(I hope you know to click to enlarge...)

It's beginning to look a lot like...

The poor leaves must be beyond freezing cold. Utah, Utah, Utah. Always inflicting weather so quickly...

Interested Insults in Disguise

If sticks could branch o’er fears and demons great,

I’d ne’er find myself hope for more than these.

A tree sits not for years to only wait;

No, his buds do wave at dead falling leaves.

His pulse beats wild like flustered rabbits’ darts

But never sings more than a bee’s soft hum.

His wiry wooden fingers stab at hearts

But never fails too, bidding my beat come.

Dirt doesn’t come em’rald-eyed to stare up,

But often’s dragooned by jealous stares down,

And humbly hides until dug down enough.

The sky and ground are always wear’ng his crown.

So sky and dirt wish not to be bear’ng it,

His leaves be my gold, wreathed, on my crown set.

_____For English class we were apparently supposed to write a sonnet, and this is what I've been able to come up with in an hour. Yeah, I know, the meter is off, but I sorta gave up on searching for synonyms. The thesaurus is only a friend for so long.

_____I hope it's not supposed to be about love... because it's more like I'm in hopes of taking over a tree. How odd it is too... but sleep calls greater than whistles through wood.

(Later side-note: apparently I didn't do too horribly on this, because my English teacher thought that I had plagiarized it, so Googled the title and returned it to me failed with this blog page attached... rather amusing.) : )

What a Life!

_____In the early morning, I’d heard a hundred milk bottles shatter. The newspaper boy didn’t really have great aim.
_____“Stupid cat,” he grumbled, another cat hissing after him and his abysmal aim. If he was a soldier, he would have hit the entire ocean trying to hit Asia.
_____Finally I slumped down on the doorstep of a joint trailer house. Another tabby cat hissed after the boy on the bike crunching his way down the driveway. If I could have flicked my rubber bands after him, he’d be a dead man. Being a newspaper sucks though – we have no opposable thumbs.
_____I must have closed my ruffled paper for a bit, because when I woke up I was laying flat on a cool glass coffee table with a ceiling fan above me. Ahh, this was the life.
_____"I love you," was whispered across the room. Or was it? I couldn’t see; maybe it was just another cat rubbing against things and making weird noises. “I love you too?” I said quietly.
_____A little girl picked me up and stared at my belly. I could see the other side of the room now. People gathered around something with their heads down and their hands out. “No! No!” A woman with curly hair cried out and covered her mouth with one hand. All of the people around her started crying for some reason. It felt like ages until I was set down again, and people came in to take away what everyone was crowded around. The little girl tried not to stare at the man who was being covered up and wasn’t moving.
_____Whoa. Maybe this wasn’t the life.

It's Only for a Day

_____It wasn’t really that bad. Dying, that is. I’d known I was going to die anyway, so it wasn’t even surprising to me. The doctors told me that I only had so long to live. I’d expected that it would be shocking.

_____It was simple, really. Stop feeling, stop seeing, stop hearing, stop thinking even. If a soul thought their way through this, they would probably go insane. What happens when the soul itself is insane?

_____Sucked into a pool of ice water, with the instant realization that I was going to drown, I was peaceful still. The water only disappeared once I ran out of breath, and by that time, it was as if we’d gone through every season in a blur, until the old me was laying still in the winter time, and the new me was standing as a stream of warm sunlight itself.

_____Everyone was sobbing. Why were they so sad? It seemed like this should be a happy place. Mary was rubbing her wedding ring with one hand, and holding the old me with her other. “No! No!” Maybe she could feel me touching her, maybe she couldn’t. I just hoped she’d let go soon. I kissed her forehead and touched my son’s hand that was holding his wife’s.

_____I turned to go to the door of our house – it wouldn’t be for long; Mary had so many more people to touch that she’d be gone from here soon enough – but stopped when I saw her. She sat on the couch, wide-eyed and staring at the Sunday funnies. Then her eyes flicked up to me for an instant, before she went back to staring at the paper. When she looked up at me again, I waved at her, and if it was even possible, her eyes got wider, and she gripped the paper tightly. I laughed as I let myself out.

_____Grandchildren have that effect on dead people.