The Ballad of Lily and ...

 Rhyming Story Challenge 2023. (Unedited) Prompts: Setting Chalet, Theme: Cowardice 

Outside a chalet high up in the Swiss Alps, 

lay a litter of seven, wee mewling whelps.

A proud mother licking clean all but one--

--the weakest little pup was shunned.

An unkempt girl stood in shadow alone, 

making note of a scene much like her own;

a needy cur born into a fractured home. 

In childbirth, Lily’s own mother had perished. 

Losing the angelic woman he had so cherished

eradicated her father’s love for his young kin, 

inspiring fistfuls of the devil from him.  

Yet, the tiny child herself, so neglected 

to abject abuse, unspeakably subjected, 

knew in her heart a pup should be protected.

At nightfall, Lily slipped into the alley,

far below ice-glazed peaks, just above the green valley

where only God could see her on that frigid eve, 

slip the rejected runt up, into her sleeve.

For days on end she spoon fed the pup

beads of warmed milk from her own, meager cup

Sustenance of love, the little canine lapped up. 

Discovering her secret, papa twisted her arm. 

She took refuge in a kind neighbour’s ramshackle barn,

and continued to nurture her sweet, playful keep,

who grew-up tugging at tail feathers and nuzzling sheep.  

As summer spread out, the pair avoided harm’s way.

The pup wrestled buttercups, Lily dreaded the day

winter would howl and keep them at bay. 

So, came a cold night, one year from when they first met.

The dog now lived in the woods, yet he did not forget

the name Lily gave him, lodged deep in his soul, 

should she call out, he would race straight to her door.  

The December sky darkened, in evening so early. 

A few icy flakes quickly turned to a mad flurry. 

Lily’s father left sober and returned soused, in a fury. 

The sot broached the threshold of Lily’s room, 

with ale on his breath, vowing unholy doom. 

Mercilessly marring a daughter for losing a wife, 

the child had decided to take charge of her life. 

Dressed beneath bed-clothes, Lily leapt from the sheets

hitting the brute with pillows,  she made a hasty retreat 

outside, under a full moon, down the thin winding street. 

Scrambling to the woods, Lily dared not look back, 

knowing the man so enraged, was right on her track. 

Running into thick pines below the mountain’s edge,

she looked up, lost and hopeless, at the menacing ridge. 

The only thing in that moment that Lily did know,

was no human could help her, there was nowhere to go-- 

--she had only one choice, and she called out for … 

…“SNOW!”

The great white dog, towering, snarled through trees, 

sent her father, cowering, down on his knees.  

Snow nudged Lily with his nose to run back, towards home. 

She flew off like a rabbit, leaving man and dog all alone. 

The old coward shook violently, in the thin alpine air.

Somehow knowing Lily’s welfare was his only care, 

young Snow stood silent, spine enhanced by hackles of hair.

The dog recalled the girl now, his only known mother,

the scent of her skin, how they'd cared for each other. 

Looking up to the sky, Snow began an elegy of his own,

for all the earth's squandered love, in a high mournful tone. 

 

Now, whenever folks tell the story, up where lilies dance

They say, “That was the year one hardened heart hadn’t a chance,

against a mongrel’s prayer that set off the great avalanche.” 

 

In A Nut Shell ...

Farmer Brown he had a dog 

and on his dog there was a farm 

 A.I.A.I ...

 OH! 

For My Finale ...

Flash Fiction Competition 2023. (Edited) Prompts: Fantasy, Night Club, Milk 

"Whirlin' Merlin" took a sip from the small bottle. He held his hand up to the sky and spoke in the steady voice that paced his usual slight-of-hand:

 “For my finale I will reach up, into the Milky Way, bring back ten thousand stars in the palm of my hand and free them in this room. From my open palm, a river of genuine stardust will flow, and everyone here will be bathed in the supreme holiness of its eternal glow.”

The light show that unfolded was said to be like nothing ever seen before on earth. The audience experienced a profound sense of well-being. Their skin sparkled for days. In the weeks that followed, crowds lined up to feel the spectacle but quickly dwindled when the majestic effect was never recreated. 

Audience members now topped out around a half-dozen each night. Most were strays from the casinos seeking a dark corner in which to doze and drown big losses in cheap booze. Every so often some kid, obsessed with showbiz lore, fell into the club wide-eyed and sober to see the great routine. Inevitably, they left disillusioned to discover Merlin’s famous finale was nothing more than a black-light theatre gimmick. Merlin knew those kids had heard about that night--the only night he had dared to use true magic on stage. 

Showbiz lore was as wildly romanticised as origin stories bandied about an orphanage. The children Merlin had grown up with told tales that merged into one, common fantasy—a mistake had been made and the most loving of parents would return for each of them in due time. More likely, the Mother Superior would call them to her office as they came of age and send them into the “real” world with a blessing and the clothes on their backs. Merlin’s last visit with her was different. His mother had left him something—the tiny bottle and a note in the cryptic figures of a language only half his own. 

Merlin hobbled to his office. Crystal decanters from decades before dotted his bar. He splashed a blue liquid from one together with a thick apricot syrup from another.  He stared at the mixture as he swirled it in his glass, enchanting himself into a final decision. Flattening his hand against the wall, he felt for the thin gap in the greasy burgundy paper.  Finding it, he knocked twice and muttered an oath. A portion of the wall retreated. Inside was the smallest decanter of all with a slim band of liquid at the bottom. Merlin made sure it was sealed and slipped it into a tight pocket. He took his sequinned littered topcoat from the hook on the back of the door and set about making his reflection in the mirror look just right. 

Merlin stood in the wings, waiting for his cue. When he arrived centre stage, he held his breath, lifted the small bottle and took in the last drops of milk his mother had left with him as an infant. He swallowed slowly and began to speak:

 “For my finale ... "

The crowd was held rapt by Merlin’s cosmic light show.  

A familiar voice spoke his real name, and the Mesmer disintegrated amidst stardust. 

 

Elegy for a Cohen

 

In the middle of 

my middle age 

on a thick, grey

Christmas Day,

I saw a photo of Leonard’s grave-- 

stark as bone 

bleached by desert sun.

A Star of David etched, 

to light his way home. 

I wandered out from my own, 

to find a trace, 

of the certain sort of place

a high priest as he

might pray. 

 

Cantering lopsided, along …

a sweet black dog. 

We pushed through meadow, 

we pressed through fog. 

Over roots wrapped ‘round

sun-speckled boulder, 

finally stopping 

by the river’s shoulder 

where,

 

“He 

sank 

beneath 

your 

wisdom 

like 

a 

stone.”

 

Sometimes There's Nothing But Despair

I’m in the bath with greasy hair. 

My swimsuit on the towel rack, 

is printed with Jacques Louis David’s 

The Death of Socrates.

I drape one arm over the edge of the tub

and toss my head back like a despondent mare.

Now I look like Jacques Louis David’s 

The Death of Marat, 

staring up at Jacques Louis David’s 

The Death of Socrates.

Was it Marat’s propensity to wrap his hair? 

Or, did David wish to paint him like a noble revolutionary from a foreign land? 

I remember the importance of drapery

 from Fine Art History 

One-O-One

With Professor Michael Koortbojian.

He gave me my first A

on an essay 

at U of T

But cautioned me 

to start using a dictionary. 

Not as much for spelling, 

as for unnecessary verbosity. 

I never really listened. 

Except! When he asked repeatedly,

“How best to know the intention of a free-standing sculpture?” 

Then he would answer himself each time diligently ...

“You walk around it.”

And that I heard because,

what a lovely discovery 

in the second slide of

the pensive 
Farnese Hercules

(Three tiny apples cradled in massive fingers behind his back)

Now, I’d reach around for the shampoo

But, when I went to the zoo,

a bottle of the same brand

was in a case by the orang-utans

beside it, an actual orang-utan hand 

posed as an ashtray, 

to illustrate the devastation 

our use of palm oil wreaks. 

Sometimes there’s nothing but despair. 

Beast of Burning (Published in the Boulevardier May 2014)

Freud suggested monsters are external, anthropomorphic manifestations of the internal threats we are too fearful to face. Originally applicable to the boogeyman beneath our beds, crafted in the likeness of an individualized anxiety, his theory was later applied in the analysis of cinema. When dialogue surrounding serious social problems becomes terror-induced taboo, a filmic menace appears in the creeping shadow of our unspoken uncertainty.  

For six decades, Godzilla has been the gamma-rayed mammoth storming the room where the ills of nuclear capacity have been swept under the carpet. The overarching message of the franchise is clear: humanity has unleashed a scourge into the environment. The unified body of the beast itself, however, is a nuanced cumulus of emotions and associations.  

On March 1st, 1954, a Japanese fishing boat happened into the path of a hydrogen bomb test being conducted on the Marshall Islands by the United States government. One immediately ailing crew member described the scene to Time Magazine: 

"We saw strange sparkles and flashes of fire, sparks and fire as bright as the sun itself. The sky around them glowed fiery red and yellow. The glow went on for several minutes--perhaps two or three--and then the yellow seemed to fade away. it left a dull red, like a piece of iron cooling in the air. The blast came about five minutes later (with) the sound of many thunders rolled into one. Next we saw a pyramid-shaped cloud rising, and the sky began to cloud over most curiously. The thought of pikadon flashed through my mind, I think, but we were busy and i went back to our nets." 

Only months later would Godzilla be introduced to the world, appropriately destroying a fishing boat in the Pacific Ocean. 

As intangible as the shell casing after a detonation and ephemeral as the moment of an explosion, the monster remains unseen in its first film attack.  Directly analogous to the bomb, its presence is represented by a blinding light reflecting from the seawater it boils and signs of devastation on the deck of the boat engulfed in flames. Godzilla as a pitiless byproduct of human engineering is a notion fortified in later scenes, where the creature first becomes visible. Ingesting energy from electric towers or readying itself to spew heat, the flame-shaped plates along the monster’s spine glow and buzz as routinely as a coil element. Physically revealed, however, the monster generates another layer of meaning.  “Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” wrote Kahlil Gibran. If there is a case to made for endowing the literally massive character of Gojira, as he was first known, with the enduring soul of the Japanese people, it is indeed found in his searing scars. Keloid scars are growths created when collagen inhabits a wound and spreads beyond the wound’s original boundaries. Godzilla’s skin was designed to appear a blanket of such cicatrix, unifying him with the similarly marred survivors of the 1945 atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.   The beast may represent the machine but the ghost that begins to emerge is a human spectre. 

Once personified, Ishiro Honda’s Godzilla roars a swath of cathartic rage through the very real and repressive silence of censorship in Allied Occupied Japan.  As per Professor Yamane’s lament in the film, that the kaiju or “strange creature” should be kept alive and studied, scientists harnessed nuclear power to replace fossil fuels. Godzilla’s gestational period in the Art Department of Toho Studios, Tokyo coincides with the birth of world’s first nuclear power plant opening on June 27th, 1954 in Obninsk, Russia. While the apocalyptic possibility of nuclear war remained a palpable threat throughout the remainder of the 20th century, the actual calling card of nuclear catastrophe came, time and again, as a result of in our inability to keep nuclear energy wholly contained within reactors around the globe. That the 60th anniversary of the Godzilla franchise be marked by a fresh installment seems appropriate. That the milestone film follows in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown-- irradiating the waters of the Pacific Ocean since March 11th 2011--seems painfully synchronistic.   

Long-term environmental repercussions at Fukushima, and the potential for similar disasters elsewhere, are topics seldom trending in social media feeds. Progress reports of the clean up effort in Japan are rarely offered by mainstream media outlets. An edition of PBS’s Frontline, “Nuclear Aftershocks” is aptly subtitled “Have We Turned Our Backs on Nuclear Energy?” When asked in the documentary whether renewable sources of energy will ever replace nuclear power, MIT Professor Ron Ballinger, though admitting his bias as a nuclear engineer, suggests that “unless we become a pastoral society where the energy use density is low enough” atomic energy will always be necessary to gird the grid.    

With no new nuclear facilities having been approved when the documentary aired in January 2012, Charles Ferguson, Physicist and President of the Federation of American Scientists, shed light on the tentative approach to fueling the future. Ferguson suggests nuclear power will be phased out only by default, as many of the 104 nuclear plants in the United States must retire in the next 20 years and new reactors are not approved. Sustaining the industrial and technological based lifestyle we want, without the energy we fear, remains an impossibility. Fuse desire with dread and the result is often a paralyzing reluctance to face the crux of a difficultly head-on.    

Whereas 1950’s Godzilla is featured in film posters bombastically dead-on, planted in the forefront of a cityscape in full out offensive mode daring the viewer to defuse his glare, his most recent antecedent seems less far less cocky. Publicity for Gareth Edwards’ highly anticipated 2014 iteration of Godzilla shows the behemoth with its back to the audience. While, undoubtedly, in part to heighten anticipation and bolster box office for the big, filmic reveal come May 16th; the ambiguity of presentation mirrors our current ambivalence towards the nuclear threat. Godzilla is now fully entrenched in the midst of a metropolis on fire. The flames burn brightest directly in line with his torso and the viewer is left to make the educated guess that it is Godzilla who fuels the inferno. As the warm golden light from smaller fires diffuse into the central scene, however, it is difficult to say with 100% surety that it is not the city fuelling the beast.