The Vitreous Surface of Grief: And, a Death on Halloween

Tags

Abstract, Black and White, Dark Humour, Death, Experimental, Music, Nature, Photography, Prose, Quotation, Swamp

“Will I always feel this way?
So empty, so estranged?”
– From the song “Empty” by Ray Lamontagne

Shadows spill in green tendrils across oiled waters. I probe the murky, moschate depths with a long, soggy stick. My hands are black and muddied. Reeds whistle beside me. A seagull mews somewhere far away. Minims of sweat glisten and drop from the end of my nose. I can taste the paracme, the tongue-slitting, nascent edge of the end.

A frog burbles to the vitreous surface. Two aurific eyes shimmer at me, bright as egg-yokes. With a gulp, they vanish. I can smell slime. My fingers balter through the mud. I am waiting. I am always waiting.

The sun spits in my eye and I turn away, longing for the tenebrous clouds of the foggy North to sidle down and cast me in a casket of embalming gloom.

I am addicted to desolation. I ache for darkness, cold and decay.

And then a cool wind finally came. Its chilled fingers ruffled my hair and it made the back gate moan plangorously against its flaking hinges. I reveled, I pranced, I forgot my little pain.

A mouse came in the night. He settled himself in a soft, grey ball beside my feet, nose nuzzling the coarse, back-door rug. I watched him take slow, solemn breaths, his sable eyes squinting, mordant. He died in the wash of a final sunrise that milked across a violescent sky, on the dawn of Halloween. Creatures come to me to die, sometimes.

The ants are burrowing into his raisin eyes, now. In a week or three, his tiny white mouse skull will be decoration on my desk.

There is always a glimmer through grief.

“Walk on down the hill
Through the grass grown tall and brown
And still it’s hard somehow to let go of my pain
On past the busted back
Of that old and rusted Cadillac
That sinks into this field collecting rain”
– From the song “Empty” by Ray Lamontagne

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Spotted Only with a Magnifying Glass

Tags

Abstract, Experimental, Nature, Photography, Poetry

She is spotted only
with a magnifying glass,
an animalcule
with limescaled wings
And a dusky face.

Clinging to
a breathing blade
of dancing
chloroplasts,
she sees
the fractals flash
in a fury of green-
the mosaics of her
shieling sea.

The dawn scatters
in a migraine of hues,
the aurific daal’mist
sibilant around this
unseen and muted thing.

Waiting to be flicked
by a snapping finger
of prairie wind,
she watches the world,
as listless as a carcass,
through a cage
of tangled light
and vying stems.

Another Twilight Hanging

Tags

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

I 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.

They 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.

A 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.

Some 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.

The 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.

A 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.

Fade to Grain…

Tags

Abstract, Black and White, Experimental, Florida, Grain, Lizard, Nature, Odd, Photography, Rain, Wandering, Writing

Olitory rain; a rain-forest in the kitchen, again. Time for a change. Time for an adventure. Time to let the ceiling-cascade water the counter-top-basil-and-sage.

Time to escape.

“Time runs along a linear plain, they say. Nothing remains the same. Thus, we can never turn back, again.”

Pompous, highfalutin windbag…

Another dull interplay as Traffic Light refuses to change.

“You see, this is known as the arrow of time, which describes the asymmetrical nature of Time, and…”

Please…Eat your…GREEN.

Bunched traffic left in a puddle, behind.

What am I doing? What have I been doing all these years?

Unraveling like an old sweater.

All my life, pushing quaint little notes under the slouching fence.  But I see no familiar, vibrant-faced recipient peeping back at me through the shadowy gap in the moldered boards. I only see darkness.

She must have grown up and moved away.

How pretty mold can be, as it glitters in the rain.

She used to snack on fistfuls of buttercups in the field and make her eyes turn white.  She liked to snarl like a mountain bear and play basketball on roller-blades.  And how she loved wild toads.

I have found it- another abandoned place to jauk about, dispensing disheveled, nullibiquitous thoughts out into the ether.

Let the leak in the dysphoric sky wash me like a houseplant.  How lovely to watch each drop scatter the dust.

That liminal phase- I wander through a succession of tropical depressions, a soggy bindle sagging over my shoulder.

A golden-eyed hobo toad searching for a secluded little hovel- preferably filled with mud and rain and, preferably, beneath a mossy stone.

A snort of lightning- a sniffle in the clouds- a sneeze of wind.

When is that point at which the pain of change is less than that of remaining the same?

“You’re beautiful,” she said, “and as gentle as a gale.”

The other day, I noticed that I was missing another tooth.

I keep digging under that same old soggy fence, searching for her bones…

I scuffle away, lutose and mildly bemused.  The usual state.

Time to face the traffic.  Time to shuffle on back, back to the swampy garden on the counter-top.  Back to unraveling into a stringy bundle on the floor.

Back to Entropy.

Fade to grain.

Sometimes, Silence is Reckless…

Tags

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

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

The 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.

Sometimes, Silence is reckless.

My 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.

Thorny 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.

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

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

He 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.

How 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.

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

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

Regaining 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.

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

I 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.

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

Sunday Foundling- Images in Polaroid

Tags

Black and White, Experimental, Nature, Photography, Polaroid, Prose, Thoughts, Writing

(It was a bleary kind of day, today, and I finally summoned the courage to take the Polaroid Land Camera for a wee walk. Experimental photos below. Thanks for drizzling by.)Dull nolition chimes within his pebble eyes, staring limply into polished shadows. The frowzy sky curls up against the grey toothy waves. Metallic reflections fuse and break and scribble away. The air tastes like a bike chain. Cold and caustic, it coils about his neck. Steel hands chomp at the gargling shore. Water blinks, trapped inside asphalt ridges.

A drunkenness stirs; a kind of dizzying noddary. A vagrant smile flutters about his yarn-thin lips. He tries to lick away the sting of mist rising from the river’s snapping fingers.The swaddle of December wind nuzzles and kisses the little foundling’s wet, lutose face. The depths that loom beyond beckon. Only the Quiet awaits.

Pastel Sadness

Tags

Black and White, Experimental, Florida, Grain, Grief, Melancholy, Nature, Ocean, Photography, Poetry, Sadness, Sea, Sunset, Twilight

In a fatal blue fugue,
she bruises
the edge of an hour.

She swallows the
Evening’s clear cries
of dark-dipping gulls

flung across the sunken wound
of Sunset.

Her brash toes dissolve through
the wrinkly-white
sibilance of quiet Tide;

her cloudy dress of Pastel Sadness
dragging carelessly behind.

A summer child is Twilight,
as overhead, Night begins to swim.

And in a rasp of
Rain-stung wind
she mutters something soft
and inarticulate
as she kicks away
the last cherry shadows
of an old rusty day.

The Harbour

Tags

Beauty, Black and White, Boats, Experimental, Florida, Harbour, Moment, Nature, Peace, Pensive, Photography, Sadness, Sea, Story, Sunset, Thoughts, Writing

The harbour lay bare and waiting. I strayed from the Sun, looming in the underbrush, gazing out at bony masts and old tattered umbrellas, dangling in the languid breeze. The wind turbines purred softly as towers of crisp white cloud dripped into dark sinuous waters. A blue darner hummed beside my ear, my mind strewn with white petals, my eyes reflecting mischief. I waited there, hidden, beside the chafing dock, and watched as boats groaned in and out, as the dolphins played and the clouds grew dark and bruised in the distance.

And at last I crawled out, and was overtaken by a Sea-Faring-Man. He gazed at me with soft, sagging eyes of crackling blue, shimmering through a russet, canyon face. And then he stepped into his lopsided vessel and slowly glided away without a word, sunlight pounding into his white-cotton back. And as I watched him, snaking reflections dancing along the rim of consciousness, I perceived something all too familiar in that depth of grief, that lesion of sadness, that seems to ever-dwell in Beauty…

 

Pothered in Fists of Cloud

Tags

Black and White, Cat, Dark, Experimental, Nature, Odd, Photography, Poetry, Portrait, Processing, Thoughts

Disdain

Pothered in

Fists of cloud

Slippery rain

With

Ashen light

Sliding off the

Rims of ripplesTwigs snapping

Louder than thunder

Creosote eyes

Wearing the storm

Cinder breath

Pawing through

Living yarnA cat chasing a mole

 

A Shrewd Grief

Tags

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

  Barbed malevolence

A shrewd and blunt Grief

That his somber Absence

Should foster such Relief