The Grid

The transport hyper-magnetized and accelerated over the grid. Ferric pylons blurred past the windows. Line crisscrossed 100,000 meters below.

The flight lieutenants on grid transports were trainees. They liked to throttle it maximum on approach. Killing these passengers wouldn’t be much of a loss anyway. Better to weed out the weak pilots on these sorts of missions.

Edric noticed the passenger across the aisle was sweating heavily. His eyes ticked in hyper-diagonals as he looked far below. The grid did that to the brain. Edric saved himself the ocular scrambles and kept his attention boxed inside the transport.

“Looks different in person, doesn’t it?” Edric said. “The grid, I mean.”

The man swallowed and hyper-nodded. Drops of sweat hit his tunic and darkened in.

“Looks kind of tiny from way up here, doesn’t it? But it’s not like that down there. Trust me. Not small at all.”

The truth was, nothing prepared you for the grid. Miles and miles of silicon meta-metals, trans-circuitry, and hyperized hyper-voltage. Each grid block could hold a city, and only very fine coordination could jump you from one to another. Only half of the passengers figured out how do it. The rest would watch at least one appendage go sizzilite.

“You’ve never been to the grid,” Edric said, a little bit joking, a little bit patronizing. “Of course, no one comes off the grid, do they? At least not the way they go in.”

The grid wasn’t the hyper-posh colony promised to these passengers. No one even had to tell them. All you had to do was look at it. The eerie blue and weird pulsations. Maybe it was the ghosts of the billions who died there. The visceral dread sucked at your innards even this far away.

But the grid was good. Over-population was a vicious disease, and the grid produced unmatched power bands and tons of trace elementals. Funny how the human flesh collected all sorts of interesting and exotic things. Plus it burned into ionized steam rather well. Sizzilite, hyper-plus.

“I, however, know the grid intimately,” Edric said, “I’ve been there scores of times.”

The man’s eyes stretched even wider.

Edric grinned.

“Prodder-First Class,” Edric said, introducing himself. “Pleasure to meet you.”

The man didn’t take the offered hand.

Truth was that not every single passenger went straight sizzilite and fed the grid. A few fought the grid insanity and learned that the resonance was lowest in the middle. They curled up there nice and small to fight the cold. It was the Prodders who came in hover pods and moved them along. With a bit of encouragement, even the stubborn ones went sizzilite.

Edric leaned over. “You know, just a little friendly advice. Just get it over with fast. Go for the the gridlines. Sizzilite isn’t so bad. One good jump and get the whole body in. Don’t play on the grid. I’ve seen the ones who try to stay.”

Edric slapped him on the shoulder.

“Anyway, it would be a shame to meet again. Especially for you.”

Edric checked the window. The grid loomed large. A steady stream of transports lined to the edge of sight.

“Ten minutes to landing,” Edric said.

He could already see grid effect in the man’s face.

Gnashed teeth. Hyper-blinking.

When the doors popped, the man would fly out and hit the nearest gridline. Good for him.

Of course, once in a while the grid didn’t unwire someone. Almost like the resonance in the person and the grid beat the same time and frequencies. Once in a while the grid felt pretty good. To one passenger in 100 million. They recruited them. Who better to work the grid? Who better to survive it?

The best of the best even managed to make it to the top. Mercy killers, really. Not murderers.

So what if the grid felt good?

Edric, Prodder-First Class.


(Photo taken in the bathroom of Mythos restaurant in Universal Resort, Islands of Adventure. Yes, that's right next to the Harry Potter section! What can I say. I was using the most of my, um, time.)

Calling All Poets!

The reaction to my last poem got me thinking. There are more than a few of us creating poetry out there in the blogosphere, Twitter, etc. To me, the old rules of poetry don't apply anymore. In one way, we're doing the same thing the old masters did. In another, the immediacy and flexibility and fast-paced nature of the internet means that we're taking poetry to whole new levels.

So how are we using poetry today? What does it offer that other forms of communication still do not? What IS poetry now? Is there a whole set of new "rules," or is the only rule that there are no rules?

I'm thinking about hosting a little poetry convention here at Clarity. I would invite a group of dedicated internet poets to talk a bit about their vision, their approach, and their thoughts about the poetic form. We can also share some our work. Hopefully, folks would comment and join in. Maybe we could all learn something from each other!

What do you think? Do you have some poets in mind? Who would you nominate? I certain can think of a few internet powerhouses!

Nectar

there once was a boy
who leapt the fields
to capture beauty under glass
so his feet crushed
milk from milkweeds
and flying hair caught rivers of sun

then
              orange
flutters
            beat
soft
                against
his
      hands

there once was a butterfly
who dreamed of being possessed
but not under glass
it opened and closed its wings
like a little yellow prayer
not knowing what boys do
to pretty little things

Vernal

hatch a patch of twitchy skin
blink long and imagine wind
squeeze fingers in luxurious mud
tongues wetting lips plump with blood

Apollo fled so we could contemplate pain
now undulations pulsing deep
melt snows into restless rain

Squalor, My Love

She knew she was the kind of person who might have a collection of wrapped fetuses in her freezer.

It’s one thing to be terribly off-kilter and quite another to know it. If nothing else, she was blessed with cruel perception.

The neighbors in the building threw her double takes the few times they spotted her during the year. The deliverymen were used to passing signatures under the chain on the door. They left the packages outside. Gladly. The air was fresher, and she waited to snatch them until they thumped down the dingy stairs.

She could have fetuses, you know. Definitely.

That was the only time she climbed from the squalor. The kind of happy you couldn’t besmirch with words. He came. Drunk usually. With wiry black hair and sweatpants. When he knelt on the bed, she would bend her neck back for miles, and he would suffer. She would bend, and he would wish to sprout five more greasy hands just to take her all in.

The rest of the time, she bagged and breathed solvents from the deliveryman. That’s also why she could gather fetuses, but not babies. Her body wasn’t just hostile, it was toxic. His sperm just fell out her. Maybe the freezer would always stay filled with just ice-burned chicken thighs.

He paid her rent. So that was good.

She waited for him between long hours. Maybe she would wash her matted hair.

Her skin wandered across her bones.

It itched for the knock on the door.

White Rabbit

Remember what the Dormouse said
Feed your head
Feed your head
      --Jefferson Airplane, White Rabbitt

She was flesh and incense.

He was a lava lamp with the lights turned low.

She laughed at her wine.

He danced with the bottle. Slowly.

The hours clicked like knitting needles, and the music kept playing with what sounded like the same song.

He floated on incense and drowned in flesh.

She molded and caressed lava with her hands.

Before the Breath

Love like cirrus clouds
piled deep with striations
lips melting new snow

Big Dinner Horizons

"Where are you from?" she said.

He shrugged. "Nowhere, really."

"Around here?"

"No. Rural. Very rural. More cows than people."

"I'm a suburban girl," she said. "Nothing terribly exciting. Not like here. It took me a while to get used to the city."

"Well, cows aren't especially exciting either," he said. "I remember when the mailman would come. That was exciting."

"That's cute."

"I spent a lot of time outside," he said. "I used to think about what it felt like. Way out there. Being part of someplace so open."

She watched him.

He kind of liked it.

"Do you miss it?" she said.

He deliberated for a few moments. More about whether to tell the truth than the answer. "Yes," he said finally. "And I never thought I would."

INTP

Have you ever heard of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator? It’s a system, based on Jungian theory, for describing human personalities. In a nutshell, by using combinations of four traits, people can be sorted into one of 16 personality types. Surprisingly, when you find your type, it does a really good job in explaining and predicting how you interact with the world.

Not to bore you with tons of background, the four elements that make up Myers-Briggs are these traits: (1) introverting or extraverting, (2) sensing or intuiting, (3) thinking or feeling, and (4) judging or perceiving. Which you are depends on: (1) do you tend to get energy more from being with people (extraverting) or by being alone (introverting); (2) do you tend to understand the world with your five senses and live in the here and now (sensing) or do you tend to think about things inside your head and understand things through your own interpretations (intuiting); (3) do you tend to make decisions by thinking though a problem (thinking) or by deciding how you feel about it (feeling); and (4) do you prefer to live with the structure and order of having decisions made in advance (judging) or do you prefer to wait and observe and have your decisions depend on the situation as it unfolds (perceiving)? There are tests which hit these questions from all angles in order to sort you into your personality type.

So what am I? INTP. That means introverting, intuiting, thinking, perceiving. It is one of the four rational personality types.

As a rational, I have a drive to pour information into my brain and find structures, predictable patterns, and logical connections in the world. I believe that things can be understood by careful examination and analysis. That is my comfort zone. Rationals differ from the Guardians, who want to follow and maintain rules and traditions, the Artisans, who want to immerse in the present and experience life to the fullest, and the Idealists, who want harmony and eternal connections in the world.

INTP’s are also known as Architects. It is one of the more uncommon types, representing 1 – 2% of the population. (Yeah, Jason, we already knew you were weird.) Because of that, it’s not unusual for INTP’s to feel out of step with the people around them. (Again, not news Jason. Move on.)

One of the extra challenges for INTP’s is the difficult, chaotic, and often scary relationship they have with feelings. Does that surprise you about me? Maybe, maybe not. Since understanding feelings is the last skill to develop in INTP’s, they can go through a kind of emotion renaissance as they age and acquire all those hard life lessons. In the 5+ years that The Clarity of Night has existed, you have been privy to a sort of overdrive time in my development, when I have sought to drop a hand grenade in the pants of my emotions and blow them wide open. That way, I can dissect them and analyze them. I can reach a truce. It’s probably why my writing so often has an almost palpable emotional pulse. And why the emotions are rarely simple and one dimensional. In my writing, I’ve eagerly stuffed myself in the skin of others and really tried to embrace what others feel. Of course, if I’m being brutally honest (which I just reminded myself to be), I probably often take a piece of what I’m actually feeling and build scenes where I can condense it and turn the volume way up. It is a window into me trying to come to grips with its nature and meaning.

Sometimes rationals are likened to Mr. Spock from Star Trek--unemotional, distant, and clothed in logic. The truth is totally the opposite. Emotion is tantalizing, wondrous, and deliciously dangerous. The problem is that emotion feels too big, too hot to handle, and it scares the crap out of us. Logic is where we flee to when the emotions threaten to sweep us away.

Maybe my writing has become almost like emotional impressionism. What I portray is purer, more exaggerated, and more interpretive than real life. Maybe I want to be Monet. Give me the essence of moods and environments. The color and shapes. That’s where I want to begin. Details are just a few brush strokes on the surface. Not the purpose of the portraits I try to paint.

Or more likely, I probably just get the paints all over my shirt. But as an INTP, I’ll always be driven to keep grappling with the questions.

Fissures

The Earth was whispering loudly during the night.

It wasn’t animals moving. Not the crunch of feet or the scurry of rodents in the pine needles. Ulrich never appreciated how many unseen things move in the forest at night, but this sound was very different than those. As he curled in his survival bag and begged for sleep, his ear pressed into the ground. It wasn’t much, that imperfect contact, but it gave him a thin, direct line through soil and clay and rock formations, through never seen veins of minerals to the faraway boil of magma below.

The sounds were restless, making him restless. The cold made it worse. Bitter cold despite the Alaskan summer. It sounded random, but it was not. As he peeled back the layers in his mind, he caught a complexity deep within. Some kind of process was underway. A pulsing rumble flowed from the east. A snapping chattered in the west. The ground right underneath him was mostly silent. But once in a while, it shrieked. Like tears rending open under impossible pressure.

He sifted through the bottom of his pack for some breakfast after the long darkness. A branch snapped behind him.

Ulrich whirled, fearing another bear, even a cub. He couldn’t spare to lose any more of his ravaged supplies.

Instead, he saw a man who looked oddly similar to himself. A certain newness clung to his clothes despite the terrible onslaught of the wilderness.

He didn’t look like the bush pilot who left him to begin this journey. That man was worn and tested. Assembled piece by beaten piece. This man standing under the hemlocks still seem soft and vulnerable. But his eyes rippled a chill through Ulrich. Without any reason to think it, Ulrich heard the rumbles in the east when he stared in the man’s right eye. The left eye reminded him of the snapping in the west. In the middle, the blankness of the man’s face did not seem natural. At any moment, Ulrich expected hear the shriek.


(Another selection from Earthtide, my novel in progress.)

Game Friday: So We All

It's been a while since we did a Game Friday. The weather has been tough. We deserve to play!

Here's the deal. Give us something that we all do as people, something that unites us in the human condition. I'll start.

So we all lay ourselves down to sleep and must put down the cares and worries of the day.

Add your own in comments!

The Shed

i spent some time in the shed
behind the house
with the perfume of mildew
and crooked rot
     but just enough roof and wall
     to make me small

there's a hugeness in being small
or more precisely, overlooked
with the reminder of mildew
and refusal to rot
     but just enough grief
     to hatch my belief