Mess Age

“I see you,” I said softly and quickly in an effort not to make a big thing of it, and just to show my gratitude, but as ever, something like a spell was broken merely through the utterance. In other words, I fucked up today by attempting to place myself on top of the situation and stepping on marshy feelings that do not appreciate recognition. Everything that’s manifest around here, and I do mean pretty much everything, is meant to be understood through implication and inference; “it’s the words they don’t want to hear.” Does this make them smug, as if they were parading around with a superior sophistication, or am I just uncouth for wanting to call a shovel a spade and pretending it digs the same hole? In any case, I acknowledged my cohort’s presence, not seeing him as a doppelganger, but more in the way of supportive back-up, a soft container for my shadow, and for my indiscretion, he fled. I don’t know if I am alone now as I say this, though I feel as if I am, but I wish I could hear the air drifting by my ears as I once did, and ascertain my right to be righteous.

© Michael D. Brown 2013

Originally posted at 6S Social Network

Cant

We are like kids ourselves playing with kids, only trying to maintain a superior outlook. We have our jargon to discuss methodology, to be sure, but never resort to cant, except for the managing director. He uses cant all the time. The flavor of the month when I started teaching at this school was Collaborative Learning. Currently, there is a move backwards to something akin to Pragmatics, albeit with high technology thrown in to spice things up. Just the other day, the MD was telling us the age of the textbook was history, and so, I guess, is storytelling of any length longer than this.

© Michael D. Brown 2013

Originally posted at 6S Social Network

How She Almost Brought Him Home

He did not appear happy she had found him here among the forgotten, in fact, quite the opposite. His rage became incendiary, reddening his neck and the skin on the back of his hands. An acrid odor wafted through the room, and she could not be sure if he had again taken up smoking, or if someone had removed a cheap pair of shoes after walking all over the factory town. She found herself apologizing for doing what she had thought was right. His head bobbed with a palsy she assumed was a recent development. Before she had a chance to say another word, he disappeared completely, so all that was left was a pile of his crumpled clothes lying on the floor beside the unmade bed on which he had been sitting.

© Michael D. Brown 2010

Originally published in 6S Vol.3 – Page 161

Outlook

Cassandra and Arthur Fulman argued all the time; the problem being Cassie’s projecting her own guilt onto Art, telling him he was always predicting negative and dire outcomes. She did not appreciate his spending entire nights cruising the Internet, stockpiling digital copies of the world’s classic literature, amassing tens of gigabytes of music files, photographs, and scanned sketches when she wanted to sit and have conversation after working all day in the hospital’s administration office. For months after he had suffered his fatal heart attack, she couldn’t turn on the computer at home without some reminder of Art, even after changing his wallpaper, and dumping his file links in an app folder and hiding it in another location. Then, to celebrate the anniversary of his passing, she cleaned house, deleting all the e-texts, erasing massive amounts of digital photos and songs, obliterating every electronic reminder of the former thorn in her side, and finally she began to feel free of his presence in her life. She called up old girlfriends she hadn’t seen in years, and went to lunch with some of them, bought some new clothes in a larger size, and even began eating chocolate again. However, Cassandra was willing to admit to herself something bad was in the wind when she opened her e-mail client at work a week later and read, in Arthur’s handwriting, a note saying, hey, where's all my stuff - cannot find anything over here.

© Michael D. Brown 2009

Originally posted at Six Sentences

QWERTY

Chimpanzee Moko sat at a typewriter three hours a day every day except Sunday, when his trainer took him to church and he rested. After three years, Moko had finally tapped out a coherent short story. It was surreal in a way, what with misspellings and skewed syntax because after all chimps see things a little differently than humans do. His trainer, somewhat exasperated by all the clacking it took to produce such a short piece of work, set Moko to the task on a laptop with a silent keyboard, but the chimp became distracted by all the images flashing on the Internet, in fact, developed an addiction to surfing until the trainer darkened the screen. At first, seeming disheartened, Moko would not play anymore, but he must have liked pressing mushy keys because he soon took up typing again, and went at it for six months straight, tap-tap-tapping away, until one day in December when he stopped; just stopped and would not move a hairy digit. The trainer, in checking the printout that evening, found at the end, the words, “wot s tha meeening of it all....i m don heer.”

© Michael D. Brown 2009

Originally posted at Six Sentences

Joseph Robert

DEATHCYCLE

A fetus perceives hot, warm dark.
A child perceives reality,
under the glare of a congenital optimism.
An adolescent perceives what should be.
A young adult perceives what could be.
A mature person perceives reality,
under the shadow of a congenital pessimism.
A robust elder perceives what should have been,
and what will likely be again.
A fading elder perceives what was, intercut with reality.
A dying mind perceives warm, darkening past.
A corpse is The Dead, is one yet are none,
and perceive nothing or everything,
Which of these?
Don’t hurry the day, friend, for we’ll both know soon.

I'M HAPPY

For the swirl of my senses
Gels the simulacrums of my mind
Into a serving, that at present,
Makes me seek not endless sleep
Even though, I was . . .
Bought on supermarket clearance, half-price reduction
I’ve surpassed my Use By Expiry Danger of Death Date
With the refrigeration of philosophy
And the nitrates of romantic love
I’m happy
Because I’m not part of the next generation
Of botulism infection vectors

THE GOOD

The Good is no gilded treasure best hoarded away
The Good is a gentle spark dependent on sheltering hands
And the sequential stewardship of those who search
But do not root in mud while planning on wallowing in slops

Giddy about charging seminar fees up the wazooo?
Back to the trough!
Pigs that gobble every snout-scented truffle
Are fit for bacon and tombstones of gelatinous goo.

Eager to share understanding?
Good on you.
But clean up that whole (fire = truffles??) noise;
It doesn’t pay to manufacture sense freelance on spec.

BLOW HARD

You cannot own the wind
But you can sell it
If your politico cronies
Give you a slice of tasty monopoly
And delegate the hiring of a sub-contracting consultant
To secure the day-to-day management of your own subsided
Wind Farm

IRRITABLE BASTARD SYNDROME

Nervous Anxiety:
That Scab Of Years-In-The-Healing Fear
Squirts My Higher Brains Across The Toilet Bowl
Wipe Away and Flush It Round And Round, Never Down
So Hard To Move On When Hate Nests In The Breast Of Id
Wide-Awake, Weary, Wobbling and Weak
Out of spite, Convincing None I’m Out Of Their Sights
With Teeth Gritted, I Shamble To And fro,
Then Plunge Forward
Blood Up And Bent On Having A Really Nice Day
(Rx: Placate With Placebos, Dosing Sugar Pills And Smiles,
We’ll Write This Off As A Case Of A Qualified Cure, Dispensed.
When Life Gives You Bitter Oranges, Concentrate.)

ALTAR IN A CORNFIELD

They built a brick altar in the midst of the rows
Bringing the polyunsaturated fat of the mind
To the polyunsaturated fat of the land
Kernels of wisdom or silage wastage?
Cook it for ethanol, drink it, pop it, burn it or pour it
And that’s what they do, make-believing it’s not corny,
They present the place as the laboratory of a workshop,
But it’s The Church of The Proud Selves Declaiming (Reformed),
And so they monk on, and nun on, and on and on,
Skimming specialist puff pieces,
For their cloister’s cohorts’ bylines, meanwhile
Scattering about the altar their own-sanctified writings:
Humanist orisons after rules-gelded diaries,
Altered to taste.

These scrips are so rarely read for their own merits,
But so often written about,
In Curriculum Vitae
Feel free to knock it,
It’s a career.

© Joseph Robert 2013

Joseph Robert was born and raised in the Midwest. However, he has always been partial to Hawaiian beaches. Nevertheless: Go Badgers! After living and working for several years in rural Japan, he now resides in London with his wife, writer and poet Leilanie Stewart. In his spare time, you can find him at the British Museum trying to teach himself how to read cuneiform. Don’t worry, yes, he has seen Evil Dead, so doesn’t read any of it out loud.

Leilanie Stewart

A FARADAY CAGE WILL KEEP YOU SAFE

I do not wish to be
yet another rivet
painted into the cast iron girders
sealed for eternity
in a rusty, decrepit
railway fence

The train goes nowhere
but it is better to be on it
than a sleeper under it,
than a fence beside it

Look out the windows
along the way
The journey
is all that matters

THOU DOST PROTEST TOO MUCH

Scoot over
for the corrugated iron roof
will ultimately fall

See those pigeons?
One-two-three-four
eating their fill-
it will not crash onto them
they will eat, oblivious

Nobody is immune
this is a disaster
that is imminent,
a concrete tsunami
that we may or may not
be able to surf

Prepare yourself
for when the tide turns
people will scatter,
flee in all directions
and what will you do?

Freeze?
Stand and stare?
Self preservation
is of utmost importance

LIFE IS A-CHANGING

The schoolboys
don’t stink of alcohol
they are not the ones
to be feared
they are decoys
detracting
from the bum
on the street
who staggers
and stinks
of carly specials

This is not
the kind of place
where you’d want
to fall, knowing
that passersby
would pass you by

You are alone
in a scary world,
little child,
so keep your wits
intact

LONG HAUL

And now
I have a dead left leg
and my belly hurts
and my eyes sting
at the sight
of the see-through knickers
on the line

they’re made of net,
what a catch!

Isn’t this prison existence wonderful?

SHOW, NOT TELL

This
grey matter
this ball
of squishy,
squashy,
saturated fat
is oversaturated
with puss and shit

This
sat-upon
oversaturated
shit
holds so much
squishy, squashy
purity,
but the masses
wouldn’t comprehend

Misanthropy
it ain’t
for if there weren’t sheep
the beauty of the shepherd
and the devilry of the wolves
couldn’t be appreciated

There hangs
the golden sheep
taunting us so readily
but they are unequipped
with a long enough rod
to reach it

Wield your shepherd’s staff!
All you abysmal sheep.
Reach the damn fleece
that you can’t see hanging
before your eyes
because of all the glinting gold

What you didn’t know
is that the fleece already fell,
cloaking your head
with a suffocating blanket

The blanket
ain’t made of wool-
it’s polyester,
ha ha!

I warned you
it was filled with puss and shit,
let me remind you-
the grey matter

The grey matter
has been skull-fucked
into a thousand fragments
of anterior cortex,
right hemisphere,
left hemisphere,
leaving only the reptilian brain

A reptilian brain
ain’t no good
in the skull of a ram
oozing rotting flesh

RIPE FRUIT

Will I ever grow up?
The vine says no
Which vine?
Not the grape vine-
the vine with spreading lianas
the vine delving into
the depths of a slumbering
consciousness

Why bother growing up?
When the acrid clouds are waiting…

It is better to stay
young and unplucked
free of herbicide,
free of pesticide,

hanging on the vine.

© Leilanie Stewart 2013

Leilanie Stewart is one half of a writing couple - the other half is Joseph Robert. By day she runs a creative writing workshop for teenagers and by night she publishes her writing in print and online magazines in the US and UK, as well as reading her work at spoken word events. Her writing blog is at www.leilaniestewart.wordpress.com