Category Archives: Fiction

I can’t dismiss out of hand the possibility of past lives because I bend over in the bathroom.

Stay with me here.

Every time I bend over in the bathroom, I have a terrible sense that I’m going to crack my head on the counter, or on an open cabinet, or on the little bench we have in there. The weird thing is, I always, always, turn away from all counters, drawers, or pretty much any surface if I have to tie my shoe, or scratch an ankle, or floof my hair. It doesn’t matter how much empty space is around me. It doesn’t matter how conscious I am of my surroundings. I always have this sense that I’m going to bonk my head hard.

I only get this feeling in the bathroom.

I have never clocked myself in the head, in the bathroom or any other room.

Perhaps the only utterly scientific explanation is some weird sort of déjà vu a past life. Of course, it is also possible that I have clocked myself in the head, perhaps multiple times, and I just don’t remember it beyond some dusty corner in my brain that is too woozy to warn me properly by the usual channels of memory.

Post Beat

Fiction, Poetry, Writing

I think I would have been a beat poet
Or a protest singer
Soul rubbed raw by reality scraping against idealism and truth.
Sharing in verse hope and pain. Not just mine —
Others may need a beat poet or a protest singer
To use the pen or the pick as a mirror and balm.

And we would sing or read or rap or march or plan or reaffirm,
Upsetting status quo gently or roughly by the shoulders with Art Revolution.
Meeting, laughing, growling
Gathering new friends or the merely curious
in coffee shops or untidy close apartments or even someone’s unironically beautiful beach home.
We would mark these times with great output and remember them decades later looking at black and white photos of ourselves that no one remembers being taken while we sang and spoke of change.

But I am not a beat poet
Or a protest singer.
Are there such things anymore, or are we post-beat?
Too beat?
I sit in coffee shops, though, and beautiful homes, calling out an occasional verse
hoping to hear the response of another raw soul.

fountain_pen