The Magic Satchel

so the other day I was thinking
big thoughts

not big like a mountain thoughts
not burning bridge thoughts
not continental plate thoughts

but fleck under the contacts thoughts
splinter beneath the skin thoughts
quiet wispy soul-crushing thoughts

i know the answers
we all know them
they are as universal as skin and mountains

it’s the implementation
that kills

and the giant hunching whispering unknown
is
on the other side am i reborn
or undead

“Yoshirolla peered around the corner cautiously, afraid of only one thing: that he would recognize all the games on the shelf. He didn’t need to see one more ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ plinko game, another ‘Farmyard Spin the Bottle’, or that latest disappointment ‘Ticket to Ride’. Why hadn’t he just be able to pull a few more shiny rainbow locomotives? Two or three more of those engines and he might have been able to snatch that victory away from his competitors.”

Read the ever-expanding award-winning story!

yoshirolla kilomantra. kind of sounds like a really heavy spiritual chant you say while eating little green dragon shaped sushi.

maybe not. maybe it’s just a game.

dang yoshirolla kilomantra.

drawing in of a sunset

soft frozen frame
slow-motion explosion
wisps and rays in synchronous flare
angel-wing mist amberly creeping
in a glacier-fast jettison
over stale-blood mahoganies, full tired violets, deceased navies
silhouetted broken toothed shoreline
a holy volcanic-glow filling
the tight hanging cloudline
lifting up an eccentric snaking gray

a gull, primordial black from my vantage
alights onto a rock as dark

the horizon shifts unnoticeably

momentarily feather and stone merge
a geometrically awkward natural unity
pulse of vein and water

into oblong bands of ochre, jaundice, and mountain
now like thick strips of bright burning kleenex
calm wetness ripples crimson
in response

the bird now gone

crisp salty breeze warms my skin
and i smile

summer 1999

I found a link to the poem I mentioned in my Vimy post: Young Fellow My Lad

It’s pretty simple, but you can imagine how many parents went through this same thing. Thought some of you might be interested

Seriously… I can’t.

Colembolla are tiny little creatures that live by the trillions in moist soils all across the world. We have all been touched by the plight of these misfortunate buggies, but most likely in a manner that would suprise. Kids, dogs, parents and duckies frolic all day long throughout parks, fields and forests, crushing these little arthropods by the dozens with every step. Of course when the sun goes down the souls of the fallen travel up through the blades of grass and into the ionosphere. There they bolster the ranks of ozone or karma or aurora borealis or something – I can’t remember. The important thing is that much like slimer of ghostbuster fame, the souls leave a little drop of wetness on every physical object that they float up through. The next morning the grass is slick with the protoplasmic dew of the collembolla.

And now where I make money. I say we load water bombers with a liquid slurry of colembolla and raid, then plaster wide swaths of forest in advance of large fires, creating what I will call dewbreaks. Or maybe collemblockas.