buzzsawtypewriter

[buzzsawtypewriter]

The Pyrex singing Against my flesh

your hair rolls down Like rivers forking

lead to the sea Unequivocally

is all I can accept The bare minimum

of what I deserve

[buzzsawtypewriter]

Feeling seen today.

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O, Sisyphean moon!

I measure time in cycles now

How many moons gone unremarked

While I slept and sleepwalked nights away?

How many arcs and settings?

Wedges and crescents and faces and hangnails

All unnoticed as distant tides.

[buzzsawtypewriter]

I was a hired hand

To raise the hall where they’d brew ale

Worked summers tan, and summers pale

They fill their vats with hops and set them to a boil

Yet I don’t lend a hand, I’m doomed instead to toil

The taxman came a-threatening; I turned back around

Still chained to toil now

Toil now

Toil now

[buzzsawtypewriter]

If a friend of mine gave a feast, and did not invite me to it, I should not mind a bit. But if a friend of mine had a sorrow and refused to allow me to share it, I should feel it most bitterly. If he shut the doors of the house of mourning against me, I would move back again and again and beg to be admitted so that I might share in what I was entitled to share. If he thought me unworthy, unfit to weep with him, I should feel it as the most poignant humiliation. — Oscar Wilde

[buzzsawtypewriter]

Unaimed, unnamed fear

Cast aside when my tongue casts

Oaths of destruction

[buzzsawtypewriter]

A pilgrimage.

Full moon at the Temple of Poseidon in Sounio, Greece

[buzzsawtypewriter]

He was wearing his cardigan again.

Thickly threaded and cuffed at the wrist, he thought of it as a garment that softened him, somehow. At least he felt that way when he wore it. Professoral, perhaps. The sort of thing a man might wear while lifting a bird's nest from the garden, say, and ferrying it to safer harbors in the hedgerow.

[buzzsawtypewriter]

Sitting at the dining room table with his computer on the blue gingham tablecloth, he was disappointed—if not at all surprised—to find that he was still in the same world, both mentally and otherwise. Even this far removed from his usual desk and the stack of blindingly monotonous work that accompanied it, he found the tangle of words and thoughts in his head, as well as his ability to find slack in the knots and send them tumbling loose, as temperamental as ever. The only difference he noted was in his posture, and not for the better.

His hopes for the dining table, which gravitated toward puzzles and the occasional board game more than dining, hadn’t been particularly high given his mixed-but-mostly-lukewarm attempts at the local library. The open area of the library had succeeded in decimating the variety of his distractions—surfing porn sites and shaking hands with the little Pope was discouraged in public, after all, and finding ways to do it anyway wasn’t something that got him going—but not their persistence. Even on his best afternoon at the library, he’d yet to lay down more than a page in one go and fewer than half a dozen in total.

Still, Damien had been calling to him in some faint, nagging way for a bit, and so he found himself hovering over his laptop in the dining room. The invocation was quiet, nothing like Roland’s insistence, and he didn’t feel any sort of ripcord funneling through his essence like what Stephen had described; just the weight of his ass against the not-as-cushioned-as-maybe-it-ought-to-be straight-backed chair. Maybe that was a start.

He was aware, but only in a distant sort of half-thought way, that he could move to his office and be more comfortable at his desk chair. The idea of writing in the dining room appealed to him and he wanted to let it percolate for a bit, even if the document in front of him was still blank and still with the sole exception of the cursor blinking in its corner. If nothing else, the change in venue kept him on the straight and narrow in much the same way as the open space of the library, owing to the bay window that sat the table opposite him and the neighboring properties that gazed back from a stone’s throw away.

Corralling his distractions had never sparked any sort of success for him, and it wasn’t changing its tune now. He’d only ever been able to produce any real volume of work when a deadline wrung it out of him for a day job or when his synapses aligned like the planets to unlock the floodgates momentarily. He knew full well it was only what he got down in the latter situations that was worth a damn, and they were few and far between.

Still, if he was parked on his keister at the dining table and stayed vigilant about nuking his forgotten coffee whenever it bubbled to the surface of his mind, maybe he’d get lucky. No one caught lightning in a bottle if they didn’t have their bottle when it struck, he mused. If nothing else, at least he’d look like a writer if anyone happened to have a look in through the bay window.

[buzzsawtypewriter]

[buzzsawtypewriter]

tanka #1, Tathev Simonyan

[buzzsawtypewriter]

Of his face, only the top half rested proud of the water. The base of his nose was even with the water’s surface and rested perhaps a millimeter above it—just enough for the air to escape and, equally important, reenter his shifting bellows. At the nadir of each breath he would pause ever so briefly, allowing the storm chased sea of his exhalation to calm before the inhale.

At the eye of the storm but just below the surface of the lightly pinked water were dark tendrils, reaching out into the water like tentacles or spilledandspreading crude. The dark shadow of mustache paired with his bald head in the suggestion of some bare-domed walrus or even Dr. Robotnik—Eggman, if you’re nasty.

Beyond, the tub’s wavering crust was broken only by the twin protrusions of his knees. Some modernist, he knew, would’ve drawn a terse comparison to women’s breasts rising and falling on the water; some postmodernist wouldn’t have said it, but would’ve found a way to make you picture it anyway. The mirrored image of his own knees, though, only led the man to think of humpback whales performing a synchronized swimming routine, offering their pale bellies up to the sun and the judges.