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Craig
Firefly
    
Kyrgyzstan
3793 Posts |
Posted - 02/02/2008 : 07:47:03
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He sat at the bar on one side of the cantina, hat pulled low, as if not wanting to be recognized. Watching in the mirror as other men came through the door, he occasionally looked over his shoulder. A habit acquired from years of being on the run.
On the other side of the cantina was the small cocina, where lunches and and hot plates were served to those coming off of the trail. There at the counter silently sat a seasoned man, grayed from his years of working his ranch and riding the trails. In front of him was a large bowl of chili.
Bursting through the door, the three young vaqueros came. Cowboys just off the dusty trail, they were full of youth and vinegar. Their first cattle drive, the first real time away from home and on their own. They had conquered the world and nothing could stop them now. They were just paid, had money and were full of self-proclaimed knowledge. They had nothing left to learn, and knew all…or so they thought.
The boldest of the three sat down at the counter, looked over and said, “Hey there old fella, you gonna eat that bowl of chili or you jus gonna look at it?”
“Naw, I ain’t gonna eat it”, came the reply.
“Well then, if you ain’t gonna eat it then slide it on over here!”
The bowl was slid over the smooth counter. The young cowboy ravenously started to eat it. “Man, this is pretty good!” he exclaimed. “We never had it this good out there with old man Poteet! We were lucky if there was any meat in it at all!”
Just as he was getting to the bottom of the bowl he came across a gruesome discovery. There, in the bottom of the bowl was part of a rat. What he had just eaten was involuntarily heaved back into the bowl. He sat there somewhat shocked and stunned over what had just happened. He could not fathom what had just occurred. He stared in disbelief at the once again, full bowl of chili.
The quiet man that had given him the chili got up to leave but not before giving the young cowboy a pat on the back and saying matter of factly, “Yeah son, that’s as far as I got too,” as he walked out the door.
On the other side of the bar, the stranger grinned as he slowly shook his head at what had just unfolded on the other side of the cantina that dusty afternoon…
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Edited by - Craig on 02/02/2008 12:30:24 |
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Ailinn
Windchimer
   
2197 Posts |
Posted - 02/02/2008 : 15:29:50
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McKenna starts the evening off; "What happened to the young lad who was called into service by his country in 1942?..." It's warm in the Day Room and many of the assembled are yawning. "Who cares!" Martin Avery grunts under his breath, not quite out of ear shot of McKenna's first line. Martin Avery is new to Sunrise. And the latest member to join the Friday evening Creative Writing Program. He insists on being called 'Doctor' by dint of his DMV degree. He uses words like "convey" and "peruse." He taps his watch with his fingernail when he lectures the Staff on "the virtue of punctuality." McKenna pauses and blows his nose loudly. Art Huffington feigns a stumble, but not all the way to the floor. His silver-tipped cane gets him back on his feet just as Robber Barron's tanned knees pass by. Robber is a full-time employee now. Her hair is still purple and spiked, her chipped nail polish, black, but she wears a clean lab coat and laces her Doc Martens. And she shows up mostly on time. Several of the residents wave their Memory Books in the air. Both McKenna and Avery voted against "Memory Books", and Huffington pantomined a gag. "I need help with Atlantic City," Alma Cottswold cries. Miss Jersey Shores 1944. Avery drums his fingers on the table. McKenna says, "Excuse me, but I have the floor..." Robber passes the drink tray around. Apple, cranberry, Sprite... Here's where "peruse" comes in. |
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Ailinn
Windchimer
   
2197 Posts |
Posted - 02/02/2008 : 15:32:18
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In the orchard of temptation, the contrary sky. The woman in the white dress, breathing. Silk underneath. Hear the rustle. And palms. Full fronds of them waving. Sky, a brazen blue the way he likes it. |
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Ailinn
Windchimer
   
2197 Posts |
Posted - 02/02/2008 : 15:36:29
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She's telling the story. "Keep going," he says, watching her hands move against the clay, the shadows on the wall, the wheel spinning. "Golt earrinks," she says, imitating Sophie Rubel, "golt earrinks he give me all the time. Make me fly!" He's still watching her hands. The way she flings the wet clay from her fingers when she says 'fly'. The pattern on the wall behind her. A spattered rainbow. |
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BarbraG
Windchimer
   
1825 Posts |
Posted - 02/04/2008 : 00:43:45
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The driver of the stagecoach was dead, no doubt about it. The rifleman pushed him over the side, and sunk down into the area below the seat, taking the reins from the man. He hadn't come all this way for Mary.... to die in the road like a wounded animal. Pray !! Pray that these horses can outrun the savages that were getting closer and closer with every hoofbeat. The last passenger had gotten off the stage miles back and his weight was all the horses had to pull. He only had to make it to the ravine half a mile away. There was safe haven waiting for him there. Friends - - with rifles of their own. "Heeeyahhhhh!!" he yelled over and over, snapping the reins as he screamed. He knew one thing for sure. All he had to do was make it back to safety and he would never be in a spot like this again. For all the times he had wanted to stop living after Mary had died, this wasn't one of them. More than anything, he wanted to live !!! The horses were running the life out of their chests and the ravine was getting closer. By a miracle of the greatest kind, he could see that he was going to make it. Rifle shots screamed around his head, with the bullets finding their marks. Just as suddenly as it had begun, it was over !! The Indians were turning back. Not knowing what the ravine held for them and losing a few braves before even getting really close to it was not a good sign. And, Indians weren't known to jump into a battle without knowing who the enemy was. And so, the rifleman made it . . . back home, and back to his Mary. He was going to "see her" for one last time. When that pilgrimage was done, he was headed into kinder, sweeter territory. He was going to live for Mary . . his love . . his sweetheart. He would stay busy, working for causes important to her. And, he would raise their son !! Mary had wanted her boy to grow up to be just like his father. The rifleman had made her a promise, and he meant to keep it. He would not let her down.
BGee
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Doug L
Firefly
    
Canada
5446 Posts |
Posted - 02/04/2008 : 23:28:58
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RIPENING
The longer we are together the larger death grows around us. How many we know by now who are dead. We, who were young, now count the cost of having been. And yet as we know the dead we grow familiar with the world. We, who were young and loved each other ignorantly, now come to know each other in love, married by what we have done, as much as by what we intend. Our hair turns white with our ripening as though to fly away in some coming wind, bearing the seed of what we know. It was bitter to learn that we come to death as we come to love, bitter to face the just and solving welcome that death prepares. But that is bitter only to the ignorant, who pray it will not happen. Having come the bitter way to better prayer, we have the sweetness of ripening. How sweet to know you by the signs of this world.
Wendell Berry
http://www.myspace.com/mickeynewbury |
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Doug L
Firefly
    
Canada
5446 Posts |
Posted - 02/09/2008 : 00:01:50
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What we all need most urgently now is to realize that transience is not separation -- for we, transient as we are, have it in common with those who have passed from us, and they and we exist together in one being where separation is...unthinkable.
Could we otherwise understand such poems if they had been nothing but the utterance of someone who was going to be dead in the future? Don't such poems continually address inside of us, in addition to what is found there now, also something unlimited and unrecognizable? I do not think that the spirit can make itself anywhere so small that it would concern only our temporal existence and our here and now: Where it surges toward us, there we are the dead and the living all at once.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters On Life
http://www.myspace.com/mickeynewburygatherings |
Edited by - Doug L on 02/09/2008 00:11:33 |
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Ailinn
Windchimer
   
2197 Posts |
Posted - 02/10/2008 : 18:15:43
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Air 77, water 59. The children wait. Lashed to fiber glass islands. Feet dangling overboard. Always looking over their shoulders. Where the sea lifts and settles. Their worlds are green. Are rolling liquid when they snap up and ride in. Conquerors of the water world. |
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Doug L
Firefly
    
Canada
5446 Posts |
Posted - 02/10/2008 : 20:16:41
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There was a train. I remember there was a young girl, maybe 17 years old, aboard the train. She was sitting in a window seat, next to me, looking out into the falling dark, where twinkled the lights of farm houses against the dimming colours of the sundown sky.
In a room built into the barn of one of those farms that she saw the lights of, there was a man about forty, a farmhand who'd come to live there seven years before. Never married, he'd meandered his way across the prairies, taking work, then moving on again. Then he took work at this farm and on his third day was injured and lost most of two fingers. He already had a scar down his left cheek and another from back surgery, so he wasn't worried about losing part of a hand.
The family that owned the farm treated him well, offered him free room and board despite his not being able to do much for a while. Out of loyalty, he'd stayed on. He had learned to be useful, and had come to know the family like it was his own.
On this evening, he is restless in his room, reading a book called My Antonia, by Willa Cather. Antonia is the spirited daughter of Russian peasants who came to Nebraska to homestead. They miss their homeland dearly. It is a book he read before, when he was very young. A girl he spent six months with had given this novel to him. It was the only thing he had kept from the time they had lived together, a story they had read to one another when they shared a housekeeping room in Sintaluta.
He had a hard time reading on this night. He walked outside and lit a cigarette, and out on the ridge overlooking the valley he could hear the train go by on its way to Melville before it veered northward to Saskatoon, where he'd lived after leaving the woman who'd given him the book. Going back inside, he filled the kettle with water and turned on the hot plate. He felt chilly, and was going to make some coffee. It wasn't cold out, but he felt cold, so pulled his jacket on and wondered if he was catching a fever.
As the train slowed on its way into Melville, the girl next to me flicked on the overhead reading light and from her purse took out a black and white photograph of a man. She looked at it a moment, then looked at me. Your boyfriend?, I said. "No," she told me. "It is a man who knew my mother, before I was born. It is a photograph my mother gave to me."
She asked where I was travelling to, and I told her that I had business in North Battleford. I introduced myself, and told her that I had a son her age. And you? "I am going to Saskatoon, to see if I can find the man in this photograph. I think he is my father." There was a silence then. I didn't want to pry, so I didn't say anything. After a minute or so, she said, "Nice to meet you, Jim. My name is Antonia."
DL
http://www.myspace.com/mickeynewbury |
Edited by - Doug L on 02/10/2008 20:22:15 |
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BarbraG
Windchimer
   
1825 Posts |
Posted - 02/10/2008 : 20:57:17
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Someday, Doug, someday !! I have to meet you someday.
BGee |
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buckman
Firefly
    
USA
2825 Posts |
Posted - 02/16/2008 : 15:28:10
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It was seventeen years ago this spring. I told her we needed to go for a ride. As we crossed the reservoir, I said, Do you ever think about the minutes just before a moment that you will remember the rest of your life? She laughed and said, No, honey, why? I said, This is one of them and I began to tell her about Martina...
I'll never forget that laugh...
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Doug L
Firefly
    
Canada
5446 Posts |
Posted - 02/17/2008 : 00:07:02
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The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious and rational disordering of the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness, he searches in himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences. This is an unspeakable torture, during which he needs all his faith and superhuman strength, and during which he becomes the great patient, the great learned one among men. For he arrives at the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul - which was rich to begin with - more than any other man! He reaches the unknown, and even if, crazed, he ends up by losing the understanding of his visions, at least he has seen them!
Jean-Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) |
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buckman
Firefly
    
USA
2825 Posts |
Posted - 02/17/2008 : 07:42:22
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The Druid named Nancy [He belonged to the Judyism sect and everyone knew him as Nancy] got to his feet like an old VW Bug tirejack; that is, squirrely, off-center, and never sure if it'll stay up. "Ya see, Rev, back in my time, 2008, I'm about four hundred years too late; so, if this is really 1817, then I'm getting a little closer to where I belong. A druid is never gonna really belong anyway; we're different, to say the least; we live in caves and in the rocks, [that's why our little group is called the Branch Rockettians, or Rockettes]. We have abandoned All to the Truth, the Whole Truth and nothing but the Truth. Here, let me read this to you. It's by a guy named Archie McLeish, and maybe it'll explain the way it is in my time.... "There is, in truth, a terror in the world, and the arts have heard it as they always do. Under the hum of the miraculous machines and the ceaseless publications of the brilliant physicists a silence waits and listens and is heard... It is the silence of apprehension. We do not trust our time, and the reason we do not trust our time is because it is we who have made the time, and we do not trust ourselves. We have played the hero's part, mastered the monsters, accomplished the labors, become gods-and we do not trust ourselves as gods... We know what we are. In the old days,[like now] when the gods were someone else, the knowledge of what we are did not frighten us. But now that we are gods ourselves we bear the knowledge for ourselves. Like that old Greek hero who learned when all the labors had been accomplished that it was he himself who had killed his son...."
Hey, Ralph, wake up,this is good stuff...
YOU ON THE PORCH,TOO...I SEE YOUR EYES CLOSED...
Sorry, but I get a little zealous, Rev, when I talk about this stuff, maybe that's why they call us zealots. All I know is that the older I get, the more it takes to fill my heart with wonder, and for me only God is big enough to do that, anymore.. I'm not lovin this life, especially the kids that keep tugging at my robe wanting to know if I'm OBI WAN KENOBI.. But once you enter the Gate, the die is cast..."I said to the man at The Gate, "Give me a light that I may walk safely into the unknown." "He said to me, "Go out into the darkness, and put your hand in the hand of God, and it shall be to you better than the light, and safer than the known."
Like Jesse Colin Young said, Darkness,Darkness, be my pillow....
[] Rev Buckman |
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Ailinn
Windchimer
   
2197 Posts |
Posted - 02/17/2008 : 17:21:35
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"Those things can trap you on an escalator," Ramon says. I was checking out at Costco with a pair of turquois Crocs. "Oh, yeah," he continues, "tear your leg off. Those ridges there... They match right up with the grooves at Penny's. Check it out." "I'm only wearing them at the beach," I say. "Sure," Ramon says, "should come with some kinds warning, though, but that's today. All the babies in flip-flops." "Probably just a California thing," I mistakenly offer. "Hey, I was born in Anaheim in '87 and I had to wear corrective shoes!" Ramon says. "I remember wearing something called Stride Rites. Ankle high with laces," I say. "Well, you're a lot older than I am," Ramon says. "No doubt," I say, "swipe the card." |
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Ailinn
Windchimer
   
2197 Posts |
Posted - 02/17/2008 : 17:30:19
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Once upon a time in a cold coastal town under a truly blue Blues sky, there lived a fey mischief-maker and his mascot, Raven's Eye. In the sanctuary of a dream he stayed off Van Ness and the corner of Third. One long night and ten thousand days. A thin blanket and a pallet. A perch for the bird. Now it's quarter past midnight when he stumbles in and thumbs a flared match to her Marlboro. She's sitting on the floor wearing sunglasses. He's hung over in his dark leather coat. He puts the perpetual coffee pot on. Shakes the salty stars from his hair. Smoke rings rise in O's from his serious mouth. Sparks blister her fingernails. They're so dangerously alive between two bridges where the past and the future converge. "Ah, the spread-open fan of memory..." he says. She says, "The longing...the scrim of alarm..." |
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buckman
Firefly
    
USA
2825 Posts |
Posted - 02/17/2008 : 20:06:50
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He lights his sixtieth cigarette of the day. He looks up at the three new paintings from the west directly above his head and salutes. As he blows the smoke out he coughs a little and bows deeply, one hand to the floor, palm up, fingers cupped.
'Tis hard to do while looking up and smoking... Only try it at home....
Rev B |
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BarbraG
Windchimer
   
1825 Posts |
Posted - 02/17/2008 : 23:45:38
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" I don't miss my mustang now." Whatever made him think of that in the middle of a midnight ride down Route 66, basically headed to nowhere, he couldn't imagine. But, in his mind, he knew that thoughts didn't come from nowhere. Something in his brain was ticking ... mustang...mustang... and he had picked up on it. His rifle lay on the seat beside him. He prayed he wouldn't need it tonight, this night of all nights. Not tonight, Lord. Please. He still had a long way to drive, but only if he came to a gas station pretty soon. The stars were drop-dead bright, like they were on a cold night with no clouds. ... mustang . . mustang . . He hadn't passed another vehicle in many, many miles, but .. suddenly .. it was like an eighteen-wheeler had dropped from the sky . . . right on his tail. What the heck !!!
BGee |
Edited by - BarbraG on 02/18/2008 22:41:35 |
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buckman
Firefly
    
USA
2825 Posts |
Posted - 02/18/2008 : 11:25:55
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Nightmare of darkness. Moonlight revealed thru the single slat of a wayward blind. Barely understood visions. Moment of a kiss. Baseball suspended in mid-air arc. Running, always running without movement. Dire fears of encroaching madness.
Morning just before full waking...
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BarbraG
Windchimer
   
1825 Posts |
Posted - 02/21/2008 : 23:27:55
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The walk along the beach with the eclipse of the moon covered in red was a bit unnerving. It was as if an omen hung in the sky foretelling of disaster to come. Being used to seeing the moon at night in its wondrous beauty and its comforting presence, I wasn't ready for the appearance of it last night. I stayed. Stayed with my moon in the universe because of all the nights it had stayed with me. It looked as if something unholy was sucking the life from it, inch by inch. The thought came to my mind . . "what if my wonderful night light remained in this present state . . covered and cold, with no warmth radiating down to the earth." How would I bear the nights ... alone, without my beautiful moon I had grown up with and waited for every night. I had heard it was going to be "beautiful", but it wasn't .. not to me. I won't put myself through this event when it happens again. Next time .. will be different. I made myself a promise..
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Ailinn
Windchimer
   
2197 Posts |
Posted - 02/24/2008 : 16:49:11
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The first few hundred years they lived on the coast of Durrow where everything he predicted came true. The village folk gathered around him at the old stone well. Tom and bold Dana from Grail. Wee Liam the bootmaker's son with his broken brogue. Maeve with the fly-away coppery hair. Bright Niamh the scullery maid. The Spirit twins and the Fortune Teller's muse. (Oh, yes, the Fortune Teller must be inspired too.) They all stood with their shoulders touching when they saw his dark shape appear. A dangerous man some mornings crossing the mist-bound moor. A scepter in his hand when he landed by the stables where the horses were stamping. How the trees stepped out of his way. How his breath lit their fragile branches. Eyeshine. Cheek and chin. Salt smears on his forehead. A cloak of seaweed to his shins. Soothsayer, he, with his summing-up eyes...his powers of divination. |
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