Haiku 3

Bitter black needle
Stabs tongue with tattoo shop force.
Awakening soon.

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Haiku 2

Lost in a sea green.
Sideways on to the current.
Angles will save you.

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Haiku 1

Twittering spring finch.
Returned from far aloft.
Beak sharp with avian cypher.

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Surface Tension

It is a pond and I live on the surface tension.

I suspect that the same is true, too,
For the New Priests:
The blogger-kings and scripter-czars,
The kulaks and uber-griefers and Linden-spawn.
Drilling through the boundary at will,
Extracting enrichment and inspiration.
Submerging only if pressed,

While the uninitiated drown amongst the choke of weeds.

It has not always been like this.
I was once tethered to the heady barometer of exploration,
For it was a place that I could learn.
A place that I could encompass.
The elusive edge of the world was tangible.
A destination. A reason.

Lost.
In its place multiplicitous dull facets.
Unimaginative yearning.
Tedious banality.

It is never truly gone, though.
The edge.
Soon,
Or perhaps a long time from now,
One of those drownlings will slip the weeds and pierce the skin.
And a wave will form.
And the surface tension will splinter.
And I will sink into the waters,
Refreshed.

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The Death of Style

The death of style creeps.
Beyond
the pale crease of the horizon.
Beyond
the critical faculties of bats to discern.
Beyond
the spectrum of sensibility.

The death of style permeates the earth.
Such as it is.
Such as it might be
one day.

But earth without mass or substance,
earth without rivers of energy,
without the fields of light and heat,
without the cut of the wind, and the slice of the rain,
is no Earth at all.

Only ether.
The death of style is ether.

Sleep.

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The Future

If it is out there.
Please tell me.
For I have not seen it.

I have wandered and sought and lost my way.
I have written volumes. Pages filled with blank.
I have spoken words enough to fill the age.
I have gazed across the expanse.
I have explored.

They say it is wondrous and shiny and gigantic.
They say it is the future. A vortex.
They say it is everything.

Nothing is everything.
Nothing.

If it is out there.
Please tell me.

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Crash Hazard

(It had dropped from the void. This was her first memory.)

She saw to the edge of the world where before she could not see.
She felt the heat of the sun where before she could not feel.
She spread her wings and sailed across her land where before she had none.
She watched the trees grow and crests of rock emerge.
She watched as the men came.
(The armies and the peasants and the lords.)
She watched them carve the rocks into cobble and the trees into beams.
(Village upon village stood at her feet. Walls rose and fell and rose again. They were always the same. They were always the same.)
She hid, in times of turmoil, in the glowing rift at the edge of the land.
(There she had wonderful and terrible dreams.)
She found her land deserted, once, after an especially bloody dream.
She found all that remained was a fog.
She hated it. It obscured her sight and impeded her progress.
(The men returned. Their village became angular, bladed. Their churches soared with razor peaks. Fog-slicing.)
She called it the crash hazard.
She called it the crash hazard.
She sat atop the steeple and waited.

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Looked Deeper

From so far above it gave me few clues as to its depth.
Upstream you could tell it was shallow, the water skipped over the spines of stones just visible.
Or perhaps it wasn’t shallow at all. Perhaps the rocks were pinnacles, being ground down by the river.

We had just met and were talking about that man we had encountered a few minutes ago.
He had a feral look and sodden clothes. He had frightened us.
Not paying attention, I slipped.
The sun was setting, the grass was wet, and at first I laughed.

The river was very, very cold.
At one point I was sucked below into a spectrum of icy blue suffocation.
The surface a mercuric flux, a long arm away.
From underwater, the river looked deeper.

The current cast me up and I was again flying down the slope of the river.
Grand manors threw fleeting shadows and dopplered gasps of balconied witnesses.
Steep banks hurtled to the vanishing sky.
The footing of a gargantuan bridge loomed like a crouching golem.
Then shot by with sickening nearness.

Salvation in an eddy. Backwater swirls of turbid hope.
She had found a way down. We had just met.