People Person

By popular request (by which I mean two kinda buzzed people in a bar that may have been just humoring me) I am posting my horror story that I wrote for my horror class last semester. Enjoy:

Aaron could not sleep. It was three in the morning and he was completely awake. He had managed to nod off for a few hours here and there, but now when he closed his eyes he did not feel tired at all.

“But this is to be expected,” Aaron thought to himself, watching the shadows on the ceiling. “Nothing can be done about it.”

After all, it was very natural for him to have trouble sleeping on this particular night. He was living in an apartment that had no furniture, in a city that he had moved to only last Sunday. And he had started at a great new job last Monday. It was all very fast and exciting. It was very natural for him to have trouble sleeping. But, more than anything else, he was wide-awake because he was going to be on national television in the morning.

Not that Aaron was very worried about going on T.V. He had given many televised press conferences since getting into the public representation business more than five years ago. But in this new job, he performed the duties of a national press agent for the first time in his whole career. Aaron had never had so much responsibility before. His face would be all over the national news tomorrow and yes, he admitted to himself, he was a bit nervous.

But nerves were just an annoying necessity in a job such as this one. If you aren’t nervous than you won’t do a good job. He did his best work when he was right on the edge. It’s when I start to relax that I get lazy, he thought.

The silence of the bedroom was broken by a bump somewhere. It seemed to come from the other side of the door next to his closet, but Aaron quickly ignored it. When he had moved in on Sunday, Aaron had not liked that door next to his closet. It opened from his bedroom into a long hallway that led out to the sidewalk. It was some sort of last minute fire escape built onto the back of the apartments.

But he really did not like having a door that connected his bedroom directly to the street and all the people in it. On top of that, the place was old and falling apart. And all the other apartments in the building were empty, he was the only person living in the whole place. I will have to find another place soon, Aaron thought, and I will find it myself instead of having an assistant do it.

Then he heard another strange noise. It was definitely coming from the door next to his closet. Some people had wandered off the street into the hallway, he could hear them talking. They might come right up to the doorstep of his bedroom at any moment. Aaron sighed and decided to get up to deal with them. He tumbled out of bed onto the empty hardwood floor. It was difficult to stand back up and his legs felt weak. He unlocked the door and went out into the hallway.

It was dark and dirty out there. A dingy little porch ceiling covered the almost outdoor hall. Aaron’s door was at the very end of the corridor and he could see the whole thing. Looking down it, there were boarded up doors to the left. On the right there were windows that just looked at the brick wall of the building behind the apartments. And down at the other end of the hall, Aaron saw people coming in from the sidewalk down toward his bedroom.

“Hey you can’t be in here,” Aaron tried to yell with authority but his voice just croaked quietly. They laughed at him, maybe because his voice was so quiet. There were two big guys with a young girl. She couldn’t have been much over twenty. Aaron attempted to yell again but his throat was very dry. They kept walking toward him so he ran down the hall and pushed one of the guys who stumbled back a little and called Aaron a wimp. This made Aaron very angry and he tried to push all three of them out of the hallway. He used all of his strength to put them back out onto the sidewalk. But his hands couldn’t grip and just slipped across their ski jackets. His momentum carried him forward and he fell on his face. All three of the strangers laughed and then just walked away. He heard them continue to laugh harder when they got back out on the street. The girl blew him a sarcastic kiss, and then they were gone.

Aaron just lay there a moment with his face against the dirty floor. He was very tired and it felt good to be lying down. After a moment he sat up and leaned his back against one of the boarded up doors. All the other apartments in the building were empty, so the owner had put plywood over most of the doors in the back. At one time, it seemed, the bedroom of each apartment had opened up into the back hallway. That way, there was way a direct path from the bedroom to the outdoors without having to go through the living room.

That’s stupid, Aaron thought. Probably just some fire code thing, but still, it’s not safe. He looked back toward his own bedroom at the end of the hall. The two big guys and the young girl were standing in front of his bedroom door. They stared at him without expression. Aaron stood up with some difficulty and faced them. Their expressions didn't change. They seemed like mannequins. Aaron could not figure out how they had gotten around him and down the hallway without him noticing. He looked all around at the shadow and dirt of the hall, and then he suddenly recognized one of the guys. He had gone to high school with him some fifteen years ago. Aaron furrowed his brow: who wears a ski jacket in August?

Oh I see, he thought. But instead of saying it out loud, he made the man at the end of the hall do it.

“You’re dreaming,” the man said and Aaron jolted his head up from the pillow and quickly cast a glance around the bedroom. Just his suitcase, his bed, and the bare hardwood floor.

‘I had better not be tired for my press conference tomorrow,’ thought Aaron but then he once again reassured himself that it was good to worry. He would really have something to worry about if he were not worried at all about going on national T.V. for the first time.

He dug his head back into the pillow and felt the whispering waves start to slowly sink him down into the plush cradle of the mattress. Amidst a great wash of relief, he slowed his breathing and relaxed more and more and more…

“Aaron,” came a woman’s voice from the door next to his closet. “Aaron can you hear me?”
He ignored the sound and curled a little tighter into the covers.

“Aaron you can’t go to sleep yet,” she said through the door. “There’s still one more thing to do.”
He sighed deeply. There was always just one more thing to do before he could finally rest. He got up out of bed again. When he opened up the door a rush of light struck him in the eyes.

The hallway air was lit up a glittering bright yellow and the walls were freshly painted white. None of the other doors along the left of the hall were boarded shut anymore, and on the floor there was a vivid green carpet. A young girl (the same one as before?) stood at the entrance to his bedroom smiling sweetly at him. Her left eye was badly bruised and blood that matched her lipstick trickled out the corner of her mouth. She looked very nice in her little yellow nightshirt.

“Hello I’m Aaron,” he said. “What’s your name?”

She grabbed two of his fingers in her tiny hand and started to lead him back down the bright hallway in silence.

“I’m going to be on T.V. tomorrow, “ he said, yawning as he followed her.

The shimmer of the air in the hallway felt oddly real, oddly lucid. Aaron was aware of the faint notion that he was still dreaming, though he didn’t much care. Mostly he was just exhausted on his feet and was barely able to stand. He wanted to apologize to the young girl taking him down the hallway: sorry, I have to go back to bed now, some very important things to do in the morning. But it wasn’t so bad being there. He would follow her for a little bit more and after…

She then suddenly stopped walking forward and Aaron took a deep breath of surprise. Quickly spinning around to face him, she clapped a hand onto his chest. Taken aback, Aaron grabbed her hand and held on tight. His head swirled amid the look of wonder and terror in her eyes. The lightbulbs crescendoed into a hot, blinding glare. And then, just when Aaron thought he'd never be able to see again, the lights all quickly snapped back to their former soft glitter. For a moment, a distinct after-lightning purple clouded his vision, and Aaron began to realize that he was now all alone.

He looked around the white walls and yellow light of the hallway but she was gone. Instead of her hand he was now holding a broken off table leg. Aaron felt a little too sad to be confused. He was sorry that she had left and wished very much that she would come back. But as he turned to go back to his bed, he realized he was standing in front of an open door. It led into one of the apartment bedrooms. Inside, there were many soft swirling colors and he could see a big comfy chair in the corner. It was a very nice bedroom, if perhaps a little outdated. Aaron thought that he would like to have a nice bedroom just like this one some day, when there was time. Then he noticed that the bedside table. It had been was injured. That was sad. Some one had knocked it over and one of its legs was missing. The same table leg that Aaron was gripping in his hand.

He peeked around the doorframe to see the rest of the room. On the bed, two big men were feverishly doing something. One was pushing his fists into the mattress, while the other had a hand in the sheets while undoing his belt.

Aaron furrowed his brow and looked closer.

The first man wasn’t just pushing into the mattress, but was actually pinning down her arms. The second man was trying to hold her knees open while getting his pants off at the same time. The bruise on her eye was smaller than before, but there was more blood coming from her mouth. It colored all of her teeth and smeared in lines across her cheek. Her whole body squirmed in the little yellow nightshirt. And though he was suddenly deaf for some reason, it was clear that she was crying, desperate to get free. Aaron did not take a moment to think. He marched into the room and, with all his strength, brought the table leg in his hand across the skull of the man fiddling with his pants. A bright red mist sprayed sideways, and in one fluid motion Aaron swung the table leg back around into the bridge of the other man’s nose. It made a sharp wet crunch. With a perplexed detachment, Aaron saw the man’s face completely collapse under the wooden leg. Aaron's head was filled with only one sound. He could hear her scream and scream and scream.

***

A week later Aaron was still under a lot of stress. Everyone had told him that the press conference had gone really well. His coworkers had taken him out for drinks afterwards, but he was still unhappy. It could have gone so much better. The questions about his company’s non-domestic banking practices had been tough, but he knew just how to answer all of them. And he had said all the right things. It was just that he had not responded quickly enough, confidently enough.

‘No it is ok,’ he told himself as he came back to his office from a weekly briefing. ‘No one is perfect the first time. It is good to have high standards but I should not let that get in the way of my focus. There will be another press conference next month, and I will know how to practice and be prepared for them this time. The next one will be easier and I will do much better.’
He was about to go sit at his desk and makes notes on his brief when his assistant, Caitlyn, cleared her throat right next to him.

“Yes?” asked Aaron earnestly.

“Your messages,” she said, and held them out.

“Oh yeah,” he chuckled while rolling his eyes to show he knew how absent-minded he was.

“You know,” said Caitlyn, “the Vice President of Public Relations was talking to the CFO in the hall over there after the briefing.”

“Really?” Aaron looked up from his messages.

“They said that you’re dreadful at your job,” she joked and they both laughed. Then she continued. “But really: they were talking about how the press conference last week seems to have brought back some positive numbers.”

“Already?” said Aaron with a little look of surprise.

“Yep,” she said.

“Why wouldn’t they say anything about that at the briefing?” Aaron already sort of knew the answer to his own question, but he wanted her to feel like she was showing him the ropes of the office.

“They probably just wanted to wait and see if the public opinion stats continue to rise for another week before they announce it,” said Caitlyn, and then added, “to avoid panic with the stock in case it doesn’t hold out.”

“Yeah, that makes sense,” said Aaron, nodding his head up and down real big. He took a moment to reflect on the news. “Well that’s great.”

“Just thought you’d like to know,” she said and shrugged.

“You’re the best, Caitlyn,” he said and then smiled real big. “Really, I mean it.”

Aaron had developed a good habit for talking with his assistants. He tended to chat with them as though he wanted to flirt, but was just too nice and professionally dedicated to actually do it. It seemed like the right way to do it and it worked well.

As he went through his messages at his desk, Aaron thought about the conversation between the VP and CFO. Why would they talk about focus group numbers out where anyone could hear them? It may have been a conversation that was staged for Caitlyn’s benefit. There was no reason for them to talk in that exact spot, especially after coming from the conference room all the way on the top floor. Maybe they figured Caitlyn would tell him about their conversation. But why not just bring him the news directly? Maybe it wasn’t actually true. So why make him think that it’s true? Hard to tell at this point. Aaron would keep an eye on both of them to see how they acted.

One of his messages caught Aaron's attention. It was in an envelope. That was unusual. He never really got direct mail at the office, or at home for that matter. He tore open the letter and it read:

Dear Aaron,
I am not sure if it is you that I am trying to contact or if I am mistaken about whom you are. Please forgive me if I am, but I saw you on television this week and I am sure I recognized you instantly. Twenty years ago I lived over on Enfield Street in an apartment. One night, two men followed me home and burst into my bedroom as I was getting ready for bed. They attempted to rape me. And they may have done it except you came in and stopped them. I only saw you for a second, and before I really knew what was happening you were already gone.
For the last twenty years I have wanted to thank you personally, and when I saw you on the news I screamed in surprise. You do not look even a day older—it is remarkable. I just wanted to thank you for what you did and say that you are very special. You did the right thing, and I hope to hear back from you soon.
Thank you for being my guardian angel,
Erin

Aaron looked at the letter for a long time and then carefully set it on his desk. He pulled out a fresh square of stationary and a nice pen his old assistant had given him when he left his last job. He wrote:

Dear Erin,
Thank you very much for your letter. I am sorry about what happened to you. No one should ever have to go through that and I am glad someone saved you.
But I am afraid that I was not your guardian angel on that night. You see, twenty years ago I was thirteen-years-old and living back in Baltimore. By a strange coincidence however, I now live on Enfield Street and possibly even in the same building. If that is the case then I am glad you have moved into a new living situation. Since I moved into that building, I have been worried about its lack of security.
I hope you are well and safe now, as you deserve to be. Please feel free to contact my office directly if you feel you still need to discuss anything more. Once again, I am sorry about what happened to you.
Aaron

He smiled to himself and set the letter aside to let the ink dry. Yes, he thought, I have handled this in the right and proper way.

Later on that night he came home and once again was reminded that he needed to buy some furniture. It was starting to get depressing. Though he was rarely home, it was not nice to come back to a bare hardwood floor at the end of the day. He set his things on the kitchen counter and wandered over into the bedroom. Absentmindedly, he opened up the door next to his closet and looked down the hall. At the end he could see people walking by on the sidewalk.

‘The landlord really should do something about this,’ he thought. ‘It is a hazard that anyone can just walk up to my bedroom, and the hallway is dingy and ugly. At the very least, my door should be barricaded like all the others.’

He shut the door and took off all his clothes. It was early but he was tired. Aaron put on a clean pair of underwear and climbed into bed. He had had a stressful day, but he felt more relaxed almost immediately. Even though Aaron was a little hungry, he did not really want to get up and make any dinner. There was a little knock from the other side of the door next to his closet. Aaron rolled over and tried to get some rest. Another knock.

“Hello?” she said through the door.

Perhaps it was best to get some kind of gift for Caitlyn, thought Aaron. She has been doing well and I want her to keep working hard.

“Aaron can you please open the door?” she said loudly.

He lay completely still.

“Why did you send me that letter?” she said, her mouth a little slurred from the blood. “It was such an awful mean thing to do. You may as well have tricked me.”

Shadows danced across his suitcase, the bed, the wood floor. He heard her body slide down the door and sit on the carpet.

“I mean I guess I just thought,” her voice cracked and she started to sob. “I mean you were so nice and you saved me from those men. It just seemed like you did it because…”
Aaron sat up in bed. She was sitting on the ground, on the other side of the door. He pictured her yellow nightshirt on the green carpet. The bruise on her pretty white face.

“I guess I thought that you cared about me is all,” she said, crying with her head pressed against the door. “I don’t know why but I thought that you loved me. It was so horrible when those men came in. You know, I get so sacred sometimes that I can’t even move. It has been so very hard for such a very long time. Nobody has ever understood or been able to do anything to help. It has been awful, just awful. And I think that maybe I love you.”

Tears reached her mouth and ran together with the blood. She broke down completely and couldn’t get out another word. The only noise in the bedroom was the quiet heaving of deep long sobs coming through the door.

Aaron dropped his head down. He pressed his chin hard into his chest and he closed his eyes very tight. There was a horrible pain in his chest.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Missed Calling

"It pains me to imagine the very probable truth that over the next 20 or 40 years, children will become completely disobedient to their parents. When they are told to behave, they will, being children, ask why...And when they are told that they must behave in order to please God, they will wail and cry that none of the other children at school don't believe in God."
-From On the Morality of Youth, written by William Goodwin Grant in 1884

I have been receiving missed calls
like the feeling of standing at the airport
holding a sign bearing the name of someone you once loved
who also missed her flight,
I have been receiving missed calls.

I get at least seven a day.
Why am I never there to pick up?

The calls I always miss are always from the same number
which I'm convinced must mean something.
I've taken the digits to the top numerologists
but they have assured me that it is not
the longitude coordinates of a mysterious Parisian apartment
nor all the prime numbers divided by each other
nor the last ten digits of pi
But just an ordinary number from a real
and ordinary phone.

I guess that makes sense.

Then let's try to figure this out logically:
Who has the power to spy on me
so completely
that he knows to call when I am
asleep or in the shower or daydreaming
or all the reasons I am ever away from my phone?
And to remain unnoticed and anonymous?
Does such technology exist?

When I call the number back, you see,
I get a busy signal.
Perhaps he (or she) is placing a missed call
in someone else's phone
or trying to call me at the exact same moment.

My father's twin brother, who is a priest,
told me it is God.
Experts tend to claim all problems
fall within their area of expertise.

He said that the calls are a simple symbol,
that God is calling me but I am not there to listen.
And I told him what my father told me,
what my father learned in school,
that God has not abandoned us
but he is hiding like a squirrel
around a tree trunk
on the other side of the Sun.

My father's twin brother, my uncle,
warned me to be careful,
"Don't be like Pascal
and trade your personal relationship
with God for a professional one."

There is a simple way to solve this.

I know that societies are remembered by their myths
And thus
Ours will be remembered by the ridiculous notion that "a watched pot never boils"
And thus
I place my cell phone on my bed
kneel on the floor beside it
and wait.

But now I've been waiting for years, and
as I grow ever more hungry, ever more gaunt,
I begin to wonder whether my cell phone
or I will run out of battery first
before He calls again.

My Stalker Roger

Exactly four years ago this month, I got the first letter from my stalker. Though I’m not sure that “stalker” is the right term. I was never followed around, I never got a restraining order, and I never even talked to the police about it. My stalker communicated with me almost entirely by letters left on the door of my dorm room. But the first letter that he sent wasn’t even addressed to me. It went to my professor and the Residential College office.

The first I heard about it was when the RC office sent me a vague email just before the holiday break in December. They asked if I could come in for a “discussion” with Jennifer Myers, who runs student affairs. When I sat down in her office, she immediately handed me the letter.

It must have been about three hundred words in loopy font. At the top in said “Dear Leslie Hutton,” who was my professor, and at the bottom it was signed with my name. In between the two was the silliest love letter I can possibly imagine. It had phrases like, ‘Dearest Leslie, O! How I ache for your loving embrace. When I see you, my heart flies over the roofs of East Quadrangle like old St. Nick and his reindeer through the sky. The curve of your dark glasses, the shine of your silvery hair brings a soft joy like the feeling of warm pudding cupped between my hands.”

I’m not exaggerating, it was really that weird.

Jennifer Myers, with whom I was on pretty familiar terms, gave me a few minutes to read it and said, “You didn’t write that did you?”

“No,” I said.

“I didn’t think so.” She asked if I knew who might have written it and I said that I had no idea, which I really didn’t. Over the next few days I developed a theory. At this point I was a freshman finishing up my first semester, and I thought that it must have been someone in the class I took from Leslie Hutton. That class had its fair share of weirdoes in it, so it was a little difficult to narrow down. But there was one girl in particular that was my prime suspect.

There were a lot of weird things about her, but we had one majorly strange interaction. One morning, all the students were waiting in the hall before class. I made a casual comment to this girl who was sitting on the floor.

“I like you shirt,” I said. It had the cover art for Quadrophenia on it.

“Yeah I really like The Who,” she replied.

“Me too, they’re really good.”

Then after an awkward silence made it clear that this wasn’t leading to a conversation, I said:

“Well I guess we better not talk about them then.”

She kinda laughed and so did I and that was that. Until she sent me a facebook message apologizing for not being friendlier or more talkative, and then ended with, “I think the Who are a really rockin’ band, what do you think?” I never replied to the message and we never spoke out of class again.

She did some strange things while in the classroom though. She claimed to have a photographic memory but clearly did not. One day she gave a presentation in completely normal clothes, but with zebra print guitar-pick earrings (I do not think she knew how to play the guitar). And at one point in the presentation she said, “There were a lot of facts in my project but it was easy because I have a photographic memory.”

So because I wasn’t very nice back then, I wrote down a set of random numbers on my notebook and showed them to her and said I was going to quiz her later. But because, like her, I also I don’t have a photographic memory, I forget to ever do it.

Anyway, though I can’t remember her name, I think she might have sent the letter to my professor. Thus she may have been my stalker, but it’s not an airtight theory. Then about a week later I got a call from my roommate, Ricky Gutierrez. Ricky was a short little bearded kid with a strong Arkansas accent. He went to prison after we lived together, but I think he’s out now.

“Hey dude,” he said. “You got a letter.”

“What do mean? Like in your mailbox?”

“No,” he said, “it was in our door. It’s got a bunch of kisses on it and shit.”

“Excuse me?” I said. It turned out that someone had written me a declaration of love, and then put on lipstick and covered the paper in kissprints. The content of the letter was the same ridiculous metaphors that had been in the letter to my professor. It had things like, “I want to be the morning harbor where you dock your yacht” which I guess is flattering that he didn’t write ‘sailboat’ or ‘schooner.’

I say “he” being the letter was signed “Roger.” And then “p.s: I want to have sex with you” which was a little less subtle than the metaphors, but it got to the point.

I of course found this hilarious and assumed I had just been the victim of an awesome prank. I asked around to everyone I knew who might have done this but no one took credit. As time went on, I became less and less convinced it was a joke.

The letters had been so ridiculous that it seemed impossible that someone had written them seriously. On the other hand, there’s no real point to a prank like that if you don’t come out and laugh at the victim. But no one did. Then things became more unusual.

Roger sent me a couple more letters, one that featured embedded photos of puppies and a rubber glove. Then he opened and IM account called, “iheartbenjamin69.”

First of all, I can’t believe that name was available. And I can’t even begin to recreate all the strange things he wrote to me. I never blocked him, and sometimes wrote back. But he was never much of a conversationalist. Mostly he just made metaphors about having sex with me. This was in the “About Me” section of his profile, and I feel it pretty well represents the sort of topics he preferred to discuss:

Top 10 Reasons Why I Should Be Benjamin Fossitt Townsend's Lover
10. He's single!! go girlfriend
9. He's a liberal - wink wink
8. I think about him every night before bed - and sometimes in the shower
7. he's into random play (I'd like to play with him randomly)
6. I want to caress his large man-meat through his taut jeans
5. We're both virgins - but not for long!!!1!111111!!
4. We both enjoy reading so we can spend long nights in the Greene Lounge caressing each other and discussing our favorite passages of Spanking Kenny's Wife
3. I can't think of any more!! Am toooo horny!!!
2. Because him an me ain't nothin' but mammals so let's do it like they do it on the discovery channel!!
1. Does true love need a reason??/??/?/
HI BENNIE! I N U!!!!!1!1

Now I don’t mean to get defensive, but at least three of these were entirely untrue. For example, I’d describe myself as more of a fiscally conservative moderate with socialist tendencies rather than a liberal (wink wink). Also the logic of number four implies that because I like reading, I’m really into homosexual PDA. But in reality, even if I’m not the one doing the homosexual PDA, I’m not really a big fan. On the rare occasions that I do see two gays making out, I just look the other way. Live and let live. Also, I was not a virgin. I once brought this up to him in our occasional IM chats and asked him to change number five on the list. I didn’t want misinformed rumors spread about me, especially ones that might interfere with me getting laid by someone who isn’t 1) insane 2) anonymous) and 3) a man. But he claimed that I was a virgin because it didn’t count as sex if it wasn’t with him, which I guess makes a certain kind of sense.

There was never any big conclusion to my interactions with Roger. He left me a few more notes, but it started to seem like his heart wasn’t in it. He still made outlandish and suggestive metaphors, but he wasn’t really trying to branch out into new areas. It felt like he was just doing the same thing over and over. Like he was leaving me letters to try and reconnect with that early insane passion he had felt but, let’s face it, had dwindled. Sometimes he would be logged into his “iheartbenjamin69” IM account but wouldn’t talk to me. Was he using it to talk to other people? Were they also named Benjamin?

I imagined that Roger had started to make some friends through classes, and when he gave them his IM account name he just told them it was a joke. He’d hang out with his new friends, perhaps in the basement of the Union where a lot of odd ducks seem to congregate. As time went on and he never contacted me again, I imagined him with his new friends laughing and discussing anime. I wondered if he still thought about me sometimes. Maybe when he was bored he still occasionally put together a list of the top ten reasons he’d like to lick my eyebrows.

I’d like to think so, but probably not. I guess he just didn’t need me anymore. Sometimes people just grow apart.

Beforever After

Your face revolves away:
the stars that turn at night slowly and carefully,
technically, technically.
But it emerges on the other side
of your head like a sun in the morning.

As a quick violent stride spans two peaceful
footprints, the rainbow that arcs from a darkness
to another.
The hues are a visual illusion
but so is the darkness too.

It reminds me of the quiet colorless morning
after an unseeable night of screaming rain;
a perfect day for driving with a hangover.
Down a thin road that feels like
a long platform of seeming truth
above the unreal trees, grass, and rocks.

A thought so stubborn it drives straight ahead
so perfectly, so lineally,
determined and desperate to get somewhere brand new.
Though even a straight line repeats
a circle around the planet
while slowly still circling around
and round the Sun. It’s sad and so on.

I was afraid before I was even born
of either being born or of living:
growing up and you, or
one day feeling the dread
of leaving you, dying, and death.

That's how I found out fear is not a thing
from before or after I still have breath
but just a thing.

...from darkness to darkness…

And beyond there is
a basket of rotting red apples,
with one on the bottom missing two bites,
that has been waiting for us
since it was picked in the early days
of the very first garden.

A brow of colors straddles the face of the Earth.
The universe began back in Biblical times
and again it will end There too.

Sonnet for the Gene Pool of Stratford

Thy revolving cast of evolution,
In and by which we are all interlinked,
May well bring mine fast execution.
But crocodiles might never go extinct
&
A fresh species that is learning to swim
Could try a new way of staying afloat.
But,
Crocodiles did not invent the forelimb,
Shakespeare stole almost everything he wrote.

To they that may drown in a wishing well:
From old form borrow, in content rebel.