Ghetto Farm Kid

Possibly the first of my poems intended in a spoken word vein. 

I'm a ghetto farm kid, trapped amid the bustle and noise of an urbanity, the hard press of humanity

here I have no choice but to breathe gasoline fumes, or the odor that looms around concrete fast food tombs.

so different than the smell of ripening wheat, or the sweet scent of clover and sage... or the hard honest sweat that you get when your sweeping a bin, or pitching the hay in on a hot heavy day

I was never meant to be a farmer, to my parents dismay my course lay instead, in literature, fantasy, the books I had read

They inspired me, widened me, and taught my mind to ignore the simplicity what lay around sowing the ground, the beautiful haunting sound of a chinook wind, or the sight of hawks hunting in the fields where the harvest is coming in

With the row of combines marching in the lines of swath on a land like quilted cloth

Swatches of green and gold, a pageantry as old as Cain, who was the first to put hand to the plough look up at the sky and curse it for its lack of rain

I wanted something more than the duties of the farm chore, I swore, I would travel, experience more than the vista of a plain Albertan plain.

I wanted to imbibe the foreign sights and sounds of something other than my tribe

Learn the tongue from the young of another place, chase down and face the desire to flee my own space, hearth and home

My feet were itchy, you see?

I scratched that itch, and set them free on a plane trip to Germany

I lived in Berlin, away from my kin, in an city so new and fresh to my eyes, there was no disguise-ing my newfound love and care for this city of the Bear

It had an atmosphere, you veritably sense it in the air, in the clothes that my peers would wear, the mohawk hair

Or the red handkerchief slung round the neck hung like a flag ready at the beck and call of a protest at the Berlin Wall which had its fall not too long ago at all

You could feel the history in this city, sketched underneath the skin of the graffiti tag

Feel it as you touched bullet holes in the Reichstag

From a World War where they exchanged one dictator for years of cold slow conflict that raged in this city divided between East and West

You can see it echoed in eyes, hear it in the chest of a people who are charged with:

Lest WE forget Auschwitz, Treblinka, Arbeit Macht Frei,

You can see it echoed in the eyes, the memories of a people who let the Jews die

But there was a willingness to engage, from the people my age in questions political, rhetorical, and cultural,

There was a thirst for debate, a desire to create a dialogue of mind and thought, a language fraught with the willingness to encompass more than the limits of theology, nationality, and blind ideology

They taught me that it was ok to open my mind from the culture I lived in - I had to make the point though, No... I'm not an American –

I found I could relate in conversations late at night in a coffee shop open far past the hour of closing and well on the way to first light

So you see, it was trip whose taste left me thirsty for really good coffee and a company that delights in the verbal spar, the conversation that ranges wide and far – far from the plebeian woes of this city that has no personality as far as personality goes

It was a good trip for this ghetto farm kid

***********

Cat's Paw: Chapter 1

This is my working first chapter.  Hormunder, while not the main character, is certainly significant, and I felt the scene strong enough to start the book on.

     
Hormunder, Magi of the Seventh Circle, Caretaker of the Blue Pearl, and Holder of the Vast Secret, seethed not so secretly.  His frustration was marked on a face that appeared to have strenuously tried to fit a what a magus should look like but hadn’t quite succeeded.  A receding hair line was demarcated by an chaotic frizz, the color of which alternated between dark red and brown attempting valiantly to become grey.  His beard was what his peers called whispy, when they were being polite, and worse things - such as scraggly - behind his back.  Calling a magi’s beard scraggly was one of quicker ways to make an already infamous temper arise to the surface.  
    Hormunder glared at the door to his tower, waiting for it to open and Elric to appear.  Appear and be suitably chastised from the terrible scandal he caused at the Amaranth Court.  Hormunder heard a grating sound and realised that it was his own teeth.  That impertinent boy!  he had no right to attempt to touch the Splinter.  The amount I had to explain to the rest of the Circle, let alone the Slythan embassy!  I will be humilated for years to come!  
    “Argh!”  Hormunder clutched at his frizz.  Small blue sparks crackled and circled around his head.  A headache began to pound, as the sparks manifested into a Achestorm, violently spinning around.  Another distraction.  
    “Enough. No longer can I wait, for that motherless son of a hedge warlock!”  He declaimed to the empty room.  It was a habit of his - making statements addressing an audience, which in this particular moment included a mouse, the cricket it was chasing, and a few semi-sentient sparks that had left the Achestorm to zig and zag their way across the room.
    Hormunder threw open his apprentice’s door with a hand that was not nearly gnarled enough.  He squinted with eyes that were almost requiring spectacles into the half-gloom.  His disappointingly medium sized nose pointed at the pillow of Elric’s simple bed.  Ahah!  A hair or two should do!  He snatched them and scurried up into his study, a mere two flights further away.  Pearl being a city of wizards, magic, and insufferable bearded elderly types, real estate upon which one would build a tower were rather in high demand.  As a result, Hormunder’s tower was actually a four floor squarish building, rather similar to another down the street, had no odd angle’s whatsoever, and his solarium (star room) was inconvienently blocked on the southern horizon by another tower rising into the sky - it happened to belong to Regulon the Incomparable.      “Regulon the Incompetent, more like,” muttered Hormunder.  Upon reaching the study, he hurried to his alchemical instruments.  “I must distill his essence from these hairs, an elementary exercise, I must say.”  This was accomplished with a few vials of this and that, a turn of a knob or three, and one or two “Blast that boy.”  A flame to the bottom of a flask to boil off any waste liquids, and a scrape to get the newly formed residue, and then a careful transfer to a smaller vial.  Hormunder approached his crystal ball - actually rather high quality, for saving up on real estate meant he spent his monies on something of value.  A practiced scatter above the ball and a few intoned syllables of a suddenly resonant voice and the mottled crystal whirled into clouds that formed and reformed.  Hormunder knotted his brow - eyebrows not quite meshing together satisfyingly.  Without warning three green glyphs glowed in the ball till they were all that Hormunder could see.  
    “What in Yrgga’s eight pl-”  The ball cracked, then shattered, the splinters falling to the floor.  Hormunder’s eyes bulged.  Then the splinters rose from the ground, forming a sphere, then an oval, then a face - nonhuman, sparkling, and phosporescing a sick pale green.  A glass tongue snaked out, the shards began to vibrate in the air, humming till it became a pitch that made Hormunder’s eyes water and his ears sting.  The face began to speak in scratchy syllables.  It was casting a spell!  
    Hormunder grasped his chest, at the pouch hung just underneath his robe.  The pouch moved of its own accord, pulling towards the snaking, sparkling tongue.  It couldn’t be!  Not this!  Never this!  Hormunder’s mind gibbered at the consequences of what his mind was starting to realise.  But even if his fears were unfounded, he had to act.  The sibilant voice of the sharded face was rising higher. One hand at his robes, the other scrabbled at the desk drawer, below the crystal ball.   There.  A bottle of redwyrm bonedust.  He popped the wax seal with his thumb, and trailed the dust in a careful circle around him, as fast as he dared.   He scribbled glyphs at the aspected points as the intoning voice grew fervent.  Whatever he had unleashed through his ball was about to complete the spell.   A trickle of dust from the bottle - Just a few grains more!  The voice shouted and the shards flew at the crouched wizard.  They reached the perimeter of the circle just as Hormunder looked up, finger still on the ground, scribing the last symbol.  He saw as the shards angled towards his face, then slowed, then fell as they breached his protective circle.  Most that is, except for the few that made up the tongue.  They whipped at his face - his eyes.  Red pain pierced him, then washed over in a tide of black.  

Spring Sprung Late

Spring Sprung Late

Hello.

This is Phil.  Yes, I am aware of the terrific lag between January when I started this blog and now, which is in the midst of May.  I don't have a lot to say to this, other than to simply shrug my shoulders in something resembling an "Aww... Shucks."  Picture this with a grimace and wince in the eyes.  You're getting close now.  Add a tired and knowing grin, and you got the whole picture.

Why then, am I writing now?  Perhaps it is that I have reached some kind of inner threshold - I can't help but write now.  Writing is the core of who I am, and in the past year (or two or three), my life has happened at such a furious pace that it bears reflection, description and observation and even maybe some prescription.

The next few posts will include:

- the first scene of a YA fantasy novel I vowed to write this year.  The working title is Cat's Paw, and I'm in the middle of my first outline.  I have the broad arc, but there is much to be fleshed out.  That being said, I want to introduce you to the character of Hormunder (or Ormunder - not sure yet - Hormunder said aloud sounds remarkable like whoremonger.... ahem).

- Some selected poetry.  I have a lot, some good, most bad, and some I've performed at slams.

- And, if I can summon the energy, I would like to continue in the theme of many of my past blogs: reflections on life.

This will cover diverse topics such as: impending fatherhood, baptism and whether it means I'll be Catholic (or not), gaming, being married, university, teaching, writing, faith, and other sundry things.