My words churn and twist

     insanity and pandemonium

     visions of surreal ideas

     orgasms of spouted thoughts

     siphoned brain waves

My words bleed along edges

     masked metaphors

     chanting syllables

     random and scattered

     dancing, dangling nuances

Words encrypted to decipher or not

     sublime flawed connections

     sexy syllables of passion

     stray words across canvas

     reaching for lemon drop moon

Innovative, ground breaking concepts

     spawning and creeping into light

     opening up repressed vibes

     scratching open barrier walls

     pain sketched on stiff spines

Refusal to cross ‘t’s’ and dot ‘i’s’

     provocative pregnant pauses

     hoodwinking and finesse

     floating Bohemian thoughts

     begging for insight

     inside writer’s free mind.

Just

understand –

nobody

expects

 jousting;

 unless

 (k)nights

 encounter

  jeweled

  unicorns.

  Never

  extrapolate

   justice

   unethically.

   Nurture

   everyone’s

    joy,

    undertaking

    new

    endeavors.

     Judgment

     unbidden

     negates

     experience.

      Joists

      upholding

      numbered

      entrances

       juxtapose

       useful

       nude

       edges

        jutting

        upward.

        Now

        everything

         jaundiced

         unravels

         nutated

         exhalations;

joining

ululating

natives.

Encouraging

 jagged

 ulcerations

 never

 elicits

  jaunty

  umbrages.

  Naughty

  elves

   justify

   unkempt

   nails,

   exclaiming

    jolly

    utterances;

    noels

    expedited

     jeeringly.

     Umami

     noodles

     excite

      jurors;

      unexpectedly

      nutritious

      enrichment.

       Junior

       undertakers

       navigate

       eternity’s

        jurisprudence

        usefully;

        needing

        every

         justly

         unexcitable

         nerve

         exposed.

Journeys

unplanned,

necessitate

elasticity.

 Jugglers’

 uniformity

 nurtures

 exceptional

  jocularity.

  Untrimmed

  nasturtiums

  emit

   jubilantly

   undeterred

   nebulosity.

   Eggs

    jostled,

    unilaterally

    need

    enclosures.

     Joining

     unbroken

     numbers,

     explorers

      journeyed

      until

      natural

      exigencies

       jerked

       unsuspecting

       neophytes

       entirely.

        Java,

       unlike

       nondescript

       entrees,

        jolts

        unregulated

        nerves

        ecstatically.

My words probe in the base of my skull

struggling to juggle like balls in the air

images on trampolines jumping into my head

living words bathing naked at river’s edge.

I gather my words in baskets of silence

scratching the surface of slick solitude

slipping into minds to draw out gems

scrambling words to make them flow

I brush words from shoulder length strands

curl the ideas around my searching fingers

grind my teeth, chomping on throbbing pain

following the miles of my etched phrases.

Words blush my skies in sublime murmurs

inlaid hearts and closed eye dances

moon crooning the corpse of raw words

I dread the day when words don’t matter.

The Emphatic Ms. MacColl

It was a windy, sunless mid-October morning as Mona settled onto the steps of the MacColl family monument. From here, she could look out over the gently rolling hills and see the leaves slowly changing color. She loved coming to this spot in the cemetery. There was rarely another person about, so she felt as if she had the whole beautiful vista to herself.

She’d been there for about ten minutes, when she heard someone behind her cough. Quickly she turned around to see a delicate woman in a long skirt and bonnet peeping out from behind the monument. “Excuse me,” the old lady said. “I didn’t mean to startle you. It’s just that I’ve seen you here many times before, and I thought I might share a few words with you.”

The woman was “quaint”—that was the image that immediately came to Mona, and she was dressed in very unusual clothing. Her long, full skirt touched the ground and was made of a material that Mona had never seen before.

“No, that’s fine,” said Mona. “It’s funny that you say you’ve seen me here before though, because I’ve never seen you.”

“No dear, I imagine not. You see, I’m part of the MacColl family that was buried here years ago. Goodness, it must be close to 150 years now. How time flies! But anyway, I’m a spirit—a ghost, as most people like to call us.”

Mona drew back in astonishment. Halloween was about two weeks away and maybe this lady was involved in some kind of hoax. Or were they filming a movie nearby? She’d seen so many film crews in the neighborhood lately. “Oh, really?” Mona said. “Pleased to meet you. It’s not often I get the opportunity to talk to a ghost in the cemetery.”

“Don’t patronize me, dear. I know it’s hard to believe, but here . . . let me show you.” The old lady turned around and walked toward the monument . . . and kept walking right through it. She looked back at Mona with a smile. “It’s really not as hard as it looks,” she said, “but I’ve no time to waste, so I thought I might as well show you right away. Certain spirits can materialize quite easily when we spy a person as open as yourself—someone we know can benefit from our presence.”

Mona thought she must be in a dream, although the woman looked so real.

“I don’t know what to say. This is beyond anything I’ve ever experienced before, and yet I believe you. Here I am in a cemetery, all by myself, talking to a ghost, and somehow it seems perfectly normal.”

“Of course it’s normal, dear. It happens much more than people know. But as I said, you’re open, and you’re able to see.”

The two women stared at each other in fascination, while a strong wind blew through the nearby trees. A shower of brittle yellow leaves fluttered to the ground.

“Why are you in a hurry then?” asked Mona. “And why did you decide to talk to me in the first place?”

“Call me Euphemia,” said the ghost. “Euphemia MacColl, dearly departed wife of the late Harold MacColl, director of the Merchants’ Society of Beamsville. That’s the inscription on our monument.

“Oh, you can’t imagine how much I detested that man. It was always, ‘Do this, Phemie’ and ‘Get me that, Phemie’—as if he owned me, as if I were his slave. But what could I do? Life was like that in those days.

“I see you coming to the cemetery, admiring the old tombstones, thinking life was better back then. I could see the look of dissatisfaction on your face with your life the way it is now, and I kept saying to myself, One day I’m going to give that girl a good talking to and tell her she has so much, she doesn’t even realize it.

“Do you think for one minute that women of my time could walk anywhere they wanted as freely as you? Why, that alone is worth all the gold in the world. And those stretch pants you’re wearing—now that’s liberation. You sit on those old stone steps in all kinds of positions we never even imagined back then. I know you’ve had a good education too, and that if you want to, you can do anything you please. And look how tall you are! Good Lord, you look so healthy and fit. You must be eating well and playing sports, something else we couldn’t do in the old days.

“No, my dear. Looking back is a big mistake, whether it’s over a period of a hundred years or just yesterday. It’s a big, big mistake, and I just had to get you out of it—so here I am.”

The wind blew strongly once again, almost knocking down Euphemia in her voluminous grey skirt. She looked even frailer than before, as if the wrinkled skin on her face really were transparent.

“Thank you,” Mona said. “You’re absolutely right. But please don’t go. It’s so wonderful that you’ve come to speak with me from the past—from your grave, really. Please stay a bit longer, Euphemia, and tell me what life was like back then, and what it’s like to die, and how you’re able to appear again.”

“No, dear. As I said, I can’t stay long. And it’s getting so very cold. That wind feels as if it’s blowing right through me. So nice to have talked with you, finally, but my job is done now and I must be returning. Only remember what I said: No looking back.”

Another gust of wind blew up her billowing skirt and toppled the old lady to the ground. There she lay for a few moments, still and ashen, and ever so frail. And then her body just dissolved. There was nothing left of her on the dry autumn grass.

Mona was sad to see her go. She stared at the spot on the grass for a long time. The cemetery seemed very lonely now, with the leaves swirling around her feet and a light rain starting to fall. “Thank you, Euphemia!” she yelled—as if Euphemia’s spirit were everywhere. And she meant it from the bottom of her heart.

She picked up her knapsack and started the long walk back past the tombstones and wind-tossed trees. “Thank you,” she called one last time, her voice echoing through the empty grounds.

The wind laughed in return.

Dr. Heller never mentioned his problem, but everyone at the clinic knew about it. We were shocked by how normal he acted afterwards. He didn’t even take a sick leave or anything. A couple of days after his incident, Judy decides to bring in a vase of flowers for his office, some ugly artificial thing with a heavy cluster of lilies and roses and ferns. Dr. Heller thanks her and sticks his face in them and we all laugh because we think he's fucking with us. Turns out, he thought they were real.

Judy later discovers him in his office and we can hear her screams throughout the building.

The clinic is in a state of excitement, the staff milling around. Everyone keeps saying that he was fine all morning. We keep saying, how could this have happened. We keep talking about what we could have looked for, the warning signs. We repeat how much we miss him. A get-well card circulates around the clinic and everyone signs it from their hierarchical order of importance—the surgeons, anesthesiologists, RNs, the receptionists, even the fat, ugly custodian who only creeps in after everyone leaves for the day.

We draw lots to elect a person to go visit him. Our clinic’s been a family for more than ten years and is heavily involved in each other’s lives. We take care of our own. (Only the receptionists get recycled out every so often for newer, younger candidates. We take pride in appearances here.) Also, everyone is dying for more news about the late and great doctor.

No one volunteers to go, so we draw lots. I get chosen. They all clap my back and say, sucks to suck.

He is a beautiful man. His forehead is taut, his eyes etch upwards at the corners. The sides of his nose are perfectly symmetrical lines. With a ruler, you can measure the alignment of his eyes to his ears. Even now, hunched forward with his shoulders drawn up so he looks like a turtle receding into a shell, his flesh is smooth and hard like plastic. He adjusts his position over the edge of the bench as if uncomfortable, and his hands are spread claws digging into the wood.

Smile Dr. Heller, I say and lean closer to him. I take a picture of us on my phone, me with a huge smile and Dr. Heller looking lost.

The sun is out, but it’s cold. The sunshine deceives us. We sit on a bench on the lawn. His personal caregiver is in a chair a few yards away from us and glances at us over the cover of her book.

He is wealthy enough to have escaped the indignity of sanitariums, where they throw together the psychotic and the mentally ill indiscriminately. He has that small mercy for him. His wife is filing for divorce now, I hear, and will soon have sole custody of the kids and house, a substantial fortune built upon the splicing and reconstruction of flesh. Maybe this is his punishment for tampering with natures works, sullied as they are. Maybe this is punishment for playing God.

I take his face with my hands and kiss him. I feel his perfectly sculpted lips with my tongue.

It’s ok, Dr. Heller.

You’ll get over this.

Everyone at the clinic misses you.

Remember Mrs. Lebowitz? She threw a fit when we told her you went on vacation. She says no other doctor in the city does skin as good as you.

It’s dark when I leave. The neighborhood is unsettling in its quiet, undisturbed by traffic or people. I miss the dirty mess and the noise of the city. The stars are like dim, sad echoes of the city lights.

But, if I crane my head, I can see the city lights glow like a distant fire.

  The vessel was neither pitching nor rolling but steadily sailing towards Adlivan  archipelago. The perfectly still weather, though, failed to becalm David Adler, who at long last abandoned his only desire to dive back into the dream after someone from the CSI unit had sighted out first ice and their agitated shouts sent the rest of the crew to the illuminators. The journey’s end was not far off. From then on for another hour the hustle in cabin was considerably louder, and combined with the constant drone of the engines made any attempt to start a dialog worthless. Finally he found comfort. After they had left the mainland It was more and more apparent that some sort of simple conversation with his new colleagues was inevitable,

whether he liked it or not. After all, he had forced himself to flung occasional words into the high-sounding platitudes.

David occupied a bunk in the most remote corner of the cabin. He pulled out a case file from a bit battered briefcase to give it a cursory glance, although he had already learned those terse line by heart:

“A group of ten students (eight men and two women) of Department of Geosciences at the UC, all experienced in long ski tours, organized an expedition across unnamed heights of Adlivun archipelago on January 27. One of the group members - George Jeugenes dropped out from the main part of the rout due to a sickness which caused a severe knee pain. He stayed at the village as the rest took a decision to continue the expedition in group of nine. Today It has been 12 days since they reported in. The hunters of the local Voguls tribe claimed they had found a dead body. George stated that according to the description the body could belong to Alex Cohleman. We started assembling a search party.”

It was altogether against his nature to feel sorry for anyone else and the job itself had taken toll on him, but this particular case almost reversed his sentiments and unearthed memories from his own childhood, - one of the hunting trips with his father to be precise, when he’d spent two days alone in the woods. He could hardly think of it without perturbation.

Going up on deck, Adler wished he had never accompanied the party. As soon as he got on top his exhausted consciousness treacherously responded to the bizarre view bursting upon him from behind the clouds of ice-dust and aroused dim ancestral and almost mystic fear unknown to a man of his profession. The vessel was piercing towards a desolate range of austerely aspiring white summits evilly framed by bleak obsidian sky and descending ridges of hoary granite wall that flexed itself against the ocean. Muffled moan of the wind wandering among centenary tree trunks occasionally reached the deck and the whole spectacle imposed an appalling impression that the vessel was carrying the crew further and further into grim white immensity haunted by an enigmatic omnipresent sinister essence.

The last time he saw her was three years ago. At high school graduation, with him wearing a black tuxedo that pinched in all the wrong places and a blue, geometric-patterned tie that he’d found at the back of his closet, her in a flowy white dress that had glowed against her tanned skin, her hair tousled and curled in an extravagant beehive that only she could pull off.  

They’d made some small talked. Tried overly hard to ignore the bitterness and resentment that’d stained the air around them blue and red and purple. Smiled too much, laughed too hard, made sure the awkward pauses faded before memories could claw their way in. And then he’d told her about how he’d decided on a different college, miles and miles away from the one they’d both planned on going, watched as her face flickered with surprise, then hurt, then relief. She’d told him about her new friend, the one that might be more than a friend, watched as he’d struggled to hide the tornado that’d crash-landed inside of him.

After that, there had been an awkward pause. And then she’d broken it by blurting, “It’d be best if we never saw each other again. I mean-like, not in a rude way, but… There’s just too much between this- between us now, and I don’t think either of us can handle it.”

She’d been right. She always was, and still a part of him had wanted to keep protesting, despite the fact that he’d changed colleges for the exact same reason. But he’d kept that hidden away too, and instead replied, “After this, you should just forget about me. Pretend none of this ever happened. Go on with life.”

She hadn’t met his eyes. And after that, they’d parted ways, determined to make sure their paths never intersected. They’d succeeded too, for three years.

Until, the call. Her soft words, masking the tears that came with them. The pang in his chest, sharp enough that he’d almost fallen over.

The beep.

The internal war.

The five hour plane ride.

The knock on her apartment door.

He wasn’t sure who’d hugged who first, but after that first physical contact, nothing else mattered. He’d held her as the dams broke, made her soup as the cities flooded, and brushed her hair away from her face as the skies sobbed, and sobbed, and sobbed.

Watery tears fall

molecules form aqua sea

soothing tender heart.

she waded into ocean of high tides

     gray clouds in sky at half mast

     poetry of soul floats with her

     her brow adorned with seashells

     tears mingling with salty sea

wind cradled her last breath

     foam smile adorned crested waves

     splashing in depths toward bliss

     stepping into aqua ocean peace

     new beginnings in soothing seas

ship of death sailed into horizon

     as soul windows opened wide

     and silence seeped below water

     absent heartbeat clothed by

     skin of the sea as she becomes

     one with caressing ocean streams