Check out my fantasy short story on Spillwords. Just use your WP blog to sign in. Here’s a link.
6 comments on The Flowers of Halloween
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Late summer sun caught
Inside a young fall
Pokes a warm beam of light
Through a window, stirring up
A ballet of dust within
A slow tangle of choreographed chaos
Dampened only by early evening’s
Crisp air hinting of shorter days
The first fallen leaves
Curled, cooked and crumpled
By autumn’s summer mask
Resemble large beetles
who scurry like scarabs
Upon sunbaked sidewalks
Dancing with determination until
Fall’s chill settles into season
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You smile, that crooked little smile, and the pendant you wear, the one of the moon, lies upon your chest, where I’ve listened to your heartbeat...that safe place where I felt the coldness of that pendant become warm. Fate plays with fools just as much as it plays with winners. I’m not sure which one we are.
This I know.
We are speeding up, like the universe.
You and I, faster and faster.
Someday we will be nothing but speed, eternal hurrying, a blur, consonants & vowels blended into mush. There may be times in the future when we misunderstand each another.
But I’m here
Now,
To form no words, just caress our created warmth, hold up the sky with you.
Forget reading the stars, their letters are in disarray, light years away from creating sentences. We will move and become nothing but movement...yet still lie together, inseparable like Earth and moon, while dark matter stretches galaxies into nothing but the faintest of glimmer and all stories cease.
Another little art fun piece by me. -
The roads are young
Next to old mines
Their abandoned tools
Rust under partial skies
Between pine, cedar
& fiddlehead fern
Scattered as remembrances
Remnants, filtered, fill
A monochrome story
The history of desire
We take pics
Searching, digging
For images & stories
Miners with phones
Manufactured from extractions
By otherness who unearthed the
Silica, Cobalt, & Lithium
To preserve the likeness
Of the barn that leans
Of the old growth
Of the green gems of water
Its opal pools
Repurposed
A group of teenagers
Run around the wilderness
Sit under a coniferous
Writing poems with emojis
Acronyms and abbreviations
While an app wants to know
Name
License plate number
Car model
How many in the party?
Reason for your visit
Peep. Click on image to enlarge. -
The path follows a simple circle
Through hemlock, cedar, & ash
Smooth
Like a freeway of dirt
Only the creek works hard
Passing under footbridges
An August trickle
Today, I hear the rain fall
Slicing the month
into two dry halves
Branches droop under
the weight of the new moisture
Fresh drops, warm
With summer inside them
Apples will begin to fall
Blackberries ripen
Hanging on to the moisture
of last spring’s slanted rain
From seed, plant, growth
Love
and again
Fall lies in the distance
Patient
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Hi everyone! I’m pleased to announce that Spillwords has published my poem The Ocean in their Featured Posts column. Check it out below using this link or the image below! Give it a little love by liking it on the Spillwords site. Thanks! It’s kind of ironic, since I’m on my way to the ocean right now!
I wish you all the best and hope things are well.
Take care!
T. Ahzio
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The sun paints this desert
With harsh strokes of grass
Red dabs of earth & brittle clay
A naked abstract...bare
That favors no one and all
Where decay sits next to renewal
And the wind, once just a haunting
Is a ghost no more
For it scrapes and stirs
The crumpled landscape
Here...I am but an etching
Vulnerable and fragile
A paradox of movement
Comprised of a simple sanguine liquid
Within a thin atmosphere of skin
Asking only for a cold-water spring
To replenish my spirit
I cup my hands, for even the sun
Cannot quell its coolness
But it is...I am, merely transient
The ground beneath me baked
Into a dirt like powder
Ash, leaf, and seed
Who scamper and dance
In the cooked swirl
Settling between toes
Of the ancestors...
Those rocks who knew
The sun as adolescent
A child first learning
The ways of gravity
Here, I become nothing
Pulled into myself
A ball, a world, a satellite
Separated from my importance
Falling, through a continuum
Wishing to be unbound
Yet, there is one strong stream
Who is my tether
That still holds onto a trickle
Adorned with balsam, lupine, and fiddleneck
Yanking me back to the depth
Of human sight, to perception
Where the first Romantics wrote, and
To where my eyes meet yours
Permanence & Cycles -
Inside a Gifford Pinchot Forest night
Denny and I, with his Wasco legs
Cupping our hands to make an old whistle
Like the hoot of an owl to settle our minds
From the fears of the directionless twirl of sky
Those fires of Warm Springs
The silence of the river’s falls
The countless ghosts of oolichan.
Upon hearing the tones from our small soft hands
The deer stand still, freeze in their tracks
Only the heat of their breath moves
Their black pool eyes, starless earth sight.
Like the solemn overstory that extinguishes
The travelling of stars
All relativity stilled
The planet, a jar, hermetically sealed
Each branch in the maze of Douglas Fir
Above our heads
Are old stories still being told anew
Our voices, with purpose, retell them to each other.
Stories of disappearance
Stories that burn
Denny says, “Little Fish,
You have so many names.”
And we know all about burning
Such dry kindling, which are our bones
Denny and I, the last ones
That will end here with us without anyone knowing
Just ask the dust.
The forest hides its mirrors in lakes and ponds
And the stick people dance around their shores
Denny & I saw our reflections for the first time
When we took a drink
Our spirits stained a huckleberry purple
Upper Twin Lake during a cold but dry winter. Mt. Hood peaks over the tree line. I won’t be posting as much, as I am in the midst of organizing material for a classic publishing medium. Thanks for all your support! -
There is a slight slant to the landscape.
Chalky old lava flows stuck to a shape
Remnants of a past…angled.
Once, this earth changed its appearance
Into patterns we wouldn’t recognize.
The bridge is out, lower in the canyon
Where the Klickitat turns towards Adams.
I and everything wait for the rain
The parched flowers and grasses
Their fragile skin and stalks, browns, and beiges
Bloomed easily last spring, without effort.
Along the dryness, scattered tree limbs
So light, they remind me of bones
Whitened and greyed by summer.
I imagine them becoming new forms
A collage of life, blood, and image
Their uneven surface, knees, elbows, & heart
A scattering.
(“Once, I believed your hands were so soft,
I thought they were made of petals.”)
I pass a row of old houses
Where the highway bends between bluffs.
Thier lawns littered with sticks & twigs.
I can barely see the yellow line of the road
It having faded through all weather.
I feel a sprinkle. It passes quickly.
Rowena Plateau. Near where a large fire recently burned. A place where spring flowers bloom. -
We sleep in the abandoned house
On top of a worn, rough carpet.
Small creaks are heard underneath
From floorboards, that are
Exposed in spots
Revealing coats of wax and stain.
We wait for morning’s blur
Pushing ourselves up
With scuffed hands, still soft
After the night’s search
For baubles & bits worthy of trade
From dumpsters, the urban Pandora’s Box.
You found a book, still new
Though its cover is creased
Said you’d become a writer
Said it’s already been written
...Somewhere.
The city seems to flicker.
We wait ‘til afternoon
To take a shower at the center
Looking for a cure
to the night.
In the rec room
There’s television news in the periphery
Featuring the fallen...
Car wrecks and shopping malls
Losses of temper & savings accounts.
Fashion zombies writing best sellers.
Cops, cops, and more cops.
Snow at five, touchdown at six.
Stay tuned for murder at eleven.
The walls at the center glisten
But so does everything.
Oil shapes our safety
From the gloves that handle our births
To the glossy final finish in a box.
Life unravels in microfibers.
Even the old floor we sleep on
Is topped with a polymer that flakes
Its bits colored like peanut brittle.
An insane medium sits in a corner
Next to a group of schizophrenics.
She says, “Pick a fate. Any will do.
But it must be done not as you, but by another you.
Amass! Amass! Be a mass cookie cutter
Fender bender, beach comber
Record collector, gas cap aficionado, murderer.
This isn’t reality TV, this is reality.”
We pick perfection as our fate
One where our bare
Feet glide across a tiled floor
All smiles
To a refrigerator filled
With presents to ourselves, where
The fat has gelled inside our ground beef
And broccoli, still firm
In its plastic bag.
On shelves, there are jars of berry preserves
As red as the day they were picked.
There is a real bed, with a comforter
We would make love.
Millionaires and sports heroes have come
to the center to serve turkey to the homeless.
It must be Thanksgiving.
A news crew is here to tell the story
About how real they are
How clever they are to have picked their fate.
They seem uncomfortable handling mashed potatoes.
The medium smiles at us and helps herself to a huge portion
Of cranberry sauce.
She says, “Fate is that little dog that won’t stop barking
At everything and nothing.”
And she laughs, mimics a dog bark.
Her lips are stained a weird kind of pink.
The cooked turkey is greasy,
Oily. It’s basted in something unique.
Our fingers become slick
We lick them dry while heading back to
The abandoned house
Carrying leftovers.
You’re wearing your jeans
The ones you have worn a hundred times.
I know them so well
I’ve memorized the weave
Of their blue threads and
The one button that won’t stay buttoned.
It is as if you’ve written these memories down
Inside of me...somewhere.
We lie down on the ragged carpet
Waiting for the night.
I kiss your lips.
They are softer than any other
Lips in existence.
“Overpassed”
