To be published in December, 2024 by Periwinkle Pelican

 Loki and His Law Practice

The world is left in our hands.  Its muddy clutter, our clutter, drops on our doorway at dawn.
 
There, the highways,
early in the day,
fill with the delivery trucks:
Pantalla Inc. responding
quickly to the human
need for more,
for anything
that disrupts
any thing the
1,000 anxious eyes set.
 
Boxes of cameras
are left on stoops
captured by cameras
and laws are not
the only thing broken.
 
Delivery isn’t freedom
for our members.
It kills.
 
Loki’s business model,
his scheme of felonious rebellion,
is to sell us on this practice:
 
Smash every screen.  
 
Do not
simply turn them off,
unplug, nor employ
the temporary discipline
of your virtual selves, 
reducing use
in the brainspace’s 
“appropriate use” naming. 
 
Smash: VERB
violently break (some thing)
into pieces.
Then wash the threshold.
Fix the eye on the sun; 
it rises one more time.
 
Loki plans to teach
that in such pieces
we can become whole again.
 
So practice freedom
from suffering. 
Ungraspable smashing.
Smash the open sky too
before it fills with riddles.  
 
We are so close to losing it all.
The lights in the rearview mirror
are not cops.  They are
an ambulance.
 
How’s that for a broken punch line?

A prose poem to be published November, 2025 in Unlikely Stories, Mark V

Sisyphus Invents Justice

Chill dawn breaks a wound in the sky. We wake where the harbor stopped us.   Here a dark sea fills barks of air with salt and sharpened steel. We wake from one sleep to another.
 
There’s no breakfast for us:  the empty iron plate is a last meal. Creosote and gull shit; blisters on our hands. We’ve no rope left to lift the life we did not plan. That life was a dangerous blade made of our minds.  Greyed stone grown in us, of us,  has cooled to the touch.  We reach up to it… from this, the tidal trough. But Providence panders again— we will not last this one and final day.                                                                     
 
Yesterday’s labor emptied us and we fell at night spent on the moldy straw mulled between warehouses on the wharves; we fall off with splinters. We, the army of hills; anabasis again, rolling rocks from the shore. We were convicted of the crime of life.  It’s winter; we make our jury of just gods, paid subscribers all, recruited from hinterlands with jade and blood sports. We named them so they could name us.
 
But the labor’s lost. The misdemeanors broke their rock all day. We felons pushed ours up the mountain of our crimes. And there at the summit the setting sun swallowed us. Even imagined prisoners need rest. The body has limits; bones obey the dark law.  We fell back to this ancient port.
 
Tonight will plug cotton in the nostrils and lay a copper coin on each eye.  So best to stop arguing the case – bloody handprints dry on the cruel rock. The evidence accrues. Punishments hew to the lunatic propensity to name things and our reprieve loses itself in moons.
 
Too late in our day: we’ve been condemned to the guillotine. So our every step up the stairs is pristine awareness, our head positioned just so is luminescent attention, our eye contact with the executioner is sweetly empathetic -- we know how hard his job is.  It’s just the water our gaze tells him & just let it all roll downhill
 
If he does his job our hands won’t need to push the stone ever again. They only need to catch our head now, tumbling freely in the air, dropping further into mystery, losing names as it falls. The day falls too, down the hill, back to shore, a withered moment stumbles and struts –gravity smirks and wants more. More of the sea washing on these old pilings -- a shelter of human sadness that’s become our scaffold to climb. Now, this morning on the pier, exhausted from breathing, we muster with pebbles in our pockets waiting for our slavery to be sold. We expected reprieves – that’s not how it works.
 
We want to choose another myth. We want to execute the plan. We learn the plan is our execution. We look up to the hills –  the help is empty and a feather is carried out on the tide. We wait between land and sea, day and night; we wait for the sharp edge
at the end of gravity
to render
justice.