He Dreams in Riddles

Existential junk in free verse...

He dreams in riddles.
The stars laugh at his smallness.
But he dreams unaware
of their mockery,
And therefore immune
And somehow more powerful
In that vulnerability
Realized only by the innocent.
For when we realize our power,
Ego steals it,
Makes it a mockery,
And hurls it to the stars.

Hair in the Drain: Excerpt

I promised and so I deliver! The following is an excerpt from my short story Hair in the Drain now available for download to Kindle and Nook on Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. The story itself is just shy of 3000 words which amounts to about 8 pages. 

By morning she'd be feverish with lack of sleep. She'd polish, scrub, sand, clean with restless energy. But the coming night would shackle her beneath her worn sheets once more until the sun, slow-filtered through moss and leaf, unlocked her. She'd spring up and repeat the process all over again. Then, when she could think of nothing else to do, she'd sit in a patch of sunlight and listen to the drip of black cypress water in her heart.

One night her taps started leaking. Not just one, as if a seal had gone bad, but all of them at once. The drips from the bathtub sounded like a slow finger drumming on the porcelain, waiting, relentlessly waiting. She felt she was in a cave, smothered in darkness, waiting for something to move and confirm her worst fears.

Stay tuned for our next episode when I publish my next installment of short fiction, The Melting Man, whose protagonist shouts:

“I don’t think, I know!” he shouted, his bird voice echoing up and down the hall. “Scoff if you must, scoff, scoff, scoff. But each drip of rain as touches me might as well be acid. It burns, it hurts, it takes a piece of me away!” He pulled up the sleeve of his raincoat. “Look!”

______________________________________________________ 

Hair in the Drain on sale now for Kindle , Nook.

You like me, you really like me! Or will if you visit my Facebook page. 

Drop by and say hi!

Titan of the Stellar Sea

You haunt my waking thoughts

On a continental scale.

And swim about my inner space

Like an interstellar whale.

Your tail stirs up moonbeams

As starlight filters through your gums.

I hear your star-drenched whale song

While astral augurs nod and hum.

I drift within your sparkling wake

Dreaming sun's epiphany

Awash in shining quarter notes 

Entwined in starshot symphony.

A tiny twist of argent fluke,

And sailing on the solar wind

You set a course across the sky

And back you float toward Earth again.

Something Approaching Song

An old snippet...


"Show me your face," he said. "Your human face."

She hesitated. She wanted to show him, but it had been so long and she'd nearly forgotten. Then... 

She changed. She felt it, the lengthening, the filling out, the ripening. His jaw dropped, blue eyes widened. 

"You are beautiful," he breathed. He laughed, held up his hands. "I'm shaking." His gaze flickered around her, came back to her eyes. "Why did you ever hide? You are lovely enough to break the hearts of tyrants." 

All the long and lonely years rushed back to her, piling up about her legs - legs she hadn't seen in decades. It was too much to express in a voice so unused. But she opened her mouth in hope and something billowed up from her chest, scrambled up her throat and leapt off her tongue. 

There were no words, only notes. So wrung with sorrow and the weight of long years in silence they fell more like tears than rose in song. Notes so pure they could have levelled mountains of diamond and he sat in rapt wonder, eyes never leaving hers unless she squeezed them shut with the rapturous sorrow of her song. 

She sang until the tears came and, with a sudden lurch, her heart shook itself to life, stuttering like an old engine. Hesitating, sputtering, but with undeniable strength it stumbled up and began beating. Her eyes shot open as the transformation became complete--not quite with pain but something akin to it, just deeper, closer to the soul. She sang as her new-woken heart shot fire through her sleeping limbs and she sang that too. The notes rushed at each other in their zeal to emerge. Fire pulsed in her fingertips, throbbed in her toes. 

He watched as a light grew about her. Not a holy light - some heavy sun disc of the saints - nothing so weighty or unwieldy. No, it was as though the stars themselves had conspired and sacrificed some of their most precious light to bathe her in. 

If he hadn't loved her before, his fate was sealed in that moment. Overtaken by much too vast a feeling for any single human to absorb, he gathered her into his arms. 

He dried her tears as she sang. It was enough. Music was always the quickener of the heart and this music would have fired a thousand. 

What happened to them then, you ask? I really don't know, but the wind passed on by with a rustle and an airy grin, taking audacious newsprint and listless leaves down through the old covered bridge, over the slow gurgle of Muxatawney River and out over the long, grey fields towards the mountains. It faded out there in the foothills, but looking back it seemed as though the gentlest star had fallen and lay aslumber in the far groves of Hollowdale. There let it lie; leave the two lovers so long apart in peace. Your questions are bothersome and I'm for some sleep. Let be, young sir, some things haven't any answers and, despite what you think, it's better that way. 

Good night.

Split Infinitives

Several weeks ago I met a girl at the book store I was working at. We spoke for a couple of minutes until she told me she was majoring in English.

I said, "Oh, yeah. I'm such a geek, I was reading about split infinitives yesterday."

She viewed me with sympathy and said, "Gawd ... I've never been good at math."