4th period composition

4th period composition

Daryl flicked long raven locks and chose a pen with sable ink. She sat in English at her desk, poised to scratch, compose whatever crap the teacher wanted.

Daryl wrote her name in looping cursive across the sheet, scribbled along the top:

         Certain dreams I wish I could remember;
         certain nightmares I wish I had forgot.

At the teacher's prompting she began to jot:

The soil was gravel; the grass was sparse. In the lee of the sun, the shadows collected in dirty drifts of snow. Spring was on the calendar but had not come.

Shades-of-shadows sighed. Trapped here in a cold Hell north of nowhere they dreamed of dappled maple shade and moist moss cover. The smell of clover lingered in their thoughts. But each day they woke to harsh reality: ice ruled here and snow gave little shelter. By the time the dawn stretched out its fingers their dreams were gone, forgot.

They wandered off each day among the stones and gravel under grey wisps that barely wet the soil. What would piss them off enough to wash this salt from dust? The lodgepole pines glowered at the rashness of their should'ves, could'ves, oughts. Patience is a virtue here, best practiced by those blessed with cones and needles, who only fear the fire, not shadow, shade nor gusts.

They wheedled out existence in communion with the mundane ghosts that harbored them. Live folks ran rushed, too busy to provide them random hugs or spare a momentary thought. Their nightmares lurked behind each smile. They'd seen those grins and smirks before, hidden behind stale social graces cloaking empty hearts, loathing camouflaged by dark designs they tattooed into titles wrought in ink from blackened blood.

They skirted around the nightmare of that cesspooled mud each day, afraid to touch the gleaming poison. Today it glimmered off the river, yesterday in a mirror of ice, tomorrow it would choose another spot. It never went away. The shades-of-shadows had studied the art of artifice with sword and pen but never Zen and the lessons learned from letting go and going to where their being could just be or could've been.

Each evening when the sun withdrew her fingers, scraping painted nails across regrets of indigo-bled sky, the shades-of-shadows cried:

         Certain dreams we wish we could remember;
         certain nightmares we wish we had forgot.

So wrote Daryl before the time ran out.

© 2009 Kåre Enga [165.450] 2009-02-23

Note: poetic prose or prose-poetry?