©2021 Michael Raven
failing your litmus test of purity only leaves me smiling & smug
Author: Michael Raven
Writes. Not very interesting. Mostly harmless.
thought+memory/
©2021 Michael Raven
i walk my own path through the woods with wights clinging to my side -- they remain silent watchful, waiting for the dim one to learn how to speak their tongue phantom passing touches of strangers give slight warmth, but never ever enough & the mists always return to chilling flesh, bone, heart they hop: branch to branch to ground to stump to rot sometimes laughing at the fool following sometimes chiding the child who is following sometimes silently guiding the man wandering down the narrow wooded path -- memory escaping -- thought deepening while the trees backfill the footprinted loam behind
secrets untold/
©2021 Michael Raven
into the forest wode stained & intrepid to waken from slumber the old paths the old ways under hillock & over knolls whispering, the shadows of secrets untold
hearts/
©2021 Michael Raven
digging dirt
for
low places
to find
those hearts
beating
underground
ways/
©2021 Michael Raven
the new ways lie broken shattered and painted in dried blood stigmata the culling of overgrowth ignored the groves return old growth, old ways, old songs where honor still lives fathered by ash oak thorn we sold souls for tuppence where we should have kept the gold hold on to the old ways hold on to before gambled lives gambled lies time to toss the dice & watch the bones dance before settling the score
entre chien et loup/
©2021 Michael Raven
trees flicker with the light & death of day the night sliding thief-like into the sky with indigo, tyrian & byzantium fingers quenching the fires still burning the forests bright i think i saw you smiling though the shadows may have lied -- they often do winter tide hands clutched, you stole to the forest garden my ghost in tow, stumbling over root rock & the fates tangled skein woven we lay in the leaves, snow & loam we became the heat stoked with fires within we were wine & earth & fire -- you devoured me whole flesh & blood consumed, i made you whole
entre chien et loup = between dog and wolf [French idiom for dusk]
ugly/
©2021 Michael Raven
embracing
ugly me
i reject
your standards
of beauty
P.S.
And I don’t care one whit what all those bastards say.
Pluto is STILL a planet. So bite me.
Erasure
While, in some respects I understand the motivations for certain decisions being made recently, I have to admit that I get tired of erasure of my past versus substantive discussion of historical wrongs that offend a world that seems to be hell-bent on being offended about nearly everything. And, in the process, milquetoast-ing the world to sanitize it of anything that might be hurtful. I’m not talking one side or the other — each side in this has been doing it’s damnedest to make sure their narrative is spoon-fed and consumed without question while each are furiously try to rewrite history as if nothing ever happened except for their own variant of the tale.
These are opportunities to discuss and educate, but you can’t do that when you scrub every nasty little “FUCK” from the graffiti-laden walls. That offensive “FUCK” was there and, instead of washing it away so someone else can just put it back up as “FUCKER” to claim it is differsame (using a double-speak equivalent of my own). Own that history. Accept it. Learn from it. Don’t pretend it didn’t exist because it hurts your tender feelings to see plain evidence that it once existed.
We’re taking the lowest-common denominator of the pampering 70s and 80s to a new extreme instead of looking at things head on and discussing them like mature societies will. Instead of growing adults, we are growing overgrown children because they have to be protected from the past. Erasure and overprotectiveness won’t solve the problems we face; meaningful conversations can and will.
Too bad people are more concerned about wiping away the symptoms instead of addressing the disease head-on.
/rant
Fetish.
©2021 Michael Raven
From the trees hung trinkets and talismans, bone fetish and feather. Was it red paint or scarlet blood splashed in the trees and on the scattered dead leaves? Laura could not tell, though the cinnabar stuff was far to viscous to be paint, she knew, which left scant few other options as to what those slaughterhouse hues might mean.
The wind shifted, rattling the bones hollow, the devil’s own xylophone playing on the wings of air. She felt, rather than heard, the subvocalized growl forming from the perimeter. The sound permeated the thick air and came from everywhere and no place, trapped in the amber moment. Laura knew she should run, but was trapped indecision, though she knew her chance at escape was evaporating. The only movement was the bones settling back, the clickclack song fading into the night as she stood there, frozen before the cacophony erupted and she screamed.
