Lumpy's Lament

in this excerpt from my novella-poem, "Sludge White and the Seven Curmudgeons"

the magic mirror happens on Lumpy, a hapless victim of the shape shifting shade,
floundering in a perceptionless dimension.

*****************************************

a fine glaze of lilac sprouted on its surface,

spreading like a breath caressing the glass.

the mirror was inspecting the margins,

scarcely attending to avoid appearing crass.

this usually resulted in raised up hackles;

an awkward task he repeatedly shirked.

but just now he was cracking a mystery;

intent on disclosing the spot where it lurked.

it was no closer.  nor was it farther.

he'd smacked up against yet another solid wall.

he'd have to consider a different approach,

if he hoped to make any progress at all.

so he slanted his linear perspective,

bending reflection in pioneering shapes;

reimagining angular distances,

deepening doorways into lopsided gapes.

skimming on the rim of an altered dimension,

dredging up wedges in a cubist maze;

he pried open portals in hinges of windows,

probing proportion in outlandish ways.

sidestepping into a surreal existence,

where perception was stretched most obtusely;

he peered down a dwindling tunnel and blushed.

there was someone right there, weeping profusely!

darkness.  thick darkness.  opaque and obscure.

a singular freedom from the dictates of form

left Lumpy less affected by shapelessness,

indifferent to the laws informing the norm.

he could easily recall the broken candle

he'd happened on while heading back to bed.

the very one Gramps had been carrying

when he nearly mistook him for the walking dead.

but as he knelt on the stairs to retrieve it

a heart-stopping shadow perverted his space;

surrounding his senses in an instant,

lacing up his skin in a paralytic brace.

then the wind was expelled from his stomach,

as he felt the effects of an onrush of gall;

and succumbing to a mind-numbing terror,

grasped he was helpless and couldn't even crawl.

and it seemed to him then that he was falling,

spinning and splashed by a bout of vertigo;

as if he'd been forcefully flung from the earth,

but with gravity lapsed, had nowhere to go.

his reception of perception was severed,

hermetically sealed in a reticent case.

objective reality had come undone,

displaced without trace by disabling embrace.

gradually adapting to absent externals,

his urgent readiness began to fade.

and he mused on the menacing faculties

plausibly possessed by a shape shifting shade.

he left off expecting imminent rescue

for time ran out, having nothing to measure.

and came to accept his grim abeyance,

relinquishing relief from limiting leisure.

his mind filled the void with films from his past,

narratives to soften the unrelenting truth;

stoking the legacy of daunting derision,

hounding the hours that haunted his youth.

with no distractions the deluge descended,

a torrent of scorn on a shame-laden wave;

till he felt once more like that ridiculed boy,

pouring out his heart in the drought-stricken cave.

Lumpy was jolted by the revelation

that his sobs had crossed the insensate divide.

for the darkness resounded with dejection,

blurting the burden he'd buried deep inside.

as surging regret at last depleted

he detected the rumble of a shunting sound;

gradually invading his awareness,

like a train derailing metaphysical ground.

then a blinding flash opened up the heavens,

as his eyes adjusted to a newfound sight.

the palest hint of a far off glimmer

had introduced a dazzling speck of lilac light.
******************************************
- Evan Hawthorn, the 28^th of October, 2015

the Tempting of Princess Pasty

an excerpt from my novella-poem, 'Sludge White and the Seven Curmudgeons'

************************************************************************

fingers of fog clutched the Curmudgeons' cottage,

a rancorous vapor, spiteful at its core

as the craggy old hag menaced the entrance

and rapped her palsied hand on the makeshift door.

she wasn't prepared for the petulant hat rack

brandishing hooks and itching for a fight

poking past the princess in her rose-pink wreath,

beaming a smile that could banish the night.

"good morrow, madam.  come in and rest a spell."

Pasty curtseyed, a twinge tinging her brightness.

for its part the hat rack clearly had doubts

this leering bag of bones warranted politeness.

"that's just like you, dearie!  cordial to a fault!

it's the reason i've come, though i mustn't stay.

i've brought a small token to express my thanks.

once i've given you that, i'll be on my way."

she hobbled in, clinging tightly to her basket,

a mouldering stench trailing in her wake.

the battlerack swaggered back to its corner,

puffing out its hoods for appearances sake.

a few of the self-starting candles blazed

staving off the haze in its steady, seeping creep,

independently sparking and dousing

like lazy twinkling lights in intermittent sleep.

the bearskin watchrug snarled round a corner

its gritted teeth bearing an inscrutable air.

at the crone's approach the couch shuffled backwards

so she seated herself in a wary chair.

as Sludge White asked "and did you find your daughter?"

the drapes were pestered by a persistent breeze.

wresting her attention from the furnishings,

the hag looked startled and vaguely ill at ease.

"your directions were right on the mark, dearie,

leading straight to my son-in-law's humble farm.

i've brought you these apples from their orchard,

a new variety called Anastasia's Charm."

placing her baubles in front of her feet,

she handed the juiciest jewel to Pasty.

"it's just the thing for tarting up a pie.

have a bite of this one.  they're ever so tasty!"

a gust of wind tossed the billowing curtains

angrily snapping as they flapped through the room;

kicking up a dusty, blustering ruckus,

shaking the shadows that clustered in the gloom.

as the clicks from the clock swallowed the silence

and the walls resettled their self-dusting shelves,

Sludge White reached for the shiny red apple

and the candles held their breath, steadying themselves.
****************************************************
- Evan Hawthorn, the 27^th of October, 2015

guardians of the gilded gang

notwithstanding the outstanding differences
between Bernie Sanders
and the pandering clowns
in their gas guzzling car,
the debates reaffirmed the lockstep,
preordained,
unquestioning adherence
that girds the gilded rule:
if you vote for a
Democrat or a Republican,
you are voting for war.

elegy for a withered harvest

the trail of torture
traced through the sleek,

redacted shadows

from its beta testing emissaries

and coup-installed thugs

back to the blood-soaked and belligerent

lawless land of its devising

has had quite a run

and found its way

into every sadistic nook.

just ask the whistleblowers,

the hapless innocents

rotting in Guantanamo,

the ailing black panthers

in their isolating cages,

the fallen emancipators in Egypt,

or the doctors locked up

for healing the heroes of Bahrain.

it continues to pay out its

twisted dividends,

much like the land mines

still maiming the future of Southeast Asia.

or the harvest of our terror

coming home to roost:

in the huddled masses scouring in their tides

for some unfenced remnant of humane humanity.

in the falling-like-flies,

riddled and repentant veterans

and afraid-of-the-sky children.

and in the tanks and dazzling ray guns

brandished in the fists

of terrorists, drug lords,

and small town cops.

the amnesia that curiously afflicts

America's entitled establishment,

all its predators, peddlers, and purveyors

of mind-numbing pablum

fails to blot out the shell-shocked reality,

its weeping roots,

or its cancerous ramifications.

the toll of our relentless

Middle East aggression

is perhaps a million dead.

another half million

longed-for children

were slowly sacrificed

to our sanctified, sanitized sanctions.

only a fraction

of what we managed

to achieve in Southeast Asia.

but the mongers are not idle

and more targets tantalize

on the yawning horizon.

anyway, they stopped counting

their corporeal crops

when they embedded our journalists,

yanking the covers over shying eyes

as they authorized the sleep of souls.

such soothing slumber eludes me

as i listen to the crowding voices

wailing in the wretched wind,

seeping through the sound bites

telling silenced, severed stories

of inessential, foreign lives.

thus lonely-eyed and weary

i await the awakening;

a bitter dawning of lamentation,

when the depth of our

incalculable loss

is finally understood.

and i wonder at the lavish strains

of righteous indignation

spilling into streets and tv screens,

marching in step with its

convenient consciousless denial

and privileged self-focus;

parading in simulcast

sanctimonious solidarity

to affirm the untrammeled right

of the one true religion

to profit from plunder

and express its exceptional disdain.

how can the home of the brave

house such a surfeit of uninformed fear,

plunging collective cowardly heads

in smug layers of self-inflicted

silken sediment

hiding from the knowledge

of its own pitiless, unprovoked crimes?

and how can a land of the free

tolerate such a self-destructive tethering,

the callous erecting

of blinders and barbed wire

on its utterly defenseless

self-impaling borders?

- Evan Hawthorn, the 17^th of October, 2015

love's lingering labours (an excerpt from my novella-poem 'Sludge White and the Seven Curmudgeons')

(in the middle of the night, in the enchanted arbor, Sylvana is mourning the apparent death
of Sludge White (aka Princess Pasty); collapsed in the shadow of her beloved's bier, draped
in its glowing pink roses.  but the princess, having already experimented with dream travelling,
is attempting to transcend the borders of her subliminal state through the seams of sleep.)
********
the vigil of braided incandescence

was swimming through a lens of intervening grief.

for Sylvana resisted acquiescence

clutching tattered hope like an obstinate leaf;

unwilling to renounce unattainable love

achingly at hand, yet out of her reach,

debris of her dreams and crashing emotions
stranded on a shifting, time-encrusting beach.

kneeling in the mingling amethyst shadows

where residual loss had managed to seep,

she ceded reason to the crickets' drone

and reeling into rhythm, rocked herself to sleep.

a whispered silhouette darted through the arbor

as an ivory owl glided by,

dazzled by the moon's commiserating rays

stringing the pearls that trickled from her eye.

the dream began with a flurry of roses

constantly altering an ambient glow,

diaphanous swirls soundlessly descending,

pink satin petals collecting like snow.

and the princess was buffeted by flowers,

exalted by the deer's devotional dance,

held aloft like a venerated icon

that skirted the earth in a somnolent trance.

Sylvana was perched upon her shoulder

rooted in the angles of a spindly legged bird,

her impassive awareness in dreamtime

readily accepting what reason deemed absurd.

and her heart was beating with wings of its own

at strange liquid words her beloved had said,

like sunlight spilling out of the horizon

leaking tidings that her future wasn't dead.

the herd revived their beguiling patterns,

that same arcane ballet she'd seen them do for Hearn

repeating an ineffable lesson

some lyrical muse must have thought she ought to learn.

her fellow birds delighted in circles

attuned to a cadence beyond the range of sound,

scudding crinkled leaves into a whirlwind,

redistributing the surface of the ground.

a tremor shivered her ambling foundation

as Sludge White abruptly opened her eyes,

flooding the warmth of a riveting gaze

on her dauntless protector in avian guise.

and it suddenly dawned on Sylvana

that this abstract tapestry was framed for her sake,

a subtle stitching of sentient seams

contrived by a presence compellingly awake.

arousing the rosy, silk-strewn ether

a brush of Pasty's fingers dusted off a kiss.

and at that precise moment Sylvana awoke
tossed up on a wave of exquisite bliss.

********
- Evan Hawthorn, the 9th of October, 2015
(an excerpt from 'Sludge White and the Seven Curmudgeons')

moose and squirrel visual aid

for those stymied by my oh, so subtle sarcasm,
here, snapped on the day he brought his famous
Moose-and-Squirrel visual aid to the UN,
is a photo of BoBo-the-nettled-Yahoo:

no apology

evidently, this man's family weren't "folks", so there's nothing to be gained politically
by apologizing for "taking them out".
when President Obama responded to Chelsea Manning's revelations by arresting him,
i grasped that he valued honesty as little as the lives of Iraqis.  when he spent more
than an hour on the phone convincing Yemen's president to keep the journalist who
revealed our drones in jail an extra year, his vengeful predilections were made clear.
all in all, i'd say he's eminently qualified to lead a morally bankrupt, terror enhancing
country like ours.  i draw no comfort from the notion that a dishonest monster is better
than a blatant, Republican one.