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A Day in the Brine

~ Unkempt Mind dribbling in the seethe

A Day in the Brine

Category Archives: Introspection

Were You Feeble in the End?

22 Saturday Aug 2020

Posted by smilingtoad in Experimental, Introspection, Photography, Poetry

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Death, Forest, Mud, Nature, Photography, Prose

Eyes of opal cream and limbs like a twist of deadwood.

Tears shining like a crow’s back in the midday sun.

I’d like to take up residence in the tracery of an old reptile skin.

Were you feeble in the end? Or did you wear every wince like a fashion?

Night edges in, warm and invasive– a clammy hand about the throat.

Thumping through the dark, there are holes in my punchinello-shoes– and though this path is softened with grass, it is host to many thorns and stones.

(My paternal grandmother died an October ago, and I shot these images shortly after being informed some months later.)

Every Crushing Step

26 Wednesday Oct 2016

Posted by smilingtoad in Introspection, Photography, Poetry

≈ 36 Comments

Tags

Black and White, Fall, Floral, Florida, Hope, Introspection, Nature, Photography, Poetry

flowerb-0559A humble path,
furry with
emerald moss
and splashed
in blue shadow.

A shiny-backed beetle
suns himself
on a cold
molar-sized stone,
then shuffles off
into a copper sea
of leaves.

flowerc-0317So many
roving feet
traverse here.

A horse gallops by
bold and solid
his chestnut sides
heaving.
He is followed
by the stab
of deer hooves
swift in flight.

leavesb-0243Now comes
my own restive shoe
hole-pocked
and pebble-filled
to bumble through.

Yet there you grow
tiny purple bloom
as if every crushing step
will always miss you.flowerc-1104

Another Twilight Hanging

18 Monday Jul 2016

Posted by smilingtoad in Experimental, Introspection, Stories

≈ 53 Comments

Tags

Black and White, Experimental, Florida, Moon, Nature, Night, Noir, Photography, Prose, Thoughts, Water, Writing

AHangingAtTwilightI saw a coyote last night. There was a tattered hole in his left ear. I almost missed him, perched there on the porous sidewalk, his lemon eyes glazed in the orange glow of the streetlight, his tumbleweed tail thumping soundlessly.

I shuffled on, my shins swishing like plastic bags.

I noticed a glint of black blood on the pavement. Just a drop or two.

ThisGardenofAleThey shoveled up the rest of my remains, yesterday morning. I listened to profanities slung by the strident tongues of the Grey Men. They chipped at the concrete. I listened to their shovels scrape and scratch.

“Smells like hell but at least I’m not coughin’ up flies,” one said to the other, his shovel dripping.

“I ain’t seen a single maggot,” the other agreed, and nodded, digging back into the heap.

There was a groan and a metallic suction and crunch accompanied by the blinking back-up beeps of the garbage truck.

I felt a seizure welling up.

Bramble-3767A mockingbird attempted to conquer the din. Ten years swam by. Hoarse and vanquished, I watched him fly against the watery-brown sky and vanish.

I once held a baby bird, a couple summers ago. The tiny creature, lighter than a fistful of sunflower seeds, quivered violently with life and burned my hand. I dropped it. Just before the cat pounced, I plucked it up again and set it in the sink.

Its eyes, like two drops of midnight, leered up at me, its pale neck of string nearly snapping- and with a peculiar rictus grin splitting its face apart, it commenced its screams for sustenance.

No harm done.

ShunnedbyScavengersSome scraps from my corpse never quite made it into the truck. Some pieces were never going to budge.

A slurry of vultures descended for inspection. They poked and rasped and then looked at each other in disgust.

I watched them shrug and mount the bilge-water sky in a flurry of razor-black wings. Even the scavengers reject my remains.

WhereTheCoyotesSleepThe sun is pooling on the horizon now, in the garden of ales. Bottles glitter, poking up from the mud like stakes. Another wistful twilight hanging, the air sharp with the scent of broken twigs.  The faceless doll in the background keeps spinning, dangling from the thumb of a branch.

The moon sweeps over. Distant lights yawn. The clouds are shorn by a gust of oven wind.  I see the coyote again, stretching in the middle of the road, his ear whistling. I whisper a muffled apology to him- though, I know not why.

He gives me a lopsided look, his lemon-ball eyes in slits. A carnivorous smile swims across his inky lips.

EveningShornApartA hiss of headlights reflects on a fleck of bone. I become encompassed in a warm deluge. I stare up from the bottom and allow myself to drown.

The ripples above never seem to end.

Sometimes, Silence is Reckless…

01 Tuesday Mar 2016

Posted by smilingtoad in Experimental, Introspection, Video

≈ 70 Comments

Tags

Addiction, Black and White, Depression, Experimental, Florida, GIF, Grief, Introspection, Nature, Poetry, Prose, Video, Writing

(Some experimental refractions.  Thank you for drizzling by.)

MentalErosionThe clattering waves. The intractable sky. Mute again, with gloomy grey eyes. A bit of bone cuts into my thumb. A touch of wind whispers through decaying feathers. I do not remember the last thing I felt before the embalming.

AbandoningSometimes, Silence is reckless.

PurgatoryMy mind is fossilized. As lively as the oldest stone. I lean back on the retracting cushion of Entropy, and gaze blankly toward the heavens. How dazzling is this thatch of scattering sparrows; how enchanting their dance of dewdrop shadows.

RelapseThorny bliss is this mindlessness, oblique amongst the dried thistle and snapping bramble. I can vaguely hear it, somewhere wrapped in gauze; a little Life fizzing at the bottom of the quiet stream, beyond.

Like a mosquito, I insert a needle into it, now and then.

RecklessSilenceIt is easy to forget the threat of a wave’s smooth caress, that its languorous massage of oblivion is still a form of erosion.

Breathing2When I was a child, my favourite thing to draw was a noose.

TheMomentBeforetheFalterHe rang the other night. I could hear that his lips were cracked and bleeding. He wept and begged forgiveness, but I had never felt slighted to begin with. Yet, my response was blank-eyed silence. There was only the sound of the restive wind moaning through the eaves to answer for me.

PugnatiousSkiesHow stealthy a foe is this stifling captor; like a cashmere cloud, its downy coolness yawned over me. Its strangeness seemed safe, nestled inside its gossamer embrace, bound in a world without senses or thought. I am far too gone to feel alarm, now.

TheBreathofEntropySometimes, love is just impotent rage that is a little too tired to bear its bulbous face.

TenacityofGriefWhat an obdurate knot Shame so deftly creates, twisting away, as the years smoothly slip by, pressure mounting against my spine.

FlyingonaFeversBackRegaining a pulse requires resurfacing. To drag the bloated body from the turgid depths. To pry open its chalky eyes, exposing them to the bone light of the wild ocean sky, above. To kiss its mucid, slimy visage and blow through its cold stringy-white lips.

DejectionTo let the cherry rivulets of pus and water drain from the self-inflicted punctures.

HoldingOnI do not know if I will dry out, chafe these wrists, and feel again. I despise the sound of my own voice, the rattle and scrape of my defunct brain and the trepid rasp of my rusty breath.

LayDowntoCompostSometimes, though, Silence can be much deadlier than the noose.

How I Wish There Were No End to Rain

14 Monday Sep 2015

Posted by smilingtoad in Introspection, Photography, Quotations, Stories

≈ 57 Comments

Tags

Black and White, Death, Florida, Grief, Introspection, Music, Nature, Ocean, Pain, Photography, Prose, Quotation, Rain, Sea, Writing

Ocean-bw-8404-BIII loomed beneath a dark feathering of sea-oats, pointed tips glazed with recent rain. I listened to the subdued murmur of little waves. The fetid and russet beds of sea-wrack had been washed away, leaving the sand barren and strange. A forlorn gull loitered at the swash line, analyzing the crinkling water as it fizzed in and out.

Beach- bw-8456-BDistant lightning lazily branched from the moody-blue squall-lines and spidered across a sullen sea of herbal green. Coy ghost crabs emerged, removing dark masses of dripping sand from drowned burrows. They built little, lumpy mounds around the entrances to their small, black holes.

The storm was leaving me. How I longed for it to stay.

Beach- bw-8441-BI was tortured the other night, seized with the memory of my little Siamese cat squeezing her eyes tightly shut for the last time. How swiftly she was gone, her soft, cinnamon cheek resting upon a colorful, flowing blanket that masked the metal slab beneath. I had never seen an animal euthanized, before. I understood, logically, that it ended the physical misery of her little, bony body.

Yet, how troubled I am by that last image of peace…of life tenderly released.

Beach- bw-8742-BMy mum died of a similar ravenous kind of disease. I remember that final image. Her face waxen and unreal, her mouth a small, black hole. She did not tightly close her eyes. She was not escorted quietly, through a warm wash of sleep, into the darkness beyond. Yet, I was not so disturbed by her image in death. And how vividly there lacked any look of peace…

Beach- bw-8752-BI do not know what that reveals about me.

But I wish the storm would never leave. I want, forever, to hear its screams over this cold and fleeting sea of herbal green. How I wish there were no end to rain. Just as there seems to be no end to Grief.

Ocean-bw-8411-B“Darkness settles on the ground
Leaves the day stumbling blind,
Coming to a quiet close
And maybe just in time”
– From the song God Only Knows by Joe Henry

Disheveled Night- Through Peccable Eyes

12 Saturday Apr 2014

Posted by smilingtoad in Experimental, Introspection, Photography, Poetry

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Abstract, Black and White, Experiemental, Night, Night Photography, Noir, Photography, Poetry, Rain, Urban

Globules of Light

Disheveled night

To peer through peccable eyes

SplatteredMigraine

The restive rebel

Curled up inside

This sweating mind

SequesteredThoughts

Warbling words

Driveling through a soggy grin

Tepid brow nestling into the grit

Of neon-washed, city-skin

thefabricofthought

Uvid and mucid

This life therein

Dank and dainty

Delicate, it drifts

NightsConfusion

Dastardly light

That sweeps and swims

just blink00

In coal-coloured eyes

That leer with a limp

And in smoky shame

Still long to live

A Shrewd Grief

02 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by smilingtoad in Art, Experimental, Introspection, Photography, Poetry

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Abstract, Art, Black and White, Digital, Drawing, Experimental, Grief, Ink, Introspection, Nature, Night, Photography, Poetry, Rain, Thoughts

Milling01   Barbed malevolence

DeathA shrewd and blunt Grief

Fern3That his somber Absence

NightShould foster such Relief

Bruised Waters

07 Friday Mar 2014

Posted by smilingtoad in Introspection, Photography, Poetry

≈ 23 Comments

Tags

Black and White, Florida, Nature, Photography, Poetry, Reflection, Thoughts, Water

FeatherDropIn the miry garden
Solemn somnolence
Effulgent

image descriptionIn greasy moonlight
The morning sky
A bruised lavender

image descriptionThe doleful waters
A tempting grave

Drown in Sinuous Streams

21 Thursday Nov 2013

Posted by smilingtoad in Introspection, Photography, Poetry

≈ 33 Comments

Tags

Autumn, Black and White, Brooding, Hiking, Introspection, Melancholy, Nature, Photography, Poetry, Rain, Thoughts, Water, Woods

Dull eyes, like nail-heads

Drown in sinuous streams

Dusk in November

Water Sinuous

Dappled green slug skin

Raspy leaves tangled in wind

Accordion cravings

Vitative

Smell of foggy woods

Staggering in solitude

Cold heavens asperge

DSC_2061

Wood-fire tango

Tendrils of rain punch the flames-

Broodings, vespertine

IMG_1729

Of Arduous Grey

25 Thursday Jul 2013

Posted by smilingtoad in Experimental, Introspection, Photography, Poetry

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

Black and White, Dreary, Garden, Morning, Nature, Personal, Photography, Poetry, Rain

Rockledge03

Of Arduous Grey,

These

Bleary mornings-

Creature caged

Beast

With gentle eyes-

This is Love

Childlike

Within the HeathenRockledgeCrys

Hugging rabbits

Sautéing onions

And black beans

Then

Weeping

In the gardenRockledgeground05

Alive

With the brilliance

Of Rain

Plumes of acrid smoke

Swirling in Dawn

This Life-

One long, laborious

Over-dose

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