Tuesday 28 February 2017

Ghosts


I know nothing at all       only that in the end        everything is a lie      that suns do not live forever     and neither will I          


Monday 27 February 2017

Getting away with it


just to see        just to fail       

            a tiger once caught                  by the tip of its tail     

                                     farewell farewell

                        my fairy tale

            farewell farewell

Out there


the light 
a threat
and yet here I am
attempting to kill
what I have resurrected
instead

Saturday 25 February 2017

Into the sun


When I fell asleep I dreamt I was walking through the field of flowers I’d so spectacularly failed to paint.  I looked up at the sky, and there was the red dragon.  As he soared above me I wished I could grab hold of his wings and fly away forever.


Friday 24 February 2017

Thursday 23 February 2017

Temporary


We are the paint peel chipping
dangling over the prickly
bushes
waiting with an eye
toward falling
I wonder who I will be
when I am cut and
bleeding 
I wonder who I will be
when I have
given up

It is like the blanking of
a color screen
the bleaching of dark
green carpeting
hold my hand for just
a little while
We are moving
and fading
on and on

Wednesday 22 February 2017

Trapped


when I am the snow without the season
made to believe in the riddle
but not the reason
what should I have asked you to bring? 
one shelter for seeking
one memory good enough for keeping
when I am
waiting
forgotten
trusted
to accept what cannot be
because after all of this
what was your plan
what is to become of me?

Tuesday 21 February 2017

The year after



oh how I loved you
more than the tides could ever
love the moon
but now silence mocks the faithful
as I ripple with the green grass
go blind from the apathetic sun

Sunday 19 February 2017

Forgotten


I woke up as a fairy in the empty restaurant next to the woods.  I suppose I always knew when I wanted to live in the dollhouse in the attic that my hopes and dreams beat inside of a tiny heart.  But not until I opened my eyes and found myself crouching in the furthest corner of the kitchen pantry did I know for certain.

I had been gone for a year—where, I couldn’t say.  Some industrious housekeeper within had thrown huge dust covers over much of my memory, but I wasn’t sure I minded.  Something about the twilight endlessly falling over the woods told me that the last good day had been long ago.

Friday 17 February 2017

So Far Away


You were a picture in a book                    nestled between a cranny and a nook             where I could close my eyes and see       but the library locked its doors        and I am prostrate on the floor                       you do not belong to me               you do not belong to me

Thursday 16 February 2017

Damocles' Sword


We ate dinner that night in almost total silence—or, should I say, I pretended to eat my dinner while Bryan just sat there, lost in space and nursing a large tumbler filled with whiskey.  His excessive intake of alcohol was starting to worry me, although I would have died before I told him this.  He might have thought I still cared about him then.


Tuesday 14 February 2017

Goodbye blue skies


We are one day past forever
so let me tell you a
story
full of hope and
recrimination

and yet somehow                   
somehow

            hello hello                    fire in the hole

I wonder
but I cannot get past the bluster
the suggestion dripping down my throat

We tried but
            this is not what I
kiss me good night
            as forgiveness winds around my
could we just
            a lie must never be hunted
when the game is already dead to me

I could tell you a story
full of tomorrows and redemption
but who would we be
kidding
acceptance is the poison

In this lexicon of sorrow
I am too tired to speak for myself
if you saw miracles spring from darkness
I saw only memory
swathed in charcoal dusty
dream


Monday 13 February 2017

Betrayed



In the endless twilight that enveloped the restaurant, no customers ever came.  Instead, my friend Marietta, the hostess, usually sat at one of the perfectly-made tables by herself, doing paperwork of a kind we never discussed.  Only the fading light that rippled through those whispering trees dared enter the large T-shaped room.  Why were there no customers?  On my previous visits I’d just seen Marietta in that hushed hour of solitude.  Like so many other questions I must have forgotten to ask her this one, too.

Sunday 12 February 2017

Seen


“You want to do this,” the witch whispered into her ear.  “His love is only for the worthy.”  But she did not want his love.  She wanted only for the old woman in the crinkly clothes  who smelled of lavender powder to let her go.  Let me go.

I have a secret words
will never find,
images I tucked
away.

I once heard a voice.
It beckoned me,
singing,
tell me your secrets,
your hopes and fears
and jealousies.
I whispered back in the
safest voice I could
reveal,
my dreams mean nothing
to you.

Saturday 11 February 2017

Hope is a Weapon



Here I am
fool again

There is always an
answer
a justification
the I didn’t mean to do it
the it’s not my fault
your blame just one
interpretation
not mine to take on
so sorry to hear it
but you were wrong

How we hope
craft fact into
fiction
this little triumph
of rationalization
but in the end it
plays in our ears
you do not belong
try again, my love
stop looking for wisdom
once again you are
nature’s victim
take a deep breath
carry on
nothing more to see here

you were wrong

Alone again


Her room looked as if Kitty had merely stepped out for a moment, as opposed to forever.  The sweater she’d been knitting sat in a basket next to the couch; some of her drawings were scattered on the table.  A book she’d been reading laid face down on the couch cushion. 

The King glanced at the book—a translation of the Interior’s history—before he turned his attention to the drawings.  Although quite impressed by her skill, he realized with some sadness that Kitty drew what she saw, not what she felt.  Even the few drawings of himself that he found told him nothing.  He would never know the secrets of her well-fortified heart.


Friday 10 February 2017

Blasphemy




All of the empty hallways.  Mile after mile of empty hallway.  The boy continues working on his own.  He doesn’t care if I know.  He doesn’t care if anyone knows.  He is a genius. 

We are all quietly sitting in an auditorium.  We are waiting for the presentation—for the balding man to come and turn on the projector and show us transparencies.  He will write on them in marker, circle the important bits, underline words, draw arrows.  We will all sit quietly but make no notes, because notes are not allowed.  We will just hear it again and again until his lecture is all we know.  And it is always the same lecture.  The same lecture, with the same arrows and underlined words.  I have heard it so many times the words mean nothing to me.  They just roll past me like tumbleweed on the road.  I will stare straight ahead and hear nothing as the boy turns written words into straws that represent intersecting hallways, each one leading somewhere I am not allowed to go.  



Thursday 9 February 2017

Wednesday 8 February 2017

Undercover


“Why do they keep coming after you?” Kitty whispered, as she wrapped the strange, foreign coat more tightly around her.  If she'd had to stumble into another world, she wished it could have at least been a warmer one.

“Because,” the young man murmured, his eyes searching the dark forest around them, “I am the king of my people, and if they capture me, they can use me for negotiation purposes—or, should a certain element have their way, they can kill me to effect a new reign.”

“You’re a king?” Kitty hissed.  “You’re joking!”

“That is nothing I would joke about,” he answered, in such a way that Kitty got the impression he wasn’t exactly happy about being a king—if he even were one, that is.  While she didn’t expect kings in any world to run around wearing crowns or sable robes, she did expect something…well, less university student-ish.  Yet all those men in the camp had greeted him as if he were a rock star, and the two soldiers who found them in the ditch looked massively relieved to discover him safe. 

Could it be possible?  

Tuesday 7 February 2017

Through the Mirror


Into words      into stars          into another boring discussion on who we are            who we were     who we long to be            I am still in that treehouse      still hiding in the leaves                      if memory is my master then I am its beaten dog                  wouldn’t I be clever it I could put it all together                   wouldn’t I be the one calling the shots                mock me with riddles ridicule me with rhymes                      you know I have no power                 that I am afraid to be alive

Monday 6 February 2017

Waiting


February, 2005

I am trapped.  I can’t do this but I have to do this.  The Roman soldier is at the door: I must drink the hemlock, or be executed.  

Thanks for the email.

I’m surprised that you would think anything is wrong.

Nothing is wrong, I’ve just been taking time for myself to work on things.  But I appreciate your concern.  Everything is fine.   I hope you had a nice birthday.  Unfortunately I'm not having visitors right now, but thanks for the offer.

I hope your job’s going well.

Love, me



Friday 3 February 2017

Cold


I have been thinking of you

Reminded it seems by
the presence of
something sadder than
you or me

How very long I held on

When now I knock against the
hollow inside
the abyss you left in each
part of my whole
So much and so completely ignored
ripping the hinges off of the doors
catapulting me into a world where
daydreams remember

How I would like nothing more than
to feel the cadence of your
pulsating love again
Nothing more than to know it is me who
you tried with your heartbreak
to protect

Instead I am left waiting on the hill
shaking with knowledge of
lost connections
I am left on the pier with memories of the dead
their sorrow pointed toward
the horizon



Thursday 2 February 2017

The Light in the Dark



Someone tore the straps off of my wrists and ankles, and lifted me off the cot as an oppressive wall of heat closed in around us.  The smoke was so thick I thought for certain I would suffocate.  And then I was lying on the grass and coughing in the cool night air.  Next to me I heard violent hacking that wasn’t my own; I looked over and there was Rick, on his hands and knees.  When he saw me watching him he crawled over and held a sooty hand against my face.  Behind him I could see the barn consumed by flames.  “You’re all right,” he assured me, in between bone-rattling coughs.  “You’re safe now.  Everything is going to be okay.


*From The Abduction Myth, available to purchase here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01KI6XNJU

Postscript


I wonder who is listening

I am not
You close and you close and you
close

Because there is nowhere to go from here

Wednesday 1 February 2017

Opaque


Back at my apartment I went through my pictures of Bryan again.  Studying the captured image of his much younger self on a city street, with his come-hither eyes directed on some poor unsuspecting waif, I wondered if a chance still existed for us.  Could I buck the common wisdom and go home again?  Might he still love me, if not as much as he had before, at least enough to save me from my downward spiral?  Because things were most definitely not getting better—they were getting worse.  Time and distance had provided me with nothing more than a lot of time and distance.  And Tim was not an option.  He needed someone who his family would welcome with open arms; it would be cruel of me to go back to him.  But could I go back to Bryan?


*From my upcoming novel The Last Confession of the Sun God, available soon

Shadows, Pt. 2


Tired but awake again

because wakefulness is waiting for
my answer
am I ready to embrace 
the disbelief
to refuse the hand that
once could pull me to
my feet

Floating into ache once more

with no morning defense
when the sun broke me like
a cudgel to
the head
stole from me any
last moments for
dreaming

Memory waits still and near for me

I am endlessly choosing I am
at last losing what allowed me to
creep through the hole in the
floor

So tired of attempting

            to end this need for sleeping