Flash Fiction Friday - After Halloween

Hello friends. I'm back.

No real Flash Fiction Friday piece this week, but I will give you a brief original poem, and a promise that in this space there will be something every week. Some weeks it will be poetry, some weeks flash fiction, perhaps sometimes something a touch more substantive.

This is pretty heavy-handedly allegorical, but I suspect that to be the headspace in which many of us find ourselves around now; at least those of us who are decent human beings shocked by the national and global moves towards hatred.

More to come.




"After Halloween"

The pumpkins away
nor the plastic witch high on the tree
nor the scarecrows.

nor the pumpkins.


 I said the pumpkin already
didn't I?


It isn't just one house; there's a malaise,
a miasma
a plague of non-pumpkin removing


To gather them is no great task
Out before dawn in a dark blue pickup truck
flying wind-tattered stars and stripes

It's easy to gather up the pumpkins,
reminder of the schoolmaster's weakness
reminder of pagan rites
goard of the devil.
The pumpkins do not belong.


It's easy to gather the scarecrows
some plastic things from the dollar store
some straw-stuffing and twine.
All fake.
There is no corn here
           there are no crows.
The scarecrows do not belong.


The witches don't belong.
No need to explain why.


These all fit in the bed of the truck
under the fluttering banners
invisible in the pre-dawn dark of standard time.


It's a short drive to the shore.

It feels good,
the cool November air on your face
the faint saltwater mist
the pleasant ache in your arm
as you fling each rotting pumpkin
each vermin-infested scarecrow
each tack plastic witch
                                  as far from the shore as your arms can launch them.


Some of them sink.
Some may float, only to be smashed against the shore
by an unforgiving current.


You drive off, your work done.

Never to know which of the pumpkins
bolstered by witches magic
fed by sodden straw
will embrace their new home
will learn to swim
and will,
from the depths
rise.

Nightmare Fuel 2016, Day the Zeroth: "Not That Kind of Monster"

Write horrible things with me.

With these words, Andrea Trask began the annual "Nightmare Fuel" project, in which every day of October,  whomever chooses to do so writes a story inspired by the same image prompt. It's a tradition which now enters is fourth consecutive year. It's a tradition which began as a way for Andrea to deal with ill dreams which plagued her as the calendar turns towards All Hallows Eve and a tradition which I've continued sporadically.

This year I'm writing before the prompt was prompted, so I'll open with a brief poem inspired by one from last year that I didn't get to. We'll see how we round out the year.

So come, listen, join in.

Write horrible things with me.


These will all be potentially unsettling, but this one comes with a trigger-warning for street harassment.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Not That Kind of Monster"

Date night. Not long planned, just a guy from Tindr.
Though moon is full, no hair grows on my face,
no howl escapes from my throat.
My legs are as smooth as a razor can get them, no pack awaits me.
I'm not that kind of monster.

He's cute, in a geeky kind of way.
Dinner,  a small table for two, he leans forward as I talk,
catching every word, or catching a peek down my blouse? No matter.
 My voice, though fair, doesn't hypnotize him,
                                                      doesn't steal his thoughts,
                                                                    doesn't curse him to follow me to his doom.
I'm not that kind of monster.


The movie ends sometime past midnight.
On the darkened streets, my teeth don't stretch into fangs.
I don't sensuously lick my lips before sinking my teeth into his neck
before drinking my fill
and leaving his drained husk behind.
I'm not that kind of monster.

When the men at the corner call out,
when they yell, "Hey sexy"
                    and "nice ass"
                      and "wanna share her, bro?"
I don't grow claws, don't break their bones
don't devour their flesh.
I'm not that kind of monster.

I do see him, my date, puff up with something like pride
even as their comments become more lewd
even as one starts to approach.
He speaks once to them,
                                   "she's mine".
I know that even if I take him home,
even after we fuck,
there will be no second date. No happily ever after.
I'll not kill him, tear his skin from his body, and wear it as a suit.
I'm disappointed in him, but
I'm not that kind of monster.


In the dark of the next morning I'll take the knife.
Again.
I'm practiced at this now. Two slices, and they're gone.
I string them up with the others as blood runs down the side of my head.
Knowing that it's useless.
Knowing that they'll only grow back again.
Knowing that I'll still hear the next time anyway.
But noticing that each time they seem to grow back slower.
That's the kind of monster I am.
One who is slowly
inevitably
one ear at a time
being killed.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I lied in the intro; this poem IS inspired by the attached image, but also by a real life event. Last month, the aforementioned Andrea Trask was subject to a nasty and frightening bit of street harassment. While she was not injured in body, the circumstance and actions [a late night, an empty street, drunk sports fans in a car] were deeply unsettling and left her rattled for quite some time after.

Thus the opener, and this year's theme: Harm. The ways in which we harm each other, the ways in which we harm ourselves, the ways in which we allow harms to come to pass.

Nightmare Fuel, Day the Fourth. Are they all the same?

Here's a weekend Nightmare Fuel entry; a few quick lines of poetry, as I don't have my usual commute. Enjoy!

Image Credited to Volpak, inc.
http://drkaae.com/MedicalEntomology/Chapter5Lice.htm

Are they all the same?
I can't tell.
The buggers all glisten
like oil on pavement.
all look
wrong


If I kill one, do the others care?
Do they
 have a bug funeral?
Is the bug colony
different or just
smaller?
Are they all the same?
Does losing one cost them
a thing?

Are they all the same?
Can they tell that we
are all
different?

The Return of Friday Flash - Not a True Story

Next week we'll be back to AV; this week I'll give a scrap of prose-poetry inspired by a a daily-prompt exercise from my friend +Bliss Morgan . If you'd like to play along, you can find her on Google Plus and, if you ask nicely, she'll let you play along.


Today's prompt was the sentence "It was only because of him that I survived". The image is very loosely related.

I may or not make one of these a day, and will post the best on Fridays to share.

"This is Not a True Story"

We called him Big House,
not knowing what the words meant.
It was 1977.
We were six.

OK, they called him Big House. I didn't call him much of anything. Ricky or Rick, under my breath. Richard in my head. Even then I knew he deserved that much.

It was on the field we met
on the pitch we met - what would be the pitch when we learned the words.
It was underneath the noonday sun, barely touched by latesummer's chill.

No nets, no painted lines.
Just patches
of smooth dusty earth where the grass had been worn away by countless feet,
empty goalposts
letting a well-struck ball  pass out of the game, back towards reality.

They called him Big House
They called me by my name.
It was 1977, or 1978.
Who knows?  

On the field-not-a-pitch I was swift.

I was a space-knight defending the base, 

a warrior defending his keep.

Big House was just a kid with a soccerball. 

I stopped him each time, cleared the ball hard

past this sector,

returned to the battle.

Afterwards I'd see him drill against the wall. 

Run, pivot kick.

Run kick pivot.

Some days I'd slip.

Some days the keep would be damaged, the shields on the battlestations weakened.

Still, I was swift.

Still, they called him Big House. 

And me, nothing.

Like some Danish prince 

from a story long ago, I pondered

if I'm called nothing, am I nothing?

Should I become nothing, embrace nothing?

Then I'd see Big House drilling against he wall.

Run, pivot kick.

Run kick pivot

and know that without me, he'd win.

I wouldn't let him.

Because of him

I survived.

The Poem Will Be Like You

Some trifles. First, a few lines of blank verse:

He swore an oath to procreate the Constitution
but spilled too soon his words
on tomorrow's barren news print
None left for fertile posterity.

Those who follow me on social media might recognize the phrase "procreate the Constitution" as an errant auto-correct from somebody else in an ill-advised political discussion last week. The missed autocorrect was, in all honesty, the most interesting part of the discussion and the kind of something with which I might do more (and more ideas are fluttering about in my head), but wanted to share this trifle as one direction in which inspiration can go; it in a way dovetails with our earlier discussion here on inspiration, and leads to a modernism.

One  interesting strain of modern literature concerns itself with what some may call the disappearance of ego, if not the author entirely. Way back in my modern poetry posts I touched on odd literary experiments by writers such as John Cage or Bart Silliman - works in which appear to be discovered or excavated as much as they are created. I would argue that authorial intent absolutely does exist on some level -  the choice to follow a certain random path is, after all, a choice - but once that choice is made the author might hand the metaphorical reigns over to ... fate? The gods? quantum uncertainty? Call it what you may, but the reigns are released, leaving what may be a thing of beauty, may be garbled nonsense, or may be a beautiful thing of garbled nonsense.

Early twentieth-century poet and performance artist Tristan Tzara took this to an interesting extreme in his instructions on "How to Make a Dadaist Poem" (the below copied from here, where I got it from educator Al Filreis):

How to Make a Dadaist Poem
(method of Tristan Tzara)

To make a Dadaist poem:

• Take a newspaper.
• Take a pair of scissors.
• Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
• Cut out the article.
• Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
• Shake it gently.
• Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.
• Copy conscientiously.
• The poem will be like you.
• And here are you a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.

--Tristan Tzara

The most interesting claim to me isn't the last, that you are a writer, infinitely original but the penultimate step, "The poem will be like you". This is the sort of thing which - especialy in the deeply ironic and cynical present - is easy to shrug off as satire. I see a bit more than that in the Dadaist movement, and find some value in the breaking of barriers of technique, artifice, and even authorship. Does the poem resemble the person who chose a newspaper article to slice up and shuffle? The readers who see it through the filter of their own perceptions? OR is it mere nonsense. What I do know is that many find this kind of thing quite compelling, when the Tzara piece came up in Al Filreis's Modern and Contemporary Poetry class on Coursera (one which I highly recommend) scores of students took to the forums with their "Dadaist poems" and John Cage-style "Mesostics" (one of mine I included earlier in this blog).

Below is a not-quite-successful experiment of my own in this vein; I took the swype keyboard on my phone and drew shapes across the letters, letting the software autocorrect it into words. This takes the the errant autocorrect with which we started this discussion to its absurd conclusion - what would a sentence of ALL errant autocorrects look like? 

And yes, the three small oranges and tin of sardines are to be considered part of this work. I'll leave "why" as an exercise for the reader, but it touches on the ongoing themes of modernism and inspiration. If you need a further hint, the sentence I'm scribing in the video is "I am not a painter"

Rd set xxx ttc c.f. foggy Zach uhh in go sex ad ex's ers fifth HB hubbub on ho Klink knoll tv c

Irish haggis educator 

slugs skid schism 

icebox Evian avian Jarvis 

David racist Koenig garlic deux finch duff 

Assad Fuchs succumb hunting visualization

 Ashburn suburbia whitewash e-book sexual Odessa 

Westbrook stump archived compact 

volcano 

vaginal January

SanDisk Serbian leak out 

stick hall Westfield catacombs prick search

 Saatchi announcing Saatchi servo insist stingy 

ssh bobbin combing/ in km in km tv cc cm 

lMcMahon mm vBulletin b.s.'m'm cub fangs 

scuffed xyz clean etc c hub b th v

Tv wry ext txt

Etc tug fact catch hubbub exec Gretchen hutch 

urged etc huff t-shirts tv t-shirts r rd c exact revved text

 Gibb dc earth ribbon textbooks dc dry exec Sgt drugs exert 

ex r Feb ten edgy f2f t tv ssh ribbon txt t-shirts Hughes Gucci

 txt bfn fig hub Inc highs had ugh th duh tv ssh raccoon high 

dc fact tax ssh Buffy by tag t.v. Essex vaccine t.v. 

I'm ilk read f2f uhh kohl circ tv

 chubby dazed junk Aziz xxx f2f Chubb hubbub

And that is that. Again, not quite successful, but read allowed there's a certain pleasure in some of the stanzas. I'll close with a thought: this could be polished and refined. TO do so would make it more readable, but blunt the element of randomness and return authorial ego to the process. Would that be a service or a disservice to the work?

Nightmare Fuel - Day the Second (and revisit the first!)

More writing today! Every day for the month? We'll see. Those looking for AV, fear not! I'll sandwich in another AV post hopefully by week's end.

Yesterday I gave you my first Nightmare Fuel entry, which I also shared with the other participants. I told them something I've not shared with you on this blog until now: that there was originally a second part which I deleted in one of my rare moments of brevity. Those who saw both posts uniformly considered the second to be the singer of the two, which shows once again that I have no idea how to judge my own work. Here it is for those of you who are interested. Compare it to yesterday's piece and let me know what you think.

On the Swing
by L Czhorat Suskin

2012
It wasn't the story wanted, wasn't the part of the story I wanted. Too big, too sensational, too ... tawdry. You've heard about that poor girl by now. The mysterious disappearance, the slow fade from memory, the growing certainty that we'd never see her again. But this time you know we did, that if you can stop yourself from mourning the lost years of her youth, if you look past the damage outside and in, if you don't gaze forward at the decades of therapy she'll need... in other words, if you're willfully blind and stupid you can almost pretend that just maybe this is a happy ending. Or at least what passes for one in this screwed up world.

So this girl's not dead, the poor thing, and I get a job to do. Take some photos of the spot she was abducted from. Some kinda swing outside a crappy old apartment building. At night, like when she was taken.

I swear it was perfect when I took it. The empty swing at night, a perfect haunting fucking shot. But I get back home, and in every single frame there's this guy with a thousand yard stare. A guy I had to have seen. I gotta cut back on the sauce.

Fuck it. I'll photoshop it out.
_______________________________________
I still don't know how I feel about that one. There's something literal and concrete about it.

Now, on to todays' entry. The picture gave me a clear mental image of a slightly unrelated scene that wound up being the final stanza of this poem. The initial question is one that psychologists ask on intake. This I know because my wife is a psychologist, not because I'm talking to anyone else about the voices in my head.

I wouldn't do that; it hurts their feelings if I talk behind their backs.

Voices

My therapist asked

"Do you hear voices that others don't?"

How can I answer? Do I ask her?

Do I ask her if she hears them? 

My therapist asked

"Do you hear voices that others don't?"

Do I? Does she?

Does she know? Does she

hear symphonies semi silent sussurations 

tremulous tides of timid tidings

deadlines and dinnertimes taxing travails and taxes and

and

does she?

My therapist asked

"Do you hear voices that others don't?"

Does she know? 

Has she been searching, researching,

dropping eaves on my thoughts?

Did someone tell her?

Day 2 Prompt. Unattributed

My therapist asked

"Do you hear voices that others don't?"

Should I? Does she?

What would they tell me? What do they tell her?

My therapist asked
"Do you hear voices that others don't?"
I could barely hear her over the
screaming came across the sky into my head
the color of a TV tuned to a dead station
called
Ishmael

My therapist asked

"Do you hear voices that others don't?"

I didn't answer.

Hours later, a second martini.

glass table caresses my cheek

Oh.

There they are.

That's what they're saying.

Feminism, Writing, AV Design, and other Modern Sports

This will be a wide-ranging post containing writing, politics, and hint at writing. If you've come here looking for AV and nothing else, you might want to skip to the last paragraph; this isn't a political blog or a feminist blog, but there are times I touch on both. This is one of them.

There's been some spirited discussion about Anita Sarkeesian's return to producing her Feminist Frequency videos, with an ongoing series on sexism in video games. As a writer I find this branch of feminism interesting because it dissects the role stories play in the creation of culture. As a gamer - and I believe all gamers worthy of the name should feel this way - I appreciate seeing the art form of gaming taken seriously as being worthy of the same sort of scrutiny as literature and film. And as a man, as the father of a young girl, and as a human being I'm saddened that we still live in a world in which women are all too often seen as objects rather than independent actors in their own right.

I'll not rehash Ms. Sarkeesian's arguments here; you should certainly watch the videos for that. There are two interesting side-points that I want to talk about today. The first, and easiest one, is that a writer can sometimes send a message without intending it, and that even the simplest stories do have a message. Consider her take on the coin-op classic Donkey Kong. On the surface, there's not much to that particular story, if there's a story at all; it's an exercise in endlessly climbing the same girders and leaping the same barrels to save the pretty girl from the scary monkey. Sarkeesian makes a very good point, though, that the entire set-up reduces the "pretty girl" to a prize. If Donkey Kong had stolen, say, a bag of gold the story would read exactly the same. This is the point about objectification. So I read this and thought about it and then, through the perils of YouTube search, came across several reactions. A halfwit with a dead animal on his head. A guy who mistakes critique of the writers of the Donkey Kong video game series with critique of the fictitious characters therein. A slew of angry men doing what they thought Sarkeesian was doing: looking into a camera and complaining. (and no, I'm not linking to any of them. Look around if you want; it's not my intention to drive pageviews for mouth-breathing pre-adolescent dimwits).

What this attitude most reminds me of are the critiques of modern writing from traditionalists like Robert Frost (who likened writing non-formal verse to playing tennis without a net) and Truman Capote (who famously called Kerouac's work mere typing rather than writing). Take a moment to read some Kerouac, or Ginsberg's "Howl".

Back so soon? Take some time.

Read them carefully.

I'll wait.


OK. The first thing you notice - at least the first thing I noticed - is the seeming chaos of these works. It really seems as if the early modern poets are just tossing words around. If you try looking a bit more closely, you'll start seeing more. Kerouac seems to be grabbing images at random, but there's an underlying cohesion which hints at much more serious effort and planning than you'd have suspected him of. If you look more closely at Howl's lines you'll find them interspersed with internal rhymes, scraps of meter, and very carefully chosen words. To assume that Ginsberg or Kerouac are just throwing around words and images is the same mistake as assuming that Sarkeesian is just complaining in front of a video camera; it is to only see what is there on the surface without digging underneath and appreciating not only the work that goes into it but also the beauty of the final product. In UPenn's excellent Modern Poetry class (on the Coursera platform last month and destined to return in September) English professor Al Filreis used the adjective "wrought" for these works; it's a good one. They are made things, built things, carefully considered things. You can throw around adjectives and adverbs in an unedited stream of nonsense, but that wouldn't make you a modern writer any more than Ms. Sarkeesian's detractors are gender-conscious thinkers or, ultimately, thinkers at all.

Which brings us, long-windedly, to what I do in the AV design world. It's easy to look at an AV system, be it a conference room, classroom, or a digital signage system it all looks simple; a TV goes on the wall, speakers go where you can hear them, etc. What I've found is that the more I know, the more there is to know. I've seen plenty of spaces with video, plenty with audio. Not all appear to be designed with the kind of thoughtfulness and care that separates an AV system from a room with AV in it.

Did someone do the math to make sure you could have enough voicelift without feedback?
Did someone do the math to make sure that your display is big enough to read the kind of content it's to be showing?
Did someone make sure that the system fit nicely into the space and fit the users' needs?

Life is like that. Not only are there are relatively few things as simple as they seem at first glance, but things that you don't see and very likely never will see unless you've learned just what to look for make a difference. The slightly longer gooseneck mic do improve the PAG/NAG equations. The carefully planned breaks in meter. The emphasis of one detail over another in developing a theme. Life is complicated. Learn to embrace it, learn to look beneath the surface, and have the courage to know what you don't know.

I'll close with more modernism; experimental writer and poet John Cage took Ginsberg'a carefully-wrought text and manipulated it with an algorithm he called a "mesostic" - sort of an internal acrostic. Here's a brief excerpt of what he came up with.

Even this is harder to do than it may seem! I encountered this during the Modern Poetry MOOC from UPenn, and had the assignment to try it myself. Since it was election time, I went nakedly and shamelessly political. I started with Ruth Lechlitner's 1936 piece "Lines for an Abortionist's Office" and tried to bring it to the present with Akin or Murdock's names after their rather questionable views on women's rights became major news. Neither gave all that interesting a result. Then I tried again with the Akin's poorly-chosen phrase "legitimate rape"

Writing through Lechlitner's "Lines for an Abortionist's Office"

              CLose,
          officE
           brinG
              wIth
          greaT
          offerIng.
               May
          outrAged,
            buT
pain-sharp Ened,

              fRuit:
              fAt
          deeP
            thE

And then gently touched up with "wing words"

              CLose,
          officE
       to brinG
              wIth
          greaT
          offerIng.
                May be
           outrAged,
             buT
  pain-sharpEned,

               fRuit:
               fAt and
            deeP as
              thE


I somewhat liked the way it ended mid-note, and think it certainly gave a mood or a tone. More to the point, even a quick throw-away exercise like this for a peer-reviewed class took some time and effort and a few false starts to give what looks like a somewhat effortless result.

Moral of the story? (all my stories have a moral!): There's more than you see. Think more deeply and question your assumptions before judging.

Spirits and Staircases, two more weeks of poems

More poetry today! I'll start with something a little strange and experimental; this is another one I wrote for my good friends at the Brooklyn Speculative Fiction Writers group. As I've already mentioned here, I'm slogging my way through the Modern Poetry course from UPenn offered on Coursera. So I took this writing prompt (a photo of a ghostly figure on a staircase which I seem to have misplaced) and threw a mashup of various poetic styles we've studied at it. It's also a touch feminist in that there are obvious references and allusions to four famous female poets or other artists. Is it obvious who?


Spirit of the Stair


You see the ghostly form upon the stair
An apparation clad in wisps of white
She whispers secret words as you draw near
steady she remains as you take flight

Does she hear you? Would Cassandra? Would Cassandra
would she hear you? Would Cassandra would she hear you
hear you hear you hear her hear you? would you hear her hear her hear
you would she hear you hear her hear you hear the risers rising
upward hear you rising upward see

her ghostly face is fair, but soon forgot
her ghostly arms, they fade into the air
Her ghostly frame, some would call it hot
but nothing more. The spirit of the stair.

into your glass eyes, your button eyes, your dead eyes
you are flesh, she is soul --
she will rise, she will descend
she is air, she is real
You are flesh.
Is Cassanda? Is Cassandra on her deathbed? On her deathbed?
Would you hear Cassandra on her deathbed, on your deathbed,
would you hear Cassandra when you hear Cassandra

Beneath your feet, the treads are solid wood
the balustrade your hands caress is smooth
You'd stop to meet the spirit if you could
but up you sweep, a brain within its groove.

You stay within your groove
the one that mother gives you doesn't do anything at all
But they know
the lifeguard found Sylvia already immensely drowned, but they know
they know they know.

You'll not drown.

You'll not touch the spirit.

Or

Would you meet the spirit gaze to gaze
to see the echoes of your better days?


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
And, some horror poetry from the Nightmare Fuel project, of which I'm slowly fading out:

"Three small turns"

Again a night of jagged, broken sleep
again the well-trod path, bed to kitchen to crib to bed
nightmares to milk to sleep to nightmares - 
an insomniac's triangle-trade
My eyes are red
her eyes are red
his eyes are red. 
His night-terrors haunt us through the day until

until the ancient guardian is engaged
a man of wood clad in a wooden hat
a sentinal from when my nightmares raged
who calmed my fears of spider and of rat
beneath his watchful eyes the terrors cease
and now once more we all could sleep in peace

until

the jagged edges of broken sleep cut once more
no spiders, no rats, no monsters under my bed
but terrors named
mortgage
terrorists
criminals
lawyers
bankers

so I take it
creep into his room - he whose nightmares are banished
and take the talisman of my youth
its wooden face still severe, strong, beneath a wooden helmet
worn smooth by young fingers

The terrors stop
the terrors stop

in the pre-dawn I wake to see 
termines fleeing the disintigrating wooden carcass
to feast on fat houseflies

The wood is no longer hard, no longer smooth, 
but soft and rotten and stinking of decay

The nightmares of parents are stronger.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And, finally, something blatantly and shamelessly political:

The hundred less one arrived to join the hunt
left words behind, spoke only in animal grunts
will the goddess and gods protect those who eschew meat
from bright-burning hundredth with carnivore's teeth?
On this day masks are worn outside our face
See our spirits form paper-mache-
clad this - this autumn night when worlds collide
when veils grow thin, we see the other side
When we, the hundred less one run enmasked
as ancestors did walk in days long past
though creatures meek as we may earn your scorn
remember that stags too are armed with horn.




---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Overall, my favorite thing about these is how I have the chance to play with form, with meter, and with the sounds of words as well as the words themselves. Look for more experiments in weeks to come.

A week of Horrible Things

Happy October! For this month, in addition to continuing with the Modern Poetry course at Coursera, I'm playing with a daily writing-prompt exercise on the Google+ social network called "Nightmare Fuel". Google Plussers can find the Nightmare Fuel page here. Every day the lovely and talented Bliss Morgan (aka Andrea Trask) posts an image, and every day all those interested write .. something. Anything. A story. A flash piece. A poem. Then we share them.

Because this is daily and time is at a premium, I've been taking the influence of the Modern Poetry class to write poems for most of these. Others have taken different directions. I'm especially taken with the "prosems" Kary Gaul is writing and the horrific little flash pieces from... well, I'm not sure what the man's real name is, but this guy here. sometimes known as Kewangi and sometimes as Johannes It doesn't matter. His stuff is consistently creepy and punchy.


Check out theirs, and look below for my attempts:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lilithwitch/8039767847/
 Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License.

Day 1 - The Curator

Standing stone -
your letters and numbers
precise
edges sharp, grooves deep and even -

Standing stone
slick and smooth. Reflecting 
sky

What engine carved
lines and squares
- an alien script - 
for what engines to read?

and earth

Standing stone -
will your faded lines remain
will you remember
when the engines have fallen
silent?

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Day 2 - Sparkly Shoes

An early fall morning, a crisp fall morning. A drycool bite in the dry cool air. Summer is over. I'm walking with the girl and her new backpack full of marble composition books and crayons and number two pencils and erasers and tissues and even - for reasons unknown to me - plastic baggies. A bag as big as she is. The girl in her new dress and new windbreaker and new shiny purple maryjanes. Companionable silence down the street, past the swimming pool, long since drained for the winter. Companionable silence across the street, now a half-block from the already-formed clusters of chattering girls and hyperactive boys and gossipping moms at the dropoff. 

Companionable silence broken by the girl's voice. 

"Lynsey has sparkly shoes. And Maddy. And Jessie."

Indeed, they do. Brightpink glitterclad things adornded and embellished with flowers, with hearts, with peace-signs. Flashy things with thick pink laces and little blinking lights winking at the world with each shuffling step of little girls' feet. Sparkly shoes indeed.

I'm calm, noncommital. "So they do." I'm not crazy. I hear the edge in her voice, I hear the pleading. I also know that the shoes on her feet - her rapidly growing feet - cost forty dollars, and the sneakers under her bed (white with fun pink stripes. Not spartly) another thirty. The shoe money is spent. 

The girl starts to say something in a hushed whisper. Pat her on the head as I turn, bridge the gap to a mom-cluster at the periphery of the dropoff, an empty unspecial square of sidewalk. The girl edges into a cluster of other girls, her eyes on her own feet As Lynsey and Maddie and Jessie hold court over the sidewalk, their eyes up, oblivious to the winking, sparkling, blinking beacons adorning their own feet.

Day 3 - The Machines

The machines like a dream, like a wish.

Everywhere - the machines -Clean and proud in the bank

Encased in logo-bearing glass - the machines -Beside the battered ice machine

.

,

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loitering in a supermarket - the machinesin a dark alleyway

ill-fitting here today gone the nexta magic shop out of a fairy tale

full of wishes open for wishesa battered plastic well gleaming

in the city night.

the machines reflect eyes the machines have eyes the machines are eyesI see them seeing me seeing them

seeing.

Like in a fairy talewishing machines like in a fairy tale full of wishes

I wave my card with a big swish swish and then I wish to wish a wishfor a dish of fish to be rich i wish 

I wish

I wish.

Nobody knows my wishes

Nobody save the machines.

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Day 4 - Surviving Excerpts From the log of the FNC Emma Goldman

Tuesday, May 1
Not on ship yet, but it's motherfuckin Mayday and we have a motherfuckin ship. The Emma Goldman, a state of the art sailing vessel. Or at least she would have been two or three centuries ago. Today? She's ours. She's seaworthy. She even has a manifesto - to be the best damn anarchist-collective freespirited, freeloving, freesailing freelance cargo ship these oceans have ever seen. To the seas!

July 3rd
Finally got a cargo, on the high seas at last. Struck the flag we're registered under (I won't even write it here) raised our true flag - the black flag. Beholden to no nation, lyal to none but ourselves.

Glad to be at sea. The business part is the part I hate, but until someone gets around to overthrowing capitalism, this is our world. We need money for spare parts, money for foodstuffs, money for rum. We're tall-ship sailors. There has has to be rum.

Anyway, the cargo part is what I hate. Creepy client was creepy, mysterious boxen are mysterious. Battered leather trunks, smelling of mildew and mothballs and... something else.

July 8th
Rum gone. Too many fucking disasters. Damage. Rats. Matty drank the damn rum. And he had the nerve to 

August 2nd
still not working but we have the sextant. Anctient tech FTW. Matty said he hears sounds from the cargo. Voices. He must have a secret stash of

August 9th

.............walk the plank if we were pirates. We should still throw the bastard overboard after it. We still have the stars. We'll find our way.



must have jumped overboard. Just wasn't there one day but he's right there are voices they're talking whispering some strange language I wish I could understand I wish I


No sun for days. Sea is grey, sky grey, sails grey. The black flag is grey. I am grey. The others are looking funny at me, I know. They might know


A cheer from above. Land? I need to see first. Need to see what's in this cargo. I can almost make out the words. 

I think it's callng me. From above a scream, "what is that". I'm down here I'm openingit now

Source Unknown

Day 5 - backroads

Back roads, way off the interstate
the smell of fake pine

Late afternoon, small town
through dry dust and dry air an old
sign reds and blues faded into woodgrain

FREAK 
SHOW

tired and I need to stop eyes need to start
eyes need to wake step in

No freaks.
No living freaks.

Curio cabinets full of two-headed taxidermy dogs
inexpertly stiched together
improbably dry spiders
wax sculptures of the freaks
the mystics the hysterics the madmen the drifters on 
the backroads.

stiff posed manikins no art no artifice no motion but
disapproving scowls
and a lingering scent
of fake pine 
and a scream




Day 6 - Patriot Day

Source Unknown

The specter of those hands against the glass
shut tight against the smoke and acrid gas
A hand but not a face
haunting, follows 
me

in each mirror
each window
each mirror or window or glass door or glass wall or showerglass or plateglass window or display glass each glass each window

each glass door
no matter how far from the city, is that glass door. 
Even in the woods, even in the cabin, it is that window
hands pressed hard against behind faceless faces
A window I dare not open.