A Burden Shared

A burden shared
Between two squires
Who slid on ice
And braved the fires
They lost their king
To ruin and wrack
But no misfortune
Held them back
What's in the chest?
They knew not what
Hopefully a lot of gold or jewels or something cool

 

Boardwalk Bandit

Bang
Bang
Ugh, argh
Ya got me
Ya yella bastard
Back-shootin' bandit, go to---ack

 

Spouting Nonsense

Urgle burgle gargle slish
Guble buble bloople wish
That's the sound the spigot makes
Spouting watery hot takes
Not stopping 'til the farmer wakes

Out, out, damned spout!
Must you always fart and flout
Your garbled wisdom from the well
Damned cenote from depths of hell
Enchanted pump my ass
 

The Priest and the Pitchfork Zombie

Priest
Torch
Pitchfork
Zombie moans
A clash of two species
Faith at a fever pitch, forks up
A scent of ascension dissipates forever
Blood, fire, and steel clash in dissonance; a shower of sparks, a spray of ichor; ARGH!

Liminal Gaze

If the hallway would simply pitch 90 perfect degrees forward
I could spread my arms and fly through the infinite
Forever falling, forever free, forever forgiven
But I cannot oblige these liminal spaces
These haunted places with invisible faces
Who lure me inside to hope
And to die
And to nope
That's no lie
 

Forgotten Sunrise

Golden light forces its way through the forest's defences

To paint a brave, solitary ray across the foaming surf

Of an undiscovered river with no source and no delta
What the hell kind of river has no source and no delta? 
Metaphorical rivers bubbling briskly through bad poems
 

The Maltese Brain Served Up on a Silver Platter

Here are 28mm scale models of the Maltese Falcon and the criminal brain used to create Frankenstein's monster. I agonized over how to paint the Falcon so as to reveal the details of its surface, but then I watched a clip of the film and realized that yep, it's just black, and you see detail because of the light reflecting across its contours. So I just painted it black. 

The road to Castle Frankenstein wasn't exactly paved with gold, Sam Spade thought. In fact, it wasn't paved at all, except maybe with the blood and sweat of the poor peasant saps of the village that sat below and apart from the tall stone towers of the castle. That road now had a little extra paving in the form of Spade's blood and sweat, though not his tears - never his tears. 

Spade's right hand was clenched tightly around his Colt M1911A1 as he kicked open the door to Victor Frankenstein's lab. 

"Freeze, you butcher!" Spade cried. A stout hunchback carrying a silver tray yelped in surprise, and in his shock the hunchback's spastic motions launched the tray's contents - a bloody scalpel and a disembodied human brain - into the air. 

"You fool!" shouted Frankenstein, his mad eyes wide with anguish. The scalpel clattered harmlessly across the stone floor into a dark corner, while the brain plopped to the floor and was smushed by the impact. 

Spade's lips twisted in disgust as he eyed the broken, oozing brain. Horrified, the hunchback made his escape, dashing for the staircase to the lower levels as his master kneeled and scooped up the remains of the brain in hands wrapped up with black lambskin gloves. 

As Frankenstein lamented, Spade took a precious moment to assess the scene. The centrepiece of the laboratory was a human shape on a metal slab, a shape covered by a white sheet. The slab was attached to chains on a pulley system that seemed to suggest the corpus could be raised to the ceiling. But for what purpose? 

"Say, what is this screwy business?" Spade asked.

Tears streaming down his cheeks, Frankenstein offered up the smashed brains, chunks leaking between his fingers. 

"The stuff that dreams are made of," Frankenstein whispered. 

"Well, sweet dreams to you, sweetheart. Here's a love letter from Miles Archer," Spade said, aiming his Colt, squeezing the trigger, and plugging Frankenstein between the eyes with lead hot as hell.  


 

The Railing Room

To the uncaring heavens I shriek
Here at the nadir of existence 
Four walls in search of a ceiling and
Someone's left the door open again

Resting on the Rail of the Starboard Bow

All is still

The ocean flat as asphalt

Embers from his pipe

Glowing as they fall overboard

Reflected in the ink-black sea

Like falling stars

Reflected, too

A glimpse of the impossible

A ghost ship 

Riding on a cloud

Like WTF

Gazing Upon Yon Eternal Night

O!
To seek the infinite
Sailing on the boundless firmament
A pushbutton voyage to the black beyond
The swirling mysterious cosmos
Right there on the viewscreen
Until a giant green space hand grabs you or some other improbable thing happens
But then in all this vastness why shouldn't there be a green hand?
Anything but tribbles

Anodyne and Apotheosis

Your adamantine spirit
Bruised by calumny
A cicerone chasmophile
Torn between
Anodyne and apotheosis
Or are you really just
A rodent on a post?

Cheesecak Remembrance

How oft the memories drift
Like whipped cream launched betwixt bearded lips
Or coffee spill'd into hapless laps;

We were once a cheesecak league
Wand'ring in search of a cayfee
Until time tore us asunder.

Until tonight we knights of the dessert fork
Gathered round to once again square the circle
And chortl'd of cheesecaks past;

And having supped, broke bread and hearts
And drove off into the night
Until time's arrow should fork once more
Somewhere beneath the giant staple

Man of Letters

The letters they
Slide off the page and
Bounce off the floor leaving
My book empty
Useless yellow parchment crammed impotently
Between two covers

I slammed it shut too hard last time
Angered by the plot twist
Now ten thousand little black letters
Are stuck in my carpet
I'd vacuum them up but
Then I'd never know the ending

So I'll pick them up one by one and
glue them back in the faint little outlines
I can see on each page

That's a lot of work for a Dan Brown novel

Goofy Gr8-tracks

Simple pleasures like
Orange Crush in a glass bottle
And solitude
The patience required for mail
Movies that took their time
And 8-tracks that -

Wait, okay, 8-tracks sucked
Low fidelity user-unfriendly tapes broke and then you had
A useless plastic case and a bunch of unravelling brown rope
Cram it all into the car's ash tray and look disgustedly through the frost shields

Can't wait for the goddam Internet and mp3s

Too bad about the glass bottles though

The Introspection Abandoned

Quagmire Snack

The scent of salt and carbohydrates
Beguiling but lethal
Mixed nuts tossed into the Nuts and Bolts
For a semblance of nutrition
In French they call it Meli-Melo
Do they even eat Nuts and Bolts in France?

The Day the Saucers Came

I was sitting on a mountaintop the day the saucers came
I was posing for a photo that in retrospect seems lame
But I grabbed my laser rifle and I carefully took aim
To send the saucers home

Glory, glory golly gee whiz
Glory, glory golly gee whiz
Glory, glory golly gee whiz
We'll send the saucers home

I was caught in the command post when the heat ray burned it down
I was dragged outside to safety by a servant of the crown
And when the flames subsided there was nothing left of town
But we gathered up our pistols and we fought another round
To send those monsters home

Glory, glory golly gee whiz
Glory, glory golly gee whiz
Glory, glory golly gee whiz
We'll send those monsters home

On the sixteenth day of battle we flew into outer space
The alien invasion had jump-started our space race
We let fly the blaster cannons and we put them in their place
The aliens ran back home

Glory, glory golly gee whiz
Glory, glory golly gee whiz
Glory, glory golly gee whiz
The aliens ran back home