Untitled

The moon is not quite full, but swollen and tilted like a distracted lover. Bright and beautiful as she is, my eyes cannot but shy away to seek the object of her rapt attentions. I quiver and sweat a bit and shake and make small circles of my gazing and turning and nervously glancing. Drawn by beauty and repelled by neglect, I wind into myself and knit my shy mind into a knot of still quaking - a place to remain between obsession and forgetting.

Chalk

I'm cultivating a culture of despair in my mind. I sow it gently in the moist untrodden places where my weaknesses leave discontented puddles in the pockmarked floor. I sow it without self-loathing or self-pity - it's a thing to do that isn't nothing, and the seeds may grow to choke and color the blandness before me now. There's nothing worse than this chalk landscape with chalk figures finding meaning in chalk figurines; where chalk is what chalk does and nothing chalk tastes of is anything but chalk. All this chalk and not even a blackboard.

Writing notes

Just getting some writing notes done at the beach house... Posts may be spotty, but more pictures are definitely in order.

Gypsy in the Woods - pt. 2

Bronze and freckles flashed in gaps wrapped in green and my eyes couldn't resolve their source until I heard a titter from the bushes.

"That wee lad

he's up an' gonoff on us, gramma! Left your sweet Mae to pray for the sweetgrass and weeds all by her lonesome-

mayhaps he scrambled

*rustle*

a tussle out of thy branches, my tree

*rustle*

or mayhaps he's as tree as thee? Eh, now little lad? A skinny tree?

I know if I were a tree, I'd be-"

This mad person would near my bush, I knew it - this little beast of the wood with her words - and I had to escape before-

"Hey now, there's the boy!" A swish and whip of the branches above landed the beastling before my bush. Gasping, her, definitely a "her", smell sent cinnamon and cloves and garlic into my senses, and I couldn't remember when I'd last been able to smell so much-

"He's still as skinny as we seen him, too..." she complained, careening herself sideways to stick a filthy twig through a hole in my t-shirt. "Ah well, skinny is as skinny eats, I guess. And what skinny sweets treated thee, huh my lad? Close your mouth, dear, there are flies." She waved her stick at what presumably were flies, and carelessly yanked a strap of her overlarge tank top back onto the point of her shoulder.

"There's roast chicken and greens at the house if you're feeling hungry for something dead. The big 'un's'll tell you where they found you and whatnot, I'm just the message-person." Her eyes wouldn't stay still, and she did a hop step to the side to challenge a hanging vine with her twig.

"And then- " -wap- " you can figure out-" -wap- " what you'll do with the rest of your night- " -wapwap- " Ha!" wap!
"Hey!" I wailed.
"-and if you're lucky, we'll get to practice my swordplay a little-" -swish- "Drat-you're-fast! before bedtime!"

Gypsy in the Wood - unlabeled part of the Gypsy series, and temporarily untangled from the brain

Dappled trickles of sunshine mingled with wind-rustled leaves and birdsong drew me back into consciousness. I couldn't remember why these artifacts of reality felt so absurd to me, even as my muddled recovering mind fumbled at their meaning in clumsy anxiety. The breaths I was taking were sweet on my tongue but the smorgasbord of scents assaulting my olfactory organs evoked pungent depths foreign and repulsive to me. I could smell raw shit on the soft breeze that touched my face, fermenting vegetation, and the pregnant redolence of bursting, blooming life. It was all wrong - the place was wrong, my place in this world was wrong, I didn't belong here and there were beings here that didn't want me to witness their becoming.

I struggled internally to blink, to cough, to wretch myself out of being in this place with the suffocating embrace of life around me, and it took me days and moments to realize that I hadn't moved a muscle.

Moss and a verdant fringe were my bed, and my left hand rested numbly in the meandering tricklet of a creek as it passed silently by. Small creatures were disturbed in their doings by the disturbance of my woolen gathering of limbs. Rising with grace out of the question, I made a multi-stage dance in my fight against gravity. How strange, I thought - my feet are bare. When did I last walk in my bare feet?