The Argument:
Mirrors, mirror.
Of Lilys and remains.
A close call.
Episode 7.1: Named True from Vengeance, My Heart (episode link), my serialized Sepulchral-Gothic Western novel, is now live at ravensweald.art.
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(more…)the words turn to blur
every voice fades
to white noise
dew wet trousers on
an early kneeling morn
chapped lips imagine
kisses in chill mists
dreams are made of
morns made like these—
the smell of apples
drifting in
i can't help but wonder
when you talk,
if you talk to me
or if that is just dream
speaking past soft veils
perhaps it is just a dream
echoing another dream
in which there is nothing
but a dream left for
anything to say
From deep within the weald, there is a longing to sit with, to learn from.
Go fly to the mountain, raven, sit on the stone-filled heath. Become the fells, be come the high places. Better yet: sink down into the underwood deadfall and loam, wrap roots around and tangle hair with moss, lichen the bone. Grow antlers. Become the stone. Who needs these wings?
They come. They receive. They go.
Grow to flint, knapped and worn. Become the old trunk they come sit with and exchange, clear off scalloped white fungus as they while away until there is nothing more. They take that away too, and cast away when bored. But that is the way.
When you are not looking, comes the wolf. Not just a wolf. The winter wolf.
And being stone will then be the whiling away while the longing melts of winter.
we are twist until we are break this cats cradle all at tangle we are caught between day & night
A rune poem, based on an Elder Futhark rune selected at random.
Today’s rune is dagaz, which has been translated as “daybreak”, that transitional moment between night and day. By extension, it might also be interpreted as “twilight” and is representative of liminality, transformation, the space between worlds, and suggests walking in both the material world and otherworld.
Please visit my Elder Futhark pages at sceadugenga.com for additional interpretations of the runes based on multiple references and personal reflection.
i river the faces &
cling no more
i have tried
red flags followed
under alpine stone
skitter scree grey
and cut to bone
the fox screams with me
and feathers down to black
sometimes we needs slendering
between their slipstreams
flesh knifed and stretched
beyond the thin and lean
and i know my blind skein
draws taut against the choke
clenched against the screams
my everyday halloween
absurd and obscene
i become long
under the night
and my heart stutters
with ache for a silent skiff
ghosting through mists
to take me to that
forgotten place where
blossoms forever fall
For Jolene Rice’s Storytime prompt.
Must include the following:
When you are the Queen they let you laugh at inappropriate times.
“Off with her head,” followed by a mad cackle. Or three. And then they say: “Oh, it’s just the Queen being a Queen,” and they join in once they realise there are consequences involved to not joining in the reverie.
Then everyone is laughing.
And it becomes less inappropriate to laugh because of reasons.
The last one had the audacity to call Us a butcher. How very droll. And still, We made his head roll. Because when you are the Queen, they let you order someone’s head removed on whimsy. The laughter was nervous, but all courtiers laughed the same.
When you are the Queen, people tend to laugh when you do. And rhyme when it suits a Queen to rhyme, too.
One of Our subjects said, “I wish I wouldn’t hear my Queen laugh when she beheaded someone.”
“Shhhh,” We said. “Your wishes have come true.”
He smiled.
“Off with his head,” We said.
And We held Our laughter until his head dropped into the basket. Then We let peel a mad cackle or three.