New Blooms of the Plant

A long hair of hers, spanning at least eight inches and covered and wrapped with black like a long coated gangster concealing a dangerous weapon, clung to the flat part of the porcelain and draped down into the sink like a sales banner on a closed down super store. As the water hit the hair it waved and you can imagine the wind catching the loose side of that same advertisement You can hear it violently smacking in the wind as the shiny vinyl is caught by the light and then hid back into the shadows.

It used to be the bigger things and the more grotesque that you couldn’t handle, but now to even imagine her lips against other flesh wrapped in red grooves or the idea of her hand flat against another’s chest made your eyes go black with torture and your head buzz with demented ringing.

What happens when the fraud falls in love? When the imposter looses his edge and is for once sincere? Others would say he still has his talents and then the rest would call them his moves, but he can’t seem to use them anymore at least not the old ones. He is forced to come up with new ones not only because he wants to make it authentic, but because he has to or his insides would rot and decay festering with maggots. He can’t take her to the same places, he can’t tell her the same sweetness in her ears, he can’t even buy her the same flowers. The wheel has already been reinvented for him. And standing here at this level looking down it is easy to not make some Hollywood sequel of the same formatted five part structure when we see the guy behind the door with the knife or the ill-fated lovers that just miss each other in the hall.

That which is truly new cannot be compared to a blueprint from the past. Here it is not a race against time or a fight for the impossible. We do not transcend the moving soil beneath our feet or the turning spirits that up until this moment have seemed to be a nuisance. Instead we work within it. For the first time we are part of it like the softening ice, transforming and moving faster, and then heavy in the cloud, until it falls back down into that cracked earth.

What You See

We cannot handle how others limit us because of the way they see our bodies and perceive our vessels. It's appalling to us and confuses us because they cannot see what we know is inside us, which is so much more. It is ok that they are limited to sight because it is not a sign of our personal limits, but just of perception.

The Sycophant

A Poem By Stacey Lee Rayburn Rothrock

He said, "I love you"...

with soulful, ardent, trust.

His tendency to communicate

the intense affections of love,

were deluding.

The "entity", of his love for her

seemed like thin plastic...

stretched, as far as, he would allow,

snapping into a demeanor, to mislead,

her judgement of him.

He said, "I love you"...

the words,

reverberating through her

fret filled soul.

Worn down with the promise

of, "enthusiastic enticement",

into the words of:

I Love You.

Worn away with the years

of, "deceiving disposition",

in an unknowing direction.

Until that simple phrase,

brought her,

irritation,

instead of pleasure.

A Quarterly Report Concerning the Optimizing of Processes Involving the Adulation of the Devoted versus Defeatism in Ideas of Nullity

A Quarterly Report Concerning the Optimizing of Processes Involving the Adulation of the Devoted versus Defeatism in Ideas of Nullity and or the Act of Not Moving

To watch her slowly get dressed was like lying on the cold wet wood with my limbs being pulled in opposing directions. It was this reverse order of everything I wanted and it was just happening right before me. The Japanese understood torture in the realm of speed. They would keep that drop of water constant. That was the big part of it. And the little piece of clothing here by the bit of tied shoe there was something the they had not capitalized on: to use the most fundamental and devoted organ like a ration in front of a starving prisoner.

And when that door, crooked on its hinges, had to be violently pulled shut the tragedy of it washed over me in the most unforgiving way. My body started to fail me. The color in everything seemed to be pulled like someone had sucked it out leaving an empty transparent drinking glass of an existence allowing me to break it and impale myself on the shards. My motor skills as well start to give out and with my hands now numb the blood in my body nearly stops flowing when her light is not there to stir it. Buttoning my shirt became a task of sheer will to focus on the flat circle traveling through the hole and then to catch on the side the way you had agreed that it would work. But then some form of life starts to come back. I can feel it in my fingertips tingling just under the curves of the print. A slight shaking as if I was denied something needed like an engine running low on the slick brown lubricant. And the misanthropes talk and I deserve it or at least have earned the title of dreamer or affectionate fanatic, but what is it when I have grown out of the games and am fine in the world? What happens when the impulse is controlled because the pain is gone as if a wound has healed and all that is left is the scar of everyone’s memory. Is this really the certainty of an impartial confidant or the grumblings of a pretender, an imposter that cannot come close to anything that I am or have come to be except maybe in the streets of pretentiousness? And I tell her listen to the misanthropes, the Nay Sayers, the priests, and the beggars. But be careful whose words you let the transfer from simple letters pushed together into some kind fictitious truth or some forged document. I tell her, I beg her to think of the most cliché of all rainbows. I say to follow it all the way through the clouds, between the branches, and if there is a thicket of sharp hard thorns to cut through them like a diamond cutter through glass. And when we reach the end do not be disappointed that a little man with a red beard and a green hat doesn’t stand there with that pot of gold the lovely pop songs may talk of or what the skeptics insurance policy recommends. But rather know that the pay off was the colors and that it was every shade. Know when my eyes no longer see or when small electronics fill your ears it was the whole spectrum of it all.

Under the Skin

lWhen she leaves my sheets fold up into a ball and the pillow becomes inconsolable. Unable to fight time I try to embrace him as a friend. The hours I try to fill with distraction, but they often become too big to even fathom. While I hang onto the minutes the clock, like some evil metronome, mocks me with its ticking. Down to the seconds is where it can be managed. They become my children as I name them: Turtle, Puff puff, Avery, Red, Spoony, and it goes on from there.

She has made me like a coal miner traveling under the earth and chipping away at the ground. The dust will seep into my lungs if the ceiling doesn’t come down over my head first. Only someone completely mad with the idea of her silhouette in the doorway would continue to cut through the rock and dirt like a Looney Tunes character sawing the limb he stands on. She was like cancer if it put on a dress and danced around the room.

But what other scenario was there? Become infected or live in grayness, tear down the walls or put up wallpaper. Have my eyes seen too much. Have I become so cut off and burnt to see truth before me? And when I feel the warmth of her teeth and lips formed into a “u” with her cheek muscles pushed tight why don’t I welcome it completely instead of waiting for a coma followed by a “but”. To feel like a fanatical holding a metal rod in a lighting storm is irrational when the sun is shining. In a sinking boat does one poke another hole or add a patch? How can you tell which is which? If a life without risk is not worth living how is the unexamined life not as well when the examination is too much risk? But when your breath stops at the ring of her call or when the only moment you feel right is in her arms and when you are not it is as if you have never had water or air, or never seen an empty field at the days end, or never felt the ocean between your toes, or never fought in the trenches of youth with the red headed Jones, or never tasted Todd Richards duck confit with currant reduction and quail egg, or never sang road house blues in the hideaway Max keeps behind the carwash, or never snuck two sips of Macallon’s 25 year scotch, or never wanted to believe in something that may not be. To give life to something with the smallest sliver of hope.

He doesn’t stagger to catch his breath. He’s too old for that and can fake not being dizzy like a ballerina in her tenth spin. But fact from front must be considered when understanding such an intelligent, well-dressed, and sizable creature such as Henry Jacob whose grandfather died by a shot in the leg and whose great grandfather laid his head on a stick of dynamite. The mere feat of dying with dignity and not by some accident or some jelly fished way out is of first priority and with these types of decisions like falling end over top for someone so young, so beautiful, so good in bed, with a lovely brain, and 23 laughs is beyond foolish. And I would have you know that he even says her name from time to time in whisper to himself like a crazy man with padded walls talking to the lady in the wallpaper. And sometimes late at night you can hear him behind his cheap aluminum siding poorly strumming away three notes on strings stretched over wood singing about her and how her smile seeps through his pores and then into his cells making them heavy and full. And truth be told she was the most lovely of the birds that seemed to bring out something more in him. His laughs were far wittier, his writings became more intelligible, and even those metal rattling against that hollowed out maple have started to sound real proper. But when he thinks of it all his father mixing the sand, the fly ash, and the water day in and day out, his mother wasting away on the couch, and all the years he has lost he stops to feel the rhythm smacking somewhere behind the skin, the thin muscle, and the breast bone just dying to ask him why not? Why not let her into your those four walls, the time between immediately and without end, and the plum colored appendage that is already engorged with the scent left of her on his pillow, the gentle smile she has in the darkness, the longing for her voice dancing against that drum in his ear.

It changed instantly. One minute I was unbound, boundless, and then in a mere second it was as if she was imprinted on me and in me. It was as if her own blood had covered my structure, my bones, and from there on out wherever I went she now did as well. When I felt the wind it was her at a whisper. When I stepped forward she was the ground.

Funeral

God ahead, move forward, and garland my grave with wallflowers. Tell the priest to keep it short because to feel this space put between me and her is like an arm cut off and taken away from the body, but kept alive and out of reach. And I fix my hair, I tie the Windsor knot my grandfather showed me, I scrap the razor against the skin, and I clean my face before I go before mindless drones like factory workers without tools. I push my shoulders back and hold my chin high, but it is all smoke and mirrors It is all just a scheme and an invention to keep me from saying the words that want to spill out like red wine on a white table cloth.

Dig my whole deeper than the rest so that if by chance she sheds a tear that may slowly seep through the gravel and dirt down to the boards above my head it cannot reach me. For if it does I fear the smallest amount of that purple dark liquid may spring life into that organ and cause the nails to be ripped from my fingers when they dig at the splinters that hold me down. Lie to them. Tell them I was a common man and decent one, but don’t tell them of our love in your way because even Marlowe’s best sonnet would grow pale in its wake and seem mundane and obtuse.

I would make the suggestion of gouging out my eyes, but this would be meaningless and in vane for her smile and those eyes that change by God’s light would continue to haunt my memories as they do now. For to be without her or not in her favor would be plastic fruit in a pot painted gold that chips when it is moved. It would be placing that same bolt to that same piece of metal in the line day in and out. It would be like breathing in the air without the smell of the honeydews or to hear without ever knowing the warm sound of French horn.