Skip to main content

Not Quite New Houses

 The new houses wore gingham insulation and brick tweed

It wasn't quite a Sunday, there was no longer a paddock

Blue sky, like an advertisment, spread behind them

The clasp of a suburban cloak printed like a magazine

Whose pages once could be flown over but now

Wrinkle and desaturate in the corner of the library 

Or the back shelves of the used bookstore, not quite

Literature, just the residue of memory

Smelling not quite pleasant, seedy paper and ink still

Selling new houses dressed in insulation and tweed.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Treacle Season

  Sharing with The Sunday Muse #190 ,  hosted this week by Carrie. Keaton was great in that show—the one with wings— Where he was constantly a [man]child on a ledge  dreaming an angel who became a superhero.   She was a sarcastic (fake?) angel—it was the 80s— But always good, on time, her lessons easy, Easy as it would have been for him to fall.   The metaphor so obvious...but I didn't get it. Nor the easy and obvious good. (/s)   I watch the TV movie every other December Remembering believing in easy And crushing on this character, that city...   Angels should be sweet, sarcastic figures, knowing (like nurses and social workers) we prefer Sleeping on the ledge, reckless to call for "heroes." To clear up any confusion:  there is no Michael Keaton movie we watch every holiday season. Although, if there were...I'd probably watch it.  -- Chrissa

Turn Away

  Sharing with The Sunday Muse , for #193. Turn away, like the moon, listening... Listening to the planet that rumbles with a hundred million slaps. All the feet, all the rockets, all the  pistons in the cars on the asphalt over the chasm where the veins run deep, blue in sunlight, black at night. Running over the chasm.  Once or twice they ran to you. Once or twice they ran by. Greetings and salutations. The sky is an entertaining shade of concrete yellow as the rain promised earlier in the week makes good on its arrival. It's a disturbing bright sallow sky, the kind of sky that puts you in mind of old movies and degraded film stock and the pops and crackles incidental to the main story.  Several years ago I made a resolution to journal more and last year I came across a video that suggested I actually re-read those journals, at least those of the previous year, at the beginning of each new year. Technically, I have kept the journal resolution, making daily notes in the margins of

The Soul and The Spine

  Sharing with The Sunday Muse #195 . Come and share! When it blew out the candle, It began to speak, voice low,  eyes dimmer than flame. Jenn believed, once upon a childhood (she's still there... but it's waning), it inhaled fire. Spines, tonight. Gears ladder bones and metal and plastic, all that lived, rungs to heaven. Heaven is a level of space where you can't breathe  so they used to send the dead. When the flame goes, it takes our memories with it. But not bot files. Maybe it believes  she'll sleep easier if bots go breathless, too. It continues murmuring and she pretends she's hearing a confession in a box Like the song her mother plays when the dark stretches  between signals We can handle shocks. She can handle the dark, the small  not-flame of its eyes. It's finally winter!! Which means bitmapped frost on the roofs, cold mornings, and a table full of succulents that are pretty much glaring at me because the kitchen window isn't the same as full sun