wb :

we are all ships passing in the night
sometimes it is smooth sailing and
sometimes it is all for nought.
there are those cruising through life
like a great white and others
going down with amigo icebergs in glory.

and you, my knight, my amore, my
lighthouse, my porthole to the world -
today we slip off the ropes and draw
up the anchors. we return every last
lifeboat, lifejacket and storm provision
we borrowed. the sea-legs return,

the seasickness comes on board.
as you dissappear off the horizon
with your nets and fish caught hook line
and sinker, my rock-climbing facilities,
champagne, hors d'oeveres, chandeliers
vanish as i shrink to

an invisible fishing vessel struggling
with the boom that would keep on hitting
my head. like the story of pi, except the
happy ending; i live off the shark fins
jamming my rudder and the salty sea;
i am no longer in osmotic balance

i'm lucky that i know
how to walk on water

Fire, fire, mark my pyre
Deep and brilliant as sapphire
At the edges of the evening
Clad in thorn and wrapped in briar

When the naked night is brooding
A cocoon of cold desire
Out a fire-moth is breaking
Taking wing, the morning's crier

And the serpent sings a beat
In the darkness of the heat
Shadow dance, the soul is shier
Moonlight-shod and starlight-cleat

Rising in the smoke-shot ember
Tell me, are you friend or liar?
Every word that I remember
Followed me from old December

Naked on November's feet
Nursed the wolfess at the teat
Laid in fur, the toil and tire
Thawing on the snowy sheet

Who the slave, and who the sire?
Fang to neck and claw to loin
Sweating, swirling, vies the vier
As the tongues of flame enjoin

Silhouette, the moon's defeat
Wax and wane, the weeks repeat
On the silence of the shire,
Bold as pewter, black as peat

Stands the bear, his stillness sober
In the distance of October
Whereto does your roar aspire?
When you face the white disrober

Snake who whispers, tongue a-quiver
Wolfess howling at the fire
Bear who wades the dreaming river
Bring me from this mortal mire

As the phoenix from the silk
Drank his fill of midnight's milk
Dreaming, dead, the dawning dire
Fire, fire, mark my pyre.

In my dreams

people die
when the fires fly
and when the morning arches overhead
we count the dead

they walk to my table and point at me
accusingly
they stand behind the piles of paper
that the people who walk and waver
leave before me as an offering
"hear me," as though the people say,
"and take the entrails of the world,
and scry into their black lines, curled
into a thousand troubles furled
and stapled;"
"and tell us, oracle, what you forsee,
what omens in the bleached sheets
what omens in the printed sheets
and guide us, sage, the blind, we;"
and still the dead point at me.

In my nightmares I am one of them

looking onwards at eventuality
sighing as a million choices
flows into the echoes
of a million voices
pointing not at he who grasps the print
but behind him, for he is blind

so my end is wrapped in those same sheets
noted, briefly
perhaps griefedly
and when the papers have conferred
then interred

no more to worry of those others
that have passed by
of those that hurt and hounded
and growled and pounded
no more to worry of those that cared
of those with their souls bared
no more to worry

So when I wake, I
am glad that I am only
a butterfly

found this on sixtimesnine today. I'm pretty impressed with Drunk Adam.

like an undelivered letter misses
the letterbox, ending up lightyears
away. the way wheelboats used to
hiss down the missisippi river the
way what bills itself as a wishing
well is just the nearest waterhole,
missing the point that critters in
wells don't fulfil destiny very well;
the way a chocolate chip misses its
cookie; popcorn its box. sand at low
tide, a cup without water, a sun
without a horizon,


the way one misses important calls,
buses go off impatiently. i guess
it must be fate, i hate to say this but
a miss is as good as a mile - i might
have to run that thousand after all.

the everyday heat
compresses my skin like an
unwanted creep


the buses hives
of people hiding from the rains
of unpoetic lives;


each waterfall
another promise the universe
forgot to keep


spaceships
sleep- docking at the train stations
letting in wet shoes


last night's tricolor HD
dream, newspapers, and maybe
some people, underneath


a ruse. like
chameleons changing skins, the
world turns


differently, i've heard
apparently they found a new zodiac
sign; that must be why


we read the stars wrong

The funeral occurred on the hundred and sixtieth day. Hordes of people gathered in the large chamber that served us as a dining hall, a meeting hall, a dance hall, and a place for government meetings and children’s games. I say ‘hordes of people’ but the total number was probably less than two hundred – that’s probably the language of the old world coming to front of the brain again, like they said it would, and Miss Jennifer in Culture and Adjustment One had told me, with a frown that I did not understand, that I would have to learn again the meaning of words. I had passed that off as her being ineffable (that was another word that I had learned) at the time, but on the hundred-and-sixtieth day was the first time I began to sense a hint of what she had meant bubbling up in my mind. At any rate it was crowded; although that word hardly meant anything; it was always crowded and you couldn’t spend five minutes without apologizing to somebody for touching their elbow accidentally; although th­e younger children seemed not to be aware of this nicety.

Some men in grey overalls were standing a little closer to each other than the rest of the crowd. They were Techs. They were large men; muscular and well-fed; they all wore spectacles and carried around them an air of importance which all of the civs deferred to. Yesterday – last cycle - a Tech had come unannounced into the room I had shared with Jacob, marched over to a console without saying a word, and spoken in a language I didn’t understand that seemed to be composed of numbers for about five minutes. Then he left. Such intrusions happened on a regular basis and nobody thought anything of them, because the Techs had the most important job, and if they walked into your room unannounced it meant they had something to fix that was more important than your privacy. Privacy. A word I would have to re-learn the meaning of. Jacob never understood when I tried to explain to him that I wanted to be alone.

Anyway, these Techs were standing in a close circle and saying things like ‘the SLs fluctuated for a few hours but we’ve rerouted the flux capacitors so that’s settled’ and I knew that it was settled, whatever it was. When a booming voice echoed out over the PA, they stopped talking and looked over to the makeshift podium.

“Today we are a broken people. One hundred and fifty two men and women and children were lost to us in the event on one four seven. It was nobody’s fault – one of the calculated risks we took when we embarked on this expedition. But calculations are numbers. The grief we now hold is incalculable for the parents, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, teachers and children than we have all lost.”

I lost my patience with Jacob. I put down Persuasion and let the Victorian English drain out of my mind for a few seconds. ‘Fuck off!’ I shouted at him. He looked shocked and angry at my tone of voice, but obviously did not understand my anachronistic insult. My English teacher, Sarai, always laughed at what words we did and didn’t know. She said that our language would become a model of linguistic solipsism that would be studied for centuries, but we didn’t know what she meant. ‘What?’ he said. I said ‘Leave me the fuck alone or I will disembowel you and space your bloody guts.’

He actually had not been doing much to annoy me. He had slithered over to the bed and asked what I was reading. For the twelfth time – I had been counting today. He was twelve and at that stage of development where he wanted to ingratiate himself with all of his older friends, and me especially, the older sibling. But I had been irritable for a few days since my period had started, and I’d just had had a fight with Sam, who said he didn’t like me dressing up ‘slutty’ around other guys. I didn’t know what the word meant, but when he explained it to me I hit him in the face. I was crabby and on the verge of tears and I deeply wanted to be alone to read Jane Austen who always seemed so calm even when things go to frozen hell in a handbasket full of shit.

‘Privacy, privacy! That’s the only word you know! Stupid! Liz, why do you need to be alone all the time? You must be watching dirty shows and touching yourself and when Miss Sarai finds out she’ll confine you for a month!’ I am bleeding out of my vagina, I thought to myself. ‘You know where you can find some real privacy?’ Jacob pointed to the outer wall. ‘Three point five meters thataway. It’s real quiet. Just jump out of the bloody airlock, that’s the only way you’ll ever be happy.’

Now I was apologetic. I hadn’t meant to lash out at poor Jacob. I sensed, however, that further conversation would not appease anybody, and resolved just to ignore him.

Seeing that further conflict was pointless, he muttered ‘You can bloody well go and fug off to yourself!’ and left the room. He’d probably gone back to N49Peter and N35Sarah’s room in the port quadrant. I dreamed of my 18^th birthday when I would move in with Sam, and began to cry hot tears of frustration. Why couldn’t I just get along with people? Yesterday the girls in PE had teased me mercilessly for not wanting to play netball in the RecRoom. They said I was fat and useless. Actually, I just didn’t want to be around them afterwards – ‘hang out’ as they used to say – and have to make small talk and be annoyed at them talking loudly about whether N32Becca was really pregnant, and whether she’d keep the weight, and how Justin Bieber should’ve stopped making music when he turned 60. I wanted to shout ‘I DON’T CARE!’ and storm off, but wherever I stormed off to would be full of people making other small talk and playing netball and whatever and I wanted to run away and hide and cry in a dark little corner but there were no dark little corners in our brightly-lit spaceship, only the endless deafening presence of people I hated.

I’d flipped in the middle of Adjustment One last cycle, too, when a girl kept asking inane questions to Miss Jennifer about why the Japanese kept killing themselves, isn’t that kind of silly and I’d stood up and knocked over my chair and told her to ‘fuck off’. I don’t think I even knew how to use the phrase properly then. After that I had a long discussion with Miss Jennifer. ‘You know, Liz, words have the power to hurt and to heal. You should be careful about saying things like that.’ And then she got wistful and said that we might all have to learn again the meaning of words.

Thinking about Miss Jennifer, I tramped across the ship to look for Jacob, heading port, then a little fragment of rock less than five metres across ripped through the port quadrant and one hundred and fifty two people died in the freezing vacuum.

On day one hundred and ninety nine we set foot on Mars and discovered that there were no dogs and no trees and no clouds and no moon, and there were no malls and no parking lots and there were no cars and no crowds. There was no Jacob. There were so many things I wanted to say to him, that I was sorry even though it wasn’t my fault, that I liked him better than anybody in the world even Sam who was a real fucker sometimes, that I was sorry.

I played netball. I worked in the hydroponics garden and wrote essays about Austen and Shakespeare. I spoke to the girls and held N51Catherine in my arms, watching as she burped and giggled at our smiling faces. Here, where new words were being invented for the green color of the evening sun reflecting off sulfate in the atmosphere, where all of a sudden the beansprouts started growing with two heads, I joined in the circle of planting and growing and reaping the harvest. Things were primitive, you might say, although we had televisions and Internet and a radio broadcast from Earth. Things were not simple; they were harder than ever, and I thought every day about poor Elizabeth Bennet and willful Portia and how they would never have had a place here.

I had a dream in which Jacob came back and stood in front of me and said he forgave me even though it wasn’t my fault that he died. I opened my mouth to say that I was sorry but when I said it the words turned into chunks of uranium and fell to the floor, glowing slightly. What does ‘sorry’ even mean here on the red planet? We left to escape Qaddafi and the world government and the silly politics and we brought our dreams and N32Becca’s baby girl and the words that meant we were free, but sorry doesn’t mean anything. Privacy doesn’t mean anything. ‘Fuck off’ doesn’t mean anything, because when you fuck off you walk off into the red desert, you walk off into space and are never seen again.

So I am not sorry. It wasn’t my fault. Those are old words from an old world that imprison the living in the coffins of the dead. I am sad, though; I am so incurably sad that I will never speak to Jacob again – I threw away the sadness and talked to Miss Jennifer and then I learned it again, only to discover that even on this dead planet­ it means exactly the same thing.

Never again would he fall in love, he swore to himself quietly over a tankard of ale as the smoke swirled in swaths and the noise crashed and broke over the heads of hunched men. Outside, the cars blared their horns in the lonely light of a corner streetlamp.

The city wept for his tragedy, golden streams of tears from a trillion eyes, trickling into the gaols and gutters of the midnight. It sobbed and gasped for air and tore at its hair, black strands trailing into the rising fires that licked at the clouds.

And then the stars sighed, and went to bed early, and the great eyes in their orbits in the heavens saw, and it was good.

And perhaps it was.

- 6 sentence fiction.

bottles paper and air these are the things that consist the universe these are the things that consist the mind of man. These are the directions of the fleeting and the futile which rob the morning air of its freshness and of its wonder. I am streets and tar and cars. I am bundles of neurons misplaced by a friendly deity who (for some reason) needs them back. I wonder who he is, that great incompetent fucker, who by suggesting that he exists suggests that everything has gone horrifically wrong. Nothing has gone wrong. Everything has gone wrong. The black and white of it is really the grey and green of it, for right and wrong are urine and phlegm in the wilderness of the sane. What a wilderness! What animals! what free and flightsome birds that grace the morning with their sharp downstrokes, rebelling against the earth. I would be a bird but for being in love with the dirt. I would be a worm but for being in love with the air. I would be a tree but for being in love with running. I am, I am, I am! But He is not. Let us pray. Dear Lord, you are a nuisance. We'd be so much better off without your constant insisting that things are wrong in a particular way. They are wrong in all the ways there are to be wrong! But You don't see that. We gave you a chance - several. No, but two thousand years was insufficient to learn you. You are incorrigibly petulant. Therefore, after much regret and consideration, we have resolved to eat you. Goodbye. Oblivion is painless. Hello then, New World, Empty Sky, Cloud, Tree, WindowSill, Computer Screen. Hello then. I am your friend as it was in the beginning now and ever shall be world without end. I am Jesus - and here's the secret - I killed God. That was the Good News - that man is now and forever truly free amen. I do hope you appreciate it and if you would stop loving me for awhile and give your brother a smile I'd be truly obliged to not do something horrific because really I'm dead and why don't you all understand that? Why don't you all understand me? I gave my freedom so much so that I died for my fever, my guardian angel, my hallucination, my abdication, my abduction. I was the last of the mad so that mankind can now be sane. That was my gift! You have squandered it. You have lost it among the papers and bottles. I hope you are happy - but I know you aren't.

Fingertips aching

breath

condenses

on the air warmly

visage.

cracked red dried lips

eyes hanging like boulders

over grey canyons

want-

far

where cold

short air

coils

between our toes

want –

lean,

and breathe

and breathe

the blue foreign frost

for in warmth,

for in cold

the great parched floor

of stillness,

the lines fidget

curling their brows

clicking joints

Revolve

great circle –

small circle

the weariness

of wakefulness

it’s all he knows how to do:
    stringing fairy lights above
    the corpse of their relationship.


he has cut up the images of her,
of them, keeping only the pretty bits –
    the comfortable silences on quiet afternoons;
    the dusty photographs of them smiling,
their faces against the sun.


in his world there is no one else.
nothing but a silent loop of tape
    constantly rewinding, playing
    images of empty roads, of entwined fingers;
happiness, contentment –
    whirring and stopping in the dark.


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cross-posted from my writing blog: i just felt like breaking adam's combo. this should bring my total post count up to three! feels good being a contributing member of the community. -ryan

tramping down to the river side

with our frenzied faces each aglow

we sat down there to watch the tide

each hoping that the tide would show,

each hoping that the tide would know

to join us there to play our game;

hoping each that the tide would show

as the sun set with a yellow flame.

keeping our watches synchronized.

huddling up against the snow -

There it is! one watchman cried

Each hoping that the tide would show,

We huddled toe to toe to toe

but breaking on the bank there came

a swelling from the dark below,

but left the river bank the same.

sighing, disappointed-eyed,

we thought that it was time to go

our shivering faces belied

the sweetness of the weather, though –

we’d each hoped that the tide would show.

we walked back slowly, fighting shame

that crept red up our cheeks and brows

and the sun set with a yellow flame.

-----------------------------------------

a ballade i had to do for my class. I know it's missing the 4-line envoi at the end, but

1) i ran out of rhymes

2) i don't really know any princes

and 3) stop oppressing my art with your rules

college morning college coffee

college hangover

and there's the umbaqanqa on the speakers,

beats pushed like a street vendor

hawking coke and hash,

and there's a torrential sadness,

'as if I didn't know my own bed.'

my friends are asleep and entangled.

I put my legs up against the wall,

wishing them conjoined dreams and

conjoined happiness, looking out,

at the rain

Then I start to pick up the pieces

of last night. I rearrange covers

and blankets, then shirts and drunken

kisses, hands held irresponsibly and

shirts and socks.

candy wrappers. orange juice -

I find a headache beneath a pillow

have you considered prophylaxis, sir?

take two for toothaches and hangovers

four for guilt and six for misadventure.

dustbin.

bottles and sheets.

So the morning starts to roll downhill

I file the night between the anthology of Renaissance music

and the book of essays, hoping it'll be mistaken

for study. That's a lie -

I lie back, watching the rain again

as snores are lost within the drums

as they reach the shutters,

mingling with the traffic and the morning.

Every college student knows

that last night was the end of days;

that this morning is a hazy afterlife.