Ruined by Love—and That’s Not a Bad Thing

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digital illustration from a photomontage + text

Little Dragon with a Big Appetite

Ever feel tiny? Like everyone and everything else in the world is, by comparison, huge and powerful and towering and you can’t begin to compare, let alone compete? Have you let yourself be measured in comparison with anyone or anything else? Yeah, me too.graphite drawingBut isn’t it worthwhile to break out of that miniscule self-containment somehow? Isn’t the most valid measure of my worth found more truly in what I do as my best self, in what I become over time by growing into a finer and grander version of me? What you see is what you get–for now. And then I plan on continuing my progress as well as I can manage, for as long as I live. That’s all I can promise. With one little [ahem] caveat: I know that the best defense against seeing myself as inadequate to any task is the blessed ignorance of my true inadequacy. So I promise as a small [ahem] part of the larger issue that I will do my best to forget that there is such a thing as the improbable, let alone the impossible, and just get on with living my life, however insignificant it may seem likely to be. [Come on along.]

O Death, Where is Thy Sting?

As long as I can crack jokes about it, there can’t be anything gruesome or terrifying or unnerving at all about dying. I hope. (She said, winking and smiling slyly.)digital painting from a photograph

Pretty Little Graveyard

Pretty little graveyard,

How all your headstones gleam!

How delicate and marvelous

Your mausoleums seem!

It’s sweet and quaint and dainty,

The peaceful way you lie

Filled up with rotten corpses,

Under the sunny sky.digital collage

Funeral Arrangements

The way the flowers grew in shade,

I knew at once that one fine day

They’d make a funeral bouquet

All prearranged, as though pre-made

By funeral mutes in plumed top hats

And wearing bombazine black sashes,

Their pearly skin as pale as ashes,

Accompanied by coal-black cats

Between the funeral-wreathed front doors,

Their carriage drawn by sleek black steeds,

With passengers in widows’ weeds

As fitting as the hellebores’.

Whether Discomposed or Decomposing

mixed media + digital imagePardon My Snoring

My lead-lined eyelids will insist it’s time to go to sleep,

So don’t be too insulted if I leave to count some sheep;

I find you fascinating and quite scintillating too,

So please don’t take it wrong if I should conk right out on you.

Your dazzling personality and brilliance are so bright

It pains me to, but go I must, and bid a fond Good-Night!

Pay no attention to the way I’m backing out the door,

And know your super-excellence could never be a bore.

I sigh, I yawn! But, for all that, it can’t be you that tires:

I’m sure it seldom happens that your audience expires!oil pastel on paper

It’s All Downhill from Here

colored pencilGhoulish Delight

I rustle my hands in taloned glee

Because the deadly recipe

From neither pots nor spoons nor pans

But sort of cauldron-cooked began

To boil and burble, burn and bake

And make a horrid bellyache

In which I openly rejoice

From the bottom of my heart at the top of my voice

Since it eats at the spot whence woe betides

I mean, my enemy’s insides

I hate to admit that it drives me nuts

How I loathe the cretin’s creepy guts

So I will make like a fleet of moles

And bore them full of a flock of holes

Filling me full of ironic glee

And comeuppance for him who so bores me

Since that’s why I really stayed in school

To grow up and be a bad little ghoul

And lest you forget yourself, sneer or scoff

Be nice to me or I’ll bump you offcolored pencil

So Soon Begins the End

Upon my word! This is a fix

I never thought to find me in–

at least not find for five or six

more decades, when my hair’d grown thin

and belly fat, and joints grown weak

and brain grown mushier than it had

been yet, but I age as we speak–

so rapidly–why, this is Bad!

I never dreamed that I would age

before a hundred years or so,

and then, at most, to turn more sage;

oh, this is a grubby way to go!