four twenty

.
and i wake up
and here is spring
stately and playful
like a kitten archbishop
cauled in spicy smoke
fragrant and full
of the promise of
future heat.

---
words: Michael K. White
story in #22: 13 Halloweens

This might get messy

or:
Superhuman

It's an eight hour drive to Mokpo, the southern coast of Korea. The forest starts right at the yellow line at the edge of the paved road. The canopies make mountains that slope up and down--like giant, mossed elephants lying next to the freeway. It feels like I can run down their green trunks, jumping atop one head to the next. The crisp air pierced my pores and I could breathe again. But I didn't know that I'd been suffocating. And these psycho-social images: money, career, family, time, an inability to provide. Unnatural fear and concern left me, carving off the inhibiting excess that held me back from being human. Not human to err, but to be surpassing with inexhaustible room for growth. And human capacity--innate consciousness over rocks, body over plants, mind and reason over animals.

I wanted the lush sight to sink into my bones, the feeling that I could bound over the mountain edge into the black space. I must have been in a snow globe when the top cracked open, a whole set of capabilities and vigor widening my mind. Like I hit "empty bin" to the trash I didn't know that held me back physically, mentally, psychologically, socially from fitting dreams/goals into a worth life. Sometimes, there are grave mounds on the mountainside, the old generations that sleep with one eye open. I smiled out of ego. The past and their spirits, the precursor staring wearily at the future generation that drives by on bald tires. The feared world they must have left. I wanted to make them proud.

----
words: Angela Koh, Korea/California (blog)

Alone

ghosts of passing cars, flaky and white in
soundwaves uninvited to a melancholy willing
to remain like all the wrong memories that
litter the floor with half-empty coffee cups,
and silence creeping about with bony fingers
that used to be kind, but remembering is
always off by just enough to guarantee
life will never live twice, and i can never
pretend away the vestiges of years like
suitcases perhaps never meant.

---
words: Bethany Basset (coffee-stained clarity)
image: Dorothee Lang (virtual notes)

Forgotten

Forgotten smiles, remembered memories
Simmering in my half empty coffee cup
Making their way across the freeways of the mind
Grasping on the reeds of time, they seek to find
Loving glances. Timely touches. Promises on paper

Forgotten ways, remembered paths
Those days spent in Jayanagar bazaar bylanes
Wind along misty crevasses of life
Brushing past the damp cobwebs of dreams
Lured by melancholy and sweetness, so they seem

Forgotten music, remembered echoes
Tunes from my favorite singers
Dance their notes off the walls of the past
Percolating through the blurred eyepiece of tomorrow
Blissful tones shaded with happiness drenched in sorrow

Suitcases full of hours and minutes
Lie in our hands
At times heavy with enchantment and magic and illusion
At times light with hurt and grime and lemons
It's the handle of the suitcase that matters
Lift it gently or it can lie in tatters
Unlock Fate, lose the key to Destiny
Before Life closes its shutters

~~
words: Swati Nair, India (more)
photo: Dorothee Lang, Germany