ASSAY to tell it all
SLANT. Yet, try too hard, and you arrive at
NADIR of expression. Not unlike wearing
DENIM to bespeak difference ended up a sameness.
Note: I was one day behind.
Author: David Wright
Bleakish House
SLATE of cases is a mill of roiling interests.
BENCH forgets the ends most days, sometimes remembers.
QUASH some attempts, find for others and drag and drag.
FOGGY is the genesis of human justice, yet the mill grinds on.
Utopia
HAZEL evoking a plant, a color, eyes. What if the hazel
BERETs were a group devoted to spreading good, rejecting
FALSE greatness, seeking the welfare of all? An anti-
COVEN, something the larger group embraced, not feared? And how soon would they fail their own aspirations?
Rivalry
BROWN van barrels into the
PLAZA, screeches to a stop.
DRUNK UPS driver stumbles out. Couldn’t
DODGE Fedex driver’s cutting words. So what if the uniform is ugly? Good work is still being done.
CGI
DELVE into tale of wizardry, not through book, but
PIXEL’s murk, green screen and algorithm’s haze.
MINOR fascinations given effect, person and story stripped bare.
CLOAK of invisibility? Cast over all that is compelling.
Disenchantment is Camouflage
INCUR the last bit of medieval fright:
DRUNK as it were, on ergot, the village imagines a
COVEN, where there is only bad rye.
THERE is now the opposite problem: demons are invisible and hide in plain sight.
Not a Boxer
CHIME sounds. Other guy darts in and clocks him. Consciousness circles the
DRAIN. Blackness. 3 minutes later, or a day, he comes to.
WHOSE body is he in? Who could have so much pain?
BOXER decides then and there: he’s not a boxer.
Schachnovelle
THUMB inky, Zweig pauses from feverish writing about feverish
CHESS, tale of a man whose body slipped the Gestapo’s clutches, whose mind did not.
SYRUPy Fios de Ovos is brought to his table. The
HOTEL staff quietly fusses over Zweig. Perhaps the care of staff may yet ground an unquiet mind.
Note: I’m imaging Stefan Zweig in 1941 writing his Chess Story, or Royal Game, in a hotel in Petrópolis, Brazil (though I think he actually wrote in his own house there). His life was shadowed by the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy at the end of World War I. He wrote of the passing of the Austrian culture and way of life he had known in the The World of Yesterday. Zweig, like Dr. B in the Schachnovelle (the German title of Chess Story) was able to escape Nazism. As a Jew, he wisely fled Austria in 1934, when Hitler came to full power in Germany. Yet, his sense of loss was too great. Within a year of writing the Schachnovelle, Zweig committed suicide.
All this Sand
VERGE of sand, bordering on sand, looking out on sand.
CAMEL stands there with a camel smile,
PUTTY lips chewing away on a tuft of saltbush.
GRASS would be juicier, but grass is not to be had, here in all this sand.
Cruelty and Anger
CRUEL words, a given of life, but uneasy input to a poem.
LIVID comes next, adding to oppressive sense. Cruelty and anger,
SPIED at remove, or experienced up close, or inflicted,
BLEND into malaise. Where is peace, where joy, who can establish them?
Note: still behind a day.