haiku 5 Apr 2018

Ruts through frozen mud
Shoots budding into Springtime’s thaw
Birds and beasts return

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

dreamstate writing 14 Dec 2017

I was in a throng of other people all queueing for to meet a powerful goddess. Beyond the sunken earthen trench in which we stood waiting lay snow on frozen ground. Set into the walls of the trench every few meters were crude cubbyholes fashioned out of unfinished pine logs, some of which I recognized as places I’ve slept rough. To our right and stretching above us reached a tall building clad in dark marble panels. As we stepped forward to be received we passed by a number of glass-doored rooms recently emptied of their inhabitants.

When it was finally my turn to be judged, the goddess swirled around me, prodding at my various bits and weighing my soul against Truth. From her back and the top of her head appeared to rise glimmering tendrils of an infinite, invisible energy. In the room with us were dozens of watching people, the formerly queueing multitudes. The goddess noted my progress in many areas, challenging me to defend my case to become bodhisattva. I pointed out the steps I’ve made toward living a life of virtue and compassion but was found lacking, and shown the door.

I returned briefly to consciousness (discovering there a full and pressing bladder), then fell back asleep. The dreaming continued in a vast subterranean room (which, too, was paneled with slabs of dark marble) where I and a number of others were searching for a propellered flying boat that had been lost at sea. Analyzing satellite photographs and old maps we were scouring the wind-swept seas. From time to time I would also put my ear to a staticky handheld radio, hoping to detect a clue. Out of the white noise lept a single word, one which caused excitement yet confusion among the dozen-odd people individuals there: America.

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ] ​

with righteous fanfare

Unearthed from some tundra in a mountain pass is a woolly rhino of world-stunning class, an albino specimen fully intact with food in her guts and with young in her tract. Her size is diminutive she is a dwarf and with righteous fanfare was moved to a wharf and transported quickly lest her tissues thaw and we lose the residues trapped in her maw. Once probed measured sequenced to the nth degree will her pelt and nashorn once more day's light see. It's true she was pregnant when her life did end way up by what's now called as the Sharp Northern Bend where our river Yalung does make a quick right in its snowed-in valley – a curious sight. A shepherd did spy her while out on the vold and knew in an instant that her bones were old and called up the b'andzar to tell of the find then set off a few vagrant lamb-chops to find. Eroded by currents of the nearby stream whose banks with all manner of artifacts teem a landslide exposed to the wildlife around what had until then been trapped in frozen ground. Genetic material pried from her chest will allow researchers her time-line to guess and possibly reveal what caused her to shrink so that from the cup of her secrets we drink. Come by when she's ready and look on her size and stare into her round and sorrowful eyes and learn of her past in the great snowy time before our own species did learn how to rhyme.

​© americanifesto / 場黑麥

bird stays put

Enjoying her moderately-warm perch too much to find another, red-breasted robin #18 didn't even bother to move on this fall's first freezing morning, even though the valley's resident man-child continued to come and go directly beneath her. Dropping her excrement all over his bolted-together old car tires, and violating her flock's rule requiring avian beasts to stay at least two dozen feet away from humans at all times, #18 thought to herself: 'Fuck it – it's too fucking cold to fly away, and this douche-bag doesn't seem like a threat, so I'm staying.'

Wondering if the bird had perhaps frozen to death, the man-child – a lowly whorphan of modest means – concluded that, since she was still balancing on that length of old electrical conduit and had not yet fallen to the ground, she must be alive. He proceeded to split a wheelbarrow full of wood and waited until the robin had flown away in order to return his shit-stained tool to the exact spot whence he had initially retrieved it. While watching from a nearby vantage point – this one caressed by the first warm rays of the rising sun – mademoiselle Eighteen rhythmically uncurled one foot after the other in an attempt to force warm blood into her exposed extremities; her wings she kept tucked tightly against her body, however, using them to insulate her torso against the frigid morning air.

#18 continued to run into the resident whorphan for the rest of the day, fleeing before him a few times as he was performing the season's last mowing with his new muscle-powered push-mower and, later, hopping out of the way as he turned swiftly onto the property's gravel lane and came crunching down it toward the house, on his velocipede. Out of concern for the birds' dwindling supply of little red berries, the man-child decided to stop waffling already and finally bought them a big bag of bird seed.

© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)