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For The Sunday Muse Prompt #116. Image “Seeing Black & White” photography by Susie Clevenger ** Yesterday’s ghouls are slowly disappearing, fading like the night light once bright but now dappled, wisps of grey carried away in our slipstream, lingering like the dust a knight’s steed leaves in the frenzy of flight. But the promise is a mirage, objects in a mirror are closer than they appear and though we run as though the wind bears us, yesterday’s shadow lurks in the space between the things we leave and the things that disappear

For the Poetic Asides prompt 530 Where You Are, Photo by Reiseuhu on Unsplash ** Here the sun hangs like a weight its heat like a curtain, dense, wrapped around itself like thick clouds keeping out the light. Dust clouds swirl around hardy rocks, each peak a monument to defiance, to aeons of resistance, to heads held high against the ravages of earth, sand and time. For a season this, this barren space which survives against the odds is home, reluctant as it may be

For The Sunday Muse prompt #115: ** Let the first sniff hit you, let the faint hint of the juice pressed and aged be like incense wafting up, a prayer to Dionysius for a blessing on this rich red liquid, chilled, swirled and sipped. Let the low heat linger, let its essence slowly spread, warming the insides of your mouth let its heft spread like a warm embrace across your tongue. Let it rise Let it rise.

Photo by Jose Antonio Gallego Vázquez on Unsplash ** When I reflected on life at the turn of the year, and wondered what the year would be for me, Delve Deeper came to mind. Behind that was the understanding, inspired in part by the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Builders, that everything worth its salt is tested, and only those which had roots sunk deep would survive. I was also on the cusp of quitting my job up north with the prospect of the move of a lifetime looming. Whatever your particular take on COVID-19 is — elaborate hoax, a pretext for instituting a new world order or a symptom of a broken world — what is incontrovertible is that in its wake has come a seismic change to the world and what we know of it. For all the preening, posturing and the facade of strength the world economies have presented, 2020 has shown it all up like an edifice built on shifting sands to use a biblical metaphor. The Emperor’s new clothes, for all we can see, are anything but a covering. ...

For C, and the others 2020 has taken. A response to the Poetic Asides prompt, Pandemic. Photo by Marina Reich on Unsplash ** Where the patter of your footsteps once roamed silence reigns, the joy of breath and thought and sonorous song subsumed by the frailty of things. Death lingered at your door, too long and then snatched you. In the silence that you leave we remember the things we planned tomorrow.

For The Sunday Muse prompt #114: \\\* May the pains of today’s desires lose themselves in the fragrance of a love reborn, the pained passion of unrequited love find itself returned in time like a blossom that speaks, a sacred whisper to the soul colouring everything in the light of a rose, beautiful in its bleeding yet whole, because the Lover and the Loved like thorn and rose find themselves entwined, from past pain and tortured paths, delirious joy arising.

At the end of the storm, there’s a golden sky… False starts and disappointments notwithstanding…

For The Sunday Muse prompt #113: \\\* The light in her eyes mirrors the mirth, in the wry smile that still, some days, wraps itself around her lips, a bird, free, born of the wild borne by the wind. The heavy scent of summer, of flowers blooming and of squirrels flitting between the trees, reaches down into the depth of the memories she bears within, the delight of summers past simmering, then bubbling to the fore though her fingers can no longer coax life from the dry earth or press pleasure into a cone.

For the Sunday Muse prompt # 112: \\\* Sometimes I carry the weight of the world upon my head, its heft held between the twin peaks of forgotten and accepted things, a history curated not by those who waver at the threat of war but those who embrace its vagaries, who daily pour out a libation to destruction. What seems like the stillness of a boat in quiet waters only hides the furious paddling of a mind being torn apart as it wrestles with the tension between conforming and desire. ...

For The Sunday Muse prompt #111: \\\* what we remember of the past are the things the mind allows, the harshness of being hacked into a thousand tiny pieces assuaged by the desire to forget, to not let the horror of the past hold the present hostage, to find a path that winds through the remains of pillage to a coherent whole. what we learn in the end is that skirting the hole where our kin should be is akin to yielding to the pressure of a hand pressed against our throat, to feed the pleasure of the ghouls hovering over our history. ...