Bantering with Octagons

[tortoise]

Friends, Romans, countrymen... lend me your Reality. Train cars packed full of writhing iguanas are speeding their way through your back yard at this very moment, yet you're too busy watching reality television to notice. Embrace your illusions, celebrate your delusions. Life can be exactly as bizarre and wonderful as you choose to allow it to be.

 

[Jimi]

On the Guildford line, yuppies hurry to and from the City daily, like lizards, chasing the elusive golden flies of Mammon. The visitor, a Continent from home, and depressed beyond belief, yearns for nothing more than a pint of Bishop's Finger and a warm, voluptuous bosom upon which to cry his tears of frustration. There is NO escape.

 

[sigh]

the elusive golden lizards of autumn
like barnacles on my mind
etch their symbols in my consciousness
their songs upon my soul

dry lizard skin twitching
sharp claws scuttling up my leg
as i strain against the ropes
and scream a wretched protest
muffled by a gag of silk
saliva
and sweat


lizards dropping
lizard droppings

 

[freescorfr]

Small, swift and delicate
Gold and green,
I caught my lizard by the tail.

That's all she left me with.

And it wriggled a lot for a long time on.

 

[GreenEyedGirl]

Lizard tails, and poppy trails, all lined up neatly in rows. Some how I thought the Emerald City would be different than what it has turned out to be.
I thought it would be precious.

 

[freescorfr]

Emerald and Opal coasts harbour les cinq ports. Today umberellas are obligatory in Cherbourg, dear town. For those at sea this is were to berth and rest. There are laces twined around my heart, I must undo.

 

[Jimi]

The beaches from Ostende to Brest are lashed by a southwest gale - the rainsqualls driving through the heaviest oilskins. The ancient barque flys four-square with the wind - her Master dreaming of the beautifully coiffed Bretonne he will embrace again upon landfall.

 

[Impetus]

When he returns home, his embers have died down so incurably that no prodding with bacon will cure the infections. Prayer might though. My arm is laden with papercuts, the status tatoos of the office tribe. I like it when my fingernails are black, I can track every movement from home base so easy, and it's marvelous just to watch them swirl around the drain. Why, exactly, is it so hard to meet people? There's billions of them out there, like grains of sand in my shoes. My iron intake has been low this week, we appologize for any inconveniences this may cause. We now return to suck-ass Survivor reruns, feel free to stab out your eyes.

General Public: But the voting! The voting!

Me: Go away. I'm playing with smoke. The first one of you to mention bratwurst get's a foot to the face.

That is all.

-I

 

[freescorfr]

I once smoked herring and saw hairy kippers flying on bicycles over a sanstone castle eroded by the North sea. They were soldiers, called-up, young men inscribed. Reading inscriptions in threads of life, tranfigured by a phrase,
my humour turns
like swallows swift
round sycamores.

 

[GreenEyedGirl]

Inscriptions on the threads of life are so poignant as to make a strong woman weep, but so small as to require the aid of tse tse flies in the trascriptions. Unfortunately, the attention span of a tse tse is often shorter than the inscription, so transmutation occurs instead.

 

[Dillinger]

The wizard wanders 2 inches off the ground with a cowgirl at his side while contemplating beets and woodpeckers

 

[cymbidia]

Woodpeckers with peckers.
Man isn't the only animal that rapes.

 

[freescorfr]

Drilling woodpeckers in this cuckoo echoing morn,
Chip with strokes of havoc.
Widening the malaise
between my breastbone and my belly.
Today I deselect.
It's place is in my relational rubbish tip.

 

[Jimi]

Morning finds me awed that the Pileated one isn't knocking its ivory bill against my cranial nerves. Never having played "hunt a gowk" to its fullest, my sense of humour is intact, as is the love in my bower, and breast.

 

[cymbidia]

Love in the form of little boy faces sneak silently down stairs carpeted with crafty smiles and Mother's Day similies. Metaphors? No similies. Mother's Day is like a big candy apple: sticky sweet on the outside and wholesomely sweet and good-for-you on the inside.

 

[sigh]

mother's day

sticky fingers
pee sprayed on the toilet
tantrums in public
vomit in the middle of the night
ear wax
and snot
and trouble at school
crayon on the coffee table
and the wall
and the carpet
spilled milk
stubborn refusals
tears
fears
sobbing hurt
guilt
worry
anger
pain
grief at potential lost

all that and more
balanced against love alone

i'm so happy i'm a mom

 

[freescorfr]

Lying in my mum's arms, re-assured
The little boy will always need that love.

 

[cymbidia]

Balanced against love, what is bigger?
The Sky?
The Moon?
The Universe?
Universal possibilities exist within the warmth of a smile.
Balanced now, the world rights itself daintily but with massive self-confidence.
Balanced with love.

 

[GreenEyedGirl]

Can Love be the big Balancer? The Equalizer? Without theme music of its own? What power exists in the warmth of a smile? In the glance of an eye? In the curve of a neck?
How then that Love feels unbalanced?

 

[Dillinger]

Stick sweet mornings explode in awe at the first coming of the universal eye. All hangs in balance, like a horse.

 

[cymbidia]

Horses race madly, dash wildly, breath deeply, unlike the sunflowers opening to follow the stately course of the star around which we all revolve, dependent forever (or for the next 15-20 billon years until it expands to encompass the entire solar system when it enters the red giant phase of its existence) on its life-giving properties.




Edited to add: ACK! My spelling really sucks sometimes! (Okay, you're right, often.)

 

[sigh]

supernova glory
all ashes and dust
white-red flash unimaginable
molecules shred into atoms
atoms scatter to the solar winds
carried out and onward
across the galaxy
to another star
another planet
with water
and air
and a need for complex atoms
to make life

rise oh simple cells of life
meld molecules upon molecules
differentiate your specialties
survive or die
reproduce
mutate
wink
blink
understand

 

[freescorfr]

Increasing in complexity
Unimaginable consciousness
The granite feels its rock solidity.
Trees think slowly
As they watch us pass our quick lives.
I'm insufficiently chemically complex,
to be.

Passionate breath struck dumb.

 

[GreenEyedGirl]

Trees think slowly. And as well they should! Anyone worth their salt would take their time in contemplation like a tree. But we run, and dart, and jerk, and frazzle ourselves into chaos. And all the while the trees watch us with amused contempt.
They were here before us, and will be here after us.

 

[cymbidia]

Trees and sky.
Salt and pepper.
Peanuts and popcorn.
Why so many opposites?

Why are there so many things that used to be the same but are now opposite to then? Why is it so easy to leave but so hard to peel the parted lives from each other? Why do we tear and rend and work ourselves into a frazzle when we could...should...simply smile and fade back and away, leaving the ghost of love to live in the past instead of drowning it in the chaos of the present? Why do we hurt the ones we've loved?

Is it a human quality to hurt those we no longer need?
Need we throw peanuts and popcorn at them?
Need we salt and pepper the wounds?
Need we kill the tree to gain the sky?