I was bored at lunch...

... So I drew this. It's what I could see. The background isn't finished because I ran out of time & had to go back and listen to more random tidbits of information about real property law.

Denim

They have adopted a uniform, these people who call themselves "free." They walk about in fields of indigo, rough cloth brushing their legs. The cloth fits some loosely, perched precariously around hips and dragging at the knees. Others wear the rough canvas close and tight, contouring the curves of the thighs and calves. Some wear blue as dark as midnight, dip after dip in the indigo dye. Others wear it washed out so far it is barely there, a mere nod to the blue to show conformity with the uniform. They stride about, these people. They notice each other, sure, the slouching sagging blue; the tight-fitting, curving blue. But they see it not as blue. They see it not as rough canvas. This uniform is ubiquitous, and not so much imposed as assumed. It is the product of social pressure, and it is so insidious that people do not see it as anything except "what everyone wears," if they think about it at all. They who wear such a riot of colors on their upper bodies see nothing odd in that their legs all match. They are so enamored with this uniform that they cannot imagine wearing anything else, and chafe at the idea of skirts or slacks. They follow. I follow. I love the blue.

And, purely for everyone's edification, here's some indigo I found on Wikipedia:

MBE Madness

After a while, every mundane situation one comes across in daily life starts sounding like an MBE fact pattern, with only a little bit of speculation as to what could have happened. We call this the onset of bar exam-induced insanity.

A man was riding on a city bus when he saw his stop coming up. He pushed the button to request a stop; however, the bus driver did not notice and drove past the stop without stopping. The man called out to the bus driver, who noticed that the man had requested a stop, and stopped the bus in the lane of traffic to let the man off. The man exited the bus, but because there was no sidewalk at that point on the road, the distance between the bus and the ground was greater than he expected, and he fell, breaking his wrist. The bus driver did not notice and drove off. As the man stood up and tried to get off the road, a motorist in a car that had been following the bus negligently ran into him, breaking his legs. Against whom may the man recover for his injuries?

A woman and her neighbor both had gardens that backed up onto each other. This year, the woman was growing peas, and the neighbor was growing sunflowers. The neighbor, who planned to grow tomatoes next year, offered to purchase some wire racks that would be suitable for his tomatoes next year, and let the woman use them for her peas to climb on this year. The woman replied that she did not want him to go to such trouble for her vegetables. The neighbor insisted, and the woman replied that he could purchase the racks, but in return, she insisted that he take some of her peas when they grew larger. The neighbor told her that he would purchase the racks in a week. Several days later, the woman noticed that her peas were trailing on the ground, so she purchased some stakes for them to climb on without telling her neighbor, and placed them in the garden. The neighbor noticed that the woman no longer needed the racks; however, he purchased them anyway. Can the neighbor demand that the woman let him have some of her peas?

A woman’s friend sent her a gift through the mail. While the woman was away from home, the postal carrier came by to deliver the package. Since the woman wasn’t home, the postal carrier left the package with a neighbor. However, he neglected to leave a note for the woman that he had done so. After the postal carrier left, the neighbor opened the package and found a rare antique clock that he knew was worth a lot of money, which he decided to keep for himself. The woman came home and, not knowing that her friend had sent her a gift, noticed that the neighbor had the antique clock and offered to buy it from him. He readily agreed. The woman took the clock home and placed it in her living room. Several days later, the friend visited, noticed that the woman had the clock, and told her about how she had found the clock in an antique store and known it would be perfect for the woman. Confused, the woman explained that she had purchased the clock from the neighbor. The friend informed her that she had sent the clock as a gift, and the woman realized the neighbor must have taken it from the mail. What, if anything, may the woman recover from the neighbor?

A complaint

I think my head is a zeppelin
that will fly far away, dragging
my body with it, feet dangling in the cool
blue water of the river.

I think my brain is overheating as
electrical impulses meet the resistance of
gray matter turned to gelatin, as my computer
overheats because its battery
is defective.

I think my muscles are pasta
strands of spaghetti, vermicelli, angel hair, fresh
and tied in knots, dried that way by pasta makers:
Delicious, but brittle.

I think my nerves are misfiring, confused
by an overload of conflicting information, impulses
coursing down paths that are unsuitable:
Contracts in the stomach, Property in
the legs, Corporations in the shoulders.

I think, I think, I think if I think more I will disintegrate.

Sing a song of procrastination...

Sing a song of studying,
A mass of tasks not done...
Four-and-twenty things to do
And I can't manage one.
I'll go to class tomorrow
And take a practice test
And make up rules out of thin air
'Cause I didn't study the rest!

More photography

Once again, I'm counting a lot of photographs taken over the weekend as my creative output for Saturday. This was at Kelly & Sue's summer cherry diaquaris party. Granted, most of the pics are actually from Sunday morning, but I figure, if I didn't go home, it still counts as Saturday.

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10100374343963592.2768554.10133619&l=c82b8a0a25

A conversation with Tarat

I wasn't going to pull anything out of my main universes for this project, but it had been a while since I dealt with this particular universe, which was always a minor one anyway. It's a useful device for getting in touch with my inner angry teenager. Tarat, the main character here, was my "imaginary friend" in high school - though the girl he interacted with in the stories I wrote was never quite me. He's an alien who came to Earth to open trade negotiations or something (my adolescent grasp of the politics was never that great), crash-landed, and through a longish series of political and cultural machinations too complex and poorly remembered to recount here, ended up stuck with the girl who found him in the desert. He's about 5 inches tall and vaguely rodent-looking, bipedal, wears long purple robes. I spent a lot of time having imaginary conversations with him; he was a calmer, more experienced, adult-type person who could nonetheless fit in my pocket. The problem the girl is talking with him about here is not actually one I dealt with in high school, at least until I moved to Tucson and even then only in a very abstract manner, but I might have if I had been comfortable enough with myself in general to even consider such matters.
___________________________________

The girl slammed the front door, making the living room windows shudder, and ran down the hallway to her room. Flinging her backpack in a corner, she threw herself onto the bed.

            “How could I be so stupid!” she howled into her pillow.

            Tarat sighed and put down his pen. Part of him cursed the unlikely series of events that had made cowering in the bedroom of an adolescent giant the most prudent course of action for the moment. This was a part of himself he tried hard not to pay attention to. It did no good to curse the past; one had only to live with the results of one’s actions. And it did no good to curse the girl, either. She may have been several thousand times Tarat’s size, but she was maybe a third his age, and the pains of adolescence seemed to be a universal constant. Tarat remembered his own childhood on his home planet with a certain abhorrence that made him rethink his policy of not cursing the past.

            So now, when the girl came home with a fresh set of miseries, small social woes and petty embarrassments, he swallowed his own troubles, got up from the table that sat atop her enormous desk, and made his way across the plastic gantries that had been set up across the room for his benefit to her side.

            “Tell me, child. What has happened?” he asked gently.

            The girl sniffled and turned her head to look at him. As always, she was somewhat alarming close up. Had she been some sort of reasonable scale, her alien-ness would be easy enough to deal with; Tarat’s people had interacted with other races before, and this girl’s people were form-wise less bizarre than some. But the sheer size of her made interaction difficult. The first few weeks he had lived with her, he had been in constant fear of being stepped on.

            Now, though, he was used to her. And he was learning to read her face, the physical manifestations of the emotions raging within, almost more easily than he could have read that of one of his own people. He could see the blood vessels of her nose dilating, the redness of the eyes, the widened tear glands. She was extremely upset.

            She gulped and gasped a bit. “I’m sorry, Tarat,” she snuffled. “I didn’t mean to disturb you. I know you’re busy.”

            He doubted this very much; she had other places she went when she truly wished to be alone. Which meant that she needed to talk to someone. Tarat was somewhat irritated at having been disturbed from his work, but he would have stopped for any friend in need. The fact that this friend’s needs were usually somewhat petty from an adult perspective was of no consequence. He shrugged and sat on the pillow.

“It is your private space,” he said. “I am merely borrowing it from you. Please, tell me. Perhaps I can help.”

            Her laughter was a coarse, hopeless bark, and she rolled away from him to lie on her back, arm flung across her face. “Not with this,” she said. “This is just me being an idiot.”

            “Why do you say these things?” he asked her. “You are very intelligent. Untrained, perhaps, but time and experience will remedy that…”

            “That’s not what I mean and you know it.”

            Tarat did know it. He also remembered making similar complaints in the awkwardness of youth, and being given similarly unhelpful statements in return. He forged ahead. “You mean you have done something or thought something or felt something you feel is foolish. I tell you, it is not. You are an intelligent person—no, do not interrupt!—you are intelligent, I say, and possessed of remarkable reason and judgment for a person of your age. Whatever you think you have done, it is of small consequence.”

            “No, it’s not!” she raged. “I just ruined every chance I have for future happiness!”

            “Child,” he started, but she cut him off.

            “Don’t tell me it’s not important!” she snapped. “Adults are always saying that these things aren’t important! You don’t know! You’re not me! And maybe it is just a stupid high school crush, and maybe it is just me being young, but damn it, it’s not helpful to hear that! And it doesn’t change how I feel! And it doesn’t change that I made a complete ass of myself and she’ll never talk to me again!”

            Tarat sighed, trying to think of how best to respond to that. The girl was uncommonly introspective for one of her age, and had likely already thought of his potential responses. Then he stopped. Something was different.

            “She? Did I hear correctly the female pronoun?”

            “…yeah.”

            “Always before it has been the male pronoun.”

            “…yeah. I know. I know! This is awful! And the whole school knows and now I’m gonna be the victim of a hate crime or some shit and it’s not like I’m actually like that, it was just this one-time thing, and I was stupid enough to think that she might have felt the same way, but no, she freaked out like nothing else and told everyone and the whole rest of the day everyone avoided me like I had the goddamn plague!”

            Tarat considered this. This was not the normal frivolous adolescent problem. And he was honestly not sure how to handle it, not being a member of her culture.

            “You should perhaps talk to your parents about this,” he suggested.

            “I really don’t want to,” she said. She looked genuinely worried.

            Tarat, feeling very much out of his depth, shifted uncomfortably. “Please understand,” he said, “this type of issue is dealt with differently on every world my people have visited, and is dealt with differently by the different cultures on my own world. I lack reference…”

            “Look, it’s not that big a deal, really,” she said, which he didn’t believe for a moment. Her face said otherwise. She continued. “It was a one-time deal, like I said. I just need to figure out how to fix the damage I’ve done to my social life before this blows up into way more than it is.”

            He didn’t move.

            “Say something,” she said, quietly, nervously.

            He sighed. “I do not know how to advise you,” he said.

            “You’re not freaked out by this, are you?” she asked, brow furrowed. He could see her sweat glands widen slightly and a faint sheen cross her face.

            “Of course not!” he said, realizing with a twinge of guilt how his silence had been misinterpreted. “Child, my people have met hundreds of races. Some have two genders, some only one, some have more. Some have multiple genders in a single individual. Some are tolerant of sexuality among members of the same gender, some are repulsed by it, some would consider social sex between members of opposite genders abnormal and disturbing. For me, it is of small importance. But in your culture, I know it is of great importance. I have seen the turmoil this thing causes in your news reports. I worry for that reason.”

            “Yeah, me too,” she said. “I mean, I know my parents are pretty tolerant. For crying out loud, my dad told me about S&M when I was ten, just because he thought it was something I’d be interested in knowing. But it’s different when it’s their own kid, you know? And high schoolers are the worst. It’s like, if you even hint at being gay, they just eat you alive. And I did a hell of a lot more than hint. Which is crazy, ‘cause I’m not gay, I like guys. There’s just the one girl, and she’s a fucking bitch anyway, apparently, and…” She broke off, sobbing.

            “You are right. In this instance, I do not know what you are feeling. I cannot begin to imagine all that you are feeling.” Tarat stood up, unhappy, and made his way carefully across the bed to climb onto her shoulder.

            “What am I gonna do?” she moaned.

            “I do not know.”

            “You’ve got to have some idea. You’re always so damn full of answers…”

            “Not for this,” Tarat said. “I do not always have answers. Some questions have no answers, and I believe this may be one of them.”

            “…So not helpful.”

            “I am sorry.”

            She sat up abruptly, and Tarat clung to the folds of her shirt. Over the months, he had become adept at keeping his balance when she moved, and she had adapted her movements to accommodate his presence. But this was a more violent lurch than most, and Tarat hissed with annoyance.

            “Sorry,” she said grumpily.

            “No matter. You are upset.” He could see she was weeping, quietly, her face impassive but tears falling down her cheeks.

            “I feel awful,” she said, leaning forward to rest her head in her hands.

            “That is understandable.” Tarat wrapped an arm in her hair for additional safety, since she seemed inclined to move around with no warning. “Child, you do not want to hear this. But you must. What you are experiencing, this fear, this uncertainty, this does not go away with age. As you grow older, you will find many times you do not know what to do, and you will feel scared and uncertain. And there is nothing you can do about that.”

            She sniffed. “I’m gonna feel like this forever? That sucks.”

            “No, not forever. Sporadically. ‘Off and on,’ if you will. You find yourself now in a situation that age and experience would not help you with. This happens. But you will find ways to cope, and ways to be happy, even in the midst of uncertainty.”

            “I still say it sucks.”

            “Yes. And you must find your own answers, your own way through this. But you can do that. I said before, you are intelligent and prudent. You will find a way.”

            “I wish I had your confidence. Right now all I can see is a lifetime of despair. All for one stupid, stupid crush. It took me weeks to figure out what the hell I was even feeling, you know that? And I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. Not even you. I just feel so…lost.”

            “I cannot help you with that.” Tarat braced himself as she shuddered wordlessly. “I am sorry. I cannot tell you how to find your way in this instance. I can suggest, though, for the moment, you make an infusion, hot tea. I know it will help calm you.”

            “Tea? That’s your answer?”

            “Not an ultimate answer, to be sure. Just to clear your head.”

            “…yeah, I guess.”

            “Also, you must talk to your parents. They can help protect you.”

            “You think I need protection?” She was alarmed; he saw the muscles around her mouth contract.

            “I said before, I have seen the news reports. I am concerned, and they will be as well.”

            “Damn. I dunno. I just want someone to talk to. I know you don’t have answers…”

            Tarat looked at her. “I will always listen. Come. Let us make some tea. And I will listen.”

Om nom nom

Snapdragon

Affirmations

I am.
I am alive.
I am warm and comfortable, I am not too hot.
I am surrounded by green growing things and rich deep soil.
I am tired from righteous work.
I am safe, I am strong.
I am.

The Wishing Star

Star light, star bright,
first star I see tonight,
Only thing within my sight
shining in the darkest night.

Lost in the desert, but I tried
to see you but you thought I lied.
A small night creature tries to hide
but will not find a way inside.

Star light, star bright,
A million stars are out tonight!
I meant to talk, I didn't quite...
I didn't want to start a fight.

Alone in the desert, can't you see
I can't be perfect; shouldn't be!
Furiously, suddenly,
The small night creature turns to flee.

Star light, star bright,
Shooting star streaks out of sight.
A creature runs into the night,
Following its wanton flight.

The desert night is so alive
Insects sing and fruit bats dive.
I'm done with you! You can't deprive
The creature its will to survive.

Star light, star bright,
Last star I see tonight,
I wish I may, I wish I might,
I wish I knew if I did right.

Saturday at FaerieWorlds

I'm going to go ahead and count all the photography I did at FaerieWorlds as my creative output for Saturday. I took something like 400 pictures. My faves I already posted to Facebook and are viewable here. Enjoy!

Present sense impressions in the form of haiku

Little tabby cat,
Won't you leave the snakes alone?
They eat up the slugs!

______

Gray-and-ebon geese,
Honking like bicycle horns,
Leave a pungent mess.

______

pale green sprouting peas
creeping through the fragrant soil
delicate and frail

______

Fifty-five degrees.
At home it's one hundred ten.
But I shouldn't gloat.

Ninja

The small gray tabby creeps on her belly through a forest of weeds, grass un-mowed and clover. She is staring at a garden. There are patches of gardens all around, but this one, ah, this one, contains a sprawling mass of jasmine growing wild. The tabby does not care about the jasmine itself - it is too dense for her to hide in and its smell is not a perfume that entices her - but she does care about what's in it.

The people walking by look at her quizzically, because she is staring so intently at nothing they can see. She pays them no notice. People exist in her world. They are sources of irritation at times, but also sources of food and affection. And, when she is not interested in them, they can be ignored.

Her ears twitch. The people can't see what's hiding in the jasmine, but she knows it's there. It rustles. It is a small creature, so small that its rustlings are not audible to human ears, especially not with the constant background noise of cars in the road and people chattering away in their little boxes, windows open to the wide fresh air. But she can hear it. She skulks forward, intent.

She crouches on the sidewalk, ignoring the person in the apartment that sits behind the jasmine. She is aware that person is watching her, but she doesn't care. Her tail lashes. Her eyes are wide and her ears up. Her paw shoots out---and she has it. Briefly.

The tiny black snake, no wider around than a worm but much longer and much, much stronger, whips around frantically. In its random terrified way, it manages to fall out of the tabby's paw. She moves forward, biting at its head. She is an adept hunter of snakes; they are her preferred prey. They are quick and clever, and nearly as fast as she is.

It is a game, it is her life, this hunting of snakes, this back and forth play. Sometimes she wins, and crouches over her long black feast, triumphant and self-satisfied. Sometimes, like today, the snake is lucky, or clever, and slips between her claws and teeth to dive back, deep into the jasmine. This is not loss, it is just another play in the game of hunting. She is not disappointed. The snake will still be there.

The tabby stares at the place in the jasmine where the snake disappeared, tail still twitching. But her ears swivel, and she hears her name called. A child has run into the grass, this source of irritation---or affection. The snake is forgotten.

Wings!

For the FaerieWorlds festival that's happening this weekend. Had to make new wings because I left my old ones in Tucson (oops), but they didn't match any of the clothes I brought with me anyway. These will go much better.

Go...Ducks...?

Well, I tried.
Found three different YouTube videos (actually way more than that, but I got bored after three) telling me how to make three different origami ducks. And here they are, in all their folded-paper splendor. 3-D art was never my strong suit.

A poem uncertain is.

Barely there. Aware...but where?
Around the bend? Behind the tree?
Idea seeking company
But me,
I see, upon the air
I stare, and quail, and flail, and rail
The pale, curtailed,
uncertainly, it hesitates
and states, "But wait,
There's more to see.
But not of me."

Small Tragedies

            She felt cold, chilled to the bone, though the night was balmy. She huddled in the shelter of a rhododendron bush, night insects fluttering around her. Her clothes were filthy. At one time, she might have cared, but now, it was just one more small tragedy, unimportant, unnoticed. The fear was real, though, and it froze her. She could not have moved if she tried. Her stomach was ice and it hurt to breathe.

            She could not have said what, exactly, so paralyzed her. It was waiting out there, though, she knew. She did not know what it was. She did not know what it would do if it found her. She only knew it must not find her, or something terrible would happen.

            Her home was a memory. She had left several days ago, days that felt like weeks, running with nameless terror. She had not eaten, but her stomach hurt too much for her to care. She wore the thin shirt and loose pants she had been wearing when she got up that morning, several days ago, and realized that she had to leave. It had rained twice since then, and she had sheltered in doorways and bus shelters until being told to move along, once by a kindly police officer, once by an angry shopkeeper who threatened to throw a heavy can of beans at her. More small tragedies.

            Huddled in the rhododendron, she could see the world moving around her. The rhododendron bush was in a park near a college on a busy street lined with cafes and bars, and little shops full of small bohemian wonders. Musicians stopped on the street, opened their cases, and played for the passersby, hoping for bits of coin. The street teemed with young, well-dressed people going to clubs, and young, scruffy people pontificating to their fellows in the cafes, and older, scruffier people, sitting on street corners, much like the musicians, but with no music to their souls. It must be a weekend. She had lost track of the days.

            She wondered at how they could all be so calm, going about their business, playing in the night. Didn’t they know the peril that stalked her? Couldn’t they feel the danger in the air?

            But no, she knew they couldn’t. It was her danger, and hers alone. It would eat the whole world, she knew, if it caught her, but if she didn’t exist, it wouldn’t either.

            That realization brought the barest shadow of a thought to her mind, but she reeled away from it, more terrified of that thought than of the thing itself. If she didn’t exist, neither would it. It was tied to her, hers and hers alone. There was something there, but she could not grasp it, and she sweated in cold panic at the thought of even trying.

            The thought gasped and drowned as a new realization hit her: it was in the rhododendrons. It had insinuated itself in the broad leaves and festive flowers, the whiplike branches, and was seeping its way through the molecules of the bush and the air and almost touching her bare arms.

            She shrieked and lurched out of the bush, eyes wild. She stumbled as she tried to run backward, staring at the bush, pointing, yelling in wordless fear.

            She was dimly aware of people around her, who had, until that moment, been wandering obliviously through their own lives. Several cried out, startled at her sudden appearance. Several looked askance at her and edged away, even crossing the street to put as much distance between her and themselves as possible. Others, though, moved closer uncertainly, saying things like, “Are you alright? How can we help?”

            Still, though, they were like shadows to her. All that was real was the rhododendron bush and the menace within it. She howled, pointing. These people needed to move away. It would get them. The bush was the single most dangerous thing in the world, and none of these people seemed to realize it. She tried to tell them that, but the words wouldn’t come, at least not in any language these people could understand. Everything she was saying was very clear in her mind, but no one could understand her.

More people were gathering now, as she staggered and stumbled away from the rhododendron. They closed in on all sides. And she realized that any warning she gave would be too late. Just as it had seeped its way into the rhododendron, so it had seeped into all the people, too. They pressed around her, hands reaching out, saying meaningless words.

“It’s all right! Let me help you.”

“Calm down! No one is going to hurt you.”

“Someone call an ambulance!”

She shrank from them, edging backwards. She was still shouting in fear. Her stomach ached as though stabbed, and her breath wheezed. It was coming at her, and would eat her. It was coming closer, and closer, roaring in her ears. She staggered off the edge of the curb, and managed to turn and run.

One of the people yelled, “Stop her!”

And someone yelled, “Look out!”

Something screeched, and thudded. It was in the sound. The roaring had taken on the noise of tires squealing, and the feel of flying through the air. She did not wonder at this. It was clever, and could change its form at will.

She was aware of pain, vaguely, hammering in her head and her side, but it didn’t matter. Just another small tragedy. She was somehow lying on the ground, looking up at the stars. And it was in the stars. She tried to get up and run, to roll away, to shrink into the ground, but she couldn’t move. It reached down from the stars, blotting out the edges of her vision. The roaring in her ears rose to drown all other noise, every other noise she had ever heard.

The stars were going out. It had eaten them. It had eaten her.

Sunflower

Blue.

 I have no idea what this is supposed to be. I just started writing. Apparently, I have an emo child trapped within me, screaming to get out of the cellar that is my rib cage. See, there it is again. OK, I'll stop vacillating now and get to the whatever-this-is.
______________________

Blue.
Blue Monday. Blue like the canvas folding chair that crouches stiffly where a couch should be. Blue like the cerulean paint chips from an old pickup truck, stuck to my back. Blue like the river, blue like the sea

more silver than blue. Shining white and deep brown and green. They say water is blue but they are wrong: it is alive, if "alive" were a color. The color of life

The color of death, the cold clinging wetness. They say water is the most corrosive substance on Earth. All things bend to it, all things decay. The great, colorless constant.

To swim is to dance with death.

Beet It!

Creeped out.

I meant to write something witty and clever. And I may still do that at some later time. I had a minor adventure today. Very minor, really. A total non-starter of an adventure. It would make a really good essay but not very good news, that sort of thing. So, I was going to write a nifty essay. But it's late. And I'm tired. And I'm freaked out. So, here, without further ado, is the general feeling that such an essay would conclude with:

Canada Goose

Still Life with Cactus and School Bag

Under the blinds in my living room,

A cactus flowers, half in bloom.

Though rain and showers hide the sun,

I think of the desert when day is done.

When morning comes, again I'll rise

Pack a bag of school supplies

Drink my coffee, catch the bus

study tomes voluminous...

But on the morrow, I shall find,

If nothing else will come to mind,

I'll always know, forevermore,

a cactus waits beside my door.

Treasure the Young

We treasure them.

We feed them and nurture them and love them. We coax them along. We shelter them from life’s perils: angry cats, harsh weather, starvation, drought. We weep over their sadness and thrill when their spirits lift.

We talk to them.

We love them.

When they are grown, how we rejoice! How wonderful it is to see them, tall and strong, brave and at the peak of perfection.

They are magnificent.

We go to these young things we have loved, and we ravage them.

We rip them up.

We pull them apart.

We destroy them in a frenzy of greed and anticipation.

They make a magnificent salad.

Then we take their seeds, plant them in sheltering earth, to love and cherish and coax and plead and rejoice, and wait for spring to come again.

Shopping Trip: A Haiku

Blue recycle bin,
why is it you hold so much
heavy, pricey stuff?

Nada

I meant to write a villanelle today

But somehow time just got away from me

I don’t have anything I want to say.

I cleared my garden of weeds and decay

And did Crimes Problem Sets both Six and Three,

But didn’t write a villanelle today.

I’m not inspired; nothing came my way

To spark a thought, a pondering, a key.

There isn’t anything I want to say.

And now it’s late; bedtime I must obey,

Yet this important fact won’t let me be:

I didn’t write a villanelle today!

I’d pull my hair out, but I know that they

Would ask me why I’d do such things to me,

But still there’s nothing that I want to say.

So one last thing before I go away:

Does this poem constitute mise en abîme?

I didn’t write a villanelle today,

Because there’s nothing that I want to say.

Viola

One of the violas from my garden. Figured I'd capture one before the cats dig them all up. Darn cats...

The thing itself. Squished a little.

Fallen Trees

Watercolor on cold press. I like shiny colorful things.

This is the photo on which it was based: