So often there is little time in the moment to do anything but breathe
in
It is on reflection you exhale, share the moment
And in others we seek people who can reflect our interpretations,
isolating common features for comfort
And those others come in many forms, a hall of mirrors from around the
world, I seek them out
And this is my Narcissus, my fascination.
The reflected world, one step away from the real world, exaggerated
and retold with a density somehow richer than the moment, pervading
the cavities behind my eyes like perfect casts in the sand.
We hold up these mirrors and shine out our little messages like morse
code.
So often you dazzle me with your light
So often it's just like watching fireflies in the night

Posted by beth

"Is that new?"

"Most babies are new, or at least newish, by definition."

"Most? Not all?"

"It's not important, but there are rare exceptions. I had a second cousin that I met when I was eight, nine, maybe ten years old. He was more than twenty years old, but he never grew more than the level of development of a couple of months old. Never learned to crawl, couldn't hold his head up. Would be a baby all his life. Clearly a rare exception to the rule. Not important."

"Ah."

"But this little head is empty. How shall we fill it?"

"Cereal and milk?"

"Traditional. I like it. What else?"

"Blood and brains? Teeth?"

"Too young for teeth, I fear, but I like the way you think. What else?"

"Television. Sesame Street and Spongebob."

"Classics. What else?"

"Lullabyes. The alphabet. Crayons and blocks with numbers."

"You're on a roll. Keep going!"

"Popping balloons and laughter. Fear of clowns. The flavors of Pla-Doh and Elmer's. Useless scissors with rounded tips. Popcicles."

"Fantastic! And then?"

"Night terrors. Dreams of the smell of spoiled milk. Segments of insects. Puppies that lie there and never move."

"It's like a lasagna of layered flavors! Keep going!"

"The chill of a darkened room with blinking fireflies outide the sunset-heated windows. The frustration of a wooden box you can't get open. A discarded revolver found in a hollow tree behind the playground."

"Slowing down yet? I can see you're slowing down..."

"The smell of a strange woman's perfumed breast. Car headlights at eye-level. Fragments of steel and rich soil."

"Is there room for another layer?"

"Cheese-flavored crackers shaped like fish. The smell of hospital antiseptic. Buttercream frosting salted with tears. More crayons. Purple and black. And a lollipop."

"Perfect! You're more than ready to be a parent. Congratulations!"

[*]

Posted by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. Xalieri

"Pathetic", he said as he stepped over the homeless man sitting outside his
office building. "Some people have no self respect."

As he rode the lift up to the 27th floor, he was seized by a ferocious
sneeze. Looking down into his handkerchief, he saw that his nose had fallen
off. The other people in the lift looked at him in horror. He covered the
gaping hole in his face and fled.

Outside. he phoned his doctor, but while he was speaking his tongue slipped
out of his mouth. It dropped to the ground and lay flopping uselessly on the
pavement.

"This is just a nightmare," he thought. "I'll wake up soon."

He lit a cigarette to calm his nerves. He lost three fingers sparking his
lighter and when he flicked the ash his whole hand fell off. He hurried
away, shedding feet and legs as he tried to run, eventually collapsing in a
limbless heap in front of a smart office building.

He leant against the wall and his eyeballs trickled down his face and landed
in his lap.

"Pathetic," he heard someone say, as they stepped over him to enter the
office. "Some people have no self respect."

Story by DoghouseReilly

Posted by jc1000000

Doctor on the ward, stand up. Nice hat doctor. Enough of your
wisecracks, have you administered any gas? Nurse said we're all out.
Defibrillator? Alas no, but i see what you did there. Rib tickler? Out
with the field quacks. Never mind, how about the squirty flower? Doc,
this ain't a walk in the park! Then it seems to me we're shit outta
remedies - do you remember the last resort? No... I beg you, anything
but that. We have no choice; buckle the patient down.

"What did the Chicken say when kicked in the stomach?"

"Oeuf."







Boop. Boop-boop. Boop. Boop-boop...

Posted by jc1000000

God, I hate him. She hated his hair, his clothes, his voice. So one
by one she set about fixing them. She shaved his head, gave him new
clothes and cut out his tongue. But she still hated him. She hated the
way he walked, the way he touched her. So arms and legs had to go
too. Eyes were next because she hated the way he looked at her. By
the time she was finished, he was just a senseless head sitting on a
shelf. Useless, she thought. He just sits there. Never does
anything.

God, I hate him.

Story by DoghouseReilly

Posted by jc1000000

Moon.
We all have one,
All of us.
Silver in our skies,
Lifting us from the sea.
The slower ones,
We'll wait a billion years for them,
We of the dawn.
How alone we feel,
How pitiful our imaginings of a universe full of talk,
Rich in minds.
We listen and we call
But there is only silent emptiness we can't explain.
We all have a moon,
We treaders of the dawn,
Calling us from our sleep an eon too soon.
The universe is ours for now,
Not locked in deathly silence,
But inarticulate with youth
While we, with our moons,
Must wait.

Posted by Euphro

Can you feel it? Reaching upward?

Not the metal of the antenna itself. That's poetic nonsense. Metal's metal. It's solid, if a bit whippy. It sticks up. It doesn't reach. It'd sag and droop if it could get away with it.

I'm talking about the charge.

The building over there is sitting in a puddle of it. Hell, you're standing in it too, but it's best not to think about it.

If you ever wave a magnet over a pile of paperclips, you'll see them stir and wobble. That's what you feel. The stirring.

Shake the magnet back and forth over the paperclips. They'll start sticking together and clumping up. Without even touching them, you can tease them into a pile, maybe even get the one on top to stand up and reach....

You really do feel it. The creeping static charge moves your hair around, on your head and arms and legs. You can feel it tug on your eyelashes. As the charge climbs over you.

The air, the water, the dust in the air all starts sucking up the charge. Molecules line up into threads and chains and cables that the other charge in the sky teases upward.

Ionized air molecules behave differently, chemically speaking. The air smells sharper. Like tin. It tastes like copper.

That's what's climbing the building and threading its way skyward: ionized molecules joining ethereal hands in a daisy-chain reaching upward, upward -- trying to link with the mirrored chain reaching downward.

If it was dark enough you could see it. The chains of ionized air glow like glowworms.

You can feel it, though. Surely you can feel it.

You're standing in a puddle of charge. You have your own cable of ionized air forming above you, snaking its way up into the sky. You can feel it.

The building over there with the tall antenna on top of it has a couple hundred feet of head start, straining upward to shake hands with the sky.

Hope it wins in the race for the lightning.

[*]

Posted by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. Xalieri

We live in a world of ghosts.
An aftermath.
The Age of Mammals. Great.
We cannot see past the "ordinary" to what was lost.
We look at trees whose sharp and bitter leaves
Avoid the meal they will never be,
And branches that grow high to escape
Mouths that will never reach for them.
We listen to a dawn chorus that has lost its baritones.
I miss those ones I've never heard.
And wonder how it would have been
To look into the eyes of Troödon,
Or out of them.

Posted by Euphro