the shaft dark
but for lantern light
silent
but for the sound
of the pick
and his own
ragged breath

he wipes the sweat
from his eyes
with dirty hand
and swings again
chipping away
at the plausible
one rock at a time

looking for the
gleam of possibility
oh, the bits of taste
honey and dust
dirt to mud

he folds them up
in his mouth
learns their flavors
prayers
wishes
confessions
and lies

he sings wildly
like a wind chime
seeding the storm
in verse
but all that blooms
are dark stunted buds
too late he has hungered
for the taste of what is

Those aren’t Murder Hornets, they’re generation one Tracker Jackers from the Hunger Games, better have your mask handy.

After 49-days of self-isolation, I miss people, places and things. Nouns. I miss nouns.

A rancher I know used his stimulus check to buy baby chickens. So in essence, he got his money for nothing and his chicks for free.

More than a bit of a geek, David had a skill of being able to recall jus’ the right something even when under immense pressure. Such was the night that he and a couple of friends entered the old mansion to do some ghost detecting.

Unfortunately for David, it wasn’t a ghost they discovered, but rather a something far more menacing. While his friends ran off, he was left to face a vampire by himself.

She had him cornered in an upstairs room next to a window, which through shone a full and bright moon. Though panicked, David blurted out, “The moon has no light of it’s own and actually reflects the sun’s light.”

Hissing violently, she pressed herself against the wall, avoiding the glow of the full moon, while David bid a hasty escape.

Jim made Alice a beautiful dinner, hiding a large diamond engagement ring inside one of his magnificent crescent rolls, but before he could propose, she swallowed it. They rushed to emergency room.

After spending the entire night, the doctor delivered the bad news, “We did everything we could Jim, but her answer is no.”

Jim was inconsolable.

While at the local market, I happened to see the Hindu goddess Durga Ji, in her mask and buying hand lotion. She didn’t look happy.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

She held up all eight of her dried and cracked hands, grumbling, “Fucking virus.”

Kevin watched as the old man struggled to reach his untied shoe. He offered to help him.

As he knelt down and began, he didn’t see the long knife secreted inside the old man’s long coat. He had only to stab Kevin once to score his 102^nd murder.

As Kevin lay on the vacant sidewalk, unconscious and bleeding out, the old man got up and walked away. As he did, he withdrew a cellphone from his pocket and dialed a number.

“People are such suckers,” he smiled, “It’s your turn and you’re still behind. Call me when you score. Ciao.”

I had a Peek-a-Boo accident. Currently in the I.C.U.

It seemed as if it were only yesterday that Scott had been fishing. But for the life of him, he couldn’t really recall when that was.

Instead, he found himself sitting idly along the bank of the river he loved so well, fishing line in and its red and white bobber floating gently down the stream. Life was great for the young teen.

He could see the men, some in uniforms passing up and down the river’s bank on the far side, as if searching for something. Scott watched as two small boats, one wood, the other aluminum, slipped by trolling the waters.

“No fishing poles,” he thought, “No fishing line in the water. What are they doing?”

He felt a slight tug on the end of his line. The smallish jerk caused the colorful float to momentarily disappear beneath the water and reappear again.

Methodically and patiently, he reeled in his line. He was slow and purposeful in his actions, bringing whatever had taken his bait, to the bank without a fight.

It was a skill that he’d learned from his grandfather when he was child.

A voice shouted, garnering Scott’s attention, “Found him! He’s over here!”

“Found what?” Scott asked himself.

This was followed by a sudden and violent yanking to his once quiet fishing line. One of the nearby boats had snagged it as it passed by.

Then Scott remembered how he’d been fishing three days before, how he had slipped in the mud, how he had struck his head on a rock and toppled into the water. He remembered it all, that very moment he saw them pull his lifeless body from the river.

The burst of luminescence and its warmth was both brief and immediate.