To While Away the Winter

Tags

Abstract, Black and White, Drear, Experimental, Fractured Self, Introspection, Micro Play, Nature, Prose, Sea, Water, Winter

“Why are you here, talking to me now, after—so many years?”

“I guess all the frolicking wore me down.”

“Unlikely. I used to see you coming down the street. I’d dissolve out of sight so you wouldn’t—You were always alone.”

“I never did stay longer than a night.”

“Did you ever see me?”

“I did.”

“Did it—did you feel anything?”

“I did.”

“But you kept cantering on. A beautifully proud and stoic Gran Cavallo.”

“A nag out to pasture.”

“I used to wish I could become you. I still do.”

“Grow a beard and thick wrists?”

“Do you know what I think?”

“Probably.”

“I think one day, perhaps, part of my skull shall be found beneath a vending machine.”

“That won’t happen. You’re never around anyone brutal enough.”

“You’re not brutal enough?”

“Maybe.”

“It’s a brightly coloured vending machine, surrounded by snow-laden trees. And everything’s glazed in a thick pelt of ice. And it just sits there, soundless and devoid of use—offering cold drinks in a place where there are no summers. And underneath will be a little piece of my parietal bone—and a pale little springtail, no bigger than a centimeter—will find it. He’ll squiggle in delight, and use it as a lean-to to ease his eyes against the drone of the lights overhead—and there he’ll remain—to while away the winter.”

“A winter that never ends.”

“Maybe it will…I can feel sympathy for strange things.”

“It’s been so long since we’ve done this…”

“Yes. Rather sudden but natural—like the Rorschach of a deer misting across the morning commute.”

“Did you think I’d come back?”

“I didn’t think I’d…be here to find out.”

“Thought I’d forget you?”

“Ha. Like remembering a robin’s egg, found crushed in the grass on a cold spring day. Just a flash of amnion in the mud.”

“You said grass before.”

“Another non-sequitur. So many, so many. Could list them to the equator and back. But why come back…”

“I did miss you.”

“And I you.”

“You could never become me, you know—I’m not, I’m not whole.”

“I know. I know.”

“Did you ever—find that face?”

“Do you see one now?”

(No reply)

“Flakelets are scattering. Can you hear them?”

“Yes.”

“Like tiny white beetles ricocheting against a black tarp. I must bed down immediately. That clicking noise will put me right to sleep.”

“I’m going, I’m going.”

“Did you go already?”

(Silence)

“Will you come back?”

(Silence)

“I guess you’ve gone. I can ease back now, let these arms bond to the earth, and analyze the entropy of this zigzag roof—see how long it takes for those holes to turn into denticled tears…”

Were You Feeble in the End?

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.)

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

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.

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.

How I Wish There Were No End to Rain

Tags

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

I 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.

Distant 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.

I 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.

My 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…

I 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.

“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

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.

Coughing Crickets

Tags

Black and White, Moon, Nature, Night, Noir, Photography, Poem, Prose, Writing

Gasping moonlight signals through a cloudy ocean beard.

Still bodies of flies and dragonflies glint, clinging to the cool, glass skin of dimming florescent lights.

Beneath an orange orb of sodium vapour the glinting lawn looks like a nest of razorblades.

Crickets loom slick and black with the dank breath of December fog nestled on their backs. They sound like coughing hinges, tonight.

The Taste of Dying December

Tags

Abstract Photography, Black and White, Brevard County, Cocoa Beach, Decay, Droplets, Florida, Monochrome, Nature, Ocean, Photography, Poetry, Prose, Sea, Surf, Surfer, Thoughts, Wandering, Water, Writing

Ashy taste of mildewed Wind, heady and warm, off brush-metal waves- sticking to thoughts– it cursitates, Neurons itching, tickled by the bleary chiming of a Rain-Pattered Sea.

The chink-metal ocean tastes of sodden rust, spume sputtering about the shoulders- these eyes– a lunging Black, as dark as wetsuit skin.

Lambent gaze scrapes the clouds; dark spindly form punctures the sky- fiberglass toes- white and sharp, like bone- and the sound of water drips like snow.

Comes the deluge, the swimming grey swarm of oblivion, drowning in a surge of metal- the colour of December’s somber death- the scent of it tingles in curled and gnarly fingers, burrowing in sand.

The balmy breath of it dissolves and settles upon these meandering splinters of thought that scuttle into the fizzy-green brine and are stolen by the evening tide, stifled by the sweeping sounds of the Seagull’s Drawl and the strumming song of a Rain-Pattered Sea.

Pursued by the Moon

Tags

Black and White, Experimental, Introspection, Nature, Night Photography, Noir, Owl, Prose, Story, Thoughts, Writing

Gritty steps reverberate the path, winding. Puttering along, the lone figure listens to the mosquito moon moaning behind skuzzy sky. Scraggly limbs cast sniveling shadow across his face, leather loafers glinting damp through lamp-light ripples. Rain hovers in misty summer air.

He stops, cognizant of Eyes upon him, lambent yellow beaming through the darkness. Then comes a muffled cry, a raspy whir wafting down from the arms of the great live oak- creature nestled somewhere in the down of rain-dappled Spanish moss.

Muted-still, the man waits, gazing up into the dripping tree, listening to the sound of life writhing and stirring in the dank and brittle grass at his feet.

With a flash of pale wing, the creature spills into view, poised on a naked branch, talons curling into deep fissured bark, glinting with rain. Those gawping eyes of lemon fire slit the darkness.

Then, a sudden gust of ludic wind flits through, brushing away the film from the moon. With a tossing steel mane, the man watches the little owl glide upwards and over the crests of trees, quickly dissipating into the darkness beyond, pursued by the lucid light of Sapphire Moon.

The man, too, hurries on, with bowed head, starlight stirring in ruffled puddles that swirl in his wake.