iPhones and elves do – so they say –
although it is a marketing tool

for finding words and phrases
to construct the unusual.

Where sorrow and regret are vivid emotions,
what’s dreamt functions only as awareness –

seeing dolphins as lucid swimmers
brings transient joy, and then there is all that

falling and falling and falling. Oh, rock your
babes to sleep / oh, rock your babes to sleep

for vigilant dreams as your musings.
In the Dreamland Adventure Encore

you’ll hear again how what went before
was the initial selection of inspiration

behind those bedroom doors: birds that fly
in the room arrived by their own journey.

I awlays take loads of pictures and videos on this night – crisp and dramatic – but I especially like these with one camera that captures the movement (of the camera!) and blurs of firelight.

~

Most pleased to have three prose pieces from my latest writing here. Thank you to Haley for the support given to contributors.

(image by artist and photographer Nick Dormand)

Either arrived
from its mess and hurried away, or sauntered
to this eviscerated demise,

so the signs on that
end-of-October beach – DO NOT WALK HERE TODAY –
were ignored in a dark reverie:

oh festivity / oh
appropriation – is Christmas too long a wait?
Autumn is the Fall as well,

and if climate
can change, so too this celebration
of deaths.

(A beachcomber
was carrying a pumpkin until it exploded,
perhaps.)

Delighted to have two constraint poems at Otoliths here, with my thanks to Mark Young who says of this issue ~ ‘As always, there’s a wide range of material from a wide range of contributors’. I have been reading and enjoying some of that range this morning.

Though the Adélie
defecate a reddish guano, it is not a good
building material,

and more
to the point: the Emperor, Gentoo, Chinstrap,
King, Macaroni,

Southern rockhopper,
Royal and Adélie trump overhead interiors
in Antarctica.

Yet in classic
construction and urban habitation, your Beam,
Suspended, Shed, Cathedral,

Coved, Tray,
Conventional and Coffered reign supreme.
Comparisons pall,

like more can be
lost to nuclear fallout than a government’s
incompetence in dealing

with Covid, or
how there are more cronies than altruism in
free enterprise.

Details and reviews here.

~

That could be a lie.

Truth-elusive (or not) vignettes collected in And I Used to Sail Barges available at The Red Ceilings Press here.