TheBanyanTree: SUB: Chaos Calling / 272 / Prose Poem [R]

[Guy Koehler]

Chaos Calling
By Guy Koehler
272 words


"You can't start a story with dialog!" 

That was critique number one, from a boy with blond hair and 
a blood-red spider webbed onto the silver chain hanging 
from his left nipple. Like I should take *him* seriously!

The girl with strawberry hair was hardly kinder. She thought 
I should take a class in grammar, English Composition 101, 
down at the community college. "Not even worth the time of 
bothering anyone who can really write," I heard loud and 
clear.

"White tower! White tower!" What the hell is that supposed 
to mean? He said it in reply to my submission. I thought it 
as I read his words. Who cares? I did when I wrote it, when 
I read it aloud to myself, as the echoes of long-dead wails 
screamed across my veins, pulling and tugging fierce winds 
over chasms of missing words.

Come on, then. Sing it, wail it, scream it, writhe and shake 
in the grip of death's sweet embrace: sugar high; so very, 
very refined.

Unshackled light, bursting sweet bonds, bathing 
illumination, white stone shards lodged in balls sweating 
into days' first kiss. You think you feel? The agony of 
cold nights' last grip caught your breath?

Come then, dream with me. Precious exile, gypsy vagabond, 
home so far across the veils music finds no clean water.

Where did you go? So far and far, and far, exile across seas 
deep, angry, far from shores no bird now visits.

Into the sun, across the sweet breeze, above the songs, in 
full-moon tears, give me release, that I might fall back 
down into your embrace, soft solace from stern reality.


END