Fiction

The Portrait of Beautiful Flight: Inspired by Musee des Beaux Arts by W.H. Auden

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As evening dropped off the clock an airship dropped out of the sky. In a menagerie cage a monkey sat, sniffed and was still again. A child laughed and pointed at the monkey, the father smiled and suggested ice cream.

The monkey sniffed. A trail of smoke sailed to the stars between a warehouse, turned into a spilled puzzle of some thousand and five pieces, possibly once labelled Number 55, according to half an edge of a wood painted sign. The other half of the sign had added a jaunty hat to an algae crusted ironmonger ship from some fifty years earlier, planted at the dock poking into the equally muddy and disused river.

The monkey sniffed. Somewhere a child giggled and undeneath it all, including various pieces of aircraft, two words floated to the top of the city.

“Oh damn.”
Fiction Poetry

Rubber Duck Pathology: A Poem about the Masks We Wear

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Rubber Duck Pathology

First find a carving knife.
I recommend the one used
On turkey and the occasional picnic chicken days.
No machetes, or butter knives.
We are all humans here.

If you happen to have a Semtex vest strapped label
Of some psychological sort.
Stick the pig that strapped you, first.
Then, find your carving knife.

If you happen to have hemp hair
Or butterfly barrettes of various shade.
Pick red or, purple people eater, pink.
Then, find your carving knife.

If you happen to always take a trowel
to cherry tomato parties.
Brush up on biology.
Then, find your carving knife.

If you happen to have concrete light bulbs
Packed near planet high.
Hold a symposium with dirt.
Then, find a carving knife.

Step two. Pick your duck up.
Behead your duck. Yes,
behead. A half slice is for the dead.
Rubber ducks breathe water.
Did you not wonder why they always float?
Let’s play biology.

When you detach the head, set it on cotton. Step three, grasp body
like a fresh oven bun. Now slice.
See the web of bath mould.
Black skein veins finger from ends to centers.
See the glass froth bubbles of cotton soap. Caught between tail feather and foot.
See childhood imprinted in water.

Carve yours in splashes. Bubble beards.
Liquid cotton and railroad boat tracks.
Digested within your rubber duck.

 
Fiction Poetry

I Ate A Box of Chocolates and Hated Myself For It: A Poem About Self-Image

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A Box of Chocolate

I ate the chocolate
I knew you hid it
behind the cheese crackers
in the corner cupboard.

It tasted of superheroes,
beauty pageants, Olympic medals.

It melted on my tongue
into celebrity.

A zero-size, tree-tall,
front-cover, magazine model.

Then I swallowed.

Reached for more.
Until my fingers felt only paper.

I ate the chocolate.
It settles in my belly,
making me suffocate under
a phantom circus parachute.

I have celebrity
with a hall of mirrors.

A rolly-polly attraction.
That’s how the room sees me.

I won’t eat the chocolate.
Ever.

I found the chocolate
behind a cup of soup
in the corner cupboard.

I knew you put it there.

Under the circus parachute.
The crowd thinks
I’m the cannon bomb.
Set to explode.

Maybe I should.
Fiction

Sometimes We Must Wear a Storm in Order to Feel the Light

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sometimes storm light winter seasons fiction muse drabble thoughts hope dreams ARR Moony

A/N: So what do you do when current home is experiencing a stupifyingly sticky and suffocating heatwave? You write about winter in your motherland.

Wearing a Storm

You can smell snow on the air before it falls. It is a crisp jingle of ice which makes your skin tingle and nose feel it needs to sneeze.

I feel this on the air, down deep through skin layers as the facade of early morning frost melts away to reveal sunken clouds, fat on the feathers of snow. Snow which will smother the land in adown blanket. Hiding. Changing. Removing what has been known and familiar up to this point.

Will the ground below this blanket be slick with ice? Will the ground be a distant memory, reached only by a misplaced footstep which sinks, then sticks. Sending you down to your knees, up in snow.

Uncertainty is a cold mistress.

You might settle a sweater or jimmy into a jumper (however you phrase it) but then, in the middle of that day of life, a shiver shudders from shoulders to slippers. Even a drink only hides it. Warming you belly, distracting your thoughts. A grey tune underwhelming the day of a day. Just another day of breathing.

Again. And so it creeps and crawls, never really leaving. Even if you are enveloped in the lands of childhood, that period when nothing is wrong and everything is okay. Okay, because you aren’t the one to worry. Your parents have ice-buckets enough of that for you.

Until you too, reach the age of reasoning, when society has dropped layers in your mind, like fresh painted fences.

And so we arrive back at the hatch, leading to the ice box, where plums are perched. In a basket. This is where uncertainty dwells.

Now you would do well to eat the plums in that basket. They will pull your focus away. All is well. Isn’t it?
Fiction

Step Outside: The World Says…

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Gone Out. Window Shopping. ETA: Will Return Relative to Soon

“Step inside. The world stands before you.” The Magician gestured toward the doorway with a sweep of a hand, as if he was a Master of Ceremonies. (A title he was banned from in Aquitaine due to an incident with an orange, a goat and a carnivorous picnic basket).

“And what does it say?” Esper bit out, feeling quite done with the showing-off.
The Magician grinned. “Breakfast.”
Fiction Poetry

Unknown, We Live by Soaring, Never Stopping, Always Exploring: A Poem

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The Unknown, We Live

In the Blue Mountains Where the moon never sets. They say there lies treasure.
Far beyond the green land, the lakes, the rolling hills. The horses.
I travel the sink sand of faces on trains.
Getting lost in crowds. This yo-yo world.
We live as. Rocking horse horrors for a circus show tale.
Sometimes creaking around nineteen-seventies hotel corridors.
All beige and yellow diamond patterns. With cigarette stains.

As I travel, teachers giggle in corners, throwing wit and sarcasm
about classroom doors. Sometimes searching in drawling accents
for accommodation on a bike trip to Paris. A village called Groomsville.
Population sixteen hundred and seven. Website, under construction,
please contact Peter O’Toole (no not that one), at 07543 677 677.

That equals all the sums. Total, planet Earth’s existence.
A yo-yo, ukulele and back-packing bicycle trip to Paris.
What’s treasure to you?
Out here in the Blue Mountains. Where the moon never sets.
Fiction Poetry

Note Left on the Door for a Hero: A Poem for Confidence

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It is, if you like, seduction.
To feel flesh part
as a spoon through pudding.
Life. Blood. Sinking deeper.
Every lap of the dragon’s tongue
like a kitten’s caress. A kitten called Death.

So I want you to remember
as you stand.
During the rain of lightning
under the burning sun.
Time is ancient
in the eyes of young.

Long ago, we painted unicorns.
In a monkey bar imaginarium,
as red as ballerinas’ lips.
Bloody orange rinds
peeled back to an overgrown palace.

But then, you left. The sun is burning.
Buried beneath a million skins of paint.
A million molecules of sand.
Not a single one red. To mark your footsteps.

No more does the unicorn fly.
No more does the horn sound in the valley.
Shadows filch laughter into a iron chest
where deep below, the dragon whispers.

Why bother living when shadow
eats shadow.
The sun has burned.

Do you see me?
I stand here. Gaze reflected
on a world. Drenched in Rapunzels. Who drown in Shallot.

A Sisyphus world, where the children
of Fenrir walk the streets.
People sleep with open eyes.

Why bother
when the sun has burned
into a million grains of sand.
I am a waste of oxygen.
Counting eternity with every dance
between knife and flesh.

No. I want you to bother
because your blood drains
still. So still. Ever still.
It fills lakes, feeding dungeons
with drachma.
It is the metal which forged rings.
It is the lightbulb. Like a star,
that blinks and gazes from the window.
Calling you, oh foot-swept traveller, home.

When you hear the wind whisper
a dragon’s sweet nothings.
When the headless maid speaks
of posies and pockets.
When the raven cries blood
nailed to your door.
When the swan trumpets victory
bought with a thousand ships.
And you flee as a hopoe to the cloud
cuckooland.
Rise up, out of the ashes. Singing.

I want you to remember
as you stand.
During the rain of lightning
under the burning sun.
Time is ancient
in the eyes of young.
So when you next greet seduction
hear me call

We are all just stories
in the end.
Fiction

Time Smells of Toothpaste: A Drabble and A Muse

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Time Smells of Toothpaste

Occasionally, time is like toothpaste. It gets used every day. It seems infinite. It is always there. Waiting.

Sometimes it comes out quickly.

Sometimes you have to roll bits and squeeze and squeeze to make it pass through and onto your toothbrush.

That is the epitome of boredom. Frustration. Challenge.

Some people have mastered that skill of toothpaste squeezing. They dance while rolling, sing while edging the paste, up and up.

Then they cheer. They celebrate. And get on with brushing.

Sometimes there seems to be such an abundance of toothpaste. Always there. Waiting.

You forget about the cinnamon flavoured tube you got in your Christmas stocking or that plain one for sensitive teeth, that really, probably, just needed you to remember to floss.

Toothpaste doesn’t last forever. Especially if the top falls off. It dries up. Leaks out. Cakes onto everything a blue or white crust (depending on your chosen flavour).

Use it wisely. One day you’ll reach for the toothpaste and realise it’s all gone.

So you write it on your to-do list.

At least, when you have a moment. You can buy more.

Occasionally, I wish time was like toothpaste.