the image blurs my mind blurs attempts to focus bring a headache so i relax, seeking no clarity, finding no answers adrift in emptiness attached to nothing; the abyss peers back what does it see?
The Abyss Peers Back
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Tag Archives: Vers Libre
Brass Monkey
the brass monkey seemed real -- not like a real monkey, but like a real supplicant, making a real offering i guess its realness was the realness of human wishfulness it looked real because it looked like what a human desires in a monkey -- rather than how an actual monkey would behave, hightailing it with the fruit up to too lofty a height to have its jackfruit repossessed i read that the original "brass monkey" was a cannonball rack on an old-timey sailing ship, then the term came to refer to cold weather, because the differential contraction of cold metal would cause the cannonballs to pop off the rack -- hence the saying: "cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey!" and, somewhere along the way, it also became a low-brow malt liquor cocktail seems strange that so many brass monkeys would exist that weren't monkey-shaped, or even made of brass -- but such is the way of words
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Three Thoughts on Shadow
I Where is my shadow? I look behind me & see that it's ill-formed & indistinct. And I wonder whether it's the quality of the light, or the quality of the me. II I read that Oraon shamans study people's shadows. Fat-shadowed people are said to be ill-tempered, stubborn, & domineering [but not necessarily fat-bodied.] III I heard tell of a master of shadows. It might not seem like much of an object of mastery -- shadows being intangible, but he always knew which way he was going and where the world sat at the moment. [And that's more than can be said of the rest of us.] It was a simple skill that most could not be bothered to practice. Everyone else's inability to find value in those dark angular patches was his gain.
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POEM: Information Age Ailment
Screaming streams of information pelt all corners of the mind. Neurons are constantly flickering with flinches. Meanwhile, the body whispers its secrets in the hushed tones of a prayer uttered during a shootout.
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POEM: A World of Loathing
a cat abhors a vacuum vacuums abhor tangled hair tangled hair abhors a hairbrush hairbrushes abhor Victorian Spanking Fetishists Victorian Spanking Fetishists abhor Victorian prudism prudism abhors immodesty immodesty abhors modesty modesty abhors whores whores abhor cheapskates cheapskates abhor expenses expenses abhor ledgers ledgers abhor ink pens ink pens abhor writers writers abhor synonyms synonyms abhor antonyms antonyms abhor continuums and so on... it's true that Eddie Rabbitt loves a rainy night, but who loves Eddie Rabbitt? [the Coalition for Names with Double-Letters, that's who!]
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POEM: Hypnagogic Voices
I hear voices -- a cold burble of voices -- too dim and distant to extract meaning, too inexplicable not to inject a rationale, or a slate of reasons: -madness -conspiracy -expectation -the impulse toward void filling minds despise quiet, filling it with puzzling prattle, and making any hash of sound into cryptic natter, until sleep descends
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POEM: A Leak in the Sunny Side
Rounding through the pass, I crossed from the cold to the sunny side. But while I transited from the damp & mossy to the dry grass side of the mountain, I carried the cold with me. The ubiquitous sun would not warm me, but rather I seemed to suck the warmth out of the world -- as if I were a portal, and the light landing upon my skin was shunted to some parallel universe. I was the world's window left open with the heater on, and the temperature differential pulled a steady breeze in my direction, to who knows where?
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POEM: Knee-Jerk Speciesism
https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/121 [via Wikipedia]
I glimpsed the red hourglass, vibrating in a stone wall -- a Black Widow spider, bouncing on a thin web spun within the void of an absent rock -- that gap forming the spider's recessed hide. And instead of being happy that the spider had found a fine shelter, I worried that a child would stick a careless mitt deep into that wall hole, and be bitten on the hand. In retrospect, this seems so unfair to the spider.
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POEM: The Power of That Which Bumps in the Night
The last lamp out dips the room into darkness [sudden darkness] and in the nothingness, before vague shapes form, a clunking sound triggers the stab of an adrenaline spike into ones chest -- mainlined frisson, or fright: the heart thumps, the chest cinches, the stomach lurches, breath is sipped spastically, and an involuntary noise escapes from some unnamed place within. The power of strange and startling thuds and whumps has fueled many a storybook, but though the mystery is rarely solved, we get over it soon enough.
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POEM: Lighthouse Keeper
The lonely lighthouse keeper, peering through a deep-set but narrow window at waves smashing onto the rocky shore, spouting upwards in a fanned geyser. So much depends upon his maintenance of momentum, but the better things go, the more dreadfully boring is life, and when things go poorly, there are russian roulette odds of tragedy. Like life on a mountain, but when someone crashes into the mountainside, the mountain-man is an unlikely participant in the tragedy.
