| Airplane Haiku Low-flying airplane. Four nervous friends glance upward: This time no bombs fall. ********************************************************************************************************************** No Bicycle So now I'm a fish with no bicycle. Feeling awkward, exposed to winds (should I say currents?) of fate, feeling like a lost appendage, the missing piece of something bigger. I'm still waiting to see if my lungs can adapt to this water. ********************************************************************************************************************** I Have Spent My Life Preparing for a Disaster that Never Happens 1. Fast If I can, I will run. I whirl, dodge, leap, turn�fall. When raw speed isn�t there (I run shuffling, always likely to sprain something, awkward on legs that don�t hold up) hope must be in strategy: set aside a bag, clothes, food, money, always. Now watch and be ready, ready to go without looking back, into the rain and night 2. Hidden To change appearances is more than just a matter of wigs and clothing. The right makeup can make you seem older; moving like a guy and hiding the long hair can make you look like someone else (who it is safe to be). A person, especially a small and limber person, can hide in spaces much smaller than you might expect. In an emergency duck under someone�s house; there�s often a few feet of space in there, and it�s out of the rain if you don�t mind breathing next to the spiders. This isn�t good long-term though. Hiding for long requires allies who will share a closet, a spare room, maybe a basement. They can bring food and the smell of free air. Try not to resort to this, as it is precarious at best. 3. Invisible Here�s a plan that works for a while: stand perfectly still don�t draw attention belong or at least, be something unremarkable be a dusty nothing reading in the library be nobody walking down the street look like air. 4. Teamwork There�s no point in talking about it, as there is no safety in numbers or anywhere else. If you can learn one thing by watching the mistakes of others, that�s it. 5. Woods Look, here is water and all the providence of nature. You can never starve in the woods. Cattail roots, boiled. Skunk cabbage, boiled in two waters but who�d want to eat that? Gather all the acorns you can, take out the nutmeats, put them in a bag or basket, and dunk them in a stream until water leaches the tannins out. Water lily roots. Inner bark of pine trees. Maple leaves. Berries in summer and fall. Burdock. Wild onion. Pigweed. Reindeer moss, boiled twice and wrung out like a sponge. Seaweed if the coast is nearby. For this you need a good knife, a hatchet, and some string or thread and a needle. You also need courage and patience, sheer stubbornness and a will to live that matches any forest creature�s. A lean living, but maybe a living. 6. Somewhere Else You have to believe there is somewhere else. Soft summer breeze. ************************************************************************************************************* Lark�s Poem �Mommy, when you are a cup, I drink you. Glug, glug.� ************************************************************************************************************* Peacenik thinks about the Corporal Well, did he think the souls of the slain would rest? Troubled times are for the ironic: it doesn't surprise me to see his name pop up on IM or hear he lurks on mailing lists but never posts. I eat irony before breakfast. I pretend to steal his coffee; he pretends to pour me a cup. Eris walks in between us in goddess we trust-- He doesn't know that I know. But I do. Troubled times are for the ironic: I try to get him to laugh. It's the only lesson I have to teach, that if you laugh you don't have to scream. He doesn't scream enough, or laugh. Says he's cranky. I say I'll make him play nice yet, just watch. Friendly nemesis? I always need one, though the game we play is deadly serious. Too important not to laugh, not to see the absurd: the most important tasks must be done light-heartedly. And now I worry they'll send him off to fight yet another war, trim off the green buds of playful life before they can flower. Not fair. Troubled times are for the absurd-- please Eris, save him. ************************************************************************************************************* Scar The keloid scar just below my collarbone is itching/hurting tonight. That scar�s where my port was: every day the medicine flowed into that port, up my bloodstream. The medicine made me feel sick and weak, and next came the walk across the road to radiation. Later, the battle finished for now, I had my port removed. Oh, it was good to sleep on my stomach. I felt less freakish, less consigned to being sick. Now I could forget those terrible months. But every so often that old keloid itches and hurts and pulls, whispering through my skin: �You are mortal. You are mortal. You are mortal.� |
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