Magic
I want a world where there are dragons.
I want a world with traveling circuses at night.
I want a world with flying carpets, mermaids, selkies –
where colds, flu, and heartache can be magicked away
with nothing more complicated than some herbs in a pot
and the right words, already written down in a book for you.
In this world of pragmatism,
it’s too hard to know the right words to say.
I want a world with beasts and beauties
requiring no photoshop to recognize,
where illusion makes you think about what life is
instead of trying to convince you the other way around.
I want unicorns,
phoenixes that can rise from ashes and second chances that really matter.
I want the impossible.
I want something more than indeterministic fate.
I want a way to cats-cradle the strings of the universe together
into something better than what it handed me to start with.
I want not the power but the plausible hope
of a world where your will could actually change things.
Where try hard enough and you can succeed,
instead of just the lie they feed you about that here.
I want a world with beautiful rules
and even more beautiful exceptions,
instead of just the shit stochastic
we all give our breath and brains and beatings to.
I want a world where words can fight fists
and win in the moment, there and then.
Words can already bruise people beyond belief
but at least with magic they could provide real safety too.
I want a world with fewer bruises.
I wish more people just hid flowers up their sleeves.
I want a world where more hearts could roar
when they hear that uttered, muttered phrase –
Here be dragons.
I want a world that will offer me greater possibility than this world has to offer
where the only magic that people can ever know –
love, hope, faith, dreaming, a kiss –
is more often that not mere slight of hand and even the best of pixie dust
will end up dead.
Tags: beauty, dragon, dream, fate, hope, magic, magick, poem, poetry, possibility, power, reality, vision, word
Quill Aquiver 
Against the Reader
4 Maysource
The public is a cruel beast. Fickle and finicky. They will fight for a hashtag today that they won’t even remember trending this time next week. It’s a short-term gratification like that, when you serve up an endless hors d’oeuvres array of choked-down phrases and coughed-up inanities. You can only fit so much lasting grit in a hundred and forty characters.
The public is a wild beast. Running here and there, grazing from whatever pasture happens to have seeded the greenest virility. Sweet and fresh, even the hardwood trunks must extend new tendrils to grasp any notice. It’s a sort of reversed food chain out there; if you don’t get a bite then you have no reproducibility.
They will rave, the public. Protest is too archaic an art form these days; throw slime or shout your garbled grumbles the loudest and it’s those stitch by stitch tears to rags that will gain you internet power. Meanwhile the authors will hide behind metaphor, saying we said something not what we said. Confuse them enough to ignore you and die dusty encased in the walls of your study; or ply a trickster twist on a trope masked enough to pass for ingenuity and garner your two minutes of fame on a Google headline. Leave the reader shaking and wagging their head – at least then it’s intentional.
There is no refined when even the gatekeepers have become so crude. Taste is torture in a bittorrent world.
Simile is useless. Nobody likes anything.
The public is a cruel beast, you see.
Tags: against the reader, age of, commentary, condemnation, confusing, confusion, digital, essay, experimental, hashtag, metaphor, poem, poetic, poetry, prose, public is a cruel beast, rave, technology, war