Tag Archives: writing

Kindred Spirits

Moonlight settles like dew over the sterile room,
A window as its indiscriminate escort
In the shadow a guest- an intruder stands
The moonlight hasn’t noticed yet.

A dryadic [Let there be…] light
stirs from his right palm.
The soft glow is lifted to his face
A siren’s call over those rough features.

A scar here – stubble there,
folds so heavy the light can find no purchase
no escape from their darkness
It’s a wonder he can see anything.

He holds the device level with his eyes
Adjusts his feet and rearranges his face
Some reflection of [Narcissus] horror,
abject pain without panic or retreat.

His arm drops as the light dims,
The poor sailor wasn’t worth the fight,
Moored to a far worse reality as he is
He searches the room for the past.

Careful to avoid the moonlight
Now dancing alone in the center of the room
Less than a day had passed since the boy was removed
But the moon doesn’t need a partner.
The moon dances for its own amusement,
while the sun, the sun dances for the flora.

House

If you were looking for a side street to get there, you’d be disappointed. It’s not like that anymore. It’s a ‘house’, not a ‘home’. The future has grown up around it, piling on top of it mounds of inspiration, newness and memories until it was forgotten beneath the accumulated past.

I’ve heard it said once the bright eyed and bushy tailed soldiers who first met with the innovations of war and machinegun fire found themselves piled up at the end of their conclusion. Hours; days maybe, of un-ending fire until they were stacked so high that they were no longer, “Roger” or “Bud” or “Kevin” or “That guy who always snored.” You’d forget their names and they’d slowly become “brick” and “brick” and “brick” and “That one brick that dreamed with his nose and wouldn’t shut the fuck up about it.” The house is like that. Too much time, tragedy and transition between anyone else and the house to remember it was ever a place to live.

So, they built around it I guess. I can only imagine the story surrounding that. So much of the city has been torn down and built back up again. Monuments, apartment complexes, family homes, you name it; all of them have been caught in the crossfire of the free market and consumerism. How this place dodged those heat seeking missiles is beyond me. I can only imagine the husk of that place was so long cold and dead, they couldn’t quite hit it and moved on to the warm bodies nearby.

It’s a wonder I saw it myself! Any other day I wouldn’t have noticed it. If it had taken me even a second longer to make out what it was, I would have already moved on, back to the meeting at hand. But it just ‘clicked,’ after a few moments. Ted had said something, you know Ted? Well he had said something during our call that triggered this whole moment where my mind disengaged and went somewhere else. I think it was something like, “It’s not like you ever go anywhere interesting on the Ferris Wheel, it’s all elevation and the marvel of how tiny we are in conjunction with how well we’ve compensated,” and I got lost on that train of thought looking out the south window into the unkempt grounds below.

As I moved from train car to train car in my mind attempting to unpack what he had said while looking down at this puzzle of vegetation, it snapped in place. I could see it! The house! Like focusing your eyes for the first time in the morning. It went away for a second, but sure enough I was able to click it back into place again, much easier this time. It was there, struggling beneath the waves of overgrowth around it. Below the briars and other hardy plants that couldn’t give two shits about the sun. I had to focus on the meeting of course, but I couldn’t hardly look away either. Each time I did I had to take a moment to find it again.

End of the day, I’m down on the bottom floor looking for a way into the interior grounds. Did you know there isn’t any? The whole south wall is concrete for the first two stories. And before you ask, I checked, it’s the same for the other buildings. The whole area is inaccessible. No wonder it looks like a tree hell down there.

Now I can’t stop looking at it though. That house. Makes you think doesn’t it? It has got to be a whole new flavor of darkness in there.

Fervor

Something is bleeding into the world around me.
No, not even that, not precisely bleeding.
Cutting,
Through the world to get at me.

Shapes rifling through the fabric of reality,
Puncturing the invisible shroud
Viscous violence
Kicking at torn edges upon exit,

The universe reduced
To a stretched balloon
now broken
at the behest of some purposeful needle.

The skin reels back, a fitful tirade of embarrassment,
returning to form,
offended to have revealed
so candid a vulnerability.

Now released the shapes are no longer discernible,
Only defined by the nothingness found between
Conception and its birth.
How could I engage such a thing?

How would you engage it?
Unanswerable questions,
Purpose and articulation
The final answer for me.

Guernica

I’m fairly certain my body has a better idea of what’s going on than my mind does. Sipping my coffee now it tastes like the first time. Shockingly acidic and hot, but it flows with a warmth that pulls you through that adversity into a deep hug of alertness. In my mind this shouldn’t feel so alien, I just had coffee yesterday. The food is a jumbled bunch of flavors I can’t make enough sense of to decide if I like it or not, but my stomach is clear enough with protests. I slap on one of those blue patches for the nausea and continue the routine.

Everything is green of course. I deliver the update, mark the cycle complete and head to the central pillar to meet up with the inspector from the east wing.

As the door opens on the pillar I can see they’ve finished ahead of me. I fix myself a drink while waiting for them to get done with the simulator. I can taste the tart of cranberry now and it makes me feel almost normal again. For a moment I just stare into the glass swirling the drink around. As long as I can keep that up the rest of this is suspect. I’m not looking up, but if I were to, perhaps I’d see my brother behind the bar, cleaning a glass or fixing his own drink.

There is a tap on my shoulder; it’s not him. The other inspector is finished, “Hey! So how’s it looking?”

“Green. You?”

“Same. We may not get much news up here but at least it’s always good!”

“That is true. I don’t think we’ve worked together before, what cycle are you on?”

“Sheesh. Ugh…” eyes roll back and they take the head with them dramatically, “This has got to be somewhere in the 20’s for me. You?”

“18. I have a little slip of paper I mark on each cycle before a I go back down. I’d lose track for sure without it, but it keeps me grounded in a way. I don’t know if that’s the most appropriate word, but you get what I mean.”

They force a transactional laugh, “Yeah, I get it. So what are we drinking?”

We talk for a while before going back below. Neither of us learn anything new about the other, conversation in the central pillar is more about re-calibrating the self, but in it’s own way the exchange is therapeutic.

All 18 cycles had been the same and tedium was starting to infiltrate the process. Physically, yes, there is a lot of down time. But mentally, it’s all continuous, like you’ve worked 18 days straight. Worse even, because you don’t really sleep, you lay down, and you wake up, mark the pad and get back to doing what you just finished up. On paper, in numbers and words, it’s feasible. In practice though, it’s tough. They said it would be. Hell, they are doing it too, so who am I to complain. At least they said they were. Who knows, all I know is the hash marks on my piece of paper. Twenty-seven now.

Green.

I mess with the simulator again, only to be reminded why I swore it off in cycle three. Never could trust the things back home and especially not here. What does that say about me though? Thirty-six.

Green.

I’ve had three glasses of cranberry and it may as well be water. I’m drinking red ‘less than water’. Forty-two.

Green.

The inspector from the east wing is pacing behind the door, I could hear it the whole time I was doing my own inspection and now I have to decide if I want to open it or not. Before I can decide he approaches the door, and looks through the glass window. The closer he gets the more of his face gets cut off until it’s just his eyes.

His muffled voice warbles through the panes of glass and metal, “Hey! Hey! Did you ever get any blanks? What do we do with blanks? What the fuck is a blank? Hey! Can you hear me?”

I don’t know anything about blanks, I tell them this with my face. He gets it and returns to pacing. I go back to the west wing report station and look up information on blanks. There is an entry of course, suggesting the blanks could be caused by a power failure. “What the hell does that mean,” I say out loud and startle myself. Purge unit it says. Forty-three.

Green.

I hesitate to approach the central pillar because my mind is telling me that the hyper anxious fellow was in there just a few hours ago, which is absurd. My eyes affirm this, it seems I was done first. A few hours later and still no one from the east wing has arrived. Forty-four.

Green, sort of. Green, but units are missing. When I file my report I look for information on that, and there is nothing. I can only assume they were purged. What does that mean though?

The central pillar is empty still, two days in a row my mind tells me. But the east wing door is open. I didn’t even know it could open from this side. When I step in, the floor is covered with technological sinew. Someone else shares my distrust for the simulator; violently it seems. I peek into the east wing to see that things are not always greener on the other side. I feel like these are problems I don’t need to get involved with. Somewhere deep within I hear a flood of anguished curses, and that seals it for me. Time for bed. Forty-five.

Stars. Nothing but stars, spinning slightly out of view.

Then I see the shadow of a thing, a relief of a wheel in negative space. A circle of black turning off the stars as it rolls through the background. Half of the radius erupts in lightning periodically. It gets colder and my viewing angle moves away from the lumbering shadow. Looking at the stars for the last time I can’t help but feel sort of relieved. “‘What do we do with blanks?’ he said. You purge them dumb ass,” I say out loud for some reason. All he had to do was look it up. Forty- six.

I need to find a slip of paper somewhere, to keep track of all this.