Dr. Malhari takes a moment to relax

Dr Malhari sits on his parlor chair, admiring a whiff of pipesmoke emanating from his mouth. The stuffed animal heads adoring the wall are somehow not enough. There is a blunderbuss mounted their too, and a silver sword. Soon, the cells under his microscope will have finished dividing, and he will rebuild the dinosaur, but with superhuman intelligence. This creation will of course be powered by silica crystals and an obscure form of gravity wave distortion. His bare feet feel good against the zebra skin rug, and he thinks of all the wonderful memories he has. So many grand adventures. So much danger. So much risk. So much reward. Martian slave girls in a silk market. The beast he fought under the dungeons of Angband. The black mermaid, with rivulets of ebony cascading as tresses, each one capped by a venomous snake. The devil. The blue robots, and their desire to eat perfection. Dr. Malhari had seen the destruction of three rocket ships. It was time for a glass of Madera, a smoke, and a look at the old trophies.

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.

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 trout's lament

I hate hanging at the end of a line like this. I am sick of this line. I am sick of this fishhook. They bait them with such lovely things. Now, I see waders in the water.

Rhizodont

I admire your coronoid fangs, beast, and your beauty. Ages before there were ages, you were out there devouring killer sharks with one sideswipe of you crowned head. Your sinews, your dark eyes, the ebb and flow of your predatory moods-they call me. To the dark denizens of a Devonian swamp you are sheer terror to contemplate. To me, you are my origin, my ancestor, and a vision that sustains me no matter where I turn. I could never forget you because you are in my bones. My radius, my ulna, and to an extent I can scarcely contemplate, my own heart, I owe to you and your predatory machinations. You are a lovely beast under that dark water. You cannot last, but nothing lasts, and you will live forever in me as a tetrapod. A mass extinction will take you out the same way everything worth of a real death meets its fate at the hands of a cataclysm. You are no exception, being at the top of so many links in the food chain. Cataclysms will happen, but not before you have given rise to the hands I use to record your passing. You live in me, forever, Rhizodont.

Queen of Autumn

Queen of Autumn, how I miss your brown tresses and your cherry pies. I long for them. I long for your dusky sunsets and your red leaves. I wish to walk among your trees again, to feel the September sun upon my face. Your pumpkins and hop cones, your soldier beetles and goldenrod, I can see them and smell their scent on my fingertips. So permanently in transition you are, loosing attention at the moment things are finest. As soon as you become golden you are already turning to black and grey sunsets, to frigid cold. Yet, you return, and you will return again, and in the meantime I can sit by a fire and remember your falling leaves under my feet.

Queen of Winter

Winter is coming, I can hear the gentle murmur of your skirts in the rustling of the leaves. Here we are again, together, you and I. Queen of Winter, how I long to gaze into your glacier blue eyes. How I long to touch your raven hair. How I long to stand close to your breast, your frigid breath against my face. And yes, Dear, how I long to kiss your black lips, and die. Queen of winter. I long for you.

an unvisited geological epoch

if i were made of plywood, i would be full of hot coals. if i were glass, tuning forks. strike that-i would be half full of warm deoxygenated saltwater, with a single eusthenopteron gulping at the surface, prowling about for its next meal, not realizing that the trilobites are long extinct, and if anyone feeds it at all, it will have to settle for flakes. an ammonite cannot escape the coils it has set, over the years, because its internal organs are locked solidly to its mantle cavity. i am a vase full of seed fern fronds, a lappet moth nestled against a bright green motel room door, unable to work its natural colors into the pattern. all my archival footage, my collection of yellowed paperback novels, my victorian monographs, creaking under two centuries of distinctive museum dust, are like discarded tapes in a paper shopping bag. I am wide awake and this is now and something truly remarkable keeps happening and happening. past history means something, because in a previous geological epoch, i might have longed for something i could not have, but that was the Triassic and things are different now. i was not expecting rainforests again, and reefs, and an adaptive radiation of new forms. this is all so unexpected. whatever happens, the face of this strange planetoid is producing butterflies, again, and in forms more diverse than before. i can only marvel at it.

an open window

i feel it too much to ask what brought this here, how long it will last, and what will become of it. i am merely happy for it at the moment. this is what i tell myself, but i ask all those guilty questions, particularly the last of the three. the Cretaceous was a very long geological period, and it had the most interesting dinosaurs. it is a similar situation with galactic evolution. hydrogen burning stars of the right size can only exist at certain times in the grand scheme of things, and long after they are all burned out, and for all those billions of years we had to wait for them, space was lifeless. how long? what will become if it?

a reverse valentine

you have angles, octagon, and i understand, i have a few of my own. i am a dodecahedron, and i have a lot of them. angles. i like knowing you are out there, with your equilateral lines, your concurrent angles, your sensible symmetry. i am irregular, some dodecahedrons do that, as you probably know, and a person would be hard-pressed to find a single axis of symmetry in me anywhere. this does not mean i am not without beauty, as you have observed. we are different shapes and structures, and our planes cannot cross in more than a flat field, but how magnificent is such an intersection. be beautiful, octagon, it is nice knowing that there are shapes like you, and this is enough for me, and perhaps even the best, because all things run their course, even geometric figures.

the universe that has shaped itself in the next room

the plastic princess tames the dinosaur, a ceratosaurus not to be trifles with, with an incantation and the promise of popcorn. all around, smurfs are dancing insulting ethnic spoofs of native american rituals, and a tree monitor the size of ten busses pleads to be allowed to eat one, just one, because he is so hungry for blue flesh. buildings collapse, pigs balance on the back of the Overdino, a plateosaurus who rules this world with a stern tempermant, and all over plastic dinosaurs and ficher price blue collar vacationers gather to witness the spectacle of a hot air ballon trip to the moon, where apparently, there is cake. this world creates and re-creates itself with such regularity that is assuming some of the attributes of a real place. it has rules. there must be a circus. The MONSTER BALL and the OVERDINO compete for rulership, though only the latter wins, interspecific love affaris are commonplace, as the monarch of the real leans he is the scion of a triceratops, and babies here, as everywhere, must be tucked into bed. A few feet away, a perpetual birthday party is in full swing, invisible cake half-eaten on plastic plates as stuffed monkeys stare at the ceiling and think of something resembling stuffed heaven.

a comet

The stars have never been so much aligned, as this, i come and go under the evidence of infernal machines and heavenly orbits, This rising and falling of iron gears and crystal epicycles. First toward Mercury and later toward distant Eris, and back. I am like a comet, of sorts, falling into the sun just far enough to get singed, then retreating, leaving a trail of vapor in my wake. Perhaps I seek to be singed some, or perhaps it is because i am so drawn to the sun as to ensure my own destruction, save a last minute escape impluse, the memory of which fades to murmurs in the celestial cold black. So, i return, again and again, to this. Some cycles run fast and threaten to vaporize my every molecule of atmosphere, others burn slow, but they all burn, again and again, till i am just a cinder.

Minos

It is dark and misty, and somehow, i have ended up in this thicket. I wandered in here in search of shiny objects, like a mina bird, looking for things to decorate my nest. the silver glinted in the moonlight, how, i do not know, there are so many brambles to cover the ground now. were all these thorns here before? i have already forgotten my way out of here, and every step brought me further into the thorns. Vine after vine, the wood bunches up over holes in the ground, and the coins seem to vanish as i reach for them. Still, it is not too late. The hill slopes upward, and i have been walking downward till now. One footfall at a time, i can find my way back from here. I hear the voice of an ancient deity in the wind, and i realize that i have dreamed of this maze before.

The Coal Swamp Has Never Been Closer

i cannot complain. there is a roof over my head and there is food in my refrigerator. i have no need of a handgun. though i am no match for a Dienotherium in a fight, I do not have to fight one. Thus, no rifle either. No flamethrower. A couch would not fit up a stairway earlier. I should have measured it first. I hear they get stuck there forever, couches, blocking the inhabitants of the upper floors in their apartments forever. There was no back staircase. Had this been the case, somehow, the couch would not have gotten stuck. After all, what is the purpose of a back staircase besides simply being big enough to accommodate irregularly shaped couches, This brings me to the subject of my unrealized desire to rule the world through terror. I need to put a ten dollar bill in the g string of a stripper soon. A cold beer is not doing it. It is hard to explain this to my two-year-old best friend, who thrills me with questions like "who made up?", and can now recite my answer "Up is not real it is just an idea....". Is this how it is supposed to work? Do bluegills love their eggs this much? What does a reef squid feel during the throes of courtship? What of all those little eggs. It is a hundred degrees Farenheit, outside, with the humidity of a place where vast pools of water sit on the cement, failing to evaporate. The coal swamp has never been closer. So sad to imagine that during the middle of the Carboniferous, those global rainforests dried up and shrank to small islands of vegetation on tropical isles. Conifers spread and amphibians gave way to reptilians. What did a gorgonopsid feel for its young?

congratulations, universe, for your neutron stars

i lament the extinction of the kronosaur, and perhaps equally so, i regret that i have yet to wrestle with a giant squid. turns out that a kronosaur and a sperm whale would be a great match in a fight, though the latter being such an ecological specialist, it is not really as good in a fight as its size would lead a person to believe. we have not enough giant monsters, and none that shoot deadly radiation from their eyes. yes, we have a few amazing elasmobranchs left, and yes, at the smaller scales, we have better beasties that most planets this size, i reckon. it is hard to know what is usual around here, on this planet, orbiting this yellow sun. it is a rather impressive star, in its own way. larger than most, but hardly among the giants. it is more than four billion years old and it is burning very nicely at present. i also think we have good gas giants. again, nothing showy, like a planet ten times the size of jupiter gradually evaporating into its sun, but i like uranus and saturn, and i think that if we could see our own oort cloud, we would be happy with its pleasant configurations.
let me be among the first to congratulate the universe for its neutron stars, now that i am on the subject. in an infinite universe, i suppose, an infinite number of sentinent beings congratulate the universe at any given moment-but the observable universe is the only universe i know, and it contains just enough galaxies that other beings have congratulated it before, in distant galaxies, but perhaps not for its neutron stars.

ode to species with heterogametic sexes or deadly venom

space jellyfish. fucking space jellyfish. the ameba of doom. death reptiles. the echo at the end of it all. the absurdity of a finite universe. the inevitable paradoxes of an infinite universe populated by space amebas. electrical storms. homo erectus men going to sea in skin boats. ammonites. kronosaurs, cheap motels. lipstick. lighter fluid. dim memories. more lipstick.
i have been spacewrecked here before. on days like this, the fading summer sun falling through green ash, a city park full of homo sapiens lying on blankets, the pull of my chromosomes directing my actions. a slave to hidden, genetic appetites. kronosaurs. spaccemen. spiders. ergot. lipstick. strip clubs. night.

Doom and Doom again

Stormbringer, I hear you calling me, and it is damned true, the Black Blade keeps on killing, till the end of time. You bring Ruin. You destroy everything you touch, and my hands are cold as ice from your hilt. Vanquished are the orcs, the goblins, and the Mind Flayers, also are the elks, the unicorns, and the fairytale princesses they befriended. It is a cold, ruined land out there now, devoid of animal life and freezing with the Northern Wind. I see snow on the branches of dead trees, and the bones of ancient reptiles make my castle. Here, in this land, I lament the queen of winter and I lament the man i once was before i picked up this sword.
Yet, i was glorious in my destruction. It was no mere mortal blade that sealed my fate. No sea elf could stop me, no harpie, no heroic young man with glistening armor. I was doom and doom again, and now, I sit, on this mountaintop, snow drifting over the icy landscape below, skulls beneath my feet, awaiting the inevitable. Doom.

the rainy day and the piano

the universe is fragmented into these layers, some of them we would call "real" and others distinctly not part of this reality. we all know this. this is how we can pour milk into our rice crispies and not be driven insane by the distinct possibility that it was another version of ourselves, a distinctly different person that existed merely seconds ago, that poured the crispies into the bowl to begin with. or is it Krispies? The man who spelled them incorrectly or at least in avoidance of the brand namature is a distinctly different person than the one who is refusing to push his cat away from the keyboard so that he can continue to write this. We are different, he and i. He has made his decisions and i have done my time in his shoes. Is that why we go through so much trouble to make these things that ultimately become memories? graduations and awards ceremonies, and days at the beach and at the zoo. soon they are gone, but in the participation of making the, we open up universes in which those people are, at least in theory, experiencing them in the present. this is good because i am an engine for the creation of these parallel universes and so are all the people that read this. this means that one index of the present is the future possibilities it is creating just by sitting there and the past, empty now, moments it believes it is connected with. every now and again i am sure we cross a reality that just happens to be the present in another timestream, and we cross over without knowing it. how could we?