Fuzz

Tumbling in the heat of weekly work,
My thoughts are teased away by blowing wind
And scatter who-knows-where into the breeze.

Moments that are left behind are bald and bare,
Steadily thinning to the point of threadlessness--
Hardly enough to wrap around myself.

Eventually I find where they collect,
Mashed together up against the screen
Of two o'clock p.m. on Saturday.

The weekend is the lint trap of my life.

Fate of the Gringet

When swingle-soft the orlep dropped
in quel so lim and lawny
that every silthered wendrup spurled
into its chuv-warmed krommy,

that very eve, 'twixt nilfumtode
and bright Algrinna's dunning,
through orlep quel on feet bilel
five crubaden came running.

Their pindet toes with bluc below
spun fast and well apliffer.
No feathered axalema could
have stommed the groam-light swifter.

Gripped tight in her dungroothsome spurs
the lanxest crub held crimbley
a Gringet, braksafed in a skell
that blummed and glowed but dimly.

Bedeft the shuddling trees she raced,
yet in the dark behind her
a stravent jeening pierced the night
and shingered stones beside her.

A harbint-shadowed hulvakon
in furage gave them chase,
and now beneath the Yomin Falls
they saw its bulgoed face.

Three crubaden turned to this foe,
while two yet vattered on,
bearing the Gringet closer to
the great Valuminon.

When wetly gluddering tunches stilled
and skeens ceased echoing,
a wounded crub belumbered slow
and lozie from the stream.

'Tis said that with quellerience
he trojeled 'til he found,
beneath six days of orlep fall,
a skell upon the ground.

Crushed into filuvent dust,
its blum and glow long spent,
a single skine alone remained--
a tragic recompense.

Of crubaden there was no sign
but that the skine was thrust
beneath a sheltering beleg-root
grown o'er with nilomust.

He pulled it free with shullent arms,
and seven tearful eyes
saw that the broken skell was shaped
like blaive before moonrise.

Then swingle-soft the orlep dropped

in quel so lim and lawny

that every silthered wendrup spurled

into its chuv-warmed krommy.

As I'm sure you've guessed, this tale is written in the spirit of Lewis Carroll's masterpiece Jabberwocky, but with what I feel is a touch of Tolkein.

Oh no!

When I write, inspiration comes from different sources for different stories. For poems I usually start with a single line and let the rest aggregate around it. For stories it is frequently a character or a dialogue sketch. Other times I am excited by an idea for a magic system. But in almost every case I have difficulty assigning titles.

Usually, I write a piece first and then try to name what I've written. Sometimes that is easy, and sometimes the title is the hardest part of the piece. Only occasionally have I started a piece with the title firmly in place. One of those is my current work in progress, a short story about a cat that I have chosen to call "Luckless Douglas."

That is why, even though I haven't even finished the first draft, I was upset when I found this rather adorable picture book.

David Melling, you stole my rhyme!
Okay, it's not an exact match. I admit I'm being irrational here. Yes, you thought of it years before I did. But that's the point--I'm no longer as original as I thought.

Are there any other ___-less Douglas books out there?

Why I'm Smiling Today

 Through morning rain a wakeful light expands
diffuse and gentle as the soft'ning gray
that furrows rich and pregnant oe'r the day,
so confident in sure, capable hands.

The air alive with smells that dance and sway,
with sounds washed clean of dust and healed of scars,
contains the strength of seeds, of unseen stars,
the wealth of wind that breath alone can weigh.

There's music in the mist no tune can mar
and calls to mind the power of the sea
endowing with a calm fertility
each motion, thought, and moment that is ours.

Suffused with this same light, this air, this song
I can't but smile, and breathe, and hum along.

Libraries!

Some time ago I was told that there were more public libraries than McDonald's restaurants in America. The assertion made me feel good about our country, and I've told a lot of other people the same thing without ever taking the time to confirm that it is true. Well, at long last I have done the necessary internet searching, and my optimism was justified. There are, in fact, more libraries. How many more? Read on!

First, the competition. How many McDonald's restaurants are there in the United States? At last count we had 12,804, which is just under half the world's supply. This amounts to 1 store for about every 23,000 Americans.
Note that this is comparable to other uber-popular stores like Starbucks (which has 11,168 locations), and a lot more than the total number of bowling alleys (just over 7,000), or Walmart-owned stores (4,404).

By comparison, how many libraries are there? The American Library Association, whose business it is to know such things, reports a total of 16,671 public library locations (plus over 850 bookmobiles). So there are about 4000 more places that will lend you a book than sell you a Big Mac, and that is a heartening thought. (You can check out publiclibraries.com to find the ones near you.)

But it gets better. You see, that's just public libraries. Think about the 3,827 college and university libraries, with a combined collection of over 880 million books! And the surely the Library of Congress has to count for more than just one, since its collection alone is more than 24 million materials. And there are a smattering of nearly 10,000 libraries in other categories, such as the ones named after US presidents.

The real weight of our libraries in the United States, though, is the 99,180 academic libraries in the public and private schools. That's right, one hundred thousand libraries, full of books right at the fingertips of our students.

All told, that's 122,101 libraries, one for every 2500 people in the US. Isn't that something to restore faith in our culture? I certainly think so.

(images used without permission)

Snowball

The phrase "a snowball's chances in hell" is a very problematic metaphor. For one, it depends crucially on one's conception of hell. Someone subscribing to the pit-of-fire image would usually conclude that the snowball wouldn't last a moment, while someone who had read Dante might assume that the snowball could last indefinitely on the frozen lake of the 9th circle.

Then again, if a snowball really were to be punished, I can't think of a more appropriate hell than a lake of brimstone, a limitless expanse of inexpungible flame. But damnation is eternal, so even in such a place would the snowball ever melt away? Or would it be always melting, steaming in the infernal heat, but never truly disappearing--trapped for eternity where it least belongs?

Of course, that begs a host of theological questions, such as whether a snowball can possibly be wicked. To all appearances, snowballs lack free will, and therefore cannot be culpable for what they are formed and used to do. And do snowballs have souls? Is there an eternal essence that lasts beyond the impact or the spring melt? And if so, what does that say about those who make, and throw, these soul-endowed snowballs?

There is no time to really tackle these questions, or to point out the other problems fundamental to the snowball metaphor. Because there is a much more evocative image, with a much more concrete answer:

"What are a fire-imp's chances in a snowball fight?"

Simply put? None.

The Hourglass

However many thousand-thousand grains of sand may lie
in glass above as time to come, or beneath as time gone by,
still in this trickling instant only one may tumble past
the narrow neck of now that is the soul of the Hourglass.

This fragile moment funnels the to be into has been
through an is that is too slender for all but the slimmest when.
I wish sometimes, when time is thin, the barrier might collapse
so that the years to love you in might hurry down en masse.

But flowing seconds filter by--some beige, some black, some gold--
enough to run your fingers through; far too many to hold.
And, blessedly, now stems the flow that else would far surpass
the breath and life with which I hold time briefly in my grasp.

Let moments, then, fall one by one until the very last
has tumbled singly, subtly through the soul of the Hourglass.