I felt the steam press firmly on my brow, wincing slightly in the vapor ... blue gingham on the ironing board, and as I tried to mind the collar I lost track of my own hand and singed a finger.  Slightly bewildered I stood motionless and looked beyond my alocasia and the flies crawling the sunlit screen of my patio door.  I found myself listening ( Read more... )

The orange moon casting ringlets in the evening haze as ash from the fires dust the midnight blue of my car's paint, the smell of smoke that wrongly reminds me of roasting hickory and cedar pine, and the dull hulk of the sun settling in the thick of it all looking like a dirty piece of stained glass ... what is this place to me?  I asked myself ( Read more... )

The black of the pupil suckling the scant light, stretched wide and tall in the torpor of what has become a long and multilayered night.  I've purposely divided my thinking into spoonfuls, and these I swallowed as I paced the concrete in the dark.  I listened for faraway sounds traveling the threads of me that reached up into the sky, felt them ( Read more... )

The morning's sun has given way to overcast and humidity.  I sit, and it feels like hot breath and teeth gnashing beneath my collar ... and then there are my legs, seemingly too long and rubbery, and this room feels like the heat trapped between the mattress and sheets after the deed.  I would like some water, and some less fitful afternoon dreams ( Read more... )

Absently twirling slips from the garden between my thumb and forefinger, before me was a pail of coarse, sharp builder’s sand and small clay pot with shards and pebbles neatly tucked into the bottom ... the sun was in my eyes, so much so that I sat with them pulled so tight they were nearly closed.  On the phone with my insurance provider, feeling ( Read more... )

While rummaging through some old notebooks I found an entry titled Headlong into the Cistern, and it occurred to me that this feeling is exactly that.  I tore the page out and tacked it to my headboard, and I’ve been eyeing my handwriting.  If I were to describe my penmanship, well, it strikes me as rather focused and interminably sad.

These ( Read more... )

With each new dawn crashing through the shades I find the day that much longer than the next ... and so it is, here I am, stretched between the widening hours as the hands of the clock strikes my heart as if it were a drum.  I forage the morning for distractions, and I’m acutely aware of the night still clinging to my back, and I fill the vacuum ( Read more... )

I promise.

A cup of coffee on the countertop, and a spoonful of sugar in hand.  Thinking about the measure of my worth, whether I sweeten still in the midst of so much salt and dust.

Early morning moments, the quality of light more than poor but with a silver-blue grain that still allowed proper shadows to fall, and I sat reclined in an old patio chair with a bowl of cherries on my lap.  Cars and planes in the distance, as always, but right there in the thick of my perception were the occasional rustles and thuds of rotten ( Read more... )