---

you say you never knew her
that there was nothing special to her
but a storm was raging through her

and she just kept the peace.

biscuits in the morning
gravy in the day
gather wheat by evening
and obediently lay

seven kids by thirty-one
mama’s work ain’t never done
i hear the songs she left unsung

by keeping all that peace.

two went off to college
one got killed in Nam
three made sense of madness
one refused to call her, “Mom”

she wouldn’t let her words pass through
her vote was his, plus hers, makes two
and she did all that she could do

to keep on keeping peace.

bend the knee and plant the farm
knit and tie the worsted yarn
protect the children from all that harm

out there, where there’s no peace.

but children fly like cottonwood seed
away from lofty cradles
and rarely know who filled their need
just wrapped her up in labels

 

those songs she sang?
though not out loud?
do you know what they said?

they said,

“peace, to you
my different ones,
my lost and my neglected
peace in lives i hope for you
though life leaves you rejected
peace in endless, urgent craving
peace in thought and tongue
peace in hand and candlelight
peace, though you’re undone.”

 

but she rested,

unheard.

unsung.

 

---

Version One:

I’m stuck in traffic.
I’ve moved two feet in five minutes.
Construction is everywhere and nothing looks better built.
It’s raining.
Is that hail?
What’s the best detour?
Can I bypass this madness?
this congestion?
this maze?
Totally. Stuck.
Argh and blech.

 

Version Two:

Pull back the shade.
Look up.

 

Take note.
Touch.

 

Cold glass jolted my fingers awake;
they remembered what I’d forgot –
being focused on gridlocks and bottlenecks
and the signs that perpetually re-route –
and ignited the rest of my senses like dominos in decline
up and down my spine.

First kisses,
near misses,
motorbikes,
and tangled kites,
tadpoles and key lime rind
flashed like photos in my mind –
electrified and changed –
though nothing’d rearranged

look up

look up

look up.

In whatever the mess, look up.

---

---

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:

First, allow me to say “thank you” for including me in your creation. You’ve really done a spectacular job with the universe and cosmos, etc. I enjoy your work very much. Great attention to detail!

Second, after many years of deliberation, I am happy to notify you that I would very much like to accept the position you have offered me, here on planet Earth. In so doing, I consent to enter the current, the dance, and the flux, of all things eternal and never ending, that you have set in motion so many days ago.

Thirdly, I’d like to discuss some desirable work habits/environments to maximize my efficacy while I remain in your employment:

1) I’d like, please, to be defined by you
and what you do through me.

2) I’d like, please, to forego the definitions assigned to me
by those who see and assess,
by those who read and decide,
by those who think and know
what tidy boxes I’d best belong in,
and let those definitions be forgot for a time

and then forever.

3) I’d like, please, to have your approval
more than that of the organizations who market you
or the men and women who say they know you better
than I do –

and maybe they do –

maybe.

 

Lastly, as I consider my long term goals within your workforce, I’d like to summarize my hope via observation of another of your fine creations:

When I watch your reeds of wheat in the field,
they do not fight over the terrain,
they do not choke each other out,
or declare their grain superior to the rest.
They grow
and bend
and sway
in unison
and separate,
on strong stalk
and gentle,
created
to reach,
to seed,
to stretch into
the season of harvest
when, in new form,
they feed,
they nourish,
they give into life
and life through them does give.

 

In Gratitude,
and Sincerely Signed,

one who is beginning to reach

 

---

The Fight

---

Now the giant was accostomed to chasing down his prey and stomping the ground so hard that as he got near, their running footsteps would be be stolen from beneath them. The earth would yield to his boot and his victims would stumble upon themselves in complete terror, trying to get away from him.

He was perpetually amused by the tactics those little humans would employ to escape their doom, which of course, never worked. He thought of those who’d hide in a ditch, betting that his vision was poor (which it was not), and how he’d pulverize the ground until he created new and deeper ditches.

The unfortunates would lose their lives in those shallow graves.

He recalled those who would run:
how futile and frantic
a run can be ran;
how a fight can be won
though it never began.

He prided himself on their 300 steps to his 15
before he’d catch them
and lift them up from the ground
and pull their limbs
like leaves from a stem.

but what this giant did not expect

was a girl,

smaller than his routine mark,
coming straight at him
with eyes so clear
and sharp.

His gait flustered and his vision perplexed.
He did not actually know how to capture something that was not moving

away from him.

 

It was a jarring thought:

“what do I do when something comes at me?”

So jarring, in fact, that he stopped, mid-trot.
His arms fell to his sides and he stood,
towering over the girl,
stupefied by her assault,
amused by her mettle,
entranced by the élan of pocket-sized pluck,
and he began to laugh.

he                       laughed

 and

he                         laughed

and

he                           laughed

 

The girl stopped.

With her heart in her throat and her knees in her toes, she looked straight at him;

there they were, in a ridiculous stand off of befuddled curiosity, when he spoke.

“Girl, where are you from?”

She replied,

“I am from a home

and a gravel road

and earthen trails

and a farther place too,

where all the sky

and all the stars

and all the moons

and suns converge.

I am from a place that is all places

and not one is better than the rest.

Where, Giant, are you from?”

He answered,

“I am from a place underneath all of this

and it is dark

and there is no sound

except the clicking of my eyelids

in search of light.

I think I should like to see

your home

and your gravel roads

and your sky and suns and moons and stars converging.”

said she,

“war no more with me

and I will take you there.”

 

And the world became a bigger place for both of them.

---

The End

The Giant

---

The girl stood in her steps as the trees parted,
and from behind the curtain of green,
came a very large
and very angry

giant.

He burst forth from the woodland as though he were brushing horseflies from his hips, instead of displacing deep oaks and uprooting ancient aspen.

He stood, ominous against the edge of the smitten wood,
and spotted the girl,
far out in her quaint clearing,
and began marching toward her.

Now the girl – she had never seen a giant before – was in shock.

It was as alarming as a pit bull coming at you from behind a closed gate,
with fangs baring and four legs braiding
in a splay of attack and threat.

Everything stopped.

In that split second
that contains the whirlwind of thought
of all the outcomes
of all the choices
she could ever make

the girl thought:

“If I run, he’ll surely catch me,

If I hide, he’ll surely crush me,

but if I run toward him –

straight at him –

there’s a chance I could see what’s coming at me.

There’s a chance I could dodge

There’s a chance I could dance

There’s a chance in me somewhere.

I know it.”

So with all her might, she dug the balls of her feet into the matted grass and began her clash and blitz against the giant.

It was a raindrop in defiance of the iceberg.
It was a bee in combat with the eagle.

but she ran, with
head down,
eyes up,
fists clenched,
feet pounding –

she ran

straight

into the giant.

 

---

…Final Chapter tomorrow!

A side note about story-telling: I’ve recently been reading a lot of allegory, myth, and folklore. So many of these stories seem nonsensical and foreign, outlandish and (in some cases) even pointless. But as I give them breath, and space to mix in my mind, I find my attraction to “tale” is not found in the answer it gives, for rarely are things tied up in neat bows, but rather in the questions that rise up inside me while I read. More than that, these types of stories encourage a willingness in me to live with sensitivity to mystery, without needing absolutes, and in appreciation of universal truth experienced through the vehicle of the absurd.

The Girl

---

Once upon a time,

a little girl went for a walk.

She walked far, far out, onto gravel roads and earthen trails, past forests, past lakes, past vast plains and wide fields until new forests began. Eventually, she came to a place that was so far away, she could see ALL the sky, and all the stars, and all moons and suns as they traveled overhead.

She stood there,
under the moons
and the suns
and the stars
and the sky,
and decided she was full.
Full of distance and full of space.
Full of mystery and full of grace.

She held her gaze with the heavens as long as she could
until her breath clouded the air in front of her
and she blinked a long blink of thanksgiving
and thought, “it’s time to go back home.”

 

On her way back home, though, whilst she was walking in wide open country, she fixed her eyes on a distant line of trees that began a dense and shadowed woodland. The trees, that should have been a static silhouette against the sky, stirred only by breeze and birdsong, puzzled her as they began to move in odd and forceful shoves. They were being violently parted, as if a plow was digging it’s way up from beneath them, from root to leaf, and heading toward the clearing.

Those massive ash and elms looked like blades of grass, cleft from the ground up, by a mouse’s track.

She slowed her pace.
She held her breath so it no longer clouded the air in front of her.
She opened her eyes as wide as they could open
because she knew something

big –

something large enough to divide woods and timber –

was about to come out
and into the open…

 

---

…Chapter Two tomorrow.

---

The mind’s eye is a fantastic thing.
It can conjure all sorts of future memories
and bring back childhood’s past.

But sometimes the imagination is not enough.

Sometimes there is a prickling in your palm as it wants for a hand.
Sometimes there is a space in the chair beside you

and you stare at it,

waiting for a ghost to take shape,
for a friend to smile there,

and you might even expect a wave of contentment to come
when pretend purchases reality – for a time –
in exchange for a dream.

a sweet, sweet, dream.

 

But sometimes the imagination is not enough.

 

Sometimes you just want one REAL moment

again

a joke.
a smoke.
one cup-o-joe or a two-finger pour.
a band playing songs you’ve never heard
but you don’t care
‘cause it’s buying you one more minute of REAL
before the car starts and the day ends.

 

Sometimes the imagination is not enough…

…and you’re sick of building snowmen in summer.

---