there is a hollow in the center where
only the trees & ever the stones
know my name
blind, the trailhead of myrkr & mist
look to ancestors below your feet
recalling we are all related
spreading as spores & tendrils
on & on
remember november?
for the chill rains falling, i sheltered
at the hollow on the center where
only the trees & ever the stones
know my name
drawing razorwire taut tendons
tight breath rustneedle intake
bury me leaves under shallow
bury me leaves under stone
rain wash silt the river down
rain wash silt the river down
fidget fingers making shadow words
fidget fingers making broken songs
fidget finger fidget misfit
metal gestalt cuts memory sharp
close winter my eyes of
slag cast, drawn...
Ed watched his neighbor undress in the moonlight in the window in the apartment across the way. He dimmed his reading lamp so he could better appreciate the natural contrasts of the moon against the inky blackness of her room, put down his book on Celtic mythology filled with more fiction than the latest bestselling high fantasy novel. It was truly awful scholarship, if there was any scholarship involved in its writing at all. The lack of references and indices told most of that tale.
It was not the first time he had played peeping tom and he doubted it would be the last. Although he suspected his neighbor knew full well that he often watched her in the semidarkness, her eyes never once stole to the window framing her slow dance from clothing to skin. That his neighbor had never once drawn her curtains in the name of modesty, Francis Edward Carlisle (“Ed” to most folks) was damned if he was not going to allow himself to take in the show visible in varying degrees of light as the moon waxed and waned throughout the year. His neighber was “a looker” by his book and Ed was not exactly flush with offers from women willing to share their naked bodies with him at fifty-two. That had stopped happening someplace in the last decade or so and, to be honest, he had never had all that many offers in life but it still happened on the rare occasion before he had acquired his permanent beer belly and man tits.
(more…)
whiskey’d lovebites
stolen from neck & lips
midnight vanilla in a kiss
as all time slipstreams &
lovers sail on a sea of dreams
Her matte-black nail polish was chipped again, a detail she had grown used to. She knew she was rough on her nails, using them for everything from a makeshift screwdriver to a replacement for the worrystone her grandmother had given her and that she had lost. Instead of rubbing a smooth stone to assuage her nerves, she taken up nail-biting. Or, rather, she had taken it up again. The stone was her grandmother’s way of trying to break of the nail-eating habit. And it had worked, until she went and lost the stone one night out on the town. She kept hoping the stone would show up but considered the possibility unlikely. And she had yet to get around to replacing it.
She ran a ragged fingernail over her lips, drawing a pinprick of blood where the rough edge accidentally caught a ridge of flesh. When she thought about it, she found that she did not care. Maybe he would think that was sexy. If not, she had other ways of getting his attention.
(more…)
river west through and sanguine
slipping serpentine dusk over red
tangled up in roots and memory
casting scree down narrow bank
a wish? or smoke on a prayer?
it seems like it was so long ago
but never rivers the same for
as wheels cut ford —
ever of in-between...
i am only winter
rags snapping crimson
of the hard north wind
i am only winter
and barren fells
a stone field within
i am only winter
fallow, hollow, brittle
don't let me in
There is no preamble when they arrive, not even the fluttering of wings to announce their presence. Just:
You are a fool, Raven says.
(more…)
