Artsy-Craftsy

 Creation is:

A thought made solid.

An urge humored.

A change manifested.

A status ipso facto.

A first act in an indeterminate play.


A reason to stay up.

An excuse for oblivousness.

A desire for more.

A need for less.

A mitigated disaster.

An answer to an unasked question.


A last throw of loaded dice.

A sunset viewed from a gutter.

A songbird flitting through smog.

A crab scuttling into a wave.

A beautiful scar from a painful wound.

A laugh in the midst of tears.


A final warm breeze before a blizzard.

A tree bent double by the wind.

An unexplained conundrum.

A denial of acceptance.

A shy smile, often unreturned.

A fear of sameness.


A patter of snowflakes on a deathly cold night.

A reach with a broken, bandaged hand.

A flair for unease.

A dramatic demonstration of the mundane.

A drowning of ego in id.


A reptilian brain deciding it just don't care.

A repetition seeking originality.

A long walk in a scenic desert with no water.

A cause to despair, ye mighty.

An opportunity to make the WORST THING EVER.

An attractant for philistines, trolls, and backbiters.


A deep bass beat from an unknown source.

A rustle of leaves before a storm.

A penetration of what is with what might.

A knockout blow from a balsawood hammer.

A surrender of dignity for uncertainty.


A half-recalled visit to a demolished building.

A terrifying ordeal, ending with flowers and champagne.

A second chance for a mathematical impossibility.

An equation: ∞ = 0+x.


A sigh of exasperation.

A lust for a nonexistent lover.

A stiff neck and a pain in the back.

An unheralded tear running down your cheek.

A hope for a hopeless cause.

A last uplift before the inevitable crash.


A bad idea.

...But there are no good ones.

Microbes In The Archives

Create to live forever, so they say

Heedless of the mortal wounds of fads, trends, tastes

(And the certainty of offending tomorrow with your yesterday)

Words endure, pictures a thousand times more

Don't be dissuaded by unpopularity

Produce for its own reward;

Someday, somewhere, someone will get It.

And the frozen shards of You within

Will rouse and rise again

Like cryogenics without the runoff

Hail, the returned Creator,

Without the grotesqueries of life to mar their divine name!

But a bitter irony blocks the way:

You will never be immortalized

If your mummifiers are mortals

Intent on their own extinction.

And a lone, gnarled pine

Twisting sedately in millennia of morning breezes,

Will long outlive the fools who buried themselves

Without first learning to breathe.

Better create for amoeba instead!

The Sandbox

The desert breeds prophets, it seems.

For lack and desolation

Demand austerity and fatalism

Offering space for belief in return

Provided there is only one.

Henotheism is silent in its solitude

Talking to the One and Only

Becomes an internal debate

An endless war against Self.


A peace treaty demands witness

And companions cry for more for less

Divine laws are carved into sun-bleached rock

Unmalleable at birth, made to be broken

Or eroded until indistinct in interpretation


Like a mirage, simmering in the raging heat

Only to reveal a reflection of an empty bowl

When approached in hopeful anticipation.


Only the great Shadow and its castings

On the sterile earth

Under a blank sky

Waiting to die

And become fuel

For the Chosen

To strangle the air

And broil the land

(Why should the Sun have all the fun?)

Lift Hell from the holy books

And sear it into Life,

Where it ought to be.


Slow-roast it all, ash and concrete and sand

Spin this globe to a glassy eye

Its dark pupil fixed firmly on heaven

Its cornea reflecting weary faces from below

Its hard shell bearing no footsteps to follow

Just the etched sayings of the prophets,


Too loudly prophesying

To hear the here and now. 

Staring longingly at an imagined past

While the future shrivels in mute neglect

And what could have been

Becomes what was, before

You burned the Garden.


Carbon scattered and swept away,

Tracing its passage with elemental progeny

Burning bright silicon

Its eternal playlist looped to endless repeat:

History.