Brother Moon

Do you know, Brother Moon, what I once was, even before your
rays touched the Earth and raised the tides, even before young lovers
worshipped your warm corona, even before you were the death of every day? Do
you know my likeness outside of that delineated by your radiant pallor? Do you
know my breath beyond those wisps of smoke shown so ghostly by your
scintillating waves? I was the vast beyond before your light, I was the wonder
of scholars before you pinned down the skies, I was the harbinger before
gypsies read alms under your mantle. And, do you know, Brother Moon, what I
shall be again, when your hoary rivers of luminescence are dried and bled away
into the deep, when your crown be torn from your flaxen hair and blotted, when
your fame be only a whisper caught between the drivel-rants of the insane?

Colour

Colour was the food she sought. In all her journeys, in all her delicate steps and in all her brash boundings, she only wanted that one course, so delectable, so intriguing was it. The reds of remorse mingled with the reds of passion and those of anger, a sweet cadence that made her feel as if the blood within her sang its melody. The greens of illness dripped uneasily onto the green of naivety, spoiling it as surely as the green of money spoils the green of Mother Earth. Blue were her tears as in blue twilight she witnessed the soft croon of a blues bard, cranking from her lungs those feelings seasoned bittersweet. Black were her thoughts as, stepping through the deep unknown of her own mind, she never thought she’d find a soul outside the black again. White were her most tenuous fleeting thoughts, innocence upon the white snow and sky, fleeing outward like a band of fledglings or the words typed upon the white of this page. But still her journey continued. She scoffed at the unwholesome majesty of violet, she reeled at the orange of perverseness and warning. And still onward she flew. She mixed her colours, she found grey. She found many years of doldrums, shifting through warm greys, and cold ones, ones with some life and ones which could only ever stay dead. And she despaired for there was nothing to sate her and she grew hungry. Wasting away, she saw brown grow around her, saw its maw wide and ready to swallow her and make her the earth. This was a carnivorous colour, one which she could not pursue but which pursued her. And the ground pulled her further in and smothered her breath. All she knew in those last moments before death was brown. Not the bright light of love or accomplishment. She had grown bored of that long ago. Not the utter black shadow of fear… that was also behind her. But this brown. This colour of worms and ordure and soot. This was her defeat. She closed her eyes and died. And somewhere inside her, a consciousness was let loose from this world of things with names, of light with hues, of increments and of textures. It became all things and no things as it became incorporeal. And in this transition perhaps her new colour, the one which, all along, was inside her, was born.

RED - Thoughts Spilling

As I sat there, so melancholy at my writing desk, my hand all of its own grasped a single red crayon and began to scrawl across the paper. I could feel every subtle rippling as it ran its smooth point over the blood-staining white. Flecks of dust below the surface of the paper became deeper red snow set upon lines of scarlet water. A small curving ribbon of crayon ran astray and fell into a groove in the table, began to colour it too that hated red. Began to fill every wooden wrinkle set across what once must have been a mighty oak standing tall in green. Now red. All red. And the crayon colour spilled so sensuously off my table, pooling in the fibers of my white carpet. Now red. All red. And it kept spreading, this pool deepening around my ankles. All the while my hand continued its lattice work upon that page, and an image first abstruse began to grow from nothing. The red was filling my world. It grew up around my waist and my legs once cream now red all red and it wasn’t a cold red, it was a lust red, it was a rage red, and it was eating my flesh and it was climbing up my chest. And the red of that crayon colour was digging into the small red of my heart and it became one red and then grasped my neck and still my hand was scrawling its suicide serenade and the image on the page was becoming a reality. And as it poured from my eyes the red became my tears and as it filled my mind the red became all my thoughts. And I dissolved in the red, and I who once was human now was red. All red. And my hand was somehow still moving through the deep to finish its image. All that existed now were the spreading lines, my curiosity, and red. A stabbing feeling exploded in my consciousness as, although my eyes were long since gone, the lines joined and sang their image loud. In that red consumption in that red cacophony in that red melodrama anger ire fleeing despair in that red that sour red that bitter red I found what my hand and that red were so ready to bring to life… it was you. Poured from my soul it was your likeness. But I have nothing more to give since I am red and you are red but we are not.

The Albatross - A Poem

The albatross is screaming
As it writhes across the patterned
Guilt of my shoulders
Bear nothing but its soft suffering
Said the keeper of the cards
As he became the shadow
Of a sour intention
And as I became enfolded
In the fabric
Of morning.

Lantern Light

My hand waved good bye to them all as I set forth at sun’s first light. My heart was not waving, it was wavering, it was awash with the dark which I thought must surely fade with the night, but did not. My footfalls were heavy, so heavy. They were iron and blood and guilt. With every discernible knot of my being I lifted my legs onward, into the bright, away from their figures, still waving in their frozen recollection. I mounted a first hill and I was bleeding profusely, exsanguinated by the light and my distance and my grief. Was it me who was moving my body into the unknown? Was it me who was launching my flesh into the smoldering new day? …Thoughts which when answered would only increase my suffering. I felt an empty vessel now, mounting hill and delving vale. I felt that my contents were littering my path, still held captive by where I’ve been and who I knew. And what did the ‘where-I’m-going’ contain but emptiness? My eyes became frosted and glass, my brow precipitous. I trudged onward with a fool’s strength, the strength one borrows from the dead. The smallness of self overtook me; I was slipping forward now, moving disembodied yet swiftly into the fading light, but one. A torch glowed on the horizon and with strength unknown to neither flesh nor spirit I became the path back to that terrestrial star. I joined myself into its luminous tendrils and for one second had a faint memory that I was the very lantern light shone at my back when that morning I set forth. When, still and quiet, the waving them-figures held the sconce aloft.

Play Time - A Horror Story

A chime overhead was followed by an annoyed voice: “Attention, customers, the store is closing in five minutes. The store is closing in five minutes.” Tyler heard the half-warning, half-reprimand, but he weighed it against the large pile of jeans he had yet to try on, and decided to ignore it. He had never found such promising and aesthetically pleasing bargains, and it would be a shame to leave them here. Plus, they have to wait for everyone to leave, right?

While he was undoing the clasp on his fourth pair of jeans (which fit him perfectly! Success!), the lights dimmed and there was a metallic grating sound from somewhere in the distance. Maybe his comforting thought was wrong. Maybe the bitch running the counter really was that stiff, just didn’t care. He ran from the dressing rooms, clumsily trying to latch his belt at the same time, and was met only with the security lighting, pouring down in isolated spires over the faceless mannequins littering the store, the gargoyles of the fashion age.

The registers were all off. The metal sound must have been the iron gates now in place across the store entrance and front windows. The only sound now was the steady hum of the air handlers… actually, the humming had just cut out. Tyler could only imagine that the cheapskates running the store had decided to cut the power at night to conserve power. Which sucked for him, because now he was amidst dead silence in a sea of cotton and polyester.

Tyler’s first instinct was to yell for someone to open the store, a guard or something had to be patrolling the mall. He walked up to the gates, and to his dismay, found that there was nothing but complete blackness on the other side of the chain links. “Hey! Hey, is anyone out there?” he yelled, at first a bit cautiously, then with growing vigor. It wasn’t working. In fact, it seemed like the more he yelled, the less… the less he could stand to yell again. What was going on? He tried to put his arm through a hole in the gate, and his hand fell upon something warm and solid. The shape wasn’t describable. It felt like a tree that was full of hot water. But it was so black beyond the gate that he couldn’t tell.

The shape writhed and slid past his hand. It was alive? Or at least it was moving? What the hell was this? He pulled back his arm as fast as he could. He couldn’t see out there, but something inside him told him that whatever was out there… could see him.

There was a crash in the back of the store. Tyler again recoiled, this time back into the fence, then jumped again, remembering what his hand had just lit upon out there. His mind was racing with thoughts? A joke? Some sick joke? Was that what this was? Shouldn’t my eyes be adjusted by now? Why is my heart racing so fast? Why can’t I catch my breath…

The thought hit him like a brick. The air handlers. Somehow his breathable air was being cut out. He was nervously sucking in all of the last of his breathable air. But how? This place is huge.. unless someone was purposely trying to pump out the air… or unless something very big was gulping it in…. no, that’s stupid. That’s stupid.

He was pacing in the front of the store, too scared to try the gate again, too scared to venture to the back door of the store. He reached for his cell… Shit, he realized. The pants he had worn in to the store are still in the dressing rooms. No way… He had to do it. If he wanted to get out… He was starting to get dizzy. All of the mannequins were watching him, like some sinister hand had come from the darkness and pushed their eye-less faces down to observe his fear.

The crashing in the back of the store was louder now. He saw some rustling among the shirts displayed along the side walls. The rustling was coming to the front of the store. Something was crawling under the clothes. Something was coming toward him. He wished he wasn’t breathing so damn loud, he wished his legs didn’t feel like lead. He needed to think clearly. He needed to think at all. Move, he thought. Move…. “Move!” He yelled to himself, and he ran to the opposite wall of the store.

He began making his way along the far wall back to the dressing rooms. He was going to reach that phone and call whoever he could to make this better. Who would he call? Who did he know? What the hell? He thought. His mind was muddy water. Swirling between his ears. He wasn’t seeing properly now. The air was becoming intoxicatingly weak. He stumbled into one of the accessory racks and a bunch of studded belts fell to the floor, their clattering filling his head like it was the only sound in the world. He had to keep going. He had to keep running.

He emerged from the retail area and fell onto the floor of the changing room hallway. The cold tiles greeted his skin like some farce of a bed, tempting him to rest there forever as his breath continued to weaken. He was crawling now, he was opening the door to his dressing room. He was rooting through the pockets of any clothes he could find. He was pulling a cell phone from the folds. He was staring at its illuminated screen. He was staring at a text message that had just arrived. The words were all in double… no, his vision was all in double… fading. His mind was interpreting it far too slow. As he fell unconscious and the crashing met him and ripped through him, the phone slid across the tile and its screen was reflected on the marble wall… it read, “Play time is over.” The store become one avalanche of clothes, and flooring, and counters, and mannequins. All coming to a stop in a stack on some plane strewn with the litter of so many more stores, of pools, of cars, of homes. An enormous arm lifted up a handful of figurines from one of the stacks, up until it was even with a gleaming pair of young eyes and a crooked smile half-filled with teeth. “Play time is over,” it crooned. And it let go off all of the plastic bodies, of all of the lifeless forms, like a crane machine at the arcade, and they fell surely back into the earth, some breaking as they hit, one twisted figure, a boy in new clothes with a look of horror painted across his visage, atop them all.

Toward

And there I was, staring intently at the word on the page. Of course, there were many other words, it was a periodical. There were many other pages. But this was THE word. This was THE page. For some reason, I knew it. I could taste this word. I could swim in its sans serif depths, catapult from the ledge of its t into the pool of its o. Why was I looking so harshly into its character?  I was interrogating the word. 'Toward,' I read aloud. And now it was real. Now its ink had been translated through the electrical highway of my central nervous system into a combination of air and muscle, reverberating from my throat like some twanging banjo in a forest clearing, tweaked by fingers both earth-grubby and delicate. Now it not only existed by virtue of some sweeping printer fingers, it existed in my body and around my head. It had been multiplied into the chords of a different perception. I was walking into it like it was a pathway into truth. I was moving toward toward. To ward? To fend off? This was a breakage, this wasn't its rightful mien. Tow ard? To move away from the arbor? I am shuffling the letters one by one like I am playing Rummikub. I am moving its cells like a biotechnologist, trying to rearrange a cat into a fish. To Draw... an infinitive. Toward contains many a line, emanating from it like spokes, but no matter how many, I continue to move toward toward. When I reach the sudden curl of its final d, I will be facing up into the heavens, I will be marching up its backbone like the shivers I get when I read to the dead. For, perhaps, when toward ends and it becomes destination, that will be where I am. Who I am. But I am stuck. I am entrenched in w, and I try to read it again and all I can say is tow. Two. To. Wot? I wager that this is it. I have dwelt on toward for far too long. I am now past toward. If I turn back I will once again move toward toward. But this is a siren's song mistake. I will be eaten by its intensity if I go back to that word. I move on. I fall off d. There is no heaven here. There is nothing but the white space of the page. And the sudden realization that the author of this periodical is also moving toward toward. I look up at the spire ahead. It is another t, falling surely into another o. I am moving away from toward by moving toward toward. And now I know it won't end. The white space will yield to this repetition. I am stuck once again staring intently at this word. At word. Toward. It is the always of this place. It is a movement that will never stop. It is time's arrow. It is entropy. It is dissolution. But it is toward. And it is a lilting reminder of continuance.