Telegram, stop.

A work in progress...

A gasp, a palpable and visible strand of air was expelled from
her lungs, stop.
He hung his moist words on the lines of her eyes,
to dry, stop.
Her eyes were teary, so his words shriveled and pruned like
old lady’s hands, stop.
So he picked the rotten words from her branches,
choked on the pits, stop.
Coughing, letters dripped from his lips, v l o e e m,
nonsensical, worthless, stop.
He understood speech to be extraneous material, glue
refusing to stick, stop.
She, glutinous from all his nouns and adjectives,
comes undone, stop.
They, strolling contradictions, unable to communicate,
choking, breaking, stop.

Victims of Ashes

This is my attempt at 'flash fiction':

Victims of Ashes

Stepping out of the ashes of the dead, Henja brushes her shoulders and walks out of the camp into the nocturnal sky filled with smoke. Her eerie appearance announces to the world the cataclysm perpetrated by the masters of inhumanity—a shaved scalp, a body now composed of cinder and bone, sunken eyes and a protruding belly. Henja, the fierce woman with 78923 seared onto her skin no longer knows how to live in a world where ashes blind her eyes, a constant raining memorial of those lost. She cannot look to the future when she cannot even bear to look to the past. When she closes her sorrowful eyes, a scene flashes of a girl with lustrous black hair, dancing around a table filled with challah and matzo ball chicken soup, but then this ethereal dream is drowned in crimson blood, with screaming whispers inundating her ears. There is no escape. There never is an escape from the cruelty of man and the havoc it wreaks upon its victims. Henja is a victim. Her sister, Pieja is a victim. Poland is a victim. And even Deutschland is a victim—to the ashes falling from the sky but originating from the corpses of once childish and happy individuals with dark hair and eyes and slightly pointed noses. We are all victims.

What Is & Is Not...

There is a miniscule path of footsteps and there is not.
There is a clearing in a tattered forest, whispering of your presence, and there is not.
There is love, this abstract apple whose taste eludes you, and there is not.
There is laughter, a gurgling sound emitted from your vocal chords, a hymn to goodness, and there is not.
There is evil, a dark and humid feeling expelled from humanity’s breast, released like spores into the air, and there is not.
There are words, pieced together letters that determine worlds, cosmic and organic, and there are not.
There is strength, a tenuous sprig resisting fracturing, and there is not.
There is Autumn, burnt amber leaves decaying to give way to death and despoilment, and there is not.
There is forgiveness, a deep and seething need to reaffirm the bonds that tie us, and there is not.
There is redemption, a revenant returning from the abyss where plant’s growth is stunted, and there is not.
There is a chair where love is perched, where hatred is perched, both dueling and yet no victor exists, and there is not.
There is a phantom that is reflected in a mirror with the same jade eyes and yet an indefinable emptiness that pervades, and there is not.
There is a father that departed, walked to the end of the street and then returned, and there is not.
There is a tear that cascaded down her parched cheek, an homage to a lost man, and there is not.

All seen and unseen, may or may not exist. All is and is not. All was and was not, but for you and me; us. Certainty.

Broken Things

This piece is a bit experimental and most certainly non-edited, in need of much work.

Broken Things

A twig, made of innumerable threads,
breaking, bit by bit, each second,
silently tearing, silently breaking
apart. A mirror, shards separating
the recognizable self from the
unknown. Snow, piece by piece,
falling, broken from the sky and
bombarding pavement. Voices,
cracking with the weight of
nonsensical words, letters strewn
together, meaningless. Knuckles,
bleeding with pressure, a silent eulogy
to happiness, lost. Pages, fragmented
by weightless sentences, bold verbs that
rip. apart. Petals, pollen falling from the
stamen, polluting. Gravity, the particles
losing grip, allowing bodies, arms, bones,
brittle. loose. falling. breaking. Fire,
flames unleashing their burdening
wrath, fragmenting all seen and unseen,
to give way to an extinguisher, beseeching—
stop. the. breaking. of. broken. things.

Aerial Canopy

This is the second edited version of a "photograph poem", one where we had to describe a photograph with clear details but while still adequately answering the question: "So what?". This poem may undergo a few more edits before I am pleased with it, but the following is one of the attempts:


A tenebrous figure sits on the tawny sand,
as the dusking sky turns from blue to purple,
resembling sweet peas as they age and
wilt. The diaphanous waves, each
oscillating back and forth from the horizon
to the shore, each swell folding a secret to be
unraveled like the thread of a spool,
its release imminent, tightly held by this man—
his emerald green eyes vacant,
his sanguine lips cracked, his shoulders
as vast as this sea. He looks up to the silhouette
parasailing, the white voile beckoning him,
he yearns to seize the braided string of
imaginary hemp, to lift himself up
and flutter away with this aerial canopy,
yet his terrestrial tendencies leave him
grounded, solitary on the loose,
scorching sand, as soft as the underside of
her arm, the ivory limestone rock formations
in the background as he contemplates
his escape. That is when she lost him,
her grip slowly loosening,
the woman whose eye of kohl lay
behind the camera, releasing her grip
from the metal, cool apparatus as
she walks away, burying her cigarette
and him in the sand, the smoke
ascending to the violent sky.

Dissolved like Alkasetzer

She had called crying and I had imagined the tears streaming down her face, her mascara drawing lines from her swollen eyes to her chin. She said, “Come home, I need you,” and that was all it took for me to pack my bags and return to the unknown. And thus, I boarded that plane unaware of the blatant alterations I would be presented with upon landing. Two months before we found ourselves at the edge of the depths of the Vaucluse, guitar in hand and Ricki Nelson songs trickling out of our mouths, our vocal cords vibrating and the sound of bliss echoing and reverberating around us. But now, as soon as my feet hit the tarmac and throughout the long train ride from Paris to the Avignon station, the blurred scenery dancing on my pupils, it was evident that during my absence, an entire universe had dissolved like an Alkasetzer in a half-empty glass of water and all that remained were infinitesimal particles of that which we had been. Ricki Nelson, laughter, summer trips along the Côte d’Azur, stopping at each alcove, each place, has now been replaced with a deafening silence and the knowledge of your imminent departure. And while you were contemplating your escape, getting out your scissors to cut the threads that bound you to us, we spent the nocturnal hours wiping the saline tears from our lachrymose eyes and blanched faces, each minute ticking away alerting us of the bomb that would absolve our current lives.

And as you snipped at each thread, severing ties, you allowed us to fall away from you, to keep falling into this somber chasm, our limbs flailing in the air, flesh tearing from our brittle bones as we screamed and cried, the sound muffled, stuck like dust particles in our tracheas.

I scratched, clawed at the film of our past, the images projected onto an imaginary white sheet in the crevices, folds of my mind but to no avail-- we were losing you. We were clenching our fists, our knuckles turning white and cracking and you were the sand trickling through our phalanges, falling to the cold, marble floors and scattering throughout the Provence with the gust of wind that was reality.

Cinder, Dust, Tears and Wails

The autumnal leaves fell
resembling burnt pieces of
thread after a fire and the ashes
was the dust that deposited upon
our doorstep, refusing to
be swept away. And she,
dressed in a red, cotton dress
shivered as the wind of reality
passed by, raising the black
hair marking her peach skin,
and gripping a broom in her hand,
the whoosh, whoosh reverberating
in the French cathedral ceilings, as she
attempted to sweep away the incendiary words:
I want my freedom.
Now, the stone house collects
cinder, dust, tears and wails
where it once amassed Francis Cabrel
songs, Cassoulet dinners, peals of
laughter and embraces. The ancient
green, wooden door has vanished
and allowed for the gales of misery to
infiltrate this once sanctuary,
each gust redolent of flesh tearing,
the acrid aroma of bile permeating our
olfactory organs, the scent suffocating us
as though a pillow was muffling our screams,
and during this slow death,
the woman whose cotton dress is now
replaced by a stain marked bathrobe,
clawed at the distorted face of her life,
scratched at the walls that were turning into rubble,
and I merely observed—helpless.