You can tell a culture by the way they ride bicycles. Not on the right or wrong side of the road. That’s irrelevant to this particular case. Rather, the riding is in where they go and how they stop. Especially in how they stop. Remember when you first learned how to cycle? Getting started wasn’t …
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.
Could Dream
When I was five I wanted to be a cat. So I could reach the sun and climb the apple trees. When I was ten I wanted to be a ninja. So I could leap from rooftops and defeat evil. Looking back I just wanted a katana. A samurai might have been better. …
Note Left on the Door for a Hero: A Poem for Confidence
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.
Character Study: Alice Alexandria Andrews of Kettle Universe Fame
When Stormy Kettle First Met Alice Alexandria in a Laundry Machine War (a chapter excerpt)
Students are, as I am well acquainted, (being one myself), masters at saving pennies in every possible manner and almost all students come with an annoyance toward anyone who deigns to waste whatever they are personally in a curious habit of saving.
Have you ever seen someone reuse yogurt containers, collect recycled paper for their note taking, or store ten different hair elastics safely on an arm? A girl I sat next to in one class always had the habit of arriving fifteen minutes early, so as to give her full range of the classroom, undisturbed by her fellow peers, to forage for all the manner of leftover pencils, pens and erasers. It caused her as much distress as it would an animal lover hearing of a cat abused, to see a pen missing its cap, lying forgotten between the corner desks of the back two rows.
Once she proudly showed me three yellow 2HB pencils, unmarred and unsharpened, which she had discovered earlier that morning. Before adopting them as her own however, she made sure to ask our class, when the room had filled with its learned occupants. Did these golden devices belong to anyone? Getting no reply, she kept them, and to this day she worships the sight of them in her pencil case.
You can always tell a student from any other individual by the way they stare down the spoons dishing into the cranberry sauce over a Thanksgiving dinner or the run-away peas which lay forgotten under a sumptuously endowed slice of turkey. Their hands itch towards their own silverware, bursting with the desire not let those peas be forgotten, or to lap up the last liquid dredges of cranberry sauce pooling by the mashed potatoes on their neighbour’s plate.
I for one conform to this mode of annoyance on quite a regular basis. Have you ever watched someone eat your most cherished cooking and then leave a field of crumbs and islands of choice bits they chose not to rescue with their utensils? As my mother always said, it showed no humane gratitude to leave enough food on a plate that could feed a whole family in Africa. That said; I do my utmost to clean my plate within range of propriety. I carefully strategize which portion will leave the most crumbs and which substance is a good mop. Only then will I begin to make inroads into my treasure box of provisions.
Currently my treasure box makes a motley crew of garden tools behind the brick storehouse of the backyard. Tomorrow my treasure box will make a modest marvel of pocelain dog statues from Avon. Yesterday was a treasure box of leftover toiletries from my massage-therapist housemate.
Alice Alexandria counted socks. She believed you could never have enough, and the infernal washing machine down the hall was not to be trusted. The most important rule of life, she always told me, came down to have a superior brace of matching socks. After each load of laundry she routinely married each couple of stripped socks and then she would slip off her boots, roll up her denim, and slide on a fresh pair; lest she come across an acquaintance.