<![CDATA[Poetry Forum - Miscellaneous Poetry]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/ Thu, 16 Jul 2026 23:40:07 +0000 MyBB <![CDATA[The Next Flood]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27479.html Sun, 12 Jul 2026 15:12:24 +0000 Mark A Becker]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27479.html The Next Flood

One day the cloud will burst
and millions will drown
in the zeroes and ones
of the world's memories.

As flood waters swell
they'll hold phones to the sky-
call out for connection
to the God they believe in-

only to be answered
with dark screens, and silence.]]> The Next Flood

One day the cloud will burst
and millions will drown
in the zeroes and ones
of the world's memories.

As flood waters swell
they'll hold phones to the sky-
call out for connection
to the God they believe in-

only to be answered
with dark screens, and silence.]]> <![CDATA[The Aegis chapter 3]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27465.html Wed, 01 Jul 2026 16:54:57 +0000 milo]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27465.html Night Shift

The hospital at 4:47 in the morning had a sound that was different from the hospital at any other hour , not quieter exactly, the building was never quiet, but the sounds that remained were the ones that belonged there underneath everything else. The ventilation. The soft percussion of shoes on linoleum. The occasional page, unhurried, carrying down the corridor and dissolving before it reached the end.
Elena had been a nurse long enough that she no longer heard these sounds consciously. They registered the way her own breathing registered , present, accounted for, not requiring attention. What required attention was the door at the end of the corridor, room 412, where Mr. Aldridge had been awake since two and where the chart said there was nothing to be done about that but the chart, as Elena had learned over twenty years, did not know everything.
She checked the time. She had a medication round in eight minutes.
She went in anyway.
Mr. Aldridge was 79 and had been in this bed for eleven days and had a daughter in Phoenix who called every morning at nine and a son who had been going to visit since the third day and hadn't. He had told Elena this without complaint, in the specific way of people who have rearranged their expectations so many times that the rearranging no longer registers as loss. He slept badly and woke in the small hours and lay in the dark with the television off because he had told Elena on the second night that the television at this hour felt like company that didn't know you were there, which Elena had thought about more than once since.
She sat in the chair beside the bed. Not the chair she'd pull up for a clinical reason , the other one, the one for family, further from the equipment.
"Can't sleep either," she said.
Mr. Aldridge smiled without showing his teeth. "I sleep fine," he said. "Just not at night."
She stayed four minutes longer than the eight she had. Then she went and did the medication round.
The day nurse was twenty-six and good at the parts of the job that could be learned quickly and still building the parts that couldn't. She took Elena's handoff notes with the slight overwhelmed quality of someone drinking from a moving source , not drowning, just working hard to keep up.
"Patterson in 308 is going to tell you she doesn't need the afternoon medication," Elena said. "She's wrong. She knows she's wrong. She'll take it if you don't make a thing of it."
"Okay."
"Aldridge in 412 wants the blinds up before nine. Not after. If they're not up he won't say anything and he'll spend the morning looking at closed blinds."
"I'll make a note."
"Rivera in 401 is scared. Nobody's told him anything he doesn't already know but he's scared anyway. If you have two minutes , " Elena paused. "You don't have to do anything. Just be in the room for two minutes. That's enough."
The day nurse wrote something. Looked up. "How do you know all this?"
Elena picked up her bag. "You'll know it too," she said. "Give it time."
She said it without condescension. It was simply true, the way the ventilation sound was true , present, not requiring discussion.
Dr. Okafor passed her in the corridor on her way out. He was thirty-eight and had been here six years and had learned early that Elena's read on a patient was worth more than most things a chart could tell you. He slowed without stopping. "The Brennan family," he said. It was enough.
"Ready," Elena said. "They're not."
He nodded and kept walking. She kept walking. The corridor doing what corridors do at shift change , two versions of the same place briefly occupying the same space before one of them gives way.
She passed room 412. Glanced in through the window. Mr. Aldridge was asleep, finally, one hand open on the blanket beside him. She noted it the way she noted things , filed, not dwelt on , and went to get her coat.
The bus at 7:30 in the morning had its own specific population. People going toward things rather than coming from them, mostly , the overnight workers the exception, recognizable by the quality of their stillness, the way they occupied their seats like ballast. Elena found a window seat and let the city move past her.
She knew this route the way she knew the hospital sounds. Not consciously. It was just in her, the sequence of blocks and intersections and the specific way the light changed when they came over the rise on Pulaski and the neighborhood spread out below.
She watched it. A man opening his shop, the gate rolling up with a sound she couldn't hear through the glass. Kids at a bus stop, three of them, the particular energy of people who have been awake too long and are now awake again. A woman she recognized from two years ago , a patient, a difficult month, a good outcome , walking with a bag of groceries and moving like someone who felt well, which was the best possible thing Elena could observe from a bus window.
Then Eli Cole, outside the corner store.
She knew him the way you knew people you'd watched grow up on a block , not intimately, just completely, the way a landscape becomes part of your vision. He'd been on this block his whole life. She remembered him younger, harder around the edges, before whatever it was that had happened to him in his mid-twenties that nobody fully explained and everybody understood had changed something in how he moved through the world. Now he moved through it like he meant to be there. Like the block had asked for someone and he had shown up.
He was talking to someone. Something ordinary. He looked up as the bus passed , she wasn't sure if he saw her through the glass or just the bus, just movement , and she lifted two fingers from her lap in the gesture that substituted for a nod when glass was between you.
The bus moved on.
The apartment had the quality it always had when Marcus wasn't in it , not empty exactly, more like held. His presence in it even when he was absent, the specific weight of a person who lived somewhere. His door slightly open, the organized chaos of his room visible in the gap. She didn't go in. She'd learned early that he kept his space the way he kept his thinking , accessible on his terms, and that the right response to that was to respect it.
She made breakfast standing at the counter. Ate it standing at the counter. Looked at his door.
She knew the edges. She had always known the edges. This was a choice she had made and remade so many times it had stopped feeling like a choice and become simply the way she moved through the specific difficulty of raising a boy alone in a place that wanted things from him she couldn't always protect him from. She saw what she could afford to see. She didn't look directly at what she couldn't.
The twenty was still on the counter. He hadn't taken it.
She noted this. Put it back. Set a new note under it.
She thought about what she wanted to say. This was something people didn't know about the notes , that she thought about them. That they weren't afterthoughts. She stood at the counter with the pen and considered what she actually meant to tell him, and then she wrote the thing that was underneath what she meant, which was usually closer to true.
Every person you meet today is fighting something you can't see. Act accordingly.
She capped the pen. Looked at it for a moment. Decided it was right.
She got four hours. The block outside didn't pause for it , the sounds of it coming through the window, traffic and someone's music and the specific percussion of the neighborhood doing what it did in the middle of the day. She lay in the dark of her room with the blinds drawn and let it wash over her and eventually, the way it always eventually did, sleep found her anyway.
In the half-state before it did, her mind moved the way it moved when she wasn't supervising it. Mr. Aldridge's hand open on the blanket. The day nurse writing something down. Marcus at seven, the year he'd put the poster up, standing in front of it with the solemnity of someone performing a private ceremony. She had teased him about it , gently, she hoped, the kind of teasing that was really just love finding a way to be light , and he had looked at her with the expression he wore when he was deciding whether to explain something or protect it, and he had chosen to protect it, which she had understood and honored.
She had thought then that it was a phase. The way children moved through obsessions, the dinosaurs and the space shuttles and the athletes on the wall. She had waited for Aegis to become something else.
She fell asleep still waiting.
She got up at two and went out because the neighborhood didn't pause and neither did the list of things that constituted actually living somewhere. The pharmacy. The grocery store where she moved through the aisles with the practiced efficiency of someone who knew exactly what things cost and planned accordingly. She bought what was on sale. She bought the cereal Marcus liked even though it wasn't.
Mrs. Patterson was outside her building when Elena came back up the block. Seventy-three years old and on this block for forty of them and possessed of the particular quality of someone who had seen enough versions of the neighborhood to hold them all simultaneously without confusion. She had a way of knowing things without appearing to seek them out, the way certain people were simply present in a place in a way that made the place confide in them.
She fell into step beside Elena without preamble.
"Your boy," she said.
Elena waited.
"Tuesday morning. Coming off the block on the south end." Mrs. Patterson adjusted her bag. "He had company. That Dre and the others."
Elena kept walking. "Okay," she said.
"I'm not saying anything."
"I know."
"Just , " Mrs. Patterson paused at her steps. "He's a careful boy. I know that. I just wanted you to know I see him."
Elena looked at her. "Thank you, Ida."
Mrs. Patterson went inside.
Elena stood on the sidewalk for a moment with her groceries. The afternoon light on the buildings. The block doing what it did. She walked the rest of the way home not quite the same as when she'd left, which was how it always was when someone told you a true thing you already knew.
She was back at the hospital by nine.
The corridor at nine at night had a different quality from the corridor at 4:47 in the morning , fuller, the day shift's residue still present in the energy of the place, the particular hum of a building that had been busy and was beginning to think about slowing down. Elena moved through it with the adjustment she made every time she came back, the small internal recalibration of a person resettling into a place that was also, in some ways that had nothing to do with her apartment, home.
Room 308. Mrs. Patterson , a different Mrs. Patterson, no relation, a coincidence that Elena had noted once and then filed away , was 81 and had strong opinions about her afternoon medication and stronger opinions about being told what to do and underneath both of those things a loneliness that Elena recognized the shape of from a hundred other rooms. She was awake, the television on, the volume low.
On the screen , the news cycling through its evening version of itself. A reporter outside a building Elena didn't recognize, the chyron reading something about an ongoing investigation. Then the footage: a loading dock, a blurred shape moving through the frame, the kind of image that had been on every screen for two days.
Mysterious villain "The Ghost" continues to terrorize the city's neighborhoods, the reporter said. *Authorities are asking residents to report any suspicious , *
Mrs. Patterson made a sound.
Elena looked at her.
"Terrorize," the old woman said. She was looking at the screen with the expression of someone who had been told something inaccurate in a very confident voice. "You know what I heard this morning?" She didn't wait for an answer. "Family on my floor. Been behind on their ConEd bill since July. Shut-off notice on the door last week." She looked at Elena now. "This morning the bill is paid. Nobody knows who did it." She looked back at the screen. "That's the terror they're talking about."
Elena looked at the television. The footage still running, the blurred shape, the reporter's voice moving on to something else.
She reached over and turned it off. Gently. The way you'd close a door that didn't need to be open.
"How are you feeling tonight?" she said.
Mrs. Patterson settled back against her pillow. "Same as yesterday," she said. "Which is better than I expected."
Elena checked the chart. Made a note. Did the things the chart required. And then, because the chart didn't require it and the night was long and the old woman's face had the quality Mr. Aldridge's had at 4:47 in the morning , that specific texture of someone awake in the dark with too much room for thought , she stayed a few minutes beyond what was necessary.
They talked about nothing important. That was the point.
The call came at eleven forty-three.
She was at the nurses' station when her colleague found her, and she knew from the face before the words what category of thing she was walking toward. Not the emergency category , something had already happened, not was happening. The stillness of it.
Room 317. A young man, twenty-two, who had come in six hours ago through the ER. Something that had a window , Elena understood this in the first thirty seconds, reading the chart, reading the room, the specific geometry of what was possible and what was no longer possible and where the line between them had been. The window had been there. Narrow, but there.
The insurance authorization hadn't come through.
She stood at the nurses' station with the chart and read it twice. The denial code. The prior authorization that had been submitted at seven and hadn't been processed because it had gone to a call center that handled volume not cases, that had a queue and a close-of-business and a policy written to protect a number on a page somewhere that had no idea this room existed.
By the time it might have been processed the window was closed.
She put the chart down.
She went to the room. Sat with the family , a mother, an aunt, a younger sister who was holding her own arms like she was trying to keep herself together from the outside. Elena sat with them and said the things that were true and didn't say the things that were also true because the things that were also true were not what this room needed right now. She was present in the way she was always present, fully, without reservation, the four minutes longer than necessary that she never counted and never announced.
When she came out the corridor was the same corridor it had been. The ventilation. The shoes on the linoleum. The page carrying down the hall and dissolving.
She walked to the nurses' station. Sat down. Picked up the next chart.
And under her breath , not performing it, not aware she was saying it, just the sound a person makes when the world confirms something they already understood and the understanding is no comfort at all ,
"The system wasn't built for people like us."
Her own words from a different context. Said differently now. Without the resilience underneath them that she usually carried as a matter of habit, the way she carried her keys and her thermos and the twenty years of learning how to work inside and outside simultaneously.
Just the fact of it. Bare.
She opened the chart. The corridor kept moving around her. There were other patients. There was always more work. This was not a reason for despair and it was not a comfort and it was simply true, the way the ventilation sound was true, and she had long since learned that simply true things did not require a response.
She did the work.
The night went on.]]> Night Shift

The hospital at 4:47 in the morning had a sound that was different from the hospital at any other hour , not quieter exactly, the building was never quiet, but the sounds that remained were the ones that belonged there underneath everything else. The ventilation. The soft percussion of shoes on linoleum. The occasional page, unhurried, carrying down the corridor and dissolving before it reached the end.
Elena had been a nurse long enough that she no longer heard these sounds consciously. They registered the way her own breathing registered , present, accounted for, not requiring attention. What required attention was the door at the end of the corridor, room 412, where Mr. Aldridge had been awake since two and where the chart said there was nothing to be done about that but the chart, as Elena had learned over twenty years, did not know everything.
She checked the time. She had a medication round in eight minutes.
She went in anyway.
Mr. Aldridge was 79 and had been in this bed for eleven days and had a daughter in Phoenix who called every morning at nine and a son who had been going to visit since the third day and hadn't. He had told Elena this without complaint, in the specific way of people who have rearranged their expectations so many times that the rearranging no longer registers as loss. He slept badly and woke in the small hours and lay in the dark with the television off because he had told Elena on the second night that the television at this hour felt like company that didn't know you were there, which Elena had thought about more than once since.
She sat in the chair beside the bed. Not the chair she'd pull up for a clinical reason , the other one, the one for family, further from the equipment.
"Can't sleep either," she said.
Mr. Aldridge smiled without showing his teeth. "I sleep fine," he said. "Just not at night."
She stayed four minutes longer than the eight she had. Then she went and did the medication round.
The day nurse was twenty-six and good at the parts of the job that could be learned quickly and still building the parts that couldn't. She took Elena's handoff notes with the slight overwhelmed quality of someone drinking from a moving source , not drowning, just working hard to keep up.
"Patterson in 308 is going to tell you she doesn't need the afternoon medication," Elena said. "She's wrong. She knows she's wrong. She'll take it if you don't make a thing of it."
"Okay."
"Aldridge in 412 wants the blinds up before nine. Not after. If they're not up he won't say anything and he'll spend the morning looking at closed blinds."
"I'll make a note."
"Rivera in 401 is scared. Nobody's told him anything he doesn't already know but he's scared anyway. If you have two minutes , " Elena paused. "You don't have to do anything. Just be in the room for two minutes. That's enough."
The day nurse wrote something. Looked up. "How do you know all this?"
Elena picked up her bag. "You'll know it too," she said. "Give it time."
She said it without condescension. It was simply true, the way the ventilation sound was true , present, not requiring discussion.
Dr. Okafor passed her in the corridor on her way out. He was thirty-eight and had been here six years and had learned early that Elena's read on a patient was worth more than most things a chart could tell you. He slowed without stopping. "The Brennan family," he said. It was enough.
"Ready," Elena said. "They're not."
He nodded and kept walking. She kept walking. The corridor doing what corridors do at shift change , two versions of the same place briefly occupying the same space before one of them gives way.
She passed room 412. Glanced in through the window. Mr. Aldridge was asleep, finally, one hand open on the blanket beside him. She noted it the way she noted things , filed, not dwelt on , and went to get her coat.
The bus at 7:30 in the morning had its own specific population. People going toward things rather than coming from them, mostly , the overnight workers the exception, recognizable by the quality of their stillness, the way they occupied their seats like ballast. Elena found a window seat and let the city move past her.
She knew this route the way she knew the hospital sounds. Not consciously. It was just in her, the sequence of blocks and intersections and the specific way the light changed when they came over the rise on Pulaski and the neighborhood spread out below.
She watched it. A man opening his shop, the gate rolling up with a sound she couldn't hear through the glass. Kids at a bus stop, three of them, the particular energy of people who have been awake too long and are now awake again. A woman she recognized from two years ago , a patient, a difficult month, a good outcome , walking with a bag of groceries and moving like someone who felt well, which was the best possible thing Elena could observe from a bus window.
Then Eli Cole, outside the corner store.
She knew him the way you knew people you'd watched grow up on a block , not intimately, just completely, the way a landscape becomes part of your vision. He'd been on this block his whole life. She remembered him younger, harder around the edges, before whatever it was that had happened to him in his mid-twenties that nobody fully explained and everybody understood had changed something in how he moved through the world. Now he moved through it like he meant to be there. Like the block had asked for someone and he had shown up.
He was talking to someone. Something ordinary. He looked up as the bus passed , she wasn't sure if he saw her through the glass or just the bus, just movement , and she lifted two fingers from her lap in the gesture that substituted for a nod when glass was between you.
The bus moved on.
The apartment had the quality it always had when Marcus wasn't in it , not empty exactly, more like held. His presence in it even when he was absent, the specific weight of a person who lived somewhere. His door slightly open, the organized chaos of his room visible in the gap. She didn't go in. She'd learned early that he kept his space the way he kept his thinking , accessible on his terms, and that the right response to that was to respect it.
She made breakfast standing at the counter. Ate it standing at the counter. Looked at his door.
She knew the edges. She had always known the edges. This was a choice she had made and remade so many times it had stopped feeling like a choice and become simply the way she moved through the specific difficulty of raising a boy alone in a place that wanted things from him she couldn't always protect him from. She saw what she could afford to see. She didn't look directly at what she couldn't.
The twenty was still on the counter. He hadn't taken it.
She noted this. Put it back. Set a new note under it.
She thought about what she wanted to say. This was something people didn't know about the notes , that she thought about them. That they weren't afterthoughts. She stood at the counter with the pen and considered what she actually meant to tell him, and then she wrote the thing that was underneath what she meant, which was usually closer to true.
Every person you meet today is fighting something you can't see. Act accordingly.
She capped the pen. Looked at it for a moment. Decided it was right.
She got four hours. The block outside didn't pause for it , the sounds of it coming through the window, traffic and someone's music and the specific percussion of the neighborhood doing what it did in the middle of the day. She lay in the dark of her room with the blinds drawn and let it wash over her and eventually, the way it always eventually did, sleep found her anyway.
In the half-state before it did, her mind moved the way it moved when she wasn't supervising it. Mr. Aldridge's hand open on the blanket. The day nurse writing something down. Marcus at seven, the year he'd put the poster up, standing in front of it with the solemnity of someone performing a private ceremony. She had teased him about it , gently, she hoped, the kind of teasing that was really just love finding a way to be light , and he had looked at her with the expression he wore when he was deciding whether to explain something or protect it, and he had chosen to protect it, which she had understood and honored.
She had thought then that it was a phase. The way children moved through obsessions, the dinosaurs and the space shuttles and the athletes on the wall. She had waited for Aegis to become something else.
She fell asleep still waiting.
She got up at two and went out because the neighborhood didn't pause and neither did the list of things that constituted actually living somewhere. The pharmacy. The grocery store where she moved through the aisles with the practiced efficiency of someone who knew exactly what things cost and planned accordingly. She bought what was on sale. She bought the cereal Marcus liked even though it wasn't.
Mrs. Patterson was outside her building when Elena came back up the block. Seventy-three years old and on this block for forty of them and possessed of the particular quality of someone who had seen enough versions of the neighborhood to hold them all simultaneously without confusion. She had a way of knowing things without appearing to seek them out, the way certain people were simply present in a place in a way that made the place confide in them.
She fell into step beside Elena without preamble.
"Your boy," she said.
Elena waited.
"Tuesday morning. Coming off the block on the south end." Mrs. Patterson adjusted her bag. "He had company. That Dre and the others."
Elena kept walking. "Okay," she said.
"I'm not saying anything."
"I know."
"Just , " Mrs. Patterson paused at her steps. "He's a careful boy. I know that. I just wanted you to know I see him."
Elena looked at her. "Thank you, Ida."
Mrs. Patterson went inside.
Elena stood on the sidewalk for a moment with her groceries. The afternoon light on the buildings. The block doing what it did. She walked the rest of the way home not quite the same as when she'd left, which was how it always was when someone told you a true thing you already knew.
She was back at the hospital by nine.
The corridor at nine at night had a different quality from the corridor at 4:47 in the morning , fuller, the day shift's residue still present in the energy of the place, the particular hum of a building that had been busy and was beginning to think about slowing down. Elena moved through it with the adjustment she made every time she came back, the small internal recalibration of a person resettling into a place that was also, in some ways that had nothing to do with her apartment, home.
Room 308. Mrs. Patterson , a different Mrs. Patterson, no relation, a coincidence that Elena had noted once and then filed away , was 81 and had strong opinions about her afternoon medication and stronger opinions about being told what to do and underneath both of those things a loneliness that Elena recognized the shape of from a hundred other rooms. She was awake, the television on, the volume low.
On the screen , the news cycling through its evening version of itself. A reporter outside a building Elena didn't recognize, the chyron reading something about an ongoing investigation. Then the footage: a loading dock, a blurred shape moving through the frame, the kind of image that had been on every screen for two days.
Mysterious villain "The Ghost" continues to terrorize the city's neighborhoods, the reporter said. *Authorities are asking residents to report any suspicious , *
Mrs. Patterson made a sound.
Elena looked at her.
"Terrorize," the old woman said. She was looking at the screen with the expression of someone who had been told something inaccurate in a very confident voice. "You know what I heard this morning?" She didn't wait for an answer. "Family on my floor. Been behind on their ConEd bill since July. Shut-off notice on the door last week." She looked at Elena now. "This morning the bill is paid. Nobody knows who did it." She looked back at the screen. "That's the terror they're talking about."
Elena looked at the television. The footage still running, the blurred shape, the reporter's voice moving on to something else.
She reached over and turned it off. Gently. The way you'd close a door that didn't need to be open.
"How are you feeling tonight?" she said.
Mrs. Patterson settled back against her pillow. "Same as yesterday," she said. "Which is better than I expected."
Elena checked the chart. Made a note. Did the things the chart required. And then, because the chart didn't require it and the night was long and the old woman's face had the quality Mr. Aldridge's had at 4:47 in the morning , that specific texture of someone awake in the dark with too much room for thought , she stayed a few minutes beyond what was necessary.
They talked about nothing important. That was the point.
The call came at eleven forty-three.
She was at the nurses' station when her colleague found her, and she knew from the face before the words what category of thing she was walking toward. Not the emergency category , something had already happened, not was happening. The stillness of it.
Room 317. A young man, twenty-two, who had come in six hours ago through the ER. Something that had a window , Elena understood this in the first thirty seconds, reading the chart, reading the room, the specific geometry of what was possible and what was no longer possible and where the line between them had been. The window had been there. Narrow, but there.
The insurance authorization hadn't come through.
She stood at the nurses' station with the chart and read it twice. The denial code. The prior authorization that had been submitted at seven and hadn't been processed because it had gone to a call center that handled volume not cases, that had a queue and a close-of-business and a policy written to protect a number on a page somewhere that had no idea this room existed.
By the time it might have been processed the window was closed.
She put the chart down.
She went to the room. Sat with the family , a mother, an aunt, a younger sister who was holding her own arms like she was trying to keep herself together from the outside. Elena sat with them and said the things that were true and didn't say the things that were also true because the things that were also true were not what this room needed right now. She was present in the way she was always present, fully, without reservation, the four minutes longer than necessary that she never counted and never announced.
When she came out the corridor was the same corridor it had been. The ventilation. The shoes on the linoleum. The page carrying down the hall and dissolving.
She walked to the nurses' station. Sat down. Picked up the next chart.
And under her breath , not performing it, not aware she was saying it, just the sound a person makes when the world confirms something they already understood and the understanding is no comfort at all ,
"The system wasn't built for people like us."
Her own words from a different context. Said differently now. Without the resilience underneath them that she usually carried as a matter of habit, the way she carried her keys and her thermos and the twenty years of learning how to work inside and outside simultaneously.
Just the fact of it. Bare.
She opened the chart. The corridor kept moving around her. There were other patients. There was always more work. This was not a reason for despair and it was not a comfort and it was simply true, the way the ventilation sound was true, and she had long since learned that simply true things did not require a response.
She did the work.
The night went on.]]> <![CDATA[Olmsted Opinion]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27453.html Fri, 26 Jun 2026 16:16:20 +0000 Bunx]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27453.html Olmsted Opinion

Hide them from you
for you might find the truth.
Disabilities often have no cure 
we'll lock them up to feel secured. 

Put them away for their delusions.
Fine their families, put them in institutions.
How dare they dream of something more
than the help they can't afford. 

Turn them into problems with a price tag.
Paint them as parasites, take their hope away. 
Invest in their suffering then get paid.
America works in a predatory haze.

Though the truth is,

those who can't feel their legs
will climb the capital if it takes a day.
They can be treated, and be stable
for decades to life if society is able.

Those who tell you to fear
have the most to lose when you choose love.]]> Olmsted Opinion

Hide them from you
for you might find the truth.
Disabilities often have no cure 
we'll lock them up to feel secured. 

Put them away for their delusions.
Fine their families, put them in institutions.
How dare they dream of something more
than the help they can't afford. 

Turn them into problems with a price tag.
Paint them as parasites, take their hope away. 
Invest in their suffering then get paid.
America works in a predatory haze.

Though the truth is,

those who can't feel their legs
will climb the capital if it takes a day.
They can be treated, and be stable
for decades to life if society is able.

Those who tell you to fear
have the most to lose when you choose love.]]> <![CDATA[Claims of Omniscience]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27452.html Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:41:59 +0000 dukealien]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27452.html

Darling automóbile will not
let me lift my hands from her wheel
even though she steers, insisting
she knows where this road is bending.

She has LIDAR, which can suss out
lane-marks, obstacles and other
cars at frequencies I cannot,
being merely human-sighted.

So, through waterfalls of blinding
rain we race at sixty miles per
hour, confident that brakes and
LIDAR will suffice to save us.

Madness, really, to reside one’s
trust in mechanisms merely
meant to help.  Yet airline pilots
do, I did, and now I’m writing.

Back from driving solo 2200 miles in 7 days.  This happened, the only counterfactual being that I actually think of my car as male (he has a male pet name) but the story seems to work better this way.  To the extent that it's a story...

Alternate title:  Second Sight
]]>

Darling automóbile will not
let me lift my hands from her wheel
even though she steers, insisting
she knows where this road is bending.

She has LIDAR, which can suss out
lane-marks, obstacles and other
cars at frequencies I cannot,
being merely human-sighted.

So, through waterfalls of blinding
rain we race at sixty miles per
hour, confident that brakes and
LIDAR will suffice to save us.

Madness, really, to reside one’s
trust in mechanisms merely
meant to help.  Yet airline pilots
do, I did, and now I’m writing.

Back from driving solo 2200 miles in 7 days.  This happened, the only counterfactual being that I actually think of my car as male (he has a male pet name) but the story seems to work better this way.  To the extent that it's a story...

Alternate title:  Second Sight
]]> <![CDATA[Merlin and the Dragon Queen - chapter 10]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27445.html Sat, 20 Jun 2026 21:34:26 +0000 milo]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27445.html Chapter 10

They landed in a field of long grass east of the city walls as the last light left the sky completely.  Yggdrasil settled with surprising delicacy for something her size, her great claws finding purchase in the Italian soil without the ground shaking as Merlin had expected.  He slid down her flank and landed in the grass and stood for a moment letting his legs remember what standing felt like.  Two days bareback on a dragon had left him with a gait that he suspected looked less like a wizard and more like a sailor who had been at sea for a month.  He took several experimental steps and decided that dignity was something he could reclaim later.
The night air of the Roman countryside was warm and smelled of dry grass and rosemary and the distant cookfires of the city.  Above them the stars were bright and Rome glowed against the horizon — not a single light but a general luminescence, the accumulated glow of a city of a million souls going about the business of their evening.  Even from here Merlin could hear it, a low continuous murmur that never quite resolved into individual sounds.  He had forgotten how alive Rome was, even at night.  Especially at night.
He reached into his pocket.  The mouse looked up at him from his palm with the alert and slightly accusatory expression of a creature that has spent two days in a wizard's pocket crossing the channel and most of the continent and has opinions about this.
"Yes," Merlin agreed, "I know.  I am sorry about that."  He set the mouse carefully in the long grass and crouched down.  He whispered to it for a moment, his long fingers cupped gently around it.  The mouse sat very still, listening with the focused attention it had learned was generally worth applying to whatever this particular human said to it.  When Merlin finished speaking he lifted his hand and the mouse sat a moment longer, then turned and disappeared into the grass with a businesslike rustle.  There was good Italian clover not far off.  It would find its way.
Merlin stood and turned to Yggdrasil who had been watching this exchange with her gold eyes half lidded. "The mouse," she said, in the tone of someone filing away a piece of information they find simultaneously baffling and faintly illuminating.
"He was a long way from home," Merlin said simply and turned to look at the city.
Yggdrasil lowered her great head beside him so that they were both regarding Rome from roughly the same vantage point, though what she saw with those ancient gold eyes and what Merlin saw with his were almost certainly very different things.  "The inlet is there," she said, indicating with the faintest tilt of her head toward the dark eastern wall where the aqueduct entered the city in its great arched channel.  "I can smell the water."
"You'll need to wait until the third hour of the night," Merlin said.  "The streets need to be quieter before you approach.  The inlet is outside the walls but there are sentries on the eastern gate and I don't want them raising an alarm before the sleep breath has reached them."
"And how will I know when it is the third hour?" she asked.
"Rome rings her bells," Merlin said.  "You'll hear them."
Yggdrasil regarded him.  "And you?  You are going in now?"
"I need time to get into position before you begin."  Merlin pulled his hood up over his head and checked within his robes — the small stone-encased sword sat in his pocket, the herbs for his visions, his pipe, the small pewter dish.  Everything present.  "Once the sleep breath starts moving through the aqueducts it will spread through the city faster than a man can walk.  I need to already be where I need to be when that happens."
"Where Mab is," said Yggdrasil.
"Where Mab is," Merlin confirmed.
A pause settled between them.  An owl called somewhere in the field behind them.  Yggdrasil's breath moved the grass in slow warm waves.  "When I begin," she said, "I will not be able to stop until it is done.  If you need more time than I can give you, I cannot help that.  If the city wakes before you are finished — "
"It won't come to that," Merlin said.
Another pause, longer.  "The mouse," Yggdrasil said again, and this time the word sat differently in her mouth, as if she were turning something over that she hadn't expected to find there.  She said nothing further.  She simply settled into the grass like a hillside deciding to become permanent and closed her gold eyes and Merlin understood he had been dismissed.
He turned toward Rome and walked.
✵
The eastern gate of Rome was manned by four soldiers of the Palatine guard, their armor catching the torchlight in the lazy manner of men who had stood this post a thousand nights without incident and expected tonight to be the thousand and first.  Merlin approached along the road without hurrying, his hood up, his staff making its regular knock against the paving stones.  One of the guards stepped forward with a hand up.
Merlin lowered his hood slightly and let the power rise just enough to glow faintly amber in his eyes.  The guard's hand stayed up but the rest of him took a step back.  "State your business," the man said, with the admirable commitment to duty of someone whose body clearly wanted to be somewhere else entirely.
"I am a physician," Merlin said in Latin, which he spoke as fluently as he spoke everything else, "called for the Bishop Epiphanius who has taken unwell."  He pulled from within his robe a document — beautifully rendered on fresh vellum in an ecclesiastical hand, sealed with a wax impression that bore the mark of the bishop's office — and presented it to the guard with the bored efficiency of a man who has done this before.
The guard took the document, looked at it, held it at a slight angle to catch the torchlight better, and handed it back.  He had almost certainly not read it.  The seal had done its work.  "Pass," he said and stepped aside.
Merlin pulled his hood back up and walked through the gate into Rome.
He had prepared the document two nights ago on the rocky outcropping while Yggdrasil slept, conjuring the vellum and the ink and the seal from the materials he carried, working by the light of a small and carefully contained flame while the channel moved dark around him.  He had also prepared three further documents of varying authority for varying situations.  A wizard, he had long believed, should be able to fight his way out of most situations but should prefer to talk his way out where possible and should always have the paperwork.
Inside the walls Rome was everything he remembered and nothing like he remembered simultaneously.  The bones of the city were the same — the great arterial roads running straight and wide between the densely packed insulae, the smell of bread and garum and sewage and incense that was Rome's singular perfume, the way sound behaved differently here than anywhere else, bouncing off stone and marble and coming back changed.  But the city was older now, layered with the additions of generations, the old buildings patched and built over and built over again until the Rome of Caesar was somewhere underneath the Rome of Glycerius like a palimpsest.  Torches burned at intervals along the main roads.  The side streets were dark.
Merlin moved through the city with the purposeful unhurried pace of a man who belongs exactly where he is.  He had learned long ago that the most effective form of concealment in a city was not invisibility but certainty — a man who moves as if he knows where he is going and has every right to go there is almost entirely invisible to casual observation.  He kept to the main roads where the torchlight gave him clear vision and the foot traffic, still considerable at this hour, gave him cover.
The bishop's residence was in the shadow of the Palatine Hill, a substantial building of white stone set back from a colonnaded street.  Merlin had seen it in his visions and found it without difficulty.  He did not go to the front entrance.  He walked the perimeter of the building once, reading it — the placement of guards, the lit and unlit windows, the side entrance used by servants, the small garden at the rear with its fig tree and its well and its convenient shadows.  He counted nine guards in total, stationed with the regular spacing of a security arrangement that had been designed to look serious without being particularly serious.  Epiphanius — or rather, Mab wearing Epiphanius — clearly did not expect a direct assault.  Why would she?  She was a bishop in the most powerful city in the world surrounded by the soldiers of an empire.
What she was expecting was Merlin.  He had no doubt about that.  The wink from inside his vision had been an invitation as much as a taunt.  She had set the table and she was waiting for him to sit down.
Merlin settled into the shadows of the garden beneath the fig tree, folded himself crosslegged onto the ground and waited.  Above him Rome murmured and flickered.  Somewhere in the city a man was singing, something low and repetitive, the kind of song that exists only to fill silence.  Merlin listened to it and found himself thinking of his mother, which surprised him.  He rarely allowed himself that.  He put the thought away carefully and listened to Rome instead and watched the windows of the bishop's residence for the movement of a shadow that moved differently than the others.
The bells rang the third hour.
Merlin rose, brushed the Italian dust from his robes and moved to a position beside the garden wall where he had a clear line of sight to both the main entrance of the residence and the street beyond.  He settled his breathing.  He pressed the flat of his palm against the paving stone beneath him and sent his awareness down through it, down through the stone and the soil beneath the stone, reaching for the water.
He found it almost immediately — the vast cool network of the aqueduct running beneath the city like a second circulatory system, patient and constant, carrying its cargo through the stone arteries under every road and building.  He held his awareness there and waited.
It began as the faintest change in the quality of the water.  Not a smell exactly, not through stone, but a difference — something moving through the channel that was not water.  Then another.  Then it was everywhere at once, spreading through the network the way dye spreads through cloth, following every channel and branch and tributary simultaneously, rising through every vent and grate and outlet in the city in thin pale wisps of vapor that meant nothing to a man hurrying home and everything to a man paying attention.
Yggdrasil had begun.
Merlin watched a torch-bearer on the street beyond the garden wall slow his pace.  Then slow it further.  Then sit down quite deliberately on the kerb as if he had just remembered somewhere very comfortable he needed to be.  The torch listed sideways in his relaxing grip.  A woman crossing the street stopped walking, looked around her with a pleasantly confused expression and then simply sat down where she was.  A soldier at the corner of the bishop's residence leaned his spear against the wall, put his back to the stone and slid gently to a sitting position, his chin dropping to his chest.  Then the second soldier.  Then the third.
Rome was going to sleep.
Not all at once — it was more like a tide going out, the energy of the city ebbing gradually from the edges inward, the sounds of it softening, the lights of it stilling as the hands tending them relaxed.  The singing man somewhere in the city sang two more phrases and then stopped mid-word.  The great murmur of Rome that never fully ceased even at the deepest hour of the night diminished and dimmed and then was simply gone, replaced by a silence so complete and so unlikely that Merlin felt the hair on his arms rise at it.
A city of a million people, asleep.
He gave it another few minutes, watching the residence.  The last of the visible guards had gone down.  The windows were still.  He straightened his robes, tucked his beard into his collar with the care of a man who had learned certain lessons about beards and open flames, and walked toward the entrance of the bishop's residence.
The door was unlocked.  He hadn't expected anything else.  He pushed it open and stepped inside.
The entrance hall was grand in the Roman fashion — marble floors, frescoed walls, oil lamps burning in their niches casting a warm amber light over a floor scattered with the sleeping forms of servants and attendants, draped where they had fallen like figures in a tapestry depicting the aftermath of something.  Merlin stepped between them carefully, moving deeper into the residence.  He passed through two further rooms, both similarly occupied by the sleeping, until he reached the large receiving room at the heart of the building.
She was sitting in the bishop's chair at the far end of the room.
Not Epiphanius.  She had shed that face entirely.  Mab sat in the bishop's chair in her own form — pale as winter, raven haired, her eyes the color of deep ice, dressed in robes of black and silver that moved slightly as if stirred by a wind that wasn't present in the room.  Her hands were folded in her lap.  She looked entirely unsurprised.
She looked, in fact, as if she had been waiting quite some time and found the wait only mildly tedious.
She looked at Merlin standing in the doorway of her sleeping city and allowed a small and very old smile to cross her face.
"Myyrrddryn," she said, and his name in her mouth was nothing like it was in Aelphaba's mouth or Yggdrasil's.  It was something else entirely.  Something that knew him from before he knew himself.  "You are late," she said.  "I expected you a fortnight ago."
Merlin stepped into the room.  "I was delayed," he said.
"Yes," said Mab, and the smile didn't change, "you were."  And in the way she said it Merlin understood that she knew exactly what had delayed him and that Nimue's role in that delay had not been accidental at all.
The door swung shut behind him of its own accord.
Merlin stood in the lamplit room in the center of a sleeping city with Mab watching him from the bishop's chair and felt the full weight of however many centuries of patience and planning had led to this precise moment settle into the room around them like a third presence.
"Well then," he said, pulling his pipe from his robes and tapping it against his palm with a composure he had earned through considerable effort, "shall we talk?"]]> Chapter 10

They landed in a field of long grass east of the city walls as the last light left the sky completely.  Yggdrasil settled with surprising delicacy for something her size, her great claws finding purchase in the Italian soil without the ground shaking as Merlin had expected.  He slid down her flank and landed in the grass and stood for a moment letting his legs remember what standing felt like.  Two days bareback on a dragon had left him with a gait that he suspected looked less like a wizard and more like a sailor who had been at sea for a month.  He took several experimental steps and decided that dignity was something he could reclaim later.
The night air of the Roman countryside was warm and smelled of dry grass and rosemary and the distant cookfires of the city.  Above them the stars were bright and Rome glowed against the horizon — not a single light but a general luminescence, the accumulated glow of a city of a million souls going about the business of their evening.  Even from here Merlin could hear it, a low continuous murmur that never quite resolved into individual sounds.  He had forgotten how alive Rome was, even at night.  Especially at night.
He reached into his pocket.  The mouse looked up at him from his palm with the alert and slightly accusatory expression of a creature that has spent two days in a wizard's pocket crossing the channel and most of the continent and has opinions about this.
"Yes," Merlin agreed, "I know.  I am sorry about that."  He set the mouse carefully in the long grass and crouched down.  He whispered to it for a moment, his long fingers cupped gently around it.  The mouse sat very still, listening with the focused attention it had learned was generally worth applying to whatever this particular human said to it.  When Merlin finished speaking he lifted his hand and the mouse sat a moment longer, then turned and disappeared into the grass with a businesslike rustle.  There was good Italian clover not far off.  It would find its way.
Merlin stood and turned to Yggdrasil who had been watching this exchange with her gold eyes half lidded. "The mouse," she said, in the tone of someone filing away a piece of information they find simultaneously baffling and faintly illuminating.
"He was a long way from home," Merlin said simply and turned to look at the city.
Yggdrasil lowered her great head beside him so that they were both regarding Rome from roughly the same vantage point, though what she saw with those ancient gold eyes and what Merlin saw with his were almost certainly very different things.  "The inlet is there," she said, indicating with the faintest tilt of her head toward the dark eastern wall where the aqueduct entered the city in its great arched channel.  "I can smell the water."
"You'll need to wait until the third hour of the night," Merlin said.  "The streets need to be quieter before you approach.  The inlet is outside the walls but there are sentries on the eastern gate and I don't want them raising an alarm before the sleep breath has reached them."
"And how will I know when it is the third hour?" she asked.
"Rome rings her bells," Merlin said.  "You'll hear them."
Yggdrasil regarded him.  "And you?  You are going in now?"
"I need time to get into position before you begin."  Merlin pulled his hood up over his head and checked within his robes — the small stone-encased sword sat in his pocket, the herbs for his visions, his pipe, the small pewter dish.  Everything present.  "Once the sleep breath starts moving through the aqueducts it will spread through the city faster than a man can walk.  I need to already be where I need to be when that happens."
"Where Mab is," said Yggdrasil.
"Where Mab is," Merlin confirmed.
A pause settled between them.  An owl called somewhere in the field behind them.  Yggdrasil's breath moved the grass in slow warm waves.  "When I begin," she said, "I will not be able to stop until it is done.  If you need more time than I can give you, I cannot help that.  If the city wakes before you are finished — "
"It won't come to that," Merlin said.
Another pause, longer.  "The mouse," Yggdrasil said again, and this time the word sat differently in her mouth, as if she were turning something over that she hadn't expected to find there.  She said nothing further.  She simply settled into the grass like a hillside deciding to become permanent and closed her gold eyes and Merlin understood he had been dismissed.
He turned toward Rome and walked.
✵
The eastern gate of Rome was manned by four soldiers of the Palatine guard, their armor catching the torchlight in the lazy manner of men who had stood this post a thousand nights without incident and expected tonight to be the thousand and first.  Merlin approached along the road without hurrying, his hood up, his staff making its regular knock against the paving stones.  One of the guards stepped forward with a hand up.
Merlin lowered his hood slightly and let the power rise just enough to glow faintly amber in his eyes.  The guard's hand stayed up but the rest of him took a step back.  "State your business," the man said, with the admirable commitment to duty of someone whose body clearly wanted to be somewhere else entirely.
"I am a physician," Merlin said in Latin, which he spoke as fluently as he spoke everything else, "called for the Bishop Epiphanius who has taken unwell."  He pulled from within his robe a document — beautifully rendered on fresh vellum in an ecclesiastical hand, sealed with a wax impression that bore the mark of the bishop's office — and presented it to the guard with the bored efficiency of a man who has done this before.
The guard took the document, looked at it, held it at a slight angle to catch the torchlight better, and handed it back.  He had almost certainly not read it.  The seal had done its work.  "Pass," he said and stepped aside.
Merlin pulled his hood back up and walked through the gate into Rome.
He had prepared the document two nights ago on the rocky outcropping while Yggdrasil slept, conjuring the vellum and the ink and the seal from the materials he carried, working by the light of a small and carefully contained flame while the channel moved dark around him.  He had also prepared three further documents of varying authority for varying situations.  A wizard, he had long believed, should be able to fight his way out of most situations but should prefer to talk his way out where possible and should always have the paperwork.
Inside the walls Rome was everything he remembered and nothing like he remembered simultaneously.  The bones of the city were the same — the great arterial roads running straight and wide between the densely packed insulae, the smell of bread and garum and sewage and incense that was Rome's singular perfume, the way sound behaved differently here than anywhere else, bouncing off stone and marble and coming back changed.  But the city was older now, layered with the additions of generations, the old buildings patched and built over and built over again until the Rome of Caesar was somewhere underneath the Rome of Glycerius like a palimpsest.  Torches burned at intervals along the main roads.  The side streets were dark.
Merlin moved through the city with the purposeful unhurried pace of a man who belongs exactly where he is.  He had learned long ago that the most effective form of concealment in a city was not invisibility but certainty — a man who moves as if he knows where he is going and has every right to go there is almost entirely invisible to casual observation.  He kept to the main roads where the torchlight gave him clear vision and the foot traffic, still considerable at this hour, gave him cover.
The bishop's residence was in the shadow of the Palatine Hill, a substantial building of white stone set back from a colonnaded street.  Merlin had seen it in his visions and found it without difficulty.  He did not go to the front entrance.  He walked the perimeter of the building once, reading it — the placement of guards, the lit and unlit windows, the side entrance used by servants, the small garden at the rear with its fig tree and its well and its convenient shadows.  He counted nine guards in total, stationed with the regular spacing of a security arrangement that had been designed to look serious without being particularly serious.  Epiphanius — or rather, Mab wearing Epiphanius — clearly did not expect a direct assault.  Why would she?  She was a bishop in the most powerful city in the world surrounded by the soldiers of an empire.
What she was expecting was Merlin.  He had no doubt about that.  The wink from inside his vision had been an invitation as much as a taunt.  She had set the table and she was waiting for him to sit down.
Merlin settled into the shadows of the garden beneath the fig tree, folded himself crosslegged onto the ground and waited.  Above him Rome murmured and flickered.  Somewhere in the city a man was singing, something low and repetitive, the kind of song that exists only to fill silence.  Merlin listened to it and found himself thinking of his mother, which surprised him.  He rarely allowed himself that.  He put the thought away carefully and listened to Rome instead and watched the windows of the bishop's residence for the movement of a shadow that moved differently than the others.
The bells rang the third hour.
Merlin rose, brushed the Italian dust from his robes and moved to a position beside the garden wall where he had a clear line of sight to both the main entrance of the residence and the street beyond.  He settled his breathing.  He pressed the flat of his palm against the paving stone beneath him and sent his awareness down through it, down through the stone and the soil beneath the stone, reaching for the water.
He found it almost immediately — the vast cool network of the aqueduct running beneath the city like a second circulatory system, patient and constant, carrying its cargo through the stone arteries under every road and building.  He held his awareness there and waited.
It began as the faintest change in the quality of the water.  Not a smell exactly, not through stone, but a difference — something moving through the channel that was not water.  Then another.  Then it was everywhere at once, spreading through the network the way dye spreads through cloth, following every channel and branch and tributary simultaneously, rising through every vent and grate and outlet in the city in thin pale wisps of vapor that meant nothing to a man hurrying home and everything to a man paying attention.
Yggdrasil had begun.
Merlin watched a torch-bearer on the street beyond the garden wall slow his pace.  Then slow it further.  Then sit down quite deliberately on the kerb as if he had just remembered somewhere very comfortable he needed to be.  The torch listed sideways in his relaxing grip.  A woman crossing the street stopped walking, looked around her with a pleasantly confused expression and then simply sat down where she was.  A soldier at the corner of the bishop's residence leaned his spear against the wall, put his back to the stone and slid gently to a sitting position, his chin dropping to his chest.  Then the second soldier.  Then the third.
Rome was going to sleep.
Not all at once — it was more like a tide going out, the energy of the city ebbing gradually from the edges inward, the sounds of it softening, the lights of it stilling as the hands tending them relaxed.  The singing man somewhere in the city sang two more phrases and then stopped mid-word.  The great murmur of Rome that never fully ceased even at the deepest hour of the night diminished and dimmed and then was simply gone, replaced by a silence so complete and so unlikely that Merlin felt the hair on his arms rise at it.
A city of a million people, asleep.
He gave it another few minutes, watching the residence.  The last of the visible guards had gone down.  The windows were still.  He straightened his robes, tucked his beard into his collar with the care of a man who had learned certain lessons about beards and open flames, and walked toward the entrance of the bishop's residence.
The door was unlocked.  He hadn't expected anything else.  He pushed it open and stepped inside.
The entrance hall was grand in the Roman fashion — marble floors, frescoed walls, oil lamps burning in their niches casting a warm amber light over a floor scattered with the sleeping forms of servants and attendants, draped where they had fallen like figures in a tapestry depicting the aftermath of something.  Merlin stepped between them carefully, moving deeper into the residence.  He passed through two further rooms, both similarly occupied by the sleeping, until he reached the large receiving room at the heart of the building.
She was sitting in the bishop's chair at the far end of the room.
Not Epiphanius.  She had shed that face entirely.  Mab sat in the bishop's chair in her own form — pale as winter, raven haired, her eyes the color of deep ice, dressed in robes of black and silver that moved slightly as if stirred by a wind that wasn't present in the room.  Her hands were folded in her lap.  She looked entirely unsurprised.
She looked, in fact, as if she had been waiting quite some time and found the wait only mildly tedious.
She looked at Merlin standing in the doorway of her sleeping city and allowed a small and very old smile to cross her face.
"Myyrrddryn," she said, and his name in her mouth was nothing like it was in Aelphaba's mouth or Yggdrasil's.  It was something else entirely.  Something that knew him from before he knew himself.  "You are late," she said.  "I expected you a fortnight ago."
Merlin stepped into the room.  "I was delayed," he said.
"Yes," said Mab, and the smile didn't change, "you were."  And in the way she said it Merlin understood that she knew exactly what had delayed him and that Nimue's role in that delay had not been accidental at all.
The door swung shut behind him of its own accord.
Merlin stood in the lamplit room in the center of a sleeping city with Mab watching him from the bishop's chair and felt the full weight of however many centuries of patience and planning had led to this precise moment settle into the room around them like a third presence.
"Well then," he said, pulling his pipe from his robes and tapping it against his palm with a composure he had earned through considerable effort, "shall we talk?"]]> <![CDATA[The Aegis chapter 2]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27443.html Sat, 20 Jun 2026 02:26:24 +0000 milo]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27443.html Aegis and the Ghost


     The loading dock security camera at the Amazon fulfillment center on Kedzie captured four minutes and eleven seconds of footage before someone who knew exactly where the camera was and exactly how to reach it removed it from its mounting without breaking it.
This was the detail that stayed with people. Not the pallets moved, not the side door left open, not the three security guards zip-tied in the break room with their phones on the table in front of them so they could call for help the moment whoever it was had enough of a head start. The detail that stayed was the camera. Lifted clean off its bracket and set on the ground with the lens facing the wall, the way you'd set down something that belonged to someone else.
Marcus heard about it the way he heard about most things — third, fourth hand, the story already warm from passing through other people's mouths by the time it reached him. He was at the counter eating toast when his phone started going. The crew chat first, then news alerts, then a voice message from a number he didn't recognize that turned out to be Dre calling from someone else's phone because his was dead, which was always Dre's phone.
He ate his toast and read through it.
On the wall of his room, visible through the open door, was the poster he'd had since he was seven. Aegis in three-quarter profile, the city skyline behind him, the logo across the bottom in the blocky font they used for everything official. The colors had faded some at the top where the sunlight hit it in the afternoons. He'd never taken it down. It had never occurred to him to take it down, which was different from deciding to keep it, though he couldn't have explained the difference if someone asked.
Elena was already gone. On the counter a twenty dollar bill under a folded piece of paper, and on the paper in her handwriting:
People who take care of others don't wait to be asked. They just see the need and move.
He read it twice. Left the twenty where it was.
Every screen in every barbershop and bodega and laundromat on the block was running the same footage — the loading dock, the break room, the three guards seated and zip-tied and apparently in the middle of a conversation with each other when the camera found them. One of the guards was smiling in the still frame. People kept pointing at that.
Curtis's barbershop had two chairs going and four people waiting and the television in the corner doing the same news cycle it had been doing since six that morning. Marcus came in and found a spot along the wall and listened.
"That's Damon's cousin," the man in the near chair said. "Third shift, been there eight months."
"He all right?"
"He's fine. Little shook up. Said they were polite about it."
"Polite." The man waiting across from Marcus turned the word over.
"Said they didn't touch anybody, didn't take anybody's wallet, said excuse me before they zip-tied them." A pause while Curtis worked. "Excuse me. Like they were getting past you on the bus."
The television cycled back to the still frames. The shape in the loading dock, blurred with speed.
"Those are jobs though," said the man by the window. He had the quality of someone who waited until he had something different to say. "Security jobs. Somebody's cousin, somebody's brother. You hit a facility, you're hitting the people working it, not the people owning it."
"Didn't hit anybody," the man in the chair said.
"Sending a message, then. And the people receiving the message are the ones can least afford it."
The room held that for a moment. Curtis kept cutting. The television kept cycling.
Then the older man in the far corner leaned forward. "Whoever did that," he said, "knew exactly what they were taking and exactly what they were leaving behind." He settled back. "That's not robbery. That's a statement."
Marcus looked at the still frame on the television. The blurred shape moving through the loading dock with a certainty about where it was going that even the bad resolution couldn't hide.
He thought about what it would take to know a place well enough to know exactly what to leave behind. Then he thought about the guards. Damon's cousin, eight months on the job, sitting zip-tied in the break room. The smile in the still frame that people kept pointing at.
He wasn't sure what he thought about the smile.
By midday Aegis was on every screen.
Marcus watched the press conference from his phone while he walked, the volume low. The mayor was there. The police commissioner. Two men in suits in the back of the frame whose names never appeared in the chyron and who stood with the particular stillness of people who already knew how this was going to go.
A reporter asked the question straight. "What are you doing about the Ghost, who's been spreading fear throughout the city?"
Aegis paused. Just a half-second. Then:
"The Ghost represents exactly the kind of extralegal activity that makes our community less safe for everyone. When individuals decide to operate outside the law — regardless of their intentions, and I want to be clear, the intentions don't matter — they destabilize the framework that protects all of us. We will continue to work with law enforcement and our community partners to address this threat comprehensively."
Marcus watched him field the next question. The quality of attention he brought to it — unhurried, certain, the weight forward and the head tilted right. The posture that had been on Marcus's wall since he was seven, rendered live and actual on a three inch screen.
He put the phone in his pocket and kept walking. Something in his chest that he wouldn't have called pride but that lived in the same neighborhood as pride.
He found the crew in the afternoon, in the back room of the place they used. Dre had the press conference on his phone — a different segment, earlier in the day, Aegis shaking the mayor's hand outside the bank that had been protected from the Ghost-affiliated crew.
"There he is," Dre said when Marcus came in. He said it the specific way that meant he was saying it for Marcus's benefit. "Your boy."
"He's not my boy."
"Got a poster of him though."
"I've had that since I was seven."
"Uh huh." Dre set the phone down. "Seven year old Marcus knew what was up."
Bea was counting — the medication in one pile, the packaged food in another. She didn't look up. "The poster's faded," she said. "Top left corner. You can barely see the logo."
Marcus looked at her. "You've been in my room?"
"Elena let me wait in there one time. Two years ago." She moved a bottle from one pile to the other. "You've had it since you were seven and you haven't taken it down. That's all I'm saying."
"Nobody's saying anything," Marcus said.
"Nobody said anything," Dre agreed, in a way that meant the opposite.
Marcus sat down and looked at the two piles. "What's the count?"
Bea told him. He ran the numbers and they were right, which they always were when Bea counted. He took his share — smaller than his cut, same as always — and Bea noted it without commenting, same as always.
Tiny was quiet in the corner. He'd been quiet since yesterday. Marcus looked at him once and Tiny looked back with the expression he wore when something was working itself out in him that he wasn't ready to name yet.
Dre picked up his phone again. Not the press conference this time — the loading dock footage. He watched the blurred shape move through the frame with the sound off.
"You see this this morning?" he asked. Generally, to the room.
"Everybody saw it," Bea said.
"What do you think?" He was asking Marcus. He had a way of asking Marcus things that sounded casual and weren't.
Marcus looked at the phone. The shape moving. The certainty of it. "I think somebody's going to get hurt eventually," he said. "Doing it that way."
"Doing what what way."
"Operating like that. No — " he looked for the word. "No framework. No accountability. You just decide what's right and do it and there's nobody checking you."
Dre looked at him. Then he thought about  the poster on the wall of Marcus's room, visible through the door. Then back at Marcus. He didn't say anything. He didn't need to.
"That's different," Marcus said.
"How."
"Because Aegis works with the city. There's — " He stopped. Started again. "There's a structure. Somebody's accountable."
"Accountable to who?" Bea said. She said it mildly, the way she said things that weren't mild.
Marcus didn't answer. The two men in suits at the back of the press conference frame moved through his mind briefly. He let them pass.
"The Ghost gets results though," Tiny said from the corner. It was the first thing he'd said in an hour. He said it quietly, not as an argument, just as a fact he was putting on the table to see what it did there.
The room was quiet for a moment.
"So does a flood," Marcus said.
That afternoon the Ghost's work arrived in the neighborhood the way weather arrives — not announced, just present.
A box outside the door of 3B in Marcus's building. No label. The family there had four kids and a budget Elena had described once as not enough in the specific tone she reserved for facts that made her angry. Marcus passed it going up and passed it again going down and by the second time he understood what it was.
He stood in the stairwell and looked at it.
He thought about the guards in the break room. Damon's cousin, eight months on the job. The smile in the still frame. He thought about what Tiny had said. The Ghost gets results. He thought about Dre not saying anything, which was its own kind of saying something.
He thought about the poster, faded at the top left corner where the afternoon light hit it.
He went outside.
Elena came home while he was at the kitchen table with his homework open and his pen not moving.
She looked at the homework. Looked at the pen. Sat down across from him with her thermos and the specific quality of someone who has been on her feet for eleven hours and has chosen to spend the next twenty minutes at a table rather than anywhere else.
"Ghost got the fulfillment center last night," Marcus said.
"I heard." She wrapped both hands around the thermos. "People at work couldn't stop talking about it."
"What did they say?"
"Depends who you asked." She looked at the homework. "That's not going to finish itself."
"I know."
She looked at him instead of the homework. The reading look. "What did you think about it?"
Marcus turned his pen over. "I think Aegis is going to have to do something about it now. Publicly. The mayor was already — "
Elena made a sound. Not quite a laugh. The sound she made when something struck her as both true and insufficient.
"What?" Marcus said.
"Nothing." She unscrewed the thermos. "You and that man."
"What does that mean."
"It means — " she paused, choosing. "It means you have had his picture on your wall since you were in second grade and you still talk about him like he's something separate from the people standing next to him at those press conferences."
"He is separate. He doesn't — "
"Marcus." She said it gently. "Those men in the suits. You know who they are?"
He didn't answer.
"The same people who own the fulfillment center the Ghost hit last night," she said. "Among other things." She screwed the thermos back on. "I'm not saying he's bad. I'm saying nothing is as clean as a poster."
She got up. Moved to the stove. Marcus looked at his homework and thought about the two men in suits and the way they'd shifted when Aegis said community partners and the way he'd chosen not to think about it at the time.
"Sometimes," Elena said, her back to him, "the system needs someone willing to work inside it and outside it at the same time."
She said it like she was thinking out loud. Marcus wrote something in his notebook that wasn't related to the homework. Then crossed it out.
He couldn't sleep.
The ceiling above him. The water stain in the upper left corner. The poster on the wall that he could see in the dark because he knew exactly where it was.
He picked up his phone. Started to pull up the Aegis footage — the saved clips, the press conference moments, the rooftop video that had seventeen seconds of Aegis moving in a way that still made something in Marcus's chest do something he didn't examine too closely.
He hovered over it.
Then he searched the Ghost instead. Not because he wanted to. Because Tiny's voice was still in the room. The Ghost gets results. And Dre's face when Marcus said framework and accountability. And Elena at the stove. Nothing is as clean as a poster.
The clips were sparse and poor quality. Cell phone video, surveillance stills. The blurred shape moving through frames with the certainty of something that had already decided.
Marcus watched them with the part of his mind that counted minutes and noticed camera angles. The operational part. He watched the Ghost move through the loading dock and thought about the camera set down gently with the lens to the wall and thought about the box outside 3B and thought about the guards — polite, they said. Excuse me.
He didn't know what to do with any of it.
He put the phone down. Looked at the poster in the dark. The faded top left corner he couldn't see but knew was there.
He had been seven when he put it up. He had believed, at seven, in the clean version of things — that there were people who protected and people who threatened and that you could tell them apart because one of them had the city's name on their side. He had believed this the way you believe things at seven, before the believing becomes something you have to actively maintain.
He was fourteen now. The poster was still on the wall.
He lay in the dark and listened to the block outside and did not reach for his phone again.
But he didn't sleep for a long time either.]]> Aegis and the Ghost


     The loading dock security camera at the Amazon fulfillment center on Kedzie captured four minutes and eleven seconds of footage before someone who knew exactly where the camera was and exactly how to reach it removed it from its mounting without breaking it.
This was the detail that stayed with people. Not the pallets moved, not the side door left open, not the three security guards zip-tied in the break room with their phones on the table in front of them so they could call for help the moment whoever it was had enough of a head start. The detail that stayed was the camera. Lifted clean off its bracket and set on the ground with the lens facing the wall, the way you'd set down something that belonged to someone else.
Marcus heard about it the way he heard about most things — third, fourth hand, the story already warm from passing through other people's mouths by the time it reached him. He was at the counter eating toast when his phone started going. The crew chat first, then news alerts, then a voice message from a number he didn't recognize that turned out to be Dre calling from someone else's phone because his was dead, which was always Dre's phone.
He ate his toast and read through it.
On the wall of his room, visible through the open door, was the poster he'd had since he was seven. Aegis in three-quarter profile, the city skyline behind him, the logo across the bottom in the blocky font they used for everything official. The colors had faded some at the top where the sunlight hit it in the afternoons. He'd never taken it down. It had never occurred to him to take it down, which was different from deciding to keep it, though he couldn't have explained the difference if someone asked.
Elena was already gone. On the counter a twenty dollar bill under a folded piece of paper, and on the paper in her handwriting:
People who take care of others don't wait to be asked. They just see the need and move.
He read it twice. Left the twenty where it was.
Every screen in every barbershop and bodega and laundromat on the block was running the same footage — the loading dock, the break room, the three guards seated and zip-tied and apparently in the middle of a conversation with each other when the camera found them. One of the guards was smiling in the still frame. People kept pointing at that.
Curtis's barbershop had two chairs going and four people waiting and the television in the corner doing the same news cycle it had been doing since six that morning. Marcus came in and found a spot along the wall and listened.
"That's Damon's cousin," the man in the near chair said. "Third shift, been there eight months."
"He all right?"
"He's fine. Little shook up. Said they were polite about it."
"Polite." The man waiting across from Marcus turned the word over.
"Said they didn't touch anybody, didn't take anybody's wallet, said excuse me before they zip-tied them." A pause while Curtis worked. "Excuse me. Like they were getting past you on the bus."
The television cycled back to the still frames. The shape in the loading dock, blurred with speed.
"Those are jobs though," said the man by the window. He had the quality of someone who waited until he had something different to say. "Security jobs. Somebody's cousin, somebody's brother. You hit a facility, you're hitting the people working it, not the people owning it."
"Didn't hit anybody," the man in the chair said.
"Sending a message, then. And the people receiving the message are the ones can least afford it."
The room held that for a moment. Curtis kept cutting. The television kept cycling.
Then the older man in the far corner leaned forward. "Whoever did that," he said, "knew exactly what they were taking and exactly what they were leaving behind." He settled back. "That's not robbery. That's a statement."
Marcus looked at the still frame on the television. The blurred shape moving through the loading dock with a certainty about where it was going that even the bad resolution couldn't hide.
He thought about what it would take to know a place well enough to know exactly what to leave behind. Then he thought about the guards. Damon's cousin, eight months on the job, sitting zip-tied in the break room. The smile in the still frame that people kept pointing at.
He wasn't sure what he thought about the smile.
By midday Aegis was on every screen.
Marcus watched the press conference from his phone while he walked, the volume low. The mayor was there. The police commissioner. Two men in suits in the back of the frame whose names never appeared in the chyron and who stood with the particular stillness of people who already knew how this was going to go.
A reporter asked the question straight. "What are you doing about the Ghost, who's been spreading fear throughout the city?"
Aegis paused. Just a half-second. Then:
"The Ghost represents exactly the kind of extralegal activity that makes our community less safe for everyone. When individuals decide to operate outside the law — regardless of their intentions, and I want to be clear, the intentions don't matter — they destabilize the framework that protects all of us. We will continue to work with law enforcement and our community partners to address this threat comprehensively."
Marcus watched him field the next question. The quality of attention he brought to it — unhurried, certain, the weight forward and the head tilted right. The posture that had been on Marcus's wall since he was seven, rendered live and actual on a three inch screen.
He put the phone in his pocket and kept walking. Something in his chest that he wouldn't have called pride but that lived in the same neighborhood as pride.
He found the crew in the afternoon, in the back room of the place they used. Dre had the press conference on his phone — a different segment, earlier in the day, Aegis shaking the mayor's hand outside the bank that had been protected from the Ghost-affiliated crew.
"There he is," Dre said when Marcus came in. He said it the specific way that meant he was saying it for Marcus's benefit. "Your boy."
"He's not my boy."
"Got a poster of him though."
"I've had that since I was seven."
"Uh huh." Dre set the phone down. "Seven year old Marcus knew what was up."
Bea was counting — the medication in one pile, the packaged food in another. She didn't look up. "The poster's faded," she said. "Top left corner. You can barely see the logo."
Marcus looked at her. "You've been in my room?"
"Elena let me wait in there one time. Two years ago." She moved a bottle from one pile to the other. "You've had it since you were seven and you haven't taken it down. That's all I'm saying."
"Nobody's saying anything," Marcus said.
"Nobody said anything," Dre agreed, in a way that meant the opposite.
Marcus sat down and looked at the two piles. "What's the count?"
Bea told him. He ran the numbers and they were right, which they always were when Bea counted. He took his share — smaller than his cut, same as always — and Bea noted it without commenting, same as always.
Tiny was quiet in the corner. He'd been quiet since yesterday. Marcus looked at him once and Tiny looked back with the expression he wore when something was working itself out in him that he wasn't ready to name yet.
Dre picked up his phone again. Not the press conference this time — the loading dock footage. He watched the blurred shape move through the frame with the sound off.
"You see this this morning?" he asked. Generally, to the room.
"Everybody saw it," Bea said.
"What do you think?" He was asking Marcus. He had a way of asking Marcus things that sounded casual and weren't.
Marcus looked at the phone. The shape moving. The certainty of it. "I think somebody's going to get hurt eventually," he said. "Doing it that way."
"Doing what what way."
"Operating like that. No — " he looked for the word. "No framework. No accountability. You just decide what's right and do it and there's nobody checking you."
Dre looked at him. Then he thought about  the poster on the wall of Marcus's room, visible through the door. Then back at Marcus. He didn't say anything. He didn't need to.
"That's different," Marcus said.
"How."
"Because Aegis works with the city. There's — " He stopped. Started again. "There's a structure. Somebody's accountable."
"Accountable to who?" Bea said. She said it mildly, the way she said things that weren't mild.
Marcus didn't answer. The two men in suits at the back of the press conference frame moved through his mind briefly. He let them pass.
"The Ghost gets results though," Tiny said from the corner. It was the first thing he'd said in an hour. He said it quietly, not as an argument, just as a fact he was putting on the table to see what it did there.
The room was quiet for a moment.
"So does a flood," Marcus said.
That afternoon the Ghost's work arrived in the neighborhood the way weather arrives — not announced, just present.
A box outside the door of 3B in Marcus's building. No label. The family there had four kids and a budget Elena had described once as not enough in the specific tone she reserved for facts that made her angry. Marcus passed it going up and passed it again going down and by the second time he understood what it was.
He stood in the stairwell and looked at it.
He thought about the guards in the break room. Damon's cousin, eight months on the job. The smile in the still frame. He thought about what Tiny had said. The Ghost gets results. He thought about Dre not saying anything, which was its own kind of saying something.
He thought about the poster, faded at the top left corner where the afternoon light hit it.
He went outside.
Elena came home while he was at the kitchen table with his homework open and his pen not moving.
She looked at the homework. Looked at the pen. Sat down across from him with her thermos and the specific quality of someone who has been on her feet for eleven hours and has chosen to spend the next twenty minutes at a table rather than anywhere else.
"Ghost got the fulfillment center last night," Marcus said.
"I heard." She wrapped both hands around the thermos. "People at work couldn't stop talking about it."
"What did they say?"
"Depends who you asked." She looked at the homework. "That's not going to finish itself."
"I know."
She looked at him instead of the homework. The reading look. "What did you think about it?"
Marcus turned his pen over. "I think Aegis is going to have to do something about it now. Publicly. The mayor was already — "
Elena made a sound. Not quite a laugh. The sound she made when something struck her as both true and insufficient.
"What?" Marcus said.
"Nothing." She unscrewed the thermos. "You and that man."
"What does that mean."
"It means — " she paused, choosing. "It means you have had his picture on your wall since you were in second grade and you still talk about him like he's something separate from the people standing next to him at those press conferences."
"He is separate. He doesn't — "
"Marcus." She said it gently. "Those men in the suits. You know who they are?"
He didn't answer.
"The same people who own the fulfillment center the Ghost hit last night," she said. "Among other things." She screwed the thermos back on. "I'm not saying he's bad. I'm saying nothing is as clean as a poster."
She got up. Moved to the stove. Marcus looked at his homework and thought about the two men in suits and the way they'd shifted when Aegis said community partners and the way he'd chosen not to think about it at the time.
"Sometimes," Elena said, her back to him, "the system needs someone willing to work inside it and outside it at the same time."
She said it like she was thinking out loud. Marcus wrote something in his notebook that wasn't related to the homework. Then crossed it out.
He couldn't sleep.
The ceiling above him. The water stain in the upper left corner. The poster on the wall that he could see in the dark because he knew exactly where it was.
He picked up his phone. Started to pull up the Aegis footage — the saved clips, the press conference moments, the rooftop video that had seventeen seconds of Aegis moving in a way that still made something in Marcus's chest do something he didn't examine too closely.
He hovered over it.
Then he searched the Ghost instead. Not because he wanted to. Because Tiny's voice was still in the room. The Ghost gets results. And Dre's face when Marcus said framework and accountability. And Elena at the stove. Nothing is as clean as a poster.
The clips were sparse and poor quality. Cell phone video, surveillance stills. The blurred shape moving through frames with the certainty of something that had already decided.
Marcus watched them with the part of his mind that counted minutes and noticed camera angles. The operational part. He watched the Ghost move through the loading dock and thought about the camera set down gently with the lens to the wall and thought about the box outside 3B and thought about the guards — polite, they said. Excuse me.
He didn't know what to do with any of it.
He put the phone down. Looked at the poster in the dark. The faded top left corner he couldn't see but knew was there.
He had been seven when he put it up. He had believed, at seven, in the clean version of things — that there were people who protected and people who threatened and that you could tell them apart because one of them had the city's name on their side. He had believed this the way you believe things at seven, before the believing becomes something you have to actively maintain.
He was fourteen now. The poster was still on the wall.
He lay in the dark and listened to the block outside and did not reach for his phone again.
But he didn't sleep for a long time either.]]> <![CDATA[Merlin and the Dragon Queen chapter 9]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27438.html Tue, 16 Jun 2026 21:40:39 +0000 milo]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27438.html here

Merlin and the Dragon Queen - Chapter 9

Yggdrasil regarded him from her great height with the patient, unhurried attention of something that had watched mountains form.  Her scales were a deep arterial red, almost black in the volcanic light, and each one was the size of a shield.  Her eyes were gold — not the warm gold of jewelry or harvest wheat but the cold, hard gold of old coins that had passed through too many hands to remember any of them.  She did not move after she spoke.  She simply watched him with those coins eyes and waited.

Merlin brushed volcanic dust from his robes and got to his feet.  "You've been waiting," he started, "then you know why I've come."

"I know many things," Yggdrasil replied. Her voice was not loud but it filled the chamber the way heat fills a room — gradually and from every direction at once. She spoke the common tongue with an accent that suggested she had learned it from someone who had learned it from someone else entirely, flattening certain sounds and elongating others in ways that were not unpleasant but were certainly not human. "I know Aelphaba sent you.  I know what you want.  I know considerably more about Rome than you do and I have been asleep since before your grandfather's grandfather drew his first breath." She lowered her great head until one gold eye was level with Merlin, close enough that he could feel the warmth radiating from it. "What I do not know," she said, "is why I should find you interesting."

Merlin's horse, which had been standing near the entrance to the chamber with the philosophical resignation of an animal that had long since given up trying to understand its life, chose this moment to let out a long and deeply felt snort and begin backing slowly out of the cave.  Merlin couldn't blame him. 

"I don't need to be interesting," Merlin answered, "I need to get to Rome."

Yggdrasil pulled her head back and regarded him from full height again. "And Aelphaba has agreed to this.  Very well.  I will take you to Rome, little man.  I will do what you need done in Rome.  When it is finished, I will return here and sleep again and you will not bother me further."  She turned her great body in the chamber with a grinding of stone that sent cracks racing up the walls.  "Come then.  I will not wait."

Merlin looked behind him.  His horse had completed its retreat and was no longer visible.  He looked back at Yggdrasil, then at the expanse of her back, then up at the ridged spine that ran from her neck to the base of her tail, each ridge standing as tall as his waist.  She had not offered to lower herself to make mounting easier.  She was not going to.  Merlin planted his staff, got a running start and scrambled up her flank using the edges of her scales as handholds, hauling himself hand over hand until he arrived, breathless and considerably less dignified than he would have preferred, astride her neck just forward of her great shoulders.  He settled himself between two ridges of her spine, tucked his staff under his arm and gripped the ridge in front of him with both hands.

"Ready?" Yggdrasil asked, with what Merlin strongly suspected was the draconic equivalent of a smile.

"Quite," said Merlin.

She launched.

The first thing Merlin discovered was that dragon flight and falcon flight were entirely different propositions.  As a falcon, flight was his.  He felt every current, every shift, every drop and rise of the air as an extension of himself.  Riding a dragon was something altogether different.  The first downstroke of Yggdrasil's wings hit him like a fist and very nearly took him clean off her back.  He flattened himself against her neck, locking both arms around the spine ridge in front of him with a grip that would have impressed a blacksmith.  She burst through the mouth of the volcano at speed and banked hard left immediately and the world became a vertical rush of black basalt and volcanic cloud and the cold spray of the sea.  Merlin's beard, braided lilies long since gone, whipped directly into his face.  He pressed it flat with one hand while keeping the other clamped to the ridge.

"You might warn a person!" he shouted into the wind.  The wind took his words before they reached her ears or she simply didn't feel compelled to respond.  He suspected the latter.

She levelled out and found her rhythm over the open sea and Merlin cautiously raised himself back upright.  The sea below was a churning dark green.  Avalon had already faded behind them.  Ahead was open water.  Merlin adjusted his grip and attempted to find a position that did not feel like it was slowly removing his inner thighs.  There was no comfortable position.  He experimented with bracing his legs outward against the curve of her shoulders, which helped somewhat and only required him to maintain the kind of grip on the spine ridge that would leave marks. 

"How long to Rome?" he asked.

A pause.  "Two days," she replied.  "Perhaps less.  The air is good."

Two days.  Merlin looked down at his hands.  His knuckles had already gone pale.  He tried to imagine two days of this and arrived quickly at the conclusion that he would simply have to stop imagining things for a while.  He pulled his cloak tight and watched the water pass beneath them.

---

On the first night they stopped on a rocky outcropping in the middle of the channel, barely large enough for Yggdrasil to land on.  She folded her wings with an air of someone who finds the available accommodation beneath them but accepts it without comment.  Merlin slid down her flank without waiting for help this time, dropped the last few feet and sat heavily on a flat rock at the water's edge.  His legs ached in ways that suggested muscles he had not previously known he possessed.  He pulled his robe up and inspected his inner thighs which were chafed raw and spectacular in their redness.

"You ride like a sack of grain," Yggdrasil observed.

"Thank you," said Merlin, "that is rather how I feel."  He pulled some dried meat and a hard biscuit from within his robe and ate without enthusiasm, staring out at the black channel water.  The moon was just past half, which meant Arthur had been fighting for over two weeks.  He thought of Arthur in the swamplands, pushing into the Romans with that furious controlled precision that was all his own.  He thought of Tristram at Cascura, drawing the enemy back and laughing at them.  He thought of Lot, whose loyalty was a question that could only be answered in the doing.  He thought of Nimue, which he hadn't meant to do, and quickly stopped thinking of Nimue.

"Tell me of Rome," he said to Yggdrasil.

She settled her chin on the rock at the water's edge. The sea around the outcropping was displaced by her presence.  "Rome is old," she said, "but not so old as me.  When I last saw it, it was still burning its dead.  The aqueducts you speak of were not yet built.  But I have felt them described."

"Agrippa's aqueducts feed fresh water throughout the city," Merlin said, leaning forward.  "They run in channels beneath the roads and vent upward through grates and openings into the streets and into the buildings they serve.  The Aqua Claudia enters the city on the eastern edge.  It has a main passage, large enough at the inlet for you to enter.  From there — "

"I will be in stone tunnels," Yggdrasil interrupted.  "Not pleasant."

"No," Merlin agreed.  "You won't be in there long.  The inlet chamber before the city proper is large enough that you won't be pressed."

"What is large enough for a man is not large enough for me," she said.

"The inlet chamber is not sized for a man.  It is sized for the volume of water Rome requires.  It is the size of this rock."  Merlin slapped the flat stone beneath him for emphasis.

Yggdrasil was quiet for a moment.  "And the sleep breath," she said finally, and there was something different in her voice — not reluctance exactly, more the tone of a craftsman being asked about a difficult technique.  "You understand what you are asking."

"Tell me," Merlin said.

"Fire wants to be fire.  That is its nature.  When I breathe I am giving it permission to be what it is.  Sleep breath is the opposite.  It is the fire before the fire. The spark held back.  The smoke without the flame."  She turned one gold eye toward him.  "I must hold the heat in my chest and release only the vapor.  Too much and Rome burns.  Too little and your city sleeps for an hour and wakes irritable.  The entire city.  The aqueducts branch throughout.  The effort to breathe continuously through all of them —" she paused "— it will take everything I have."

Merlin nodded.  "How long can you sustain it?"

"Long enough," she said, which did not answer his question but which he understood was all the answer he was going to receive.

"I need four hours," Merlin said.  "That's all.  Four hours in a sleeping Rome and I can do what needs to be done."

Yggdrasil was quiet again.  The sea moved around them.  "You are going to face Mab," she said.  It was not a question.

Merlin looked at her.  "You know about Mab."

"I told you.  I know many things."  She settled her great head more fully onto the rock.  "Mab is old and not to be treated carelessly.  Even by wizards."  The last word carried nothing contemptuous in it, which Merlin found, oddly, more unsettling than contempt would have been.

"No," he agreed.  "Not carelessly."

She closed her gold eyes and the outcropping was suddenly very dark.  "Sleep, little man," she said.  "You will need it tomorrow more than tonight."

Merlin lay back on the flat rock and looked up at the sky.  The stars over the open channel were extraordinary — unwashed by the light of any city, simply present in their full cold abundance.  He thought about Mab in her bishop's robes winking at him from inside his vision.  He thought about Rome, asleep in its streets.  He thought about Arthur.

He slept.

---

They made landfall on the Italian peninsula as the sun was declining on the second day, coming in low over the coast from the west to avoid the shipping lanes.  Yggdrasil was a dark shape against a darkening sky and Merlin had grown, if not comfortable, then at least functional in his position on her back.  He had worked out that if he leaned slightly forward and kept his weight on his knees rather than sitting flat, the worst of the chafing was manageable.  His hands were so thoroughly locked to the spine ridge that he had stopped noticing them.

Rome grew in the distance as they flew inland.  Even from the air in the failing light it was unmistakable — the sprawl of it, the density, the smoke from a thousand cooking fires rising in the evening air, the great dome of the Pantheon catching the last of the sun and throwing it back.  Merlin had been to Rome once before, in a different life, in circumstances he didn't often think about.  It was still the most extraordinary thing man had built.  He felt a complicated admiration for it.

"There," he said, leaning forward and pointing.  "You can see the aqueduct coming in from the east.  The Aqua Claudia.  Do you see the inlet?"

"I see it," said Yggdrasil.

"We need to land east of the city.  Outside the walls.  I'll go in on foot and you wait until dark before you approach the inlet.  The water level in the channel will be low enough at night that you can enter without displacing it into the city.  Once you are in the antechamber — "

"I know what to do from there," Yggdrasil said.

"Of course," Merlin said.

"And you?" she asked. "What will you do while I am in the tunnels?"

Merlin was quiet for a moment.  He looked out at Rome growing larger beneath them, the lights of it beginning to glow as the evening came on.  Somewhere in that city Mab was wearing a bishop's face and pulling the strings of an empire like a puppeteer who had got bored with the usual plays.

"I am going to have a conversation," Merlin said.

Yggdrasil made a sound deep in her chest that Merlin had not heard from her before.  After a moment he realized it was a laugh.  Not a warm laugh.  Not an unkind one either.  The laugh of something very old watching something much younger walk toward something very dangerous with tremendous confidence and very little idea of what was coming.

"A conversation," she repeated, and said nothing more.

They descended toward the dark fields east of the city walls and the fires of Rome burned below them and all around the great city the aqueducts ran their ancient patient courses through the stone, waiting.]]> here

Merlin and the Dragon Queen - Chapter 9

Yggdrasil regarded him from her great height with the patient, unhurried attention of something that had watched mountains form.  Her scales were a deep arterial red, almost black in the volcanic light, and each one was the size of a shield.  Her eyes were gold — not the warm gold of jewelry or harvest wheat but the cold, hard gold of old coins that had passed through too many hands to remember any of them.  She did not move after she spoke.  She simply watched him with those coins eyes and waited.

Merlin brushed volcanic dust from his robes and got to his feet.  "You've been waiting," he started, "then you know why I've come."

"I know many things," Yggdrasil replied. Her voice was not loud but it filled the chamber the way heat fills a room — gradually and from every direction at once. She spoke the common tongue with an accent that suggested she had learned it from someone who had learned it from someone else entirely, flattening certain sounds and elongating others in ways that were not unpleasant but were certainly not human. "I know Aelphaba sent you.  I know what you want.  I know considerably more about Rome than you do and I have been asleep since before your grandfather's grandfather drew his first breath." She lowered her great head until one gold eye was level with Merlin, close enough that he could feel the warmth radiating from it. "What I do not know," she said, "is why I should find you interesting."

Merlin's horse, which had been standing near the entrance to the chamber with the philosophical resignation of an animal that had long since given up trying to understand its life, chose this moment to let out a long and deeply felt snort and begin backing slowly out of the cave.  Merlin couldn't blame him. 

"I don't need to be interesting," Merlin answered, "I need to get to Rome."

Yggdrasil pulled her head back and regarded him from full height again. "And Aelphaba has agreed to this.  Very well.  I will take you to Rome, little man.  I will do what you need done in Rome.  When it is finished, I will return here and sleep again and you will not bother me further."  She turned her great body in the chamber with a grinding of stone that sent cracks racing up the walls.  "Come then.  I will not wait."

Merlin looked behind him.  His horse had completed its retreat and was no longer visible.  He looked back at Yggdrasil, then at the expanse of her back, then up at the ridged spine that ran from her neck to the base of her tail, each ridge standing as tall as his waist.  She had not offered to lower herself to make mounting easier.  She was not going to.  Merlin planted his staff, got a running start and scrambled up her flank using the edges of her scales as handholds, hauling himself hand over hand until he arrived, breathless and considerably less dignified than he would have preferred, astride her neck just forward of her great shoulders.  He settled himself between two ridges of her spine, tucked his staff under his arm and gripped the ridge in front of him with both hands.

"Ready?" Yggdrasil asked, with what Merlin strongly suspected was the draconic equivalent of a smile.

"Quite," said Merlin.

She launched.

The first thing Merlin discovered was that dragon flight and falcon flight were entirely different propositions.  As a falcon, flight was his.  He felt every current, every shift, every drop and rise of the air as an extension of himself.  Riding a dragon was something altogether different.  The first downstroke of Yggdrasil's wings hit him like a fist and very nearly took him clean off her back.  He flattened himself against her neck, locking both arms around the spine ridge in front of him with a grip that would have impressed a blacksmith.  She burst through the mouth of the volcano at speed and banked hard left immediately and the world became a vertical rush of black basalt and volcanic cloud and the cold spray of the sea.  Merlin's beard, braided lilies long since gone, whipped directly into his face.  He pressed it flat with one hand while keeping the other clamped to the ridge.

"You might warn a person!" he shouted into the wind.  The wind took his words before they reached her ears or she simply didn't feel compelled to respond.  He suspected the latter.

She levelled out and found her rhythm over the open sea and Merlin cautiously raised himself back upright.  The sea below was a churning dark green.  Avalon had already faded behind them.  Ahead was open water.  Merlin adjusted his grip and attempted to find a position that did not feel like it was slowly removing his inner thighs.  There was no comfortable position.  He experimented with bracing his legs outward against the curve of her shoulders, which helped somewhat and only required him to maintain the kind of grip on the spine ridge that would leave marks. 

"How long to Rome?" he asked.

A pause.  "Two days," she replied.  "Perhaps less.  The air is good."

Two days.  Merlin looked down at his hands.  His knuckles had already gone pale.  He tried to imagine two days of this and arrived quickly at the conclusion that he would simply have to stop imagining things for a while.  He pulled his cloak tight and watched the water pass beneath them.

---

On the first night they stopped on a rocky outcropping in the middle of the channel, barely large enough for Yggdrasil to land on.  She folded her wings with an air of someone who finds the available accommodation beneath them but accepts it without comment.  Merlin slid down her flank without waiting for help this time, dropped the last few feet and sat heavily on a flat rock at the water's edge.  His legs ached in ways that suggested muscles he had not previously known he possessed.  He pulled his robe up and inspected his inner thighs which were chafed raw and spectacular in their redness.

"You ride like a sack of grain," Yggdrasil observed.

"Thank you," said Merlin, "that is rather how I feel."  He pulled some dried meat and a hard biscuit from within his robe and ate without enthusiasm, staring out at the black channel water.  The moon was just past half, which meant Arthur had been fighting for over two weeks.  He thought of Arthur in the swamplands, pushing into the Romans with that furious controlled precision that was all his own.  He thought of Tristram at Cascura, drawing the enemy back and laughing at them.  He thought of Lot, whose loyalty was a question that could only be answered in the doing.  He thought of Nimue, which he hadn't meant to do, and quickly stopped thinking of Nimue.

"Tell me of Rome," he said to Yggdrasil.

She settled her chin on the rock at the water's edge. The sea around the outcropping was displaced by her presence.  "Rome is old," she said, "but not so old as me.  When I last saw it, it was still burning its dead.  The aqueducts you speak of were not yet built.  But I have felt them described."

"Agrippa's aqueducts feed fresh water throughout the city," Merlin said, leaning forward.  "They run in channels beneath the roads and vent upward through grates and openings into the streets and into the buildings they serve.  The Aqua Claudia enters the city on the eastern edge.  It has a main passage, large enough at the inlet for you to enter.  From there — "

"I will be in stone tunnels," Yggdrasil interrupted.  "Not pleasant."

"No," Merlin agreed.  "You won't be in there long.  The inlet chamber before the city proper is large enough that you won't be pressed."

"What is large enough for a man is not large enough for me," she said.

"The inlet chamber is not sized for a man.  It is sized for the volume of water Rome requires.  It is the size of this rock."  Merlin slapped the flat stone beneath him for emphasis.

Yggdrasil was quiet for a moment.  "And the sleep breath," she said finally, and there was something different in her voice — not reluctance exactly, more the tone of a craftsman being asked about a difficult technique.  "You understand what you are asking."

"Tell me," Merlin said.

"Fire wants to be fire.  That is its nature.  When I breathe I am giving it permission to be what it is.  Sleep breath is the opposite.  It is the fire before the fire. The spark held back.  The smoke without the flame."  She turned one gold eye toward him.  "I must hold the heat in my chest and release only the vapor.  Too much and Rome burns.  Too little and your city sleeps for an hour and wakes irritable.  The entire city.  The aqueducts branch throughout.  The effort to breathe continuously through all of them —" she paused "— it will take everything I have."

Merlin nodded.  "How long can you sustain it?"

"Long enough," she said, which did not answer his question but which he understood was all the answer he was going to receive.

"I need four hours," Merlin said.  "That's all.  Four hours in a sleeping Rome and I can do what needs to be done."

Yggdrasil was quiet again.  The sea moved around them.  "You are going to face Mab," she said.  It was not a question.

Merlin looked at her.  "You know about Mab."

"I told you.  I know many things."  She settled her great head more fully onto the rock.  "Mab is old and not to be treated carelessly.  Even by wizards."  The last word carried nothing contemptuous in it, which Merlin found, oddly, more unsettling than contempt would have been.

"No," he agreed.  "Not carelessly."

She closed her gold eyes and the outcropping was suddenly very dark.  "Sleep, little man," she said.  "You will need it tomorrow more than tonight."

Merlin lay back on the flat rock and looked up at the sky.  The stars over the open channel were extraordinary — unwashed by the light of any city, simply present in their full cold abundance.  He thought about Mab in her bishop's robes winking at him from inside his vision.  He thought about Rome, asleep in its streets.  He thought about Arthur.

He slept.

---

They made landfall on the Italian peninsula as the sun was declining on the second day, coming in low over the coast from the west to avoid the shipping lanes.  Yggdrasil was a dark shape against a darkening sky and Merlin had grown, if not comfortable, then at least functional in his position on her back.  He had worked out that if he leaned slightly forward and kept his weight on his knees rather than sitting flat, the worst of the chafing was manageable.  His hands were so thoroughly locked to the spine ridge that he had stopped noticing them.

Rome grew in the distance as they flew inland.  Even from the air in the failing light it was unmistakable — the sprawl of it, the density, the smoke from a thousand cooking fires rising in the evening air, the great dome of the Pantheon catching the last of the sun and throwing it back.  Merlin had been to Rome once before, in a different life, in circumstances he didn't often think about.  It was still the most extraordinary thing man had built.  He felt a complicated admiration for it.

"There," he said, leaning forward and pointing.  "You can see the aqueduct coming in from the east.  The Aqua Claudia.  Do you see the inlet?"

"I see it," said Yggdrasil.

"We need to land east of the city.  Outside the walls.  I'll go in on foot and you wait until dark before you approach the inlet.  The water level in the channel will be low enough at night that you can enter without displacing it into the city.  Once you are in the antechamber — "

"I know what to do from there," Yggdrasil said.

"Of course," Merlin said.

"And you?" she asked. "What will you do while I am in the tunnels?"

Merlin was quiet for a moment.  He looked out at Rome growing larger beneath them, the lights of it beginning to glow as the evening came on.  Somewhere in that city Mab was wearing a bishop's face and pulling the strings of an empire like a puppeteer who had got bored with the usual plays.

"I am going to have a conversation," Merlin said.

Yggdrasil made a sound deep in her chest that Merlin had not heard from her before.  After a moment he realized it was a laugh.  Not a warm laugh.  Not an unkind one either.  The laugh of something very old watching something much younger walk toward something very dangerous with tremendous confidence and very little idea of what was coming.

"A conversation," she repeated, and said nothing more.

They descended toward the dark fields east of the city walls and the fires of Rome burned below them and all around the great city the aqueducts ran their ancient patient courses through the stone, waiting.]]> <![CDATA[Where the Heart Is]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27433.html Sun, 14 Jun 2026 13:05:39 +0000 Mark A Becker]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27433.html Where the Heart Is

The world isn't really much
bigger than this map, he said.
It is precisely hand drawn
on yellowing paper, inscribed
with detailed descriptions.
He points to all the places
he's been, where they are
all within walking distance
of the only home he's known.

He laid out his entire life
intentionally- some places
highlighted, others struck through.
As you walk beside him
on the trail by the creek
he stops, at a large old oak-
initials fading, yet clear.
I always knew that girl
would be my wife.

Further up, you cross on flat stones
where the creek is shallow, winding
with the path through tall sycamores.
You come to a small white church
marked with a heart. Behind it
a headstone circled in red. He carefully
folds the map; hands it to me, gently.
It's yours now, son-
you'll know where to find me.]]> Where the Heart Is

The world isn't really much
bigger than this map, he said.
It is precisely hand drawn
on yellowing paper, inscribed
with detailed descriptions.
He points to all the places
he's been, where they are
all within walking distance
of the only home he's known.

He laid out his entire life
intentionally- some places
highlighted, others struck through.
As you walk beside him
on the trail by the creek
he stops, at a large old oak-
initials fading, yet clear.
I always knew that girl
would be my wife.

Further up, you cross on flat stones
where the creek is shallow, winding
with the path through tall sycamores.
You come to a small white church
marked with a heart. Behind it
a headstone circled in red. He carefully
folds the map; hands it to me, gently.
It's yours now, son-
you'll know where to find me.]]> <![CDATA[The Aegis chapter 1]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27431.html Sun, 14 Jun 2026 04:28:01 +0000 milo]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27431.html
More recently - as the superhero genre gained traction on Netflix - I rewrote it as a 10 part screenplay

Not really much room for that here and I don't have much else to do with it so I am opting to rewrite it as one of my favorite formats of all time:  The Serial!  Why the hell am I posting this here???!!  Not exactly sure, don't have much else to do with it TBH - I think the world moved on from serials maybe 50 years ago but here - in my beloved Pigpen - maybe there is still a small space for it.  Anyway - Part 1 (of 10):  The Aegis


The Block - Chapter 1


The rail yard spread out below the fence like something the city had forgotten about — freight cars sitting in the dark, the distant signal lights bleeding red into the October air. Marcus wrapped his fingers through the chain link and breathed.
He'd come four miles to get here. Maybe more. He didn't count anymore; he just ran until the particular pressure behind his sternum loosened enough that he could stand still without feeling like something was going to come out of him. Some mornings it took longer than others. This morning had been a long one.
Below, a freight car shifted against its couplings with a sound like a slow exhalation. Nothing was moving yet. The yard was all stillness and signal lights and the smell of oil and cold metal and somewhere underneath that, if you knew what you were smelling, rust.
Marcus was fourteen and he knew what he was smelling.
He stayed at the fence until the sky behind the skyline went from black to the particular gray-purple that meant the city was thinking about morning but hadn't committed to it yet. Then he let go of the chain link and turned back the way he'd come.
He heard her before he reached the apartment. Third floor, the window at the end of the hall — he could tell by the quality of the sound, the specific acoustic of their kitchen, the way the pipes knocked when she ran the tap at that angle. The thermos filling. He knew the thermos by the sound it made, a low gurgle that cut off abruptly when it hit full.
He took the stairs quietly, which was habit rather than strategy. Elena wasn't fooled by quiet. She wasn't fooled by much.
He was in bed with his eyes closed and his shoes still on when she stopped in his doorway.
For a moment nothing happened. He could feel her standing there the way you can feel someone standing in a doorway — the slight change in the air, the awareness that the space you're in has a different shape now. She was reading him. She did this with patients, he knew — stood at the door of a room and read what the room was telling her before anyone said anything. He had watched her do it in the hospital once, when he was young enough that she still brought him on shifts sometimes, before there were other arrangements. She had the ability to look at a situation and know more about it than the situation had offered.
She knew he was awake. He knew she knew. They had arrived at this a long time ago without discussing it, the way you arrive at certain things with people you live with — not decided so much as accumulated, an understanding that had built itself one morning at a time until it was simply the way things were.
"The neighborhood doesn't owe you anything, Marcus." Her voice was quiet, aimed somewhere between him and the wall, the way she sometimes talked when she was really talking to herself. "But you owe it everything."
The door to her bedroom closed. A moment later the front door opened and shut, and the particular silence of a space that had held someone and then released them settled over the apartment.
Marcus opened his eyes.
The ceiling had a water stain in the upper left corner that his mind had, over years, converted into a map of a coastline he'd never been to. He stared at it for a while. Thought about what she'd said. Thought about how her words were almost always doing two things at once, and how he had learned over time to listen for both things, and how sometimes the second thing didn't show up until days later, arriving in the middle of something entirely different.
Then he got up and unlaced his shoes and went to the window.
The block below was still mostly sleeping. A man he didn't know walking a dog he didn't recognize. The corner store's lights on but nobody inside that he could see. Down the block, the overnight freight truck from the food supplier was parked halfway on the curb, the driver's door hanging open, which meant Ramon was inside dropping the produce order and leaving the engine running again, which the building super complained about to nobody every single week.
Marcus watched it for a while.
Then he went and made himself something to eat.


He found them where he usually found them, in the particular way that didn't involve finding at all — Dre already on the corner when Marcus came around it, Bea sitting on the stoop of the building next door with her notebook open across her knees, Tiny standing slightly apart from both of them the way Tiny always stood, like he was practicing at being somewhere he hadn't fully committed to yet.
Dre saw Marcus and lifted his chin. Not a greeting exactly. More like an acknowledgment that the count was now complete.
"Truck's already there," he said.
Marcus looked down the block. The pharmacy delivery truck sat with its flashers going, the driver's door closed. He checked his watch. Nine-oh-four.
"How long?"
"Just parked."
So eleven minutes from now, give or take. It was always eleven minutes. Marcus had watched it three Tuesdays in a row before he said anything to anyone, and even then he hadn't said I think we should — he'd just mentioned the eleven minutes, offhand, the way you mention weather, and let the number do its own work in the room.
Bea closed her notebook without looking up. "Back door's unlocked on Tuesdays," she said. "Driver props it."
"How do you know that?" Tiny asked.
"Because I watched." She said it without any particular emphasis, the way you'd explain something to someone who'd asked what color the sky was. She tucked the notebook into her jacket and looked at Marcus. "Southeast corner of the truck has a blind spot from the pharmacy camera. That's new. They repositioned it last week."
Marcus nodded. He'd noticed that too, but he hadn't said so yet — he'd been waiting to see if anyone else had caught it. Bea had caught it.
"What about the corner store camera?" he said.
"Doesn't reach the truck. Angle's wrong."
"It reached in August."
Bea looked at him for a moment. "They put up the awning," she said. "End of September. Cuts the angle."
Dre made a sound that was almost impatience, almost amusement. He did this sometimes when Marcus and Bea went back and forth — a sound that meant I don't know why you two do this but it always ends up being right so fine. "You both done?" he said.
Neither of them answered, which was its own kind of answer.
Nine minutes and forty seconds, as it turned out.
The driver came back out at nine-fifteen, hitched himself up into the cab, and pulled the truck away from the curb without looking in either direction. Marcus watched him go. A man with eleven — now nine — minutes of his Tuesday accounted for, the rest of the day its own thing, the stop at the pharmacy already receding into the accumulation of stops.
They walked back through the park without hurrying. Tiny had the bag. Bea was already doing the count in her head — Marcus could tell by the way her lips moved slightly, just barely, a habit she didn't know she had. Dre was talking about something, a story about his cousin, and Marcus was listening to it with the part of his attention that was available for listening to Dre's stories, which was not the largest part but was genuine.
The rest of his attention was on the news monitor mounted outside the pharmacy across the street.
He almost walked past it. He had walked past it a hundred times. But something on the screen caught the edge of his vision and he slowed without deciding to slow, and then he stopped.
Aegis. Standing outside a downtown bank, the mayor to his left, the police commissioner slightly behind and to the right, the whole arrangement so precisely composed that Marcus's mind registered it the way it registered the truck's eleven minutes and the pharmacy camera's new angle — as a thing that had been thought about, calibrated, placed.
The chyron at the bottom of the screen said something about a Ghost-affiliated crew and a prevented robbery and community safety. Marcus didn't read all of it. He was watching the man.
The way he stood. Weight forward just slightly, enough to be present without being aggressive. Arms loose at his sides. Head tilted a few degrees to the right, which gave him the quality of someone always in the process of listening to something just out of range. Marcus had seen enough people perform confidence to know the difference between performance and the real thing, and this was the real thing — not performed at all, which was almost harder to look at than performance would have been.
"Marcus."
Dre, from five feet ahead. The others had kept walking.
Marcus looked away from the screen. Looked at Dre. Looked back at the screen once more — Aegis already mid-sentence now, answering a reporter's question with the same quality of unhurried attention — and then fell back into step.
They didn't say anything about it. There was nothing to say.
Later, in the back room of the place they used, Dre had the same press conference on his phone and was making the sound he made at things he found both impressive and irritating, which was a specific exhale through his nose.
"Standing up there with the mayor," he said. "Like they're old friends."
"Maybe they are," Tiny said.
"Nobody's old friends with the mayor." Dre set the phone face-down on the table. "That's a transaction. Everybody in that picture is getting something."
Bea was counting. The medication in one pile, the packaged food in another, the vitamins she was already sorting by type because she knew which ones Dre's buyer wanted and which ones he didn't.
"What does Aegis get?" Marcus said.
Dre picked up the phone again. Looked at the frozen image — Aegis mid-sentence, one hand slightly raised. "Same thing anybody gets from standing next to power," he said. "The appearance of more power."
Marcus looked at the phone. At the hand slightly raised. The weight forward.
"He stopped something today," Marcus said. The words came out quieter than he intended. "That crew was going to hit the bank."
"And now they're not, and the bank's money is safe, and the people who own the bank are grateful, and Aegis is on television." Dre put the phone down again. "You see how that works?"
"That man doesn't know your name, Marcus," Bea said, without looking up from her counting.
She said it without cruelty. That was the thing about Bea — she delivered true things the way she delivered the count, just the number, no editorializing. Marcus knew she was right. He also knew that knowing she was right didn't change the feeling that sat in his chest when he watched the man on the screen, which was not admiration exactly and not envy exactly but something that lived between them and didn't have a cleaner name.
He didn't answer. He took his share — smaller than his cut, same as always — and put it in his jacket and listened to Dre finish his story about his cousin while the afternoon light moved across the wall.
Elena was home between shifts when he got back, or at the end of her night — the timing shifted depending on the week and Marcus had long since stopped trying to predict it and simply adjusted to whatever he found when he came in.
She was at the stove. This meant she'd been home long enough to decide cooking was worth it, which meant at least forty minutes, which meant she wasn't going back out immediately. Marcus dropped his jacket on the chair by the door and sat at the table and she didn't turn around.
"There's rice," she said.
"I know, I can smell it."
"Then why are you sitting down like you're waiting to be served."
He got up and got a bowl.
She told him about a patient while they ate. A man in his fifties who'd come in through the wrong channels — routed through a clinic that didn't have what he needed, delayed, the paperwork building up around him like a slow flood. She'd spent two hours on the phone that morning, before her shift technically started, navigating between three different departments and a billing system that seemed designed to make the right answer as difficult as possible to reach.
"Did it work?" Marcus said.
"He's on the right program now." She pushed rice around her bowl. "For now. Until something else changes."
She said it without bitterness. That was the thing that got him sometimes — the absence of bitterness in the way she talked about the work. Like the difficulty of it was just weather. Like you didn't get to be bitter about weather.
"Sometimes," she said, "the system needs someone willing to work inside it and outside it at the same time."
She said it the way she sometimes said things — aimed slightly away from him, at the middle distance, like she was testing the sentence before she committed to it.
Marcus ate his rice. Thought about the press conference. Thought about the back room, the count, Bea's voice saying that man doesn't know your name. Thought about the drawer inside him where he put things that were going to matter.
"What do you do," he said, "when working inside it isn't enough?"
Elena looked at him. It was the look she gave patients when they asked questions that didn't have answers she was willing to simplify.
"You figure out how much outside it you can afford to be," she said. "And you stay honest with yourself about the cost."
She got up and put her bowl in the sink. The conversation was over the way Elena's conversations ended — not abruptly, just completely, a door closing on a room that would still be there later.
At midnight Marcus was at the window.
The block below had settled into its late version of itself — the corner store closed now, the overnight quiet that wasn't really quiet if you knew how to listen. A car passing. Someone's window open three floors up with music coming through it, too low to identify, just the bass underneath everything like a second heartbeat.
He had his phone out and he was watching old Aegis footage. Saved clips, some of them barely watchable — shot from across a street or from a high window, the camera shaking, the resolution the particular blur of something that happened too fast and too far away. A chase across a rooftop, the figure moving in a way that made Marcus think of water moving around obstacles. A confrontation outside a parking structure, two minutes of circling and then something that resolved so quickly the camera missed it and the operator swung back to find Aegis already still, already turning toward the gathering crowd.
He watched it the way he watched everything. Looking for the pattern underneath the thing itself.
The weight forward. The head tilted right. The arms loose and ready in a way that looked relaxed until you understood that ready and relaxed were the same thing if you practiced long enough.
He watched it until the phone screen dimmed and he had to tap it back to life.
Below, the block went on being the block. Owing nothing. Requiring everything.
Marcus stood at the window for a long time after he put the phone in his pocket. The freight yard was too far to see from here but he knew it was there, the cars sitting in the dark, the signal lights bleeding red into the sky. The city breathing around all of it.
He thought about what Elena had said. He thought about the cost of being outside.
He thought about the hand, slightly raised, mid-sentence, on a screen outside a pharmacy on a Tuesday morning in October.
He stayed at the window until the bass from three floors up finally stopped, and then a little longer, and then he went to bed.
]]>
More recently - as the superhero genre gained traction on Netflix - I rewrote it as a 10 part screenplay

Not really much room for that here and I don't have much else to do with it so I am opting to rewrite it as one of my favorite formats of all time:  The Serial!  Why the hell am I posting this here???!!  Not exactly sure, don't have much else to do with it TBH - I think the world moved on from serials maybe 50 years ago but here - in my beloved Pigpen - maybe there is still a small space for it.  Anyway - Part 1 (of 10):  The Aegis


The Block - Chapter 1


The rail yard spread out below the fence like something the city had forgotten about — freight cars sitting in the dark, the distant signal lights bleeding red into the October air. Marcus wrapped his fingers through the chain link and breathed.
He'd come four miles to get here. Maybe more. He didn't count anymore; he just ran until the particular pressure behind his sternum loosened enough that he could stand still without feeling like something was going to come out of him. Some mornings it took longer than others. This morning had been a long one.
Below, a freight car shifted against its couplings with a sound like a slow exhalation. Nothing was moving yet. The yard was all stillness and signal lights and the smell of oil and cold metal and somewhere underneath that, if you knew what you were smelling, rust.
Marcus was fourteen and he knew what he was smelling.
He stayed at the fence until the sky behind the skyline went from black to the particular gray-purple that meant the city was thinking about morning but hadn't committed to it yet. Then he let go of the chain link and turned back the way he'd come.
He heard her before he reached the apartment. Third floor, the window at the end of the hall — he could tell by the quality of the sound, the specific acoustic of their kitchen, the way the pipes knocked when she ran the tap at that angle. The thermos filling. He knew the thermos by the sound it made, a low gurgle that cut off abruptly when it hit full.
He took the stairs quietly, which was habit rather than strategy. Elena wasn't fooled by quiet. She wasn't fooled by much.
He was in bed with his eyes closed and his shoes still on when she stopped in his doorway.
For a moment nothing happened. He could feel her standing there the way you can feel someone standing in a doorway — the slight change in the air, the awareness that the space you're in has a different shape now. She was reading him. She did this with patients, he knew — stood at the door of a room and read what the room was telling her before anyone said anything. He had watched her do it in the hospital once, when he was young enough that she still brought him on shifts sometimes, before there were other arrangements. She had the ability to look at a situation and know more about it than the situation had offered.
She knew he was awake. He knew she knew. They had arrived at this a long time ago without discussing it, the way you arrive at certain things with people you live with — not decided so much as accumulated, an understanding that had built itself one morning at a time until it was simply the way things were.
"The neighborhood doesn't owe you anything, Marcus." Her voice was quiet, aimed somewhere between him and the wall, the way she sometimes talked when she was really talking to herself. "But you owe it everything."
The door to her bedroom closed. A moment later the front door opened and shut, and the particular silence of a space that had held someone and then released them settled over the apartment.
Marcus opened his eyes.
The ceiling had a water stain in the upper left corner that his mind had, over years, converted into a map of a coastline he'd never been to. He stared at it for a while. Thought about what she'd said. Thought about how her words were almost always doing two things at once, and how he had learned over time to listen for both things, and how sometimes the second thing didn't show up until days later, arriving in the middle of something entirely different.
Then he got up and unlaced his shoes and went to the window.
The block below was still mostly sleeping. A man he didn't know walking a dog he didn't recognize. The corner store's lights on but nobody inside that he could see. Down the block, the overnight freight truck from the food supplier was parked halfway on the curb, the driver's door hanging open, which meant Ramon was inside dropping the produce order and leaving the engine running again, which the building super complained about to nobody every single week.
Marcus watched it for a while.
Then he went and made himself something to eat.


He found them where he usually found them, in the particular way that didn't involve finding at all — Dre already on the corner when Marcus came around it, Bea sitting on the stoop of the building next door with her notebook open across her knees, Tiny standing slightly apart from both of them the way Tiny always stood, like he was practicing at being somewhere he hadn't fully committed to yet.
Dre saw Marcus and lifted his chin. Not a greeting exactly. More like an acknowledgment that the count was now complete.
"Truck's already there," he said.
Marcus looked down the block. The pharmacy delivery truck sat with its flashers going, the driver's door closed. He checked his watch. Nine-oh-four.
"How long?"
"Just parked."
So eleven minutes from now, give or take. It was always eleven minutes. Marcus had watched it three Tuesdays in a row before he said anything to anyone, and even then he hadn't said I think we should — he'd just mentioned the eleven minutes, offhand, the way you mention weather, and let the number do its own work in the room.
Bea closed her notebook without looking up. "Back door's unlocked on Tuesdays," she said. "Driver props it."
"How do you know that?" Tiny asked.
"Because I watched." She said it without any particular emphasis, the way you'd explain something to someone who'd asked what color the sky was. She tucked the notebook into her jacket and looked at Marcus. "Southeast corner of the truck has a blind spot from the pharmacy camera. That's new. They repositioned it last week."
Marcus nodded. He'd noticed that too, but he hadn't said so yet — he'd been waiting to see if anyone else had caught it. Bea had caught it.
"What about the corner store camera?" he said.
"Doesn't reach the truck. Angle's wrong."
"It reached in August."
Bea looked at him for a moment. "They put up the awning," she said. "End of September. Cuts the angle."
Dre made a sound that was almost impatience, almost amusement. He did this sometimes when Marcus and Bea went back and forth — a sound that meant I don't know why you two do this but it always ends up being right so fine. "You both done?" he said.
Neither of them answered, which was its own kind of answer.
Nine minutes and forty seconds, as it turned out.
The driver came back out at nine-fifteen, hitched himself up into the cab, and pulled the truck away from the curb without looking in either direction. Marcus watched him go. A man with eleven — now nine — minutes of his Tuesday accounted for, the rest of the day its own thing, the stop at the pharmacy already receding into the accumulation of stops.
They walked back through the park without hurrying. Tiny had the bag. Bea was already doing the count in her head — Marcus could tell by the way her lips moved slightly, just barely, a habit she didn't know she had. Dre was talking about something, a story about his cousin, and Marcus was listening to it with the part of his attention that was available for listening to Dre's stories, which was not the largest part but was genuine.
The rest of his attention was on the news monitor mounted outside the pharmacy across the street.
He almost walked past it. He had walked past it a hundred times. But something on the screen caught the edge of his vision and he slowed without deciding to slow, and then he stopped.
Aegis. Standing outside a downtown bank, the mayor to his left, the police commissioner slightly behind and to the right, the whole arrangement so precisely composed that Marcus's mind registered it the way it registered the truck's eleven minutes and the pharmacy camera's new angle — as a thing that had been thought about, calibrated, placed.
The chyron at the bottom of the screen said something about a Ghost-affiliated crew and a prevented robbery and community safety. Marcus didn't read all of it. He was watching the man.
The way he stood. Weight forward just slightly, enough to be present without being aggressive. Arms loose at his sides. Head tilted a few degrees to the right, which gave him the quality of someone always in the process of listening to something just out of range. Marcus had seen enough people perform confidence to know the difference between performance and the real thing, and this was the real thing — not performed at all, which was almost harder to look at than performance would have been.
"Marcus."
Dre, from five feet ahead. The others had kept walking.
Marcus looked away from the screen. Looked at Dre. Looked back at the screen once more — Aegis already mid-sentence now, answering a reporter's question with the same quality of unhurried attention — and then fell back into step.
They didn't say anything about it. There was nothing to say.
Later, in the back room of the place they used, Dre had the same press conference on his phone and was making the sound he made at things he found both impressive and irritating, which was a specific exhale through his nose.
"Standing up there with the mayor," he said. "Like they're old friends."
"Maybe they are," Tiny said.
"Nobody's old friends with the mayor." Dre set the phone face-down on the table. "That's a transaction. Everybody in that picture is getting something."
Bea was counting. The medication in one pile, the packaged food in another, the vitamins she was already sorting by type because she knew which ones Dre's buyer wanted and which ones he didn't.
"What does Aegis get?" Marcus said.
Dre picked up the phone again. Looked at the frozen image — Aegis mid-sentence, one hand slightly raised. "Same thing anybody gets from standing next to power," he said. "The appearance of more power."
Marcus looked at the phone. At the hand slightly raised. The weight forward.
"He stopped something today," Marcus said. The words came out quieter than he intended. "That crew was going to hit the bank."
"And now they're not, and the bank's money is safe, and the people who own the bank are grateful, and Aegis is on television." Dre put the phone down again. "You see how that works?"
"That man doesn't know your name, Marcus," Bea said, without looking up from her counting.
She said it without cruelty. That was the thing about Bea — she delivered true things the way she delivered the count, just the number, no editorializing. Marcus knew she was right. He also knew that knowing she was right didn't change the feeling that sat in his chest when he watched the man on the screen, which was not admiration exactly and not envy exactly but something that lived between them and didn't have a cleaner name.
He didn't answer. He took his share — smaller than his cut, same as always — and put it in his jacket and listened to Dre finish his story about his cousin while the afternoon light moved across the wall.
Elena was home between shifts when he got back, or at the end of her night — the timing shifted depending on the week and Marcus had long since stopped trying to predict it and simply adjusted to whatever he found when he came in.
She was at the stove. This meant she'd been home long enough to decide cooking was worth it, which meant at least forty minutes, which meant she wasn't going back out immediately. Marcus dropped his jacket on the chair by the door and sat at the table and she didn't turn around.
"There's rice," she said.
"I know, I can smell it."
"Then why are you sitting down like you're waiting to be served."
He got up and got a bowl.
She told him about a patient while they ate. A man in his fifties who'd come in through the wrong channels — routed through a clinic that didn't have what he needed, delayed, the paperwork building up around him like a slow flood. She'd spent two hours on the phone that morning, before her shift technically started, navigating between three different departments and a billing system that seemed designed to make the right answer as difficult as possible to reach.
"Did it work?" Marcus said.
"He's on the right program now." She pushed rice around her bowl. "For now. Until something else changes."
She said it without bitterness. That was the thing that got him sometimes — the absence of bitterness in the way she talked about the work. Like the difficulty of it was just weather. Like you didn't get to be bitter about weather.
"Sometimes," she said, "the system needs someone willing to work inside it and outside it at the same time."
She said it the way she sometimes said things — aimed slightly away from him, at the middle distance, like she was testing the sentence before she committed to it.
Marcus ate his rice. Thought about the press conference. Thought about the back room, the count, Bea's voice saying that man doesn't know your name. Thought about the drawer inside him where he put things that were going to matter.
"What do you do," he said, "when working inside it isn't enough?"
Elena looked at him. It was the look she gave patients when they asked questions that didn't have answers she was willing to simplify.
"You figure out how much outside it you can afford to be," she said. "And you stay honest with yourself about the cost."
She got up and put her bowl in the sink. The conversation was over the way Elena's conversations ended — not abruptly, just completely, a door closing on a room that would still be there later.
At midnight Marcus was at the window.
The block below had settled into its late version of itself — the corner store closed now, the overnight quiet that wasn't really quiet if you knew how to listen. A car passing. Someone's window open three floors up with music coming through it, too low to identify, just the bass underneath everything like a second heartbeat.
He had his phone out and he was watching old Aegis footage. Saved clips, some of them barely watchable — shot from across a street or from a high window, the camera shaking, the resolution the particular blur of something that happened too fast and too far away. A chase across a rooftop, the figure moving in a way that made Marcus think of water moving around obstacles. A confrontation outside a parking structure, two minutes of circling and then something that resolved so quickly the camera missed it and the operator swung back to find Aegis already still, already turning toward the gathering crowd.
He watched it the way he watched everything. Looking for the pattern underneath the thing itself.
The weight forward. The head tilted right. The arms loose and ready in a way that looked relaxed until you understood that ready and relaxed were the same thing if you practiced long enough.
He watched it until the phone screen dimmed and he had to tap it back to life.
Below, the block went on being the block. Owing nothing. Requiring everything.
Marcus stood at the window for a long time after he put the phone in his pocket. The freight yard was too far to see from here but he knew it was there, the cars sitting in the dark, the signal lights bleeding red into the sky. The city breathing around all of it.
He thought about what Elena had said. He thought about the cost of being outside.
He thought about the hand, slightly raised, mid-sentence, on a screen outside a pharmacy on a Tuesday morning in October.
He stayed at the window until the bass from three floors up finally stopped, and then a little longer, and then he went to bed.
]]> <![CDATA[Life]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27414.html Wed, 03 Jun 2026 22:06:07 +0000 Bruce V]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27414.html Each moment
Tailor-made
Perfection bound.

Needs must
Debts paid
Doors open
Light enters]]> Each moment
Tailor-made
Perfection bound.

Needs must
Debts paid
Doors open
Light enters]]> <![CDATA[Dog expert]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27396.html Wed, 27 May 2026 18:15:24 +0000 CRNDLSM]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27396.html Bad dog
Good Ole bad Ole big Ole
Little dog

Thank you so much

Everything known
Has an exception
Plan D is always 
Improvise

Dont be surprised

All dogs are good dogs
All dogs are bad dogs
All dogs are puppies forever

No one knows your dog
Better than you
You dont know your dog
When youre not there
(You think you do)


These are the facts]]> Bad dog
Good Ole bad Ole big Ole
Little dog

Thank you so much

Everything known
Has an exception
Plan D is always 
Improvise

Dont be surprised

All dogs are good dogs
All dogs are bad dogs
All dogs are puppies forever

No one knows your dog
Better than you
You dont know your dog
When youre not there
(You think you do)


These are the facts]]> <![CDATA[Pulse, the Dark Round]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27395.html Tue, 26 May 2026 19:29:48 +0000 rowens]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27395.html Pulse, the Dark Round

When queen cats, shed of inner lions,
turf-angry, embrace their shadow like a trauma
and purr close to rocky ditch between stony smiles:
how can one tom tell-tale of harmonies
different? Frequencies only she can wail.

Answers are not in any square defining,
nor are they bumper-stickered on her social
wall. Once nipple-weaned, genders cry out
blood. Myths of milk linger,
churn, spilling each litter.

The feline brain stays open nights;
essential life is dreaming. Circular square
of angles, its own cellblock, a densely
loose colony of shades. Stray
certainties make leaps for each round
butterfly: dead of its own round.

Food is a secret, scratching all desires
from hamlet stones.—What is in a rock?
Gentle vibrations only strangers heal. Beauty
though it hides in raspy tongue, laps the ocean
free again. Churning teats in their decline,
pollution savory for vultures. Certainty's midwives.]]> Pulse, the Dark Round

When queen cats, shed of inner lions,
turf-angry, embrace their shadow like a trauma
and purr close to rocky ditch between stony smiles:
how can one tom tell-tale of harmonies
different? Frequencies only she can wail.

Answers are not in any square defining,
nor are they bumper-stickered on her social
wall. Once nipple-weaned, genders cry out
blood. Myths of milk linger,
churn, spilling each litter.

The feline brain stays open nights;
essential life is dreaming. Circular square
of angles, its own cellblock, a densely
loose colony of shades. Stray
certainties make leaps for each round
butterfly: dead of its own round.

Food is a secret, scratching all desires
from hamlet stones.—What is in a rock?
Gentle vibrations only strangers heal. Beauty
though it hides in raspy tongue, laps the ocean
free again. Churning teats in their decline,
pollution savory for vultures. Certainty's midwives.]]> <![CDATA[Journey]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27374.html Wed, 13 May 2026 19:52:51 +0000 Bruce V]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27374.html I've tried to find 
The way back
But the further I travel
The fewer things I recognize.
Am I lost
Or am I getting close?]]> I've tried to find 
The way back
But the further I travel
The fewer things I recognize.
Am I lost
Or am I getting close?]]> <![CDATA[Post Lightning]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27366.html Sun, 10 May 2026 19:35:22 +0000 Bunx]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27366.html Post Lightning 

Sometimes I replace 
"I don't care"
with silence,
because I forgot how to share.

An aura of shame,
outlined by fear
protected by pills
that hold back tears.

Catalyzed by 
hidden events in my life
that happened
during trying times. 

My vision went 
beyond comprehension.

Portraits morphing in jailcells 
to changing hospital walls.
Days after being tazed 
inside my former living room. 

Watched from the 
body cams perspective 
a nightmare
recalled differently.

Seeing myself confused, fainting 
down worn blue stairs.

Cops picked the loose
shocking metal from skin.

Is this the cost of sin?
The consequence of miss-prescription?
I don't deserve these sensations.

It's not that I lack empathy,
it's not that I don't care.

Mourning the days listening 
to friends complain about their day
answering compassion's call.

I'd rather write about love
then hospital walls.]]> Post Lightning 

Sometimes I replace 
"I don't care"
with silence,
because I forgot how to share.

An aura of shame,
outlined by fear
protected by pills
that hold back tears.

Catalyzed by 
hidden events in my life
that happened
during trying times. 

My vision went 
beyond comprehension.

Portraits morphing in jailcells 
to changing hospital walls.
Days after being tazed 
inside my former living room. 

Watched from the 
body cams perspective 
a nightmare
recalled differently.

Seeing myself confused, fainting 
down worn blue stairs.

Cops picked the loose
shocking metal from skin.

Is this the cost of sin?
The consequence of miss-prescription?
I don't deserve these sensations.

It's not that I lack empathy,
it's not that I don't care.

Mourning the days listening 
to friends complain about their day
answering compassion's call.

I'd rather write about love
then hospital walls.]]> <![CDATA[Merlin's Cave]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27344.html Tue, 28 Apr 2026 14:15:28 +0000 rowens]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27344.html Merlin's Cave


Love-cursed is right;
you didn't do it; 
least not the cursed part.

No, you are no gorgon,
not even close. 

I always wonder how anyone ever made it through
your walls.

And how many defeated their head on the out-
side 

I feel I am walled up
inside your wall.
I can't go forward and I can't go backward.
And every direction I turn, I'm surrounded by your absence.

Does Anteros with his inverted arrows
satisfy, being turned to stone?

All I see beyond a scorched forest of the Impossible,
my drive and goal,
Love, even more impossible.

I might as well believe in God.]]> Merlin's Cave


Love-cursed is right;
you didn't do it; 
least not the cursed part.

No, you are no gorgon,
not even close. 

I always wonder how anyone ever made it through
your walls.

And how many defeated their head on the out-
side 

I feel I am walled up
inside your wall.
I can't go forward and I can't go backward.
And every direction I turn, I'm surrounded by your absence.

Does Anteros with his inverted arrows
satisfy, being turned to stone?

All I see beyond a scorched forest of the Impossible,
my drive and goal,
Love, even more impossible.

I might as well believe in God.]]>