Prose Writing - Tumblr Posts

Vampires

Light as windborne leaves, you were soft and pale as down, your cornsilk mane a midday fire that framed haunted wells of profound blue. You were prettier than anything I could have hoped for and crueler than anyone I’d ever known We had both been torn from the bellies of our worlds and met at the bottom, on the cutting room floor, with scalpels in our hands. Pain filled our cups and told us stories of happier days as we drank each other like vampires in the dark rooms of our hearts. It was no secret that I was a mad dog, a stoned stray, feral and desperate, and you howled with me in the canyons of my wounds. I clawed at your back as you drove a stake through my plans and I paid you, happily, for the pleasure of losing my mind. I carved your name in my chest. Parts of you were stitched into the closing gaps, like buckshot buried in the scabbed-over graves of a few brilliant moments. Hot breath and cold kisses. Love-drunk and wine-stupid. Children making children in the shadows of oblivion. © JM Tiffany

Box of Charms

A pale shadow in gossamer draped, old wings tattered and fluttering. A fay ghost trembling, she whispers that I am not I, just a box of charms: old brass and polished stones, all witch bones and memories tethered to feathers.

Her fluttering dreams batter my heart, this ardent jewel of glowing art.

Resplendent she sits, a caged bird singing songs about love, her aching breaths all sweet odes to pain.

I write her name in notes that dance along resonant strings, and spell my own in blood.

She carves strange runes into living bones, her wispy fingers tracing the pink of my lips.

We lock velvet arms in delicate arcs as we frame our presence with spidery limbs and weave these dreams that we become.

© JM Tiffany

Nexus

Wet ribbons of highway pass asphyxiated exits as noise pulsates from the dashboard.

The undulating interstate winds into damp darkness toward a vagant interworld nexus.

Hypnotic neon lights pulse, like vampiric dream-serpents of mind-killing urgency.

We pass under aqueducts where new gods form like obscene angels.

© JM Tiffany

Gravity

Sick with sadness and wretched with longing, I found you in a night of smoke and poison.

Crooked reptiles leered through alcoholic distortions and I burned myself to check the nightmare for substance.

Twin blue flames cut the haze.

Your gravity drew me closer and, like a star of grace, or a sign of calamity, you cut through the clouds and crashed straight into my heart.

© JM Tiffany

Chrysalis

Gasping for air in chrysalitic translucence, I am the liquous anticipation of transformation and the lucent opalescence of nascent life.

I am a new heart pupating at the edge of death.

See me as I hang, swaying from the Tree of All Worlds?

My markings shift like turbulent, melting tattoos, all dreams and memories of flesh mixing like blood in water.

My iridescent sarcophagus cracks and oozes: metabolic scars, glistening, drip the clear fluids of birth. As the luminous crystal membranes of new wings unfold, I am joyous in my terror and shudder with the paroxysms of my becoming.

As my bright wings spread in the darkness I am made again of living fire.

© JM Tiffany

Soil

What did you hope to find here? An idol to worship? A thing to covet and to keep? You had love, and it bared its teeth when I sang. Was it me you wanted or just an escape from the prison of your choices? I could hear the voices in your head, your secrets gaped like wounds in my back, and the wife of your misery sat like a stone on my heart until my insides burst forth. I told you everything, and you took me for a myth. And still, you chose to worship me. You called me your angel even as you stole fire from my sky. I gave you all the mercy and grace I could fit in my fists until I punched that hole in your chest. I poured myself into that pit and swam in the dark. You drank of me and I drown in your mouth until I was spat out like something unholy. And that was your gift. I fell away from you like rain until brighter things grew from the soil of my life. © JM Tiffany

Desert Rose

You said that you loved me but you denied me my face. You said that you loved me but you denied me my body. You said that you loved me but you denied me my clothes. You said that you loved me but you denied me my voice.

You said that you gave me the world  but it wasn’t yours to offer. nor was it mine to receive.

You said that you would give me your heart but all you handed me was an empty vessel.

I longed to drink of you, but my throat grew dry  and still I thirst.

I put my parched lips on yours and a desert spread between us.

I watched the sun go down in your eyes and bloomed alone in the dark  as I waited for the world to end.

© JM Tiffany 2023

Red Bones

In my vision I flew as I fell and rode a great gray wolf through a vortex of smoldering antlers. My beast steered my thoughts until, like water in milk, we merged and became a singular ghost rushing like wind through the dreaming wilds. I was drawn to a sullen sound and at once saw a young boy’s skull hanging from ghastly strings. There was a mournful chanting nearby, a soft feminine voice that sang wordlessly in the night. I found its source: a young girl who was rinsing her ruddy hands in a starlit pool. She was bare, save for a wooden mask, its brow carved with a pale moon. Nearby, amid the vines and briarwood, a black bear lurked, but the girl showed no signs of concern. I saw then eight arrows of yew, each with a glinting green obsidian point, arranged like the spokes of a wheel on the ground. I looked again at the boy’s skull and saw that it hung amidst his red, excarnated bones. A gentle breeze rocked his remains in the gnarled tree, each bloody bit bound there by his own sinews to its misshapen branches. It seemed to me that he sprouted like macabre fruits from the sleeping, twisted limbs. His luminous flesh caught the light of the full moon and glowed dully in the darkness as the masked girl began toiling to stretch it tightly over a simple wooden rack. With her hands, she caressed his lovely ruin, and smeared the taught flesh with the boy’s own brains. This she did to tan and preserve his hide, but also to work his memories into the skin. “I will wear you in the Spring,” she lamented, “and you will rise again as the Sun.” I think that she wept beneath her mask, though its rough wooden visage was unchanging and stern. When she resumed her singing, I heard the rough sound of ursine breath behind me. As snow began to fall, I opened my eyes. © JM Tiffany 1.2.2024

The Egg

Single-minded, bare feet challenged by sinuous vines, his gentle hands prized one egg of three from a neatly crafted nest. Pale and blue as sky, he placed it in his mouth and gingerly descended the roughly knotted tree to squat at its base amid the tangled brush. Carefully, he dropped the turquoise ovoid from his chapped lips into his small, dirty hands. Sad furtive eyes examined the delicate shell. Turning it this way and that, he raised his treasure to a ray of sun that sliced like a white laser through the dense emerald canopy above. The backlit egg glowed, burning like an amber gem enclosed in the pale sapphire of its thin encasement. Gazing intensely, his keen eyes squinted and saw two ruddy, capillaried shadows: the silhouettes of a naked man and woman bound by threads of blood through the ovum of time.

The blue-amber light of diffused sun sparked a bright reflection in the boy’s dark eyes and he lovingly placed the egg back into his dry mouth. Within him, it hatched, and a bird took flight its broad wings, black and white, bore his sight upward in an ascending spiral. He rose above the world until he saw one great tree with two mighty roots, and a single mind that knew itself only as strangers.

He then saw himself as a fruit dangling from its burning branches where masks were hung in offering to the madness of life. When he woke in his mother's arms, he was crying. Large crystalline streams wet his cheeks as the soft lull of her voice consoled him. He saw his concerned father peering wordlessly over his mother's shoulder and the boy smiled slightly, reassured. Then, suddenly, he shuddered as a wild wind raked wooden fingers across the rain-streaked pane of his bedroom window.

The rest of that night the wind howled through the tunnels of his mind and he did not sleep, though he did dream until the sun spilled its warm yoke through the gauzy curtains of his room.

© JM Tiffany, 2.24.24

Nothing Here Is Dead

It was an early morning in late September and the monuments were waiting for the first blush of dawn.

I intended to visit a friend there but had brought my camera to shoot the rising sun.

I drove up a thin black ribbon past ancient stones and gnarled giants to greet the amber glow from the crest of a mighty hill.

The trees there were all fat and happy, their crooked roots sunk hungrily into the silent, sleepy tombs.

I hadn’t been well (and neither had the world) but I felt a certain vigor returning and the morning air resurrected me.

Unfortunately, I had been away too long and I could no longer locate his headstone.

It was just a small plaque anyway. So insignificant and unobtrusive. So unlike him when alive.

I laughed at the comparison.

The last time I visited I had brought his ghost a beer and some cigarettes.

A lot had changed since then and I was no longer a person he would recognize.

Of course, he would always be beautiful. And 27.

Had it really been so long?

Though the dead may rest there, there was so much life in that place. It was a green explosion, even with the new yellows of Fall’s intimation burning at the edges.

I passed a great old oak sporting an early burst of mistletoe.

It made me think of the god Balder and how the pretty, yet parasitic plant, had been used by Loki to kill the god of joy, a being loved by all. Oh how the nine worlds had wept when he passed away!

I told myself stories then about my fallen friend as the lens poured light from an ancient star into my insignificant little head.

Then I remembered that all of this is made of an endless fire.

Ashes are memories, I thought, but that flame lives on.

I was painting with light that morning while the light was painting me.

Nothing here is dead, I thought.

I packed my gear and drove home.

I smiled, because my friend rode with me, nestled warmly in my heart and sprouting from my head like little white berries in a golden hour.

©️ JM Tiffany 3/31/2024

In Silent Depths

The way was steep, descending in tight shafts through sedimentary layers into the pulse-haunted quietude of dark spaces below. I hammered my anchors and tested the protection before rappelling deeper. As the rope spiraled away like a thin snake into the aphotic throat of silence, I lowered myself down. My lantern glowed amber, creating a thin blister of light around me that swayed with each movement. Precariously, I dropped further into the depths. I was squeezed through a maze of tunnels, down broad fissures, and out of claustrophobic cracks into wet chambers. Limestone, gypsum, and dolomite took strange liquous forms, carved as they were by the slow flow of water over time. Occasionally, when I raised my lantern, strange fossils and ancient relics would cast worrisome shadows amid the looming stalactites and stalagmites. As my footfalls echoed into the shadowed stillness the warm glow of my little lantern was my dearest companion. In a place that dark and isolated, time passes differently. Without the Sun and Moon to pull one through their days, time vanishes into a permanent Night in which the only stars are phosphene flashes in the optic nerve, the false lights of the so-called “Prisoner’s Cinema”. But I was no captive here. I had come in search of something. Something lost. Something precious. After several cycles of resting and moving (what day was it?) I reached at last a vast chamber hollowed out long ago by heat and pressure into a natural cathedral. My lantern sent waves of light shimmering through a sea of dancing refraction. I shivered in the vaulted womb and listened to the sound of my breath. Eventually, I found it: a low mound of dirt on a bald island in the center of the prismatic chamber.

Though tired and sore, my heart fluttered in anticipation. I set down my pack, adjusted my lantern, and set to work with my shovel. How long I labored there in that crystalline abyss I cannot say. My face dripped sweat and strained muscles weakened as exhaustion set in. On I went, giving myself fully to the task, until at last I uncovered a feminine form beneath the moist soil of that secret place. I was struck with a sudden fear, and for a moment, I was frozen. I could hear the subtle sound of slow moving-water as I set to using my hands to clear away the dirt. It was then that I saw her face. How long had she lain there? Gingerly, I wiped the mud from her eyes, my hands gently clearing the muck from her cheeks and brow. When she opened her eyes I saw myself in them, and taking her into my arms, we wept. When at last she would emerge into sunlight, it would be without me. My body slid neatly into the impression. As I lay motionless in the mucky indentation, I closed my eyes. “I love you,” I said. “I know,” she spoke softly. I smiled as I felt each shovelful of earth add its weight upon my body. It was strangely comforting. Finally, I could rest. I closed my eyes and dreamt of her. © JM Tiffany 2024

Black Body of The Void

Perhaps we live in a colorfully luminous bullet wound through the black body of the Void. Whole worlds living and dying in the expanding cavitation until the fatal collapse.

Oh well, nothing lasts forever. Probability and certainty offer only one guarantee. It doesn’t matter if you love someone, or how much you pray: all stories end. Yet most human aspirations are pinned to paper wings in the hope that they will fly forever. Mine are covered with stories of us. And everything is on fire. © JM Tiffany 2024

Unsolvable

Long ago, possibly in the late 70s, someone replaced a single piece of this bucolic jigsaw puzzle with one from another box.

This single piece is neither the right size nor the right shape.

Its colors are brighter, and it clearly belongs somewhere else.

The mocking lacuna reminds me suddenly that there are two puzzles that will never be solved.

Each is forever incomplete.

Each puzzle is missing a critical piece belonging to the other, and each piece is somewhere surrounded by others, yet utterly alone.

But then I consider that perhaps these puzzles willingly exchanged parts of themselves.

Conceivably there was an oath, and maybe they were in love.

I ponder how many pieces of myself I have given away and wonder if I, too, am unsolvable.

© JM Tiffany 2024

Red Kisses & White Bones

All we are we are together, falling forever in delicate dissaray.

Sun and moon, separate but not severed, we encircle the sky.

Red kisses and white bones.

The wolf and deer exchanging skins.

© JM Tiffany 2024

Thunder-Black Heart

Pliant and luminous as the melancholy of roses is the softness of my thunder-black heart. Cold, wet, dark, and feminine, I am gentle as nymphs and brutal as angels.

I am beautiful with kindness and mad as truth. My lips part like the wisest of flowers. I am holy and ruinous as the newness of youth, and sadistic as God’s alchemical dreams.

I am a black maze of tunneling light. I take the silent roads of fallen gods and walk trembling in the healing night, for I hold in my chest the deepest of poisons.

I am drunk and swimming with teeming sorrows but the water is warm and the rain is loving. To know myself I sacrifice tomorrows on the altar of today and kiss the mouth that drinks me.

© JM Tiffany 2024

The Knife That Sets Us Free

Madness chops everything into quivering bits, placing them neatly into little boxes. Carved into clever cubes, we are numbered and named, then hidden away or punitively displayed by fools afraid of animals. Our strata laid bare and sliced by the ugly language of fear, we wince and withdraw while grasping the edge that wounds us. Spontaneity is sacrificed with the knife of reason as our flesh is mutilated by moral delusions, forcing straight lines like arrows through hearts, all driven with the fatalism of one-way streets. Meanwhile, Joy bleeds to death on the corner, dying in the wan belief that life is somehow… evil. We are maimed by this stupid cruelty, pierced by its dissonant spears, and crucified to that Holy Assumption. But God doesn’t make mistakes, God is a mistake. The heavens are feral, and Eden lay all around us. We have been dissected by the clumsy, brutal hands of priests and kings, and all that has died was placed into boxes, our eyes trapped in gleaming hexahedrons of waking death. Life’s naked wonder, neatly destroyed, the roses yet bloom and trees will bear their crimson fruit. So run, my Dear, run while there is yet red on your lips, and diamonds in the sky. Tigers still prowl the night. They are searching with hunger and bitten by need. Let us capture them, and kiss them, and make love like beasts. For even now, in the shadow of the blackest cube, bright things may grow. Some flowers bloom the better for having been cut, and sometimes it is the knife that sets us free. © JM Tiffany 2024

Empty

Egos hate emptiness, but empty is what we use. Just ask the watering can and it will tell you: “I am hollow that I may be filled. This void within me contains what nourishes life”. So I pour myself out, over and over, until the water runs clear and the flowers bloom. I am full of emptiness. I am useful.

© JM Tiffany 2024

Lost

No one wants the broken. That which is soiled and cracked does not find a home amid the shine of new things. Whatever is ruined does not attract care. There are no ribbons for dead dolls. No lullabies for the lost. What is cast out is forgotten. What is used is disdained, and only those who have fallen will find us.

© JM Tiffany 2024

Moss

No amount of fear or desire will tilt the scales of life. All the iron nails in the temple of my heart will not outweigh the core of the earth. The winds shall howl over the song of my breath and clouds will cover my nakedness. The trees do bend, but not for me. Mine is the stillness of spreading roots, the fixed and sleepy pace of moss. I do not resent this rain upon my face, but cursed are they that long for the sun.

©️ JM Tiffany 2024

Green

Your limbs were too weak to hold me when I fell. There was no malice in me for that. I was ripe and heavy with age. You were supple and green, far too delicate for one such as I. You drooped as I tugged at you. It was cruel of me to want you so. I wanted so badly for you to see what I carried within me. There was a secret promise of newness hidden in the bright flesh of that late summer. I sighed with resignation as I watched you climbing away from me. But then, I smiled, for though the fall had split me open the birds that ate my heart carried it somewhere brighter. A place as young and green as the hands that let me go.

©️ JM Tiffany 2024