stale air, always staler, the only thing keeping these fibers from aging to crumbling, well that and a worn, salt-encrusted cork plugging the mouth of this cloudy glass world that bobs among ceaseless blue, split in two as one that moves against the other. the ink inside these rolls seems damned to irrelevancy if ever dry land is even reached.

#freeWrite
#Stray9writes

is this what a hermit crab feels like, between shells? Having finally clawed out of a shell that, while once home, had become a tightening and crushing trap, the crab is both free and exposed. Stiff and creaky and fumbling and not at all adjusted to the wind bare against its whole body, it stumbles, and skitters, and then scrambles over stretches off sand and sea-worn rocks. There is another shell out there, and the last shell was certainly it's own end, but the beach is suddenly a sprawling, sun-glared place.

#freeWrite
#Stray9writes

Thunder hasnt stopped rolling since the storm passed, unbroken by lightning in bolts or even distant flashes, it echoes against half a bright blue sky as the grey keeps moving south. Been dry nearly half an hour and the storm keeps moving away, yet the rumble seems here to stay, persistently and even peaking louder than you thought the loudest could be even ten minutes ago, still it rolls.

#freeWrite
#Stray9writes

sometimes a summer rain is just muggy, heavy and hot and wet too, with the air just trying to break. Sometimes though, the heat and humidity and wind and the distant applause of a million droplets of water cascading around feels like being in the bathroom, with the shower hot and the steam building, where it is safe and secure and the rest of the world is outside of tiled walls and your own tropical micro climate

#freeWrite
#Stray9writes

we didn't poison the well,
but we all kept drawing from it
and drinking
and sweating
and crying
and leaking back into the same ground
we didn't poison the well
but with it, we poisoned ourselves

#freeWrite
#poetry (ish)
#Stray9writes

just beyond a railing strung in hanging lights, a blip of yellowish-green glow appears in the twilight yard, and then several more, and as my eyes adjust to the waning light beyond, i see them in number; blinking into and out of sight in air that doesn't seem dark enough to aid the disappearing illusion.
i missed seeing lightning bugs.
a summer without lightning bugs is like a night sky with no stars, but in a quieter and less jarring way, so that you don't notice it's missing and start to think the air of summer evenings never sparkled with their dance.

#freeWrite
#Stray9writes

we just call them gulls now,
as they swoop and dive through suburbs and cities
we took the sea from them, why not take it from their name?

#freeWrite
#Stray9writes

a toy to be bored of easily,
a tool that is just in the way
when not being used,
to which layers of rust will be added
in eulogy,
and dings never dinged
will be blamed for the disposal.
as selfish hands, near applause,
shake off the dust and deny their own fingerprints

#freeWrite
#Stray9writes

along these walls i'll build shelves, and on those shelves i'll stack jars; dirty and musty jars, scuffed but not cracked, with screwtop lids that are rusty but still thread tight and i can drain the sloshing sewage into those jars until i am both hollow and empty again, surrounded instead.
But i can leave a room with walls, and shelves, and jars.

#freeWrite
#Stray9writes

i was teetering before the sunset
weeble wobbling on the precipice
hours and hours of dark and
i figured i was still on the edge
daybreak's light glows on rock
whizzing past beside me
but mountains don't move
have i been falling all night?

#freeWrite
#Stray9writes

some days it's hard to remember waking, like in a dream vividly aware in a moment but how you arrived or the context around eludes even being noticed in its evasion, and maybe that's the consolation that if noticed it must be something else, must be just broken brain, and not misplaced reality, and not trapped in a subconscious too blurry at the edges to escape, and not blinking between disconnected moments further and further down the drain.
some days it's hard

#freeWrite
#Stray9writes

the sun felt like someone's fingers drumming on my shoulders, the heat came from inside, until the wind blew it away. birds laughed at my confusion in the stillness and the nape of my neck got hot again, and again from the inside

#freeWrite
#Stray9writes

Battered ballast, patched in duct tape and hope, pitched for the surface if the leaks don't worsen, and senselessly - yet in no position for correction - dragging a broken anchor covered in bits of reef and rock.

#freeWrite
#Stray9writes

the storm is coming with a smear of clouds, blues and greys and grays too rolled like drippy watercolor paints on a curling damp paper. But, at the front of the smear, where the last light after sunset is still setting the not storm clouds aglow in a way it can only backlight the edges of the stormy ones, there was, for less than a minute even, a leading reach of cloud shaped very much like a charging elephant and high reared trunk. The slow and persistent rumble of thunder bouncing from horizon to horizon could, easily, be the pounding of an elephant's feet across a breaking summer sky.
i heard once that Elephants maintain and may even have made many oasis' in their environment, due to the heavy pounding of their feet on their migratory routes. And now, after the hottest day yet of the summer and drought conditions just starting to loom, here in this cloud is an Elephant and damned if it wasn't pulling a rainstorm in its wake.

#freeWrite
#Stray9writes
#imagePoems

today smelled like sunblock
and heat
and now, sporadic flashes
and rolling rumbles in the sky
say it might smell like rain too
and cool air
aren't all summer days supposed to go that way?

#freeWrite
#Stray9writes

standing in a parking lot, on the eastern edge of the city, and the horizon is torn with yellow-gray creeping fingers turning orangeish-red as they thin towards the sky above. in the time to fill just a small cart, the fingers have turned to a curtain pulling fast to the other end, and well past overhead; the air down here got gritty quick and the exhaust from a two decade old van is indistinguishable as it exits. so many days ahead without the sun - just a hazy glow like a giant, semi-functioning fluorescent light in the sky - or air that isn't unprecedentedly toxic. so many times taking off a respirator to smoke a cigarette.

#freeWrite
#Stray9writes

i felt the wind just moments ago, cool but not cold along the backs of my hands and around my ankles and up my calves, it tickled my scalp without moving my hair and it hung around the walls of my coat as if ever patient for an opening. the only one sitting on this balcony, just past dawn above a quiet sleeping neighborhood, but i wasn't alone. it beckons i think, to come along wherever the breeze may carry, to leave the coat in all its forms and just drift

#freeWrite
#Stray9writes

i don't wake anymore
between fluttering eyelids i walk
through memories riddled with ghosts
and places i left behind,
in time non linear,
until the next blink;
do i remember this place as a dream
when i am anywhere else?

#freeWrite
#Stray9writes

it's not that i dislike daylight
but early morning birds
have always sung the best lullabies,
and sinking into sleep
among dawn sunbeams
is a good way to stay out of the dark

#freeWrite
#poetry (ish)
#Stray9writes

snap, crackles, and pops
a fire putting rice krispies to shame
nestled inexplicably on a roof
i've been here before and
never will be again
perhaps i wasn't, even then
stay away from the edge they say
but i feel hands on my back
pushing

#freeWrite
#poetry (ish)
#Stray9writes