Category: Writing

An unapology using pre-postmodern memes

A millenial tried to explain to me why emojis and gifs of memes are a better means of communicating.

“Talking by phone is a drag.”

“Speaking face to face, even precovid, nearly an impossibility.”

“And, using the written word? So tedious and time consuming.”

(If bored just scroll through the images below.)

~

As a gal born in the early 1980’s, I often feel stranded between two realities.

Yes, I always used a word processor to do my school essays.

Yes, I had to go to a library in early days to gain access to said PC.

No, I did not grow up with the internet until my early teens.

No, I have not always had a cell phone. Not until college. And, I quite enjoyed my dumb phone.

Yes, I may be a soul more befitting of the 1920’s.

Immediate conclusion?

Screw your shortcuts.

Screw your sitting before a tv and watching movies, then snipping these to create a gif to speak for thee.

Screw your desire to make a digital smiley face to show me that you are happy.

Then, I recalled all the symbols I painstakingly learned to express things antiquatedly.

Do millenials actually recall the origin of the word “meme“¿

Here is my attempt to show that meaning to thee.

An eggplant is not a clever reference to sexuality. At least, not to me.

Antiquated symbols offer an erudite aesthetic beauty not found in millennial symbology.

~

I can describe the entire sky, at any moment in time, with the following.

I wager the people whom created these were chastised by their contemporaries, for staring at the sky too long. Much like I accused thee of staring at the tv.

But, yeah, I find these much more charming.

Of biology and chemistry, the simplistic can be communicated thusly.

Of the self referential nature of the most basic of mathemagics, perhaps, we may express the most, irrespective of the language through which we spoke.

Of philosophical logic, holy howl…I feel the need to apologize before even getting started.

(But, before we begin, consider then…

“Nothing matters” is another way to say “everything is meaningful”.
Negation elimination states that anything follows from an absurdity.

What if the proposition, “nothing matters” is meaningful? Logical absurdity.

You have proved meaning by saying “nothing means anything”.

Undercutting the nihilistic philosophy.)

Whether the weather? Yes, symbols can speak to that.

You take a prescription? Well, here is how they speak about you, behind the counter.

While we could get into calculus and statistics, we shall keep it simple, stupid and talk of basic physics.

Yes, many symbols seem the same; but, remember, context is everything.

be

Picayune and jejune.

Still your tongue, little one.

I take notes of that which you do not say.

Do as thou wilt and keep silent about what might may.

Be.

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

A finger over closed lips subverts avoidable mishaps.

The first step to alchemize gold is not brash.

It is bold.

the strange peach’s stone

A faint light briefly illuminates the window across the way. It makes me wonder what changed interiorly.

A downy softness surrounds me today.

Time moves slowly.

Suddenly surprised, hearing geese honking. Flying higher than the lowly, snowy cloud cover.

A silly goose once puffed up and squared off with me, during an unintentional path crossing.

I backed down quickly, alarmed at how alarming it found me to be.

It makes me wonder of the owl who used to visit and play with me.

Twice swooping and snatching at the breezy, long ties of my sleeveless shirt.

It subsequently perched on the lowest limb of the nearest tree.

A father and his child came to see and commented of its beauty.

I stared at them, speechless and dumbstruck, still and in awe of what had just happened to me.

The great bird was tufted. Signifying it may have originated from the underworld.

What spirit concerns itself with me?

Here it comes: the strange peach’s stone of a memory, sitting in my stomach

heavily.

So, I write backwards in Hebrew, which feels like forward to me; and, whilst I know the characters, I know not that which they mean.

Pure, pleasing automatic writing before I play.

a medicant

My patron saint must be Augustine for I have nothing to give but The(se) Confessions.

Tolle lege.

When you find meaning in everything, everything suddenly becomes overwhelming.

Sannyasi is a medicant whose anagram corresponds to [dictamen].

Dictamen en Español/a equals opinion. In English, it is a pronouncement. Rule.

The plural? Dictamina.

I am æ’scribe, a vessel, a medium.

My sacred Contract.

Rubbing this pebble until it becomes a philosopher’s stone. The Great Work.

The rite of writing.

I know the goat, Baphomet, but only casually; yet, s/he asks me to call they/them by another sobriquet.

S/he asks me to play my favorite game, inquiring “What is the difference between

[CAVALRY] and [CALVARY]?”

“How very cavalier this question is which Y’all ask of this cavalier servente.”

They laugh; because, I have responded with a statement asking them to acknowledge the difference between two very different things.

“Parçigal sounds presumptuously pretentious,” they reply.

“She has not sounded at all, in ages, seemingly.”

what of we?

Flowing like the blood of Abraham of Worms.

“To serve and fear,” he promised, along with gifting ten gold florins.

Sounds like the needed Judas.

Without villains, how do we know that ostensible hero?

What of we who relate to the in-between called ‘antiheroes’?

An alarm screams.

No siren, but a klaxon doppleganging.

To bind the demons, must you first summon them?

An odd gambit given that you may not have had their attention initially.

Diamonds of snow falling, whilst I read the broken man whose sobriquet is Lewis Carroll.

Here do I call him out by his birth name: Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.

And, any fan knows Alice’s hair was brown, not blonde.

An erudite form of witness protection.

Links

Hello, dear partners in crime,

I am excited to have an ekphrastic piece up on the delightfully prolific Experiments in Fiction site.

You can check it out here.

EIF Ekphrastic Challenge: The Results

Two other fantastic writers are also featured. You can show them some love, too!

Misky: https://thetwiglets.wordpress.com/2021/02/09/twiglet-213/

Ron Rowland: https://ronrowland.com/lets-embrace/

Also featured is artwork and thoughts from renaissance man Nick Reeves.

perhaps this is what they call jazz?

the derivation of.

I try to catch him; but, I continue to miss him.

Once you gift a sobriquet, you lose all control.

Wolves in winter howling at the moon,

then listening with no other purpose than to hear.

The call and response of a preponderance of silence.

This is an answer.

Echoes across the canyon.

A loneliness in a crowd.

Wanting to be in rooms where the players lick their wounds, where the second hand smoke makes your lungs hurt the following day.

A reminder you are alive because it brings you closer to the stone and farther from the forceps.

▪︎

I move through time backwards.

I am younger the more I age.

No mere howls.

Magic so high it is all but taken for granted.

The line where sky meets land is unclear.

There is a hidden seam somewhere.

▪︎

An ochlophobia of ochlocracy, along with the oddment and its odoriferous.

Œnomel stings across my nostrils and coats my throat.

And, I taste the œvre of his lifetime.

A thick honey cloys.

The best people are salted with a touch of unrespectability:

too much disgusts,

just enough delights, and,

none at all renders bland.

▪︎

The harrowing of hell taught us how nature abhors a vaccum.

Soteriology does not necessitate an orthodoxy.

I hear you child. Let me show you alchemy is mathematical.

The derivation of a unit circle before the golden ratio.

Bohemian Phoenix

I used to be a Sky Teller, back in the prehistoric.

A’sat still, watching the welkin change.

Divination by changing cloud cover,

reading the weather like tarot.

Mystics struggle with the trappings of modernity.

◇

I remember the night when all the stars fell.

My parents thought me fast asleep; but,

thinking something does not make it necessarily so.

So, I crept outdoors and froze,

star struck in horrific awefulness.

◇

I saw blazing comets plummeting.

They looked like rapidly descending jellyfish,

sinking from the the Firmament to our Below.

Poussière d’étoiles

◇

And, in that instant, my soul became

restless; and,

I knew my heart would never hold still again.

And, I became a hum’bird long before I turned into the ibis.

pebble once cast

I wolf whistle, lowly.

Two fingers pushed between parted lips, touching tongue.

And, I wonder…

Why do people need writing prompts?

They preempt.

Suggestions not needed.

Explicit requests enjoyed, nonetheless.

°

“You think I was talking about you?” he asks.

“It doesn’t matter. I heard you, anyhowl,” I say.

°

This, something, but, not just anything.

Head hazy open because it is heavy.

°

An attractive, not unwelcome, nuisance.

Needing to be handled. Straightened out.

Make hard to render malleable.

Remade and dripping.

Thumb it your mouth, moth.

Carry your hardwood.

I can carry the water.

I still thumb the pebble you once cast to me.

purposeful farce of her reasoning.

And, of the methodology of social studies, the lady spoke, saying,

“It should be art and not science.”

Make it poetry, not dictum.

■

Art inspires; science Informs.

science is Hard. judges.

Art is soft. Encourages.

one is known by how it Does;

One is known by the noun containing It.

A real Kant of a reckoning:

The false premise that existence is a predicate.

■

Existing adds nothing to the essence of a being.

De quocumque prædicatur aliquid quod non.

Of whomsoever it is used in reference to something which is not.

■

Ontological argument:

one is observer bias.

One is observer effect.

But, Which is which and of whom is Who?

■

Make it unironically magnanimous.

Make it impervious to dogma susceptible to leveraging.

Make it conversational and able to play devil’s advocate with no consequence.

■

The difference between a petty enemy and a formidable foe is metaphysically existential.

The Art of making a soft dialectic is the diabolical epitome of all that is Holy and Hard, of having an ally in the brethren of the adversarial.

■

“Let the catbird/s sing,” she whispers.

“All that is well and good;” he redundently says, “but, how do we pragmatically comply with this epistle?”

“How should I know? I’m a poet not a scientist,” she concedes, giggling at the purposeful farce of her own reasoning.

♤

(And for the Time-Being, she continues to enjoy the half and half in her coffee.)

rite before this winter.

And, the quick of a moment felt so sad that even her burger seemed a dash bleu.

It was not, to her chagrin.

She always doted on cheesy ones.

■

She makes sure to try to sound measured because it’s the thing to do when she feels so unmeasured.

And, how still it is and how alone this is.

Small and full; tall and hungry.

Orestes and the Erinyes fighting over family improprieties.

She could write a myth lickety split.

Mice in high heeled, specially blown, glass slippers are the new beauty queens; because, in this pandemic climate, only the prettiest of the common vermin thrive.

Rodents cleansing the wicked.

Nut cracking and just in time for the holidays, come the Furiæ.

Three sannyasins of the Erinyes.

One of whom is Megaera, tempest decrying oath breaking authority.

■

Carrying wood yields returns in words, historically.

Nemo auditur propriam turpitudinem allegans.

■

She had once been found to be part of a common scold,

just another pretty shrew.

Some illegitimate, termagent harpy, ranting and bullying.

A peevish, malignant, clamorous, spiteful, vexatious, and turbulent one.

But, by this reckoning, he is found to be more shrew than she.

Augustįne in autumn

the tweezers I lost

I, coaxed under the quilt, am.

Say the following, aloud, three times:

~guilt~

~less~

~inning~.

Through open shutters, panes, and, screens does the breeze force a shudder from these

curtains.

And, you try to wait for the good ones to come; but,

meanwhile, you wonder,

Is the barre too high?

He could pull a hamstring, stretching,

while I’m stood there,

en pointe, waiting.

(((Suddenly, the tweezers I lost,

they appear(

after a lengthy diatribe) delivered to Know~One)

Socratic Circles….)

…I told you I’d try)

((( (…) )))

And, like a moth, I wait for his light to turn on;

yet,

were they to read this, each might think it’s about him.

Bringing the medicine of chaos, I return.

Full and hollow like a cæctus tree.

A talented rearranger.

At the end of the day, before bedtime, a poet is simply a talented rearranger.

The end of the thought starts with, “to let me use the words of another.”

The bass voices sink the harmony; weighted and anchored anglers’ lines

reeling.

⊙

Battened down with closed windows.

The marine layer of the Sound meeting wild, smokey arboreal particulate,

here in the convergence zone.

And, her windowsills have been sealed tight well-over eighty hours.

Yet, her eyes burn and itch anyways.

She figured past smoking would better serve her presently.

⊙

And, there remains the novel

Virus

Innoculum.

⊙

And, sometimes, sleeping suspends;

so, she plays with shadows and lights,

(while her door hopefully bæres the passover mark)

…

Curtain ampersand Apperature.

Sans breezy volumes of infinite emptiness, posed.

Avec ennui

possessed.

Pretty Bird and his Lady Zen Archer.

A Fury of Fugue/s: A Diabolicalogue

“Why did you become a hermit¿” Hafiz asks me.

“I didn’t. I went to the desert on a horse with no name. It felt good to be out of the rain. In the desert, you can’t remember your name,” Æ replies on my behalf, using the words of others.

Alice interjects, giggling, “And, if you do not know your name, only but No-Body can call you in from the garden to study!”

Ms. Dautrieve asks her, “Were you there to tend and care for the vine?”

Looking down, underground, “No, I was just playing in the dirt,” Alice replies.

Hafiz, laughing, “Stubborn women.”

“Æ contains multitudes, don’t judge me for my biological gender,” I say on Æ’s behalf.

Hafiz, “Okay. Y’all are stubborn. Period. Full stop.”

Alice, “EYY Haaa, HEE, Haw!”

Even Ms. Dautrieve joins in brayin’ and kickin’

I am laughing out, “You asses!”

☆

Hafiz begins shaking their head.

Shakti rising in me, almost invisible except for presenting in a single arched eyebrow.

Bacchus, stamping and taking swipes in the soil, appearing as the uncastrated bull.

The Trickster spins down to the ground as a spider doing a silk dance down it’s own web, before becoming a coyote.

Negrune, the awesome Lovecraftian, lumbering beast towers into a meatball of a docile pitbull.

And, I espy with mine brown eyes, Merlin, the only wizard appearing without vizard.

So, I address him first, asking, “What’s the difference between a sorcerer and a wizard?”

He laughs and Secret Chiefs gather nearer to better hear

His reply of, “What’s the difference between a wizard and a warlock? A sorcerer and a witch? A mountain and a molehill¿”

And now We Are All howling in laughter at this pile of nonsense we pylon.

☆

“Æ knows! Who wants to play King of the Hill¿!” cries Alice, elated at the fit of giggles to which these would-be adults are reduced.

The Trickster immediately rushes to the highest ground.

Negrune growls, slowly encroaching on The Coyote.

Ms. Dautrieve simply and politely raises her hand in affirmation.

Bacchus prepares his ill-advised bullrush.

Alice sizes up the more masculine beasts, already competing but only after briefly contemplating.

“Only if Æ can be Bobby!” I giggle, willfully missing the point before trying to be purposefully confusing.

Hafiz sits themselves down, to watch, in mild amusement.

Æ spreads itself to all through The Litany called pneuma.

Waiting or stranded?

Waiting….stranded between two sonars.

Forceps;

Shesatyr with Familiar;

Stone.

Make it funky.

“I’m okay, today. Just okay,” she tells her, continuing on, “I so want to be a normie.”

“Between you and me, I think normies are a bit of a boring, drag,” she replies to her.

~

And, I think I see a splinter in your eye; but, I fear I am mistaking it for the log impaling mine.

So, she takes a walk.

It is mistimed; because, the sun is so bright she must cast down her eyes instead of holding her head high.

In her cans, she hears someone play chord C on a piano, repetitively.

Middle C.

And, while she cannot count the time, she times the steps of her feet.

Four between each.

The iterations end.

A voice asks her “What shall we play next?”

“Doesn’t matter much to me. Just

make it funky.”

I’m used too

” ‘There, art thou happy’?” asks Æ.

“No, I’m simply okay because I feel crummy,” says I.

“You are impressed with my quote though, yes?”

“No. It’s derivative and you know it.”

“But, he was a great writer, yes?”

“He did what he did and by “he,” I mean a slew of people. ‘Shakespeare’ is over-rated.”

“Someone is on their soapbox.”

“I am a shorty trying to feel taller. ”

“You are a coward.”

“That’s exactly the sort of thing a coward would say to me.”

“You saying I’m scared?”

“No.”

“What are you saying then?”

“I’m saying I do no not want to say anything.”

“But, you won’t shut up.”

“Neither will you.”

“You used to be a good writer.”

“No. I am a writer, you just used to relate to what I said.”

Show myself

My shoulders don’t just fold;

they collapse.

My upper lip moves, caught on a hook

being tugged by an unseen angler.

My lungs forget how to work.

My brain refuses to accept the notion that people want to show kindness to strangers.

They.

My fingers sign as though suffering a rheumatoid attack.

Snout buried.

And, in this moment,

I wish to become invisible.

But,

I show myself anyways.

Leaf Left

Passing time with this final leaf left.

Fighting sleep, fighting hunger and dehydration.

Why?

I could not tell you.

Begging Death to come for me so I can fight him off again.

Purpose.

A caterpillar abseiling down to pupate until I can get to wherever I’m going.

Fast and free.

A corvid in the time of covid

Outside my red barn door sounds the ferryman’s horn.

He smells the stink of my freedom,

his fishers of wo/men casting rods with wormed hooks.

¤

I listen; and,

the automated time operator says, “after the beep it will be eight eleven o’clock.”

¤

I espy,

perched, a corvid in the time of covid.

¤

Together, we watch the casting of lines,

the sinkers dragging down the lures,

bobbers poised to tattle if I bite the bait.

¤

But, I don’t.

Together, we hold still.

Ellipses kissing

¤

{

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□■□■□■

□□□■■■

□□■■□□

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}

¤

And, when the late afternoon light becomes all a bit too bright,

the bird and I retreat within

to watch my curtains’ shifting as they breathe with the Sound’s breeze

We calculate the curvaceous calculus of the wind’s volume,

inside the cavernous gutted carcass of the scarlet barn.

¤

I ask the oscine passerine a riddle of

equality regarding the allotment of the equine,

“Can you divide a dead, old man’s seventeen horses in proper proportions between his three sons?”

The old crow caws out a throated laugh and asks, “Can you tell me the mathematical significance of the eight of wands?”

¤

It is technically a statement.

It is phrased as a figurative question¿

¤

In the evening, silent, we conspire about

The Great Escape

through the bramble of branches, not the seam of the green where we’d be

upwind and easy for the Dogs.

Shall we carry squeak toys just in case they get a whiff of our freedom¿