Category: prose

  • Only Just

    There was a dreaming of that narrow living room, and my place directing from the far corner: move stage right, turn down bass, less delay, crouch as if in pain, sing it again…

    You thought some suggestions were madness, but weren’t we all actors in the theatre of the absurd? That’s okay, I would find myself saying again, I pushed too hard and I understand that you cannot see what the madman sees.

    Ignore them when they said that bass can’t sing, can’t chord, just play that thing. And so he did, like he was wont to anyway. I was both superfluous and absolutely necessarily all the same.

    What use was my lingering? Affection, I suppose. Maybe a little spite as well.

    Just like that faded dream.

    Along came a summons. Paired with a wonder: Was it only just a dream?

  • unthinking

    I am not thinking what you think that I am thinking and that is a fact. I bundle my thinks up nice and tight, in thick, oiled leather and lacing and push them bone deep inside. No one has asked because there are none who might care, not really, about what goes on tucked up in there.

    The truth is scrimshawed along my bones, inked in ashes and kohl, under atrophied muscles wrought tangled by scars. I sing to stones and prophets, fill the undersides of my nails with soil, paint stains on my forehead, circles on brow.

    “What are you thinking?” they ask.

    See, finally someone sees truth as I howl in the nights, at bogarts with thorns and ghasts that prick with memories. I rend my chest with fingers and unfulfilled promises made when someone still has something to gain. But—

    I am not thinking what you think I am thinking.

    And that is a fact.

  • All that remain

    There are times that there is only empty. You could not understand.

    Everything ash. Everything dust. You could not understand.

    I am weary of silence, but there is no mouth with which to speak to the missing ears which could never hear. You could not understand.

    Rivers run my blood in tears from void for eyes, screaming blind. You could not understand.

    This is a limbo, something you could never understand.

    Piercing pinions stretched for all the night. You could not understand.

    That I miss your lips and their wine… You could not understand.

    Ribbons are all that remain.

  • Dares

    I feel I am crossing liminal spaces of late — between dusk and shadow, slipping between night and day.

    I’m not sure if it is the hours, or maybe it is these days. But there is a persistent tug of flux, a drawing in and release. I grow disinterested in the machinations of the embrace of doing things the same way day by day. It seems much more interesting to drift and fade, and it is a mistake of mine to expect my object to all subjects to feel the same.

    Snip. Snip. Snip. A painfully slow arcade of cutting the linen laid bare before me, watching with wry, droll amusement at times as supporting threads give way to unraveled snapping instead of waiting for Atropos to come by and give a release clean.

    Into the mists, then. Who dares follow? Who dares dream?

    Fox cries razor through white, quickly filled in. Crows announce the edges of dark with cacophonic chatter as they discuss the next and the next and the—

    Lost, who dares remain unfound?

  • Bookstore blues

    Henry, he walked all jazzy like he was ceiling tall. But he was only French and overqualified to sell books at the bookstore for minimum wage, as he liked to remind us regularly in his French accent. ONree, he would correct anyone looking at his name badge. Why can’t you American’s get it right?

    But maybe it was just some of us. Not all Americans. I couldn’t say. Besides, for all of his self-imagined height, he was five-foot-nine. Just like me. I suppose he would have said it was 175 centimeters, which is not wrong. Just very Henry.

    And while his primary goal while working was to avoid working, he did like his jazz and got mortally offended when you told him, okay, it is Saturday evening and it is time to play something other than jazz because, well playing jazz doesn’t sell Top-40 CDs, playing Top-40 CDs gets people to buy Top-40 CDs.

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  • Receptions

    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.

  • lark on the morn

    Today I draw dark lines in charcoal on parchment so thin as to air. All gravities pull in your direction and the angles bend true, in teeth-branded skin and hurt so good.

    Head wrapped in linen for better to see. My fingers dance liminal, waiting for the telegraph of dream. Can you see the words writ in water? The ripples cross my dark lines in coal drawn on angle to you.

    Granites love your gravity, antlers turn their curves to thee.

    And, it is in this I apprehend. Waiting on the morning lark to call you into being.

  • Stolen away

    There are days that I feel like everything was stolen away. Like today. A flash of stagelighting splashed on chrome, showering us in cobalt bright and cherry gone to burgundy under the finger tap tap tap. There was sweat, laughter and I fell in love that night, but there was not enough summer to keep.

    Those moments were before the things broke and I fell to the stolen, poisoned under a trail of stars.

    We danced. How we danced. Different voice, a skew of face. Keeping the faith and spinning, yearning there on the eve of May. Michael, you said, a vampire drawing, drinking me away from the night. Be one of us of us of us…

    And I turned before the fading, blinded again with white. I should have not gone into the light because that it where it started to break. The theft in your obsidian eyes, a box containing all the light and the smell of the waterfront. Distracted by the glitter, I forgot to forget and give over.

    Maybe, I should have let the dead die.

    Tired of the absence, I slender eyes to shadow. I ache for the heart in your voice. But now only echoes sing in the empty place where everything was stolen away.

  • night braille

    i read the night braille
    a chill breeze raises on skin
    all fingertip & firefly slow
    with a burning below
    while your fingernail
    stole away my breath
    whisper in crushed velvet
    while crickets fiddle
    under full moons

  • The Wormwood Mason

    AI-generated image with refinements by Michael Raven using Gemini agent

    Erza trudged up the muddy two-wheel track leading to the Vane cabin, making sure to cover his bound notebook under his slicker to keep it dry. The rough path was greasy with the steady drizzle of rain that had arrived at Wormwood the same day as he had. He had despaired of driving the last quarter-mile to the cabin immediately upon seeing the conditions from the two-lane, shoulder-less county road that passed by the homestead. When choosing his rental car, he had emphasized economy over practicality. He regretted, not the first time on this expedition, that he had not rented something with four-wheel drive for a trek into the heart of Appalachia.

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