Category: Poems

fictions, speculative dreams, and meditations

Greenhouse Christmas

Epigraph

This experiment in POV and the sudden flipping thereof is a year old.

Main Content

Walk to the greenhouse,
Sit by the heater,
Enjoy the warmth.

Pull out an iPod and a notebook,
Smile at the rustling plastic,
Lean back to day-dream—

And crash into the heater.

Blackness followed by a growing awareness.

The yellow notebook is buried in mulch.
The heater is on its back.

Jump to your feet,
Lift the heater,
Trip over the chair—

Vague images of hair over eyes,
Close-up of lips.
Strip out the soundtrack and make me
Say what should’ve been said.

The iPod is face down inside a clay pot.
The screen is not cracked.

Dig out the notebook and
Write what you came out here to write.

The Chinese Problem

I wouldn’t be apprehensive about Chinese
if it weren’t all space invading octopuses.

(You should be imagining
a yellowing handmade sheet of paper,
its rough edges frame
a fishing village and its surrounding mountains.

There are 3 to 5 vertical lines of Chinese calligraphy.)

A segment

Either depression, or a Buffy re-watch marathon, has kept me from posting anything in a while, so I thought I should. Here’s a segment of a scene of a collaboration I’m working on.

Poseur and the Gent peer into the darkness and slowly unclasp their hands. The air is heavy and low with despair. A distant foghorn echoes through the cavernous alleyways and explodes into the courtyard; its deep notes harmonize with the creaking of lumber, and is punctuated by the popping of moths drawn into a lamp’s mantle.

Amorphous shadows roll over pavement and shimmy up dilapidated buildings. With a hesitant well then, the Gent saunters towards the struggling beacon. It flares between his breath, ripping ragged patches out of the shadows.

A fuzzy shape streaks the periphery. Eldridge catches a breath, and with a grimace, shifts his eyes towards the disturbance. Continue reading A segment

Discovery

In a notebook somewhere, or maybe just in my memory is an image. I am laying on my back watching the sky through a canopy of tree branches.

In this memory are structured words and lines describing grey lawn-darts blasting through a blueish grey sky. And other birds. I don’t have the patience to capture that image. Of being covered in grime and exhaustion. Of laying on my back on a wooden planked back porch. Feeling, or ignoring, the splinters pinching through my salty crunchy shirt.

Of rubbing my face with rot and dirt and dried sweet. Scratching pockets of sunburnt skin and out of place whiskers.

Smoke vanishing into the grey of the sky, or getting lost in the black leaves. And occasionally a bird darts over the scene as if to make a point.

My notebook may indicate that it was relaxing or inspiring or simply a happy distraction. Or it may be a few scrawled lines about overhead lawn-darts. It won’t indicate that I occasionally remember playing chicken with my brother, in which I was actually a target that wasn’t supposed to move when this huge sharp thing was hurling toward me.

We’d also play this game where he’d shoot at the bottle I was holding.

Or he’d chase me down with a lawnmower.

I found this as I was searching to see if I ever transcribed my notebook exercise. I don’t know if it’s the most recent version or not. What I can tell you is it’s written in plain-text as a markdown document. I can also tell you is it’s a TextWrangler auto-backup of a 750words.com post. The file name is 750 (2011-07-12 02-25-15-316). In the same folder are cached copies of C. K. Williams’ Whacked.