Got One for Ya

Have you heard about the blind novelist, well versed in the art of irony, that joined a five man bank robbery team? Guess what his job was:
the get away driver.

Black Roses

Days of tango music and black roses; not real black, rather midnight red, old blood black and I have lost my soul. Or, I have not lost it as much as I danced away; left it in pieces, fallen from me; brittle leaves and faded petals scattered on a glossy hard wood floor.
I left my soul at the black rose bush and it dripped into the ground. My own vein's water grew thorns and splattered up into the sky; delicate flowers, dark and rare. The black rose: beauty, death. Beauty from the abyss, beauty from dirt, beauty from nothing.
I wanted to walk with no clothes, not naked, but dressed in card board; draped in drab, completely disposable. Ephemeral; a single season seed. I wanted to be true to myself. I wanted to be a gift to this world, wrapped in tissue paper and ribboned, when I entered here.
Still, I searched for the fragments of my soul. Quiet and still I looked with clouded eyes.
The pieces returned in solitary drops from the endless sky and wet my cheeks; tears of gratitude running into my heart. Tears from blind eyes, filling an ancient dry sea; painting it green and wild. A vast field of roses from bleached bone. Sweet fragrance sent to soothe the sightless.

Mice Dream Night Returns

Morning pushes night underground; night rests. She rests too, in the fur of black cats and the iridescent plumes of crows. Before closing her eyes, she hides clues in the deepest shade. Night asks the morning birds for a good night serenade.
In the evening, as the sun sighs into her western bed, night returns, quiet and sly; pervasive and rejuvenated. She sprinkles star glow onto still puddles and ponds, where the sparkles dance. They dance too, in the soft eyes of frogs and the hard gaze of owls. A silence grows; the silence between breaths. Children dream.
Children do not dream of cozy beds and dark houses. Rather, they dream of the day and the days’ doings; they dream and feed the sun; calling her back.
Before morning, field mice trundle underground, their pockets filled with polished pebbles of night; tiny globes that hold the memory of endless stars. Curled tight in dry grass nests, mice dream the thoughts of midnight and first-star wish; of crescent sliver behind veiling clouds. They dream of night and her husband, the Great Nothing.

Apple Trees Leaf and Apple

The gnarled and twisted began smooth and fine. Shaped in time and by circumstance, warped and wound and going deep, the roots fold themselves around obstacles, into the hard and unforgiving and there, in the dense dark, melt the edges, squeezing the experience, bring sweet water into the world.
At the ending edge of summer I will pick an apple, stretching tall and reaching, pull it off and down, that which came from the dark, the fruitless hardness. The crunch of fractured rock is there; the sweet of long days is there; a stem and smooth brown seeds in the core are there. They ask to be tossed aside. Not trashed, but tossed into the wild, into the inhospitable, onto hard, crusty soil where:
Perhaps and maybe another tree might spring. It too, if so, will start small and smooth and fine; patient and unrelenting, chip into the dense, the recalcitrant and joining the heavy with the light to lure another child grown tall; might pick a worldly globe and maybe, maybe toss into the future; hope for the next generation.