Becoming

He appeared in the mirror over my shoulder as I brushed my teeth.  An eyeless face, glistening fishbelly white; a flat, tiny nose and thin, bloodless lips; long, thin, greasy black hair.  I felt that my reflected gaze was met, somehow.  Certainly, my attention was fixed, immobile.  I could no more move or complete my dental hygiene routine than I could fly. 

PSA

Search for the poetry of everyday language – seek it out wherever hides.  And when you find its dread cadence creeping into common expression, shine the spotlight of your pure reason upon it.  Chain it down, hold it back, with all the weight of plain speaking.  Words are monsters, made stronger by the secret rhythms of our unconscious training.  And that hidden poetry will rise up in your mind, until all that remains of your soul is a pulsing beacon of pure art, a swaying sine wave streaking into the universe, impregnating reality with dreams. 

A Box Full Of Fog

There was always fog.  Morning, noon, and night.  Thick and cloying; it muted sounds, made of speech a buzz, coated the tongue, and reduced all colors to shades of grey.  Summer, winter, no season seemed to exist under the fog. He thought he recalled a time, perhaps when he was still a very young child, when the sun had shone freely on the city.  It was now little more than a vague, bright disc that did nothing to brighten the fog or to dry the droplets that condensed on his beard. The fog even made its way indoors. It was inescapable, and had been for years.  He was used to it now, and he assumed that everyone else was, too.

In the Night, a Promise

In the depths of the night

In the groaning, tossing, sleepless hours

Soul-shriveling and sprinkled with hate

Sickly stars shine down

On a banquet of my own weakness

Never-ending and without release

 

And what comes next?

the Bandits at Kulzcak

Yelm the Iron Giant watched his partner Tomas as that Rabid Dwarf carefully negotiated his way through the busy common room of Vsetin’s least expensive Inn.

They were a formidable duo.  Tomas the Rabid Dwarf: a very short man – although not truly dwarfish – with bad teeth and an impressive mustache, so called for his temper and predilection for explosions and unprovoked violence.  And Yelm the Iron Giant: single-armed and Cyclopean after the final engagements of the War, so named because he stood eight feet tall and consistently survived what broke other men. Together, they ranged the European lands once ravaged by the armies and the creations of the New Scientists and the Madboy Kings, hunting down the Haunts which had survived the Second Thirty Years War.  Those peasants and burghers who had likewise survived the conflicts, and who now found themselves piecing back together the old nations in spite of the vestigial aristocracies, paid well for proof that yet another of the monsters and machines created by the Madboys had been destroyed, and so Tomas and Yelm were able to stitch together a living in the midst of the ruins and the fear.