The train is a mechanical snake,
its hiss occasionally scrawled
above the grating of its own

movement as it cuts through
the smear of graffiti and concrete
and waste and dry bracken.

A single voice, “she was the
third fastest girl at the gala,
yeah she was really pleased”,

the voice enveloped by the
drone once again. The train
entering the tunnel.

The Financial Times lies on
the plastic table, the pages loose
from bored ******* bears the

headline: sacrifices required for ambitious goal.
Eyes trace the same paragraph over

and over, drawing nothing from
the coldness of the type script.
I think about conversation but my

tongue lulls in my mouth, dry,
and my mind wanders between
small talk and meagre pleasantries.

I stare at the man across from me for
what seems like minutes, knowing that
he knows I watch him, analyse him,

but there is no fight or pretence, only the
tired apathy and reluctance I know.
his arms cross. His eyes close with half sleep.

Television glows
blue upon my skin.

My head lies on
the static of radio

and the electric
of the streetlights

blaring through my
window keeps me awake.

The red digits of
my alarm clock

grow less vibrant as
the grey sun stirs

to the accompaniment
of the jubilant birds

with their repetitive
song which hangs

like these vacant walls,
holding me.

Like in a scene from a film,
where the camera pulls back,
we see a head resting in the mud,
glassy grey eyes stare out
as if searching beyond the trees.
Grey hair crusted with muck.
Soil specked lips, bluing and sluggish,
parted from the final inhale
exhale process which has
failed like a broken clock.
Stopped heart like a rock.
Skin, liver spotted and birth marked,
cold and graying like silver birch bark,
A brown overcoat covers arms
splayed like branches, caught
and underneath a vague sheet
of russet leaves which have
since fallen in the breeze.
Insects crawling from beneath them
climb to inspect the unfamiliar mound
still to be discovered by a passerby.

And in a house not far away a wife looks at her watch
And she sits in front of the television,
And aware that something isn’t quite right
her stomach clenches up like a fist.

Fragile flickering celluloid reels
Behind the light of the projector
A single beam of changing colors
Displayed on the silver screen ahead.
Fixtures dim and black the room
Filled an audience anxious and waiting,
Waiting to see what’s to be seen.
I love the look of film!
In its variety of size and color
35mm and 70
Digital and Film
Black and white to Technicolor
Three dimensions or two.
The history of an art form
Forming before your eyes
Seen here are the scenes of time
From anywhere that’s been seen
A dynamic show of lives lived and lost
Brought in pieces pieced together
By those much like us
Unfolding a world survived
By war and a way of life lost
Fallen years ago
Survived by the look of cellulloid
A world encompassed in film;
Where time is never lost
And life is always found.

:)

We would joke
they would make a film about us,

but every moment did feel like
a movie with you.

Mother pulled the beat to hell diluted blood red minivan containing my brother and I into the darkened parking lot. The car couldn't park fast enough as my brother and I tore the creaky side door open and leapt onto the awaiting pavement. We stepped from darkness into light as we hopped onto a curb to be greeted by the brilliance of neon lights erected atop a single story rectangular building squatting at the top of the rectangular lot like a full measure rest. Glass windows as whole walls teased the treasures that lay before my eyes window-shopping like madmen I felt the objects of my covetry leap from their white shelves into my sweaty youthful grasp. Mother breezed forward, stepping across the tier confidant and disengaged; the front door rang announcing our presence. Two bells sounded: ring ring. The Rhines were here. Like a pistol shot signifying the start of a race, my brother and I scampered and scattered and scuttled like wild animals, scouring the shelves that sat dispersed through the gleaming room consuming with our eyes words that told stories with pictures that danced and sang. Clusters of shelves huddled together under several flat signs hung by frail strings dangling from the ceiling displaying themes that told me where to avoid "Romance" and where to find my beloved "Science Fiction." I halted, realizing almost as if there were indentations within the itchy carpet that had alerted me to the place where I had cemented by ruddy feet countless times before. I took my roving eyes from the stalling ground to peer up into the shelves that loomed over me like giants, arching over my head like holy stones erected atop holy celebratory sites of yore. My fingers traced along the shelves trailing over the innumerate plastic spines that encased my bountiful riches; I mouthed the vibrant words imprinted like cattle on each of them and sang to myself stories that spawned off of each one before finding the paragon that most expertly weaved JR the Raconteur into its fabrications. I bore into its dazzling shell hungrily, gobbling up faces and places and names and dates I spun it over to its backside to read plots to read histories to read legacies to read memories I read and read and saw and saw my mind was never more alive with the astounding conception of limitless potentialities my night was just getting started and with my final selection--and mother's blessing--I would march home victoriously wielding my fortune, my medium for which the pictures in my mind would transpose and dance before me like luminous sprites on the brilliant splendor of a luminescent two dimensional stage that is the television screen. It was the weekend getaway I waited for with anticipation every Saturday; I was an unversed monk relishing in the ancient libraries of History.

I cradled the unfurling shed snakeskin delicately
admiring the imprint of faces and places
swallowed up in time.

An ancient amative light sat patiently
on the blank sheet
before the electric medium;
the electric medium sitting buzzing
eager to tell another silent story.

I wrapped the skin around its spindle;
and from its den I extracted slowly and cautiously,
urging the skin into the hungry buzzing medium--

And minute punctures in the skin,
where the projector's teeth sink in,
whose teeth chatter like plastic wind up dentures
as the skin passes snake-like through its dusty plastic entrails.

The tattooed skin is illuminated at the heart of the vessel--
where the countenance of a single solitary bulb
omits a radiance, brilliant and magnificent--
powerful enough to cast the skin like a shooting star
across the darkened room

onto the patient white sheet
where my eyes await the tattooed memories
to dance before me.

I sit in my torn and weathered leather chair
echoing the silence of the screen--
(hypnotized by the hum of the projector--
an incessant electrical drone accompanied by the bombinate
incantations of chattering crickets.)

The stories are shielded from my inquisition
by layers of translucent grain
that leave textures gritty--
and a soft focus that leaves faces obscure
and expressions ambiguous.

(How clever you are to stay silent,
and leave me in such tempestuous musings!)

Vast pores pop up excitedly burned and scabbed intrusions
and if you linger for too long
the brilliance of the glare will burn into you--

Like the shaman who dances too close to the holy fire.
Like Apollo flying too close to the sun.

I must be careful,
and fully aware--
of your transience.

These ambulant hieroglyphs
speak volumes in their silence--
and I find myself drawn
to the blurry smiling faces
as they peer into my soul.

History breathes.
and History repeats.
but lies silent
in the sands of Time.
Becoming muddled,
but waiting.
for its story to be told;
for the mediums to rise from the grave.

I suddenly agnize myself as the last generation
to have its memories and histories burned onto tape.
and as I sit here I wonder
of the Society
whose soul I will peer into--
when I am unearthed
out of the sands of Time.

There was a time in my life when I thought you could fix me.
The two of us were lost and scratching for meaning in a post-post-postmodern world,
looking for purpose and clarity,
looking for the black-and-white morality in our grayscale lives.
When fate left us reeling in a shared embrace,
I let my sorry *** believe you were the Big Bad to my Virginia Woolf.
Leave it to me not to learn from past mistakes.

There was a time I saw you as a hero, a martyr of some twisted kind,
willing to give back to me that missing piece that someone else had cut from my flesh long ago.
I saw your love as the highest I could ever earn,
and I was devoted to your work-- whatever that meant.

I never saw the casualties.
I don’t even know that there were casualties, but I look into your face and I can see--
blood has been shed,
and it was on your behalf.

You don’t have the kind of face that launches fully armed battalions.
Leeland says you look like a mall Santa,
but I think you make quite the lady-killer.
And I mean killer.
You may as well call me Lizzie Short.

And when your life or ours started to wane,
when I saw your empty promises for the broken vessels that they were,
I realized I didn’t know where I ended and you began.
I realized there were so many words in your textbook full of saccharine lies
and you were using all of them to keep me weak enough to stay.

Was I falling for it? Hell ******* yes, I was falling for it.
I wanted so desperately to have someone in my life
whose every word I could believe
without fear of betrayal or accidental abuse
that I chose intentional manipulation.
Better to know it’s coming, that was my logic.
Better to cause it myself.
Better if I’m the one who dips the cigarette in your poisoned blood and lights it.

You won’t end my life.
You look like it, you act like it, but you don’t outright **** anyone.
You just give people the means and method to end it themselves.
I’ve heard it said there are three types of people:
the type that lose to you,
the type that win and suffer the trauma for the rest of their lives,
the type that win and then become you.
I’m the third, and though you hate to hear it, I wish I’d been the first.

Some people are so grateful to be alive.
But not me.
Not anymore.
Not ever.

Battered bones left scared through battle,
oozing with blood in a painful brutality.
Wondering through limbo,
silent suffering.
Frozen in torture,
an unfathomable loss.
Fingernails disintegrate in dirt,
grasping with an invisible grip.
Pure hatred within his eyes,
seeking a premature revenge.
No intentions of failure,
obsessive determination.
Into the breach once more,
to chase his just cause.