1

you can go on a trip

don't call me for three days

do not reply to my messages;

I understand

that you need time,

go in peace

that in my thoughts you always have

a place.

And

that sooner rather than later.

you will return to my arms..

I am wading neck deep in a roomful of rose hearts floating belly-up in red wine foaming at the surface, and I watch hopefully as the surrounding walls collapse burying my soul. Grief happens in slow motion. A black and white slide show of static is mainlined through my veins, and the light shudders through a foggy lens before me. Your presence is a ghost. Under this rubble, I nose frantically for your scent. The notebooks upturned with your words are clumsy with memories, and they fuel my mania in an effort to experience all lingering remnants of you. My ulcered stomach growls for you, and I cannot breathe. The dust from this vacancy emanates from beneath the past and it is choking me with its intensity. The sinful envy that I feel for those near you makes me lustful for blood, but I surrender. It has been 148 days since I have been close enough to smell your tobacco and leather, and, this I know is true, I will never be the same.

When I come up with new ideas they occur in one of three ways typically.

One way that I am using less often is that I will come up with a title and work out from there, slowly adding Why the plot exists then the characters. The second way is I might get an idea for a character then I have to find a place to put them, often I will try to put them in an existing work but they will grow a personality to large to be a secondary character so I must make a world for them. Last and most common recently I will come up with a single concept and create characters and a plot.

The notes below are for an idea that I came up with while watching Forged in Fire with my sister. She is a ferrier (someone who trims horse hooves and makes shoes for them) and she mentioned that you could intentionally forge a sword with weaknesses so that it would break after a few strong hits. From this comment the idea of a smith intentionally sabotaging his rulers sword arose.

First I had to know why the smith was angry, then who the ruler was fighting, and lastly the setting of the story, which turned into the idea for a series. The names for the books were created during writing down my notes, which I have to do after a lot of my brainstorming, because in order for my mind to work to write a story I have to be walking. Usually the first parts I flush out in my mind are the dialogue of the characters in the story.

End of the Age of Tyrant's

Outsider hero

Book 1: A Sword Forged in Hatred

Smith looses his wife.  sword breaks

Book 2: Poison to Taste

Cooks sister flogged to death. Allergy poison.

Book 3: Song of Trifles Canary

Best friend murdered by the queen. Hanging

The desolate chill numbed my soul

A winter like no other pressed me to the edge

Recoiling in horror at the heart I once knew

A stranger lived in my head

Someone I never knew existed

Pushing me closer and closer to the jagged, icy crevice

Silently stepping off solid ground into the void

Broken wings flailing at the laughing air

As I tumbled through the emptiness

//////////

Swallowing me up

with unthought words

I would have cut my heart out

And traded it for a bit of peace

Barely clinging to myself

Fears, delights, anxious nights

Scratching at the door of my mind

Begging for entrance as I pushed back

Against the frigid winds

That threatened the life I loved

////////

Spring breezes have melted the icicles that gripped me

Softly sweeping away the gray snow that blinded me

Bringing me home to myself

Letting me breathe again

Letting me feel again

Buds on the trees remind me

I survived

I made it though

This Winter of unbearable discontent

There are three things you need to know before you read this.

1. I am a constant worrier

2. I always try to think of new stories to write

3. My inner voice is my best friend and worst enemy at the same time

Whenever I invision my brain, I can't get a clear picture of it. I can picture what a brain looks like, but pinning down the inside of mine is a struggle. I'm bouncing around between thoughts. Between praises and insults. One minute, I'll be working on a WIP, and the next, I'll start a whole new project because an idea hurled itself around my mind.

I see my thoughts in a mix of pictures and words. Some of my thoughts work better in sentences like story ideas or names. Others are vivid scenes for a WIP or even something new.

But I can't seem to put my thoughts in categories to save for later. They're a jumbled mess, and I always get ideas at the wrong time. Too many instances, I get the perfect twist for my WIP when I'm listening in to my teacher in class and forget it by the time I got to write.

I can't keep my thoughts together when I'm in a panic. If I try to calm myself down, my inner voice is being negative or unreasonable. Too many emotions at one time jumble my thoughts even more and everything looks like a train wreck.

My brain is a factory with an efficient creating system but an inefficient organizing system.

At times I feel like an old book spine...

Fatally frayed at the edges, but somehow the pages hang

So desperately together, suspended in time

Like a 50's biker gang passing out smokes

outside a store they have plans to trash...

Or an ancient piano that you find in a burnt down building

That must have been a school or something,

But now has no educational function except as a time capsule,

Which is pretty damn educational actually...

Spray painted by perhaps the same kids that frequented the school once upon a time...

The circle of life...

Sometimes I feel creaky,

And snaky as an old alley cat...Meow!...

Maybe that's why I always love old alley kitties and reach to pet them whatever the flea ridden worm happy consequences...

My body beckons from the graveyard of life,

And I feel the soil inch up around me like a python hug,

But with each Mortality Tango

I come closer to tasting my youth in all it's raw acrid acid reflux abundance...

So often we don't know what we have until

It's forgotten,

Though the eyes of a child are never gone

Only shunned out of blindness, and disorganized disregard...

At times I feel like an old book spine...

Fatally frayed at the edges, but somehow the pages hang

desperately together, suspended in time...

Dipped in the liquid quicksand that passerby's so often miss...

From the future I watch you through the glass from the outside

As you live and breathe within this school before the fire...

The standard lessons slide right by you,

Arithmetic, and History class dissolve...

But there's something far more canny

That's being vacuumed

Up via your cranium...

The fly inside the ointment...

The rift that links both worlds...

I see it glisten in your window gazing orbs...

The sun goes down, and as it's colors dissipate

The school is burned to ash, but you still move

And change within the haunted bird who beats her feathers

Inside and upon the funeral pyre of existence...

The Mortality Tango

Has your number by it's sights...

...Holds my digits over waterfalls like the castrated balls

In a Mapplethorpe picture...

Spells the cut out words dramatically staining

The naked wall of a public stall in sleazy neon...

Rolls the icy hard dice, and then there we go...

...We're off and running!...

Bunny Villaire

6/24/23

Edit#3