skonen_blades

There's an event called A Day at the Races where poets go to the horse races and they each pick a horse name at random from each of the seven races and then use that name as a prompt for a poem. At the end of the day, we read out the 'winning' poem from each race and then whatever other poems we think turned out pretty good. It's a fun day.

This is poem 07 from race 07 and my horse's name was Timeless Shrug.

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Timeless Shrug

Every adolescent
From the beginning of time
From before recorded history
And far into the future
(Until humans are changed into something else
or removed entirely)

Every one of them
Has a timeless shrug

A twitch of indifference

They join every other teen
In an eternal
Timeless shrug continuum

I envy the timeless shrug
The up and down of shoulder bones
That Atlas shrug of clavicles
A dismissal beyond the fifth dimension

As the shoulder hangs at the apex of its motion
Time pauses and stops
Accordioning across millenia
As every young shrugger
Joins in unison and power
An engine of not knowing and not caring
Piston shoulders rising and falling

With the same motion

That angels use to flap their wings




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The halos up in Heaven vary very differently
Some are hula hoops while some float microscopically

No two are identical; these glowing hoverthings
That bob above angelic heads like floating, neon rings

Some are barely cheerios a human thumbnail wide
And others look like pipe you’d use to build a waterslide

Some halos have a rakish tilt, or perch towards the stern
But all of them with holy light magnificently burn

Look! There’s one there! A massive halo seven meters wide
Why, were that halo on the ground, a truck could fit inside

And that looks like the smallest halo, like a tiny star
It’s special and unique but really, all the halos are

Each halo girth, and width, and tilt, diameter, and size
Circumference, volume, number, height, and weight. You’d be surprised.

The only thing that bothers them is halos are quite bright
They never dim or darken and they don’t turn off at night

Most angels like the light they bring and angels don’t need sleep
But every now and then an angel’s eyes will start to weep

He’ll crave some darkness. Just a blink. A little tiny night.
A break from the incessant beaming headdress made of light

Sometimes it can be assuaged and quelled and pushed away.
Content, that angel spends eternity in constant day

But sometimes angels cannot be eternally awake
And one thing halos have in common is that they can break.

A quick reach up, a grip, a twist, a snap, a pop, and there
The angel’s halo cracks in half and darkness fills the air

Relief and then a scream and then the fallen angel cries
Because the halo can’t be fixed and now they realize

That darkness can be just as constant torment as the light
Eternal darkness just as equal to eternal night

The broken halo floats in halves above the angel’s head
The shadows making everything look drab and dark and dead

Two letter Cs, a horseshoe split, two curves that damn and haunt
From just a momentary lapse of judgement and of want

And they become the type whose mere appearance scares and warns
Because a broken halo from the front can look like horns

That’s all demons are you see, just broken halo folk
The ones that couldn’t take the light and made their halos broke

There’s just as many pairs of horns as halos up above
And just as many filled with hate as angels filled with love

Remember when you see a demon wandering around
It’s just a haunted broken-halo angel who’s been downed



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Some angels have rectangular halos.
They’re called angles.
They see in lines and ninety degree turns.
They’re all about the hard lefts
They love a good tangent.
Being perpendicular and standing up straight
They’re total squares.
They fly in zig zags
Impossibly turning in a right angle
While the other angels loop in a lazy curve
These angled angels scare the rest of heaven a little
With their logic
They’re easy to confuse
But they’re like a razor when they’re right
The edgiest of the seraphim
They never cut corners
They are the logical arm of heaven
Their wings are sharp
Cutting through the wind quietly
Stealthily shark finning the clouds
The world should be a grid, they think
Corners make stability, they think
Circles roll away
Squares stay where they are
Angles are dependable
Curves are fragile
Their arguments are solid
But a little chaos and they’re lost
They work great within
The greater fabric of heaven
But it would become hell
If they tried to run it




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The metal angel was hard at work sharpening his tools. The war was coming. The angels of love and inspiration were huddled in heaven, listening to the sounds of war outside. The floor of heaven vibrated with the concussive bass of battle.

Wings made of long saw blades, fingernails of scalpel tips, and eyes aflame with the brilliant blue of a welding torch. The angel perched near the sharpening stone, if something that weighed eight tons could be said to perch, and leaned the blade against the spinning rock. A fantail of sparks showered up and out into the holy foundry.

He was the last battle angel to head out. The newer angels had the ‘radar’ and the ‘infra-red’ and the ‘heat-seekers’. Their weapons merely needed to be turned on before they jumped out of heaven’s bomb-bay doors without so much as a battle cry. Kids. All about stealth and being cool under fire.

Give me a good war scream any day, thought the lone battle angel. Let the enemy know you’re coming. Scare the crap out of those red-skinned, black-leather bastards. Go in with the sword a-swingin’ and lay waste like the reaper himself.

He leaned forward with a creak of hydraulics and the scrape of massive hinges. The sparks roostered up higher with the finishing touch. The sword was now sharp enough to slice a soul’s tether. It could split a demon in half with hope. It forgave with each mighty swing.

Big as a building with a chest plate the size of a Cadillac, the angel stood, knees and shoulders screeching. He had no long-range weapons. He was the biggest fighter and he brought up the rear.

A quick, body-wide shudder was the only weapons check he needed. Like a dog shaking itself dry, the battle angel felt his internals speed up. Steam bays emptied in a shroud around him as his engines kicked up to a higher pitch. He was a living golem made from chainsaws and righteous anger.

He twisted his enormous mitt and the sword caught fire with a thunderous rush of light.

The bomb-bay doors lay open and the battle raged below. The last battle angel stood at the lip, looking down into the volcano theater of war.

With an amplified scream that made the entire battle pause and look up, he spread a thousand scissoring feathers and dropped like a stone towards the fray.




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The angels came for me from the eighties.

They were beauty personified. They were Nagel visions from the decade of my generation’s sexual awakening. Flipped-up collars under giant manes of teased, feathered hair restrained by gallons of atmosphere-destroying hairspray. They stepped off of a Duran Duran record cover.

There were three of them.

The blonde angel on the left was wearing white leg warmers. She had on a unitard built for jazzercise and early-morning workouts. She had crimped her bangs. She snarled at me playfully under white eyeshadow. Two lightning bolts had been painted on each cheek and across the bridge of her nose was an Adam-Ant bar of white paint. Her nails were long. She had a small ceramic triangle on one ear and a small ceramic circle on the other. Her pristine headband shone.

The blonde on the right had her hair piled high in a Flock-of-Seagulls wave of chemical brilliance, streaked through with bleach and held back from gravity by Studio Line Strong-Hold Fixing Gel by L’oreal like a picture of the crashing surf. She had on an impossibly huge oversized white sweater with a mock turtleneck riding high. Her earrings dangled with feathers, small crosses, and long, fine chains. She was wearing white leotards that disappeared into tiny calfskin boots. Her face hid beneath the hair but above the collar, like a tiger watching prey from the tall grass. She formed jazz hands in her fingerless gloves.

The dark-haired wonder in the middle stared straight at me with eyes as blue as the neon in a video game arcade. He collar was popped, bringing the wingtips up to her cheekbones. Her white silk shirt had shoulder pads that would do a linebacker justice. She had on lipstick that glistened, damp with promise. Streaks of blush and thick mascara turned her face into a sensual kabuki mask from a bygone era. She was clean lines. She had on white powerwash jeans, high-waisted and excruciatingly tight. Her white stilettos pushed her heels up to fashion model height. Her nails were long and the colour of pearls.

Behind them, the wings. Above them, the halos.

They had stepped forth as the angels designed to take my soul, to make my passage into the other plane voluntary and pleasurable.

They guessed well.

I smiled and stepped towards them.






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Cold tires and chicken wings. Dinosaurs and dice.

I have a dream-catcher the size of a bicycle wheel and it’s clogged with nightmares now.

The thing looks like a pizza. It drips and stinks and moans. I need some metaphysical Drano. I need some care-bear blood to throw through the cat’s cradle of the first-nation strings, something to melt the caught dreams like sulphuric acid splashed on the face of someone who owes a lot of money to bad people.

I have throwing stars with badly-drawn portraits of a smirking David Duchovny etched on them. I have a phone book filled with the names of people that have been accidentally erased from time. I have a magnifying glass that shows a different world on the other side.

I have a little hand-mirror that shows me, only me, as someone else. It’s very disconcerting. I won all these from a millionaire with sunglasses and a beard in a poker game in Nevada. I also won his bar and his wife.

I drank so much in those days that I don’t even remember why I burnt the bar to the ground. The wife ran off. I remember feeling just fine about both events. I remember that bar fire gusting high when the roof caved in, lighting up the Reno desert outskirts like all the jack-o-lanterns from every porch laughing.

I keep thinking about how that millionaire never took his sunglasses off. That’s not unusual for a poker game but there were a few times, while he smoked his cigar, that I thought I saw smoke come out from behind those sunglasses.

Like maybe his eye sockets were empty and the cigar smoke was somehow coming out of them. Good reason for glasses but not really human, y’know?

I have an extra finger on my right hand. It’s amazing how many people never notice that. That showed up one morning along with a streak of white in my hair and a lost week. I didn’t ask questions and I considered myself lucky.

I own houses in most states. They are all in disrepair. I am a vagabond with money. There are homeless people living in all of my run-down houses. When I show up, I have dinner with them and use swear words and listen to their stories and hang out. They do their drugs or have their episodes. I don’t judge. They don’t know that I own the place.

Somewhere along the way, every day for me became a mixture of Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. A window from twenty years ago looped back with a bright fist and remembered me. I am a string puppet being manipulated by my future self. I am a raffle ticket on a fishhook.

I am an orange peel remembering summer on the tree.

Cold pizza and angel wings. Flying cars and rice.



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My guardian angel is hideous.

Seriously. I can’t read books when he’s near. He breathes like a pug. Puff. Blow. Snort. He sounds like an ogre with bronchitis. The fibrillations of his nostrils trying vainly to snort through the mucus repulse me.

And the hair! Everywhere I go, he sheds in a path behind him like a Persian cat in the spring, except that my angel has thick, straight, almost insectile hairs. They’re like strings from a guitar. Luckily no one can see them except me but they’re seriously gross. It’s a blessing that they’re invisible.

I tell people that I have no sense of smell but the truth is that the reek of my guardian angel overpowers everything except burning tires. It’s an acrid stink. It’s not like human body odour. It’s a stink combining scents like leaking batteries, rotting tree trunks, and burning plastic. It’s hard to describe. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

If he smelled sulphurous at all, I’d suspect I was being duped. But he doesn’t.

And he’s fat. I don’t mean ‘a little extra’. I’m talking huge. He stomps around because his wings long ago lost the ability to carry his bulk. He always manages to keep up with me, though, no matter what I’m doing. There’s something miraculous about that, I guess.

And don’t get me started on his looks. It’s like he dived face-first into a swimming pool but forgot to put the water in. His face is practically cubist. He makes Sloth from the Goonies look like Brad Pitt.

His wide, thick lips hang like deflated inner tubes over the ruined jut of his splintered, brown teeth. His chin pushes forth like the prow of a ship. His huge nose would probably come down to nearly touch his shelf of a chin if his snout wasn’t broken to the point of zig-zagging off to the right. One of his eyes is dark brown, too big for his face, and can barely stretch its tight eyelid over itself to blink. It waters constantly. The other eye lives in a pit on the other side of his face. I don’t know what colour it is. It glitters from time to time if light manages penetrate that deep.

Sometimes, looking at his ears, I joke to myself that he has two pairs of wings.

His body looks stapled together from whatever was left over on god’s table. Like a pelican. He is the opposite of grace. His ugliness transcends race. It goes beyond any definition of ethnicity. He is from Ugly Country.

His voice is thick with guttural noises. Half of his sentences are sighs, grunts and other unidentifiable glottal utterings that make no sense to me.

However, I have been safe from harm and lucky all my life. Even when I’ve unknowingly placed myself in harm’s way, the worst I’ve ever received is a lesson.

And the love in my angel’s eyes when he looks at me almost makes up for his disgusting appearance. I swear that if it was possible to cut him, nothing but admiration for me would leak out.

It’s hard to spurn that kind of devotion. I’m lucky to have him.



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Ah, good times.

The GCC. The Good Conscience Convention. This is the time of year where all of us Good Consciences leave the shoulders of our earthly mortal hosts and convene to update our status, research new psychological initiatives, keep in touch, and generally pat each other on the back.

Some of us are better at our jobs than others.

Over there, the GCs of the powerful politicians and heads of the major corporations are seated in a circle, chain-smoking and wide-eyed, staring silently into space. Our hearts go out to them.

You can’t help but feel responsible when your host gives in to the dark side. Sure, there are all kinds of graphs to show us that no matter what we do, there is a bigger picture of morality at play. There are platitudes, equations and conjectures about how all of our hosts are fifty per cent evil so defeat is inevitable at least half the time.

Try telling that to GCs of the abused kids or the gangsters. They dream of fifty per cent. They hope for ten and consider themselves lucky if they get even that. They get all the support we can give. They take notes furiously, trying to stay positive.

There are symposiums about simple mental tricks that a GC can implement to push their host towards the light. There are panels from successful GCs giving tips and smiling advice. There are debates on the nature of evil.

There are pacts signed here as well. GCs are allowed to help each other. It gets to be a difficult process, though, as there are limitations. The banding together that we did in the early sixties was outlawed by heaven as a violation of the Free Will Act of Year 0. There was a small rebellion but in time, the Big Guy was proven right and we shook our heads.

Every boom has a bust, they say, and the unbridled, unlimited happiness-seeking of the 60s led to the excess of the 70s which brought about the moral depression of the 80s and early 90s. We had hope for a natural resurgence but in a post-911 world, we’re still reeling.

We thought it was our turn since the Dark Age BC insurgence was condemned but never properly equaled by our side. All those witch-burnings had never been avenged. We thought that free love, peaceful protests, mind-expanding drugs, and radical anarchistic notions of personal freedom were the way to go. Now we realize we were just thinking like the enemy and trying to fight fire with fire. Stupid.

Things are still out of wack and oscillating wildly. We’ve learned our lesson. We need to shape our hosts and push them gently. Manipulating them to be good all the time is like putting a piece of chocolate cake in a goldfish bowl. They eat themselves to death.

Also, whatever we successfully lobby to the Holy Congress to be allowed to do, the Bad Consciences are also granted permission to do.

There are panels where bad consciences give their side of things so that we can get an insight into their psychology. It’s a little unreliable because they’re probably lying their asses off and having a lark with us but hey, whatever we can glean will be useful. That’s the hope, anyway. They’ve signed NDAs and No-Harm Treaty Pacts. They wear whatever they feel like and smirk constantly. All the male BCs have goatees.

In between seminars, I catch up with old friends.

The whole Good Conscience Convention is held in the west wing of the Heaven Convention Center. The walls here are white. We’re all in our robes. The cafeteria is awesome.

I spent half an hour talking to a few of the younger GCs before heading off to a Fuzzy Concept Ideals Panel featuring Richard Branson’s GC and BC in a dual address with a Q&A afterwards. It’s a hot topic so I should get there early.



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I’m leaning up against the Tree of Knowledge. My back is getting sticky from the blood trickling down its ancient trunk. There’s a knife wound in its bark that’s gushing freely. The blood is many colours.

One lick and I’d know much more than I already do. I’m not even tempted. Die, tree, die.

I grab the knife I used to stab the tree and use it to skin another golden apple for a snack. The tree is shaking softly in its death throes. Its leaves are falling off.

It’s been a long ten years getting to this place.

Getting this knife, for instance, took six of those years. Its blue metal will cut through anything, including thick magic. It’s one of the only things that can skin golden apples. This one I’m skinning is my last one.

The Tree has many defenses that it could employ. Illusions, fields of force, mind-clouding, etc. None of them can stand up to me and the equipment I have with me.

The Tree’s last defense is to Se-Seed. This means that it removes itself from time and randomly floats free of temporal anchors. It’s very hard to track if it does this.

Unless you have a compass made from the wood of its branches. It took me another two years to get that.

And no one can see the Tree unless they have a wooden eye made from the root of the tree. I have one. It took me another year to get it.

I still remember putting the hot points of a sharpened elvish fork into my own left eye and stuffing the wooden one in there while the socket was still warm.

This new eye can only see the tree and the tree only. No illusions or mind-clouding can stop it from seeing where the tree truly is.

The map, now, that was surprising. That only took six months. I found a market seller who traded it to me for five years of my life and my six weakest hopes. He didn’t even know what it was.

So now my quest is over.

I’m sitting here up on top of Mole Hill underneath a darkening sunset sky. I’m not sure where in time I am anymore. The tree tried to time-jump when I stabbed it with the blue blade but I hung on tight and went with it.

The Tree is dying now and my left eye is going dark with it. I pull out my compass and it’s spinning wildly, no longer sure of where to point. It won’t be long now.

I have no idea where in time I am. I smell sulfur in the air and I can see white lines high in the sky.

I pull out my ration pack and lay a slice of unicorn jerky over a chunk of the golden apple and eat it thoughtfully.

Stupidity will reign. My job here is done. I smile. I wonder what’ll happen next?




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Stuck during Lifetime Achievement, I missed a hurdle and ended up face-down on a flatbed carrying dead-eyed strugglers using humour to avoid hard questions about how they got there.

My tribe.

It’s a shock to see so many familiar faces and so many variations on my own. The flatbed is a train, a barge, a truck, and even a cargo plane on occasion, blending smoothly between vehicles with the seamless transition that takes place in dreams. It’s not alarming.

Sometimes, in my mind’s eye, I can see the race track I was on and I’m surprised at its narrowness. These so-called fringes where I ended up are choked with the majority of the race. We’re all a little bummed to be here; The Unintended Path.

I was something of a z-list celebrity, arriving as late as I did, having gotten further than most. And I thought I’d fallen early. That makes me laugh now.

Some kids are born here, never even knowing that an Intended Path exists as a concept.

We’re followed by angels, our eyes glow and we eat salamanders to stoke our magic metal hearts. We’re rocking chairs for destiny. Crowded like targeted ethnic groups in a boxcar, we laugh.


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