The dancing rainbows

of plastic bottles in the street

had a way of catching her eye.

She filled her pockets with broken

pieces of colored something-or-other,

and she knew without question

that it was beautiful.

So she tied them, one by one, to a piece of yarn.

Jewels for the necklace

that she left on her mother’s vanity,

on top of the white wooden jewelry box;

its shiny surface reflecting in the mirror,

and that she woke up

to find poking out

from under two kleenex

and a rag of cat throw-up

in the trash.

Tags: brigits flame, poetry, trash
Current Mood: Sneezy

                A little girl crouched, staring intently at the ground.  She wiped her purple hands on her new skirt and immediately returned to her work.  The steady scraping of the chalk blended with the sounds of morning, like a songbird who had awoken with a scratchy throat. 

Current Mood: sneezy

Tags: brigits flame

Tags: brigits flame; prompt
Current Mood: groggy

Sun shone off the steam slowly rising in the morning air.  

Current Mood: sleepy

Once there was a girl named Kate

whose one talent was to aspirate.

She filled her lungs with 8-inch slate,

and crayons, and books, and dinner plates,

which made her mother quite irate.

“How will you ever find a mate?”

(every day her mother would berate,)

“I’ll never leave you my estate,

Until you settle down and procreate!”

To her mother’s consternation,

Kate never ceased her aspirations.

She took trains from station to station,

to aspirate across the nation.

Until one day, to Kate’s frustration,

she tried to aspirate a red crustacean,

resulting in— her expiration!*

*Note: "Expire" literally means “to breathe out.”  

Tags: brigits flame
Current Mood: sick

Fire in their Eyes

Saturday, March 21, 2009

10:22 PM

            The fire crackled, and the marshmallow puffed, charred, and finally melted off its stick, leaving a trail of sticky goo.  Andy's clear blue eyes were staring into the fire, not noticing the white blob that was now flaming on the end of his stick. 

"Andy!  Andy!  Hey! An-dy!"

Andy didn't speak, but his eyes flickered briefly to the loud, bright boy beside him. 

"You lost your marshmallow" David offered.   Andy slowly removed the stick from the flames.

With its charred tip he drew a circle and surrounded it by three diamonds.  "Oh, that's pretty" David smiled.

"For protection" croaked Andy.  His ears twitched.  "You don't hear drums, do you?"

"Hey, lighten up, shorty.  We've got marshmallows and a fire! Ligh-ten UP!"  David shouted the

last word, and Andy leapt to his feet.  With a trail of marshmallow bits and smoke Andy's stick whistled through the air and caught David smartly on the side of the head.

"Be quiet!" he hissed.  "You don't want to wake them up." 

"Them?"  David looked around.   There wasn't much to see as far as he was concerned.  They had

managed to find themselves in a little clearing surrounded by pine.  A small fire crackled inside a makeshift circle of different sized stones.  In front of them the pines cleared, and they stood staring at a sheer cliff face that was as smooth as though someone had polished it purposefully.  Set into the rock like diamonds in a ring were seven skulls, each with a different expression of spine-tingling anguish. 

"You mean … the boneheads?" David shrugged as Andy glared.  "Well I'm sor-ry.  You made it

sound like a camping trip.  Like we were gonna find treasure or pirate ghosts or stake some werewolves or something--"

"You sounded a lot more professional the way Amy described you."

"Oh? Does she talk about me? What'd she say? C'mon, c'mon!" David narrowly dodged another

swing from Andy's marshmallow stick.  "All right lighten --"

"Shh!"

"What?" David stammered, but he knew before he asked.  He could feel it.  Something had

descended like a new winter snow.  The silence was so thick now that it crushed his ears and made him feel as though he were breathing into a pillow.  "What's happening?" he wheezed.  He tried to keep from whimpering. 

            Andy's eyes were rigid as stones.  "She didn't make it." 

           "So now what do we do?"

            Andy rose slowly, knowing his clumsy circle in the dirt would break any second.  "We run," he whispered, but David didn't hear him.   His gaze was fixed on the cliff wall, where fourteen red flames had somehow sprung from nothing  in the eye sockets of the skulls in the cliff face.  His heart pounded so loudly he could swear he heard --

            "Drums."  Andy gulped a deep breath and raised his marshmallow stick.  "Then it's already too late to run."

Current Mood: drained

Happiness in a bottle.

I didn't have much time to work on this this week -- therefore it makes little sense.
 

Water drips, paper rips, little girl with tight blonde curls in a white pinnafore.  Gets her Sunday shoes dirty, jumps in puddles, rains booze to the thirty dirty old men in a dark smoky bar.   Behind a car, rides her trike, grips the handle , lights a candle: flame burns, tale turns:

Pel never liked his name.  To him it sounded like a raindrop in a bucket.  Or a marble dropped to the cement by some child's clumsy hand.  Pel wanted a name that was like a lion roaring.  He wanted a name like thunder shaking dust off the mountains.

Every time Pel thought about his name he felt a little uncomfortable twinge, as though something between his ribs had ripped.  But that's only where it started.  The tiny tear grew.  And grew.  And soon Pel was hateful of everything.  He hated the stones that cut his feet.  He hated the wind that tangled his hair.  And he hated the moon, because it was so calm and peaceful that it made his stomach choke with distaste.

The only thing that Pel did not detest was the sun.  He loved the way it burned; he loved the heat on his head and the light that made others squint.  When he was in the sun his muscles bulged, and he felt like he could do anything.  And so he decided: he would bottle the sun. 

Pel began collecting stones, working only on the sunniest of days.  In the mid-day heat he would sit unshaded and hew them into bricks.  Brick by brick he laid a foundation the size of a country, and began to build his celestial stairway. 

Any other man would have died.  It took far too long for the staircase to be built for one man to live through it.  But as Pel built and grew higher and closer to the sun, he felt strengthened.  His skin browned and tightened and he ceased to age.  The closer to the sun he got, the quicker he could move the stones, until finally he was sitting right on the edge of the sun.  So close that he could reach out and touch it if he wanted.  So he did. 

It felt as though his entire arm had turned instantly to liquid gold.  He felt as though he were the sun, and all the people below at the foot of his mighty staircase were shielding their eyes because of him.  "They will give me a name that rings from the hilltops for this!" he crowed.  And without further delay he withdrew a spoon from his pocket, and began scooping up the sun in little bits and sliding it into the glass bottle he had brought with him. 

He spooned and spooned until there was nothing left of the sun.  The bottle he held was warm and bright, but only on him.  If he held it in his hand, it was covered up, and all he felt was the darkness, and the terrible, terrible cold.  A cold that was too much for every other man, and that was too much even for Pel. 

He fell backwards down his magnificent staircase; it crumbled even as he fell, weakened without the sun that helped forge it.  The bottle flew up out of Pel's hands
 

little girl catches in hand, cracks glass, spills on her dress.  Toes in the sand, wipes at the mess.  Eons ago, lighter ignites.  Little girl takes a bath, then turns out the light. 

Tags: brigits flame
Current Mood: relieved

Tags: quote
Current Mood: drained