ghostfinding

The magician walks in places where even shadow fears to tread,

His will burns a cool grey light that shimmers through the air.

Beside him pads a creature clothed in a child’s human guise

Who reaches a small hand for his, is calmed by steady strength.

About them was a penthouse that felt both sterile and sick:

Open-planned, modern-lined, no room for darkness anywhere

But every sound had sullen echo, breath fogged in summer air.

“Jay,” the magician says, waiting for answers he must learn.

“There’th broken bindingth,” Jay lisps, “like a show gone bad.”
The magician silence presses, the boy mouths words in thought.

“On TV, everything ith fixed in half an hour,” he says proudly.

“You don’t say,” the magician says, his tone dry as the dead air.
Jay sticks out his tongue and grins, the darkness flatters slight.

“So there is a problem here that can be fixed with ease?”

“Yup! That,” the boy responds with a pride fit to bursting.

The magician wanders room to room to pause and study them.

Each bedroom boasts a king-sized bed fit for company of kings,

The ten-year old boy is pulled away from pianos fit for gods

And vast TVs adorn each room like idols in modern temples.

“Who haunts a place so full as to be empty?” the magician says

And Jay just shrugs and looks about and no ghost does he see.

The magician studies wooden floors, his magic a soft whisper.

The floors remain untouched and gleam as statues did for kings.

“The movers scratched nothing,” he says and laughs quite soft.

He raises his voice, his power gentle thrum to match the fridge.

“I make a point to not see ghosts and Jay’s nature would destroy

So if you could offer up a sign you’re here we’d be much obliged.”

Drawers shuddered, chairs danced, the place shook short and sharp.

The magician nods and turns to leave, the boy’s silence a trust.

“She hired a poltergeist moving company. I will suggest she pays,”

he says and kills his light, the boy’s pride warmth enough.

Wanderings

                 For Jesse on his Birthday

I imagine you walking,
air like candy flowing into parched lungs
that think they never breathed before.
Stranger's eyes look at you from beside Coke machines.
Stranger in a land perhaps
not strange enough,
filled with jarring echoes of home.

I imagine the lands you travel through
as one who sees them on TV:
picturesque landscapes, Kodak moments
frozen in time, insects embraced in amber.
Each day is a new moment.
Something new to see - and be?

Not a week passes when I do not see something
I wish I could show to you
or something is said you'd love to discuss.
Half a world separates us yet sometimes
I feel you are closer than you seem,
like an object seen in a rear view mirror.

When our roads meet again
we will have much to say to each other,
knowledge to share, to learn, to remember.
Wisdom, perhaps, to express.
And we'll know if time has made us wiser
and if air can taste of candy.

on writing poetry again (a ramble)

I haven't written poems in years, not really. Oh, small scraps here and there, but mostly stories and novels in the past six years or so. At present, however, I am reaching my nadir period, wherein I don't write much for a month or two. It happens every year: I figure the brain needs to recharge.

I'll continue with Boy& Fox, at the slow pace I'm doing now, let other stuff marinate. And in defiance of that, slowly write more poems. I don't consider myself good at it -- I wouldn't subject the world to a book of them, for example (chapbook or otherwise) but it's a nice pov to throw my brain into, to tease out pure economy from words.

Also to dig up old stuff and revise it, which is always an interesting experiment.  Shall see how the next month goes.

Dry Amusements & Novel Stuff

In which i go meta on my own work. Kind of. I used to write poetry pretty often. Way back in 2006 I did over 500 in a year (the genesis of this blog, in fact) and did a 30 poems in 30 days and poem an hour for 24 hours once as prior experiments as well. I did write poems in 2007 but slowly petered off, to the point that my ones from 2009 onward languish on my computer without having been printed out.

This is only interesting because I have been posting older things on tumblr, having gone through 2004 and into 2005, ignoring the longer ones -- most of them being, in retrospect, not that good at all. The differences are interesting. 2004 was a mishmash of styles and influences, whereas 2005 is largely rhyming poems, many of them relatively challenging and some needlessly complicated. Some of them are decent. Most, I think, suffer by being constrained too deeply into restrictive styles.

I tend to post a poem a day, mostly because I will run out eventually, but it is nudging me into writing small bits of poetry again though I tend to view the results thus far as not that good at all. I may have to do a poem-a-day project soonish just to find out if that spark is, mostly, gone. It shall wait until the current novel is doing before I really think about it.


In better news, the draft of Ghoulish Happenings has passed 53K. It's worked out to roughly 1K a day of 'finished' material though I have a series of notes on some characters and things posted to this blog that need to be fixed. None of that is major and much of that has been incorporated into the latter part of the book (Post 40K). As the last third of the book is plotted out in very loose terms -- meaning I know the ending but the details of getting to it are a bit sketchy -- I suspect this draft will count as 'done' sometime by the end of February.

At which point I shall give thoughts to the sequel, which I've begun to write. It was going to be a short story submission to a zine but I realized there is no way I was going to make the deadline for submissions and figured that having a first chapter as a short story is probably a good idea anyway for a novel. As long as it connects to the larger plot of course.