Writing With Icicles

A row of icicles taps out a rhythm on the ground, with bass accompaniment from water dripping a hollow pop sound in the curve at the bottom of a long, straight stretch of gutterpipe.

Pipe.  Tripe.  Sandpiper.  Pied Piper.  Pieman.  Pied.  Pedestrian.  Sylva.  Puer.

Three-dimensional crossword puzzles.  Add a fourth dimension, the words and meanings change with the ticking of a clock.

Pickpocket.

Plain word list, pretending to be sentences and phrases.

These words do not exist.

Words like these exist, do they not?

What?  Watt?  Whut?

Vocabularies are not sounds.  Pronunciations, enunciating, denouncing, convincing, elucidating.  Enlightened by now?

Hyderabad.  Hyperactive.  Turkish turkey bathes in babes' babushkas.

Palm readers read faces first, first impressions last and jewelry value first and foremost.

We rarely pay attention to the value of our pockets.  We miss ourselves in the mirrors of other people's eyes.

Scrolling text, scrolling text, scrolling text, scrolling text.  Why?

Do our eyes scan the text of a book or does the book's page move under our eyes?

Walk on by.

Time to stop reading and listening to the voices on this continent.  My image in a dusty, tarnished mirror not delightful.

When was the last time I sat down and read some of Sequoya's writing in his language?  When did I listen to an Aboriginal on the island of Australia and gain the same wisdom as smelling the air and listening to the voices in the wind?

The echoes of our people bouncing off tree bark.  Our movements thumping through the tympanic soil.

I, who does not exist, am alone without a self.  Loneliness is but an unframed work of art.

The slaughter of my people belongs to all of us.  We have ourselves to credit and to blame.  We drown in the blood of our blunders.

A new birth.  A rising sun.  The day uncharted and unrecorded.  Icicles getting shorter as the music plays on.  Dum-diddydeedum.  Dum-dum.  Deedeedeedeedeedee.

A feral cat sleeps under the breakfast bay, feeding on the nuggets and morsels we toss outside, supplemented with mice, squirrels and perhaps a chipmunk.  Drinking heated water poured into a bowl twice a day.  Winter winds and flakes of snow telling the cat it's not time to go, this cave an easy life compared to the wild world of real life away from people's imaginary cocooned protectorates.

When the barbarians storm the gates, where will you be?  Inside?  Outside?  Nowhere?  Did you leave the back door unlocked so they'd enter without a fuss?  Some barbarous troops are hard to see.  Ever watched smallpox destroy an army?  Ever seen ice take down a plane?

I like the way snow homogenizes the differences in a landscape.  A momentary vision of one world, one people, that disappears when things heat up.  Life in a snow globe, calm and peaceful looking, able to be shaken with the touch of one finger or held with one hand, the miniature landscape unchanged.

To be.  Is.  Was.  Were.  The icicle symphony on ice.