Fringe
Creative short prose, women in the family, being unusual, living in two worlds, dealing with society.
Stripping Down
Writing prose, the new role of a middle aged woman, going back to simplicity, realness, back to herself.
Vulture
When it began they were scouting the sky, back in late august, when the summer light glared fierce. The span of their wings was the extent of a premonition. Drought and desert had come to the city to stay. Dead things lay fresh, but soon to be gone; lives run out and reclaimed back to earth. On my daily commutes they signaled from above, when doubt and dread circled my mind, like scavengers. It got better when I looked up. Vultures raking air and spotting the blue, waiting patiently, until the great swoop. Precise, economic, my winged totem advised against dilapidation of what good energy I still had. Vultures of the mind are unproductive, inefficient, they don’t leave the land really bare. Their shadowy silhouettes conceded honour to the city rotting below, it’s heart overrun with concrete, synthetic memories instead of a past. They could smell the end even as it began, and already sailed the sky with prudent grace, circling wide perimeters. Entrusted with disposal, they’d consume us back to our mission of advancement. They’d answered a muted call –look up! Vulture, a dark reputation, reference to what is unsightly, death. But by early November of that year I utterly disagreed. I liked my peculiar friend who was almost pure width. I found his stoic way, and his mystical hiss, alluring. Today, when he cruises the sea above, floating effortlessly, omniscient over the mountain range, he assures me all is what it must, even in times of decay, like these.
Slither
Slipping through the cracks, an ethereal presence, a phantom being, slithers in deep silence, at the bottom of darkness, in the abyss. There’s more beyond the cracks: new intuition, a world still without words, unseen, barely heard, more felt. Old laws don’t work anymore, only the desire for birthing something new and free. Energy build up is what’s needed to fatten up the slithering smokey ghost. I hear steady crumbling as the last degrees of march skid by. Degradation of matter, a snake shedding its skin in tatters, in a temple where nobody prays anymore. We’re are heading to the equinox of the wooden snake. Never before did I feel as a vessel by vocation. Believed in burdens, painful shoulders, the clank of the machines. Never believed in the constancy of receiving flowing care, protection by right. Long and tedious is the low key hum of tooth and claw mindset, suppressed natural impulse, aching traps. Yet I seem to be slipping through the cracks, as I did once, many moons before. That I am only asked to wait, catch the right winds, and be the slithering vessel of an ebony world inside another, inhabitant of this new womb. The new being floats as a headache, a suggestion in my spaced out brain. As I slide through, the first glimpse of a new time line, barely developed, is the hazy horizon after a grand fire. The slithering wooden snake goes forth, and is soon lost in the remaining rubble, the spray of fine debris. How she loves to stir up worlds like ours, watch us burn, but by the end, we will have birthed our new selves.
Prayer to go
Help my impulse, let only the purest emerge, don’t allow me to think, enough pondering has been done here. Rush me toward my truest reality, that sudden drive to your designed road, that which is my true node, the vector of my mission. Whisper it to me in sleep, the ending words ever so loud, definite phrases to broaden my glance, to see the path set forth, and faith awaiting those first steps. Appease this mind and its lunar phases, its flippant nature, steady me into the ground indicated, all its grain. Allow me to merge with the observant mountains, the steadfast trees, the pounding headaches of the city, even its decay. Train my instinct, prop it up with your breath, make it your most faithful servant, even wiser than my thoughts. Gift me the beat of thunder in my footsteps, a sense of safety for the unchartered land. Leave my mind vacant of choice, hold her down under your gaze, contained. Give us the great halt. Tame our horses into the next level of freedom, steady our anxious needs, the aimless roaming, delusion. Make us sturdy again, fit for the job of carrying forth only what is truly yours.
Autumn shades
You’re dissolving, an invisible flame burns the pages quietly in the stillness of your study. Ashen skies glow softly, cradling the twilight sun; soft autumn light drizzles between branches, beyond the sliding window of your routine. You’re are fading, while scribbling the usual, at your desk. My body only wants a moment, this very one, no past or future, no history to tell, no projections for tomorrow. In this way I will disappear too, and though you’ll remember I was dear to you, though you might keep the tenderness, the vague tune that was me, you’ll find we cannot precisely repeat the tones anymore. And somehow, the song does live. We have been, back when the game seemed so real, and I made myself believe the tattered reality, sewn together by familial duties, but no, nothing comes now, I’ve got no product to show, I never could stitch like that, like you do. This is my new direction, it breaks off under that archway of trees, at the fork where we’re heading. All the while you believe you can still hear the discards of autumn crunching under our steps. Now you must keep me as that song you can’t really remember. It keeps lingering on the tip of your tongue, between a memory and certainty. Soft as the pale January light, distant as a busy butterfly, ashen as the last of the shrivelled pages, ashes wafting in the study, before final disintegration. Know I tried my best, I played the role just for you.
Things that Fly
When noticing things that fly, vision strives upward, blackbirds shriek, common gray ones flutter on branches, loaded with nutlets. Beyond the trees, up above, a huge bird of prey, some hawk or eagle, scans the city by air. He passes over the buildings, gliding with patience, unhurriedly, up where time is different, and mountains mock man made towers. A vision wants to take off bad, again and again, to see it all from the heights, because eyes have wings. Things that fly say freedom is the answer to grief, grasping. It is lightness much missed, unworried mentality of space, romance with those things that point to the sky, isolation from unrest and strife. Time ages in the city structures, darkness settles in the limits of property, survival mode seeps under front doors. We’ll have no more of that. Better to have wings caressed, shaped by air velocity, riding the invisible. A bird like heart, fast to pump on a given second, at the first glance of a mountainous chain, stretching beyond imagination. Things that fly, our faith is coming of age. A dragonfly in September’s clear blue, determined chopper of the currents, advisor to my ascension, proud, primitive and poised, sat on the clothesline of your huge yard. The lawn was already dry, the wind content, slightly warm, and by bare feet connected to the pricks of toasted grass. She landed and balanced as a seasoned acrobat, stoic and powerful, her eyes domes of fractals. She saw all the pieces, my fragments connected to this moment. I walked around her carefully, while the morning sun healed my chilled bones. The broken fence you haven’t been able to repair cracked a bit more, and the tool shack I noticed, is sealed shut from oxide. Memories live in the museum of your back yard, and here today, the dragonfly acknowledges that your long process and my disconsolate joints wish to heal, to swish over it all, as she would. Why, your garden is a sunroom, where our day star tells of fires still alive in us both. Meanwhile she stares and bathes too. Her wings fizz, she energizes in stillness, charging her body with sacred rays. I came to your house last September , when the first of the dragon flies saw me decide for good. I walked across, under the clothesline, in the newborn autumn, considering flight my next truth. Moths stuck to my car, as soon as the weather mellowed to humidity. Neptune had just receded back to its house, and cuddled up to good old Saturn. The pale season came with moths, fresh out of chrysalids and all that happened inside. Baby bodies gone, retreated and dissolved, reconfigured to fly. Their new wings reminded me of grandma’s curtains, somehow they’re new but still old. They sought refuge in the cavern of my SUV, in the early work morning, when light has the cadmium filter of the end of year. A minute one settled beside me, under the rearview control. Seers say moths are the bearers of transformation, and these day they stick to me, as I change lanes. In the afternoon another landed on my window sill and stayed. At night they upholstered the panes to the back of our house, drawn to a sliver of inside light. It’s the beginning of it, the timeline I can see already from this side of the livingroom. Moths like dry leaves, analogies of the elemental kingdom, flighty daughters of autumn, November’s promise of tomorrow’s stable glow.
Devotional
He’s still here but Is he still willing? More so than me Because he’s my crab. His scorpio rises Riding a bull Pliers hurt But his outer shell Glistens. The creature is all about staying It persists Grabs Claims Instinct devotional and He prays to me drunk. But for what? No! I bid him to stop And then again He’s the literary dream I asked for Unaware. He demands And I am his To come home to Vent Relieve. Why me? Don’t have much grain I’m nothing more than an oddity A crooked arrow Who can fly straight. What he sees I’ll never know Still he stays Enduring time lapses Under muy loose chin These jowls. He wants this joking smile My mockery of life These worries followed by a breakdown My sleeping body trembling Under the influence of dreams. Yes, yes, those things I remember He’s that dream The oldest one of all, Devotional nightmare Come to life.
Unanswered
Who are they? And where from? Old lovers, friends, sons, fathers, brothers Those who helped, guided, worried, cared Same ones who left, changed me for, walked away from, grew to hate My lost men. Who are they? Jitters arise for their attention I long for their excitement Mourning when they find another better Satisfied when they laugh it out Inevitably expecting A reaction. Why them? Why me? Who were we until now? Old flames in transformation Merge and part And we haven’t stopped yet Something reaches Lights our wick Impregnates our feeling Since long ago. They invade routine and fantasy alike I make believe they listen That they are here Drawn to me and I to them While they’re at work Away And I ask again Who were we until now? But no one’s answering.
The Item
There is a presence, an item, and it lives, without need for oxygen. But it’s not him, even if my mind’s eye insists. I made him up in the length of decades. After many words ensued, he inhabited my head, full of himself. He became a rant, annoying as a jump scare, never listened. But today I let him go, even if he imprints his presence, always busy in the background, ready to protect from the greatest threat of them all, loss. I created him, internalised the frequencies of his mission; absorbed into my stream the perceptions he embodied; took it all into the deep tissues. His worried presence, neurosis, accumulation of stress. The item fights a future he conceived in fear, almost a century ago. But today I granted him the possibility. I bade him farewell, gave him the freedom to disappear and to continue on as simple energy, told him he could change. I can differentiate now, and that is the difference. He is not human, but a servant of a will that is not my own, the envoy of a mission that I did not choose. Yet he must be appreciated, somehow acknowledged, and I do, by strange grace arisen at the summit of change, an eclipse, a dark Sun bearing the radiant crown of closure. An item to be left aside, to dissolve in the newborn year. He shall then rise as cottonwood seed would, in the warm air of my evening. In the meantime, I will fight to remember the way of brightness. Adventures free of expectation, clear roads unblocked, vacancy. I shall pray for silence, empty rooms, and a handful of future. Gold pebbles in the raw, the touch of Midas in my hands, a magical song dancing as a flame would in twilight. Intentional fire ablaze. Velocity inspired. He left in an instant, when I saw my fear was his lack, the familiar voice an poor imitator of my soul. Imagination transmutes fast, I know. Soon he will live differently, on another type of ray, a beam of tomorrow, dressed in clear splendour, waiting for my arrival.