bit5-Venom

I could hear the sobbing, like a dark, pulsing undertone to the brilliant flashing red of the screaming.  It still shocked me, made my stomach turn, despite the fact that I head this cacophony almost every day.  My god, how that woman could scream!  The noise seemed to grow hideous claws that ripped fiendishly into my eardrums.  It sounded like some fool had released an angry mountain lion in the house, but I knew it wasn't the sheer ear-rending volume (however impressive) that racked her daughter's fragile body with deep, heart-wrenching sobs; It was the tone of the false (and true) accusations, fairly oozing with malice and dripping with sarcasm, a verbal venom that I could picture as a violent radiation-green liquid, flying from her lips as she spit her carefully honed words of hurt at her own child.  I even cringed from where I was curled up across the house, biting my knees and wishing for dark, calming silence to take over.

Elemental Love - Earth

Your love;
Dark, as the soil which fosters the brightest blooms;
Or as the grave, which swallows all those who pass into it,
Embracing them forever.

Solid as the earth beneath;
Often tread upon and taken for granted
Yet not crumbling.
Or, like a rock, containing many precious gems
Only for the eyes of those willing to look beneath the surface.

Rained on, stepped on, abused and broken,
But growing softer, not harder;
The birthplace of my own love,
Not only nurtured but nurturing.

Though often hurt, never hurting;
Though damaged by the hardest of hearts,
Yet as tender as a young vine.
Soft as silk, desiring only one thing;
A return for the love you so freely give-
Here's to you.

I love you.

Elemental Love - Air

The Wind passes swiftly o'er the meadows
Caressing, kissing,
Embracing, then leaving.
It finds a young, precious flower of the field
And cools it with its gentle touch.
Then, as quickly as it is come
It is gone.
Flitting mindlessly to a new target,
Leaving the flower to wilt in the heat.
It moves from place to place,
Never stopping long enough to be seen
But just enough to be felt forever.

Such is your love.

It is beautiful, ravishing the heart;
Bringing all emotion to the surface
Only to fly away, leaving the soul dead.
You may never be truly caught;
Always free, always alive, Always happy,
Never mine.
Yet this one consolation I have:

I have seen the wind.

Elemental Love - Water

Do my unwitting word tear so cruelly at your heart-strings

That tears must come?

Or are my very words so close to your heart,

That their slightest movement causes it to flutter,

Procuring the precious drops?

They flow so freely...

I, but the humble servant, drawing up the crystal flow

From the deep well of your emotions,

Gain that which gives me strength, yea, life itself!

For the potency of those drops is in from whence they spring:

Thine own true love.

Oh, but there is more than I could ask,

For that which sustains me is not only drawn upon,

But is freely showered down in the form of a refreshing rain;

A beautiful spring shower that gives life to all it touches!

But love is more...

More than a deep well, whose depths can never be plumbed...

More even than a beautiful and refreshing rain...

Love is a river,whose strong tide and churning waters

Have carried me away...

Its billows crash over my soul, and sweep me on

To a most delightful end.

Oh, to drown in your love!

It washes away all thoughts,

All desires but one:

To hold, and to be held, in your arms; Life!

Love is an ocean...

A great sea teeming with life

Whereon bold adventurers, like you and I,

May sail together in search of a beautiful land!

The journey may be long...storms will come...

But whether our end be fair or foul,

We shall be covered at last by the current of a great love,

Flowing under us... around us...

Through us...

Love is a mighty ocean...

A swelling river...

A refreshing rain...

A deep well...

And the single glimmmering drop on your cheek.

Elemental Love - Fire

The word "Love" is overused.

But what else can describe the overwhelming fire

Devouring me and subduing my spirit?

Is it, after all, mere shallow passion?

Deep obsession?

Or did "I Love You" actually mean something once?

I didn't see the spark when we met;

It soon caught my heart on fire, though...

My negligence has destroyed me.

This fiery love burns away all my excess feeling;

Blackening and destroying the life I had,

Leaving naught but the evidence of passion's extreme heat.

Your heart, hard like steel, pressed close to mine in the flame.

I still feel the searing of the hot iron into my flesh,

Branding me forever as yours alone.

Yet I would not tear away from the pain:

For all that awaits me is the cold, empty place

I lived before your fire.

The heat of a once-returned love,

No matter how barren it leaves the soul when it is gone,

Is far more precious to me than the cold beauty

Of an unrealized ideal, no matter how perfect.

So touch me again, the one who you destroyed.

Sear me and ravage my very soul,

Then leave me if you must; but leave me my memories:

The charred ground...cold ash on a cold wind;

Evidence of a love that, once, burned like flame.

Apology

Dearest Reader,

I wish to apologize for not posting for several days.  I have been piecing together passages of Tales of Augelond, and not all of the ones I have so far are in chronological order...  This means that Chapters 1.3, 2, and 3.2 are still missing, while Chapter 3.1, although complete, cannot be published until 1.3 and 2 are finished.  I apologize for the inconvenience.

In lieu of this scattered collecting, I have decided to post the Elemental Love poems.  A far cry from both Tales and Lucy's Curse, these are perhaps the four best descriptive love poems I have composed during my short writing carreer.  I hope you will enjoy these poems while I continue to shuffle through old manuscripts and collect scattered thoughts.

Your Humble Author,

COWL

bit4-Luck

Did you ever get the feeling things couldn't possibly go wrong?  Like everything you did was somehow blessed?  Like you were somehow lucky beyond all belief?

Yeah, me neither.

Tales of Augelond-CH1.2

Elia Uunt hummed lightly to herself as she stood over the sink, long, pale gold draped in plaits down her shapely back, her arms buried in a monstrous heap of suds and dishes. This would have given some casual, if imaginative, onlooker the impression of a goddess reaching down through the clouds to touch some blessed mountain. The twins had been tucked safely into bed with this same tune, and, after a long and somewhat strained kiss, her husband had retired to his study. A ghost of a smile flitted briefly across her soft lips at this memory, giving her once again the look of a goddess, that same look Aarden had been so taken with in his younger days.

He works so hard for us! Elia thought to herself. And he can't even understand what he's doing.

Elia knew, though. She knew all too well how hard he worked to provide for them, the long hours of overtime at the office just to get her a "little extra" for herself. That's what he always told her when he called, and he always called when he had to stay late. "Just getting you a little extra, sweetheart." She felt sad at the thought of him working himself to tatters, barely sleeping (he slept less and less these days, it seemed), and all for what? Money? A better life for his family?

Suddenly she wished fervently that they were back on the farm. A cold chill ran over her making goosebumps stand out all over her pure white skin. The farm was hard, true; they went deeper into debt every year, and barely kept food on the table, but it was home, and he was always able to be with her, or her with him. Besides, there was something inherently wrong with this place, something sinister, like a ghost hiding in the shadows; something that could only be felt, but something that was there, nonetheless. And those mountains, curse them! The domestic goddess shuddered involuntarily. Those mountains always made her skin crawl as if she was covered from head to heel with invisible spiders. Something was definitely going on in Augevilla, and it was affecting her husband. I'll talk to him tonight, she thought rapidly, rinsing her hands in hot water, not bothering even to pause to dry them. He has to know, and then he'll see how I feel, and we'll kiss, and then we'll take the twins and just leave. Leave this terrible, awful place forever. And then things would be right again, just like they had been, like they had always been before they came here. She fled toward the study in a state approaching panic, no longer a goddess but a tired, scared girl, golden locks flying behind her as she rushed on down the hallway, past the pictures of family long gone, past reminders of happier times long gone, past the old coat of arms her husband still kept (he was royalty once, she thought, and this slowed her travel somewhat), and on to the heavy oak door that led to her husband's inner sanctum.

A shrill scream pierced the air.

Her hand, still dripping with water from the sink, now feeling very cold, froze on the knob of the already open door. It took a moment to register that that hideous, animal scream came from behind the door in front of her. I was imagining it I must have been it's all in my head I mean after all nothing this side of the Ridge makes that kind of sound....

Her thoughts trailed off as the scream was repeated; a fierce, wholly animal scream of pain, frustration, hatred, all of the above or none of them, now without a doubt came from inside her husband's study. Her composure shattered beyond repair, she rushed into the study.

Theirs screams mingled in a discordant harmony of terror and pain.

bit3-Sleep

Tired.
Tired of running.
Tired of fighting.
Tired of that feeling of inevitability.
Tired of trying to escape what I know is my fate,
My Death.
Feeling like lying down to rest,
Letting it come,
Come to me in my dark room.
Letting it take me over at last.
Then no more running.
No more fighting.

So tired....

Lucy's Curse- CH2

Inside of every mind there is the potential for psychotic behavior. Not that every person will become psychotic; many people are never exposed to the "triggers" that will set them off; but the potential is there. For most people, the trigger is stress. Whether it originates at work or at home, unmanaged stress builds up like hot gas in a glass bottle, until the pressure has become too great and the bottle -that is, the mind- shatters. The trigger that sets insanity's ball rolling may not even be connected in any way to the problem itself; it simply overloads the circuits and the whole mental grid goes up in fireworks.

For others, the trigger is some sort of trauma. If either viewing traumatic events or experiencing them firsthand, these people snap under those strenuous circumstances. If stress can be compared to bottled gas, then trauma is something like a stick of dynamite in the bottle. The mind is there one moment, functioning properly, and the next it is completely gone, creating a macabre magic show of sorts.

The first time I met Lucy (I still don't know her real name; she never told me, but seemed to accept the name I gave her) I was taking a short siesta around three o'clock in the afternoon. Suddenly, I was aware of something that could not be seen, only felt. Call me crazy, I probably was... am... whatever, but I felt what I can only describe as Evil, capital E, oozing from the corner of my cramped bedroom, right beside the giant oak dresser with the mirror on the back.

I sat up in bed, staring at the shadow beside the dresser. There was nothing there to cast the shadow, nothing blocking the passage of light from the dim overhead bulb on the dirty ceiling fan to that corner of the room; the shadow simply was. I sucked in a deep breath, and it felt like I could have inhaled every bit of air in that apartment, and half the air outside, too. I'm not sure how long I had been holding my breath, but it must have been quite some time; if I had had the presence of mind to look in the mirror over the dresser at that point, I'm sure my face would have been red or blue or purple or some other unnatural color. As it was, my eyes were firmly fixed on the ethereal darkness in the corner.

I could have sworn it moved.

I sat looking at it, staring into it, for ten minutes or an hour, trying to catch it moving again. I don't think I blinked once. All this time, those horrible Evil waves kept washing over me, never moving the air. I was soaked in sweat. I know that whenever someone describes that sort of situation they usually say it gets cold in the room, or that they feel some sort of a chill run up their spine, but this thing was hot. The closest thing to that feeling I can think of was having pneumonia. I had that once, as a child, and my lungs never have really recovered from it. It was like that- a hot, humid, infected feeling. I got up and turned on the fan, and that helped a little, I guess. Finally, I was convinced that there was an It in my room, but whatever It was was just part of my imagination, brought about by extreme exhaustion. I laid back down and tried to relax, but all I could do was stare, hypnotized, at the filthy ceiling fan and the old light as the blades continued to make a soft whistling noise, barely audible above the hum of the motor. My life was about to go straight to hell, do not pass go, etc., and I somehow knew it.

Stress? Trauma? Or Something else?

I don't know or care anymore.

Because that's when she spoke to me.

Tales of Augelond-CH1.1

The hatred in it was intense. As intense as the darkness it lived in was impenetrable.

As intense as the plan it had for the future.

Neither man nor beast, it was a fiend directly from the Pit. Its long, silver mane sprouting from between two curved, knifelike horns was ill-befitting to the sharptoothed gorral skull it wore it called its head. A sickly greenish glow emanated from somewhere far behind the empty eye sockets. It called itself GRAAL, (in its own tongue, master of darkness) and had dwelt silently in the caves of lllos for many years. since the arrival of the Settlers, in fact.

The Settlers had brought life to much of Augelond, harvesting grain where once there had been barrenness, building villages where once rotting corpses filled the air with noxious fumes.

-Even causing prosperity to arise from among the crashing waves of Duun.

Yes, the Settlers had been an influence for all that was hateful to Graal in all the land. All, that is
except the Mountains of Mor, where he resided. Many times did they try to corrupt his stronghold in the shadows with life, and always he drove them back into the comfort of their tiny huts. Over time they had advanced on him, even building their center of commerce, Augevilla, in the shadow of those dread hills.

He had waited far too long for this.

Aarden Uunt was sitting at his desk in the office of the little third-floor apartment his family called home, running his fingers through his already mussed golden hair. They had moved here last summer from the family home in the country; times were hard, and the city held promise of jobs and prosperity. There was a lifetime of memories attached to the old homestead, true, but you can't pay the bills or put food in hungry mouths with memories. The city had fixed all that, but at what price? Even as he sat at his desk, Aarden could feel the gears of the city pulling him down, threatening to crush him and his family, pulling them deep into the darkness of the caves that ran beneath the town. Sweat broke out on his forehead and ran down into his left eye, making it sting. They would never get out. He could feel that.

bit2-Pyro

Fire. A beautiful, undulating creature, quietly sexual in its soft movements, entirely composed of energy. Filled with power and an infinite hunger, but most of all light; it is pure, and purifying... Nothing can stand before its onrush. Living, breathing, feeding, reproducing. Relaxing, terrifying, Fire takes all for herself, leaving nothing behind, infinitely selfish and foolish.
Fire. Perhaps the greatest creation of all.

mis padres

Let me tell you a little story...

Once upon a time, I was a kid.

I'm serious! Although now that time seems far removed, I once was young and full of life. Now I suppose I'm really nothing more than a cynical wash-up, driftwood on the shores of reality, debris cast off from the sea of life. But even when I was still an active youngster, there were several signs that I can look back on and see, if only in shadows, evidences of what I would become.

There were many times when shades fell over my childhood. I was very angry as a young man. I hurt a lot of people I loved very much, and I have always regretted that my relationships have been scarred, if not destroyed, by my bad judgement. These affronts to my closest friends hurt me almost unbearably as soon as I could see through the red veil of my own anger and into their eyes; but nothing I tried changed me as much as a return of the "favors" by girls I have known. Especially the ones I never hurt.

Still, these random stabbings of pain and regret served one very useful purpose: they gave me the fuel to express myself, not just emotions, but the very essence of my being. I started soft and sweet, as most writers in their early teens when the infamous "love-bug" bites them hard in the hormones. Poetry, sonnets, the whole nine yards all flowed freely from my gaping mouth and starry eyes; but with an increase of pressure and a little pain, truly great things began to flow and I began a series of elemental poems, one for each girl I had loved. In spite of the somewhat awkward subject matter, I was fairly happy with the way they turned out. But soon poetry could not express all that I felt; even free verse was too constrictive, and I soon turned to fiction as the best way to express the darker emotions that flooded my brain in my late teens.

Perhaps the best example of my darker works was Tales of Augelond, a fantasy I started in college. Though I didn't realize it at the time, this work directly corresponded to the schizophrenic tendencies that would become prominent only a short two years later, inspiring my work on Lucy's Curse. The work was never finished, however, because my parents found the half-finished looseleaf manuscript and promptly burned it.

Page. By. Page.

The first I heard of this was when I came home during my second, and last, semester of college. Needless to say, I was devastated at the senseless destruction of endless hours of labor and research. Depressed and disinterested, I let my grades slide, and dropped out at the end of the second semester.

I have, since that time, found several short sections of my original Tales, and plan to publish them here on this blog as I piece them together with what remains in my head. I hope you will read and enjoy these chapters as they resurface.

Sometimes parents can be...

bit1-destiny

Nothing I can do or say will change anything...
...I realize that now.
I was such a fool to think that any of my actions could change the course of fate, such a fool to try to spit in the face of destiny and pretend I was making a difference.
Huh. I guess that's why they call it destiny.

Lucy's Curse- CH1

ATTENTION: This post is part of a series meant to make up a story. It is not complete in and of itself. Books, chapters, and parts of chapters, are clearly labeled in the title.


It all started in the beginning.

I know that's an odd thing to say, but the way I figure, my problem had to have started way back at creation or the "Big Bang" or whatever. When you roll a stone down a mountain, it takes a long time to build momentum. Something like this must have been set in motion a pretty damn long time ago to hit me as hard as it did, and to change everything I thought I knew about life. I'm not going to lie, I believe in God and angels and all that, but something... or worse yet, someone... set itself against me, and it sure as hell wasn't divine.

I had just been laid off from my job as a grunt at the local warehouse. Whorehouse, we called it, on account of you could always find a girl or two there who wanted a little something to take her mind off of how much her life sucked. Usually a lot. I fell to that once or twice myself. After all, my life was hell too, and no matter how much the girls lives sucked, I knew they could use some company on those inebriated weekends.

The lack of employment was fine by me, of course; I hated that place with a fiery resentment, hated the hours of unpaid overtime, hated the fat-ass "supervisors" whose job seemed to entail nothing more than computer games, gorging themselves on fat-laden pastries, and screaming at us workers to hurry up every time we came in for a new load. Most of all, I think I hated myself for dropping out of college to take a job like that. It wasn't that I didn't like school, I just wanted to make money right away.

Hey, I was 18.

Kids are dumb.

When the blow fell (and it had been coming for some time, let me tell you. The hatred was mutual.) I turned into insta-hermit. Just add job loss. I closed myself off from everyone who meant anything to me, including parents, friends, girlfriends, etc. I talked to no one. I saw no one. Hell, I barely even moved for close to three months. Not that no one tried to reach me, because they did; I just never responded. Occasionally they even came to the undersized apartment I had at the time, but I pretended I wasn't home at the time. Which was pretty much true. Finally they stopped coming by completely, and I was left to myself, buried in a constant, wordless, mindless,

lonely

fury. I suppose the loneliness would have killed me if I hadn't been so alive with hatred, and maybe it did anyway. I honestly can't tell.

After a couple months of isolated simmering, I tried to pull myself back together. After all, it's pretty hard to buy groceries when they won't even let you in the store. Okay, that requires a little explaining; you see, under periods of great stress, such as severe anger, the mind tends to snap a little. It was one of those days when every child in the store is screaming, every mother is bitching into a cell phone with terrible reception, and the music... oh God the music! Repetitive insipid fumblings of a no-class music killer with no artistic talent, eternally stuck on loop, creating an ideal sense of torture. I'm positive they play that one in Hell.

I ran screaming down the aisle, both arms extended, ripping as many products from the shelves as possible. at the end of the aisle I whipped around the corner and continued down the dry goods section, screaming from the top of my lungs and bearing down on a stocker. The poor girl looked up at me from her position on the floor, and a look of absolute terror came over her face. she let out a miniature shriek as I sped by, covering her in boxes of powdered milk. I didn't even notice at the time.

Maybe that was it. Or maybe it was the standoff in the canned goods aisle before the cops brought me down. I'm not at liberty to say; that's between me and Hormel.

Nevertheless, I tried to straighten myself out somewhat, and even managed to get back on the store owner's good side. That took a lot of work, and that girl still screams and runs from me, but for the most part it was a successful venture. I got another job clearing power lines, and it finally seemed like my life was getting back to where I wanted it, to where it was supposed to be.

Then I met Lucy.

a new beginning

Dearest reader,

To take a line from the beginning of one of my favorite postmodern works of literature,

This is not for you.

If you decide to travel further into the madness of the mind that my soul calls "home", then I cannot prevent you, nor protect you from the assailments of insanity. If my words begin to affect your actions, or if my arguments for the impossible begin to seem logical, please close your browser, close your mind, and withdraw from my charming yet dangerous company. I would wish my "gift" to pass upon no one else, for, like fire, insanity is a beautiful, useful thing that, ill-used, can damage and destroy both mind and body.
That being said, I sincerely hope you enjoy your journey as I lead you down the dark, although not deserted, corridors of my mind.

Please. No flash photography.

Some things don't like light.