Unsatisfied
An exploration of my heart. Why does it hurt? The feeling of it there, but not fully. The shallow breath, stifled flow, the unknown beat of decadent desire, doubting desolation. I am invested in a dream, and I ignore what could be now. I am drawn to the arc of the covenant, drawn with a whip in my hand. The 
desire for adventure, daring and dynamic. Deny not what dawn brings, the croaking of the toads and the songs of the birds. There is a beetle here with a bright green shell. Each movement sheds reflected light like drops of dew.
I think the heaviness in my heart is a reminder: I am alive. I am alive! There is blood, there is brain, and the left brain keeps thinking and the right brain goes to sleep. The light shed from my computer screen draws the fruit flies, the mosquitoes, and I hunger for human contact. I hunger for touch, for real touch, for touch that is comforting, stimulating, I yearn for the stroke of soft fingers and the strength of a hug.
All the while as I sit here, yearning, the world passes me by. There is a video camera next to me, and it calls with, siren, to create, create, create something to leave behind. This is stream-of-consciousness, it is real, it is thought. But it is, ultimately, effortless. I leave behind any thought of what should be, what could be, and just create. I write words no one need read, words that no one will care about. Tomorrow I will read through my blog for the hundredth time, and I will marvel that I wrote that, I wrote that, and I will feel satisfied, and will write no more.
Until the heaviness of my heart drives me to do something, anything, with my time here.
I go take a picture of a dog.
Refuge Pg 3
The seelie are a High Court now. They parade around in moonsilk and faeweave, showing their tits. They ain’t got a speck of flash showing, they’re nat all through. The tower is their home, the tower, rising like a finger, like a phallus from the center of the City. The tower is the shaft, the slums the balls, the outcasts and unseelie the little hairs and mites. The tower is the phallus of the High Court. You step outta line, you get fucked.
Flash is a good industry these days. You know how to rig a body-bot? A new arm? You can hold the flesh together when it starts to fail, and you’ll keep your own hide just a little longer. Best flashwalla is a beast, little ape with horns and a temper. Flings his shit if he’s had anything to eat, otherwise just makes new eyes and ears, new muscles. It ain’t pretty, but it works.
In the slums, there be one rule, na? You stay alive at all costs. You beat back the sickness, the wasting, the slow death. You keep moving, you keep reaching. Die by the sword or the sizzle and that ain’t a bad way to go. No one wants to sit and wait to fall apart, and anyone you meet will kill to keep it so.
(The attached image is the third page of the comic short Refuge, written by me and illustrated by Christina Beard.)
Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home
The soft white flakes swirl. The earth is cold, cold beneath me. I slumber, bereft of light, bereft of warmth. The long nights take their toll, and I watch the world die around me. Deep into the earth my roots run, seeking, striving. This season, this unending time of frost. When will the sun return?
The shortest days will soon arrive. I remember this, deep in my roots, I remember the hardship of the shortest days. Unending monotony, fearful of falling, of feeding the earth.
I am aware and I am free, but I am not like you. I do not walk the world, I do not decide with great leaps of insight or feral instinct. Where to grow? Where to grow? This is the question, paramount, where and how and when to grow. I am not like you.
Yet I listen, I feel. I know the world around me and I love it. I hate it. I fear it. A fox trots past and I know his footsteps, feel his urine, soak up his scent. I hear the rat-tat-tat of a woodpecker resound in the silence of the snow. The little mouse in his den beneath my roots, I feel him stirring in endless sleep.
I witness the great dramas going on around me daily, even as the world dies. The quick death of the sparrow in the owl’s taloned embrace. The slow death of the insects as they succumb to the cold. The romances of the wolves, the great chases and kills. The start of new life.
