Collaborative Poetry, Work 1, Architecuture/Life

Concepts and shadows of history, architecture and lives, (GL)
Can make for structural deficiencies (NH)
Prices not paid and sprockets still cranked, (JL)
Something good contrives. (JL)

But life and art are never sweet together, (GL)
Dancing a house for a roomful of chairs. (GL)
Our blurry focus wears. (NH)

Left alone, the sweet sounds of hours gone by, (KL)
Whispering the echoes of dream sweet sighs, (MR)
Ride on the winds of one's internal life. (JB)

Damn, I have stepped in a cow pie. (KL)

Yet life's weary focus with keen eagle eyes, (MR)
Is never brighter than in the morning rays (GL)
Of those who do not wish to sit, learn, and stay, (GL)
The firedogs of university. Never wanting to burn. (GL)

Credit of authorship to: Gillia Lambert (GL), Naraelle Hohensee (NH), John Lambert (JL), Ken Lambert (KL), Merri Rosado (MR), and Jon Barrows (JB).

30 Days 30 Stories, Installment 30, Remnants

There were the remnants of the day on the kitchen table, like any day. And she looked at them, and sighed, and wished they would all be put away, and thought: perhaps tomorrow. The empty milk carton, the product of a week of cereal eating by her and her love, and the cash he had left her for the tolls, the ipod he had attached to the computer and forgotten upon the table after it was charged, his ever-present concern to have music around him surfacing again after a week of stressful, time-consuming work for both of them.
Books, her contribution, constantly inundating surfaces in waves of new releases and old favorites, always toppling between the two boundaries of her life - from the library and back to it like the tides. And the shopping list and its notepad, yellow and crumpled, with the every-day memories written on it like a palimpsest, sheets and sheets of the memories of hours and days, the have-tos, duties, and needs that they planned and fulfilled together.
The things she sighed and wished would be put away.
Until the day she realized it was the very thing she loved so much. The day she realized he wouldn't come home again, and she left all the things there, like smears of life and love, until they became dusty. She picked up the money and his ipod, she turned them in her hands, and felt the ghost of his placing them there, carelessly, carefully for her. And she cried and wished it all undone, but it was done, and so she sat at the table, like sitting at a piece of art, a memorial. And wondered why so much of her life had been putting things away.

30 Days 30 Stories, Installment 29, Heartache

There was once a woman who wanted a car. She really wanted it. It was the one thing her father had never let her have, that feeling of independence. And so she waited and waited for it. When she was twenty, the picture of the car was on her refrigerator, shiny and new and red, a beautiful Ford, and though it was outdated, when she was thirty, and working in the city it stayed there, on her refrigerator, looking at her. She kept wanting it, and though men would ask her out to dinner, or lunch, or a drink, she thought about the car and she just kept working, saving, hoping someday she would make enough to get it.
When she was forty, she went looking for it. It was a twenty-year-old car by now, they said. It wouldn't work very well. But she found it, she found it in a junkyard, but there it was. She had it towed to a garage. She painted it bright red. She invested in every accoutrement. Finally, after a year, it was ready. The garageman called and told her it was ready; she smiled. Then she paled. She had never learned to drive.

30 Days 30 Stories, Installment 28, Cold

There was once a beautiful queen. Her skin was white as pearls, her eyes the color of the sky, and her hair as dark as a starry winter's night. She was the wife of the most awe-inspiring king; he was from a hot country, his skin was as dark as his wife's was fair, and his eyes the color of honey. His hair, like hers, was dark as the coal when the fire has burned. They lived in his kingdom of plenty, and they prospered. Until the summer came. It was the hot time. And this was when the queen became unwell. She began to get colder. The more intensely shone the sun, the colder she became; while others sweltered and ran to the baths to be wet and cool, she huddled beneath her silks and shivered. The king, large and warm, came to her and held her, but she was as ice in his arms.
He called the best physicians, and the best magicks. He went to far away places himself, to bring her unctions and syrups. But nothing did any good. As the summer deepened, so did her pallor, and her hair, thick and shining, began to fade to almost gray. At night he held her, because he did not know what else to do, and he wept over her freezing form.
They knew her time was close, she could no more recover from her state, and she asked, her voice faltering, to be taken back to her home land, so that she could see and taste the snows once more before she died. He protested the temperatures, but she asked, and the pleading of her blue lips convinced him. That night, without preparation, they left for the snowy lands Northwards.
After many days of travel, they arrived at the lands of snow and ice, and there, clad still lightly as for the heat, she descended her elephant and walked, barefooted on the snow. "Oh how it burns!" she cried, but delightedly, and her cheeks, before so blue, had lost their deathly pale. They shone with warmth and health.
They went to see her father, who lived far up the mountains, on a craggy cliff. And there they stayed for some weeks. But just as the heat did so much bad to the lady, the cold did the same to the gentleman; he was eaten up by fever. He could not be touched, hardly, for fear of heating him yet more. His queen, weeping in desperation, ordered him back to the Southlands, and accompanied him.
The summer was fading, and as winter came, the queen recovered her spirits somewhat. But the cold within her could not help but come out in the temperate climes. And so it was, of course, with her husband and the heat of his lands born within him, too. They looked at each other, but knew the answer lay somewhere neither of them loved. Would the love for each other be enough?
They went to the midlands. Beautiful though they were, where flowers beckoned spring, and summer was swept with delicious breezes, both sighed for their homelands, and the homeland of the other. The sands and the snow were the same, somehow, so different from the lands between them. And though they lived healthily in the grass-covered hills, the hills were very foreign.
But they loved one another, and in that love they realized for love and happiness to be together, so must there be suffering. And so it was. Each winter the lived within the heart of the Southlands, and the Queen suffered; each summer they spent in the North where the King was nursed from his ever-weening fever; and in the spring and fall they kept to the midlands, where their good health bloomed, but their kingdoms and people were not. And in the cycle of the seasons there was balance, and in the marriage there was justice, and in the hearts of the king and queen there was love, and pain, and love again.

30 Days 30 Stories, Installment 27, The Weaver

There was once an old, old woman. She did not speak, but she was invaluable to her family and her tribe. She lived in the mountains, beyond the reach of modernity where trucks and cars passed. She kept to old ways and old habits, except, of course, for her beloved electric stove - for she could cook and clean like she never had been able before with the contraption. And she wove. That was the way she told her stories. She wove and wove. And each work was a story.
When Violet had a fourth, miracle child, at fifty-two, that went into the baskets. The weave was beautiful, and complicated, made of many different subtle colors. It told of passion and of pain and of the inestimable complications of birth and life.
And when the sky clouded up and it rained for what seemed like months, the dark wool wove together under her fingers into stories of homes lost and cars ruined, paintings and beds molded, and refinding, the good silver jewelry, the love for one another; the baskets and the mats were alive with straining vines.
And always, in the deep evening, with the stars beginning to shine through the veil of day that was being drawn back to reveal the depth of night, she would weave quietly, humming to herself, a different thing. No basket, no mat. A long thing, a thin thing. A box, a large one, with sides of reeds.
They found her the night after the full moon. She looked peaceful and lovely, her eyes were closed. She lay on her bed, at ease. Her feet looked strangely placed, but what does not sometimes look strange about death? The coroner called her official time of death, and they thought that would be the end of it. But Cassia, the store clerk, couldn't let it go. She walked up the mountain, she let herself into the old cottage and she nosed around until she found what she was looking for. The project, the old thing, sides and a bottom. The size of a small woman. And unfinished. The basket told a story - a story perhaps only the old woman could read - but the story was not finished. The weaver had stopped, but in a way the basket told on. Cassia called the police. She reported it a murder, she laid out her evidence, the town stood behind her.
And why? Why? There was little to it; death by poison, culprit unknown. The story was unfinished, with it the basket.
Many years later, an old man came to the town. He was very old, and worn. His eyes were hardly eyes any more. He looked about the town, he asked and he nosed. The basket weaver? She was dead. And her baskets? Gone, gone to the little city museum, where she was held a living - now dead - part of history and of heritage. He walked slowly, achingly to the museum. It opened like an old basement, and smelled of it, from lack of usage. He touched the weavings, he traced his fingers. He put his nose to an old basket, shiny with the oil of her hands. He ran a thumb over the raw edges of the last basket. And then his fingers made odd movements, like a weaver.
They wove and wove. They wove a story of a man, driven mad with frustration and a woman, who would not yield. A man who wanted the woman away, away from the darkness of the forest and the danger of living alone, and a woman who wanted her life and herself. And the hands told of the hatred that built in the pain of the loss, and the fear of the discovery of a relation so unmodern, and the fear of the loss of an inheritance, many years older than either of them. And as his hands moved, rusty at first, but then more sure, he wove in the strands of the basket with another plate of reeds, and they formed, together, a patchwork history. And then he left, and he did not come back. And he did not look back. But his hands were there, in the weaving, and his warmth, and his life.

30 Days 30 Stories, Installment 26, Betray Me

There was once a young couple, kind to each other, but kinder to themselves. And though they both felt marriage was quite the thing to do - and it was quite a lovely wedding, in the style of Barbie and Ken or perhaps, better still, Cinderella and the Prince - they felt after they had done it as if it was, in a word, done. The next item on the list must of course be children.
It was a time when the house and the family was the world of the woman, the female, and office and the road and all the other places of danger and sexual exploration, and any sort of interaction at all outside of tea parties, socials, telephone calls, was the universe of the man. Little oases, the home; or little prisons. Alternately, Elizabeth felt about her home as such. A haven, and a prison, and sometimes, vaguely, a place she hated. But those sorts of ideas were soon squelched.
Charlie was a good man. He was nice to his wife, he rarely had a mistress at a hotel, and he never embarrassed her, at least not in front of others. He was kind to dogs, children, old women. And she loved him. As love is wont to do, though, it tended to wane in the light of the days spent away from him, and the moments when it really came to her that the strange smell upon him was the product of other lips and hands than her own. So it was a wan sort of love, something like the perfume of a distant flower that would come and go as the winds blew, or as often as she saw him in his nice suit, smoking a cigarette and looking like a mixture of Clark Gable and John Barrymore.
It was all well enough. Two years of quiet socializing, and fondness, and firesides with a book or two, and very little talking. Until he came home, broken, and he collapsed upon the sofa and he wouldn't look at her at all. The roast got cold. The jello began to melt slightly, but he didn't want any, and she felt funny eating by herself. She offered him a drink, trying to pretend that all was usual, and everything was just as it should be; but she couldn't help feeling she was missing some amount of wifely knowledge. This was outside bounds.
"Oh, Shelly," he said - he called her Shelly because he always had teased her that Elizabeth was the name of an ice queen, and that Shelly was so very much more her, like the happy sunny feeling at a sandy beach - he said her name again, and couldn't look at her.
"Yes?" she answered, tentative, really not sure what to say at all.
He just stared at the clean, tiny, empty fireplace, his face wooden.
"Would you like another drink?"
"NO!" he screamed at her, and went face down on the couch.
Two days later, he hadn't gotten up or gone to work. He was a mess, she tentatively called the doctor, who came, and sat with him a long time.
He came out, saddened, but with a smile for her. She fluttered around him, her large skirt rustling, her eyes worried, but still prettily so. "What is it, doctor?"
"I'm afraid he'll have to tell you himself, my dear," said the doctor kindly, and walked out of the house, purposefully, as if he had something better to do.
After another day of silence, and worrying, she finally entered their room (she had been sleeping on the hideabed in the study) and sat by him, her face hard. She asked, in a stiff little voice, what the matter was.
No answer.
She cleared her throat and asked again.
Silence.
Finally, quite deliberately, she upended the jug of water by their bed on his head.
He popped up, his eyes sad and horrified. "How could you?" he demanded!.
"How could I? How could I?!" She screamed back at him. Ladies always kept their voices down, but ladies' husbands didn't do these strange things, either.
"You have lain in here for four days, Charlie! Four days! No word to me, no eating. Drinking. You disgust me."
"I disgust myself," replied Charlie, surprisingly.
She turned to him, astonished.
He looked right back at her.
"What happened?"
He looked like he was trying to put up that painless facade, the one he had presented her so seamlessly for so long. "I slept with the boss's wife," he stated baldly.
She yelped, and sprang up from the bed.
"How could you do anything so stupid!" she cried.
And in that moment, they both knew they had always known. And he looked at her shocked, and amazed.
"You are so smart, Charlie. This was a stupid, hurtful thing to do."
"I was fired."
"You betrayed me."
"I'll leave."
"You'll stay."
They stared at each other. That night Elizabeth went to the bar. She got drunk, she kissed a man who was not her husband. She came home smelling of liquor.
Charlie was watching tv.
"You stink, Shelly."
"Don't call me that. My name," and she drew herself up to her full height, swaying on the strong winds of alcohol, "is Elizabeth."
"You," she said, pointing at him, "betrayed me."
And she went upstairs to bed, and she stayed there for a week. When she got out of bed, Charlie was still there. And so was she. And the world had changed.

30 Days 30 Stories, Installment 25, I'm Sorry

The note lay under the bed for ten years. She realized this when she finally moved. The room had been abandoned the day he left, and the day that she honestly came to herself that love wasn't for her. And so she had waited, in that corridor, between decisions for a decade, and when she finally moved to the new house, the one on the shore by her grandad's old place, the one she had played in as a child, the one she had slowly rebuilt and repainted, she found the note, absentmindedly picking it up off the dust on the floor, thick as it was, like a gray carpet.
She smoothed the brownish paper, the paper of a lined spiral notebook. And she thought about nothing but the oddness of visiting the room again, like an old hospital ward, now empty. And she glanced down at the piece of paper with a start of recognition, something like the feeling of throwing up, but as if the feeling had aged on a shelf for many, many years, and now was a searing sort of sick pain. But just for a second. Until she read the words.

there wasn't one thing i didn't love about you
however, the same could not be said for myself
and when the lights went out
i wrestled dark embraces
reaching up to me from
underneath the bed.
my gift was words
and yours was embraces
my gift the movement on and on,
and yours the methodic sort of
waiting for change.

anyway, i wanted to say
i'm sorry

i really wish.

It hit a lot like thunder, a little like a mudslide, somewhat like fire. It built in her, the strange emotions all wound up like old, old, vines, the fine buds of shame and still-banked unsettled emotions rearing up, quiet and tired, but still alive, ever so little. And then she crumpled up the paper and threw it away - away on the wind. She was sorry too. But a note was not his body next to hers.
picture, Vilhelm Hammershoi, The Poetry of Silence, Royal Academy of Arts, London

30 Days 30 Stories, Installment 24, The Psalms

The day his mother died was the first day it happened. In his sad reflection, the tears upon his childish face, a pencil near his hand seemed to come into it of its own accord, and in his little five star spiral bound notebook, he wrote the lines of love and longing and pain that haunted him somewhere deep within. He really wasn't aware of the words, until they rushed out, like flames, onto the page, so many many words, repetitions and swirls of them, unlike anything he had read or seen. He hid his notebook underneath his mattress and went to school, but at night he picked out the worn pages again, looking at them, longingly, and the love they evoked. Because at those moments, he didn't feel anything at all.
The next time he experienced that feeling was the day that he lost the baseball match for the school team. He wanted to leave the team altogether; never wonderful at sports, he had ruined it all. The pentel pen lay by his bedside, left over from some plane-drawing project he had begun before sleep. And out of him again, mountains and rivers of words. Ashamed, he closed the notebook, exhausted by emotion.
He remembered clearly the times when it didn't seem to happen, too. The moments when Cherry didn't want to go to prom with him, the moments when all he wanted was to swim but the pool wouldn't let him in without permission, and his father, petrified now of water, wouldn't allow it. He remembered the moments when he dressed in black with his friends and thought it would be cool if he could write 'poetry' to some girl. But at these times, the darkling waters never took him, and he couldn't summon the words for the moments, for the feelings he felt. They were confused and angry and anxious, and they weren't for writing.
He went to university, and experienced those parts of life we never think we're going to; the parts that aren't as pretty as they should be, and the parts that are much more so.
When he was 27 he met a young man, a man who was his friend and like his brother. And when he sat on his bed in his apartment that night, the fountain pen of his last sojourn to the bookstore by his hand, he grasped it suddenly, and in a gasping moment of discovery, the waters of his soul broke again.
Darkness and light, altogether. And realization.
picture, Lucy Hennessy "Little Boy Lost"

30 Days 30 Stories, Installment 23, The Night Garden

There was once a woman who planted a rose bush. She watered it, she fed it the best of mulches, and she cared for it year in, and year out. And yet, though she went to it every day to see, it never bloomed. The buds lay, closed, in their blushing shells and never burst forth. She was very sad, but tended it still. Until, one night, she woke from her dreamless sleep to find that outside her window, the rosebush was blooming with the scarlet roses of her undreamt dreams.

30 Days 30 Stories, Installment 22, Bird of Paradise

There were once two lovers who dwelt in paradise. They were, as one might suspect, deeply in love and in a state of wonderful happiness. Until the day the bird of paradise fell in love with the woman. Large, colorfully and beautifully plumed, as beautiful as all the things within paradise, the bird spied the woman asleep, and as she woke and kissed the man, and in that moment his feathers rustled in a way he had never known. That night he stole her from the embrace of her lover, leaving one long, green feather in his wake, and flew her far outside the bounds of paradise, to an island of feathery trees and the bluest waters, white turreted towers of ivory enclosing rooms of carved splendor.
And there she sat, and white with rage, she would not love him.
He brought her a great grey pearl from the depths of the sea, where he had dived deep and long to steal it from the sharks and the whales and the monsters that guarded it.
But she wept, and would not love him.
He brought her the endless fire from the top of the highest mountain of the world, the fire that never went out, but lit, eternally, that which it touched and kept it always warm, and dry, and alive.
But she sat in silence and would not love him.
And he brought her, finally, the most beautiful silk that was ever made, embroidered with thread that had been spun from starlight and worked over with the rays of the sun. And it saddened him to see her form, so beautiful as it was without covering, to be covered by even such a raiment as this.
But she looked at him with the largest and saddest eyes he had ever seen in her lovely face, and she told him, quite simply, that she did not love him. She did not. And she would never. She loved her lover in paradise.
The bird of paradise fell deathly ill. his long feathers lay, wilted, upon the counterpane of silk and satin that he had prepared for her. His long neck tossed this way and that. He was ill with love.
She bent over him, and she nursed his head, she gave him water, she soothed his fever, and she sang him lullabies.
But when he awoke he saw she did not love him.
She bent over him, her eyes warm and kind. "This day," she whispered in his ear, "you have become a man. You have suffered the pain of love, and you have survived."
When he glanced at himself, he saw, there on the bed, the form of a man, and he looked at her with his still green eyes, the eyes of a bird of paradise, and a soul who had loved.
He returned her to paradise, and began his journey alone.