POEM ROUNDUP FOR MAY

Number of Poems written: 41
Average number per day: 1.3
Days I didn't write a poem: 16, 17,26,27, 29,30
Revised average: 1.6
Longest poem: 31 lines (Dear Spammer)
Shortest poem: 3 lines (Haiku)
Total wordcount: 3,181

The Return Of Love, written after listening to a country song that amounted to a Harelquin Romance novel.

I left but you came back:
God knows it'd been awhile
You said me you'd just came to talk
All dressed in a new style.

You traded goth for corporatese,
You said nothing of us still remained:
There were grass stains on your knees
From when you prayed you'd be mine.

I had a new wife and brand new life
But that never bothered you at all:
Had a baby at your side -- I died a bit inside
And I found I had to kill you after all.

Cuz your baby has eyes like mine,
And I left you behind long ago
I wish I hadn't had to kill you
Cuz the law has brought me low

I had a new wife and brand new life
But that never bothered you at all:
Had a baby at your side -- I died a bit inside
And I found I had to kill you after all.

Future Vision

I was wandering through a nightmare
Of a time that had not come.
There were voices all around me
Striking me deaf, making me dumb.

I stared at the life that would be mine,
At children and a kitchen sink
Of dirty dishes and no time to think.
The baby had my diploma as a diaper
And in that moment, God I hated her,
And her happy life on her knees
And every kind of grand design.

So I ran away without a care,
Left my old life behind me undone,
Left Joe for a girl named Debbie.
No now there's no children screaming
In my dreams, just the living of a lie.

Sometimes I see someone when I look into the mirror
Sometimes I just stare and wait, heat knotted up in fear

Something tells me I'm still dreaming, and
Inside my head I'm the only one screaming
Looking desperate to the future to burn
The bridges to another one.

Fragment Based On My Mother's Teacups

Had to burn my hands to hold you
But I had no one I could sue
You're just an ugly tea cup
Better as a pot for growing up
Plants, not tea leaves; I relearn
Not to buy crap as my fingers burn.

Shadowered

There is a certain light of flesh, the
Play of stone in shadowed water, a
Singer in search of lost words, while
A fog looks for a form in patterned frost,
And there is no silence, no, but words.

Love Is --

Love is pears
	falling
from apple trees,
summer rain from blue
sky and tears of joy
	and
	skipping!
ropes and songs!
free laughter
	dancing
	dancing
	dancing	oh!
Free	and	bright

Writing Update

To have one of these, too.

Lessee....

Research for the fourth (and probably last) volume of the Shuck Cycle is mostly finishing, the bsics of the plot and characters are roaming around my head, and editing is done on Waking The Dead.

So, sometime this month I have to print off 3-4 copies of Waking The Dead and find some poor sods - err, subjects - to read it IRL and send email copies to people online for their views. I hope that'll only take 2 months or so (the time spent doing current novel) at which point I will look through all edits and redo Waking The Dead accordingly. Then I will begin sending it out to people.

And, with luck, said people will stop laughing at it in time to send back helpful rejection letters and the like :)

A repost

From here, just to help spread the word... even though no one reads this blog.

So I'm annoyed with AW being shut down. More annoyed than I realized, apparently. Scammers make me cranky. People who yell and beat their chests and throw tantrums to get what they want make me cranky. Losing valuable resources, even for a day or two, makes me cranky. Ms. Bauer's efforts have hit that lovely little triangle at the intersection of Jim's Venn Diagram of Crankiness.

So anyway, I was noticing that when you Google Barbara Bauer, the third link is the AW reposting of Writer Beware's Top 20 Worst agents.

I've also noticed that Google page ranking depends a lot on the number of links which use that particular text.

So, for example, if I were to link Barbara Bauer to the SFWA posting of the Writer Beware Top 20 list, that would cause a slight increase in the SFWA page's rank as a search result for Ms. Bauer.

Better still, the more people who include:

<a href="http://www.sfwa.org/beware/twentyworst.html">Barbara Bauer</a>

on their journals and web pages, the higher that page will move in the results, until theoretically, that might become the very first Google result.

It's just a thought. But a thought I felt should be shared. Feel free to copy and repost or link back to this entry if you feel the same.


ETA
Technorati Tag: BarbaraBauer

Magical Law (Tetractys #4)

One last
Day to burn things
By municipal law --
All of us hurrying to find the last
Witches.

Change

The caterpillar
Becoming a butterfly
While spring remains spring
And nothing changes
Except - only - everything.

Monsters

We lose the monsters under our beds when
We become scarier than they can ever be,
We lose the things that make us human when
We refuse to let the world see our pain.

On Demons

There is wisdom in avoiding polarities.
Not all demons, for example, are EVIL.
Some are Evil, some evil, some (evil) -
Many are simply ambivalent, or just
Mischievous: what happens to a trickster
No longer needed, no longer believed in?
Lack of belief only makes them stronger
But to not be named for your ow deeds
Galls the pride of even the saintly.

Modernization

Cupid outsourced,
Indulgences sold for love;
A vacation to the Bahamas, and
A rise in beatings called love.

Fragment Fragmented

Was the world this when I was young
Ah, to have a song not yet sung
A wishing of hearts and dreams
That what's inside is what is seen.

Fragmented Fragment

Death requires no courage, only
Walking down an empty road
Alone when only desert flowers bloom.

Novel Roots

Voices given to silence in
Waking dreams, skippers
Moving to terrible words,
Mounting skies to bleed though
Defeated dreams of gods.

Angelic dreams grace the earth,
A caress of fog-born whispers
Oh! Was there ever a dream
Bereft of stains of madness?

Reminders we are alive

Reminders we are alive
are fresh cut grass in spring
scattered over a lawn like waves
on the green waters of lakes
and how the world changes
under sunshine and rain, but
how it is always the same,
a palimpsest for memories.

The Cubicle Men

The cubicle men are gathered around water coolers,
Chubby men speaking about diets and their families.
Faceless in their grey suits and ties they watch clocks,
Wait for the ending of their shift, and then go home.
It is only later, when they get the horns, don outfits,
Hunting down foxes in human shape in their cars,
That their true form is revealed. And few of them
Even remember being the Wild Hunt so long ago.

Haiku

death is the quiet touch
of a dogs soft nose: cool, wet
-- and a waggging tail.

Body Fished From The River

She had moved into the city looking to get away
To find someone to love and to give her heart away.
But cities are cold after the stifling warmth of towns:
She found no place to stay that didn't want to bring her down.
And she always put her trust in the wrong kind of man
Which is how a sad tale ended ere it had began.

Krishna Thoughts

There are things more beautiful
than perfection.
In the antimaterial worlds there is
nothing that can be destroyed.
The perfect moment is eternal,
goes on without end
because it never began,
aweful and serene.
Down below, not understanding,
penned animals fear freedom
and flight without bodies,
huddled in belief that dark matter
will destroy them, and right
even as they are wrong.

Dear Spammer,

Hello there.

We don't really know each other.
In fact, we'll never meet each other,
Which I consider to be wonderful.
I normally like meeting people,
Even strangers, but in your case
I'd have to make an exception.

You see, I have this problem.
(It's not porn, despite your post.)
It's that I sort of do want to meet you.
To find out why you abuse our site.
To find out why you've hidden
Behind so many IPs, and posted
Links no one follows. I wonder
If spam is the new porn,
If you sit at your computer, and you
Masturbate each time you post.
Or, better yet, you are waiting
Until someone follows your links,
And you are sitting there, silent,
Depressed, naked and waiting with
Hopeless yearning for someone
To be as stupid as you think
People are.

It is almost enough
To make your continued existence
Remotely bearable, but i find
I can't imagine a world where
You don't exist, because then I
Would not be able to live
In one which you do.

Under A Window

The drawing in of darkness
In the light after the noon,
Heavy hearts and heavy steps
In shadows casting gloom.

In water under the window
Lies a maiden pale and fair,
Dead from madness and a love
Too full of pain to care.

She joins the ghost on the walls
But is never heard nor seen,
And wanders dark paths of reason
To try and grasp what it means.

Conversational Piece

I have listened to my dreams
Seekping truth in eclipses,
Moon coming through the sun --
The God's blind eyes
A prison for souls.
The hospitals are only
Prisons to make us weak,
The infection of sickness giving
Work to doctors of madness.
Only in dreams are we sane:
So sure they never make sense
Except when they come to us
As nightmares of this age.

No, I won't explain what led to writing this.

I poop only for you, my love.
You're what I'm always thinking of.
When we fight and curse and hate
I confess I end up constipated.
I poop only for you, my love.
And it's -- all -- first -- rate!

Cyborg Porn - Pat IX: Supersized Life

The many offers of love and lust
Only make the loneliness deeper still.
Present and past mingled seem to see,
To say the universe runs on irony.
I am offered more parts than I can name
But love only in darkness, with cameras
Trying to reforge one that lost moment
So that I no longer know what it meant.
We know each other's names now, though
We never said them that one night.
I find myself falling inward, too afraid
Of this new alien life I never made.
I would leave it but for the beauty
Of the sex, of feeling something deep,
of being cherished even just for money
Not wanting to know what others see.
When they look into my optical units
With my life an open book to them.
I fully except to be disassembled by
Someone who won't let the past die.
I am waiting to be worried about this.
In the meantime, I make do with lust.

Mother's Day

Mother's Day is
Saying "I love you"
With cards that cost
Too much money
For something read once,
Saying what it always says,
And discarded, meaning
Lost in dollar sighs and clerks
Telling you that the gifts
Are still on sale Sunday
If you want to get one.

6 p.m. Thoughts

I just thought I'd come here.
To break the silence, you know?
To tell people the truth, to unveil the lies, to make
a better world.
But there's only so much we can do.
Only so much love we can hold.
Only so hard we can push, before
we're just pushing on doors instead of people.
Karma makes the world go round.
There is no Karma Sutra for the positions
taken by people after tear gas tears.
There is no much silence that I am afraid
to break it apart with stumbling word
groping into the dark to a future half imagined.
Catharsis is pain that has to happen, bleeding
disenfranchised dreams down to the freedom below us.
I sometimes thing we're not half as afraid
as we should be.
I am afraid to turn on my TV every night.
I know they're controlling out thoughts with it.
Not in a UFO sense. Or a horror movie sense.
Just because they control what we see, and why, and when.
Because their words are another kind of silence
and never seem to mean anything real.
I'm terrified that I already live in the better world.

Love

I wonder if you know
I am not in love with you?
I wonder if you know
I only say I am
Just to annoy my friends?

Adultery

It doesn't bother me anymore
Not much does since you broke down,
Crying outside the bedroom door
Saying that you were so very sorry
Though you never told me what for.

We come home with strangers
Smiles painted on our faces like clowns
As we dance devoid of anger
Treating life like an STD safari
Addicted now to the love of danger.

Cyborg Porn - Part IIX: The Past, As A Corkscrew Wound

They removed tear ducts for optical needs,
For weapons and vision and because of waste.
Once a man stood with a gun over a girl
Simplest story of all the long tales told -
Except he told her to run, soft, sad,
Staring at a face that knew only fear
But he was just a man, his promises
Of safety just words: actions are louder
And the death of hope lies in pooling blood,
Not wanting to die but knowing you will.
The man fell too, his screams hoarse ragged wounds,
Not enough for the terrible thing he gave,
A refusal to touch and a dull hurt
Some call hope that, for a moment, gave wings.
Perhaps she would take comfort in his fate,
Bound to earth and chained unto life by men,
More machine than human, staring at her
As her face fills vids, his life story just
Images and sound bites and nothing more
As he helplessly follows his own thoughts,
Wonders if she'd have been as good a lay
As all the other guys had bragged about.

Oddities....

I have worked out the date of birth for the Main Character and his family, along with their zodiac sign and element.

I have no idea why I did this.

I assume it will be Important in the novel. Eventually.

... Just thought I'd share :)

Cyborg Porn - Part VIII: Without A Title.

To come undone
in a world so pure
it only learns old lessons

is to walk through sanity
and out to freedom at
the other end, where only dreams
remain the same, ethereal
and unchanging.

To know what was lost
means to know you had
anything to lose,

to give up the seduction that is
being powerless and, in the silence
before words, to make choices

and to know - just one thing only
the only true thing to learn - and to
understand you brought yourself here

to this moment, this time, this inseeing,
this life, this place, and no one else
can be praised nor blamed, because
no one can be, and sometimes power
is knowing when it is safe to cry.

Ramble

What happens to love when the myths we
fashion around it dies? What happens to your love
When you see them again for the first time?
People who wonder why some stay with abusers
Should wonder, more, why fewer die
When the loving ends and
We are left with friendship.

Bridges

The purgatory overpass lies stretching over hell.
At the public meetings the damned were an easy sell.
It stretches high above their heads, a giant work of art,
And when they see it the remorse fair twists their hearts.
Salvation for those trapped between is torture for the lost
But a torture self-chosen has it's own special cost.

Questioning Rosies and Posies

The ring is drawn
round the roses
But no one falls
Do you suppose
That tales so tall
Are real for you
Or somehow true
Not wholly dross?

Fragment on 01/05/06

Life is an accumulation of junk,
yard sales for the dispossessed,
climatized to pressures and
a barometer, in the corner, dial
on changeable, never wavering.

Summer Fun Run. No, really...

Okay, so .. SFFmuse is doing a summer fun run. This means 60L in June/July, for moi. I have the novel idea. I have a plot. I have characters.

Now, if only it would leave me alone so I could edit Waking The Dead in peace! But since it will not ....

What kind of power do words have that don't exist, that aren't real? Invented ones for dinctionaries, for example. Or those that enter into pop culture? I don't know, yet, but it's part of the plot. It's there, somewhere, in the fact that words are magic and names a deeper magic still. That, in the end, names have power, perhaps all the power there is. To name something is to define it. Hence when the Unnamed is a deposed god, perhaps.

More: Love takes work. Real love lies in having the courage to see someone as themself, not as the myth/story you build up around them. What happpens to people when the myth is taken away? Or when people change, and forget to tell each other? What do you do when the loving is over - is friendship enough? Can you base Forever on that?

There are as many ways to die as there are ways to live. And there's both the same thing. We change, when we're alive. Even after we're dead, we change, if only in the minds of the living when they find our poodle porn collection. We never stop changing. So what is death, besides just another world, another step? It's just a part of Being. There is Being, and there is Unbeing. The rest is semantics. Or perhaps magic.

So magic is, then, change. It's the space between things, where the cracks meet: the hidden places of the worlds. Even in the subtle worlds, real magic is rare. Everyone has tricks, sure, but no one has miracles, except Witches and the like, and they pay higher prices than many ever know.

Which brings us back to sacrifice. Because there are some that shouldn't have to be paid, prices no one should have asked of them, things that should never be seen. How far can one person go for love, for family? Does it outweigh honour? What happens if it means destroying all the myths about yourself you made?

There are other questions. But, for now, I think I have a few out of my system to let roam around and poke at again later.

Back to editing.

Kage's Dream

There are angels devoid of wings
standing glowing in the air,
and serpents softly smiling
with dead eyes that do not care.

In a dream that seems like waking
though you know it isn't true,
you are walking through a field
with mountains all around you.

There is summer in the fields
and a spring in your steps,
and a woman smiling, falling
with eyes that never wept.

In the way of dreaming things
you step to another place,
facing an empty well, a watery mirror,
unable to see your face.

Spring warmth of life flows up around
and the kiss of a vampire's breath,
and a voice on a wind whispering so sad:
"If live is given so, too, is death."

There are hollow children walking
through a blighted winter storm
and behind them a puppet master
dancing to strings of his own.

And a voice is talking, rough and low,
of wonder and of mystery,
asking if you'd given angels back their wings
and risk the loss of everything.

There's a messiah by a crossroads
with nothing left to save
and the harlequin in silent bells dancing,
singing we're all slaves.

And lastly you see a garden gone wild
full of nothing but of weeds
and footsteps! Echoed grey fog on the air
as in the silence a grave bleeds.

Reality

To discard our faults is
Losing pieces of ourselves.
Our hearts hold both
Good and evil, right and wrong,
And there is evil in
Removing parts of ourselves,
Pretending they don't make
Us whole.

Fragment

And the magpies broke the silence
That seemed feted to the land
You could see the last satyr dance
With dryad's hand in hand
And there were so many for sorrow
Not a single caw for joy
The future from which we borrow
Breaks like all other toys.

Nature Is Balance, With Help

The drowning of the children
Wasn't a bad thing at all.
They'd have all been little men
It's why they had to die.

This seems horrible, but it's fine,
Just balancing the books
For all those girls killed in China
A few boys will die here.

Living For Life

Living for the sake of life,
Bound up into machines:
(a thought: is Hell
infernal beeping, humming,
clinging to life in terrible fear)
The body trapped in life drains
Resources for reasons we
Don't wish to articulate.

There is only vaunted technology
And the weak fear of gifts given:
For if life is a gift so, too, is death.

Cyborg Porn - Part VII: Instafame

There are error messages and holovid offers,
Swarms of important people in real suits
Made by real people, offering deals and fame.

It seems she and I were found, given fame,
Our video a work of art, hailed as premodern.
They ask me: "What was it like, to change
The very structure of art?" And I tell them:
"It was fucking." And they edit it away.

Some things never change, not once.
For every understanding, a new
Censorship; for every wonder, a new label.
I'm tired of all the bullshit. They tell me:
You founded a new Way! So I ask:
What was wrong with all the others?
All I get are blank stares, nervous laughs.

She has leapt into it, to talk vids and sold
Her life story, ghost written by someone
She'll likely never meet, about a stranger
She only wishes she knew. Or maybe I just
Read too much in my envy. It's seems
So easy for her, to step into fortune.

The last time I did what I was told, leapt
Into places, forward, ahoy! I ended up
In this body, this frame, this life; and
None of those I saved came to see me.

I won't dance to your tune, I tell them.
But in some way we're all dancing still.