I observe him when he does not know I æm there.
Who he is when know~one is seemingly æround.
An ænimal in his natural state.
Sacrosanct
His eyes go soft and unfocused.
His voice rises in pitch, ælmost imperceptibly.
Beauty without æwareness.
A repeated, unconcious nod recurring.
Like præying.
Stalking like æ big cat,
Æ Espy with mine brown eyes.
Shining teeth and blooms of the moon.
The watering can found overturned this morn; spilt was last night’s prepared water.
I tried to tell you, “let it age,” yet, what you heard was, “it is not a game.”
What was actually said only Know~One knows,
because having a steno pad is not the same as having a stenographer.
Shorthand and chicken scratch scrawlings.
Pecking and clucking.
A woman once asked my paternal grandfather,
“What do you do with an mean rooster?”
He replied, “take your hands and hold him beneath the water until he falls a bit still.”
So, she did.
Upon coming too, the bird nearly tore her eyes out.
“You did not hold him under long enough,” he dead-panned,
when she presented her grievance to him.
Careful whose advice you follow,
particularly if they keep one hand in their pants’ pocket.
Might just be a touch of sardonic, Louisiana Southern gothic.
I always watch the cycles of the moon.
They pull the tides of my feminine theatre.
Waking at six in the morn to watch the Worm moon squiggle to its setting.
Eagerly awaiting the egg moon aka the pink moon.
I put the snake’s oil over my face.
I slick back my long hair because, you know, the devil’s in there.
A Good Friday.
A potato casserole with green onions and sour cream.
Comfort.
A lamb wilt
Be grilled.
A key.
Lime.
And, what frightens is often the deepest kindness.
A casted shadow is dark, but only because it derives from the sunlight’s strike.
Embrace.
He moves slowly.
Brow wiped against triceps brachii.
Dewy and salty. Deep inhalation.
Restrained.
Wild hairs blowing in the humid breeze.
Turned inward. Toes pointing towards the other foot’s toes.
Face downwards, yet eyes casting up.
Observant. Quiet spoken.
A grin never breaking into a toothy smile.
Piqued.
Piquet.
As one dies, so is one reborn.
With an eye on the sparrow and his one eye on mine.
And, the singers of hymns look at me sideways, and the modernity looks on with eyes rolled at me.
Stranded between two sonars.
But, know what?
I sing because I am happy,
I sing because I’m glad.
I sing out of key, yet, wholeheartedly.
Because I am free and here is spring.
Therein does the majesty of existence fill my heart.
Words re read.
Albums relistened to before the w/hole becomes the sink/ing w/hole.
Words whispered as memories forgotten but felt like meteoric impact
striking land surface.
We are many.
They are few.
And, you likely misunderstood.
Recollection of the woods of a mill creek coupled with a salmon’s ladder,
no longer used.
Clever fish.
Not you; but, but who I used
to be.
A joke named Syd Arthur reduces me to my knees.
Hesse and Mann.
And, me with determined purposelessness.
Speak with your face and fingertips.
Louder than words uttered.
Understated is better than stated.
And, one can tell many things about another one, by how they treat a vegetable.
The way they wash, the knife they choose and how they slice.
Dice thrown; and, the dye cast.
What music shall I choose to play for this death.
Even vegans must confess life feeds on life feeds on life.
Does that empurpled onion reduce you
To tears?
A seasoned cast iron skillet does not need soap.
Brushed with bristles.
Oiled up and then left alone.
A serrated saw to slice tomatoes to preserve their fleshly consistency.
A fat, straight blade to make onions pay for arrogance.
Slapping herbs in the face, to conjure the aromatic gift.
The coolness of cilantro is a hipster’s voice you desire to hear but also wish would shush.
Tasting whilst you bring demise because you wilt not be caught up in surprise
At what you create.
And, should you tell me, “I do not cook.”
I wonder, “Why does fear of failure have you so shook?”
Prostrate before a pinch of sea salt.
The kindly courtesan whom doth correct all.
Pray for the favorable countenance of a full garlic clove.
This is enclave.
Like how clothes made from cheesecloth may suit one’s fancy, thereby, I reserve the right to mispell words in ways that pleas me.
Intentional irony. Is that a definition of satire?
<my eyelashes innocuously and stupidly batting>
The brief rain smelt of Alabama in its kindest springtime offerings.
The weather done did my hair.
Humidity curling my tresses like wrapping ribbon struck and pulled against a scissors edge.
Popping curls like my ass and cunt twerking.
Locking into this collision course.
And, in this northeastern dry climate, the slightest bit of humidity becomes me and makes me brazen enough to speak á la a way uncummly.
The intentional rye~bald, of an insecure man’s combover.
I come on too strong when I feel too unsmall.
A tiny mouse can tower. But, when other vermin shrink,
I over think
my place.
And, you kunst get my joke without finding it to be funny.
Because, rite now that is as good as an hysterically laughing crack~owl.
My cauldron bubbles in its boil. A sacred prayer to the dead man chicken in my pot.
And, the last three years have been such an eternity that any song both brings me to proudly stand on toes with limbs extending past 90° to Earth’s curvature.
Whilst also reducing me to tears without my understanding why.
The legacy and curse of a dancer’s ballet-cy.
Words invented while subterfuge may whisper context.
Lost on most of my friendly vigilantes.
And whilst a boiling cauldron sounds dramatic, it is nothing more than a beautiful breast in spices, the most important of which being garlic.
Whole cloves and bay leaves.
Magic so simply esoteric that many mistake it for being erudite.
Just read, sweet things.
Nothing more simplistically
Put
Into a proper place.
And, the uninitiated may unabashedly speak volumes whilst claiming the Heyoka status.
When did admitting yourself to be The Fool become so unseemingly.
Chicken nervously almost cooked and begging shredding.
And the act requires meticulous tediousness.
Yet, if you want to consume a sacrificed carcass should anything less be expected?
And I miss the Jamaican aroma. Unallowed here. But, the rite of alcohol pales.
The breast resists shredding.
Respect for sacrifice;
so I rest
before the rebeginning
You want to see my shape cut?
I care not.
Can you tie a proper knot?
Does your patience stand the test
of sailors hoisting masts?
When this I don, it is my pleasure.
Yours, sir? It matters naught.
I know it pleases thee, such from this do I draw your reaction.
Lie down. Lay down. Bow at my altar.
For what I do is for me and not for thee.
Cowards of necessity cower in my wake;
and, from me, you produce not a single shake.
Make yourself and leave me to be what Æ wilt.
My impatience becomes me and makes the Fool of thee.
Know your place because I find mine sans shame.
Hush.
You speak of power; but, from me thoust draws thine.
“Oh my, my, what of the raven? Is it you?” I am asked.
“No. I am quite simply not into carrion,” is my reply.
“What are you in to?”
“Being the last bird to leave before the storm; then, being the first to return.”
“An ibis?”
“Yes, which is also a Phœnix.”
“How so?”
“A Phœnix appears to rebirth itself from a flame’s ashes; but, it is illusion. Everyone fled the mælstorm. I never died, you left; and, upon your return, you assumed me to be reborn.”
“The truth is then?”
“I neither left nor died. I simply survived.”
Say hello just as you once waved goodbye.
I respect Silence’s blame; I miss thee just the same.
From me does the Stillness urge a disquieting benevolence coalescing into
this grievance.
The plasmatic burst of a coronal flare turns to a sickly flame’s green glare.
The Universe wrought itself from naught and therein do we return,
Unto a new Form.
A Thing will fall apart only to be remade into a newly fitted part.
The queen of Magnets insists on polarity because Friction is necessary.
Heresy and hearsay do not become me. Yet are they my Necessity.
Shed the veil and show thine face.
I wilt hold your place.
So tumble and flail. Howl like a feral dog into your Fog.
This peculiar part is ever of less Proportion to the W/hole.
And, the peace thou dost seek, upon being found, will be abhorred.
Until evermore.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
And, the girl laughed because she made a small error in her breathing exercise;
but, she kept her rhythm and regarded the incorrect exhalation as a ‘wrong’ key struck on a piano.
“I must keep to the tempo. What matters is the playing, not striking the ‘right’ key.”
She turned to the cat, Dinah, to see if she agreed.
Dinah had noticed nothing; and, this made the girl giggle harder and wonder:
Who is the pet and who is the master?
The girl had been thinking about thinking.
Dinah was being.
And, the girl wonders, if she cannot trust herself, why should she trust her mistrust of herself.
Then, she realized she was figuratively
asking a seashell for a sermon
instead of admiring it with determined purposelessness.
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.
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
There’s inconsistent consonance amidst the constant dissonance; and,
it makes her so tired that she could not possibly sleep.
This continent of consonants sees few vow well.
The scent of an uncapped pen’s ink funnels up her philtrum to violate her nostrils.
It makes her wet.
■
The sun grew too bright, so she saved her daylight time to accrue an extra midnight hour.
Preparing for Persephone, abiding until the winter solstice.
Her handwriting abruptly changes its font; and, she understands she is now taking dictation from a new source.
■
So, she stalks the coquettish house in the ebony of the deep evening,
listening to its moans as she strides down the strange steps of the home’s erogenous zones.
The walls writhing in their dripping striptease,
scraped off wallpaper revealing more wallpaper covering more wallpaper.
Hard wood floors caressing her soles with cold smooth.
Door jambs whisper secrets most care not to know.
Roof hovering, dominating, hiding the stars that may be falling.
Too many patterns pronounce; and, she’s so consumed by seeing them that she forgets to keep looking.
The Truth of a trickster may be bald and unabashed; but,
it is never ugly.
■
She is an unoccupied sleeve of a cigarette vending machine.
Coin plinked, toggle tugged, message received:
Brand loyalty is an unaffordable luxury in times of scarcity.
So, smoke ’em if you got ’em, for tomorrow we die, again.
She pours two fingers of spirit, then tops it with two more until only the thumb remains.
■
The Holy Ghost resents the Father and the Son; but,
holds the Fallen Madonna(,) dear.
So, She houses the Spirit tightly
against Her breasts
because God doesn’t talk to Her;
and, She refuses to speak to angels.
■
The chaotic neutral must be just that
because a single leaf fell here instead of there.
WrittenCasey 