Let Us See

Let's see if, in between the galaxies
   we could imagine a space where
no space remains between us.
        A place where we were nowhere
  and everywhere, poignantly weightless.
And finally there I could lick the darkness
   from beneath your eyes
and capture raindrops in the dip
       of my clavicle.
Finally there I could fall into the pleasure
     of relinquishing the reigns of my responsibility
and we could gallop like stallions
        between the pinprick stars
into the sheets of night.

Character Intro: Meeting Casper Fowl

Casper Fowl was a painter. He wasn't making any money at it. He was very superstitious, so he went to an old gypsy woman who told fortunes for spare change and spent the money on food for her cats, and she told him that if he wanted to make a living as an artist he should soak his brushes in jars of gold coins. Angrily, he stomped back up the dusty road to his tiny room above a garage. Someone might describe it as a studio but to him it was just a prison cell, a physical manifestation of his lack of success. What a fraud, Casper muttered to himself, if I had a jar full of gold coins then what would I need to make money for. But if she was a fraud then Casper was none the better, an artist who couldn’t make a dime. And so he pulled out an old box of golden costume buttons and he soaked his brushes in those instead. As a result, many of his paintings had a shiny tint, like tapestries with gold thread stitched in, visible in only the right light.

            It hadn’t worked. Casper Fowl sold just enough paintings to continue on a stable diet of diner food, black coffee and tins of beans and tuna. He sold his fridge to pay for his prison fare and board, and refused to admit that food should need to be chilled or cooked. So, Casper Fowl became a thief. He abandoned his idea board where he stuck polaroids of developing art: a road kill at sunset, a dilapidated church, a greenhouse with a tree burst right through the middle, a crying child, and an egg frying on the pavement on one particularly hot day. He took them down and put them in his someday drawer, which was really just a shoebox, and imagined one day taking them out and hanging the back up with care, touching each one of them and saying don’t worry. I didn’t forget about you. He replaced these ideas, just as he would begin to do in art museums. He covered his walls with Pablo Picasso, Monet, Warhol and Dali, ripping the pictures from magazine and printing copies at the library, always at different locations, always with different names. And all of his replicas, while they were good, were mockingly fake in the proper light when the costume button gold would glint like bad highlights.

            Casper Fowl has never been a good judge of character, but he really fudged up when he chose to go into a partnership with Jeremiah Fox. Jeremiah was not an artist. He was a greedy, conniving, clever snake who had been stealing since the day he left his mother with nothing of her life savings, but a note on the coffee table to tell her not to bother searching for him. She didn’t bother, and who could blame her, for Jeremiah was as slimy as a toad, and she had three other children to worry about, not that she could feed them anymore.

            Jeremiah Fox spoke with a slow drawl and wore expensive suits and paid for the attention of not-expensive ladies. He and Casper Fowl met when he was passing through, when he offered to pay Casper a sizeable amount of money for a replica of Dove with Green Peas by Pablo Picasso. He posed as a curator, taking art, judging its authenticity, and then he would swap them, taking the real for himself and leaving the replica in its place. Casper Fowl had no sense, no wits about him, and though he would never intentionally bring people harm, greed is contagious like a yawn. Greed is the yawn in the middle of an airless city that fills your lungs with tar and multiplies like so many flies. Once you’re bitten by greed you’re as gone as a rabid animal, selling your morals at a pawnshop to buy liquid fire to qualm what’s left of your soul.

            And so a partnership was forged, Jeremiah in the lead, with Casper Fowl trailing along with his hopes and dreams stuffed in a shoebox.  

- The Shutter Muse

[A Note From TSM: This is my newest story which does not yet have a working title. The other MC will be featured in my next post. I've been focusing more on writing so a few of my posts will likely be photo-less. I appreciate your understanding <3]

we all have many chances

The first chance is usually fleeting.

Puffed out from between the lips like oxygen

we forgot we needed.

A cloud of air on a frosted wintertime morning

something we’ve released before we knew it belonged to us.

Like sand wiped on derrieres of ripped denim

you would laugh to know that just two palm’s worth of sand were yours

could you find your crystals on the beach?

The second chance is drawn out,

ripped like fabric from the sewing machine.

You know that the glass is broken

because you hear the scattering of teacups on tile

and when you tossed the pieces in the trash

you wore a ring of beaded blood

because shards of glass are not beautiful jewels

until the ocean washes them smooth with her tears.

The third chance is a gritting of teeth,

seeing the sand slipping like water down through the hourglass.

hearing the clock tick ticking…

like your grandmothers wristwatch so many years ago

as she smoothed the sweaty curls away from your forehead

mapping out her love in the constellations of your freckles.

The inevitable knowing that each moment is irretrievable,

and that using up your chances like layers of Kleenex,

is like collecting fistfuls of water, and calling them the sea. 

-The Shutter Muse