Black and White

Glitter of winter
Spread out before
And black clouds above
Promises more.

When black appears;
A ball of fur
With yellow eyes
And resonant purr--

He follows where I lead
Over a lake laden with snow,
Our paws indent
Leaving behind blue shadows.

White on black
And black on snow,
He winds around my feet
Preventing me from where I want to go.

The Gig Downtown on Saturday Night

Wooden sticks sting the drum;
The conception of a song.
Rhythm engulfs your soul.
Body, hands, and heart synchronize with the beat.
Sweat flings off thrashing hair.
Feet punish the floor.

The liquid starlight of the keyboard
Intertwines with the silver of guitar
And his rich, glistening voice
Dribbling like Mercury
Onto the throng of pulsating bodies:
A mass of confusion
Moving in discordant unity.
A black fire of shadows climb the wall.

April

The sky was tin and

the gym was gold.  Dank and

stale, though, from too many bodies.

Egg-like spheres collided high,

but more likely caught and 

choked in a tangle of net.

The high ceilings 

echoing girlish screeches

and males' swallowed curses.

The cool hotness of bare chests,

and slap of skin on ball,

burning red on wrists, face, limbs.

A scene of boring pandemonium 

On a rainy Wednesday.

The Gemini Effect

The Gemini Effect by Chuck Grossart
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This was such a bad book, it was almost enjoyable to see how much worse it would get.  Usually good books I think of as movies or serial shows on a premium cable channel.  Ok books I can see as Hallmark channel movies.  This one I had to resort to comic book status.  The plot is completely far-fetched, the characters are stock characters from the main girl scientist who looked like a "red headed  Marilyn Monroe" to the all American Boy Scout who is the President of the U.S.  And the writing was so very bad.  It was horrible.  And it just kept getting worse.  If you want a ridiculous apocalypse book, this is for you.  If you want a book where the author actually convinces you that the same storyline can work with interesting characters, read The Passage by Justin Cronin.


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Blindness

Blindness by José Saramago
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a good book to read with someone.  "White blindness" takes over a country (the world?) like a plague.  Every day brings new horrors, and for no one is it more horrible than the one woman who has somehow escaped the malady, leaving her alone to witness the atrocities. I could tell it was an allegory, that the lessons of appreciating what you have, and the danger of turning a "blind eye" were there, but I admit, it would have been nice to bounce ideas off of someone else to get deeper. In the end I did turn to the Internet to help get some more insight, if you will.  It was helpful...like the lack of quotation marks, and the difficulty in trying to figure out who is saying what was deliberate to help the the reader feel the chaos that existed.  Until I realized that, I found it frustrating.  It is definitely a book that gets better the more you think about it.
The message [of today] is that morality is passé, conscience is for wimps, and the single overriding command is ‘Thou shalt not be found out.’” --Joseph Sacks


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The Other Woman

I was the other woman once.
Though I can't say I was
      any good at it.
I didn't even know he had another
Until I saw them walking
     hand in hand
In front of the store window
Where I was trying on a
     green wool coat--
The one with the slick silk inside
And a floppy hood
     that covered my eyes.
The funny thing was,
     She looked like me.

First World Afflictions

Insomnia has given way to narcolepsy.

There are no dropped conversations,
or heads pillowed by dinner plates.
We weaned ourselves from food and talk long ago.

Most often the spells happen
behind the wheel--
though our vans know the way
on that rutted track...
from the school to the field,
from the studio to the shop,
A quiet circle of miles with banked left-hand turns.

We are found snoozing in front of the screen
heads limp, hands still,
sorry after-images of another's sun
burned beneath our eyelids.

We run on treadmills,
though our feet slap pavement.
The scenery is relentless:
a family portrait of houses
with identical marigold corsages.

Our beds know us intimately,
curled in fetal positions,
hugging our vitals to ourselves.
There are no dreams--
we can no longer follow the plot.
The rain, sun, wind--
just a soundtrack on an endless loop.
Alarms become white noise,
bedsheets are strait jackets,
our eyes slowly tracking
a spider on the ceiling.