The Monster's House (D.O.D. 2022)

 

We called it 'The Monsters House'

First 

Because it had no windows and was made of concrete

It had a lighthouse tower

Only a tiara on tiny red lights to warn planes

In fog and like May

Was always in thick blankets 

Of grey days stacked

On holidays most years 

There was some decor

As if it could fit in

With the community

It stood on the Pacific Coast

Line and you could draw a line 

Home from any spot

Within range

Like Babel

It spoke of neither here

Nor there

A power plant

It became powerless,

Nothing like plants

Holding sun

I tossed out my anchor

With the security of pillars

Standing strong

Eternal and moral

You can guess 

How it crumbled

Like sand

Decommissioned, dethroned

And deleted

From the horizon

As the world spun

On and on

I stood

Still

Ashes go nowhere

Nobody will remember

A solid building

Of imagination.

Image: Self, taken in front of Monster's House (Cbad-Tamarack) March 2020 (D.O.D.-date of destruction)

Seeing spot(light)s

The dawn gave us Time
enough for our eyes to adjust
by dilation and securely
put away our Imagination.

Still, we can rely on the day
which washes out
lines in shadow,
and though
we act like we know
how it will go
down
in lumens and lux
by observing magnitudes
we are too tiny to see.

When the sun comes up,
let us pretend
it has never been
done before
this way
we can see
All
the stars
conceivably.



Photo credit: By NASA/JPL (http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA00576.jpg) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
Detail via Wikimedia: A Martian sunrise was captured in this Viking 2 Lander picture taken June 14, 1978, at the spacecraft's Utopia Planitia landing site. The data composing this image were acquired just as the Sun peaked over the horizon on the Lander's 631st sol (Martian solar day). Pictures taken at dawn (or dusk) are quite dark except where the sky is brightened above the Sun's position. The glow in the sky results as light from the Sun is scattered and preferentially absorbed by tiny particles of dust and ice in the atmosphere. When the Viking cameras are calibrated for darker scenes, the "sky glow" tends to saturate their sensitivity and produce the bright regions seen here. The "banding" and color separation effects are also artifacts, rather than real features, and are introduced because the cameras are not able to record continuous gradations of light. The cameras must represent such gradations in steps (bands) of brightness and color, and the process sometimes produces some "false" colors within the bands. The scattering of light closest to the Sun's position tends to enhance blue wavelengths. The narrowing sky glow nearer the horizon above the Sun's position occurs as a result of light extinction. At that elevation, the optical path of sunlight through the atmosphere is at its longest penetration angle, and a substantial portion of the light is simply prevented from reaching the cameras by the dust, ice particles and other material in its way.

Imagine in Nation

What doesn't ask
doesn't care.
There it
has been said,
did you know
I care?
We are in War and Love
above all else
I dwell in neither possibility
but probability
namely the art of science
or the scientific artist
these are the best of We
wherein domain and abstain
are eminently plausible
coextensively
if it has feathers and quarks
respective of space
and time to think of asking
who cares?


Image of painting By Ernst Karl Georg Zimmermann (1852-1901) (Dorotheum) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Before this Pine is Done

When we moved here
there was a plain picket fence
and a giant pine tree

We painted the fence white
then the tree got sick
its tips tinged with red fever

Kids walk by
on their way to and from school
every day, so I made it special

I added a sprinkle of magic to the mundane
tacking up, installing a little elf door
or for fairies and dreams

All ages stop, to wait or knock
all ages smile, at her shade and hope
all ages now notice the tree

They came early one morning
parking the wood chipper outside our window,
waiting for the hour

They've claimed two others
on our street, but ours stands
in defiance and sheer self-reliance

If I could only bottle the woodsy smell
of that dripping syrup, her savory sap
it makes me drool too

And I too feel like one of the children
when I smell her sweltering bark, perfuming in the sun
making me want to simply play and run
(just for fun)
before this pines perishing time is done.

"Obsessed by a fairytale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace."-Eugene O'Neill