death is male
boats are gentle and kind
and lust, what is its nature?

these are the words
these are the secret words
held deep underground quivering ember glowing
with key lost in youth

words that flicker in candlelight
whispered frighteningly and apologetically
at the end of prayers

gasping and wheezing unholy words
that rise from deathbeds
upon a world unbreakable and broken

these are the words that hang
in clouds on winter walks
retold in dimly lit forests for eternity

"Give my clan more time to adjust," said the Dwarf Lord.
"From a a tod I learned to drop your sort on sight, now I don't pull axe when I hear Elfchatter. This is a start."

Dustbunny limped down the street where Titmouse lived. He came to a stop in front of her apartment. Two little girls were sitting on the cement steps in front of her apartment. Both looked down at his weak leg, one whispered to the other and they both giggled. Securely holding on to the rail, Dustbunny executed the painful and embarrassing climb up to Titmouse's front door and rang the bell.
He could hear Titmouse coming to the door.
"Hi," she said, a little out of breath.

"Hey... I haven't heard from you in a while so I thought I would walk over and see how you are doing."
"I'm fine," replied Titmouse, "I've kinda been busy."
"Would you like to go get an ice cream or something?" Dustbunny shifted weight onto his bad leg for a moment. He could hear the little girls giggling again. He flushed.
"Yeah. Let me get ready, I'll be right out." Titmouse left Dustbunny with the porch, the handrail, his bad leg and the giggling girls.
She came back to the door quickly, however, with a sweater draped over her arm. She took Dustbunny's hand softly in hers, shooed the girls from off the porch and they walked slowly down to the road.

This evening every type of cloud was
thinly spread in the Autumn orange haze.
The field, with wet and closing womb
lamented it's eternal lord and sun
falling incrementally from the sky
and the wind and the rain
erased every line
I had carved in the soil.

Dustbunny spent the idle, late summer evening smoking opium from a small wooden pipe, the lazy, gray-white smoke wafting over the already still hive within his head. His thoughts remained unchanged, frozen from progress or decay. Progressive decay.

Decay for progress, or the soft lack of it. Or something. Or as he recalled, nothing. Curling rising. Lift shift dissipate.

The universe resized itself to fit only the contents of his one room cottage. Basking in the half-space of things, the marching of time also became lost in thoughts.

But then he remembered his pipe and remembered not remembering and the things he chose not to remember came back sweetly and gently, cushioned and without malice -- each thought in its time, lifted from the hive within his mind, dancing unthreateningly in the smoke filled space that was he and that he occupied.

Ran into an old friend in a dream Friday night. Haven't seen him since my late teens. He is the kind of guy that shows up too often in thoughts and dreams, as if the remembrance of him is a metaphor of some sort. He looked troubled in the dream and not able to gather the fragments of his life between when we lost touch in our teens and Friday night. Old and tired, he spoke a forgotten phrase, a dream words that never copy to the page quite right.

I replied something in the nature of, 'It will be OK', again in dreamspeak, where a single word can expand to near infinity.

He calmed, faded, then disappeared. I woke up to a new feeling that with a bit of sorting, all might be OK.

Peter the squirrel woke up more peaceful than he had been in a long time. He slowly fell out of the night's last dream, some concoction from his imaginings of Scandinavia and its fauna. He untangled himself from his pet wolf, sat on the side of the bed and bathed in the cool-orange glow of his den.

No yesterday, no tomorrow.

His withered paw did not bother him as it usually does in the morning. It was there, but it did not seem to matter that much, so pleasant was his mood.

There is a rift under my workshop desk which I call the Trader. I do not know if it has shape and form, as I have never actually seen it. I am only aware of its existence through its effect on small solid objects that are accidentally dropped near it. Often, when I drop an jewelry piece under my desk, it disappears -- hours of searching will not reveal its whereabouts -- fallen through the rift into to some Other Place.

This is not the most inexplicable behavior of the rift, as it could easily be argued that I am just terrible at finding lost items. There is a stranger behavior that I attribute to the rift which I think happens too often to be coincidence. When Trader accepts a new 'offering', it then redeposits a long lost piece dropped under the desk in exchange, often placing it in the most obvious, front and center, easy to find location. The rediscovered item is usually a years-ago dropped jewelry item that I searched for in vain before accepting it was probably gone forever.

I have crawled under the large bench many times in search of unfinished pieces of jewelry or tools. The rift has never accepted me as an offering, at least not that I have noticed. Maybe it takes time to recharge, having too recently gobbled up a half-finished ring or other trinket? If the Trader is large enough for a person to fit into or through, I think I would like to visit the Land of Lost Items. If I was accepted, I wonder what it would replace me with? And with what might I be redeemed?