Sanctuary

I drove to the border of cloud and watched ghosts dance about its edge like waves on the sand. From here I can see the land bathed in thunderous sunlight; even from the shadows I can see that the world is filled with such beauty. There is a gossamer veil of mist, impermeable and unforgiving, that separates our world from theirs. Toeing the end of shadow, I can sometimes make out the holes in the sky where what lies behind pierces through – stars. I’ve tried to paint them, but white is hard to come by in this land between the highways.

(From the base of the clouds where the ghosts spy, we are probably only a contour cutting its way through mountainside and ocean shore, unalarmed and indiscriminating.) I asked the ghosts where white tones are found, and they indicated the cemetery. But, as I said, that veil is impenetrable; thus I stand in a meadow drenched in hues of grey so that the highway is indistinguishable from the patch of Queen Anne’s Lace to my right. I stand looking into a sun meant for a painter of white. I stand looking into a sun that whispers lines I don’t understand.

Speechless

A mountain stream of thought: clarity. Pouring from a vacuum, in the midst of which I stand, there is language. A prairie of lowercase letters sway in the breeze of speech, interrupted only by the unruly height of the occasional “l” or “b”. Beyond lies the forest of the uppercase. Beginnings wait there, between the trunks of our “P’s” and “Q’s”.

I collapse into the lowercase, covered, drowning in codependent words like “such” and “as”. I strain my jaw open to take a breath and find that language is already there, flooding in and out of my lungs so that I am suffocating.

The words are written, unspoken, debilitating, decapitating, broken and meaningless without context; the words are a hell of nonentity, the words are smoke in my lungs, the words are poison in my thoughts – the words are… O! the words!

Speak, I command myself. The oxygen slowly seeps from my bloodstream as I sprawl out in speechless agony. I grasp for something spoken. The world is turning dark; I clasp the closest set of phonemes and speak:

Help.

The War of 1991

A cloud gathers behind the windows, fogging the glass. The glass curves, like an exit lane, but there is no exit. The cloud goes nowhere, degrading into fog. Pressure; building, and building. The atoms excite; heat. The fog is oppressive; the room is a steam engine. Pounding; the atoms push against the window pane, one by one by one. The curvature creaks in complaint against the pressure. A scream of white flags sliver and snake across the pane. There is release.

We creep through the cracks like children let out of school. The air is open. We run through the streets to see every windowsill decorated with broken glass. The barriers between the internal and external are now permeable. We’ve learned to let the open air inside like a lost stray. Century-old portraits on the mantle now weather more rapidly, but the faces look younger.

7:20, PM: a boy sits on the porch with a head cold. As he sits, the fog crawls slowly back through the windows and his eyes grow red. I sit across the street and dully rub my own burning eyes. All down the road, from this coast to the next, we red-eyed youths sit on our porches beside a plastic bag of medicines, unable to sleep because the fog has crept from the window to our beds.

Anchorage

This is somewhat of an attempt at prose poetry. Hope you like it!

The lurch of the impact left the tattered wood into my feet up to my chattering teeth. Cold, wet with rain and eyes distant from watching endless horizons of wave after wave, I fell to the deck of my skiff – shipwrecked on your reef and hung up on your shoal. I dropped anchor to cover up my shame and convince passers-by that I’d meant to visit your waters. And so I’m left to lie on this weathered, waterlogged deck, squinting my eyes as the raindrops beat against them, and I watch the squall pass; despite my haggard disposition, I look forward to grasping the sand of your shores and feeling solidity once again. Or else, my feet may meet only hard stone existing rather than thriving above the waves. Regardless, welcome or not, I am here and here to stay. Love me or hate me; I allow no middle ground – but you can only hate so much as you love.