A creative writing blog
Every seat but yours coated with dust.
On the screen, the film flickers silently
between grainy images of her dancing,
stretching and yawning by the window.
The usher tires of this nightly routine
of wordless dismissals at your shoulder.
It’s up to you now to turn your back
and shuffle lonesome toward the exits.
Let your slow stride cast a silhouette
that stretches over the screen as you go.
Let the brightness of the dawning day
blind you as you push open the doors.
I wanted to hold her through
that starless winter night
but everything inside
(table set for two,
bed half unmade)
was washed in the cold
of her absence.
Easier to hold the silence
than to risk laying bare
your porcelain fragility,
And easier, easier too
to smile in feigned content
as days drift by implacably
Like snowfall on the sea;
for when lions of night
pursue you inexorably,
It will be easy, too easy
to greet them unflurried
in your seasoned docility.
Wishes that go unspoken
sink no pennies to well-bottoms
nor dreams to darkened depths,
raise no spirits of spurned lovers
nor sails of shoreline fleets…
The spaces they occupy
are dark and austere;
their owners keep them locked in
with shame, bemusement and fear,
swallowing the key anew each night…
How lonely it must be
for the unbroken among them,
gazing at the light from the peephole,
rapping meekly at the door
while their keeper turns away…
Knowing, with a sad conviction
that keeps them pacing through the dark
how, if unshackled, they would raise
the downed sails of their keepers,
the spirits sunken with fear…
like drunken fireflies
adrift in a knowing wind,
embers come to rest
on her open palms.
blinking into dulled hues
of orange, they float
away as ashen flakes,
leaving, like twisted
black ribbons,
drawings upon her skin.
It would all come to be routine:
the drips that fell on our eyelids
jarring us awake at daybreak,
the handfuls of ice we’d gather
for patching our sun-scathed walls.
Even the murky breaths we’d touch
with our frostbitten fingertips,
the bedside stories we’d whisper
against our cold, moonlit walls.
Still, the ice on your eyelashes,
your voice like waxed violin strings,
your smile that curls like a wick:
I needed them. You knew this.
You knew this so you stayed with me.
You stayed when I tipped our lantern,
when drips fell in our open eyes.
You stayed while our igloo gave way.
Life in prison wasn’t easy for a kangaroo. The ceiling of his cell wasn’t tall enough to hop in, so Bobby had to bounce idly on the tips of his heels. The only place he was free to hop was the prison yards, where he was routinely made a mockery of. The other inmates, intoxicated on humorous notions of a boxing kangaroo, forced Bobby to participate in organized fights. Outcries to the guards fell on deaf ears, as many of them had a stake in the gambling ring that had formed; the others were indifferent.
There was nowhere within the confines of the prison for Bobby to graze, and the meals were ill-suited for his herbivorous diet. He had become weak and frail due to his malnutrition and regular fights, and began to wonder if he’d ever live to see the day of his release.
The thought of his joeys was all that kept Bobby’s will alive. It had been years since he was taken from them, but he was confident that his children would be exactly where he had left them.
(Continue reading the story here.)
When the executioner was the only one
unconvinced of the killer’s guilt,
he pulled the switch
like rope on the pulley
of his own descending grave.
When the killer’s face began to appear
ruffled and out of place in his dreams,
he would wake up chilled
to the marrow,
his fingers
clutching the rope
that held the pendulum over his head.
march lightfooted in that porcelain frame
and fill the air with the sound of bones
against pavement, like a pair of dice
tossed on a block of ice.
the night is spotted with street-walkers
so keep that skull up, chum,
because here comes a breather now
who already looks as if he’s seen a ghost.
*the Halloween poem
Dear Ocean,
Do not erase me.
I’m just here to mark
the spot where you showed
that the crest of every wave
is happiest as it falls.
Please bring a wanderer
before the wind carries me
grain by grain to the shore.
Two-bit Time Bomb 