here is some art

Transcribed:

incidental characters
a girl who laughed at
the most arrogant critic of literature
the boy seven years
engraved in winter
together etching
bits of poetic prose
short poems

salsa is such sweet sorrow

Cilantro has taken over the city.
It is a just ruler,
Doling out its fresh light flavour
Equally amongst the people

But all kings have their faults.
There has never been such a
Lime shortage

He keeps them
Imprisoned in herby cells
Deep in his multi-floor mansion
That one that we issued him when he
Won us over.

We can't go back now.

the ocean

I woke up this morning in the ocean. Pacific, I think. But I can't be sure.

There weren't any of the usual fish around though; in their place were mermaids, but not the Disney kind. Their bodies were pasty white, and skinny; boys I remember from middle school, smiling at me with acne covered faces, fingernails blunt from chewing. Their tails broadcasted their personalities in the form of their internet browser histories, a rather unfortunate characteristic. At least they were easily identifiable that way.

I would make a directory later.

They brought me to their sand castle kingdom, a modest building decorated lamely with shells and seaweed. It resembled a dormitory. I shivered.

In the basement, we sat on stained couches and sang songs of rebellion and metal and death in cracking voices.

Anarchism was a hugely successful fad in the deep sea, I realized, but not because they really believed it. It gave them something to do, and chains and eyeliner to wear, guitars to shred.

I'd learn in time, they promised me.

good morning

I love watching her wake up in the morning. She stretches, yawns.

The sun glints off her long fanged teeth.

She turns to see me, leaning in the doorway, and blinks slowly,

Eyelids closing sideways in front of her

Elliptical pupils.

“Want some breakfast?” she hisses gently,

Forked snake tongue slipping in and out of her ruby lips.

“We’ve got eggs.”

She slips past me into the kitchenette,

Toenails clicking on the hardwood floor,

Leaning in to kiss me on her way past.

Her breath smells of decay.

Some people just don’t understand.

How I can like it when I feel things under her skin.

How I can bear to look at her serpentine face.

The thing is, no one sees her like I do;

No one feels the electricity buzzing when she

Touches my cheek with too many fingers,

Kisses me with too many tongues.

She lights up my life.

"wait is this prose?" -- A Story For Halloween

It was love at first sight.
The house was old, and huge, and apparently haunted according to the landlord and half the neighbours on the block. It was perfect.
Ann loved it right away.

She let herself in the front door and surveyed the goods. The long hallway opened into a ton of different rooms along the sides. On her right was a living room, cream coloured couches lined the far wall. An old TV set played reruns. It looked ordinary, really, and Ann found this just a bit disappointing.

That is, until the ghosts showed up.

They appeared gradually; a shift here, a shriek over there. A severed hand in the bathtub.
Soon the place was crowded with them, all shuffling zombies and dragging chains. Ann found the noise annoying at first, but after a while they became part of the house. Sometimes it's nice to come home to your own haunting orchestra of things that go bump in the night.

On weekdays, Ann would start her day stumbling out of bed and into the bathroom. The Headless Man would be there too, trying awkwardly to brush his teeth and balance his head on the counter at once, dripping blood on the tile.
"Sorry," he kept saying, "terribly sorry."
Ann mostly ignored him, she was too groggy in the mornings to make worthwhile conversation anyway.

The next ghost she usually saw was the Retired Football Player. Ann had guessed this, as the man didn't talk much. When she first encountered him, he had been in the living room, watching old football commentaries. His cracked helmet obscured his face.
Lately, "football guy" had taken to standing catatonic in the hallway. His large frame blocked her way to the kitchen so effectively that Ann usually had to resort to army-crawling between his legs.
He never seemed to notice.

In the kitchen, Madame Pontmercy bustled about, "cooking breakfast".
"Good morning, Dearie!" she would say, "would you care for some tea? Or perhaps eggs..."
She reached for the tea cupboard handle to but could never fully grasp it. In fact, it seemed as though Madame couldn't cook or clean a thing in the house, try as she did.
This confused Ann. If she could stand fine on solid ground, then couldn't the ghost also open cupboards? She couldn't bring herself to ask.
"Just a second, sweetheart," Madame would insist, "let me just... Oh bother!"
"How about I put the tea on today?" Ann would suggest, "maybe you could just sit on the couch?"
"Oh thank you, you're too sweet, I'll go get started on the dusting."

This happened every day, but Ann didn't really mind. It spiced things up, and she was sure the army-crawling was doing wonders for her fitness.

idioms are weird things

I was eight when I stumbled across my first idiom.

It made absolutely no sense.

‘What does this mean,’ I held up the picture book, ‘Why does it say she’s a bee when she’s not?’

‘It says she’s busy as a bee, dear’, my mother rolled her eyes, sighing ‘Don’t you learn anything at school?’

This opened a whole new can of worms to me.

I started comparing things to insects every chance I got. I would crawl at a “snail’s pace” to school, I would come home and “worm my way out” of piano practices and math tutors. I would get “butterflies in my stomach” when I had to present a project, and be “merry as a cricket” when it was over. I spent afternoons staring “bug-eyed” at the television screen, and my dog wasn’t merely gentle, he “wouldn’t hurt a flea”.

Idioms fascinated me. I developed the odd idea that everyone in my life had some sort of buggy alter ego, one that reduced them to a single idea I could fit into an ecosystem where everyone got along, where everything was just right; and it was this belief that drew me to figures of speech like a moth to a flame. I started picturing people I knew as insects, cartoon-like and playing their parts in my life like the characters in my tv shows. There was my mother, the social butterfly, flashing bright colours and flitting out the door with a swish of her glittering wings. My father, stuck at home with me and buzzing, angry as a hornet. Some days I made the mistake of pestering him to play with me, whining down the stairs ‘Dad! Daaaaad! Come play with meeeeee I’m so booooored!’ to which he would yell back, stingers sharp, ‘For Pete’s sake, don’t you ever just shut up?’

I “bugged” him, which was confusing. The entire time I had been constructing my insect world, I’d forgotten to make a spot for me. Where would I go? What would I do? Was I nothing more than “the bug that bugged people”? I began to think that this whole second world thing was a bad idea. Everything was getting too complicated, and it was getting hard to think over the sounds of flapping wings and buzzing and chirping and swishing.