“Firstly, there is no such person as Death.
Second, Death’s this tall guy with a bone face, like a
skeletal monk, with a scythe and an hourglass and a
big white horse and a penchant for playing chess with
Scandinavians. Third, he doesn’t exist either.”

Neil Gaiman – The High Cost of Living

Set You Free

I ran with you out of the jail
Right past the sleeping guard
We slipped through the unlocked door
Escaped the prison ward

In yet another time and place
We tunneled through the ground
Digging in the hard-packed dirt
Until the light we found

And here I find you, once again
In a prison of your own making
I want so much to show you, my friend
That freedom is yours for the taking

This time the walls are not concrete
The bars not made of steel
The fortress now is in your mind
Feelings you won’t let yourself feel

The prison guards live in your head
The bars encase your heart
Let go your fears and choose instead
The risk of a fresh start

Come fly with me, I’ll set you free
We’ll soar above the trees
Come run with me through open fields
Let your true self be revealed

Anet Paulina

The Upholstery Of Dimensions

Exiled kings and forensic guardian’s
Narrative dance within speech implications
Delivered by brides who were married in gardens
While Solomon’s radar determined the venue. 
Aerial subsets in fountains of riddles
Are practiced by worlds that befriended convection
Embedded response and applied renovation
Raised transient questions through astral commitment. 
The centerpiece of immortal fortune
Recognizes the gems of omission
As cities no longer connected by roads
Is this cruise a fiction in visceral code?

Kenneth MacSween

Through Spaces Not Seen

Going through life
picking up pieces
never seen
never heard
always remembered
yet not knowing where they go.
But they go where I choose,
whether they fit or not
they are my cracks,
my pieces,
no one but me
can change and rearrange.

End Of Story.

Bill Pate
From Within A Soul – 2010

“You could stand me on a beach until the end of times, and never would it occur to me to try to make it into windows.”

Bill Bryson

On a sunless day

trees stand as sentinels
over a cold, gray land.
Placid lakes breath
in silver moonlight
and the world feels forlorn.
The sweet song of the Meadowlark
fades distant in my memory
and dull red chimney tops sigh soft smoke
ribbons.
Stillness baths my soul in melancholy
interrupted only by an occasional
push of the wind against the shutters.
Ah, but this gloom cannot keep its hold
when the sun returns to play.
as days stretch out and birds return.
Sky will put on her mantle of azure blue
and the lake will seem excited as a grand lady,
adorned with a million diamond sparkles.
Crickets will rule the night
and I will sleep
with my windows wide open.
And scarce will I remember
that sunless day
when the trees stood as sentinels
Over a cold, gray land.

~Sheila MacGregor ~
January 19, 2010

Of a Tile’s Inner Text

Intimate vastness

Exotic in content

Contrast resounding

In crackling darkness

Encoded dialogue

Hand made in vantages

Graphic involvement’s

Precarious resonance

Immediate contact

Preceding remembrance

Applied to surrounding

Its sensory output

Surface of language

In tactile horizons

Alludes to the grasp

Of a Tile’s inner text.

Kenneth MacSween, 2007

The Concerns of Man

Perennial as the ocean tides

Storms against the shore

Are the concerns of man

Tidal waves of discontent

Sent crashing into foam

And rising ever again

To spray upon the beaches

of his soul.

Judyette Clarke