Poem: “Utterfly”

I was an utterfly,

my wings dense matter,

colorless for they were every color at once.

I was the universe in the palm of your hand,

Too heavy.

And I sank, fluttering, into the gallows of your hollow stomach –

Was I too much to swallow?

How it tasted going down:

the flavor of incomprehensibility;

you could not take me, tame me.

And I burst from between your ribs,

turned you inside out –

An utterfly

is the sheer vastness of all things:

Knowledge – and the lack of it –

a reminder to learn so you can learn

to forget.

Because why should you remember the definite shape

of infinity?

The People Poem (Self/I/We/Others/He/She/Them)

“Self” is

The canvas

Clay

“I,”

The product

of mutation, a

Reflection

Of what you want,

It is

Whatever’s left after you

Tinker with

My self.

A blank page

With color added.

“We.”

It is a cluster

Conglomeration a

Group

Unity?

No such thing.

We’re all pigs

Floundering in the

Mire but

We’re not in this together, we

Don’t even like one another.

“Others.”

Division.

“He.”

“She.”

Distinct and different

We split ourselves

Like atoms

And what results

Is armageddon

What color is the self, exactly?

Slave brown?

Army green?

Combat-boots-black how about

Thirty-women-and-children-dead red?

Bruised blue, they’re ugly

The colors we paint people

And when we realize

That fact, when we see

How we’ve mutilated this world we

Create another entity,

The scapegoat,

To cover it up

And we call it

“Them.”

Prose: “The Other Colors”

As I lurch down the path, everything is rust-red.

Red, and yellow-green and grey-brown, the color of dead and dying things. Dull, muted as the winter air crystalizes in my lungs and the grass shrivels to a crisp frozen stubble. The buildings around me are brown, made of chipped brick and copper.

Walk fast, I tell myself. Live fast. Die young. I have places to be and people to see. But the people flash past in a blur, black streaks of smoky shadow stretching across the path, this path that I follow like a robot polished to a silvery sheen. This path that is landscaped in the colors that the system wants me to see, that I’ve been programmed to see. Rust-red. Yellow-green. Grey-brown. My vision is not mine. Maybe that’s why it all seems lackluster.

What of the other colors?

The thought is pale yellow like a distant star, the shimmering pastel hue of hope and wonder. One of these days I should lift my head and notice them, really see them: the other colors. The colors that I have always been taught were meaningless, the colors that serve no one. White: the cotton ball clouds drifting through the atmosphere. Pink: the blazing sun if I stare too long. Blue: the sky, a fragile shade, like a freshly laid robin’s egg. White pink blue, all of them meaningless, pointless to think about. Why bother? The sky is for birds, who fly because their lives have no aim, whose brains are too small to comprehend the arbitrariness of it all. They don’t realize that the sky has nothing to offer them. Man knows better than to immerse himself in such emptiness. It is futile to dream, they tell me, to seek one’s destiny anywhere other than in what is given, what unfolds beneath me as I tread the red path.

Red: the color of willful ignorance.

Everything I’ve been told is wrong. If the sky is meaningless, then why is there a crayon my box that is the same precise shade of baby blue? There is substance, something to discover in it all. Why else would it exist?

Here is something else with substance: man. Man, who is brown and tan and ash-black and beige, who has created this world and unearthed the shades of it, this world that is an oyster, craggy and dark at first glance but rippled with opalescent iridescence inside. Man is a diamond revolving in the sun, shooting off beams of dazzling light, fractals of violet and magenta and crimson and gold and lime, and these—

—these colors often go unnoticed, because we have been trained to ignore them, trained that the only colors that matter are the colors of success. The system raises us colorblind.

But I am not. I am not a red path, or a patch of dead yellow grass and brick buildings. There is a whole other world surrounding me, a world of pink and white and blue and perhaps others, I can feel it. So I will go, valiantly, into the sky, into the futile yonder, where it waits. Or maybe there really is nothing to be found there, out in the world. It may be. But at least I will have, if I try…

…the other colors.

Poem: “Fonts”

 

Poem: “Wistfulness”

Here is a house in South Dakota.

It is not where I was born, nor would I say it is where I am from,

But it is where things are simple and childhood is sweet,

And my best friend lives next-door to me,

And she still has two brothers and I all three cats,

And we watch cartoons and eat chicken pot pies,

And waddle through three-foot-tall snow drifts in the winter,

Bundled in overalls and heavy coats like marshmallows

Waving at the snow plows as they scrape by.

 

Here is the Pebble Creek apartment complex,

Where I resign myself to a life of listening

To the soft, unimposing drone of people going about their lives,

Blissfully without consideration of me.

It is here that I stuff myself into a dryer

To hide from a tornado whose roar I cannot hear.

It is here that I attend a Halloween party as a ladybug

And stay out past curfew to ride my first skateboard,

And where the coolest place for kids to hang out

Is the brown gazebo in the park.

 

Here is the house on Miramont Street,

Where nothing exceptionally dramatic has happened,

Except for this time when the neighbor’s German shepherd

Climbs onto the roof through a second-story window,

And someone calls animal control because the owner

Won’t answer the door when we knock,

And a few days later the cops come to find him

Dead on the bedroom floor due to suicide.

The neighborhood never makes a sound.

 

Here is the house on Hawthorne Avenue,

Which belongs to a suburb in the middle of the desert,

Next to an Indian reservation

And a casino.

I ride my bike for miles into the dust, never meeting anyone but the southwest wind,

And the only person who speaks to my family

Is an elderly widow who crochets fingerless gloves, grows cherries,

And waits for the rain to come.

 

Here is 108 Deer Path, in Manitou,

Which was built in 1864 and lacks air conditioning because

The mountains are just quiet enough for you to realize how hot it is,

But the alpine breeze makes you forget.

Tourists who wander into the town are rushed by the odor of marijuana and

The sour stench of hippies and incense,

And when they shuffle past the street kids playing banjo on the sidewalk,

The vagrants just smile, sleepless but kind,

Because they are attached to nothing, nowhere, nobody.

 

Now here is a little brick dorm room with thin walls,

In a city with which I am not quite familiar,

Where conversation crackles in the air like electricity and

I cannot keep my window open at night like I used to because

Inevitably a car horn or a drunk frat boy will sound and wake me

From a dream in which I am longing for all the places I have been—

In which I am yearning for the serendipity of silence and simplicity,

When things were young again and I could not possibly comprehend

The enormous noise of this world, this life.

Poem: “Gladiator”

Definition

A degree of clarity

I went to school to find it

But it wasn’t quite the same.

Regret is an ocean and I am treading the salty waves.

Who is this person in the mirror and

What have I accomplished with these textbooks when I

Could have been running through the forest, barefoot

A wild child of the universe?

Who

Am I?

What

Am I doing here?

Go ahead: call me a hippie                                                                                   (I’m fucking infinite.)

Animal instinct shreds flesh from bone—

I clawed myself open and stars spilled out.

I’m stepping out of this paper-thin skin,

‘Gonna howl at the moon like the wolf I was born to be.

I’m taking off these rose-colored glasses

And putting down the boring books;

They were never very useful anyway.

Dreamers, eat your hearts out

With forks and golden knives;

Taste the particular flavor of the void.

I hear you screaming for me and I swear

I’ll come back for you some day,

But my heart it runs on gasoline

And I need to fuel my soul                                                                               (I’m running on fumes.)

I can hear my engine turning

My embers are smoldering

And any moment now I’m gonna

Strike

The match.

Start here.

A fine white powder dusts the ground this afternoon. I’ve broken out my favorite mug, brewed myself some strong earl grey, and uncovered all the windows and mirrors in my mind. These are the planes that will reflect and be reflected upon until the downy grey sky shimmers with ideas. The air is a fine wine ripened with creativity. It’s the right kind of day to start a blog.

Welcome to the official home of Hunter Linar’s writing and writing-related ramblings. Here you will find prose, some poetry – and maybe a little magic, too.

Feedback is welcome and encouraged on all works. If you find something you like, feel free to leave a comment or share it from the corresponding Facebook page. In the meantime, enjoy your stroll through my little thought garden.