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Darkness [Classic] (unfinished story)

I think I’m secretly creepy. (My son says it’s not so secret.) I have dozens, maybe hundreds, of story snippets and have been grabbing random stuff and typing them up here. Below is one that caught my eye. Kind of an unsettling, serial killer, stream of consciousness piece.

Tonight I’ll see her. I’ll find her at the corner where we first met. She’ll smile when she sees me and ask me for a ride. Walking through the park very late I’ll meet her — taller and thinner this time. She’ll laugh self-consciously when I startle her and we’ll make strained conversation about how unsafe it is at night. At the grocery store, pleased to see me after all these years — we’ll go for a drink and talk of college days until after the sun goes down. Walking her home from a movie we’ll take a shortcut I know through a dark, deserted neighborhood. Hitchhiking, I’ll give her a ride back to town. Her date has dropped her in the middle of nowhere, the bastard, and she is glad to find someone else driving at night on this godforsaken road.

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Vic Memory 2 [Classic] (140 words)

I found the next Vic memory! The first is here. If you haven’t already, read Memory 1 first.

Memory 2
Vic lying in his bed, his mother and father arguing in the next room.

“He is not retarded,” his mother’s voice is the screeching of harpies “he’s just overly imaginative.”

“You didn’t see the look in his eye when he came at me with the bat. Jesus, Gloria, the kid scares me.”

Their voices fade in and out as Vic drifts off to dreams of knights and dragons and kingdoms to conquer…

He is awakened again by the screeching of harpies. “We’re not going to send him away!” Vic’s mother wails as she rushes into his bedroom to protect him.

Vic looks up to see his mother swooping toward him, eyes red from crying, hair in disarray. The screeching of harpies still echoes in his ears as the filthy beast stretches out its claws. Eyes wide with terror, Vic screams.

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Strange [Classic] (14 line poem)

Since today is ‘brother day’ [I posted some riddles written with another brother here], below is a poem written with my brother Rob when we were both quite young — early teens? pre-teens?

Silly is good. Weebles, if you don’t know, are toys from my youth [link]

the untiring sound of scraping your dog
the wonderful feel of bumps on a log
the pleasant aroma of reheated gloves
the inflatable raft of your only true love
bowling balls marching from here to Siam
the congested sinus of Lizzie the lamb
the rhythmic laughter of Weebles at play
the croak of a needle that’s lost in the hay
the hum of a hummingbird not told the words
the triumphant bugle of elephant birds
the innocent fungus infesting the crown
the munching of Freetos to Sweet Georgia Brown
the puckered-up thumbprint from sucking your thumb
the end of this poem most surely has come

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Riddles A [Classic] (4 line poem)

This riddle was written with help from my brother Rick for playing Dungeons and Dragons with my friends in college. Being full of imagination, I was of course the dungeon master when we played at school. Feel free to enter your answers as comments.

Riddle A
You never want it in a pot
It’s only there when it is not
It changes name when it gets wet
The more you add, the less you get

A hole

(A hole filled with water is a puddle)
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The Kids [Almost New] (unfinished poem)

Though unfinished, this is part of my big Alice-like narrative which I’ve mentioned that ties together my longer poems. Prior to my sabbatical, this is one of the few things that I’ve written within the past few years. I may need a new category to tag these items — ‘almost new’ or ‘classic plus’ doesn’t quite cut it.

The children from the town have come to play around the farm.
These kids are always trouble so I’m sounding the alarm.
Half the kids are astronauts, half the kids are clowns.
Half the kids are standing up and half are falling down.

The animals have gone to hide, the birds have flown away.
The donkey and the billie-goats are hiding in the hay.
Half the kids eat ham and cheese, half the kids eat cake.
Half the kids are on the shore and half are in the lake.

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Starlight [New] (12 line poem)

This was inspired by watching my lovely wife at the Russian River yesterday. I had lots of problems with this poem because none of the verses wanted to be like the others — I still have a long/extra line in the second verse that refuses to go away. Plus there were fish and slow moving animals in an earlier draft of the poem — but they kindly agreed to leave and await some future opportunity to help out.

She rises golden from the water
The current cradles her memory
Her name echoes in the depths
And is whispered in the shallows

She moves with grace through nature
Which is bettered by her presence
…..and depleted by her passing
The animals bow down
And stand silent once she’s gone

She is Artemis, Athena
She is Helen bathed in starlight
She’s the west wind from the desert
Bringing promise, bringing change

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What Is a Poem?

They teach us that poems come in all forms and need not rhyme. But I feel that there are rules.

It’s a little like modern art — you can throw a pile of garbage on the floor, splash blood on it and call it art, but is it? I think there is some minimum level of aesthetic that must be met. Art not intended to evoke pleasure should come with a warning label. There’s a phenomena known as the ‘uncanny valley‘, where a human replica (say, a robot) actually evokes revulsion the closer it looks to human while being recognizably not. I think some modern art lies in that uncanny valley — looks like art but it’s not.

Back to poems — even poems that don’t rhyme have recognizable patterns: line length, verse length, rhythm. It’s hard to argue that a news article or reference passage is poetry. I’m working now on a poem that, by design, doesn’t rhyme — but currently also has varying line length, and even varying line count per verse. I’m struggling with how much I need to bully it into shape to be (recognizable as) poetry (nudging it out of the uncanny valley) while trying not to lose some of the existing wording that I like. I don’t want to waste too much time on it, but I also don’t want to abandon it prematurely.

🙁

ADDEMDUM: I finished the problem poem ‘Starlight‘. It came out okay — phew!.

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The House [Classic] (unfinished poem)

This, which I wrote years ago, seems related to my more-recent passage here.

Abandoned by all things divine
Surpassing death, transcending time
The House stands hungry, eager in its wait
Of life The House becomes aware
A braggart’s bet, a liar’s dare
A hand reluctant reaches for the gate

Into the inner depths of mind
Where fear and pleasure sleep entwined
The House steps soft through unfamiliar ground
A wave of joy, a burst of pain
The hand withdraws, then moves again
With hand to gate, a heart begins to pound

(NOTE TO SELF: I have more individual lines written that could be included in future verses.)

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The Prowler [Classic] (440 word story)

I awoke from an unusually vivid dream to find the apartment pitch black and my bedside clock showing 2:42 AM. My body was drenched in sweat. The sheets clung to me as I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed. Sitting hunched over in the darkness, I tried to recall the dream whose echoes still troubled my sleepy mind. I shivered in the night as the swirling images returned.

A prowler…across the hall. I had dreamt that someone had broken into Sarah Burgess’s apartment. The thought nagged at me: what if I’m right? I could picture the incident clearly — someone breaks in through the front door… awakens Sarah… jumps her… she hits her head on the table… dies….

I struggled into some pants and stepped out my apartment door.

At last, my efforts had paid off! For months, I had been trying to achieve extrasensory perception through focused meditation. Five nights a week were devoted to a deep searching of the mind in an effort to expand perception. Now it seemed that I had a vision of clairvoyance — the ability to know current events outside normal human perception. It must have taken a significant event such as this break-in to trigger it.

I tried her front door and, frowning, found it locked. Maybe my vision was more general than specific — maybe the intruder entered some other way. Fortunately, the locks in the apartment building were not constructed very well. With the proper lift and push, it was possible to open the doors without too much trouble.

I did so, but made more noise than I intended as the bolt suddenly sprung free. I had wanted to enter Sarah’s apartment silently to take the prowler by surprise, but now it seemed that I had to work fast. There! In the doorway! A dark figure moved slowly into the room. I sprang and collided with the figure bringing it down under me.

Thud. I heard a sickening crack as the figure fell and hoped that I hadn’t seriously hurt whomever it was. Rising to my feet, I felt along the wall for a switch and turned on the lights. I looked at the figure on the floor and groaned in despair as it all became clear.

Sarah!

She lay motionless on the carpet next to her coffee table in a puddle of blood, her eyes now staring and lifeless. There was no one else in the apartment.

“No!” I screamed, but it was true. I had not had a vision of clairvoyance but of precognition — seeing the future.

I was the prowler.

This is one of those ‘surprise ending’ stories that I warned you about a few days ago.

NOTE TO SELF: At some point in the past, I rewrote/expanded the first few paragraphs but, looking now, I decided to go with the original — which is better.

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Vic Memory 1 [Classic] (160 words)

Here’s a ‘Vic’ tidbit. Vic is the main character in a long narrative of mine about a guy who sees real-world occurrences as if he’s in some fantasy world of knights and mythical beasts. After writing a bunch of ‘present day’ stuff where Vic is grown up, I wrote stage-setting items like this childhood memory. Here is the next memory after the one below.

Memory 1
Vic and his father at a vacant lot near their house.

“This is the baseball and this is a bat. You take the bat and hit the ball with it. Like this.” Vic’s father tosses the ball up, swings softly, and hits it twenty feet. He smiles hopefully at Vic. “Okay, now you try it.”

Vic with bat in hand and father twenty feet away.

Vic swings the broadsword, testing its balance. Not bad, he decides. Vic’s father does an exaggerated windup, and tosses the ball.

Suddenly, Vic catches sight of a roc winging toward him, talons spread in anticipation, eyes riveted on his throat. With one mighty swing, Vic splits the bird in two.

“Good!” Vic’s father yells and turns to get the ball that flew over his head.

The roc is gone, Vic reflects, now time to vanquish the evil magician before he can summon another. With sword raised, Vic lets out a fearsome battle cry and charges.