Skip to main content

Who Lies Sleeping?

Who lies sleeping? 


Dreaming stratum dreams, stone thoughts that age by long, long, long ticks. 


Who lies sleeping? 


Down and hidden in the pages of the mightiest book, where each word is a mountain and every sentence a millennia; across composed works beyond human hands. 


Who lies sleeping? 


Memories undone by the winds, achievements erased by the lashing sea, defeats forgotten by the hungry flames. The earth swallows, the earth destroys: the earth forgets. Empires vanquished by the enemies that forged them. 


Who lies sleeping? 


Eggs. Envoys of a nameless past. Embryos fresh and angelic and half-formed, like so much possibility sliding unbothered in their amber stasis. The old-world, the banished world, whispers it’s memories and forgets it’s sins in those fresh minds. Machines of rock and gravity tick, counting every stroke in particle decay. Waiting to raise. 


Who lies sleeping? 


No one. 


Not anymore.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Something Growing In My Basement

Something is growing in my basement.  Plump and bold red mushrooms coat the stairs like little crimson forests, and through what little light remains I can see their spores drifting. It’s damp, humid.  When it sighs the whole house shakes, my windows rattling by a wind not from outside but *below*.  I dream of horns, black and curving and many, like bony branches thrust up out of the dirt. Crisscrossed by red roots.  The mailman throws my packages, hurls my newspaper. My neighbors eye me and my home like it’s something mad, something hungry, and when I finally sit at the table to read I can’t help but feel that the floor is sinking under my feet. Listing into swallowing earth.  I know soon I’ll wake up, stiff, entombed by so many blood-colored caps. Tenacious roots spilling over me. The thing in my basement will speak instead of sigh and all that rotting wormwood will come down, down, down. And it will be free.

Lepidopterophobia

You are dying.  Doesn’t matter how.  Feels so far away now— doesn’t it?  That’s it. Take it easy. Let that last breath slip away, like the warmth that comes in a killing cold. Gentle into a silent night. No more looking up at those crowding, concerned faces; a herd of pale, pained moons.  - - - - - ___________ A dark tunnel. Familiar, but not. You’re welcome all the same. Hands groping, grasping against glassy coolness, stumbling—  Light.  The most perfect, pure sunlight. Every idealized summer, every perfect candlelight and warming fire, all that condescend sun-sure dances across a lifetime of days. It’s mere existence is the most pristine invitation. In illumination alone it says come closer . If you had a heartbeat it would be racing.  Up. Up. Forward. Scuffing, almost tripping. Surging forward, hands outstretched.  You’re here.  The Light. The Light   It’s so— wrong . It’s purity vanished, replaced with an organic and oily sheen. Like firefly glows made rotten, morphed in the shape

Betty and the Storm

 Betty takes a mercifully long drag on her All-American Stag , feeling the Kansas breeze. It’s a beautiful summer day with big sky country blueness everywhere and only faint, grey-streaked clouds far off on the horizon. Betty loves prairie storms, how they turn her world into blues and blacks cut ragged by hungry lightning. That familiar, lovely earthy smell that lingers even after the clouds have gone southward, down to the more welcomingly humid gulf.  A bit of incoming stormy wind snaps at the clothes on the line and Betty stands sighing and a halfway laconic smile, feeling long hours of chore caused aches lessening with each puff of the Stag . Reaching out a hand to fix one of Teddy’s work shirts, Betty unclips it, hoping to smooth the wrinkles with an absent hand as she turns again to watch the storm roll in.  When Betty sees it, it’s almost slippery in her vision. Like she’s got something in her jade green eyes, something that makes focus hard and dizzying. Betty squints. Scrunch