a microwave.

Lilacs Are Old.

2010-03-26T13:56:00.001-07:00

My face has grown, tattered and old-
The skates are inline and washed in the kitchen sink.
My friend, Jasmine,
Sprays herself with perfume and gets ready for a date-

The lilacs curl on the ground.

The ground is white with snow.
The snow has melted in.
The snow is in everything.
My face is old.
My lines are wrinkled.

My grandmother has been withered like
A flower,
She has Alzheimer’s
And cannot get out of bed.

Her charm is simple.
She is simple in her charm.
Her face contorts into a smile.
Her smile is stilled.
She wills herself to sit up and take a drink.

The lake outside is glowing.
The garden is shattered with ice.

The ice moves mountains.
Mountains are exhausted full of sun,
The bark from the wood is torn down.

From the Flesh of Tomorrow.

2010-03-24T14:09:00.000-07:00

You told me you would come see me tomorrow.
The shop had to be closed up.
You were a mechanic and had been one for three years,
Your eyes spin like tarnished coins in an antique shop.

Don’t act like you care about me.
You carve your way to grief-
Grief is in the folding of the flower,
The doorway that is always open.

I take shelter in your eyes.
The eyes that glare and glimmer over me,
Your body is transcendent,
Your eyes are pure as bones.

In this house, there are field mice;
My mother is making banana bread
For my father,
My sister is cruel, waiting for the mail-
The old man walks up the stairs with
Bended back,
Eyes glittering steely behind glass bars.
I am not a criminal.
Your hatred is from flesh,
Derived of flesh-
The bones are aching and tainted.

THE DISTANCE IT TAKES TO ZEUS.

2010-03-21T18:40:00.001-07:00

THE DISTANCE IT TAKES TO ZEUS

The two moons were strange and distant.
Professor Heglic Mangdogulas studied them through his telescope, and frowned. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. The robot, Radical, spun around and around in circles and went over to him, tugging on the end of his lab coat. “Sir,” he sputtered, shaking his head. “Sir, what are you doing?”
He got up. “Looking,” he replied shortly, shaking his head.
“Looking, for what?”
“Stars,” he said, smiling.
“Stars? What stars?”
He scowled. “Didn’t I teach you this already?” he demanded, shaking his head. “They are big balls of burning gas.”
“How big?”
He spread his hands. “This big,” he answered. He smiled, cocked his head to look at him. “Bigger than the Moon. Bigger than the sun. I think it shines in June.”
“Or smaller than the sun,” the robot said, he shook his head and clicked his tongue.
“The sun is cold,” said the professor.
“The stars are colder,” a familiar voice replied. It was the same “person” as before. The robot.
The professor smiled at the computer on his desk. “Contessa, my love,” he purred, blinking. “How are your lug nuts today?” He patted the computer. It was a large computer. The window of the computer was a black face.
“Fine,” the computer answered. “I’m a little tired, though. I was chatting all night in some stupid chat room, and this man called me a Dreamer.” He chuckled. “It was funny. We had a good laugh about it. He thought I was a woman.” He laughed again.
“You’re weird,” the professor said, ignoring him.
He shut off the computer and lumbered out of the lab.
The computer sighed and shut himself off. He drifted off to sleep.
The next morning, the professor returned to the lab and looked through his telescope again. The stars were bright in the sky; but were brighter during the day. He saw something in the sky. It was coming increasingly closer. Closer, still, until it was right in front of the lens. He thought it was a bug at first, and reached out to swat it, but realized it was a star. He reached for the phone on the desk-the computer giggled-and called NASA. “Shut up, everybody!” he hollered.
The computer quieted.
“Dang,” he said.
“NASA, this is Professor Heglic Mangdogulas,” he reported. “I’m at 54; 51; B12, in the Eastern sky. Time is four-oh-clock. What is it?”
“It’s a new star,” the operator sounded surprised. “Good God, man, it’s a large one, too! Do you want to name it?”
The professor nodded. “Sure,” he said. “I want to call it Zeus.”
He snorted. “That’s a dumb name,” he said.
“Should I pick out another one?” he asked.
“Not really. I just penciled it in.”
“But, you’re using a pencil.” He frowned in confusion.
“I said, not really. Good day, sir.”
He hung up the phone and resumed looking out of the telescope.

i pick myself up

2010-03-20T23:04:00.001-07:00

THE ROBED ONE.

2010-03-20T23:00:00.001-07:00

THE ROBED ONE

The man was not a machine.
He started out as a machine, a long time ago before the Robed One came and freed the Freeman from the destruction of themselves; he remembered being a machine, heard the grinding of his gears while he pondered and stared out the classroom window at the flowers and the flowers sang their song, their mouths tipping open, their white faces nodding and scowling. He did not find out he was a machine until his 117th year being Awake, searching through the trash near an abandoned hospital, tirelessly searching for something he couldn’t even remember thinking about in the first place, when an old man approached him, mumbling something under his breath.
The man who was a Machine, wanted to be a Rogue Warrior. The Rogue Warriors were the ones who stole in the depth of the night and fought the werewolves, the gnomes, the globetrotters, the men who bashed bones and came straight from Africa. His thoughts were muddled. He ate a breakfast of orange juice and scrambled eggs; his chompers grinding them. His teeth were his best feature; the white bone glistened in the moonlight. Did he tell people this? He liked the night best. The stars shone bright, and the wild wind cried out at the injustices of the world.
“What are you going on and on about, old man?” he demanded.
“Things,” he muttered. “Things.”
He eyed him critically. “You Freeborn, or Freeman?”
He raised an eyebrow at him. “Is there a difference?” he asked harshly.
The man shrugged. “Yes, and no. A Freeman was born in a Test Tube, a lab; a Freeman is a human who was once Machine. I am Freeman. What are you?”
“Democrat,” he muttered. “Democrat.” His eyes whirred rapidly.
“Dumbass,” he said, scowling. His name was…well, he forgot his real name, and adopted the name of Eric Freeman. He didn’t know why he chose that as a last name. Most people didn’t have last names, not anymore. A long time ago, they did, before the Apocolyptic War broke out in ’75, and nearly one half of the world was destroyed or lost, depending on your perspective.
“Dumbass,” he repeated, scowling. “I call myself Dumbass, now.” He grinned crookedly, his eyes sparkling.
He shuffled off, his right leg limping. Most people were genetic mutations of some sort; the sun had become enormously close to the planet, and everything became increasingly hotter. Antarctica was now another ocean.
The world Eric lived on was called Earth.
Some of the Freeborn went out into the universe to explore other worlds; some of them stayed in their own solar system, the solar system they were born in. Most humans were born on Earth, their names were stamped in their genetic code at the hospital, left in the blood sample they left behind for others to use in case it was needed. Most government laws were based on ancient Laws of Physics, before Galileo Galilei, before Newton’s Law or Some Such Nonsense.
The Freeborn were an interesting breed of humans.
They were going to go to the Moon for the Ten Thousandth Time.
Eric was not going to go to the Moon. Freeman were given free passes to get from Earth to the Moon on a star shuttle; the star shuttles were enormously large, and had windows like wide, staring eyes.
They were blank faces. Eric returned to his apartment and grasped the knob and turned it and stood in the doorway of his kitchen, looking thoughtful and quite put-out. He went to his refrigerator and opened the door, and it was stuffed full of food. Shadows climbed up and down the walls and everything moved painstakingly slow, and his back and knees creaked and he heard the sound of the clock ticking in the kitchen. He was not thinking about anything other than having lunch or dinner, maybe a little of both; it was only four-oh-clock in the afternoon. He got a can of spaghettios out of the cupboard and poured them in a saucepan and let it heat to boil; then he carried the food into the living room and watched his big, flatscreen television he purchased three months ago from Costco. Stores were all computerized now; run by Machines. Machines ran everything, it seemed.
Eric could not find the remote.
He picked up the cushion on the couch and went through the whole thing and put the cushions down and shook his head. He crossed the room and placed himself in front of the television and turned on the television set…with the television knob! No remote, can you imagine! His mind must be going crazy. He watched tv for a half an hour and climbed up the long stairwell to bed. He was very sleepy. Morning opened, he lumbered down the stairs to the kitchen and sat at the table and ate a breakfast of cereal and cold toast; it was hard getting food now, most of the third world countries were angry with the United States of America, and refused to barter with them. Instead, they got most of their food from Mars or the Moon, because they claimed territory there first. Claiming territory was the most important thing to Freeborn, now, at least it made them think about other things besides wars and killing people and drowning machines in oil and lug nuts and rudeness. Truth be told, the end of the world was not imminent; although many prophets talked about it years and years ago. Some new prophets, idiots, talked about them still and it irritated him. Most people were stupid. Eric didn’t want to talk to most people. They were idiots.
The next day he found the remote in the flower pot.
He picked it up and changed the channel and the pot holders disappeared.
Eric stared at it, a shocked expression on his face.

DRAGONBANE, beginning.

2010-03-16T22:17:00.001-07:00

Alchemy’s Encyclopedia:
Dark Knight (n)-one of four branches of government that exists in the world of Merlin; the Gray Branch; the Blue Branch; the Red Branch; the Orange Branch. Three branches consist of humans; the fourth branch, the Orange Branch, consists of magical creatures and the like. The Dark Knight is a human turned mutant with the abilities of sleight-of-hand; dark foresight; and a flair for adventure. Most humans never go back. Most aren’t able to return to their normal life, whether they drop the knight title or not.
* * *

CHAPTER ONE.

Alchemy’s Encyclopedia:
Dark Knight (n)-one of four branches of government that exists in the world of Merlin; the Gray Branch; the Blue Branch; the Red Branch; the Orange Branch. Three branches consist of humans; the fourth branch, the Orange Branch, consists of magical creatures and the like. The Dark Knight is a human turned mutant with the abilities of sleight-of-hand; dark foresight; and a flair for adventure. Most humans never go back. Most aren’t able to return to their normal life, whether they drop the knight title or not.
* * *

CHAPTER ONE.
The White Raven clan moved through the inner part of the kingdom of Hanover. The white robed men shuffled through dirt and mud and snow; the snow fell from the sky in sheets and everything sparkled and was white, whiter than anything, and the ground was white and they shuffled in the cold and the ground was cold, too. The night was cold. They huddled inside their fur coats and stared up at the dark sky, a strange, benevolent expression on their faces.
“Food,” Patric Conner grunted.
The woman, Wilma Rogers, smiled and offered him grapes and he popped three into his mouth. The White Raven clan were an interesting breed. They did not have homes to live in; they shunned money of all kinds; they were not brave in battle and ran away, screaming, afraid of trauma to the head-they were very particular about the head injuries, especially, and didn’t like not knowing what was going on. They lived in caves and huts, mostly, sometimes on the beach. They were mostly cold-blooded creatures, and Merlin didn’t take kindly on humans who were cold-blooded. The night glared over them. Everything was stark and white and naked to the bone. The whiteness was seen all around them and the cold snaked through them and everything was discolored and strange. The universe was a strange place and they often talked about getting on a spaceship and returning to Earth, but they did not know how and scientists were not brilliant in that regards; they did not know how to build a spaceship.
The sky was an endless blackness.
Endless and ash gray.
Everything was ash gray.
They felt very sorry for themselves. They wanted to live in a home and could not. They wanted to breed and were afraid of contracting diseases. They were afraid; wary; helpless; their conversation was hushed and muted.
One day, they came upon a small hut.
The hut was made from mud.
The mud was caked into hardpacked soil and it could house the entire clan, of which there were ten people. The ten clan members could all fit inside the hut and they built a fire in the firepit and warmed their hands. It was warm. The clan found a corn field behind the hut and made corn mush and the wind cried and moaned and the house was built from mud; and the cold was inside of it. The wind was sad and lonely and the clan ate their corn mush and talked amongst themselves. The leader was Don Whittley. He was thirty-nine and used to be a contractor in Na until he was tried as a witch and sent away. He was very deep; his words were deep and still and he couldn’t find himself thinking about anything other than rest. He used to stay up all night long, back when he was a young troll and lived with his parents. Now, his parents lived in the kingdom of Storm, and he visited them very rarely. He had been stuck in the attic for awhile, but he was too bored to leave it himself. Apparently, Andrea was amused by the whole thing. He was, too, kinda. Not really, he guessed she lived in the Tower along with the other Elders. Some of them went stag, and had their own place. Some of them were virtually homeless, and went from one country to another. He looked out of the Watch Tower. One small yellow light blinked on the roof and everything blinked and flickered and moved; it was stiller than the quietest night, and the wind cried and was sad and lonely. The troll hummed a tune under his breath. He liked to make up songs while he was waiting in the attic. He liked to make up songs; they were good enough for his own ears.
The silence of the night was all around.
Even in the silence, the night was all around.
Everything was still. Shadows were everywhere. Shadows fell over everything and the night was still. It was cold. He pulled his jacket tighter around himself; and he went into the kitchen and made himself a hamburger. The refrigerator was stuffed with food. Magic refilled it. There were only two refrigerators in all of Merlin that could do that; the one at the Tower of Light (aka the Tower of High Sorcery), and the one at the Watch Tower. It was midnight. After midnight. He heard whispers in the dark; whispers from the ghosts who dwelled in the Tower, the ghosts that cried and spoke about nothing. The language of the dead. He was not fluent in the language of the dead, but it was much like the Harhishians. It started to snow. The troll went out of the front door and into the yard. The yard was so bright it was spotless and the night was calm and cold and everything was calm; colder than cold. The coldness was everywhere.

*

Jenny Biggins was nine-years-old. She had red hair and blue eyes. She was three foot one and very skinny for her age and she loved to read books, especially the big, thick ones she could get lost in. She had knobby knees. She hated gym class and liked her teacher, Mr. Babbage. He had wavy brown hair and brown eyes and a wife named Laura. Laura had white hair. Jenny hated gym class. She always sucked at gym class and was always picked last for volleyball. Her best friend, Clark Jesken, was always picked first. He was good at games and had a basketball court in his backyard. He said it was a present from his father for his ninth birthday. His father was always excited about the sports Clark played. He was going to be a basketball player when he grew up. It was his dream. Clark knocked on the door of her house. He had his backpack slung over his arm, and a sandwich in the other, and was eating the sandwich. “Come on,” he told her. “Let’s go.”
She laughed. “What are you eating the sandwich for?” she asked him. “You know it's breakfast!”
Clark shrugged. “I’m hungry,” he said, frowning at her. “Besides, Mom gave me a dollar. I can buy a hot lunch today.” He grinned. He had been wanting to get his mother to buy him a hot lunch for awhile now. She finally caved in. It was one small victory, he said.
“You’re going to have to bring a sandwich tomorrow,” she informed him.
He made a face. “I know. I hope it’s tuna fish.” He shook his head and they walked down the sidewalk to the street. It was a warm day outside. The sun was in the sky. It was very hot. They walked down the street and to the elementary school at the end of the street. Clark and Jenny pushed open the big double doors and went inside together. Their class room was on the first floor. Jenny put her lunch in the cubby hole and sat down in her chair and folded her hands in her lap. Mr. Babbage had not come in yet. Yettle Ewelender, the new kid, showed everyone his pet frog. He brought it for Show-and-Tell. Clark said Show-and-Tell was for babies and said Mr. Babbage was having a marital crisis at home. Whatever that meant. But Jenny agreed with him, anyway. He was a little weird. He always wore brown pants and a white shirt and his hair slicked back until it shone. He wore glasses. Jenny thought he was kind of cute except for the glasses. She thought Clark was cute but not in a boyfriend way. Her other friend, Martha Rhodes, had a boyfriend. His name was Cliff Trend. He was in the fourth grade. Jenny met Cliff during lunch once. He was a very bubbly sort of person.
“What are you doing today?” Jenny asked Tyrone Wells. He was a blonde-haired boy and had glasses and dark eyes. Jenny heard he was part Elven, that his parents were part of the Council of Elders that worked at the Tower of High Sorcery in Bromwell.
“I don’t really know,” Tyrone replied, shaking his head. “I was going to go to the river and hunt for tadpoles. I like to watch them grow into frogs.”
“You can’t cage tadpoles!” she protested.
Tyrone scowled. “They won’t be caged,” he replied. “They’ll find a nice home.”
Jenny shrugged. “Whatever,” she replied. She sat down.
The classroom door opened and Mr. Babbage entered and sat down at his desk. His desk was very neat. A notebook was placed on it; along with a coffee cup; a calculator; and two planners, a school planner and his own planner. Mr. Babbage was fond of planners. Jenny didn’t use them. Her parents were poor, and besides, she didn’t have time to use a planner.
“Today,” he said. “Today we’re going to learn about the history of Orkshire.”
Jenny made a face. She didn’t want to learn about the city she lived in. It was stupid. “I want to learn about Earth,” she informed him.
Mr. Babbage looked surprised. “Who told you about such things?” he demanded, making a face at her. Mr. Babbage started making a bunch of goofy faces and she glared back at him.
“You’re such a weirdo,” she snorted.
“You’re a weirdo!” he replied. “You’re not to learn about Earth until the Council wishes you to.” With that, he started telling a story about how an Elf came into Orkshire one day and stole a bag of apples. She dropped her pencil and bent over to pick it up to tie her shoes. She glanced around. No one had noticed she dropped it. She put her head on her desk and noticed a piece of thread rested on the edge of the desk and she glared at the piece of thread, too. She reached out to pick it up and throw it on the floor. Suddenly, a burst of lightning tore through her fingers and streaked across the desk and the piece of cloth turned to metal. She yelped, “Ow!” and sucked on her finger.
Everyone laughed. “Jenny’s sucking her thumb!” Matthew Winters cried, pointing at her.
Mr. Babbage looked annoyed. “All of you, shut up!” he scowled. “Sucking your thumb is not a terrible problem. I do it on occasion.” He glared at everyone and told them to be quiet and concentrate on learning about Elves. Elves was a prime topic nowadays because of the Great Elf War in Bromwell, at the Tower, and other places around the world of Merlin. War was a terrible, terrible thing. War was never-ending.

According To us.

2010-03-14T23:42:00.000-07:00

According to us, the sun was destroyed
In a ball of fire.
A ring around Saturn.
The planets are all aflame.
I am not the one to blame.
The river is a torrent of voices.
It spins to us in many different choices.
You are the river.
The void of night.
You are the dying of the light.
I seek but do not find.
I fight but do not climb.
I hear but do not see.
It is just me.
I find rivers.
I find cold forests;
Beer is in the cold forest.
I seek to blame.
I am one without a name.
I am not forgiven.
My light is not a flame.
I care to stay alive.
My heart is not of floods and waters.
We are tired.
We bury bones.
We are tired of stillness,
The water is cold.
The wind is timeless.
We are the river.
We are tired.
I find rivers.
According to us, the moon was in motion-
The water was fluid in movement.
The memory is still inside of me.
Still. I can’t see.
Boxes are in cornflowers.
I write a riddle down on a piece of paper.
The riddle is myself.

MISTER GREY

2010-03-13T19:18:00.000-08:00

MISTER GREY

Xi Krode-captain
Ryan Grey-secretary aboard the lightship (unnamed)
Gloria Chance (blonde)
Chann C. Erik
Joe Dude
Anna San (Elf)

The strange man stood in the doorway of the lightship, looking out at the vastness of space. Space was everywhere, of course; space was in everything, and it looked massive and dark against the sky filled with stars. The strange man was human. The others on the ship were not human; they were Ulranian, Uversian, and Kerian, from worlds far beyond what the Earthman had ever known himself. He had been aboardship for several months, filing paperwork, doing other odds and ends. He was not the captain. The captain was an Xi Krode, an invisible being who had crossed dimensions to the other side and reported for duty, due to a glitch in the Universe Patch on Stellar 5-8. That was the crossing point from this world to the Other Side, the place where beings were without bodies. He glanced down at the starboard, and moved several knobs with his mind. The ship shuddered; an image of Earth appeared above the computer-the computer was white, and it ticked and tocked and shuddered, heaved, as if it were tectonic plates moving in the center of a planet. The man missed home. He missed home and everywhere else. Mister Grey’s first name was Ryan. He supposed it was an Earth name. Ryan reminded him of better days, playing in the yard with his sister, Gretchen, now long dead because she was Earthwoman; Ryan had been going from planet to planet, stocking up his ship, talking to the locals and asking about the weather, asking about things he absent-mindedly forgot about later. There were no days and nights in space. Only the blackness. The veil of space that was cold; bitterly lonely. He wanted to go into space if not to avoid humankind, the people that had twice decided to shun him for his malpractice; for the nights that were graceful and dark and they blamed him for the bad weather; the darkness; the viruses that spread like flies. Everything was spread; everything was absent from his mind, everything was voidless, everything was depthness, the everything was within and the night was veiled.
His name was Ryan.
He was an Earthman.
On a lightship.
He did not remember day from night. He did not remember everything. He did not remember the seasons of Earth; he did not remember those sleepless night, lying naked and alone, and cold; or how he felt when he looked at a woman. The captain walked towards him. Ryan could see him shimmering against the veiled night. “Sir,” the captain said (he called everyone “Sir,” even the women-it was a joke among the crewmembers, now.) “What is the time?” His voice was gruff. Like the wind. Ryan missed the wind. He could experience it in the virtual tank. It wasn’t the same thing. He missed the wind. The wind missed him. That was all.
“Fifteen hundred,” he replied, his smile quickening. “Why do you ask?”
“Ah,” he replied. “It is time for my morning run.” He smiled at Ryan and jogged away, his legs shimmering just a little bit more than usual. He turned to the viewscreen. The stars shone brightly.
It was time to work on the map.
They were supposed to locate Sector V-4; Ryan’s eyes were purple-they had changed color after he decided to Orbit; after he decided to stop being a human being and start being a Universalian, or whatever they called People of the Stars now. Being in space was different from being on Earth. It was much deeper. Much colder. Everything was something new. Everything was something else, the stars were deep; space was deep. Ryan was afraid of space when he first started out in the world. When he first rose from the depths of his Trenton, New Jersey home; the hurt was deep in his heart, of having to leave home and no one being the least bit worried or fearful of his safety; it was all like, “Goodbye, good luck, see you soon.” Ryan dimly remembered Earth. He did not miss it so much. He did not mind the aloneness. Every day was the same. Every day was exactly like the other. The days were not days. The nights were not nights. The cold was very cold. Everything around him was cold. His mind grasped the dimness of space. The everything that was around him, solid and real and the everything inside of him.
The captain returned.
Ryan was working on his log. “Yes?” he queried, looking up from it.
“What,” he heaved.
“Yes?” The repeat.
“Jogging. Hungry. Food.” He puffed his chest with pride. His pride was in the way he walked; the way he spoke; the captain was the captain and nothing else was what it appeared, moving and unmovement, the movement of himself. The shift in the dark. What was the shift in the dark? The strangeness of it. His mind grasped at straws. His mind saw things…the how; where he lived; the dimness of his mind was sacred; dwindling; he was fearful in his reverie. The strangeness of the nothing. He had been on the lightship for several months, and it felt like years. Light years were different in space. Actually, they were the same in space or somewhere else. He couldn’t feel it. His vision was different from Ryan’s. In all his years as captain, he had never met a being quite like that of Ryan.
Something dinged far above him, in the walls-it was like a doorbell. Ryan remembered doorbells. They were supposed to be for houses.
“We’re docking,” he told Ryan.
Ryan was surprised. “So soon?” he said. “Where are we docking?”
“I thought Anna told you. We’re on Flin 7.”
“That’s a dumb name,” he remarked, shaking his head. “Whoever came up with that…”
The captain smiled. His head shimmered. “The computers came up with the name,” he replied. “Did I ever tell you the story about how the computers came up with all the names of the worlds that were discovered?”
Ryan rolled his eyes. “Yes,” he snapped. He thought about it for a minute. “Oh, wait. No.” He shook his head. “What computer came up with it? When?”

The Cancer is the Moonlight.

2010-03-06T12:25:00.000-08:00

Moonlight

I walked in moonlight,
Holding the check tightly in the palm of my
Hand.
Holding the check in front of me like a shield.

His best friend has cancer.
The doctor says it is a disease.
The words aren’t the ones people want
To hear.

He was not depressed,
He told himself.
He was not depressed.

He played checkers
In
His den,
Then moved to the attic.

Light spilled in through the window onto the
Floor.
The floor was polished.
Glittered until it shone.

He was not depressed about anything.
He was not depressed about the way the
Light shone, stiller than the moon at night,
Stiller than the cold and the dark and
The attics waking in walls.

The cold is in his bones.
The cold drifts through him.
He is shadowed at the heart of it all,
Shadowed at the heart that drifts and
Fades and the feathers come falling

Down, down-
Down into the nothingness that
Is everything.
Into the nothingness that is new.
Newer than what we believe is to be seen.

In the dusk of anything,
We strive for Alaskan wilderness-
We strive for the wind that moans,
And hearts beat at glass doors.
We open them and shut them,
Again and again,
Whispering words your mother can’t
Understand.
We speak languages.

Falls In Snow.

2010-03-04T21:05:00.001-08:00

The trust falls in the snow.
The trust is not in anything.
The trust is in him-he sees, but does not
See. Do not try to climb your way out of
Trust. Do not block yourself from the stairs.

The stars are bright tonight.
Above us, the stars shine, sparkle,
Twinkle-
Night becomes nothing. Night is not
Anything.

Fierce realization. Fierce persistence.
Nothing to do. Nothing that can be done.
Homeward bound, I am caught in
The rhythm of the different shades-
The shades of sunglasses.
The words are spread on tarp paper.
I am glass wrapped in glass.
I am shaken and stirred.

Something happened that was outside of
Us.
Broken and marred, the mirrors are
Thrown over us.
Shake the pillow, the feathers fall
To the ground.

You talk about ghosts.
You talk about ghosts and smoky mirrors,
Glasses dropped from the sky.
The trust is broken in two.
The windows fall out of buildings,
And onto the sand-
We aren’t home yet.

My Uncle Stan.

2010-03-02T07:52:00.001-08:00

My Uncle Stan

My Uncle Stan-
Paints the room upstairs blue.
His hands are torn like wildflowers;
He calmly paints and it is storming outside.
My Uncle Stan-
Has a blue truck. It sits in the driveway,
Humming quietly.

The neighbors wonder what my uncle is
Doing.
I tell them proudly,
Gesturing with my hands-
Using wide arcs, using dance methods
I was taught at dance class.

My Uncle Stan-
He was a new man after he got
Married.
He is not depressed.
He enjoys smoking cigarettes and
Long walks on the beach,
And baking cookies for his grandchildren.
He is eating lunch on the porch,
Thinking about the woman he met
At the grocery store.

He thinks she is poetry.
She would not come back.
He wishes his wife would not come back.
She was stubborn as a mule and
Ugly; a large mole on her chin.
Sometimes, he told himself she had a double
Chin to make himself feel better after
They fought, after they made love and fought
Again, trying to fix their broken…thingy.
The thingy wasn’t broken.
They were broken.

The Rocking Chair Was Sold.

2010-03-02T07:37:00.001-08:00

It was sold.

The rocking chair was sold to a poor Vietnam veteran.
He clashed. His eyes were brown. He was born of something
Better than anything. His mind was shallow. He was shallow.
The wind is cold.

I was not happy about the color of the clouds-
The ash color of the sky.
We fought tighter temptation,
The land mines were broken on broken soil.

My mother’s old cow lifted his ears and mooed
And chewed the grass around his feet.
He was not an it. He was my mother’s favorite,
He liked him better than anyone else,
Better, even, than the doorframe.

The books taught me better than the professors
At Brooklyn College or Mott,
Where famous professors haunt piles of old
Rocks.

Rock sold. Rocking chair.
You took your rest for too long, and now your ears are dumb-
They wove in and out of highways,
Anything within reach.
Oh rocking chair, I fear you-
You are farther away than anyone.

My mother climbs over walls to reach new heights.
I was bored, I carved my name in old cellos.
I was burdened by the flowers in the vase.
I was burdened by my flyaway hair.
I didn’t understand the English language.
I didn’t understand the words that crawled outside of
Tiger’s mouth.