Tag Archives: surreal

Sleep Writing

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I know that my brain works overtime, coming up with strange and atmospheric stories while I sleep. Maybe it’s meant to balance my waking laziness. I won’t ask! Here’s another one of those few from which I have awakened with a crystal clear memory. Not of its putative symbolism, of course, if you’re wanting to analyze my weirdness for dreaming surreal tales with death in them that are somehow not nightmares but simply strange and (literally) colorful, unexpected nocturnal in-head cinematic confabulations.Photo: Wheat Field

Text: Color Coded 1

Digital illustration from photos + text: Color Coded 2

The Time is Out of Joint

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digital illustrationDo you ever feel like something unnatural or supernatural has taken hold and everything around you is suddenly unfamiliar and not what you’d always known it to be? That chaos reigns and confusion is dimming the lights and obscuring everything useful and meaningful from your sight? Do you have those times, too, when you may be quite sure that this will all pass and the atoms of your universe will subtly shift back into the places where you expect them to dwell but that for the moment, what should seem normal and clear and knowable to you is utterly inscrutable and bizarre and impossibly at odds?

Have you noticed, as I do remember to notice eventually, how often this happens around holidays and tax time?

Yeah, I thought so.

And So, Good Night

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photoBedding becomes at a certain time the only allowable necessity in the list of must-have, must-acquire things: a soft, squashy place in which to drop into docile dreams and a few gentle coverings to keep the nighttime’s monsters reasonably at bay. In the great grand scheme of everything, it is plain that eventually nothing matters so much to us as a modicum of food and a good night’s sleep, and that, with the essential and desirable bits of bedding to line the nest.

These are nearly universal enough desires that I think I can safely claim they’re innate and downright laudable human compulsions. And if that’s so, why then I’m quite happy to claim that as the possessor of an extreme quantity of the urge for lengthy, peaceful sleep and lots of delicious food, in that order, ergo I must be a particularly outstanding specimen of humanity. Fortunately, this approach to a philosophical stance on my being excellent by virtue of having a notable love and appreciation for the most desired of goals is so far removed from logic as to be virtually unassailable. Unassailable, at least, by persons deeply asleep, which in this tautology we all ought to be. Therefore, I adjure you, let us all seek and dive into whatever glorious sleeping comforts we can find, and make no more pretense of being productively awake.photo

Unfinished in Perpetuity

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digital artworkWork Forever in Progress

Hundreds of lines later,

I have nothing to show

except if you count

a sense of accomplishment in having

been faithful to a commitment, in having

persisted steadily in the face of the

unseen and unknown, in being

somewhat soothed by the simple

process of having given a little

heart and soul to something

simply because I could.

However I came to exist,

I think I might be a little bit

the same kind of puzzle myself,

imperfect and utterly incomplete,

but nicely so, for all of that–

nicely, because,

after all, I am working my way

toward being something at last,

and whether I have

an encompassing purpose or not,

I have at least

begun to Be . . .digital artwork

Side Effects Make a Changed Man

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Beastly Discovery

Mild-mannered Monsieur Ste-Hilaire

Went out one night to take the air

And came home newly sharp and snarky

(Full of mischief and malarkey);

I think that maybe in the park, he

Might have met a succulent

Voracious, wild and truculent,

That bit his elbows, left and right,

Infecting him that very night

(As you’d imagine, quite a sight)

With psychedelic thoughts to itch

Him to a highly fevered pitch

Wherein he met another world

And in its vortex, seeing swirled

(The way such rarities are hurled)

Strange creatures in bizarre parade,

He loosed the window, threw the shade

Upon it open just to share

With us the beastly thoughts in there

(Effects of which you’re now aware).digital illustration

Mysterious Phenomena & Exotic Doings

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graphite drawing

It’s hard to know what to make of such goings-on . . .

Sharp Objects Falling out of the Sky

On certain Wednesday mornings

Sharp objects from the sky

Come shearing down the sides of clouds

Like spaceships zipping by

And boulders, ashtrays, cutlery

And great meteorites

Come slashing from the heavens

—But clear up by Wednesday nights

graphite drawing

. . . but I’ve come to expect the unexpected . . .

Hot Flash Fiction 3

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graphite drawingA Menopausal Mini-Mystery

‘OutRRRRRageous!’ she purred, ‘I’m only a lady who has fallen prey to the sentimental desires of A Certain Age to visit my old acquaintance!’ Still, her counter-suit of police Profiling would have been more plausible if she hadn’t been spotted in that location and in such a compromising position. The acquaintance in question, quivering in the doorway behind Madame De Léopard, was still squeaking with shrill accusation as the neighbors began to gather and fling catty remarks back and forth like batted feather lures. When the arresting officer demanded a sobriety test and detected that an illegal quantity of West Country Farmhouse Cheddar had been dabbed behind the lady’s ears, pandemonium erupted and many of the surrounding crowd were convinced that there was a far more nefarious explanation for her appearance on the scene than middle-aged maundering.

Natural Cycles & Unnatural

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For my arachnophobic friends out there: hurry past the first illustration–I think spiders are pretty, but I understand that you do not!

digital photocollageShort Term Shelter

Under the porches of the house,

amid the floor joists, posts and beams,

cobwebs and dust, dead mice and dreams,

there is a corner one last mouse

still nests in, where a little light

leaks underneath the latticed edge

that skirts the porches, where the hedge

holds lots of insects that by night

fill up his little rodent sides

and round his belly with their crunch;

this nest of his, I have a hunch,

will soon not be where he resides,

because, although he’s now grown fat,

it’s been discovered by the cat.

digital photocollageRides Upward & Back

Bicycling up into a tree, I paused to see what I could see

between the branches, richly leaved, and saw, if I was not deceived,

a broad, expansive view indeed, and haply so, while I was treed–

but (Woe!) relaxed my braking foot and clocked my forehead on the root–

so, shorter ’twas than was my wont, this little arbor-biking jaunt.