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Remember the bumblebee.
The human body contains its own exquisite timepieces,
the Frankenstein concoctions of our private anxieties and desires.
The sequence above may be changed in either of two ways.
There are two operative words here, abstract and irrelevant
although they are very loud, their influence will be short-lived
from the perspective of the clock-shifted butterflies.

Another clock is the heart. All numbers used were real numbers,
but the children were breaking them faster than they were made.
The house seemed to be full of sea. During the labor dispute,
barrels of potatoes were emptied across the highway
the gruesome, tragic, suburban boulevards.

If the rectangular box with no lid shown above
has the effect of rendering the repulsive beautiful,
delete “as it is”
delete “we know that”
delete “I believe”.
No question has a negative answer. No error.
If you finish before time is called
S T O P

This song is meant to be sung to the tune of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.  Not that it’s a patch on the original, of course,

.

.

I knew a girl who was lost before
Her ship was wrecked but she reached the shore
(But I could never get you to read Shakespeare)
Her world sank with her brother’s mast
“What country, friends, is this?” she asked
The captain answered her: “This is Illyria – “

By day you walk our marble halls
Her physics chalked upon the walls
Her memories make these mysteries familiar
I scan you like a page of text
But your prophecy won’t reveal what’s next
And for all my skill I can’t translate Illyria

You’re a comedy with a violent core
I’m a tragedy clutching at your straw
You wonder if the whiskey makes it clearer
Well, I drink to get rid of the taste
Of the blood she coughed up on my face
You were the storm that wrecked her ship, Illyria

I’ve died more times than I care to note
How the blade lay smiling in my throat
But I never really knew death till it took her
She was shaking while her insides tore
And I lay helpless on the floor
As before my eyes you cracked her soul, Illyria

Now you don the mask and fill the role
But this willow cabin calls no soul
There’s no one left within the house to hear
Illyria, you’re a blue-veined shell
And we both deserve to burn in hell
But you are all I’ve left of her, Illyria

And while I teach you how to breathe
You try to autopsy my grief
Because you cannot grasp why I weep for her
Her body fits you like a glove
But you are not the girl I love
You still don’t know how to weep for me, Illyria

Hair is only so much waste.

Alive, it was brushed, sprayed,

combed by the fingers of a lover’s hand.

Dead, it’s disowned.

It was never yours.  Grease, dead skin cells,

tabloid exposé (the brown roots

of the flawless platinum strands)

The traces you don’t want left behind.

.

Hair, omnipresent.  It mushrooms.

It breeds like bacteria on an agar plate.

It spreads like infection through the rooms of a house.

Colonies form on pillows, the headrests of sofas,

whole orogenies of the floors of barbershops.

No surface free

.

from the single stray strand, the first insidious squatter

clusters, carpets, civilizations,

the spawning of empires.

The sinuous debris of humanity.

Descending, chokehold

deathgrip

to clog the bathroom sink.

play – compromises. lumpy. stitched together. math & plays.
scenes same different reverse

play littered with assumptions
evidence available to us changes
the characters construct proofs all the time, so do we
love
deftly patterned play. no long speeches.
soliloquys huge building blocks of character
this is a dance, they’re switching partners

stereotypes given to us, keys to unlock
played around, whittled down, inverted

play ends – Catherine begins to speak.

all around the sound of fingers on laptop keys
falling like rain

.

.

.

.

A/N: The original title of this poem is Notes On Proof Taken During Mr. Burge’s Literature Class While The Poet Was Menstruating.

Lady, what am I doing
With a lung full of dust and a tongue of wood,
Knee-deep in the cold and swamped by flowers?

- ‘Leaving Early’, Sylvia Plath

i.

The operation was swift, the cut clean.  When Blue came to his arm was gone.  That was it.  Like so many other things in his life he never said a real goodbye.

He dove in and out of a swamp of healing magic and painkillers.  At one point he woke up and saw his hospital room lousy with flowers which were making it difficult to breathe.  He thought he saw at the foot of his bed a single red rose in an empty jam jar.

ii.

People came and went.  Snow and Bigby, sometimes together, sometimes individually.  Pinocchio a constant.  Once Fly visited with roses from Ride.  All this was hazy.  He was unable to say anything through the drugs.

He knew it was her when she arrived.  Her voice serrated, grating on the edges of his pain.  She came and stood by his bedside, a vague figure tipped with red like a candlewick.  The annihilation of her smile.

“Thank God,” he heard her say.  “I was so afraid we’d lost you.”

He made words for her, his first words since they knocked him out after the operation.  They were dry and awful on his lips.

“Were you?”

She stared at him, then put something down on his bedside table and left the room.

Days later, when he was finally able to observe his surroundings without them dissolving into swirls of milk, he discovered that it was another rose in a different jam jar.  By the time he found this out, it had died.

iii.

“You know,” Bigby told him one day during a visit, “Snow was never ready.  So I never pushed.”

“No,” said Blue.  “The two of you got whacked out by some spell and went camping and then you got her pregnant with septuplets.  My situation’s quite different.”

Bigby gave him a sidelong look.  “It could always be arranged.”

Blue threw his hand towel at him.

iv.

Snow was, of course, infinitely more pragmatic about the whole thing.  “Give it time,” she advised.  “Who knows, in a couple of decades maybe the cycle will repeat itself and she’ll get another crush on you.  You’ve all the time in the world.”

Blue didn’t throw anything at her because Snow was never wrong.

v.

“It’s all down to the testosterone, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“I mean, you’re holding our friendship hostage just because my rejection killed your male pride.  You can’t get over it.  That’s why you’re behaving like a total jerk!”

“That’s not – look, you were the one who rejected me!”

Rose looked away.  “I didn’t ask to be asked.”

Blue said nothing.  His phantom limb, he could feel, had reached out towards her hand.  His real arm lay inert on the bedspread.

“I’m sorry,” said Rose, “these aren’t things you say in a hospital.”

vi.

Snow spent the next few days indirectly apologizing.  “Something’s come up at the Farm” or “the Haven Fables need so much administration, she hasn’t got a second to get away”.  Blue pushed hospital pudding around with his fork.  “I understand,” he said, all too well.

vii.

“Do you love her?” asked Bigby.

“Yes,” said Blue.  “No.  At this point I really have no idea.”

“If it’s an infatuation, or sexual,” went on Bigby, “I suggest you forget it.  Time will get rid of it for you.  If you love her, of course, it’s a different matter.”

“If you love her, you will wait for her.  If she keeps you at arms-length forever, you will wait for her.  You will watch over her every move, because every hurt visited on her is visited on you tenfold. You will never be happy, because you left happily ever after back in the Homelands. But you will wait for her, centuries and centuries, because your immortal existence is fit to be spent no other way.”

“Or,” finished Bigby, “you will realize that you don’t love her that much.  It’s not worth it unless you do.”

Later Blue watched Bigby leave the hospital, watched the Range Rover swing by in the entrance drive. Snow got out, flitting over to the passenger’s side.  Bigby chucked her on the chin and she kissed him on the nose and he smiled, before moving over to the driver’s side.

Bigby was wrong about one thing, which was the happily ever after.  They read him and Snow, Blue and so many others in this town, like the fairytale endings that grew false so long ago.

viii.

His room was pretty much the way he had left it; no-one else had moved in.  Blue stood looking at it for some time, then went downstairs.

“I’d like to have my old room back,” he said when he found Rose in the kitchen.

Rose flinched, startled, and dropped a glass of milk.  “Oh, god,” went on Blue, in horror. “I’m so sorry.”

“No, no – ” said Rose distractedly, “it’s, it’s fine.  I didn’t know you were discharged.  You should have called – did you walk down here?”

“I got a lift on the supply truck.”

“That’s great,” said Rose.  “That’s really great.”  She was staring at the glass shard by her foot, one of her shoelaces soaking up the milk.

The seconds dropped from the air like flies in the heat.

“Rose,” said Blue eventually, “Rose, could you please give me something to do?”

Rose looked up, though still not at him.  “Right.  Ah, there’s some heavy stuff around the barn I need – oh god, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to – I’ll find you some paperwork – can you write?”

“I’m left-handed.”

“Awesome sauce,” said Rose.  “I’m going up to get the stuff, be back in a jiffy, don’t touch the mess.  You mind waiting here?”

She took the long way around the table and disappeared into the hallway.  Centuries, he heard Bigby say.

“I can wait,” said Blue out loud.

The first thing that Mark notices is wrong is the car.

It’s a flaming red Lamborghini and it’s parked right outside his apartment.  It’s a capitalist vehicle in the Lower East Side, and it hasn’t been jacked or graffitied or slept on by bums.

Mark can’t help staring at it as he enters the apartment block.

The second thing is that the door is not locked.  Mark can tell this from the landing because somebody has shot through the bolt.

The third thing is Roger sitting on a chair in the middle of the apartment, facing the window and not moving a muscle.

The fourth is the absolutely gorgeous chick sitting in his lap.  From feet up she’s wearing gladiator sandals, leather hotpants and a red bomber jacket with nothing underneath.

She’s pointing a submachine gun at Roger’s chin.  Mark doesn’t even know why he knows it’s a submachine gun.

“Mark,” says the strange woman, “you got an appointment.”

Mark address Roger.  “What the hell is going on?”

“I really have no idea,” says Roger, eyes still on the window.  “She kind of invited herself in.”

The woman pistolwhips him.  Roger’s head jerks back with an alarming crack.  “You don’t talk about the Fox like she ain’t there, pal.”  To Mark she says: “You hear me, dumbass?  You got an appointment with the Professor and he don’t like to be kept waiting.”

“I don’t understand,” begins Mark, stammering.

The Fox shifts abruptly.  Mark finds himself staring down the barrel of long, black annihilation.  “Move it, cocksucker,” snarls the Fox, “or I blow your friend Kurt Cobain here to shreds.”

“Okay! Okay!” shrieks Mark.  “I’ll do it!  Whatever it is you want me to do!  Just…just don’t shoot Roger.”

The Fox cracks a grin then.  It’s the most terrifying thing Mark’s ever seen.  Yet.

“Well then,” she says.  “Let’s haul ass.”

Before Mark can even squeak, she’s got him by the scarf and is marching him down the stairs.  “Please,” gabbles Mark, “please, please just tell me what’s going on…”

“What’s going on?”  The Fox laughs.  “Shit, I don’t even know where to begin.  Let’s just say you the son of a great man, Mark.  One of the greatest ever lived.”

“What?  My dad?”

“Not that dad.”  The Fox pushes him onto the pavement.  “Them folk ain’t your real parents.  That home ain’t where you belong.  Man, you ain’t even fucking Jewish.”

She slams Mark up against the door of her Lamborghini.  “Your real father – he was the Killer.”

“What the hell?” says Mark in response.

“You’re a pathetic sonofabitch, Mark Cohen,” the Fox continues.  “You don’t earn shit from your little films.  You don’t earn nothing.  Hell, your girlfriend dumped you for another woman.  How much more of a loser can you be?”

She brings her face up close to Mark.  Her lips are very thick and very red.  “All that’s about to change, Mark.  You the son of the Killer.  You damn better quit shooting with those goddamn cameras and start shooting with something else.”

“This is a nightmare,” moans Mark as he is bundled into the car.

The Fox guns the engine.  “Only difference between a nightmare and a dream’s how big your balls are, bitch.”

It’s ten minutes to their destination.  Mark screams all the way.

-

A/N: I totally ripped that last quote from the actual graphic novel.  Which I prefer infinitely; don’t get me wrong, I love Timur Bekmambetov but the film adaptation was like eating the skin without drinking the milk.

1

No memory of another time before this only lights and glitter and colour colour colour sound of bells on the ceiling smell of roasting scratchy feel of some rough surface then arms and air and more light and they carried him into the room downstairs to everyone’s applause.

3

Three was when he opened everybody’s presents when they were all at dinner and his mother thought it was hilarious although his father didn’t, not really, on account of what he’d bought his mother.

9

His mother insisted that he learn to play the piano because that was what men of society did.  His father disapproved of men of society; however, he relented when the boy actually took to practising pieces of his own accord.

That Hogswatch eve, he was the one who played the carols.  When it was time for dinner his father rose to go, but his mother said abruptly: “Play it again, Sam.”

He played all the carols again.

16

The night his father didn’t come home for dinner, his mother had set out the entire feast on the table and sent all the servants away; then the two of them sat at either end and didn’t speak.  His mother had her hands clasped and her lips tight and she kept looking at the clock.  He couldn’t help staring at the sheen of oil on the roast ham, the glistening apple stuffing.

Twenty minutes after midnight, they heard the bolt in the front door slide back.  “Oh gods,” his mother was saying, “thank the gods – ” and then she was running downstairs screaming: “DAMN YOU SAM OF ALL THE NIGHTS – ” and by the time he got to the staircase she was sobbing on his father’s shoulder, the one without the knife wound, and his father said quietly, “Happy New Year, Sybil.”

23

The night he didn’t come home for dinner was also the night of his first kill.  Later he recalled next to nothing of the chase, the blinding snow, his own panicked breathing in the dark.  Only the sweeping arc of the torch lighting up the two men struggling in the wet slush, the flash of a blade, Fred Colon shouting and trying to hold him back but his ears were full of a rushing wind as he shoved the torch into the fat man’s hand and raised the crossbow.

Later he remembered that Hogswatch not as the night of his first kill, but the night he brought his father home.

48

The piano stayed in the house that he inherited, along with everything else.  None of the children showed any inclination towards learning music.  As time went by, he himself played it less and less.

That Hogswatchnight he opened the lid and touched the keys of old ivory.  He couldn’t remember any of his old practice pieces, but the notes that came to mind easily were the carols.  In the midst of his playing it occurred to him that this was the first New Year they would pass without his mother.

He stopped, and lifted his fingers from the keys, but the voice behind him said: “Play.”

His father was sitting by the fireplace in his armchair.  He could not see the old man’s face.  His father, who was by now almost deaf, said: “Play it again, Sam.”

He kept playing.

in response to Gertrude’s Prayer, as well as Havisham by Carol Ann Duffy:

Mother, I dreamed I walked
through a live minefield, and each mine
a heart.  They were colouring the air
with blood and purple muscle.
I walked on.  I knew that they
were none of them mine.

Mother, you feasted on me.
I was the wedding cake you never cut.
What is this sick beauty, Mother,
this Chelsea grin you carved into my face?
Mother, you taught me how to smile.

Mother, you forgave me.
Would that I could forgive you.
You saved me from grief
but I would fain have my heart back,
not this strange jewel you pinned to my breast.
I may have loved you once.  I must have been
too young to remember.

Mother, you left me a nightmare
of stopped clocks, a horror of spiders.
The day I was wed, the mirror showed me you
in my yellow wedding gown, death’s-head bride.
The flowers already crumbling in my rotting hands.

A/N: Despite Burge’s dislike of Charles Dicken’s females, I’ve always thought Estella and Miss Havisham to be two of the most fascinating characters in the book.  So when Melly wrote her Gertrude’s Prayer, I tried to respond from Hamlet’s point-of-view but couldn’t (or wouldn’t.  It’s hard when you keep thinking of Kenneth Branagh).  So I simply jumped texts.

The ‘Chelsea grin’ reference is for Melissa.

“I don’t get it!” shouted Harry.  “Either you’re pretending to be bloody oblivious or you really are that dense.”

Snape had his back to him; he appeared, against all the odds, to be doing something administrative with a filing cabinet.  “Don’t bawl, Potter.  Unless you wish to bring the entire school down on us?”

Harry considered throwing something at him.  The echidna spines within reach of his right hand were looking like a good, attention-grabbing option.

“Don’t,” said Snape without even turning around, “even think about it.”

Damn you to hell, thought Harry virulently.  He hoped the Legilimency picked that up, at least.

“Language, Potter.”

So much for that.  Harry tried another tack.  “Look, you know how bad I am at Potions, right?”

Snape spared him one glance.  “Indubitably.”

Harry took a deep breath.  “It’s your fault.”

“I’ll thank you, Potter, to keep the blame for your abysmal grades directed at yourself, instead of pitching them with the utmost inconsideration at others.  Not an admirable trait for one so heroic.”

“It’s just…I can’t concentrate,” Harry babbled on.  “You remember that one time during mid-years when I blew up Lavender’s cauldron?”

“Completely unforgettable, I assure you,” returned Snape.  “It took four first-year detention crews to get the stain out.”

“That…that was because you did that thing.  With the hair,” finished Harry lamely.

Snape finally turned around to face him in full.  “Potter, I refuse to be the subject of your ridiculous adolescent fixations.  Take your fawning elsewhere.”

The familiar wave of rage flared in Harry again.  “And that’s what I mean!” he shouted.  “I can’t stand how you can’t stand me! I wish you were dead!”

“Indeed,” said Snape unforgivingly.  “As does Mr. Weasley, and Mr. Longbottom, along with most of Gryffindor and probably half the school to boot.  If it were really your desire to single yourself out for my attention, I’d suggest a more exclusive emotion.”

“Exclusive?  I doubt anyone else in school feels the way I do!”  Harry stared at the flagstones with sinking realization.  “They’d have to be bloody insane.  Oh, god.”

“Angst does not become you, Potter,” Snape informed him tersely, rearranging his stationery.

“I could have had any girl in Gryffindor.  It just – it just had – ”

“The honour flattens me.” Snape collected his stuff, and whirled on Harry.  “And if you turn up one more time in my dungeons uninvited, I will send you for detention.”

“What?” snorted Harry.  “With you?”

“Attractive as that might sound to your depraved mind, I fear I would have to donate you to Professor McGonagall.  Perhaps your youthful charms might find themselves of more use in that arena.”  Snape scooped up a pile of materials, and swept towards the door.  “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a conference to attend.”

Harry flung himself desperately before the dungeon door.  “Look, Professor, I can – ”

He barely had a chance at an intake of breath before Snape grabbed him by the front of his robes and pinned him against the door.

A fuse blew in Harry’s brain.  While his neurons ran around screaming in complete darkness trying to find the emergency fuse-box, Snape leaned till their faces were a bare inch apart and whispered, in a voice that sent a disturbingly delicious chill up Harry’s spine, “Weren’t you paying attention, Potter?”

Then he opened the door with his elbow and dropped Harry.  Harry fell like a log.

“Get you gone, boy,” ordered Severus Snape, from what seemed like miles up.  Then he swept past Harry’s face and out of his newly-inverted sight.

Harry covered his face with his sleeve, groaned, and banged his head against the flagstones a couple of times, for good measure.