Folio

CREATED: [2023-02-23]

I do not reemember much of it, or at least that is what I tell myself. The little of it I can bear to think about these days is deliberately set a little off-center from the place where the actor in those scenes is acting, a mental cushion for the things which are too intense or too painful to hold outright from inside their dark flaming center. One of these is the conversation where I remember it was decided that we would be going North, and not South - against my wishes, and against my pleading - I remember the impassioned pleading and get angry on behalf of mysel that I was ignored - and another is the decision made, not until the bite of the knife into yet-tender flesh, to begin eating the mammoth - I remember the knife and the stiffness of my fingers, as if it were a sympathetic echo I had while watching someone else's fingers clenched as if they were fused to the handle by the ice.

CREATED: [2023-02-11]

Kiss me, I may say, and hope you'll put a rope around my hope and drag it through my rippling throat, convulsing and alive. Kiss me, I may say, and dance, upon the ashes of the chance that you can wrap your tongue around the truth that lives in mine. Burn my calculations of the future that I'm dreaming of and show me dreams in what escapes the flames before my eyes. Kiss my rhyming, kiss my song, kiss me for the ridealong, kiss my feet that burn and split as I run alongside. Kiss the fears that I confide, kiss the captor, kiss your bride, kiss the self that would have died, that I keep safe from you. Lower down yourself into the well of things I keep from you, and kiss the things you fear and find that some of them are true.

CREATED: [2023-02-07]

Let's tell a story about two demons, shall we? - And one is a trap and one is a vice.
Let's never take our own, or the demons', advice,
But follow along on the journey they set us to test if we're telling their story correctly.
– can they steal us this way, when we won't yield directly?
My teacher would say that the stories of poets were there to convince us of what always was true,
So that when the storms came, we wouldn't fail to remember and use what we already knew.
Let's tell a story about demons to see if the stories in poems can lead us to truth.
If they fail, if we fail, we'll be trapped in our visions, but there are worse ways to wager our youth.

CREATED: [2023-01-05 Thu]

If everything you thought you knew
Of things that don't mean much to you
Were somehow shown to be untrue
Would you still wake up in the morning?
Would you still kiss your wife, and go to work, and do your chores,
And try not to hurt the people that you meet in incidental moments as you go about your day?
Or would you go into mourning?
If you couldn't pray, one day, to the gods that you thought you had left behind long ago,
If your childhood really was a lie, and you knew but didn't yet really know,
And somebody showed you your face in the mirror when they said that to you:
If all the things you didn't know you held on to
Weren't there when you looked - not real, or not true -
Would you still feel any kind of joy in the afternoon sun?
Would you still know how to have fun with your kids?
Do you think you could still keep a lid
On your temper when the dog tracks mud in the house?
At the center of the world that is no longer turning, is this still your house?
Is this still your house?

CREATED: [2022-11-03 Thu 14:56]
ID: c441b718-d7c1-4ffa-b2e3-2813f3eec3b4

(In my house there was a whole jar of dead pens,
To frustrate adults when they needed a pen)
- Who's riding so hard in the night and the wind?

- A question for setting the wind in your hair,
Stealing from you the chill from the draft in the stair,
and the voice in the eaves. Memories shake loose and twist
In the gyre set spinning by a spasmodic wrist,
A voice churned to froth by the pianist.

A false poet's mourning his sullen, sweet child,
Setting index cards fluttering in a high overtone.
A counterpoint beat, a resonant pitch,
An anodyne for that deep skeletal itch

You may feel in the mornings of indifferent nights,
Tracing that which has happened, (what's already done),
Which you haven't finished with. (You don't know how.)
The things we repeat are the path of a spring,
My child's hands did better at pulling apart
The meat of a thing than I ever do now.

CREATED: [2022-09-23 Fri 00:37]
ID: 01eb4e48-82bd-45e0-ab29-c5afdb388d9b

Dactyl is not quite dactylic, but dactylic is, which means just the adjective's an autological word.
So, transformations attributed ere to considerations of grammar alone, may find that the form supports unforeseen function: of such accidentals is poetry born.

CREATED: [2022-09-22 Thu 03:17]
ID: 0a7f84f9-999d-4576-92e8-fd96b25adcdc

To become a ploughshare, you must bend
   (your head to the earth)
   (your blade to the dirt)
   (your hilt to a shaft)
   (your cutting to clawing, and swinging to drawing)
   (your hand to the rein of oxen or men, which was unaccustomed to treacherous tools)
   (your plight to the suffering of fools.)

CREATED: [2022-09-20 Tue 21:45]

Knowing and caring both feel the same,
And rule following in your knowing or caring
Is only as good as the clothes you are wearing.
(When nothing can touch you, what do you know?
When nothing attracts you, where do you go?)
Stand naked before me, or go back how you came.

CREATED: [2022-05-17 Tue 03:10]
ID: 57d990c7-6855-4436-9335-2669f39e7c31

CREATED: [2022-04-16 Sat 00:00]

Rest and I'll write you seventeen lullabies
To get the rest of the way to sleep

CREATED: [2022-04-15 Fri 23:00]

And then I wake up-
And nothing's the same
If it always was leaving, I wonder why it came
And the world's a little darker, holding onto its grey
All the color has been washed away

And if I can't stop time, I don't want to run
By the side of the train tracks, no, those days are done
And it's no longer fun to keep up with myself
I pluck out the sun and put it on a shelf
For another day

And when I wake up, as we fly through the years
I reach forward in time to dry off my tears
We've been here before and we'll leave again soon,
Dear heart, there's nothing to fear

And I cannot stop time, but I don't have to run
Time needs no assistance to take me along
And the sun is too far away for me to reach
And tomorrow was always gonna come
There's always another day

CREATED: [2022-02-27 Sun 00:01]
ID: 973ddcbb-d5d6-4b51-b918-78c1c8909aa5

Definition: A means by which I cause you to understand an action I take as an indication of something other than the action in itself.
Indication: I want you to think about this.
Want: In the dark of your mind, what you feel ought to be the case.
Feeling: What your body uses to indicate to you.
You: Not me.
Not: What you learn when you trip over something, or your parents are at a loss.
No: What you learn soon after you learn wanting, or when your parents are unhappy with you.
Happy: A word for when nobody wants anything.
Un: What you learn when you break something, and then want it.
Break: Also called time. What you learn soon after you learn No.

CREATED: [2022-02-26 Sat 00:11]
ID: e3b76933-1551-4104-9b72-86b4b33fbb07

It's pretty scary, isn't it, to think of yourself as the other? In the mind of a foreigner, you are a dream. In the mind of an outcast, you are a part of the flock: movable furniture. The protective response of any animal faced with any intelligence is fear; but beyond that undiscriminating first line of defence is the full palette of unsettlements available to the empathetic animal. Empathy itself is one such: when the threat is shaped like you, you see, your best hope of understanding it is to invite it into yourself; and if that is uncomfortable, why, it's supposed to be - you are meant to move away from the threat, no matter how much like it you are. Thus, the Other: the ability to disregard the evidence of common ground, to treat the fertile ground as fallow. One's understanding shapes one's desires, and the refusal to understand is a powerful immune response against the dangers that can recruit you in their enaction. Of course, the strategy isn't without its obvious side effects: what many refuse to understand, one may still consent to understand. (Not knowing, you see, that knowing itself is the danger.) Empathy, for this poor stray, becomes a forced pathway into the space behind the social contract, behind one's complicity in civilisation and the illusions it affords. Through no fault of their own, a member of the flock can thus wander into the bleak world beyond the realm of the common guarantees, whose air it cannot breathe without at once changing. Otherness is infectious, transmissible by the very same mechanism by which it is constituted: and upon contact with the intelligible other - and if unimmunised, upon transformation into that other - you are put in the position of either being understood to be Other by (those who are already) the Rest; or enacting, and continuing to enact, that immune response yourself, to the irrevocable understanding that has already occurred inside your mind.

CREATED: [2022-02-24 Thu 01:50]
ID: 108e1066-37ae-4b3a-9d8e-4537835a8ded

These are the things that will flow out - we will let them flow
And when they go to the ocean and grieve, it will win us the reprieve
From the awareness of our sins, and the sins of our forefathers
The still waters will swallow whatever you wish them to swallow
But the running water, though it may not hide what you wish not to see,
Still it will change what you put into it,
And that change will set you free.
This is what the water can give you, for this is what it gave me.

CREATED: [2022-02-22 Tue 15:45]
ID: a468d28e-5a52-485e-a702-2fd9737d43a0

If I were to start squeezing, I wouldn't stop. The center of you calls to me, from between your ribs and inside your bones I feel the ache of our separation. To try to touch what is mine, I would break you.
But I wouldn't break you for anything. I'm left helpless, skating over surfaces, hardly daring to touch at all.

CREATED: [2021-09-11 Sat 16:01]
ID: fdb90f36-3709-4f91-9c82-a5039665d3c8

I wish for nothing but to be by your side,
And that you don't wish it does not hurt my pride.
It doesn't make me lonely, I was always alone
It doesn't make me sad, for I'm sad on my own.
Yet what pain is this, that shapes my breath into sighs?
Why this new longing for impossible things?
I haven't been cheated: nothing was traded nor earned,
But what a cruel world it is, where love can be spurned.
I wish for nothing but to hear you again,
I knew that I would from the moment I heard,
I still feel the lack I began feeling then,
The hole in me echoing back every word.
So: was I made aware of what was already there?
Or had I been hollowed, for what wouldn't remain?
The love your throat made to the quivering air:
I can trap the mere sounds, and release them again,
I can catch the mere patterns of light in your eyes,
I can read your words over from the page where they lie,
But their color and flavor all taste like my sighs.
What a cruel world it is, where those we love die.

CREATED: [2021-08-26 Thu 23:00]

Take a pot, and love it well -
A cushion, napkin, fork or spoon -
The curtain you part to see the moon -
The lamp you light to see the foolish things you're writing as you write
The surface you are sitting on, when you do this in the night.
  The foolishness of things is like the foolishness of written words,
A simple rearrangement of things you've seen and heard
    In other places, other rooms.
What you mean now when you say "mine"
To a new-made thing upon your page, or
    A pretty something on your shelf
    Is the shell you draw, the thing called self
    Around the things you'll use again.
Words on a page are nobody's until they're read, and read again;
Again, again, until the thing you are is them, or is them too.
  To hide from this becoming, what we say is they belong to you.

CREATED: [2021-07-18 Sun 01:20]
ID: 01e1bf0e-4405-4b4b-a40b-dac929c5daa5

Its streets ring with my lack
And when the children wake to the bells that ring, they
Look out to the sea, where once my lover
Went away, away, and when I wake, I look beneath
Myself a sword, the sea my sheath
My eyes submerged, my yawning teeth
That children swim around, beneath
They hear my calls in morning bells
For love I've wept for, long and loud
"come back, come back!" - I was once proud
The sea became my graceless shroud.
My love is deep, and here I float
The city on my back's a child on which I dote
To be their boat, I stay between
The air and sea, the blue and green
And call out loud, come back to me
Come back to me, don't stray so far out in the sea
But my love can't or will not hear, for what they love is being free.

CREATED: [2021-07-12 Mon 22:41]

Why shove your way into a corner or out of a corner, into the middle,
Where uninvited, where regretted, where reconsidered
Inviting consideration onto oneself
(it now cannot but be the self, needing defence
(The only defence for rudeness is personality))
It's rude.
A word we use to confuse the rude, because all it means is something a human hasn't touched yet,
But what we're saying is that we don't want to touch the thing ourselves.
Obtruding is waiting, out convexly in space,
For others' vexation to subside, so they may consider you properly. As a strategy it seems
Horrendously vulnerable.
Demanding, really,
Well, obtrusive.
I would never want to do it.

CREATED: [2021-06-17 Thu 18:02]

that fleck of sea foam you forgot
that tail and feeling scale you flay
those eyes that just won't look away
go on, ask, I'm still around
why on earth I'm still around
why I'm still around on earth
thrashing and slipping on the ground
and why I never make a sound
silent, see, I'm not a sound mind, don't ask, I don't try to lie
stay still until I'm looking right, stay down until I gain the right to generate what people say to people who will say the same and play that game until I die and fall into the sea again
I say, again, why died I not, the womb won't let me walk away
I play the game and play the game and walk the path and stay the same and change my tune and change my ways and wait for change to touch my days
I stay afraid, I stay awake, I lay awake, I count my stake,
I take and take and take and take
I fall asleep in self defense to hide from things I didn't make
Uncommon sense, uncrowded lens, no arguments, a quiet lake
I ask myself, why died I not? Wherefore is life, why life and sun?
Why do I beg, but never reach,
 for back where life had not begun?
 I've overgrown, I'm not my own
I catch and I do not release
I'm on my knees, I'm on my knees
and every single breath is grief
There's no relief there's no relief
I do not want to make a sound.
another round, another round,
I don't know why I'm still around.

CREATED: [2021-05-08 Sat 17:58]

Find the rocks and pick them out,
And with your fingers wear them out
Till they fall through the sieve.
Let us meet, but ten years hence,
When all the rocks have been worn small –
 we couldn't help but let them fall –
So clasp our hands, and grieve.

I will say, "remember when"–
But once we need a "which" or "when"
The thing that won't come back again
Is past - and when you say
"I do", and ask me back the same
That, too, is back the way we came
We'll come ten years and play this game,
Since we came all that way.

CREATED: [2021-04-23 Fri 17:36]

What is it you need of me?
If I could I'd find a way to give it, so you'd leave, and stop this
Asking after things I'd rather leave beneath the dust you found them in.



Dress me, then, in dust of attics
Shelves above the kitchen shelves
Where we keep our Occasional Selves
Like Traveler or Murderer.

Dry me in the summer sun,
Pleasure in its fullest bloom
Is punishment in winter rooms.
Breathe, and weep, and shed your fear.


Transmute pain out of our fun,
Perhaps that's far enough you've run.

CREATED: [2020-08-08 Sat 23:32]

Leaf in the middle and glass on the left
(You eat with your right hand and ought to sip water
Though everybody disagrees on just how and when)
Salt isn't asked about, sweet's always yes
The rest of it, you can try to say yes or no
And there's rules about everything that you won't know
But the grandmother next to you (grandfather's at
The head of the table, and we wait for him to eat)
Will make sure you follow them and explain if she's nice.
You're lost, and you'd drown, without this advice.
Later, when you realize that they laughed when you sprinkled
The water round your plate like you'd seen them all do
Because imitation doesn't work when the rule's just for you
And your grandmother's in the kitchen, eating after she serves
Not how the only girl child of her generation would
If she could be quiet, and appear to be good.
When the womenfolk eat, I lay out their food
The salt and the sweet and all of the rest
And they say yes or no based on what they like best.

CREATED: [2017-03-03 Fri]

I loved. I loved, and I was not I
And you were not you
And we were not two
An oeuvre is written in an hour of the night
And none of it true.

CREATED: [2017-03-03 Fri]

The prettiest thing that you ever saw
Wasn't as pretty as I am today
Nor half as attractive in most of the ways
It's important to be.

The prettiest I ever was is today
But I'm as pretty or prettier every today
Today is a day that I know and I care
And I notice you stare.

CREATED: [2017-03-03 Fri]

Smoke and the burn and the restless mad turn
Of the wheels in my head that all churn out cliches that I somehow don't mind and I somehow don't pause
And a million and one stupid thoughts without cause
And the cleverness I somehow catch when they're listening
And foolishness inside my safe simple mind
And rhymes that need use of the useless word glistening and all of the pretty young thoughts I can find
And I wish I could dredge up my histories in ways
That make them anew for me, not just them
Who will sometimes sit down and hear what I say
And I really do try to entertain where I can
And my reader you see, hasn't found herself yet
And my reader, she hasn't found me, but she's looking
And while she looks, foolisher rhymes will keep cooking
And words are invented, and rearranged more
For the pleasure of war games than the business of war.

CREATED: [2016-09-30]

Those we count as friends, know the dates of our funerals

And can write our eulogies.

Let them speak.

CREATED: [2016-07-11 Mon]

You know the greatest fear?

The greatest fear is thinking you once thought something that might have changed the world. It's too terrible a truth to face up to. We shy away from it. But you see, I have. I have read the thoughts of people who looked to change it, who succeeded, if in nothing else, in leaving their mark. Many times they are people who did more. And I have thought what they thought.

This is the fear.

It is an opportunity that has passed me by. It is a wound that I might have healed. It is people, who have suffered or died or lost their faith without another to replace it, because I did not care to pursue or develop or share what I thought.

It has happened too many times to count. It has been happening since I was a small child. Of course it has.

I am not exceptional. So, I conclude, it must happen, if not to everyone, then to a great number of people. And yet the world continues to run as if having thought of something first is worth something, as if it is possible to trace an idea through its million conceptions to some ultimate parent; as if there is value to be found in that. I live in a world where the creator is cast automatically as the best defense for an idea, where the creator's particular version with all its baggage and peculiarities is a privileged 'canon' which can be revered and reviled in its entirety as if it were a useful thing to do. It is not a world where people behave as if they have thought of many things before. Or if it is, it is one where they can't admit to it on pain of death.

Metrics backpropagate. If the world behaves as if the originator of an idea bears rights and responsibilities to it, one can choose to hold oneself to that metric, and fear the overwhelming weight of the error they have made in not pursuing the potentially transformative idea they have re-encountered in someone else's work; or one can see if perhaps the metric has erred in measuring what you expected it to measure. We don't take the second door often; we rarely stop even to question what a metric is measuring in the first place. In this case, there is another fear whose shoulder is pushed up against that door: the reluctance to acknowledge that the passing thought we see echoed was never our own, that notions of claim do not reach inside one's mind to cast a protective shield around its innards. Our ideas are not unique, not necessarily and not even in practice; therefore, necessarily and in practice, they are not our own.

There, in a stroke we are free from the yoke of our own imagination. And so the pattern goes: freedom is bought at the price of one's self. Independence from the outside is achieved by blurring the boundaries between within and without. It's quite simple: a few feats of everyday magic, and the world is a different place without having risen from one's chair, without having to exercise anything at all, beyond one's faculties of comprehension. And if the old notions of claim, ownership, and control were to apply, one could argue I've taken over your brain. But you see, all that's happened is that you've understood.

And that's all that we're talking about, really.

CREATED: [2015-04-05]

It calls to you from the empty space beyond railings. It's there, waiting, between the cars, tangled with the motorbikes, in every gulf of city road and every chasm of dark highway whose surface sings at the stroke of approaching wheels like the strings of a double-bass. It weaves long, slow spells around the piling trash and unwashed sheets of the cubicle you live in, until it convolves the world into a point of fiction; until your bowels don't have anything left to process and the clawing of your belly seems as much a dream as anything else. Because you have to, inasmuch as you have to do anything, you walk on by.

CREATED: [2014-08-10]

My secret soul that hides between
What parts of my world count as seen
Is sometimes moved
And sometimes bruised
And one day it may die.

All the words I ever knew
Won't give it away to you
It sometimes screams
And sometimes dreams
And does it all alone.

It holds within an ageless ache
Because, you see, it cannot break.
It sometimes sleeps
And else, it weeps.
I feel it in my bones.

Kiss me, I may say, and hope
You'll draw it out upon a rope
You lower through
What's told as true
And taste it where it lies.

CREATED: [2014-08-10]

“Conversations always end too soon for me.”

“Do they now.”

I chewed on my lip, trying to frame my answer. “Either it's awesome, it's working, and the other person says it's over out of the blue, or it just peters off, and I don't know where it went.” No, that wasn't right. “It's not that they're silent, more that it stops working like it was.”

He seemed perfectly content to stand where he was, looking at me or through me as we went on. “You make it sound like a machine.”

“Conversations? Yeah. Lots of delicate little bits that go in very specific places.”

“And a lot to get wrong.”

I twisted a corner of my mouth. “Yeah. That's where the problem is. It's like everybody I talk to works with only half the blueprint I've got.”

The damp seeped into our clothes as the mist curled. Fingers of it licked at his ears. He rubbed his jaw, and I followed the motions of his white, smooth hands. “What is it supposed to accomplish? This machine of yours?”

I blinked, and pinched a slip of tissue from behind my lip between my tongue and teeth. “I don't know.”

“Well, that's an easy answer.”

“If I don't know, that's it, isn't it?”

He shifted to face me better. He'd been alternating between this and facing the street to my left for the past half hour, always leaning against the waist-high fence I was sitting on. “It doesn't explain why you keep trying to build it.”

“Maybe I'm just curious.”

“Oh, come now.” He was smirking, but he was serious. “That's not an acceptable answer.”

I sighed. “No, it isn't.”

He let me be silent, trying to think it through.

“Maybe it is. Say I find a way to build the whole thing – someone with the whole blueprint I have Or enough to bullshit the rest of their way. Then I'll have finished, and I'll see what it means, right? That's what I want.”

I looked at him, and he had his own moment to chew that over. Then he grinned. “I just hate the word. 'Curiosity'. It sounds so flimsy. Compare it with someone saying, 'I want to know.'”He'd lost the grin at the last, and put it back with practiced timing. “They don't seem like the same thing.”

I was nodding along. “The second is more powerful. As though it could shake your bones.”

“Split them and eat the marrow.” He laughed, falling back on the fence to face the street again. I smiled, and looked down.

When I looked up again, he was watching me, and the pause had stretched too long.

I didn't try to break it.

Somehow, he found the moment, and spoke again. “Maybe this is the solution to your problem.” He stopped, and looked at me. I couldn't open my mouth – it had been glued shut from being kept too long committed to staying that way. He smiled as if he knew the issue. “How about I stick around until you want me to leave. We don't have to say anything.”

When I could, I said, “You don't have to do that.” My voice, nervous, was too soft, and I had to repeat myself.

He rubbed his jaw again. There were red spots on his hands, behind his knuckles, between his tendons. It bought him a moment or two to consider what he said.

“I'm reasonably certain I want to. I'm not done with this yet.”

Damp made his hair heavy, and it was beginning to drip onto his forehead.

I hopped off the fence, and stretched forward with my hands still on it. Then I turned, and jerked my head to my right.

“Come on, let's go inside. We'll get a cold.”

He lifted a corner of his mouth. “Why not. You have hot chocolate?”

CREATED: [2014-08-10]

She tried to picture the quiet of her meditation hall, timeless, without a beat, without a count, with only the steady progression of forms, the position and reposition of the body, every action of muscle corresponding to an action of breath. One began with palms flat against each other, fingers facing up, held against the sternum, pressing into the bone like a knife-edge lightly held in place; knees and back held straight, unmoving but relaxed, still but not rigid; feet together, facing forward, eyes as well. Ekam.

“It's next stop.” Spin's voice rang low and clear in her ears, despite the muting effect of the dull murmur that enveloped the immediate environment like a blanket. Around her, the dank smell of commuter traffic filled her nose, bearing its own personal stamp along with all the typical elements: in addition to the sweat and the smell of once-fresh cotton and linen and nylon were the faint whiffs of tired, once-strong spices, fried meat and vegetables, oil and horseradish and chili. The remnants of lunch. The shifting crowd began to rearrange itself with practiced steps, as some spilled out of the overfull container of bodies and some forced their way in. The person on her right took seven steps, minor shuffling rearrangements of position. Seven people brushed against her as they moved around. It looked like rain. She could see people exiting putting up umbrellas and hoods, quickening their pace. Inside the train car as well, hoods went up in anticipation of disembarking. She counted seven in her field of vision.

She took a deep breath as the train doors closed. Seven seconds after the third person disembarked. Or seven and a half. Which meant that it was seven seconds since the interval between persons three and four. Seven seconds since three and a half?

The palms were then opened, facing downward as the arms extended in front of her, held to continue the line of the arm; and then the arms were raised, slowly, above her head, until they continued the line of the torso; and then taken back further as, without a pause, the torso tilted back from the hips to arc the body into a single line of action, curved like an unstrung bow, as her chest filled with air to curve it further. Dve.

The train's movement was gliding and untextured, more like flying than land travel in its smooth feel. The arms of the passengers around her were nevertheless stretched upwards to hold onto the provided handles, a matter of comfort or habit more than any real need, she supposed. The odd forest of human limbs above her head crisscrossed and broke up the windows into irregular panes, in her view. One window to her left was split into seven by the limbs blocking it.

She turned her head to find Eane watching her, dark eyes flatly assessing through wispy black bangs, and took another deep breath, this time slow and even enough not to be obvious.

The torso and then the arms were then unwound from their position, the bow defying its own laws of tension as it straightened with ease; and the arms were swung forward deliberately, looking as though they extended in length when the back curved to hang them farther down, until the forehead met the unbent knees and the palms were flat against the ground next to her feet, the whole body folded in two, locked to itself like the edges of a silk fan, air released from her chest and stomach in a steady flow to note the compression and mark the change. Trini.

Telephone poles whipped by; she flicked her eyes to the window again quickly, and counted seven before she turned away. She pinched the bridge of her nose, head falling forward for a second. She lifted it immediately when she saw three and a half pairs of shoes in her visible range, and looked back at Eane, willing herself to calmness.

The hips dropped and the right leg extended far back, so that the left knee bent to tuck into the armpit neatly. The head was lifted to look up, neck arching to create the curve that extended through to her right foot. Again a breath was taken in. Chatvari.

“We're here.” Spin's voice was brisk now, and she automatically moved to follow its directive, following the dance steps neatly to exit the monorail car. The station was above ground, the sky ominous but rain still holding off.

The left leg was taken back to rest parallel to the right, ramrod straight, and using the soles of the feet as a fulcrum, the entire body was turned on the hinge of the hips so that the arms and torso aligned once more and the hips, held in the air, resembled the peak of a mountain. Air was deliberately exhaled, downwards to mark the support drawn. Pancha.

Fourteen people were wearing yellow on the platform. Seven heads stood slightly taller than the rest. Seven turnstiles stood in a row, gleaming silver. Stainless steel, minimum ten point five percent chromium. Seven times fifteen, a hundred and five. Above her head were thirty-two spanners holding up the roof. Sixteen times two. Sixteen minus two was fourteen. Numbly she felt a hand pull her through the station, out to an exit, onto the sidewalk where cars whizzed by. Twelve cars passed the spot she stood at for three seconds before she was propelled further along. Twelve divided by three was four. Three plus four was seven. Two of the cars had been red. Twelve plus two was fourteen. Hysterical bubbles of laughter rose to her throat, but her mouth was paralyzed and wouldn't open. Instead, the low sound began coming from her throat, through her nose, nearly inaudible, but deep and rolling, arrhythmic in its delirium.

The knees were collapsed onto the floor,the body folded onto the lower legs, arms outstretched still, forehead to the ground, a position of total supplication, breath indrawn. Sata.

Six.

She began to shake.

CREATED: [2014-03-12]

We die; we are killed, we are weathered, are felled, are decayed,
We remain living, watching the ghosts that our murders have made
We suffer our punishments at unseen, untouchable hands;
We write our poetry in languages no one else understands.

I look at you, and my mind is unbound, unfettered in storm
Undoing ghost, what were the murders that made such a form?
I write myself over once more for your unseeing eye,
I look at you, self-written cryptic, and suffer, and die.

CREATED: [2014-03-12]

Who is the person holding the cue cards
and what does he want today?
Sleep ran off with Night, so I drank with First Light
She washed all my lines away
Sometimes they're blank, and sometimes they're written
in languages I never learned
Sometimes he's filled them with absolute nonsense
And sometimes he's holding them turned

Who is the person holding the cue cards
and what does he want with me?
We've never met, and we've never spoken
So why can't he leave me be?
Everyone sees him, but don't seem to notice
It's me that they're looking at funny
Is he Somebody's nephew or Somebody's boyfriend?
/Is Somebody taking his Money?

It's driving me to my limit
It's time to get out of this business
I fail to see what's in it
For me anymore

Wave me goodbye and kiss me
Lie to my face that you'll miss me
As you were, I'm sure you're busy
I know the way to the door

CREATED: [2014-03-12]

"But I love you," he pleads, eyes streaming and voice shaking; a mess of quaking limbs and blotched skin, dressed in dirty thirdhand rags and alley-cat hair, on his knees on the expensive carpet I had had selected and arranged just last week. I sniff, disgusted. Does he honestly expect his snivelling to make any difference to me? One would have thought he’d know better by now at least.

Gingerly, I brush at a trailing, fraying bit of cloth with a foot. I’m not even sure it belongs to any garment – it seems perfectly possible that he fished it out of the gutter outside a tailor shop.I try to lift rather than press at it – I don't want to riskdamaging the carpet any more than he has already. It’s likely beyond repair, but one hasto show at least that modicum of consideration.

I’m quick enough to pull away before he catches my leg, thankfully. I just finished getting myself in order and presentable five minutes ago, and heaven only knows what kind of destruction he could wreak on my coat with those filthy hands. The lunge he makes towards me is pitifully weak, but it’s enough to topple him over; he could be made of wire and gelatin, all quivers and stiff joints. He lies, sobbing, with his cheek pressed to the shag pile. He tries and fails to lever himself up again, and sobs some more. I sigh a little.

A glance at one of the servicemen standing in the background is enough. They know what’s needed, and will handle it without my needing to trouble myself one whit more than I have already. I give the heap on the ground a last look before turning towards the balcony. It’s the only place in the house where I can be assured of escaping his stink.

It's a nice night. I wish I didn't have to disturb myself, when I could otherwise spend the time enjoying it. The air is balmy, the smell of the sea is coming in from the slight, warm breeze; the lights twinkle above and below – flickering pinpricks like dust in the sky, and the more vulgar multicoloured flashes shining up from the spread of land below. The lights climb the low hills to the south. They look like bleeding fingers, metrically lit avenue-strips leaking pools of muted rainbows. It appeals to the nouveau riche aesthetic, I suppose. I’ve been there, but never lived there. I wouldn’t want to; for all their vulgar sprawl, those estates make me claustrophobic.

For myself, I prefer to be in town, not those suburban excuses for city life.I’m placed directly at the nerve-centre of the network of lights, but elevated to remoteness from it; prized territory rather than profligate. It’s well decorated and cosy, with nooks to hole away in and oversize cushions for naps. The art is bold and abstract. The furnishings are Art Deco. The colours are soothing. I pay for comfort, and I pay for taste.

I watch now, perched on the wide railing, as the even patterns shift and dim. It’s late, for night-blind folks.

He's pushed onto the deck through the French windows; they close silently behind him. I look him over sidelong, unwilling to displace myself excessively and slightly afraid he’s still in that obscene state he arrived in. As expected, however, all is well. He's clean, hair washed and combed, in a cotton shirt and silk slacks, shod in the smooth, buttery-soft house moccasins set aside for him. Sweet, generic gardenia perfume wafts its way to my nose. While the cringing expression and stance is annoying, it takes low priority. I beckon him closer lazily. Thankfully he's unable to find anything to trip over in the expanse of empty, sanded wood between us.

He stands awkwardly over me. The silence stretches. He never can handle much of it. Practice has given him about a minute's worth of liver, and then, on cue, he snaps.

“Princess. Princess.” he looks at me, desperate. I can read it in his eyes, the panic that prey undergo when they realize they're trapped – nothing worth doing, and yet they struggle, blindly, because their brains tell them to. He has to say something, but he doesn't even realize what's coming out of his mouth.

“Look at me, princess. Won't you believe me? Why won't you believe me? Princess, I love you, I love you so much. Isn't that enough for you? You said it was, you did, you did. Princess, look at me—”

His pupils crowd his irises out of the way. He's talking without pause for breath, but cuts himself off as I open my mouth. More fool him – I’m only yawning. He watches me, and I can see the threads unravelling from his mind as the situation truly sets in and he realizes where he is, what he's doing.

“Come with me, Princess. You said you would. You said you would you said you would you said you would you—” a gurgle of sorts interrupts his litany in his sort. He's collapsed, sobbing.

It's actually somewhat amusing, in one light. What does he expect me to do?

I sigh. The balcony is no longer silent, and I abandon what slim hopes I had of salvaging some part of my nice quiet night. I hop down and saunter past him, close enough to cross his shadow – just to spook him some more, for the fun of it. He starts violently away, tipping over again;and lies trembling as he follows me out with his fixed prey-stare.

The door is opened for me. As I pass through, a soft, delicate hand travels along my back, nape to tailbone, in one smooth stroke. I stretch into the touch, pleased; my head curves back to glance archly at the demure black-and-white figure.

She used to be dressed in cotton and lace once upon a time, when the old steamboat was alive. Now she’s in silk, from her fair, bare silky hair to the toes of her soundless, spotless black ballet flats. My orders, of course.

It was the steamboat, in her ticklish feathers and nubby, itchy velvets, who left me all this. She won it all from her old mate, of course, but that was far before my time.

Idiot lady. Somewhere she had told somebody that the house and the moneywent to either me or her new mate, whichever stayed in the house with her corpse for thirty days. The fool sitting outside hadn’t made it a week before running. I think it must have broken him a little bit, inside his head.

Milk-boned twit. It hadn’t exactly been easy for me either. Three days in, and the smell was on everything. It made me ravenous. Still does whenever I think about it.

It took a week after the carcass left – minus a few nibbles, and who could blame me? – but my peteventually madeit so you’d think you were in an edelweiss field fourthousand foot square, right in the middle of the city. I had had about five minutes to enjoy it – the last of the old upholstery had just gone out the door when this fool had tried to let himself in, and his reek with him.

“We’ll throw him out, my sweet. Don’t you worry.” She massages my back some more, her long fingers exactly the trick for my sore nerves. We’ve never needed words between us, my pet and I; she’s mother and lover and attendant. She knows what I need.

She clucks now, the sound musical in her throat. “The hag had terrible taste in some things, didn’t she, sweet? What she saw in this fool to marry I’ll never know. And to think he still had a key!I took it, of course, but we’ll need the locks changed anyway.”

She looks at me, indulgent. “And to think he wanted to make off with you. But you’d never look twice at that mangy upstart alley lurker, would you, Princess. He never made you turn a hair.”

I feel her smile in her fingers, more than I see it. She picks me up, holds me against her soft silk-screened bosom. Her fingertips tease behind my ears. “Why don’t we make a show of it, and have him dragged out by his shirt tails?” Her voice is musical, soft. It has none of the screechy pitches of the idiot outside, and none of the overloudboom that the steamboat’s had possessed.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Princess? And I suspect I would, too.” She laughs, low and throaty, at her own joke.

I purr again, long and loud, in counterpoint.

CREATED: [2014-03-12 Wed]

"Put that cheapot down, Helen."

At the sound of the high-pitched voice, with its imperious tone, Helen jumped so badly that the cornflower-blue teapot nearly fell out of her hands. With hands still shaking, she slotted the teapot back into its hexagonal niche in the wall, and the pneumatic door slid closed in front of it almost before she could withdraw her hands again. Helen's daughter stood crossly in the doorway, hands on hips.

"I don't know why I haven't gotten rid of that filthy old thing yet. In fact, I think I will tomorrow." With a gusty sigh (made somewhat less impressive by her tiny lung capacity), Helen's daughter skipped across the room towards the large plush purple beanbag in the center.

"Daughter, no, please, please don't-"

The small child spun on her heel to face Helen, and stomped her foot. She pressed a button on the remote control dangling from her wrist, and Helen had to grit her teeth to hold back the scream. Helen always had to be careful about her screams when she was punished - some children liked them, she knew from the Manual, but not her daughter.

"Don't argue with me."

Helen knew she wasn't really that angry - she had remembered to spin on her heel and stomp her foot, after all. That meant she was doing it for show. It was only respectable to reprimand a parent for speaking out of turn, and PurpleLava was eminently respectable.

It was also only respectable to have the teapot vaporized if she expressed a wish to preserve it. It broke just about every rule of respectability in this enlightened era to preserve an object established as old, on the entreaties of a parent. Helen knew it was hopeless, could feel it in her aching spine. Still, she had to give it a try.

"I'm sorry, daughter. I shouldn't have said that, should I have?"

Helen's daughter calmed.

"No, you shouldn't have. But that's okay, if you know that." She fidgeted with the pin-and-purple plastic beads on her wrist. "Why should I keep it, anyway?"

Helen smiled. She knew she was much better off than most parents were in their homes, with a daughter like hers. PurpleLava (that was the name she had most recently picked for herself, and the folks at the Development Centre said that it was a sign of an out-of-the-box, progressive bent of mind) was on her way to being a Scientist. That made her more open-minded to ideas that Helen put forward, even if they were by definition backward ideas, coming from a parent.

"It's a curiosity. It's not something that you see everyday, is it? Even if it is filthy and old." PurpleLava rolled her eyes.

"It's a boring curiosity. It was invented how long ago? It doesn't matter at all." She scoffed. "What kind of a name is cheapot for a curiosity, anyway?"

Helen tensed; she had to pick her words yet more carefully. "Yes, but nobody in the latest generation has looked at it yet. It's so old, it's almost a natural object, isn't it? So maybe you could see something in it that people couldn't before. And you can always rename it."

PurpleLava considered this, her thumb in her mouth. Then she took it out and nodded. "That's not such a bad idea. Even if it is filthy and old, I guess I could look at it a bit before we vaporize it."

Helen nearly collapsed with relief. It would be months before the question of the filthy old thing in the wall occurred to her daughter again. Until then, the teapot was safe. With shaking fingers, she pushed the button to close the receptacle. It slid shut with a pneumatic hiss.

PurpleLava was already skipping off, headed for her home lab. She had already lost interest. Helen would have been a Scientist in her day - but there was a genetic weakness in her mother's side, and she came down with a disease when they were children. Helen had been quarantined for three years, and hadn't been able to attend the Development Centre at the right ages. She had stayed at home spending more time alone with her mother than was considered healthy for a modern progressive child. Her mother had been a foreigner, and she had had a number of filthy old things with her. One by one, Helen had had them vaporized - they weren't respectable in the slightest, and her visiting colleagues would have found them disgusting - but once she started staying at home, she did this less and less; and the last one, the teapot, was left until after her mother turned forty, and she couldn't bring herself to get rid of it.

She hadn't always been called Helen. She had been GreenPony, and Starry, and SunsetButterfly, but had eventually changed her name to what her mother had always called her. No one knew what it meant, but Helen was sure it was old. PurpleLava didn't like people to know that it came from Helen's parent - a parent's parent, a thought vaguely nauseating in itself. It was a serious embarrassment to her. Helen was often punished for it when PurpleLava was in a bad mood, but parent names weren't that important anyway, so none of her colleagues ever found out, and Helen was allowed to keep it.

Fingering the bruised skin around the electrode at the back of her neck, Helen wondered what PurpleLava would say if she knew that Helen still sometimes used the word mother in her head. She also wondered if Purple Lava knew what the teapot was made out of. Probably not - she had never even touched the teapot before, and she hadn't seen the stuff before either. Helen tasted on her tongue that foreign idea, the idea that she knew something her daughter didn't. It wasn't a new idea to her. After all, she knew because her mother had told her. What it was was something called tchina. Her mother had owned a lot of the stuff. If it broke, the pieces would be sharp.

Helen turned the idea over and under in her mind, considering.

CREATED: [2014-03-11]

Long did I travel, from home I was far
When I saw you make love to the evening star
That home I've forgotten, and can't find anew
For my world has faded to that star and you.

Venus is fickle, but her lovers are true
You've yet to return from wherever you flew.
I'll shadow her—though she seems dark to me too
I'll wait in her darkness to once more see you.

ID: 405618af-b6a4-4409-a5e6-aa5c82444c4d