Happenstance
Summer dreams all fly in a glitter of dust
Under drama the pile grows stale
Series of ages to walk through
Some happy, some sad
Some drama piles on the sadness
Aglitter the lashes flutter
Some dreams grow by stages
Aglitter the trauma fades in
Some dreams leap by bounds
A recollection drifts down the pipe, bursting into flames;
Speculation rings you up
A tremulous voice on the other end
A stark reminder of no guarantees
Languid seething neurons under your skin
First written likely 2015, this poem appears in my book Synaptic Syntactic which you can get directly at the bookshop there or other outlets below. I’ve just submitted it to the Indie Author Project which may get it into a variety of libraries, which I probably should have got around to years ago. Googling, I found out that, despite its abysmally insignificant sale since 2017, it has unbeknownst to me already been added to one multi-city-library system, the Black Gold Cooperative Library System in California (https://blackgold.org/GroupedWork/e0458588-53c8-e539-a6bc-436c7d589791-eng/Home). Rereading tonight I found it still really gobsmacks me and has fewer flaws than I’d feared. I also noticed some things I failed to pay notice of before: the word ‘silence’ makes like a million appearances. The word ‘love’ also does which is strange since that’s one area I’ve singularly failed at. Actually, yes, saying that out loud, it makes perfect sense that it would be everywhere, psychologically. Admittedly, the Story of My Life middle section is quite different to much of the Lunatic Fringes, Stand and Mobilize beginning and Jabberwocky ending pieces plus the various pre- and post- and inter- ludes. This one is from the Story of My Life: noon section. That said, I did file this with Indie Authors Project under ‘Adult Fiction / Poetry’ not ‘Adult Nonfiction / Poetry’ (there are no other base values than those two in the list; Poetry does not get a root category). I think that’s about it for now.
While you’re here check out my store Nautilus Crayon Designs, my website Save the Oxygen which is about the effects of climate change and other human inputs on the oceans, and my eBook Synaptic Syntactic (also available at Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Scribd and iBooks.
Banner image copyright Cooper Dozier created with DALL-E 2. Bottom image by Anne Nygard at Upslash. Interesting you can get DALL-E to do things often REALLY interesting and less flawed by pasting emojis into it instead of just telling it a specific thing you want in text alone, though it takes a bit longer and sometimes fails. The banner was picked from a wildly diverse set of 4 (it makes four for every request) with the instruction “💥🗝️⚙️🦝🌼💥 🎨🎇⏰📍”.
Lost in Mist 