(c) 2012 Nin Harris

I used to fear unicorns would run away from me,
because I had lost the innocence of sunrise-tinted meadows,
the first blush of dawn reflected on billowing white gowns.

Now, I roam the marshes, sometimes in watermaiden green;
others in tunics of the deepest, most tragic purple.

Some days I dance for them, in swirling red;
jangling bronze coins around my hips and ankles.

They said unicorns would forsake me.

But they come, through wind, through earth, through water.
Narwhals with their liquid song, draconic solo-hornlings from
the archipelagoes, sparkling lilac gazelles with spiralling ivory,
the dark, stolid obsidian pony from the depths of the Himalayas,
and the dappled mare from the Steppes.

When I curl upon my nest of words, they shed me of every hue
and I am left in billowing white, often tinted with the colour
of my sometime-equine companions, elected to protect
the innocence of my dreams.

like Hesse said

(c) 2012 TAB

pebbles in the stream
can’t turn off mental verbalization
give up corners and roughness
and closed mind as defense
wearing away in acceptance
need practice in deconcentration
to greet life with smooth ease

I have been anaesthetised by the deep,
like you, and here under a starless sky
I’ve found a home: a place absent of light
where I can sleep. No doves rest on
the crest of solemn gates I seek to greet
with unquiet praise – instead the wretched
souless wraiths have gathered round
with hauter flavor: a fitting station
for those in limbo of His grace.

Cold as winter’s breath are the hearts
of those behind these gates and their shivers
are enough to shake both worlds which men
consider to be night or day. But the words
He whispers still echo in this hallowed land—
so much, it’s strange, the lending of a foreign hand.

(c) Joshua Biddle 2011

I long to brush away
sun sutured red hair,
to trace dots
on unsheathed shoulders,

to kiss a bare blade,
and hear a soft sigh
or breathless intake of air.
As morning comes I would awake

still dreaming, a carnival
blurr like early morning
reflections across the lake;
I crave to finger beneath,

to move aside a tangled mess
and reveal eyes that stare back,
unimpeded and full of sleep.
I yearn to move closer, my palm

cradling cheek, nose to nose,
to breathe in breath
and finally feel the heat—
to rest in the moment of a dream.

by (c) Joshua Biddle

They will tell you
the best way to see through
darkness is to keep moving.

One step at a time.
Defeat the beast—for eyes
to focus through strobe black

up the spine of an elated
concience, shun shadow
and pluck the feather

of a crow which seeks forgivness.
But residue resides, an offering
able to burn white with light,

hotter and brighter
than eyes can withstand.
And there will be a choice,

sound of caws from altar rafters,
demanding confession,
or redemption—

a spiral that will never be
forgiven nor whispired—seven crows
a secret that never will be told.

by (c) Joshua Biddle

What am I looking for in a foggy night,
like tonight, where the lights are dimmed
from the distance and the denseness in between?
This place, conjured from otherworldly occasions

where events are exhaled into existence and forgotten
like the slow inhale of a breath being absorbed
into the body; though I am out of body,
standing in the place between the swaying shadows

of a swinging lamp, attempting to connect the dots
from where my body stands to where the light
is its brightest. Yet there are many sources,
like the street lamp, to the passing headlights

and tilted reflectors standing guard,
to the dull shade of puddles standing
beneath my feet. And I am remiss in forcing
one direction for losing sight
of all the denseness of this foggy night.

by (c) Joshua Biddle

Now What?

(v2 – now with capitalization)

(c) TAB 2011

We picked up Albert at age 24 from Switzerland and said “look man, they’re going to turn your dreams into bombs”. We snagged Tesla and then went way out there and got ahold of Archemedes. We brought them back to the base, 1830 in Nevada. We had a huge daoist monastery built out there; machines and tools and water from a secondary and older base in Hawai’i where the king was very happy that we had brought the secrets of steel toolmaking and now the europeans couldn’t boss them around with cheap trade goods. That base was a huge pirate haven by fifty local years later, operating ships all through the North Pacific. Maybe it’s time to back up.

In the summer of 2045 my friends and I decided that engineering was boring without any truly cool projects to work on. Jamal said he could figure out the physics of time travel if he had a couple years to mess with equipment. We wrote an innocuous grant proposal to develop some solutions to a minor problem and got some gear for him. None of us had real jobs except Lu at the library and Mike’s part-time job at the liquor store. It took us three years of eating dumpstered donuts to build a working time machine. By that time, we had some extensive plans.

Obviously a time machine has to let you travel through space too. By adjusting the destination time so that the Earth’s spin would deposit us in another spot on the surface we could go to a lot of places. Not anywhere, but a lot. It had to line up to where we’d be within a few meters of the ground or we’d be flying through some random airstream. We built the machine into a weak helicopter just in case. But this is probably boring without explaining how the time travel part works.

Basically imagine time as being a gelatinous sphere. You can go anywhere and do things and new time branches will just appear. There’s never any erasing timelines from creating logical paradoxes, just making new ones because the original split into identical branches, except the paradox parts. Each outcome gets its own branch, so if you kill your grandfather there’s just a new line without that part of the family in it. In one timeline, you are the proud owner of a dead cat that smells like chlorine. In the other, the cat is just waiting to jump up and scratch your face off as soon as you open that box back up. You can get back to the same old unedited time whenever- if that were worth doing in its case- or just go to new timelines extrapolated from the changes made each time. Or like us you can decide to become time gardeners, go back again and again to one new branch and make it awesome.

(continue reading…)

(c) 2010 TAB

-
Raiden was doing the crossword puzzle section of the Gaian Times and had just about finished the last crossword. He checked the clock on the top of the page and noted that he would probably finish today’s set in record time. He sipped on his absinthe; the sugar was settling out of it since he hadn’t bothered stirring it or drinking it too fast. A few more words and he tossed down the paper. He watched the fluffy Florida clouds and took out a pack of Dank Filterless from his tweed jacket and lit one. This place was always amusing, flocks of teenagers sitting around sipping free water and talking about nothing, some adults with dogs or babies or books. They kept this sector at summer all year for the tourists and it felt like hundreds of years ago, usual estadounidense behavior seemed to have been preserved in time somehow here as if capitalism still meant multiple corporate entities and the world were full of nation-states.

(continue reading…)

(c) 2010 TAB

Hoover is built underground in the area around Hoover Dam and Lake Mead. it is not visible from the surface at all except for carefully concealed and fortified tunnel entrances, often in rocky hills but concealing a road connection to flatter areas. these roads are as short as possible and sometimes seem to lead to nowhere, stopping well before they clear the hills and rocks and sometimes built flat in the middle of nothing but miles of hills that cannot be considered roaded at all. the only area above ground are the Dam and Lake themselves. it is peculiar in that there are often many tracks near the roads. they come not in pairs but as single wheelmarks with strange carvings made into the outsides of the wheels- the only explanation for the way the tracks look, but not something which makes sense. rarely there is a pair with a third track down the center, and these sets of tracks always disappear a short way outside the entrance. the entrances are always closed and when closed resemble natural rock enough to be not easily visible.

(continue reading…)

(c) Joshua D. Biddle

Take me back to the time
of our first disclosure,
when poetry was simply words
strung together forming childlike tales
of hand-me-downs and days gone by;

when sentences were sterile and metaphors
lovely in their innocence.
Take me to the time of budding flowers,
when motivation was something to be sought after–

a time for living, heart-strung
on sleeveless t-shirts,
working the fields, and minimum wage.
Send me back to the place
where creativity was boundless

and stifled silence from gaunt tounges
did not yet exist;
a time of heartache and heart break,
whimsical fantasy lore
and creatures of comfort.

Usher me back to the place where I began,
a place of stainless pleasure,
when bike rides were just bike rides
with no pretense and sex was naught yet found.
The place where abandonment was a lie
and the future still held all her stars in the sky.