Category: Writing

Everything drips. A busted pipe in the apartment above, the one above this ceiling of clouds, has been running for days. Everything drips. The metal chairbacks, the table’s edge, the glistening needles on bushy pines. The puddles shimmer with pock-mark drops. Each drip a sour plunk or plink on this toy piano.

Green skies tint the evening light. A squirrel stands on the deck rail – front arms folded nervously into her chest as though she might say, “oh me oh my, the rent check bounced.” Her eyes, the color of black walnut, remind me of a teddy bear.  Swishing her tail, she scurries away.

Rain is on the way. A man and his black dog duck behind a car. We avoid each other on walks. Three minutes and 50 feet: pulling, tugging, walking, scolding, lunging, barking, snapping, correcting. Five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes later, one of us is still flustered, embarrassed. It’s not the dog.

The evening hours feel gumdrop slow and cough syrup thick. The NyQuil sky in my mind’s eye is midnight blue and sea green swirl. Hill Country blues drone, wail, and croon on the hi-fi. The surfaces have all turned smooth. Time is sliding by. Come on… come on and go with me.  

Lost lost lost. In my head I’m lost. The sun is out – shining bright. The day will ease into warmth. In my head and on my walk and as I make my lunch, I’m lost again. I’m building a national institute, fighting the good fight, spinning off projects that never get planted.

Frosty morning light, late April. A few birds chitter in the trees. Their songs more reserved, less exuberant than on warmer days. The cold shocks the waking world back into its shell, grinds to a halt the progress of spring’s bloom. The bluing sky looks crisp and thin. Winter pays another visit.

A chained dog (black and white) barks as we walk past. My dog stops to sniff the base of the stop sign. Near this intersection, a dog once broke its chain and killed another dog. I tug and drag. He’s an anchor insisting on sniffs. I mutter “why are you so difficult?”

A propeller plane crosses the sky faster than the white clouds drift. Once in the Mississippi Delta, a yellow crop duster flew low and near the highway – cotton fields. I held my breath as we passed. It was smaller than this plane. Both broke the silence, churning and chopping the blue-sky air.

On the umber-stained deck, pollen clumps in yellow dots like plastic stars glowing in the bedroom night.  A robin cuts the air with a sharp arc turn – lands in a weedy patch of grass. Behind me, I hear the static crackle of squirrels scrabbling up the loose bark of an aging pine.

Blue Jays scream… and scream and scream. Last week’s maple buds unfurl to waxy leaves of purplish-red, wine, fandango, and smitten eggplant. Each one a jazzberry jam popstar in the sparkling light – their Byzantium dawn. Pollen dusts the car, the railing, the backyard deck.  Eyes itch… and itch and itch. Jays scream.

The sun is out and there’s another article about the chatbot telling lies. I can’t rule out that this is all fiction. The sun, the dog licking his paw, the chatbot’s lies, the stories about the chatbot’s lies. This is just another tale about a guy waking on a sci-fi sunny day.

Song lyrics dance on the mind’s stage and just as quickly exit with a vaudeville hook. Talk is cheap, my darling. Eyes close, thoughts doze. This is the half-dream state of late evening. “Hime for treason” isn’t a sentence. Write it anyway. Words that aren’t words, write anything that crosses this canvas.