cruxymox-shadows

[cruxymox-shadows]

All true love stories end in heartache. Yet we wish to live them again and again.

Love and flight and drowning and breath and breathlessness and blinding by brightness of dark converged with light—I am no fool. I understand that all love is heartache that is so very worth every agony. Every. Single. One. Who would choose to live without love for fear of the pain? This I could never understand when life is pain anyway. Find your scraps of finely scented happiness and bliss and mirth amongst the thorns. Have moments of complete insanity. They’re so few in this life. Fall as fearlessly as possible. Without hanging onto the safety line. For a few moments it will feel like flying. Then you drown. Then you go blind. Then you wonder if you are still alive while at that exact moment you do not care if it is all a dream.

[cruxymox-shadows]

When you think of me while you lay alone in the darkness of your sleepless night, what is it you call me, in the silence of your mind?

I have thought of what I call you.

I call you Orion’s Betelgeuse, rubescent

twisting in the hush black sky

declaring otherworldly existences

where night has breath and arrows

have flown and hunters have hungered

the small punctuations piercing

my body with what trembles, what

sounds have whinged like

night-birds beckoning for sleep, no,

for flight, for coos and cradling calls

of, shushed caresses and do I need

to beg you to enfold me, hold me,

in sacred oath and sweet indulgence

you sigh, and the light escapes you

issuing through me like a shiver

and I am yours, through and through,

like the arrow flung from Orion to

the wild thing on the hunt

drag me to the fire.

watch me be consumed.

—The Holloe Quiet

[cruxymox-shadows]

Rushing (but in slow motion) A tsunami covers the town and nobody notices. They shuffle from car to work and sometimes church. I think a thousand thinks by noon and utter only seven. Why are there gulls in the clock tower? Humming a song an octave below, some amalgam of hums about dust, shells, home, rivers, and pockets. Light bounces off my hair and I feel a moment of childhood again, the sick part and the sweet. I’m so much better off when I carry a book. Sidewalk versus nettles versus steps and it’s all one path. You can mourn quietly and laugh loudly and it’s the same heartache for chasing an ever-moving light. Time chimes through a town and old people cackle. We catalog things we find and it’s mostly numbers and colors. We slide from morning to night sometimes lingering over lunch barely taking in the layers of art in a day.

[cruxymox-shadows]

I was always letting go. One day perhaps I will hang on, but I’ve found, there’s little point. Since birth, hanging on has been a pointless effort in futility, as nothing remains, except the rawness of your fingers and the pain inside your chest. I keep thinking, at some point, rather than hanging on, in that open palmed act of letting go, surely something will nestle gently into the softness of my hands and understand what it is, to be loved without claws digging in. Something will understand what it is to be adored and not take advantage. Something will settle and stay and rest in the softness of my tenderness.

—The Hollow Quiet

[cruxymox-shadows]

One day, one rhyme- Day 3791

Such cheery hues in clouds of grey;

Pitter patter on a bouquet;

Picked and arranged, now damp to drain:

A bunch of flowers in the rain.

[cruxymox-shadows]

Breaths, borne upon wings of halos around the moon and its kindred sun, shiver in the timewoven stillness,

and we shimmer in our own extancy;

minutes prove eolian in sway of thought and dream both, days rappel from morning's apex to the evening chasm and hush so very so,

and we shimmer in our own frequency, our radiance blooming as love.

© Anna S. 2024

[cruxymox-shadows]

[I] like knife slicing slowly a lump of grief / [Ban] like pulp, kissing the side of the blade

[cruxymox-shadows]

Last night I had a dream

that I wrote a beautiful poem,

telling myself I'd share it here.

I've spent the entire day

so far

trying to remember the words,

with no luck.

So now I'll just write a poem instead

About having a beautiful dream.

[cruxymox-shadows]

I pause. The boy who entered the office did so without actually opening the door. He grins, and the grin hits like nothing else, not even seeing a puppy.

“Hiiii Francyne!!!”

No one gets my name right. “Hello. Can I help you?”

“Uh-huh! @cruxymox wrote a poem that wasn’t about a Jay and!! I’ve asked it questions but it gives really confusling answers you know!!”

“I -.” I pause. “This isn’t normally a police matter?”

“It’s not?!”

“The poem isn’t a missing person. I doubt it committed a crime?”

“It might not have been jaysome,” the boy offers quite seriously.

“I will act a detective to look into it?”

“That’s a good idea! Lance helps a Jay a lot,” and the boy is gone. I blink, rubbing my face.

Somehow I know he didn’t show up on the cameras. I close files, and I read a poem.

[cruxymox-shadows]

does the blue sky demand that I enjoy it? or can I gaze wistfully with my melancholic eyes and ask it to bathe me in a beauty I cannot see.

[cruxymox-shadows]

these feel like they were torn from the worlds of clark ashton smith.

Barry Windsor Smith

[cruxymox-shadows]

Of Christmas bones and jaysome wishes

The morning Christmas songs on the radio sound slightly strained, which would be silly if the world didn’t contain warnings if you pay even a small amount of attention. This close to the holidays, the tension in the world could be cut as easily as fruit cake. And taste almost as foul.

I pour myself a coffee. The wandering magician is already wandering the town, doing small magics to help places and people before the season made it too difficult. There are no texts from him yet about needing anything, so I’m considering options and what gifts to snag for him when Jay bounces into the kitchen of the hotel suite from his room.

“Oh! I’m totally going to be busy today Charlie just so you know!”

I pause, mid-sip of coffee. When an eleven year old from Outside the universe tells you he’s going to be busy, there are several responses. The sane one would be asking when and where and being as far away from the resulting adventure as possible. Adventures are one thing; busy adventures are very much something Else.

“Busy doing what?”

“I’m helping Rudolph,” Jay says proudly.

I set my coffee down. “And Rudolph is –?” I ask, because last week Jay was making friends with a virus he said was named Dave.

“The reindeer, Charlie. Because because because! Santa knows if you’ve been good or bad, so Santa knew the other reindeer were mean! And they shouldn’t be like that, so I’m going to help Rudolph have an extra jaysome time!”

Jay vanishes with a huge grin.

I finish my coffee and text the magician a warning before leaving the hotel.

The staff are polite and wary-friendly, which means rumours about Jay have spread. Most hotels have jaysome insurance, which Jay is convinced is a hug and a very good thing. I’m just glad this hotel doesn’t have memory foam mattresses.

It isn’t snowing yet but the air is a pleasant chill as I walk outside. Most of the shops are opening up, their gods working the morning shifts. Chain stores seldom have a god, but local places tend to even if no one realises that. Some nod when they see me. A few try to hide as the created gods hide as normal employees. I let the latter think they succeed, as I’m not remotely here to deal with anything weird that I know of.

I get a few nice shirts for the magician, a couple of pieces of clothing I’m certain Jay will enjoy wearing and the day seems almost sane before I catch movement in an alley and a skeleton girl walks up to me. She is wearing a redsatin coat over bones and her eyes contain bright stars that dance and play together.

No one else is noticing her, but people tend not to notice things they know can’t be real.

I don’t have that luck or luxury these days.

“I think we might have met before?”

The skeleton girl considers that, her head cocked to the side. She nods once.

“If you’re looking for Jay, he’s busy helping a reindeer.”

She smiles, and I know that in the same way I know that Jay is eleven. The god inside me stirs protectively.

I let out a breath. “You came to me for help instead of Jay?”

She crosses her arms and nods, and this time her silence speaks volumes.

“Fair enough.” I can do more than eat troublesome gods. Thanks to knowing a magician, a lot more than other god eaters. Thanks to being friends with Jay, sometimes far more than that.

I reach, opening a direction I have no name for. The moment stretches, my ears pop, and another skeleton is simply here. The snow keeps falling, and shoppers move around us as if unaware we are here. This one is taller, somewhat like a tree except not being a tree at all.

“You’re cruxymox’s skeleton?” I ask, the knowing a slow dawning realisation. The new skeleton nods and smiles almost shyly.

I have questions, and even more worries, but the skeletons touch hands, bone flowing into bone in a gentle fractal pattern.

They walk away, talking in a way that hums through bones and is not words at all. A sharing. An understanding. Making a story as wind whistles like music through their bodies.

I don’t listen in. Knowing things is one matter; knowing what not to learn is even more important sometimes.

I head back to the hotel, wondering about the bones of trees and garland but not enough to be foolish about it. The wandering magician is in the hotel suite, his eyes dark shadows. This is a rough time of year for magic, needs and desires acting as demands more than gifts.

I offer a light hug, which he accepts with a soft laugh.

“This is part of your holiday gift -.” I begin.

Jay appears. His eyes are wide and worry radiates from him.

“Kiddo?” the wandering magician asks.

“Uhms! I think an oops happened cuz Rudolph said something about Santa being the CEO of Christmas and got all kinds of mad-face before eating Santa!”

I exchange glances with the magician. Gifts can wait. A worried Jay cannot.

“Let’s go,” the magician says, and we vanish into an adventure that is probably Jay’s secret gift to us.

Sometimes even jaysome works in mysterious ways.

[cruxymox-shadows]

Have you ever tried

Dancing in your concrete shoes?

Do your ankles ache?

[cruxymox-shadows]

I do wonder what it must be like to live a life that doesn’t experience the enormity of this internal ache. To live without it, to breathe without it. What is existence without this deep chest pain beneath the ribs that always threatens to consume everything inside of me? Surely I’ll never know.

[cruxymox-shadows]

I would ask you to gather me

into you, like wildflowers, clutch me

to your chest and breathe me in.

I would ask. but you already know

I’m poisonous.

but should you want to die

in agony, gather me to your chest,

watch me make you bleed.

watch me die, withered against you,

your hands my sweet little tomb.

—The Hollow Quiet

[cruxymox-shadows]

The Box

There was a box that was not a box. It was not a boot, which the narrator feels is important without quite knowing why. The box contained a secret, which was not so unusual: a box is made in part of walls, and to lock something out is to lock other things within. Sometimes the box was made of wood, or steel. Sometimes it was an idea that thought the way boxes do.

Some days the box even had an owner, to the extent that it could. (Had the box been able to voice an opinion, it would have been that to be owned was as dangerous as being an owner, but the box had never given any thought to the matter.)

The box contained a shadow once, though the shadow was sometimes other things as well. A box is a box, no matter the same it takes: shadows are far different. Shadows can be dangerous, but the box knew that a box could be as well.

The box was held by a boy who stored the box inside him.

This was a new experience for the box. Not the being swallowed: that could be down with small-enough boxes.

But in this case the boy also came to visit the box while the box was within his own body.

“Hi!”

The stomach was the boy was not like other stomachs. It contained multitudes and was oddly comfortable for a box to be inside.

The boy gave the box a pat. The boy was inside his own stomach, which meant his stomach was inside him. The box did not understand this, just like the box wasn’t certain why it knew that the boy was eleven.

But the boy gave the box a grin, and the box shivered just a little in the core of its being: the boy had rings in his fingers that were not visible but the box had no need to see things. The boy was older than he looked. And the box was certain, as deep as hinges dared go, that the boy could open the box at any time.

The boy did not do so. He gave the box a bug, which the box was pleased by.

“I’m doing a quick visiting to make certain you’re still OK because some boxes get a bit weirdy inside a Jay. And! some are even weird outside a Jay too!”

The words made sense, in some fashion. The box had not even know it had a language, but it knew rust and elements and time and space. The box spoke that, but gently. Not a box, but to the box, a sharing like a gift placed inside the box without placing anything inside.

The box was slightly uneasy, but did not express this sentiment.

“I’m making sure you won’t be broken because! it’s really safe to be inside a Jay you know. Sometimes I come inside me to be safer too!”

The box did not know this. The box was certain that being inside another box – a true box, not a building box-shaped, would be very odd and perhaps insulting: one should trust the boxdom of a box, or not have it at all. But the box also knew that the boy spoke true.

“Oh! I should go, but if my shadow comes and wants to open the box, you should probably say no.”

The box vanished, but was still around the box. The stomach shifted, making space for another.

The box rocked gently.

It was safe.

No shadow arrived.

The box was locked, and felt as if it would be safe for a long time, and that there was something to this that was a feeling as much as a knowing.

And the box knew that the name for this was jaysome.

And the box was content.

[cruxymox-shadows]

When the world ended

They blamed the poets

Who wrote a poem about this

It didn't help