fodder

Is there a point then if it isn’t the best? liked? understood?

If it hasn’t been cast in emeralds and strung around an impossibly thin, socialite of a woman?

Is the value then determined by the source who receives it? And if none? if one? if two? Is it the what that counts or the why?

Does anyone know the difference? Does anyone even care?

Most things of note get shot out into the world jet-like, propelled into the abyss, the eerily beautiful abyss, only to be caught on the wing of a plane, dragged back down to earth and left to flounder like a dying fish, so completely out of place, there, on the runway.

It becomes just like everything else; fodder for the masses, in their mediocre, impressionistic, catatonic state.

lurk

I saw it and I didn’t imagine it, he said, convincingly, like he’d hand over his shotgun if you could prove him wrong. He went on to describe it. Lights, like the fluorescents in the bars, neon and glowing, giving everything that ambrosial outline, descending and hovering a few feet above his head. He was a dismisser of folklore, of urban legends but since that night he was convinced his dead mother was lurking in the evergreen trees outside his shack.

slice

We are the labyrinth from which there is no exit. Every exit a shut door, chained, containing us in a hallway leading only deeper into our own neurosis. Desperate to climb out of our skulls yet with no head lamps we are left to spin, dizzily, until we tip. We simply cannot get far enough away from ourselves. Even flight to another solar system incapable of severing the bridge, stubborn, impressively constructed, between brain and thought.

porch

He appeared there again, like before, only this time it was pre-determined. His weakness had won him over and now here he was at her doorstep. But you can be anything you want the universe whispered. She just stared at the veins popping in her hands and knew she was closer to the dream.

smudge

It hangs on you, heavy, like an old wool coat, tiresome in most seasons, but even more so in the summer. It isn’t something you can’t live with, but living without it is cumbersome and confining. You want to shed it like some thick, weary skin, long past its prime. Many times you have tried, scrubbed yourself raw to rid the memories, zombified your brain with mindless distraction, edged yourself further away, physically, geographically, hoping it would expedite the exorcism. Intuitively though, you know it will unravel and dissipate more unobviously, in slow motion, like the melting of snow or the turning of leaves. You hate being where you are, in the middle of the undoing, wishing only to be at the end, looking back with objectivity, with wounds healed, with armor unkinked. Even when it has rolled over on itself and come to rest out of sight, there is still the punishing task to forget, to erase all traces of it. Your end becomes the missing fragment; a part of you, hopeful, free and loving, gone, forever, used up in that moment for good, bad, indecent, broken. It can’t ever be returned, merely replaced with whatever happens to exist at the time.

on being an empath

It is like being the feet of others, the skin, the heart. You go where they go, not literally, not physically, but subconsciously, emotionally. When they encase themselves in facades and beguiling masquerades you need not obey like the casual, distant observer, neatly oblivious to that strangers paradise. You instead shuffle non-threateningly off to the side, your intimate knowledge stowed respectfully. The shoestring subtleties loud, clanging in your brain, like some random code deciphered unconsciously with absolutely zero effort.

carnival

Helium balloons. Clown whores in the dark. Peanut brittle snapping teeth. Snow unrelenting, falling, falling, falling. Think of nothing. Think of something brilliant. Be intelligent. Kids seducing kids. Adults seducing kids. A beagle in the window. Be happy. Just be happy. Stop being so sensitive. Be abrasive. Dampness in the day. Money.

closed doors

Tiptoeing around, as if they are ice, thin, in the spring, about to crack. Moving here, there, dodging the reason why they have come.

I could crush you, her eyes say, but he doesn’t notice, because he’s breathing, in, out, deeper, full of what he has anticipated, of what he knows will unfold.

They want to exist there, aloft and frozen temporarily in the uncomplicated, the pure, the bliss. Skin, thoughts, merging into a moment soon to be just like the rest, over. He steps in, ready to shed his ego and she steps in, ready to make it happen. Lovers circling like insects upon some wanted ground, busy with intention, escaping time to see it through. So many looks, so much rawness tempered only by distance and soon it will cross into no man’s land. The place where rules dissolve and reason slides with the rain into the sewage hole.

Only the two of them now, drenched in one another, as close as close allows, becoming the whole of the part, the step in between, the lost and forgotten void, now buried in the sounds of surrender.

A note echoes, from an old, barely tuned piano; a haunting serenade of this beautiful transgression.

There is a smile, only it is not on her face. The deepest of emotion just below, out of sight from eyes, from wavering sensibilities and cracker-jack moralities.

All that is here stays here, except for that one bit; it swirls with the stodgy air and trails out the window into the street, the world going on in oblivion.

back

They confused her, wildly. In solitude the happiness came again, crept back in a joyous reunion.

blurb

We step on us marginal folk. Socks soaked through our rubber boots as the seasons change. Bread crumbs on our shirts and water rising from the drains.

dust child

Smiles, joy in motion, on the faces of them, hopeful, sly, mesmerizingly beautiful. They crawl into your heart and burrow in, implanting themselves so you can never forget, never erase their beings, busy bustling through their short life spans.

Flashes of them, barefoot, dust swirling up around them like the dance of the Sea Monster, long buried beneath the sands of drought.

They are so light, effervescent and without the sagging weight of a rampant and indigestible bias, throwing them down like iron anchors tied humorously to wood-carved canoes.

Wings with no bodies to transport, see-through eyes with no concealment or pretense or fear.

They are sunflowers glowing in a garden of snails, giving us a way in, a way we long ago traded for complacency, choosing instead a place for our feet, steady, predictable and familiar.

They show us, remind us, how life is powerful by nothing more than just being.