Category: PROSE

Serving Specters

Come.

Sit by the fire in the hearth.

I will put my chin on your knee, stare into the ether and let my thoughts run.

Perched upon your feet, keeping your toes warm.

Sitting on the floor.

Closer to the earth.

The storm passes, the rain relents, and the sky above the Sound nearly recovers.

The air outside remains cold.

⊙

Locals say this place is cursed.

I’ve seen enough tragedies in others in my four months here, to believe it.

Heard of even more.

Yet, here shall I establish my residence.

A mid-thirty year old,

amongst the retirees still seeing themselves as inhabitants of Stellar Street.

Mick and Keith working the corner shop.

⊙

The wealthy snow birds hum, at the restaurant where I work, about migrating to the South for the winter.

Winter homes.

“Guess how old I am”: he says.

His wife giggles.

Howl I loathe this game.

But, this pair is old enough to not take anything personally.

78: I guess.

The correct answer is 97.

He proceeds to tell me experiences from both the first and second world wars.

I am captivated.

They do not take their leftovers to go. They turn down the offer of free bread.

°

The less well-to-do appear even more non-corporeal.

No winter homes to which they may abscond.

Disembodied spirits of bodies that no longer exist.

To serve and host at this restaurant requires second sight.

Many of these people long ago became invisible to most.

Are you Irish?: he asks.

No, I’m from the South.

Oh, I was stationed there with the good old boys. They went to bars during their off-time. I went to museums and landmarks. But, I was odd.: he tells me.

He shares stories of being an 18 year old from Montana who ended up in the South during George Wallace days.

I am captivated.

He and his wife take their leftovers home in a box and ask for extra free bread

which they are given.

A nuzzle

Let me nuzzle my cheek, just barely, against the uppermost part of your pectoral muscle while you tell me stories of before I knew you.

Let us, again, rub limbs together like how crickets sing, to keep warm.

Because I can see the pending winds of winter on the watery horizon of the Sound admidst the

clouds of steely grey.

Smoke from some celestial dragon finishing an exhalation

from his degree of inclination.

Pull close in arms and tether me against you.

Listen to the furnace rattle and to the homestead’s ribbing creaks.

Because, when the partially frozen rain begins descending,

we wilt not see but what is immediately in front of us,

So, let it be one to the other, through this season of alaying bare.

Re-cognition to Pre-position

He says: Attention is not the same as recognition.

I reply: What if you seek the attention of just one, only to be gained through recognition?

A remembrance of your re-cognition.

Private exhibitions in a single gallery.

Not a diasporic display, even if openly splayed.

The change from bitter to better is [i] before [e]

Except after [c], like my initial.

So, Æ remain unembittered for the better; but,

sometimes, my left eye twitches

A defiance of my body in the face of the mirrored reflection of self-control.

Self-taxing to grow your privatized, closed economy.

And, I scriven in this big notebook with smut.

Do most people know for whom they make themselves appear

or do they just present?

I should have written the words flowing through mind as I slipped to sleep, last night,

because, now, they come less easily.

⊙

Exfoliating feedback into smoothness.

Bang and blame.

Someone imitating you back to yourself to show how ugly you just appeared to them.

Trying to tell the girl who dogged herself to her face.

You remind me of mom, making that face: she says, making a face.

That’s exactly the kind of thing our mom would say to flip the script when she feels uncomfortable: I think but do not say.

The hinterlands wherein we hide behind passive aggressive similes and abide behind thoughts unsaid.

I am not whom I used to be; and, you liked her better; but, I like me more.

Price your art for your target markets and I’ll keep giving myself out for free.

Valued or bought and sold?

Valueless or invaluable?

Just desserts or just dessert?

A dable of monsoon in a desert.

Success for me is not success for you.

Success for me is the Tao of doing while still being able to notice when my bootlaces untie; so, I may, once again, pull this sea monster heart up by them.

He says: I know the magic trick called Algerian Bootstrapping.

I giggle.

I wasn’t talking about you, but I like to: I say with the pedantic, daft determination of someone choosing to end her sentence with a preposition.

Pre-position.

From a planked position.

Troubadours clap out: one, two, three, four

before launching their song.

Choreographers snap: five, six, seven, eight.

⊙

Í, silently, count

one, two, three

four

five.

⊙

{Inhale and move.

An animal playing her lungs,

with the discipline of the earnest open-amateur.

Done for pleasure and not profit.}

⊙

A fugue of breath.

Comingling.

There is no room for thought when stood upon only one foot’s toes.

There is just getting oxygen to muscles without falling too hard.

Repeat until the body is too tired to not sleep.

It is not always elegant, and sometimes,

it becomes less so as the progression continues.

Irrelevant.

The point is the intent to doing;

and, the resultant action.

You’ve got to enjoy

the ride

until, abdomen and sides ache from maintaining

unnaturally natural postures.

⊙

It is in this ephemeral space from which

Í best perceive the flowing visions.

Pure restraint,

Time in mind.

Coalescing confluence of the conjunction

of this intersection of dimensions.

Planes upon planes with turtles

all the way down.

⊙

A whirling dervish aside a spiraling top.

Spinning pips and mumbly peg.

I do what I can to pass the time.

Only boring people suffer from boredom.

Says the voice called: don’t stop now.

So, í drop into a planked position.

A push up posture slowly dropped into an upwards arch.

Face presented to the moon.

Folding shoulders

With idiosyncratic impunity,

to own this longing to belong…

Sacred wood is the heaviest to carry,

But the most worthwhile in terms of time to cost,

down to, smouldering, remaining benefits of glowing embers.

Whose odd, red light trembles like magma flows.

And a voice more clearly reveals that it is a musical instrument

when it speaks in languages foreign,

In a strange tongue

that makes my shoulders suddenly fall forward,

caving in

going downwards

Shallowing into empty water lakes

into the above of

each, respective collarbone.

Where skin becomes

shoulder.

Sharply Honed

One is not obligated to the obliging one.

Heads.

Something bespoke is not beholden.

Taíls.

Trail heads.

Heady tales.

⊙

What is my secret?

To appear as though I have a sweet, secret.

This smile whispering to you, making you wonder:

what produces it,

it comes from the desire to make you believe that

í know something that you do not.

To make you wonder until

you must inquire,

“What makes her grin in that

small, lips-closed and

pressed-pursed way?”

To make you want to wipe it off my face,

if you cannot know.

Howl this only makes my grin grow.

Ask me in private, and you will see my upper lip

arch into a sinister snarl.

Because there is no one else t/here.

No one to save you, or overhear the

sound of the feral ferocity,

whose volume keeps rising in my harbour.

Silly beast, it is true:

You are brut(e).

You came for me.

You come to me,

to slay the dragon

stalking me; but, you

now see how it wraps itself around me,

slickly leather wings folding around my shoulders as does a shawl.

See how I play with and stroke the tips of its scaly wings?

It is my shadow companion.

My gossamer wings keeping it warm.

The fire of its breath keeping my second set of wings, steely knives, sharply honed.

This is the power of having an open secret.

Í have nothing to lose by revealing myself, but

you have everything to gain if

í do.

Off-the-cuff Choreography

A bath drawn to

to draw your words.

To soak your bones and remind your greyhound mind

to unwind.

Put the pen and paper away. I have nothing to say: he says.

Excellent. Í don’t wish to take dictation, then.

Ballet slippers donned and satin ribbons laced up my calves.

A custom pair. A parting gift from the corps

following a fall that took my left ankle’s ability to regularly dance en pointe.

There is no visible trace of the bone’s weakness, but I sometimes feel it,

still.

An act now saved for special occasions, and certainly not slick floors of bathing rooms.

But, I can still stand on my toes all day,

A white, gauzey skirt, flowing but slitted, and worn, only at home.

Black, satin camisole, containing little but fully covering.

A pinched waist.

There are valid reasons for dressing the part.

He says: Do your barre work in here. Can you extend each leg to the towel rack?

Yes, my extension is good but my turn-out requires me to warm up. Í’ll start with the countertop.

Familiar feeling of tendons pulling. Straining until a’loose.

Initially struggling to stay tight, they go loose like fretted guitar strings after many plucks.

Í arch my back and bend my spine backwards. It releases its tension more easily.

My arms move slowly like a lava flow.

Í warm my muscles.

Í imagine the heat your body feels, in the still hot bath water.

Í envision the expansion of your blood vessels and the increased flow of your bloodstream,

Therewithin.

The pulsing that your body sensates through the process of acclimating.

Í feel it.

It limbers me.

Í feel your eyes.

Í pretend not to but í delight in knowing that you know that í know that í am

under observation.

The awareness of this suddenly envelopes my attention and í slip from my posture,

but í do not fall.

Oops. Giggle.

Tell me, again, your mythos of Svetlana Zakharova and Robert Bolle.

Í love it when you have me repeat myself.

Well, she is from the Balanchine school, where every movement is lavish and ornate, pronounced and, often, painfully slow. Most male dancers get cast as choreographical fillers. They dance in support of a prima or a principal or a soloist, keeping her held in spotlights in impossible postures. This is changing, though. Bolle was the best at this. But, when he dances with Svetlana, she needed no outside support. She would hold her own positions while he knelt and/or took the spotlight. Her tenacity, strength, gave him a chance to both shine and rest. A chance to breathe. You know í found some of my prostrations from her La Bayadère variation.

He says: I know. The way you wrap your arm about your crown to cup your opposite cheek

My eyes have gone wide.

Í am loose now.

You look ready: he says.

Í know the perfect album: í say, flitting away.

From the other room, í drop the diamond tip to spinning vinyl.

Beaming.

Watch this: í say.

As the music flows.

My eyes remain open but í am not seeing.

Í feel as if becoming music in motion.

Í snake, í extend. Pronounce the flare of hips.

Í make strange signs with my fingers.

Í shift in this solo performance for the audience of the one.

His neck bends back and rests on the tub’s edge, eyes narrowing.

He begins speaking words as they come

to his mind.

There is no need to write these.

He says: I like how you begin with the restraint of ballet proper before losing yourself into more, less classical, feral movements.

Í whisper: ballet is a foundation of five simple positions from which infinite variations may be culled; but, dance is second to second and cannot be predicted, only experienced. It is undomesticated, improvised, choreography at heart.

Vellum pressed on wooden grain

You cannot awaken someone pretending to be asleep: he said.

Making a desk into one’s own.

Write upon me. Pleas: í say.

Priapus’ pen is pushing into papyrus; and, the

song of the sound produces a strange and intoxicating

ability within me to suspend mine own breath.

í hear your eyes speak to me:

If I dropped my pen to the floor,

how hard

would it be to convince you to recover it, for me, in your mouth?

⊙

And, if imagination is a precursor to reality, well,

í have got it in spades,

Howl í can only hope and imagine

Whomever, in this card game, takes the bid calls spades as trumps.

The sunny, shiny queen of magnets is also the

aloof, wide-eyed lady of looking-glass house,

and, wanting, to be

Your night witch.

⊙

Do the pillars ever leave or do they

simply appear

to leave as we move further closer

…

Further

Closer

….

As we imagine our stillness to be actually motion in movement?

/venture forth and know me/, no-one man of wildest dreams.

Howl í howl when í say or do something wild,

like the sweet, little monster í am

And, you respond: I know.

Prove it, pleas/e.

Unrooted.

The silence slaps the sweet smile from my face.

Two dimples disappear and my eyes go wide and watery like reflecting pools.

It was expected, knowing the routine.

Like my cheekbones slipping softly against your inner thighs.

I return of my own volition.

I am into repetition. Can ya tell?

A cassette played and then rewound, to be as the stabilizing soundscape to enhance feeling and gift a smile,

but cared for and never unspooled.

After doing the same action, ten times,

the action becomes anew,

because we extend the potential through practice.

Carrying wood.

Ritualization.

Not new, but still true. Reposted

Like an aged letter.

I am soft today.

Wide-eyed in hope and a hint of previous hurt.

An open vessel never being vacuous.

I embrace it,

whispering in a whimper: hey, let me in.

A Tea Party for your sobering Psychopomp.

Vamp for me, wild thing.

I will howl out the accompaniment to your movements.

The accompaniment as the autumnal ewe fades away,

but before the howling winds of this

fall remove all the leaves from your limbs

And leave You exposed to face the winter

Unrooted.

pendulous periodicity

Locals always laugh at the outfits of outsiders.

Before this autumnal fall,

í, in summer, remember when the sun would not fully go down until the double penetration of digits of the timely hour:

ten o’clock

eleven o’clock.

The midnight sun.

Mooning and fully waxed, then too soonly waning;

like how the free market prefers prefit,

favoring beholden over that which is bespoke and

hand-made.

Hot-air ballons.

so tightly wound, we no longer remember which is the right side of the road

down which to drive.

What of those howling, “sincerity is my only credential?”?

Those who live where the gravity is strange?

Where it pulls at such acutely obtuse angles?

Like shadows of the diabolicals we call hills and valleys.

Leaning forward whilst reaching back in this pendulous periodicity of the multiform streams.

Questioning statements.

The breeze returns. Curt blasts whitecapping the water of the Sound.

My eyes return to your forearms.

Do you think sailors ever smoked to gauge the wind’s direction?: I ask.

There would be other, better ways, I imagine: he says.

But, any so physically and painfully pleasing?: I challenge.

⊙

Hear the sound of my hard swallow

after hearing you

say: no you cannot.

The yield of yielding when facing the inexorable other.

The difference between unmerciful and

mercilessly defines itself now,

Like the vulnerability of engaging in the outrageous.

⊙

Enraged does not imply rage any more than ‘engorged’ does not always imply an

Empurpled structure.

Shutter speeds of my apperature struggle to clearly capture the inside vantage point.

This lurid fecundity from your reinvigoration,

arches my spine into a gateway.

A point of entry becomes created.

⊙

Tell me something good.: he says,

as an outreach.

I say: I chop vegetables and fruits as meditation. Slowly, precisely. I pour my attention and love into the act until it feels as though they butcher themselves. Nourishing before ingesting for nourishment.

Mastery through repetition of action. I heard you swallow hard again, you know.: he replies.

My flow of thoughts continues to stream out from between my lips.

I feel my solar plexus and diaphragm release and tighten as my tongue and mouth shape the exhalations into

spoken sentences, saying:

the vivisection of a tomato is proof of magic and, isn’t it curious that oranges grow on trees whether you have a personal savior or not. I am not religious but I see the miraculous in much of the mundane. A habit can habituate into passé routine without proper inspection or

it may alchemicalize, under our will, into ritual.

Ssshhh. Your mind is always restless, do you think?: he quietly interrupts.

I think I feel a strange pleasure at you asking questions to which you already know the answer. And, yes my mind is. It takes a great deal of restraint on my part, to make it still.: I say.

Proper restraint is how we unleash ourselves and run wild.: says his voice.

The upward inflection on his final word gave the appearance of sounding like a question, even though

it is a statement.

The fall of a trip.

A pair of mended pantyhose, rationed from back during war time, hang on a wire, until dry, next to a patio railing lined with salted peanuts made as an offering to the nervous yet inquisitive Stellar’s Jays.

How I appear; how I am; how I perceive.

I first steeped in the blues near the delta shores of Muscle Shoals, as a child.

Families singing songs since forgotten by most places where time flows through you more quickly.

/ the grandfather clock was too tall for the shelf, but as it weighed,

not a penny,

not a penny, weighed more/

A pendulous arm with a weighted ball

pivots about the point of suspension.

Ticking out time in mono sound.

Watch it and I will show you how that strange land taught me to turn five seconds into three æons.

⊙

And, I write these words, first, by longhand to show how inane I can be; and,

to see those recognizing

kindness is kin of open-mindedness.

⊙

Sometimes I get a little...:howls the singer.

/And, when nobody’s there to write it, I’m gonna show you everything…/

/and, I can feel it in the silence…/

/why dont you come take a trip with me./

⊙

An emptied vessel is not necessarily vacuous; but, to

presume it is craven to be filled, is teleological fallacy.

Without trying,

{still}

a cistern is what it is:

Bits of sand transmuted into glass blown

to be exploded and then recapitulated.

Sea glass is simply sandy trash recycled.

⊙

I found the open secret viz a viz a well-marked rabbithole

with a spray painted perimeter to warn that

you fall at your own sweet risk.

A sound not a bay.

I am the subtle magnetic force trying to kindly shift

your aged space and the immediacy of your moments.

Or, is that you?

Pulls of the polarized enliven me.

Maybe I am your current, optimal conditions,

an ideal, unidyll ether enabling materialization.

I see from the lonely vacuum without feeling alone.

Electric light and natural radiance.

A backlit screen,

The sun striking the pages of written text in a newly opened book.

Lidar and black holes howling in polite algorithmic rhythm.

The Oxford comma not being used within

sentences always running-on.

⊙

A’stood between two pillars of trees

with bark gnarled from time,

coarse like hands that can carry wood and graphite,

my writing flows

forward and backward.

And, simply saying, “hush” can be a come and turn-on to the fretted strings.

⊙

I see success is your proof; and, it

arouses need to draw your reaction.

Your attention.

So when you ask: Do you see?

I respond: I know.

Because I want to hear

You ask me: you know what, exactly?

i know my eyes want to watch your eyes: I reply with sheepishly calculated vulnerability.

⊙

I can see you enter a hypothetical room and

stand still.

Hell knows what I’d be doing, but

I know

I would stop doing it at the sight of your site.

To read you, without words,

your reaction. The response received from your eyes, without smiles.

Feeling as a fool tossing a coin with the Fates.

⊙

I ran with you in dreams last night: I say.

And, I understood the difference between a cagey connoisseur and a common collector: I think.

A coattailer or a partner in crime.

You tell me: your hair is a kudzu trail twisting down a terrace in tresses of winding locks.

⊙

These things are integral, like a well-timed laugh,

yet, they reduce to simple vibrations and shudders.

I live by a body of water

that is a sound oft confused for a bay.

But, my bays sound

like a whispered suggestion:

Come and bathe with me, Archimedes.

Verba Eclipsata

The ascent of a scent,

warm and humid like southern nights.

A recollection of something never had yet still known,

like the smell of a world existing prior to the industrial revolution.

Encoded in all minds, like a forgotten dream suddenly recalled.

“It’s curious how ‘illicit’ is used more than ‘licit.’ ”

“That’s not what I’ve come to discuss.”

“Are you sure about that?”

The livery stable holds a horse rode hard and put up wet.

From the projection of the rider’s own limbic system,

thereby was a scythe observed

being cleaned

off in a river of cortisol,

and, then, resheathed into the odd, wrappings

made of hide.

The harmony of the discord between a

sympathetic

And

parasympathetic

nervous system that is only given rest through

relentless fight or flight.

The capture and surrender of two individual, respective attentions.

Things contained and separated by encasings of skin.

Verba Eclipsata Intende A Dinspir.

Going Native

Taut red skin

Mercury droplets shifting, smearing.

The scent of the vanilla extract.

A compromise made in offering to being uncompromising,

to be compromised.

Reclamation of a piece of land left to lie fallow

after slash and burn farming.

Going native is just realizing your root.

A gift economy.

Pearl eats Oyster

The wex of supplication

The hex of self-sacrifice.

An aloe juice applied.

A smoked cigarette.

for supplication

of abasement.

⊙

Simplicity may dissolve into

a unity of psychic diversity.

Four bases produce

endless genotypes producing

infinite phenotypes.

The nature of nurture or lack thereof.

The art of service:

The difference between

I’m happy to help.

&

I’m glad to help.

Private humility

Laughing in the darkness of that which gifts you discomfort.

Where strangers are seldom seen.

⊙

I make circles. Keep up with my eyes.

Let it all be a tactical, tactile trick.

Kind brats of men move my pen.

See and know. Bathe with and clean.

Tepid water tested by toes while the ewer of a

faucet head drips.

⊙

Wake from a lucid dream into sleep paralysis at a touch of skin.

Churlish obstinacy and insubordination.

An affixed clothe-spin stinging like an inability to articulate.

A sheet hanging until until no longer wet.

The silence of the narcissist to the empath.

The empathic, giggling punishment of a narcissist.

A fretted string strung too tightly,

coiled to snap like a cobra.

A mouse that

turns out

to be a mongoose.

The extension of legs when moving from flat footed

to en pointe.

A swan taking flight.

A hunter knowing a swan strays not too far from its pond.

The thrill and repulsion of an irregular pearl who consumes

and swallows the oyster muscle.

.

Sweeping up

Sweep me off my feet.:he said.

This was different.

The difference between breathless and breathlessness.

I could set fruit on you.

⊙

I’ve been dreaming of restaurant work. Not stress dreaming.

The other night I was seating songs on the dining room floor.

Color swirls and wave patterns that

you could not

visually perceive yet

you still see

And, they made hummin’ noises.

Dreamy little lilts that were not parts of the songs they represented.

⊙

I just got off a great yawn of a breath.

⊙

Imagine the inconceivable: you say.

Well,: I say: gladly, assuming you recognize

you have requested i prove gödel’s sentence g

[trans. The very constructs of the query are technically

impossible to prove by the rules

enlivening the question as reasonable to me.]

⊙

I look up and

my neck cranes over my left shoulder,

to shudder and squint into the sun.

The moon will be in its place soon enough.

Unidyll Cads

Some of us are born out of synch with time

, revealing shady shadows

hazy

making weird and wet.

Even now the power lines can be seen as

demarcators between sky and Sound

, the lie and the allusion of a false horizon.

As, it is not a two dimensional axial tangle where water meets sky

It enjoins the earthen solid with the heavens and the sea.

Like how I could not see the mountains to my left

, for a solid month. And

, upon, seeing them

, to only mis-take them to be transient clouds of vagrancy.

The crows take their nuts

, chucked down to the Pavement below.

The chickadees take and taste everything fearlessly.

The Stellars’ Jays need lots of attention

, carrying boomboxes slung over their left wing

, blaring The Boys are Back in Town.

The junkos take nothing but simply get caught in condo hallways above parking decks.

The hummingbirds

, they come with simple ferocity for the taste of sugar water.

And a staccato strikes repeatedly. In time

, I take action.

My left hand flips an ancient

, anchor Roman coin.

(No calling heads or tails

, as there is simply Janus).

Flick

, twirling woosh

, palm-slap catch.

My right hand plays with a switchblade knife.

Opened.

Balanced upon the the knuckles

, then

Pwap

Balanced upon the underside of the knuckles

, my palm open skyward.

Spinning the web of a mesmorist to lay your tired greyhound mind to rest.

Notice howl the flare of nostril changes the shape of your lungs’ breath.

/and, nobody cares, especially me. But, I can’t help myself/

As I fall back awake from sleep.

/the intolerable lucidity of insomnia/ wrote Jorges Borges (The Circular Ruins).

The Art of Dreaming authored Carlos Castaneda after years of staying up all night.

The Voice of Knowledge wrote the nagual.

Shadowboxers fighting in the sunshine are oft under

Appreciated.

Parçigal Waxes for Æ

A man I pass every morning told me, yesterday: you must be a native, dressed like that.

I wore a pallet of grey, black, and brown.

I assumed it was these colors that made him say such a thing.

Then, I saw myself.

A native alien in this strange land,

but four hundred years before now.

An imposter amongst the indigenous.

A civilized lady gone native.

A warrior savage with hunters who fall with her.

And, now, I see that

the Sound is water and sky together.

A point of infinity from whence we cannot distinguish air from liquid.

And, now, dearheart, night became itself.

The moon waxes nearly full,

jumping from one side of the street to the other,

as I snake around two city blocks. And,

even clearer now does the tower

with twenty seven windows crumble before mine eyes.

I built those eleven steps to its front door two decades ago.

Where many may think: what has become of my work?

I think: that old thing is still standing?! Didn’t Æ cry “to dispose of this” as the Philistines yelled at Daniel in a Lion’s den.

But, see,

I know: a lioness does well in a lion’s den.

All I want.

I don’t want your money. I want your time: I tell him.

But, time costs…: he smiles, tapering off.