The best pretender

 Look at him
Averts his gaze

Off she goes about her day
Decade here
Decade there
Now he's grey

Young men chase
Quick to pursue
Eyes light up
Mostly untrue
He hardly noticed
She didn't care
A fan of someone who wasn't there

But he kept it up
Tracksuit bland
No inner power
Just a fan
Her snobby face
Words pretty enough

She dressed him down—a disgrace
For his doubt flowers on the skin
His fear perspires, insecurities win
He gives up chase, returns familiar
His peers failed too, their symptoms similar

I see half-hidden grins
She pretends not to care
But she turns to the older man
And in his direction stares

Dona Galore's voice

 Gardening your voice
I plane it out with every syllable
I utter the correction
I overflow over it

Sound is my dragon my keeper
I aspire to become duke of the mountain where it lives
The early Earl of these graceful rocks and voice
provocative forests that are colored just the right shade

I ask for your echo to ring out through this very valley
So I can capture that voice on the breeze
Bouncing back to me directly
I'll be gardening that voice

Planting your words in a line
Cultivating them until they reluctantly flower
In my own scarred hands
For the privilege of their scent

Unashamedly their taste Dona Galore

Back on the rail with gramps

 Curiously enough my reddish skinned grandfather Eric appeared as I wandered up the rusty lines of the railway willows and pines on either side, giving me the option of avoiding the fake sun.
The fake sun wasn't fake because it was cold or not present.
It was fake because like the world I found myself in, it is all simulation.
Something built to ferment the soul, so that our giant afterlife God may drink us down.

Digest us as we transform into the energy it needs to shit out the next galaxy.
Or piss a supernova, or if it's like some of you vomit blackholes.
Curiously my grandfather doesn't buy that story.
He says God wouldn't be subject to mere bodily functions.

That the supposition is highly ridiculous.
Is that wisdom or a slowly distilled bucket of doctrine the prune of man has been drinking.
I'd call it wisdom. There's something spirit numbing about walking these train tracks with the presence of Eric right next to me. He told me his cat interpreted God as a successful hunt. A carpenter would translate God as the concept of construction itself.

Again the trees thinned and there were but shrubs beside us. I could smell the fake fragrance of meadows. Like the overperfumed dress of the promdate you failed to cajole.
Was I too interested words old man? Is that where my notion of God went?
Into vocabulary. Am I the last poet In this rugged old purgatory.

never before have i been so frustrated as I looked at my grandfather's face and he slowly uttered the words that would bother me more than the swinging seedheads.
"ohhhh, well... Sort of."

Bandit in the gym

 The smell of steel and sweat
The ghost of the morning
melting the frost
breaking into the day

First I'm a bandit
Then I'm a king
An interloper
Then the only native

I smell sunlight
Breaking through
Heating the day
lurking like a bandit

I feel like a weight
the one I'm lifting
One exhausting me
breaking through to failure

Sun hits my face accusingly
It's warmth makes me reinvest
I admit I am not halfway there
My bandit energy accumulating

Phil and Eric on their way

 Like I said these two had left the yellow trainstation.
When I say trainstation there were no real trains. It was the ruin of an old trainstation.
From a time that never was here in this place that is not supposed to exist. But it does.
They headed off after years and years of deliberating in this silly little railway shack.
I can only guess they followed the rail lines.

There used to be a town here too.
When I had my vision back in 2022 I saw my father cross the town.
There were other souls there, traffic and houses. A sense of the familiar.
He had a rucksack and crossed the railway line out of town.
He didn't talk to anyone or stop for anything. It was like he was pulled to the yellow shack.
The one on the edge of this town that no longer exists. Weeds and the most aggressive seedlings have taken it over. Obscuring any sign of the once quaint village.

Old man Eric started getting his hair back. His leg had grown back. But my father was sill impatient.
I saw them only in dream, I could not join them, I was flung into some bigger spiritual scandal. probably because something I wrote.
But I saw them and followed their journey
The trees became shrubs and shrubs just tall weeds.
The seedheads on the weeds were incredible fat. it suddenly made sense that the countryside was riddled with it.
Those seed heads slapped against their cordoroy jeans in places where the plant had embedded itself closer to the tracks.

My grandfather grinned. he grinned a grin that could grace his face for an hour, as if an epiphany had rippled out of him. But there was actually no great insight or idea whatsoever. The man was just happy to have the limited heat of the fake sun and the company of my father walking beside him.

School in the ruins

 The class was outdoors because all of the structures were destroyed.
The woman teaching us was a warm bubbly 42 year old pale skinned brunnete.
She would cut or mix something on the big table infront of the class.
And her curly brown hair would kick up to and fro.

I thought she was very smart and charismatic.
The idiots sitting next to me distracted me from her class.
But i paid attention evenso.
After the class she invited me to speak to her.
I was hardly 19 years old and I was nervous in her presence.
Of course I wouldn't admit that to anyone.

She invited me to sit in the front row the next day.
She would make room for me.
I thanked her.
Then her younger and even more beautiful women friends came.
They would go cross country to the next village over to press grapes.
Hopefully they would bring some wine back from last years squeeze.

Exits, aggression and an empty shop

 I entered the shop carefully because it was also an alley away from the stinking church ruins. I thought ther might be someone there to mug me. Something almost as bad was waiting in there.
I must have looked a mess because the man's face became harsh and an accusatory frown formed on his face. He pulled a dagger and locked eyes with me.
"I don't want anything from you, I am just passing through your shop to get out of the courtyard, the barbarians have brought down the walls and gates. There is no other exit." I pleaded with the man.

"Don't I know it." The man said gritting his teeth.
Looked like he really thought I might try to rob him. He held the culter out from his body as if it was a threat not just to me but to his own body.
I put my palms up in a gesture of non aggression. It made no difference, the man followed me closely until I had left his shop. 

The desperate clenched face was still as aggressive and tight as it had been when I entered the shop.
As I turned back to look at the man and tell him that obviously he hadn't needed to be so aggressive, it struck me that his shop was absolutely empty.
Everything was already stolen.
The defensiveness had become his default response.