“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings The dog poked its head beyond the threshold of the glass windows and wood of the front door …
Lightbulbs: A Drabble
She wasn’t a Betty. Or a Betsy. Not even a Milly, a Molly or a Mandy. Certainly not a Mary or a Charlotte. Catherine was too pretentious and Elizabeth, too grand. No, she was just Terry. This is all learned the third time I met her. Directly, anyway. Though even as I say third time, …
Castaway
Look. If you only listen, step quiet and stop. Peer through the shutters, out into the night.
There exist worlds only wished for from the tips of fingers.
Can you find one?
If you do, step light, look far and near or you might find yourself falling through a crack you never meant to touch.
The Lighthouse
Above the clouds, with the stars, sits a lighthouse full of books which wrap around the winding staircase until the tower’s peak hits the ceiling of the universe.
At this peak is a light which shines through a window. A long trail of gold which glitters brighter than any pot at a rainbow’s end. Those are just illusions you know. But this light, this light is real.
When you look out your window, in the corner of your house, or glance at the lamp at the end of the street, that light you see, flashing from the edge of your eye, that is the trail which tracks from every planet in every galaxy, right back to the small window at the peak of the lighthouse.
So when you greet the new year, the new day, the new hour, look up above the clouds, with the stars. You might just spot the lighthouse.
When We Built Airships
In every history lived a little girl or boy who found a book.
It’s pages crinkled and curled over, hugging the faded ink scrawled across and spilled into a story. A story which rose up around the child in the form of warriors and airships, kraken and unicorns, castles and cliff edges where wit and rapier crossed.
Deep in the curve of caverns and under the sunny seas, these children leapt into exploration. Because of curiousity.
Until one day, they found a loose scrap of paper. Pink maybe or blue, one of the sticky note squares their parents used to decorate the refrigerator with.
These squares told them what they needed to do. It gave them a quest toward fame and fortune. Go to school it said. Get a job it said. Find a partner it said. Get a house it said. Have children it said.
The children went to school. They left their books under a pile of reality. Delving into new worlds, still clinging to curiousity.
Until one day someone said these children spent too much time imagining. They were lazy. They did not know how to work. Even if they wore suits and fetched coffees for bosses. They only had thoughts and no skills.
The children turned away from these square people who lived when imagination was not a universe of pixels stringing paperback to backpacks.
They returned to their books. They built an airship, they fashioned a compass and they found a map. They took to the skies and disappeared in the clouds, among the million flocks of birds with the same brown wings.
Their history passed down to friends who built airships and a few family members too but caught, between the curve of each word settled the quiet meow of a cat, as it fell asleep next to another book.
There Be Musketeers
She came riding to the sound of high noon, stirring a sleeping barn owl and sent the inn in an uproar. Her rapier hilt flashed against the wheat field as thigh high boots clumped over the rain muddied path. As the wind ran through leaves, her voice commanded.
“I am here on the King’s business.”
Lyric Poem: Far Below A Whispered Moon We Seek
A Lyric Idea
A lyric poem written in celebration of stories. The image which inspired this piece came together thanks to various images from creative commons of flickr.
I value that which I can create with my own two hands, so this is a rare piece. However, I sometimes find as much value in creating new images or stories from pieces of others. A remix of sorts.
In this, I refer to both literal stories and visual stories, told as oral tales in ancient days or photographed and formed by people today.
To the power of the story!
Far Below A Whispered Moon We Seek
Far in the misted west, lingering in the deep of the moon, hear the call of the white wolves, whispering to the loons.
Long ago and past the fields, full of thundering deer, sits the silverwood in faerie song that echoes across a lake’s mirror.
If you hear the voice of adventure, don’t forget your hat. Wear it high and proud in sun song, but when the rain storms down, beware the thundercat.
Listen to the wind as it circles empty branches, a herald to the snow that comes, crashing a wave of avalanches.
In the deep night of spring, ‘round circles of stone, hear the call of the folk, it speaks to the stories in every bone.
ARR~Moony
The Portrait of Beautiful Flight: Inspired by Musee des Beaux Arts by W.H. Auden
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.”
Sometimes We Must Wear a Storm in Order to Feel the Light
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?
Step Outside: The World Says…
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.”