“In misdirected desire, the cicadas sing
their enticements to my lawnmower,
but its blades are dulled, and merely
caress the grass.”
“I didn’t ask about your feeble
suburban atmospherics.”
Tag Archives: surrealism
the dream giver, and other things
The sun is in its Ptolemaic orbit, epicyclic,
if I’m not mistaken, and its light is focussed on
the kitchen cupboards. Coffee’s in a capsule
and bread is in a toaster.
The songs of rowdy traffic lorikeets
are mimicking my neighbor yelling at the kids,
and a distant mirror is shattering,
with someone’s cherished image
dissolving in the daylight.
—It will do.
concrete and clay
One packed toothpaste and a sewing kit
for essential sutures.
“Space-time, its nature is undeniable,”
(in lieu of a goodbye) and that one headed off
towards tomorrow’s sunrise.
The one indoors was waving from a window.
“Everything may be cleaved in two,
so it is with digital computation.”
fênix 6: the first night of the ultraviolet forever
When fantasy disappeared from Fênix and everyone left, Sorry, who fell out of the sky with her Subaru, and a possibly undead storyteller, were left behind. She warned him of an imminent electrified dystopia, and they sought sanctuary in Guarapuava. On the way, they saw herds of armadillos ridden by sephine spiders. Part One is here.
Luck was with us when we arrived in Guarapuava:
the world had not yet ended, and by the teary shores of
the Lagoa das Lágrimas, we came across
the Pensive Teahouse, open after midnight.
ghostery
Friday night at the Ghostery on Relentable Drive,
and a whirl of leaves blew in,
took my vaguely personal shape.
Talcum-powdered others
like to do their ghosting,
whispering and wispy pale,
but I don’t play that game,
I’m as solid as a memory
of a memory.
return to the lost planet
Microscopic particles of time
rain upon our lives.
Paper promises grow brittle,
mapped forgiveness folds, unfolds,
frays and tears along the creases.
Our memories refract through prisms
until the brightest day is lost
in anesthetic runes.
~/~
I heard a motor revving in the carport,
and from my gate,
I watched my Kia Starfish drive away,
with the spindly legged carport
galloping behind.
contretemps 2: sam’s tale
Someone in a Chrysler Valiant driving along the Botany Bay shoreline has picked up a couple of skeletal hitchhikers who have come from the sea. The first part is here.
We are Sam and Sammy,
please drive us to the West,
to invoices and wheat fields,
where desiccants and accountancy abound,
and everything is warm and flocculant.
irrelevant self awareness
in the pavlova recipe
Sorry, I have to take this,
the pavlova says. The microwave
is ringing and they speak together in whispers.
travel blogging
Down by the seas of roads and rails—tarmacs lined
with dashes on the runways to the shallows—
the metropolitan trains approach a nexus
where all begins and ends.
Once my life was stippled on those waters
and broken on those shores.
the shadow sun
Through the window, washes
on a watercolor planet,
rainy autumn shades in spring, and
in the early evening, scattered photon showers
are forecast, a luminous return of light
from the shadow sun.
Indoors there are smaller mysteries,
trailing motes in negative space—
old-fashioned sunlight
leaving lamps and bulbs,
domesticities and peripherals,
drawn out between the curtains
to the shadow sun.
telma, joanne, a train
The rail clatters its rhythms but the carriages never move.
They’re always here, and through a frame, a door,
a window, a hole cut in a rainy mirror,
you can see them waiting.
Telma was painting the feature wall
with essence of vanilla. Joanne was reading
a possible book, perhaps the persistence of trains,
or a painting, the persimmonence of time.
She’d need her glasses to be sure.
never let us go
He stood at the door with a forlorn smile
and a hand-drawn mustache—
a comically tragic pastiche wearing
nothing but tennis shorts and socks.
My name is Rodney, might I
come in?
I know who you are. You see
my name is Rodney as well.
a waspish day
Everything is ordinary, the rain birds
said, and I believed them, though
the morning breeze had blown
my cat away, and the wasps set up
a circus in the bedroom.
When I voiced a few concerns, they told
me that the wasp show must go on,
and when I hinted at a discount on the door,
they insisted I must pay full price.
the laundromat of time
Time is not a river in the mind,
it runs in agitated swirls and eddies,
with a little fabric softener.
We’re pebbles skimmed across its waves,
seabirds too ungainly to find its sky,
who skate along time’s surface, and
never understand its heights
and depths.
nadi and the sun
Day in, day out, Raoni turned the golden
handle in the temple. The greatest honor,
the elders said, because his turning
caused the sun to arch across the sky.
But he didn’t know that Nadi
had been busy in the solar vault.
She’d fixed a belt around the shaft
that ran to the sun machine,
and a pulley with an arm attached
stirred water in a tub of clothes,
to automate her washing.
dawn of the hydrolithic age 1
It was a king tide morning on a
beach south of Rio when the very
first train came out of the sea.
Isabel saw it from a swing in the
playground, and she told the
teacher, but no-one believed her
till the train reached the freeway
and the eight am rush.
a sip of moon water
When it rains on the water moon, I sip my aqua vitae and watch the droplets trickle down the acrylic. Sometimes I wonder what the wood ducks are up to, or whether I should feed the cat, or whether anything exists at all beyond the plastic.
If not, the tins of salmon in the pantry must be for me.
Marginally more seriously, Charles Payseur of Quick Sip Reviews fame writes shortish reviews of speculative fiction short stories. They’re very handy for busy humans and water fowl, like the wood ducks and I, and he’s just done Fantasy Scroll Magazine Issue 11 including a review of my story The Water Moon.