(Soon to be an artist’s book.) For a couple of years, I’ve been taken to task by well-meaning folks who want me to make only positive, light-hearted, beautiful books that affirm life and hope. And I do – I’ve got a lot of those on the workshop table, or in development.
But being a nihilist, I also embrace the darker possibilities.
Almost to the point that I understand what, in a fantasy world, goes into the making and meaning of a cursed object. How beauty and craft can be slanted into devious turns and outright horror, charged with subtle or overt poisons meant to game one outcome or another.
No, I don’t have to accept this ‘new normal’. No, I’m not going to bother to ‘make peace’ with people – even my own blood kin – whose fear, laziness, and entitlement led them to vote for the distilled worst parts of the American psyche: a conman, swindler, chronic tax cheat, science denier, bully, buffoon, and rapist. I don’t have to pretend manmade climate change isn’t happening, because like a gamma ray burst, my lack of belief does not shield me.
‘Narrow Shore’ will be a dark little book, but not the darkest in my CV.
Narrow Shore
Every year, the universe pulls away.
Every year, it darkens as the first light fades.
Those who saw the Earth from space
Are growing old.
Their children traded thoughtless lives
For easy gold,
Trapped along the threshold
Of this narrow shore
Between the howling desert
And the uncaring deep:
Too weak to linger,
Too spent to leap.