Triassica

My heart will not leave it, though it begins and ends with catastrophe. So many skeletons, frozen and mineralized. So many secrets. So many creatures doomed to extinction. For one narrow moment, each and every one shone brilliantly-a sapphire in a bath of cosmic light-a sonnet in a burned library. Now, only fossils, shifting sand, weathered rock. One world gives birth to the next.

Eggs

There is a monster out the window, a red one, and we need to fight it with swords. We do not exactly live in fear of monsters-they are a fact of life-like hurricanes in the Bahamas. I will miss life without monsters, especially the red ones, that creep about parking lots and menace plastic babies from out hurricane-proof windows. We feed them cookies. Ginger cookies, apparently, will not do, because nobody likes them. The Fiend Folio and the Monster Manual are pulled out regularly, to calibrate imagination with cold, hard statistics, and a new bestiary writes itself. Somewhere beneath the sands of a lonely beach-eggs.

To the Lords of Chaos

Great ones. Horned goddesses of Chaos. I summon you. Lay your hands upon our great cities and reverse our train schedules. Corrupt our monetary system, so that land has no intrinsic value and cardboard boxes hold no truth anymore, just plastic parts. Bring lightning and hail. Bring dungflies and scarabs. Bring rot. Most of all, great ones, bring entropy. Scramble coded messages. Corrupt languages. Spread confusion.

Lords of Chaos, accept my sacrifice of dried leaves and unanswered math problems, forged pottery and unpaid parking tickets. I give them to thee, willingly, and with a fuzzy mind. I summon thee.

Abeyance

Knucklebones. An asteroid missing its target. The very same bolide hitting the face of Jupiter. The spine of a great beast, sand drifting about its extinguished carcass. Inland seas on the retreat. Weathered cliffs spared the final onslaught. Great beds of mussels dry in the sun. An ancient seafloor settles. This is not a mass extinction. It is an abeyance. This is a time for alligators to prosper in long river courses. This is a time for freshwater fish. I lament every lost mosasaur though, every crinoid without a home. Seas come and go. It is the Earth's way.

math problem

there is a circle. and at the center of it, a sun. at the center of another circle sits an oak tree covered with caterpillars. Cockroaches breed in another circle, and another is packed with freshly picked pears.
Now, rotate each one in a third dimension, so that they form a sphere. Stack the spheres on top of each other in yet another dimension, so that they are all simultaneous, but there is an order to them. The pears intersect the sun. The sun intersects the caterpillars. The caterpillars intersect the cockroaches. Iterate. As you can clearly see, the result varies from one state of the system to another. A single under-ripe pear can drive the cockroaches into the paleozoic, or far into the future.

Angband

A million orcs once swarmed from the gates of this place. Men and elves have met their fates here. Crowned in thunder, a dark god named Morgoth hammered his name across the land in rhunes of smoke and fire.
Day after day, I cast the dice, and their numbers always added up to this.
Iron gauntlets, a horned helmet, filed teeth, a smoke-grey battle axe covered in the blood of trolls-I stalk the halls of Angband. At the end of every corridor, my own death awaits. Yesterday i made love to a harpy and avoided the gaze of Medusa herself. Still, the monsters come. Today, it is orcs, flaming arrows, and pitch black corridors. Forever in a dragon ship, forever under fire, forever swinging an axe at the knees of an opponent or nicking then with an envenomed sword. My wits are sharp but my soul is mummy dust. I long for a peaceful night on the sandy beach, enemies vanquished, wine flask extinguished, moon at full mast. That is not for me. I am haunted, alive and dead at the same time. The labyrinth, it beckons again.

A lament for Stormbringer

I have forgotten what it is like, the experience of not having this black sword at my side. On my hip, in my hand, swung two-handed in an arc over my head. It is the source of so much strength, yet it will be the death of me. Dragons, tall ships. doomed princesses and even-more-doomed cities, it has doomed them all. Doom.