Sijo is a Korean form that requires three lines of 14-16 syllables with a pause in the middle of each line

            Dale types text to overlay the photo: You are about to receive ten thousand dollars! Type yes if you believe! He clicks save, names it, using a naming format he’s adopted to keep track of his thousands of affirmations, then pulls up the next photo, a generic sunrise. He switches screens to his running list of affirmations. Closing his eyes, he calls upon his intuition to make his gaze alight on the right phrase. He looks at the screen. His eyes land on All that you have experienced was only preparation for this moment. Type yes if you believe!  He repeats it in his mind three times to give it intent, then switches screens to the meme-making app and types in the text to overlay an image, saves it, names it.

            Dale posts the affirmations on Instagram and Twitter. Timing is everything. With half the world’s population engaging in social media an average of 2.5 hours per day, the odds of reaching just the right person at just the right time might seem low, but not if you factor in the divine algorithm that organizes everything. The Internet, Dale thinks, is an avatar of Universal Mind, the elephant-headed Ganesh manifesting through microchips.

            Dale feels guided to do one about love. He checks his running list, but nothing feels right. He turns to the hole in his own heart that yearns for a twin flame to burn beside him and waits for angels to put the words together. He feels it coming and begins typing before he even knows what the words will be. You will meet your twin flame today. Love is coming to you. Type yes if you believe!  He finds a stock image of two lovers holding hands, but instead of overlaying these words on that image, he decides to keep this affirmation for himself.   

            Dale intuits he’s posted enough for now. As if on cue – isn’t everything? – the ring-tone on his phone sounds, a Zen meditation gong struck to signal it’s time to rise from the cushion. But when Dale looks at the caller’s number, he takes a deep breath, mentally crosses himself, and swipes.

            “Hi Mom.”

            “I’m just calling because you haven’t called me. I wanted to make sure you were still alive.”

            “We spoke a few days ago, Mom.”

            “How’s work?”

            “Fine.” There’s not a lot to report if your job is handling packages at an Amazon fulfillment center.

            “Are you happy, Dale?” This is, at best, a rhetorical question, and at worst an indictment. If he says anything other than an unqualified yes, she’ll drop any pretense of boundaries and expropriate his entire life.

“Sure, Mom. Anything new with you?”   

“What could be new with me? I’m in constant pain with my arthritis, but I don’t talk about it. I don’t want to burden you. I’m thinking about replacing the couch in the den. It’s been broken for years from where you used to jump on it when I told you not to. Your father’s having problems with gas. It’s a good thing I don’t smoke, or this house would go boom like the Fourth of July ”

“A new couch sounds like a great idea, Mom. Well, I have someplace I have to go, so I’ll hang up now.”

“Is it a girl? Do you have a girlfriend? You didn’t introduced us to the last one.”

“No, Mom, not a girlfriend.”

Silence.

“That’s fine, no need to tell me, I don’t want to pry, so long as it’s not drugs.”

It’s not anything. It’s just an excuse Dale made up to end the call.

“No drugs, Mom. Say hi to Dad for me.”

“Love you.”

“Love you, Mom.”

“Call me.”

Dale ends the call. He’s all jangled inside. And he still has more affirmations to prepare for posting. Maybe he’ll call it a day on the affirmations. Maybe he’ll go for a walk in the park. Yes, that’s what Intuition is telling him to do. Eureka! Dale pulls up the screen of his running list of affirmations and types “Intuition is the only authority. Type yes if believe!”.

                                                            #

Megan can’t believe Tony is dumping her via text.

You’re a wonderful person, and it’s been wonderful to be with you, but I think I need time to figure out who I am and I can’t do that and hold up my end of a relationship at the same time..

Megan doesn’t believe it for a second. Tony’s just tired of fucking her and wants to fuck somebody else.

I know you’ll find someone better able to meet your needs.

It’s a reversible-jacket kind of sentence. It could mean he’s admitting he’s an emotional cripple or he’s saying she’s too needy.

 You deserve someone who can hold up his end of the relationship.

There’s that phrase again – hold up the relationship, as if they’re carrying a piano up the fire escape and he has a bad back.

Maybe in six months or so, I’ll give you a call and we’ll catch up.

Translation: don’t text, phone, or stalk me. As if.

May all good things come to you, because you deserve them. Yada-yada. Megan resists the urge to type a sarcastic reply. She types what she knows she should type – I understand. Good luck in your journey. Take care – and clicks off her phone. Megan isn’t brokenhearted. She’s pissed because he was the one to break it off instead of her.

What a way to start the day. Fortunately, it’s Saturday. She has the weekend to get the taste of Tony out of her mouth. It’s only 8:30, but the sun is blasting through the window of her apartment. It’s a good day to go to the park. Besides, she doesn’t want to be in this apartment that still reeks of Tony’s vibe. His vibe is a fingerprint at the scene of a crime, the crime of bad judgment in men. She sticks her apartment key in her pants pocket, grabs a book she’s been reading, and heads for the door.

                                                            #

Dale shades his eyes with his hand. Sunshine angles through open spaces between the summer-green trees, already powerful though it’s only 9 a.m. Dale doesn’t mind he has to shade his eyes because the heat feels good against his body. Dale has an affinity with Ra, the Egyptian sun god, probably because Dale might have been a temple priest back in the day. As Ra rises above the tree line and people and plants alike begin to groan under the August heat, Dale will just smile the way all-seeing Ra smiles.

Dale’s mind is filled with affirmations floating randomly in and out of his consciousness like balloons. It reminds him of pigeons at the beach that pester people on blankets for a scrap of sandwich or a potato chip, a flock of would-a, could-a, should-a. Dale wants to get away from them, get away from his mother, just let life unroll however it’s going to unroll without the burden of “doing” something.

Dale spots a couple of benches under trees. One is occupied by a woman in pink shorts with her nose in a book, but another bench ten yards beyond her is empty, as if it’s meant for him. He strides over and sits down. He un-focuses his eyes and takes a deep breath, focuses on breathing in and out, slowing it, deepening it, until everything is a little fuzzy. It’s like opening a window and letting in fresh air, except the air is also light. Dale may not be good at life, but he’s fair to middling at meditation.

After a few minutes, his attention returns to his senses. He looks at the ribbon of asphalt winding through the trees. The walking paths are empty at the moment but that will change. Sure enough, he sees someone emerge from the shade around the bend, a man with a clutch of balloons.

                                                            #

Megan lifts her eyes from the book. There’s a man standing in the grass beyond the walking path. He wears a baseball cap that has no team logo. He’s holding a dozen balloons on strings. She wonders whether there’s a fair in the park or if he’s advertising something.

She returns to reading. Her book is about synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence. Synchronicity evidently is something somebody named Jung came up with, though the author says Eastern religions believe in it, too. The idea is events that have no apparent causal connection are actually connected in some other dimension of experience, which sounds pretty woo-woo. If it’s in another dimension, how could we even know? But Jung says there are no meaningless coincidences.

   Megan thinks the quest for the meaning of life is a fool’s errand. If there were an answer, somebody would have figured it out by now. Megan has her own answer: sometimes you’re happy, sometimes you’re sad, good things happen, bad things happen. Bad things like Tony dumping her. But is that a bad thing? Maybe it’s a good thing. She’s surprised how easy it is to let Tony float out of her life. She feels like she just lost ten pounds.

  “What do you say?”

It’s a mom on the walking path speaking to her small daughter. The man in the baseball cap is handing the little girl a balloon. It’s bright yellow.

“Thank you!”

The girl walks ahead of her mom, gazing raptly at her new balloon as if she has the whole world on a string. They pass a little boy wearing a blue Paw Patrol T-shirt. He lets go his mom’s hand and points greedily at the little girl’s balloon. Then he laughs – the balloon man is walking toward him, extending a blue balloon in his right hand. The boy takes it, delighted.

Megan goes back to her book, reads a few pages, but every few minutes nearby movement or the sound of “Thank you!” pulls her vision back to the balloon man. This pattern repeats over a period of half an hour, and now the balloon man has given away almost all of his balloons. He says nothing, asks for nothing, no money changes hands. He’s just giving away balloons. She notices again that the balloon man has no logo on his ball cap. For some reason it strikes her as subversive to not be for one team or the other.

                                                            #

 Though Dale’s bench is in the sun, a nice breeze cools him from behind, stirring the leaves in trees across the walkway, a pattern of whispering. He thinks of Findhorn, a spiritual community in Scotland that communicates with the intelligence of plants and the angels, divas, and fairies of nature. Working cooperatively with them all, Findhorn miraculously can grow amazing plants and herbs in barren sand. The inexplicable fecundity of Findhorn mutes naysayers who think angels and fairies are woo-woo. Who can deny the empirical evidence of a forty-pound cabbage? Dale studies the movement and sound of the branches to discern if there’s something alive in there. Suddenly his view is blocked by a figure in front of his bench. A man is bowing to Dale. His arm extends and he hands Dale the string of a balloon. Dale takes it. He looks up at the balloon. It’s pink.

When Dale looks down, the balloon man is walking away from him. Dale watches the man disappear down the walking trail and into the shade. A sweet smell hangs in the air around Dale’s bench. Pipe smoke? Pot? Sage? He can’t tell. And now he’s holding a pink balloon that’s bobbing and dipping in a sudden breeze. Dale grips the string tighter to control it as it blows to his right, in the direction of the woman on the bench, the one with the book. She’s watching him. She’s pretty. She’s wearing pink shorts, a shocking pink that lassoes the eye.

Another gust of wind makes the trees noisy. For a moment, it seems the trees have a throat and tongue speaking to him. But what are they saying? Something that feels like a powerful magnet pulls his eyes back to the woman on the bench. She’s still watching him. Again, he notices those pink shorts, bright as a flare in deep shade.

Dale stands. His feet have a life of their own and carry him over to the woman. She holds his gaze. A welcome sign hangs in her eyes. When he reaches her, he stops and extends his arm holding the balloon.

“It matches your shorts.”

“What a coincidence.” A corner of her mouth curls up.  

“There are no coincidences,” he replies. Her jaw drops.

“Damn!”

He waits for her to explain. She shows him the book she’s been reading. Dale recognizes Carl Jung’s picture on the cover. Dale grins.

“Damn,” she says again, shaking her head. The features of her face soften. Dale extends his arm again and she takes the balloon. She smiles.

                                                            #

The August sun is disappearing into dusk, the crack between worlds.

I close my eyes. I see that it will be in winter, at a third-generation hippie restaurant, when they are celebrating their sixth-month anniversary of being together. Her suspicions will have dwindled to a speck of dust because he’s a puppy that just keeps licking her face. She will wear the Ra T-shirt he bought for her. She wears it not because she’s into Ra, but because it’s a cool picture of an eye. He will be reading Jung’s Man and His Symbols and will wear glasses instead of contacts to look intellectual for her. She will have a Greek salad. He will have a tofu and vegetable dish served over rice. They will drink too much. And, for the Nth time, they will reminisce about the day they met at the park. He will talk about the twin flame affirmation he composed that morning, how he saved it for himself, and about fairies in the whispering trees. She will talk about synchronicity, and they will have to admit, yes, the pink balloon matched her pink shorts. They won’t say much about the man with the balloons. They won’t remember his face, only the baseball cap.

That’s okay. I wasn’t selling anything. I wasn’t asking for anything. I was just giving away balloons.

“Graduation,” The Curator Magazine, September, 2022

Read Arranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic, political poetry for a post-truth world, available at https://cutt.ly/MikeWilsonTitanicRabbitHousePress

Haiku by Mike Wilson, photo by Constantine Stamatis

These poems appeared in Mockingheart Review, Fall 2021

                                                        The Tao 

When Marvin woke in the morning, he always felt emptied, like a catharsis had happened in his sleep in dreams he couldn’t remember, clearing away clutter, as if he’d cleaned up the garage and now each tool was hanging in its proper place. When he pressed the button on the coffeemaker and the blue light lit up like a hello, he felt comforted, and even more so when the gentle gurgle and drip sound decorated the silence. Today would be a trouble-free expanse of happiness stretching like canvas that the Tao would paint according to its own rules and regulations. So much to look forward to. And it was still hours before dawn.

He poured his first cup of coffee and sat on the couch where he always sat. He picked up a book, but didn’t open it because reading sucked you into the minds of other people. Was it Sartre who said hell is other people? It was why Thoreau had lived alone at Walden Pond, but Sartre was the one who had articulated the inner truth. Marvin lived alone in this apartment south of the university. He’d once lived with his mother in the burbs in a house with a garage, but that was another story. The cop working the cold case had thought it odd that Marvin hadn’t kept any pictures of his mother, but having pictures would be like living with her again. Instead of the gurgle of the coffeemaker, he would hear his mother’s voice. Make yourself useful, clean up the garage. Annoying comments that always meant something entirely different than what she was saying.

            A fly buzzed by his face and Marvin’s eyes followed its flight. It landed on the coffee table. Marvin slowly raised the book over the table, then slammed down hard. The fly was too quick and it escaped. That was the Tao for you.

            Blue lights were flashing through the window, so Marvin got up to look. He watched the lights trail into the darkness. Most crime happened at night, but Marvin didn’t think it was because darkness made it hard for the victim to see what was coming. It was because the day’s clutter builds up, and clutter is stultifying and noisy, so by nightfall it has to be cleaned out. Cops always looked for motives. Every motive was only one motive – getting rid of the clutter. People always make things more complicated than they really are.

Marvin didn’t bother with motives. He looked for signs. The Tao unfolds in a series of signs that foreshadow everything, tiny mustard seeds growing into great trees, yin becoming yang and yang becoming yin. The blue lights were a sign. They were part of the Tao unfolding.

                                                                        #

            Marvin opened his eyes when the gong sounded ending the meditation session. It was time for the group’s break. The people around him stood, stretching stiff legs, and he did, too. No one said anything so as not to soil the tranquility they’d spent the past couple hours cultivating by emptying their minds, just watching thoughts bubbling up, letting them go like balloons released into the sky, floating away, eventually descending where birds, turtles, and fish would swallow them and die. Marvin had asked the meditation director where he thought the thoughts went when you let them go, and the director had said they just disappear. This, of course, is a lie. Nothing disappears. Thoughts just float to some street corner where they wait for a victim. Nothing is ever wasted by the Tao.

            Gradually, the meditators migrated to a room where a table was laid out with herbal tea and snacks. There would be talking, now, and Marvin felt anxiety build in his chest like a tea kettle boiling but you couldn’t hear the whistle. Someone would speak to him and he would have to talk back. He would have to justify his existence to this person and this person would dislike Marvin or would like him, which was worse, because being liked meant being imprisoned in a cage constructed by the mind of the other person, like a lightning bug some kid caught and put in a jar because he ‘liked’ it. This disliking or liking would stick in Marvin’s mind like flies stick to flypaper, all these noisy annoying flies making the tea kettle boil hotter. It made Marvin sick to his stomach to think about it.

            “Is this your first time at a meditation weekend?”

            A woman was talking to him. Her name was Charlene. She was nice. But that’s how trouble started, thinking everything is okay, treating that gut feeling as something wrong with you instead of the flashing yellow light it really is.

“No,” Marvin said. “Is it your first time?”

The logistics of talking are easy. Be a mirror. If they say hello, say hello back. If they say what do you do, recite your job description and ask for theirs. But all the while, flies fill your brain like it’s a rotting carcass, the noisy clutter ringing in your ears until you can’t hear anything else.

Charlene continued talking but Marvin was having trouble listening. She stopped, waiting for him to say something. Marvin felt like he’d been herded into a cattle chute that led to the slaughterhouse and he and this woman were going there together.

“Want to walk outside?” he asked. She looked at him as if assessing his intentions.

“In the meditation garden, I mean,” he said, and that seemed to assuage her concerns. They slithered between folks congregating in the kitchen and slipped out the back door where a gravel path meandered between shrubs and under trees. They entered that path as if going somewhere together. The garden was tiny, not much bigger than Marvin’s apartment, but it was carefully designed to create distinct spaces, only a few feet apart, that cohered like little self-contained bonsai parks. They moseyed from spot to spot like visitors in an art gallery, but the flies buzzing in Marvin’s head were getting louder. And then, as they rounded a corner, he heard them with his ears, too.

“Oh,” Charlene said, stopping. On the ground in front of them was a dead robin covered with angry flies. The angry buzz of the flies grew louder as if the flies feared there wouldn’t be enough dead bird to go around. The flies were like prisoners with an arm around their plates and eating as fast as they could. The buzzing in Marvin’s head grew louder, too. The dead robin and her entourage of flies was a sign, a correspondence between the inner world and the outer world. It was the Tao. Charlene pointed at the little bird corpse.  

“We should be mindful of death. Then we won’t put off meditating because we never know when death will take us.”

  Marvin started to take issue with her assertion that we never know when death will take us, but checked himself. Suddenly, he felt like Charlene was annoying him. Suddenly, the weight of her annoyance was so great it almost made him tip over. Suddenly, the breadth of her chest, her low hips, and her short legs reminded him of a robin. Her robin-ness felt like an insult or a provocation.

“We should get back inside,” Charlene chirped. “The next session will start up soon.”

They re-entered the building and slithered through the kitchen again back to the meditation room. Other people were assuming the lotus position on their cushions. The din of noisy flies was deafening. Marvin had trouble catching his breath as he sat on his cushion and tried to look like everyone else.

                                                            #

It was 5:30 and the Saturday session was over. The group would return tomorrow morning for the Sunday session. Sitting on the meditation cushion for a few hours had quieted the flies. They still filled Marvin’s brain, but they were asleep. He walked gently so he wouldn’t wake them. Charlene was checking her phone when Marvin approached.

“Want to meet for dinner?”

She hesitated as if surprised, but quickly said yes, a smile on her robin face. They picked a time, 7:30, and a place, the Italian restaurant in the old neighborhood south of the university, not far from Marvin’s apartment. It also was near where she lived, she said.

“It is? Where do you live?” he asked. She gave him the address, adding, “It’s within walking distance of the restaurant.”

Marvin felt the tea kettle in his chest simmer.

“See you then.”  

As he left the building and went to his car, the flies were stirring, but he shushed them by singing a little melody in his mind. When the red red robin comes bob bob bobbin along.

                                                            #

 Marvin was pacing back and forth outside and looking at his watch. At 7:15, Charlene came out the front door of her tiny brick house that probably was considered nice when it was built back in the 1930s. Nostalgia gave the university neighborhood character otherwise denied low-income housing, as if the people living in these old houses were a better class of victim than someone in a housing project.

“Hi,” he said. “I came early so I could walk you to the restaurant.”

Charlene smiled. The flies exerted pressure in Marvin’s head, but their wings were still. Charlene was wearing lipstick. She liked Marvin. It occurred to Marvin that this might be a nice dinner date. It could be a pleasant evening. Perhaps that’s what the Tao had in mind. It was nothing to Marvin either way – he would simply follow the Tao as it unfolded.

Charlene launched into a blow-by-blow description of the mundane events of her week, the way people do when they think you care, a monologue requiring no response from Marvin. It reminded him of his mother. He didn’t like that. Charlene had been better when she was quiet. All her talking was like someone splashing water in your face when all you want to do is float in the ocean. Then she said, “I’m actually glad you came to walk with me. I was thinking maybe I should drive to the restaurant instead of walking. There was another murder last night. Did you read about it?”

“No.” Marvin’s answer was literally true. He never read news. News was just clutter, the hell of other people. Marvin felt the tea kettle start to boil. The flies were waking up, rubbing their eyes, compound eyes, each of which consist of 3,000 to 6,000 simple eyes. Thousands of flies, tens of millions of eyes looking and looking and looking.

When they passed an alleyway that cut between this block and the next one over, Marvin took Charlene’s hand. He nodded.

“This is a shortcut.”

Charlene wasn’t looking at the alley. She was looking at Marvin, forming an opinion about Marvin holding her hand. This kind of behavior was typical of most people, wasting time imagining motives instead of looking for signs. People typically insist on being clueless, even when surrounded by clues.

 Charlene followed the gentle tug of Marvin’s hand like a horse bridled as they slithered down the alley together between empty boxes and garbage cans. There was a broom leaning against the wall, as if someone had started to clean up the clutter and then abandoned the task. At the end of the alley, next to a child’s bicycle, was a dead rat, coated with a mass of flies walking back and forth unhurriedly across their booty, sated from a round of feeding, waiting until they became hungry enough to do it again.

“Oh,” Charlene said, squeezing his hand. She was reacting to the smell. Marvin saw that she had no appreciation of the beautiful intimacy of the flies crawling over the dead rat. Charlene was a stupid robin. The lipstick made it worse. Marvin pulled her through to the end of the alley. Across the street was a run-down public park with an empty playground where a flock of starlings strutted about, pecking at the ground. Beyond the playground were the woods. 

“If we cut through the park,” he said. “We’ll be there in sixty seconds.”

He pulled her with him and she followed without resistance as if they were dancing and he was leading. As they approached the playground, the starlings rose in mass like dark rain returning to the sky. Barely a beat later, the flies in Marvin’s head released and rose with the starlings, and Marvin felt his eyes roll back in his head as he felt himself disappearing into uncluttered emptiness.

                                                            #

   Marvin got out of bed and made coffee. Some kind catharsis had happened in his sleep, a dream he couldn’t remember, as if he’d cleaned out the garage and each tool now was hanging in its proper place. Henceforth, there would be nothing but order and contentment. That always was his thinking when he drank coffee in the morning. Today would be trouble-free, an expanse of happiness stretching like canvas the Tao would paint. And it wasn’t even dawn yet.  He sat on the couch where he always sat and began humming a tune, and words came to mind to go with it. When the red red robin comes bob bob bobbin along. It’s funny how songs stick in your head for no reason at all.

Marvin heard sirens in the distance, coming closer, now coming down his street. He went to the window to look and watched blue lights flash as they passed and then trail into darkness. It was a sign, a mustard seed that no doubt would grow into a great tree. Marvin heard the voice of his mother – make yourself useful, clean up the garage – bounce around in his brain. He willed it away, like releasing a balloon into the air, a balloon that eventually would land on some street corner to wait for a victim. Marvin remained at the window, sipping his coffee. After a few minutes, he saw a glimmer of light in the east, and then a sliver of orange peeking over the horizon, the Tao replacing night with day, yin becoming yang and yang becoming yin.

A fly buzzed past his face. Marvin’s eyes followed its flight to the window sill where it landed. He slapped at it, but the fly was too quick and escaped. That was the Tao for you.

This story appeared in Omens: An Anthology, published by Antimony and Elder Lace, 2021

A Children’s Bible is the latest novel by Pulitzer finalist Lydia Millet, is an apocalyptic story satirizing the feckless, self-indulgent, well-off, and educated adults for letting the future go to hell to the detriment of the next generation. The story is narrated by Eve, a teen among a group of teens who, with their parents, are vacationing at a lakeside mansion when a destructive storm hits and the world begins to fall apart. Abandoning their worthless parents, the kids strike out on their own with mixed results. Here’s what Kirkus Reviews says:

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/lydia-millet/a-childrens-bible/