The Dance of the Terrible Middle
Caught in the terrible middle of the animal,
in the white nerve of my sleeping grandfather,
I go with the signs of night in a straight line,
eluding the contented star animals,
breathing with the transformation of their high place.
The high mountains are my prison,
the fear of your love my punishment.
I occasionally give in to thoughts of you.
The ghost of your memory is in my center.
We are separate, but
in each of us is the house
where both of us live.
In the table of your hair,
in the locked room,
to the living heart of the beast,
we come for charity.
The sweet scent of reason
dances to my middle self.
It is of the moon,
but equally of books––
a mongrel with its tail between its legs
howling a mortal solo of our split lives
and our separate deaths.
The rolling body of the star,
my body spinning to the paradox
of what I could believe in––
the faded ochre of the one truth of your friendship,
the disparate truth of my grandfather.
All out of line, unparallel.
Lover with your full nights’ sleep
and half of your life lost to this sleep,
you dream of three futures while
I dance the tango of the terrible middle.
I’ve been to two Xmas craft shows and a weekly street market, and at each, the only person whose work I couldn’t resist was the lady pictured above.
And this is what I bought. Believe me, I could have purchased more. Her pieces were one-of-a-kind and there isn’t one I wouldn’t have purchased if I had the room. These are all Xmas gifts. Except, perhaps, for one.
for Bushboy’s Last on the Card Challenge Hope you don’t mind that I shared my last two as I figured the creator of these objects deserved to be seen, as well.
A walk on the San Juan Cosala Malecon is always notable. Here’s a fun event from a few weeks ago:
Click on photos to enlarge.
For the Weekly Prompt: Notable.
Family Feud
The quarrels in my family are numerous at best.
If I say they are ubiquitous, believe me, I don’t jest.
Daddy’s always angry. Mama’s always in a tiff.
If discord had an odor, you’d always get a whiff
as you wandered past our windows or entered our front door,
and if you thought to mention them, we’d only produce more.
Bring up race relations and there’ll be no interstice
between Daddy’s rants and ravings that display his prejudice
and Mama’s stepping in with her opposing point of view.
Then before you know it, they’ll unite to lambast you!
We seldom have a visitor and have no friends at all.
No salesmen knock upon our door and no neighbors call.
If I threw a slumber party and had friends to spend the night,
the angst here’s so infectious that we’d have a pillow fight.
No cousins ever join us at Thanksgiving to give thanks
because our extended family has fired us from its ranks.
We are the loneliest clan in town, and that for sure’s no fiction.
But— if we have nothing else, at least we have conviction!
Before you ask, this is fiction! Prompt words today are ubiquitous, tiff, prejudice, interstice and mention. Image by Afif Kusuma on Unsplash.
To enlarge photos and read captions that give a hint of the story told, click on each photo.
Divisible*
Our species has malfunctioned and we’ve finally met our match.
It’s waited all these years for the right time for it to hatch.
First there was the ice age where we had to deal with frost,
but it seems like global warming is the place where we’ll be lost.
We’ve flaunted our dominion and must be reprimanded
It seems as though our prototype’s about to be disbanded.
It’s ironic that a virus so small that it’s invisible
might be the thing that proves that mankind might be divisible.
Divisible: capable of being divided by another number without a remainder.
Prompt words today are malfunction, flaunt, prototype, frost and match.
For Cee’s FOTD
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 