Tuesday, January 17, 2017

Brantley, Byron, Bennett, Blake, Boden, Braden

Brennamae, Brynlee, Blodwyn, Brandalynn, Brooklynn

Thursday, January 12, 2017

Life is:

Sad, red and green bulbs floundering in the lukewarm rain, struggling to conjure up Christmas on someone's front porch. On January 12.

The moon – is that really the moon? A dim, diffused luminescence, spayed of clarity or myth, hovering sickly on the fringes of a sympathetic cloud.

The stripped square of land which promised to be the site of a home. Promised, never delivered. Broken, crumbled clay, tufts of horse grass, terminating in a blank wall of trees. Just like life. Rocky, unvaried desolation which ends not in peace, but complete, impenetrable unknown.

Indefinable lights in the hillside opposite. Windows? Porchlights? Garages? Streetlights? A nuclear power plant lends its characteristic charm.

A stretch of silvery road – a thin sheet of liquid patina on soft, crumbly ridges, everything given a moonlight sheen. He who enters here learns the miracle of walking on water.

A teacher becomes invincible, because he is expected to be.

The apparition. Sudden, silent, stalking. A shadow? A shade. Less to be feared, more to be pondered. Is it me? Am I it?


Saturday, January 7, 2017

A rich old fellow walks from his village into a nearby graveyard at sunset and sits upon a bench. Looking at the copper silhouettes of the headstones against a smoky red sky, he astutely observes: "Though he may try again and again, night after night, the devil's fires will never consume those who sleep safely hid beneath-ground." Sure enough, as he rises to leave, the sun's ember glow impotently slips below the horizon, and the grave markers immediately escape the smoldering light, like a household's evening windows all-at-once darkened into secure oblivion. But, as the satisfied fellow turns to go, something catches his attention. He starts, then gasps. A single edifice still burns with reddish lustre. Looking up, he beholds it: Perched high upon a marble mausoleum, caught in the calculating sun's last persisting rays, languishes the weather-scarred shape of a stone cross. Immediately, the man cries out, falls over dead, and the village's six church bells each toll six knells, re-echoed once apiece by the hill upon which the now-dark graveyard stands.