Never to return

The cover of darkness
proves a poor insulator -
the stiff cold of winter amplified
over the steady buzz of silence.
A train pulls from the station, resistant,
until the tether snaps. Freedom.

And at each stop on the line,
the world has been asleep
just a little while longer -
a string of infinitesimal time zones,
the difference of a few minutes
as precious as true love.
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Playing on my iTunes at this very moment:
Audioslave, Like a Stone

Flash Nano 2017

Trying to stimulate the creative part of my brain again - as you can see in the blog archive it's been a long while since it was productive. Flash Nano is essentially the short story version of National Poetry Writing Month. I'll be attempting to write one flash story (<1000 words) every day for the month of November. Here goes nothing.

November 1st - Write a story that takes place on a school bus.
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From the second he climbed aboard, he was almost positive that this was the same bus he'd taken to school eleven years ago. It still had the same scent, like the years of delinquency it had beheld were baked into the vinyl seats over too many stale summers.

Blinking off this wave of nostalgia, he began his inspection. Row by row, he made sure the recently departed passengers hadn't left anything behind. Of course there were always a few personal effects lingering - he remembered that he couldn't seem to keep track of his own possessions at their age. Where he had left a GI Joe stuck halfway into the seat crack there was now the LEGO version of some new Star Wars character. Where one of his loose trading cards had fluttered into obscurity underneath the seat, there was now a fidget spinner.

He gathered the items and stood to walk farther back into the bus. His hands and pockets full of the misplaced joys of modern youth, he again found himself awash in memory.

Each row of seats held fleeting images of another year of his life. In the front he sat as a kindergartner, bouncing and joyful, eager to spend another day among new friends at school. And in the very back, not so many years later, a jaded teenager, convinced of his own superiority, and that he knew everything there was to know about the world.

He sighed as his vision returned to the present, not so much borne of regret as it was exasperation. He glanced down at the toys in his hands, wondering how many of them would soon be discarded by kids who would paint themselves into their own corners of self-righteousness and incomplete "worldliness." He shrugged and turned to leave. He supposed that they'd learn the same way he did.
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Playing on my iTunes at this very moment:
Oddisee, After Thoughts

Heat

Just another night in the city,
faces set in stone but not grey -
they're dyed brightly by the lights,
watercolors mixed by hopelessness.

Leftover rain drips from the wires
like lazy condensation,
this whole world is summer
on the sweaty edge of a glass.

And just like it should,
the heat rises, slowly, and then
the rush, the boiling and bubbling
and every thermometer reads red.
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Playing on my iTunes at this very moment:
Run the Jewels, A Report to the Shareholders/Kill Your Masters

And now...

Think of all the fury, all the noise,
and the noise, the noise, the noise,
the noise, the noise, the noise -

Enough.

This is where it all ends, buried deep
in sterile confines and stark white tiles,
in air that smells exactly like nothing,
in the arms of a hundred people you
never knew you would need to meet.
They'll be there for you when you arrive
and again when you leave, exactly
when the rest of your world is frozen
in indecision, when it feels completely
stupid to just leave and move on,
but really, what else can you do?
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Playing on my iTunes at this very moment:
Noname, Reality Check