Arctic Eyes

For The Sunday Muse Prompt #90 . \\\* The brilliance of her luminescent eyes lights the darkness all around, twin pricks of desire shining bright, like stars, stark against the tapestry of a night sky. Fire and ice, both together and apart lie here, the wild and the quiet as one.

January 16, 2020 · 1 min · AJ

Abandonment

For The Sunday Muse Prompt #84. Image Source. \\\* Behind the grime, and the ravages of time the remains of living now lie, each layer of dirt a sigh, a dirge for the mystery of abandonment, for how easy it is for things once woven into the fabric of the present to slip beneath the shroud of the memories we lose. Maybe this is what leaving is, things returning to the way they always were.

December 4, 2019 · 1 min · AJ

After The Rain

For The Sunday Muse Prompt #83 . Image “After The Rain” by Cyril Rolando \\\* I tremble at the echo of the booming thunder, the resounding of its clap like the roar of a lion stirred, a brilliance incandescent in its majesty as it splits the night sky like a warm knife shears butter. I have shivered in the embrace of a light rain its fluid fingers, by persistence finding their way through my garments till they meet my bare skin. ...

November 26, 2019 · 1 min · AJ

Wildlings

For The Sunday Muse Prompt #82. \\\* Though quiet in their noon day repose, strength hides within their supple limbs, the power of the one - unfettered in its reach - melded to the quiet guile of the other; together - a Whole stronger than its parts - freely, wildly going.

November 19, 2019 · 1 min · AJ

Dancing In The Dark

For The Sunday Muse Prompt #81 . Photography by Sarolta Ban (Website HERE ) \\\* The lure of the lyre - alive in its reverb - calls out, inviting beauty and the beast to dance, to yield to the rhythm of the wind, as it rustles in the leaves, swaying the trees. We all - boar and deer- of earth born and saved, gather here, to dance the gentle dance of the dark.

November 13, 2019 · 1 min · AJ

Missing Parts

For the Sunday Muse prompt #80 and Wordle 428. Image source. \\\* I carry a heavy silence in my missing parts, each breath a prayer for resolve to fight the desire to resign myself to the ache of a festering disgust spawned by the echoes of a lie borne up on the winds from the hills into the valley’s depths. Outside a crisis looms - our house of cards built up brick by brick with the things we want to believe slowly yields to the probing of the truth, until in the way things really are I find myself covered, whole again.

November 6, 2019 · 1 min · AJ

Together...

For The Sunday Muse prompt #79 and Wordle 472 \\\* Sometimes beautiful things can dance in the light - the dainty and the dense chiming together, their hum heavy with intent as it probes the edge between the steady and the sublime. In washing the raw hide of of a dead gazelle with salt there is a saving from its struggle with putrefaction, a prayer for forgiveness, for absolution for the crime of taking by brute force. Here on the edge of the things we think we know the dainty and the dense become as one, both reduced to subsisting at the mercy of the things which hold everything together.

October 31, 2019 · 1 min · AJ

Shelter

For The Sunday Muse prompt #78. Image copyright Erik Johansson. \\\* Stroke by stroke these words, hewn by force, as though from resistant rock are building a shelter, each one a link to a thought and then a world beating back the clouds which loom, a slowly growing splash of colour holding out against the ashen night without. These words are calling the trees, to stand in defiance against the howling wind and the ground, now covered with frost, to cling to life, through the night, because tomorrow comes, and with beginning again.

October 30, 2019 · 1 min · AJ

Yellow Dream

For The Sunday Muse Prompt #75. Image Source . \\\* A yellow orb,tethered to the earth by slender strings descends, its yellow light a hue cast over this dream in which I find myself looking at my selves; the past and the future holding the hands of the present, tiny figures scurrying up ladders which seem to reach for the sky, reinventing what is seen. Darkness lingers in the corners of this vista but stroke by stroke pixel by pixel, the dream and reality are slowly melding into one.

October 1, 2019 · 1 min · AJ

Remembering

Image source, for The Sunday Muse prompt #74 \\\* Like the slowly louder clunks a train’s wheels send ahead, as it wends its way along ancient tracks, the old man’s memories float slowly to the fore, the streaks of dappled light dancing on the walls behind his face a spotlight, falling on him the same way it falls on a minstrel at a cabaret, drawing a hush out of the muted mumblings of the gathered. Though his wrinkled skin, once soft now lies wrinkled, warped and folded and his fingers once supple now lack dexterity, like a seagull resplendent in its freedom the memories of past songs return, the track and the piano fusing in a crescendo refusing to be silenced.

September 25, 2019 · 1 min · AJ