The Far Queue

Eruption ~ Jacek Yerka
The crow descends in silhouette
Trees scratch his name against the dawn
While last year’s leaves as yet un-swept
Declare the day in whispered scorn

And from my thoughts hang twisted kites
Which steal the night unhinge the locks
Their fingers search out every tumbler
Their tails jump-start the mourning clocks

His silhouette descends through boiling clouds
Calls my name across the dawn
The flock mark my passing and check my pace
I pick my beak with talon thorn

Breath condenses words from steam
Balloon thoughts here too soon dispersed
This music feeds my fever dream
Leaves me walking paths well versed

Lovecraft ~ Abigail Larson
We do not know who discovered water but it was almost certainly not a fish.
Anybody's total surround, or environment, creates a condition of nonperception

~ Marshall McLuhan

Present company excluded (of course)

Loving the Alien
This groove and tongue tirade
Channelling some chic samurai
In pitched battle teevee dreams
At the edge of a fashioned world

Runs with the blood
Of a thousand slain poppies
In the veins of some velvet morning
And the children of an arcane moon

Ultraviolet waves once crashed
Upon the keys of your skeletal coast
Derailing trains of Cartesian thought
Leaving poison pens impatiently poised

Now this machine with morose-ghost standards
Tastes your tender edge, your acid etch
And whispers a secret two-step
Into the dancehalls of your inner ear

And the stones once placed upon your eyes
Make holes in a papier-mâché mask
Send ripples through the mind’s catacomb
And echo in the face of an alien son

Burlesque ~ Tony Notarberardino
Patience awoke every morning to the warmth of a clean day; a day to be climbed the better to view.

Were it not for the ghosts Patience would have left the house to its very slow decay.
As it stood she felt compelled to attempt those repairs that she felt she might most be able to secure.

With inept hammer and recycled nails she battled the porch roof, winter wind and gap-tooth lifted; where the ghosts of the night sky glimmered, unmarred by light, lamenting their loss to progress. The tiles themselves were troublesome and uncooperative; the ghosts of a baby’s cries in the night.

With bent screwdriver and rough hewn wedges Patience re-hung the hanging door, thereby restoring some privacy to both the empty hall, whose silence was often marred by the battles between the ghosts of sword hands severed and the spectres threadbare sun umbrellas, and the moody sitting room whose tattered and under-stuffed armchair was occupied by the ghost of a father’s laugh, echoing in the afternoon.

The treacherous staircase was decayed by the spirit of an arrow that had found no heart and nightly ascended by the ghost of a life impaled by love. Here Patience hammered planks recycled from the nearby sawmill, (itself haunted by the ghost of a night spent in enforced and heart-broke solitude).

By evening Patience darned and mended bedclothes and blankets to warm the dreams of lovers lost in time; the rooms haunted yet by the ever fainter composite odour of their life together

And while Patience slept, the ghost in the attic cherished a tender kiss on the lips when only a cheek had been offered.