Lord of Shallot

A grasshopper bounces against the road side curb, attempting to reach the tall grasses and the waist high weeds. A cigarette butt is thrown from a red truck and it smolders in the ditch. The tobacco gives of the last puffs of sweet smoke into the breeze, never to a light a single blade of grass. And a young man sits in an apartment attempting to write a story about a fantastical universe. He looks up and sees a small field. Button tansy blossoms wave next rusty brown yarrow dead heads. He remembers they use to be so white when they were first in bloom. He crossed the road and picked a few to add some wild life to his studio. But that was months ago and where the summer had its numerous stories told, his pages remain blank, blank as snow.

Across from the field is a small stand of trees. Pines, beach, bitch and maple so densely grown together they give the illusion that a real forest stretches out from behind them. But the storyteller knows better. Beyond the field and the trees are not more trees and more fields but a subdivision. And behind that, a church, a mall, two gas stations and yet another subdivision.

He contemplates this as a vanilla scented incent stick burns away. Smoke twists and dissipates in front of him and the blinking cursor on the screen, but he is lost in thought and pays no attention to either smoke or computer.  He wants so much more than this repetitious stench of urban, suburban sprawl. And so he attempts to write in the words of his favorite author “I want it all to be true because the world really does need griffins and monopods and unicorns and fire-breathing dinosaurs and rivers of stone and impossible and beautiful stories in it. And so she wrote a book”. And so did he. Or at least he attempted to.

When not writing or attempting to write or thinking of amazing and awful things to write about, he tried to make his world as impossible and beautiful as they are in the fairy tales. He grew his hair long and got an apartment on the top story of a six floor building. Surly with his hair bushing his belt loops and with his desk by the window, this would attract a prince or two to come along and rescue him from the monotony of twenty-first century living. And really, it doesn’t even need to be a prince. The floor length mirror and tapestry would certainly be reminiscent of The Lady of Shallot. Gazing at the city in the distance, his Camelot, the stream two blocks over, the wild flowers and grasses with the amber seed heads. All of these reflected in the pages in books of poetry and prose upon his bookshelf.

And so he works by night and day, weaving stories and sending them to publishers to pay rent and student loan debt. Slowly altering his world to include all the wondrous thing which the pages in his books project into the theater of his mind. Perhaps one day, he will get up from his desk, break his mirror and leave the apartment. He will get a canoe and paddle down the stream, to the river and to a place where the world is new and fresh and renewing. Away from his Camelot and his high towers. If he can over come the curse the lady or all those princess who sleep forever and are incased in glass coffins. He will shatter all the glass and tear up all the pages and truly write something new.

He might find himself in the middle of a wooded glen, alive and not dead. Build a hut and raise chickens and a hog. A summer sun will shine through the canopy and autumnal leaves will church breath feet, cloven or otherwise and he will be happy; the baba yaga before she grew old and wicked. And perhaps he will give shelter to a hunter and will repay him with a stag and with his happily-ever-after love. And ivy will climb up the chimney and he will cut his hair and grow pumpkins, as big and as round as the moon.

Writers Block or Something Like It

This is the thing about writers block: it sucks! Although I’m not even sure if I necessary have writers block but perhaps its tortured cousin to it. Perhaps one would call it writers-back up.

It’s not that I don’t have ideas to write about, cause I do. I have several ideas for novels and just as many seeds of short stories tumbling inside my head. What happens is I will write about 200 some words of it and then… poop. Nothing. I’ve lost the spark. I can’t make plot point A connect to plot point B. It’s sad really cause I would love to see this stories and narratives complete themselves. 

I’ve gone back in my hard-drive to a folder entitled STORIES, which is where many a story goes rest for a while. I call it the cryogenic portion of its life. They are there, exactly how I left them. Here is a girl walks to the edge of a forest in search of a pumpkin. A man gives shelter to a sea-faring traveler and is attempting to dock the boat named Selkie. His arms have been pulling on that rope for over a year now. In another, a whale has invited a man to touch her slick skin under the light of a full moon. In another story a woman has been attempting to change her villages’ bigoted attitudes towards the family of satyrs who are her neighbors for quite some time now. 

And these are just the stories I started last year. Never mind the tales I’ve spun over this summer. The crow people and the woman with her cherries may never have the rest of their stories told. The boy who began to study under the wise-woman might never become a fully actualized individual. Who is the Queen of Crustaceans and will she ever reconcile with her sister the Duchess of Cephalopods? Two churches stand in the middle of an post-apocalyptic town and the people are learning to live in harmony with nature again. This is a solute to the Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk.

How many other pages will be born and laid to rest in this corner of my hard-drive till I liberate them from their slumber? When will I release them from the task I’ve left them with and find resolution? 

Perhaps, I just need an inspiration and a muse.

Red Cherries and Mottled Beans

Her skin was the color of sand after a rain storm and as smooth as a shell. On that morning her finger tips were as if they had been dipped in red wine. It was the season for cherries and how she loved cherries. She popped them in her tiny mouth and spit the pits out into her hands all afternoon. And now the bread would be kneed with her juice stained hands, lending a new and subtle sweetness to the dough. Her children wouldn’t notice and either would The Tempest.

                The Tempest, or as he as more commonly known, her husband, would be home from the sea this afternoon and she wanted to make something special. So that morning she went down to the wharf to pick up the usual amounts of lemons and flour and yeast. But she also bought a pound of almonds and several handfuls of dark cherries. It took all her will power to not eat the while of them on her way back up the dusty streets and spit the pits into ditches and side streets alike. She would pray to the ruby red god who looked after all fruits with a pitted center that they would grow and she could have cherries rain on her every time she made her way to the early simmer market.

                She allowed herself only three of the nearly black spheres on her way home. The first one she ate right away. Its tight skin split so easy with the closing of her jaws. The savored the release of sweet and mildly tart juice. With her tongue she muscled the flesh away from the stone, the seed. Once cleared of every fiber she-- with as much femininity as she could muster--- spit the pit into her palm and tucked it into a fold in her sari.

                This fold she created specifically for seeds and pit of fruits she loved. Countless cherry pits found their way into the pocket. Beans that were mottled with purples, blues and grays once filled the secret space. She found them at a market as she traveled west, the basket was spilling over with these beauties and she vowed to plant them in whatever garden she would call home. When she reached the sea side village on the Mediterranean and married the tempest, she buried the seeds and tended them with as much care as she could.

The spade shaped leaved climbed all the way up a ladder leaning against the house and bunched like a great crown on the eves. She was still learning the language of these people and there for named them in her native Sanskrit: sahasrara, one thousand one thousand. The vines gave off hundreds of beautiful purple and white flowers in the early heat of summer and the pods the extended form them were long and slender. They were plan green and were deceiving. Who would have thought that such a common and simple looking plant would yield thousands of pearl like beans with such colors?  When the rains subside and the dry season is upon them, the green selves shrink back and cling to the seeds within, like a string of beads that lives. Finally when the time is right, the seams open up and one thousand beans tumble to the ground below. They were prefect in their dented ovular shape, swirled and splotched with purples and navies, and whites.

In time, the children would help her collect them into clay vessels. In the coarse of things, they would get board to collecting them into bowls and find them perfect for throwing at one another. Intercepting a flying troop of mottled projectiles, she scolds them gently and reminds them that this is their dinner and is not meant to be thrown around. They would cease for the day but come the next and the day after that, they would see them fit for pelting each other again. But she knows this and will, in her best attempts, make their lives happy and nondestructive, especially when it comes to the garden and their meals.

But when the cherries fall from they’re boughs daily, the beans are just several leaves and two tendrils wrapped around the legs of the ladder.

The Crow People

When we are born, a crow is sacrificed in the name of the child and in honor of the birth. Its face and upper beak are cut away and adhered to the newborns head. The unguent glue by which the child’s new face is attached is made from the bones of those fled in war or those lost to illness.

By this initiation we, The Crow People, are forever reminded of our connection to death, for it fuels that which lives, and reminds us of our debt to the ancestors. It is they who taught us how to hunt both crow and caribou. It was they who showed us how to plant the seeds year in and harvest them year out. And it was them who made the rites and rituals. Without them, the crows and our forbears, we are lost; forever scraping our way through life, through an abyss, an oblivion.

But they do provide life and we are ever grateful.

The crows grow abnormally large in the foothills, or so we are told by those passing through our land. Because of the large size, they’re sacrificed and the fashioned masks are able to be placed and molded to a babies face without much manipulation. The crow’s eyes are removed and given to the godparents for safe keeping. Wither by magic or science or both, the crow-mask grow with the child. As we mature, old feathers fall out and are replaced by new plumage, shiny and soft as oil. Our faces are covered to the jaw with the feathers and are then stop to meet the hard obsidian beak.

No doubt other fauna or even flora were attempted to become part of ourselves. Perhaps back in a time just before the creation of the world, our people attempted to embed goat horns to their forehead, projecting verity and strength. Or mint leaves sewn into fingertips to spread its sweet-tingling scent wherever one was to place their hands. But for what ever reason the god have deemed them to stay separate from us—other than through the occasion ingestion—and we forever belong solely to the crows.

Because you are a Shooting Star

*Please excuse the momentary dredging up of my intestines (which is really a string of metaphors), my stomach (really a bag of similes), my pancreas (a producer of personification), and my lower organs (these are just my testicles) for your reading pleasure*

I can’t bare this anymore. I see you all false and with out direction; like the illusion that is the aura borealis which secretly wants to be a solar flare or part of the deep space nebulas. No! This is too heavy for gravity, this need. No, it’s not a need, not a want, not even a desire. It is a wish.

Like a shooting star in the night sky of my life. All hot and bright and fast for less than a moment. You are not an expedition to mars or a fleet of mining ships that extract iron ore or diamonds in meteors. These are wants, these are desires. You are just a shooting star and shooting stars are just wishes incarnate.

Not a comet are you either. Comets are my reoccurring lovers who enter my orbit, penetrating my atmospheric layers for days. Shooting stars are quick and they punch and burn up all their helium and oxygen in my nitrogen rich aura. But shows of orgasmic creation can not happen in a vacuum. No new worlds to explore are in a shooting star. No vast caverns which formed in the great blackness of space in which to play. I can not. I will not pulse my way through the empty space.

How I do wish to reach out across the universe and touch that icy hot tail, that speck of cosmic dust in process of using up everything it ever was. But it is to quick, not sustainable and my blazing iron core will never make journeys through space/time for something so fleeting.

Will you someday crash into my crust? Will it require such force that you cram a creator into my surface, a mark, a forever? Can you reach my skin and kick up green earth and bury yourself past my blushing red mantle and merge with my core? Do you have the strength to endure my gravitational field?

Perhaps not. Wishes burn too quick to have the desire to met a solid planet. They’re only cause in space is to be peaceful, glide through a void and one day, when the time is right… Pop to life with brilliance all their own. With the last atom of carbon or magnesium or phosphorus release they’re final thought: they hope someone, somewhere below was there to bear witness.

Becoming Stars

A bright light jetted across the night sky. It hurtled towards the moon which was emerging from its hiding place and formed a curved scythe in the rich darkness. When the light would cross the luminescent crescent, the two lights would converge and make a great bow and arrow in the sky. Thousands of stars splashed in the black expanse and the Milky Way’s current ran in the southern sky. Peering into the vast expanse above him, thousands of wonders turned before the boy’s eyes.

He couldn’t have been more than 15 and the tale tells signs of puberty raced across his body. A thick covering of peach fuzz spread over his face and he had taken to secretly saving with his mother’s razor. He wasn’t so much ashamed of using his mother hygiene products as much as not knowing how to phase the request for razors of his own, without causing a moment of awkwardness. Of coarse this would be unavoidable either way, for any parent who sees the maturation of their children tend mark of the significant, or less-than-significant, moments of their children’s upbringing; shaving being one of them.

But on this night, the boy not yet a man stared at the night sky, pondering the mysteries of the universe. He wondered what the stars were. He had read tales of how they where the spirits of the gods. In the day time, when there light vanished by the coming of dawn, they would walk among us, causing havoc or bestowing blessings. To other’s they were known as “The Star People”. Once again, when the black of night faded into ocean blue and then fully laminated by the sun, they would walk among the living but hide in the corners of houses and in the attics of barns, not wanting to be seen by humans. Even still, there were tales in the old woman’s books that said that the stars were chewed into existence by a great black mare Her body was the night sky and she tore into her own flesh and she spilled the sliver blood unto her velvet coated flanks. With so many interpretations, and his teacher not exposing her beliefs to him, how could he make up his mind over what these mysterious forces were?

His mother stepped out from the shadows, which was to say that she stopped leaning against the side of the house and stepped towards her son. He heard her approaching, like anyone with ears enough to hear would have but when she had been leaning against the outside wall, he could feel her presence there, though he was not sure if it was his mother or anther person lurking in the night. His senses were becoming more acute and he wasn’t sure if it was his training under the witch or just the simple process of growing up. The detection had been faint and he had hardly needed to concentrate upon her presence to notice she was there. But before he could have contemplated the though farther she spoke.

“What cha looking at?” she said with a air of lightness on her tongue.

He hadn’t needed to turn towards her to know a soft smile formed on her lips as she spoke to him. He took a moment to drink in her demeanor, the moon, the comet, and the multitude of stories regarding the stars and what he felt true in his heart.

“Ma, what do you think the stars are?” he said never turning away from the moon’s gaze.

Two Temples

On the opposite corners of Pine Street and Fjord Avenue stand two churches. One is greatly bigger than the other but each hold to their ground with solid foundations of stone and concrete. The smaller of the two is covered in pine planks painted a clean egg shell white. On either side of the simple doors are two towering cedar trees. In the spring they sprout new sets of needles that emerge otherworldly green and fresh flowers will be planted at their trunks. The black tiled roof matches the black pavement of a now unused parking lot, and each will fade to a dull gray in time. It is a subtle and humble building singing a song of it’s time. A dozen rows of scratched and polished maple pews make up the only furniture, save for a simple pulpit and even less ornate alter. Bees wax is now in abundance and candles burn upon the high table often. In the sweltering days of late summer, the scent of lavender or chamomile clings to every surface and the congregation leaves dripping sweat and oil. 

Across the way from the effortless church is the other house-of-worship. Its many walls have heard the sermons of several faiths and the voices of countless practitioners. When it was first built, it was much like the white church but was made of ruddy red and mottled brown bricks. Pews of walnut and maple studded the floor and a dais was erected for priests and priestess to address lay women and men. The ceiling was much higher than that of its cousin; three times its height and vaulted. It is no longer like this thought. It was the first place for the towns people to seek divine wisdom and as such required an expansion in due time. This was before the white church and well before Pine Street and Fjord Avenue were the official names of a dirt road and a goat path. 

No, the first church, or temple as it should be properly identified as, is if nothing a shifting and changing building. The clergy and towns people tore down the first bricks and built in its place a tower with a ziggurat for roof. A narrow set of stairs wound its way around the square building till it reached the top where rafters were constructed. From the rafters was hanged a chandelier and bowls of rose and lavender water. Occasionally a band of traveling peoples would pass through town and exchange citrus fruits and fragrant spices for meals, shelter and a story. Some of these precious spices, herbs, and rinds would be placed in these bowls as well. Newly initiated acolytes would light the great hanging fixture and refill the clay vessels. 

As the town grew so did the temple. This time instead of tearing down the structure and ruining the work of their progenitors, a new addition was made. This time a circular room was constructed with white clay found at bottom of the river which lay the edge of the town. The Great Hall, as it would be called, was then painted with thick blue lines which depicted the waves and currents of the river. Here people would come to celebrate the thawing of the snow and rejoice in the flooding of the river. This was before it took the lives of so many and the people prospered because of the river. The room with the ziggurat for a roof was then given the name Tower of the Ancestors. The pews were moved to the edge of the room and some went into The Great Hall. The alter moved to the center of the room and a larger alter was constructed on the dais and the towns people came to morn their loved ones. Gone were the scents of flowers. Replacing them was the smoky and resinous pine pitch. 

Finally a third building was added to temple. This one was larger but not nearly as splendid as the other two, but not nearly as tall as the tower. From the outside it was a simple square building of yellow brick. Glass-work had become a skill known to a few craftsmen and craftswomen and large cloudy black glass windows were placed in the additions walls. The simple exterior was nothing compared to the feat of engineering inside. The room was a mess of tiers and cloisters. Ladders connected some levels to others. Brick stairs lead into single rooms emerged from the tops. These cell like structures, connected to one another by various means, were the rooms of priests, priestess, those who wished to become one with their choice of deity or ancestor, and the occasional holy traveler. The rooms were caved into the earth and rooms were built deep below the ground. They tunneled below The Great Hall and Tower of the Ancestors. This habitation center became The Beehive. 

But this evolution of the big church on Pine Street happened so long ago that it some had relegated it to legend or delusional thinking. Construction and demolition of the various rooms happened in later years and by this or that religion of the century. It was said that the small church on the opposite corner was built to counter the heathen and pagan activities done in the depths of The Beehive. These clams are even more far fetched then the tale above and those who claim it’s truth are bitter, jaded, and wounded by the events of the last few years. What ever the truth is it does not matter as much as what is in the moment and a plural history is better than one that claims to be the one and only. 

What probably happened is a town was settled near the river and through it’s economic prosperity a number of people form a number of faiths traveled to bask in it’s booming success. In time the temple had to expand and architecture was choice by the residing religious tradition. The Beehive was probably a monastery and the Great Temple was probably room in which dances could have been held; it’s circular design conducive towards a twisting chair dance or familial jig. Even I who came to this town by means of following the stars and believed to be guided by spirits, or gods, or astrological whims have a hard time swallowing the parts about the Beehive and it’s cacophony of chambers.