Words with Pictures

The backwaters of the south Louisiana bayou stirred with mosquito clouds and by scaly gator tails.

The moon peeked out from behind moss hanging from skeletal limbs, spanish moss and old mans beard.

The creole voodoo priestesses and witch doctors walked through the bog, their torches sparkling in the distance, just a few more fireflies dancing in the night.

My fathers guitar sighed the melodies of a poor Irish kid remembering the sounds of his ancestors.

The sound of the unseen things circling the house were nothing to fear as long as the music played. They would crawl through the mud on their hands and knees, eager to scurry towards our lamp light, but would stay trapped in their circling, fearful that the sweet sounds of Irish sorrow would end.

The words of the song would cease only long enough for my father to pull from a whiskey jug, then begin again, fending off the advancement of the shadowy things; those things that survived on superstition and lizard guts.

The song tonight recalled a folk hero that stood atop a hill for three days watching for the advancement of the English armies. He spotted them, blew his horn to warn the others, then fell dead. McGreggor, the good lad of Nethalbrosh.

My fathers hands went to the whiskey, and I felt the fear and the shadows advance.

A Soldier with A Pen

Battlefields are all the same. The impossible task of retaining awareness is failed within seconds of the cavalry charging across the plain, the cannon fire and their blackened belches of smoke, the almost supernatural sound of carpet bombs ripping into a city, the clash of forged steel moving through flesh.

In every age, since the beginning of time, men have sought to kill each other.

The man that wishs calamity upon his world, given time and ability, will be the bringer of calamity.

We rest in plush chairs, drinking whatever sugar enriched drink we favor most, only standing to defecate and order more food to restart the sole event in our lives.

The “civilians”. Those watercolored, faint impressions of men that flounder over their small worries. ‘Do I look better in navy blue or does this crisp white shirt suit me better?’. Your blue can never be Navy blue, only an offshoot that hints at the true color. Let them become obese flanks for failing, let them divorce and steal, let them wear their white collars and sleep fitfully in their California King beds.

Give me the wild, the untraced lands beyond the developers eyes. Give me the less giving life, where survival is enough to stave my mind from pondering the stars.

Let the bears and lions come. Let them stalk me in the night that I might feel genuine fear, rather than handing over my worthless paper in exchange for a ticket, a second had vision cast on a silver screen.

Let my hands grow dark with the stains of earth. Let my home be a pile of stone that I placed with the labour of my own back. Leave me to hide in the dark of my own making as the night storms outside, lightning and fire silhouetting the forms of beasts that would dine on my body.

Let the fires born from that lightning wash over this world so that when I emerge from my stone holdfast I can see the pure ashes before life fills the void. Let my tears wash away the soot on my face and from those tears let the first plants grow.

Count each tree as they spread from my tears and watch their seeds drift on the windy screams of my loneliness, until the world is covered and I walk through the new forests naming each tree like extended family.

Let my body fail. Once strong hands now curved with age and the weight of stone. Let me rest against my holdfast in the unfiltered sun, so that I might sleep an honest sleep.

Let the birds and foxes come to take away my bones so that the world can move forward as it did before “civilians” came to “civilize” it.

Let the sun burn out. Let the cold emptiness of space expand until no chemical or quantum mechanic is left to wind down it’s mathematics. Let it all end. No more dreams. No more vibrating energy. A thin haze of separated elements suspended in the lightless vacuum. Pray for silence.