Feather Stone

By Sean Fitzgerald

This collection of prose accelerates on the fuel of rhythmic sentences, slows to verse to let another reader in, and drives us deeper into our imaginations. Along the way, you’ll ride through snowstorms and hurricanes, drift down streams of consciousness, launch to outer space, and oscillate between dream and reality. The speaker’s conflicts are the conflicts of everyman: the monotony of living, the wavering of faith, and the pains of separations. Ultimately, the hope needed to sustain us through life’s tribulations prevails.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Nov 7, 2019
• ISBN: 9781684703838

Book preview

us.

A Close Miss

You missed the artist. She sipped on near beers through red vines and made the fish face. She passed by and words are like wind so something was said. She scratched at the flowers in the paintings and blew the air botanical. The room coined itself a scented menagerie, lolled its tongue out the front door and laughed clouds of laughs. The windows blinked, blushed their faux wood blinds and whatever the wallpaper does in your mind, it does in your mind.

Sick Day

I called in sick and said à tout à l’heure to the mundane of middle class. I am a vacation thief. But the dog knows nothing of sleeping in (5 AM) and there’s a cold wet nose nudging my cheek. (Is all life tethered to a scheduled post?) Making the best of things, I said screw it and cracked a bottle of black label, snipped a cigar’s tip and opened up the outside. The dew on the grass soaks through my slippers. Whiskey singes my throat like lava silk. A furnace flicks on in my core. Following my smoke rings unto night, stars move down and around me. I am among them. The dog lifts his leg and a comet trails across the sky. A satellite whizzes by. I am an ornament within a Christmas tree, the lights beaming with peace all around me. Weightless, I drift. A cosmonaut in a bathrobe. Through galaxies of prim rose, teal and pink. This one swirling like water down a sink. Past marble planets undefined and novel scenes refined, I drift and drift and think how absurd the fretting, consternation and gloom? As the sun rises, perfect forsythia blooms. I declare this day mine. The center of the universe is between my eyes.

The Back of the Moon

Every man is a moon and has a side which he turns toward nobody: you have to slip around behind if you want to see it.

- Mark Twain The Refuge of the Derelicts

I give my wages to the walls, to unused bedrooms, to chimneys to cough up in wood smoke. I give it all to the walls so the house creaks. My bones creak and crack the quiet. I curse the winters but they never hear me. The whine and the sound are temporary. Even the long vowel falls short. So I rest under old blankets in the quiet ubiquitous, clean pajamas for the succubus. I dreamed a sacrilege, an arrogance of walking on water and I do not regret. It was something. Like a final leaf, I sleep around for the sleeping tree until it releases me. A passel of maple rises and spreads like bones for chalices. I lay spread eagle on the earth and dote on the flooding sky as it creeps in red and augmenting. For the robin’s return, I lean on the cold and the quiet. Colors fold into an accordion. They huddle a midnight in another cage. Yet another trap! Ah, to be the prince of paupers, to follow a pallid desert and a lodestar, to be wary of lookalikes, the dolls and the idols, the cons and the icons. My eyebrows press the linen of iris, scald brun. I labor to discern. When calm goes gone, I stare down Janus, get caught up in the foil of two faces, tear at the tendons of my mind with hooks of whys. One face of architecture and its antithesis a visage of demolition. In December, a copse of cedar throws planks on puddles of mirrors across I step and sink ankle deep. Trump l’oeil. A joke on the eye. Like Tom Sawyer, a wink and a smile, a shift in plans. Even the moon has phases and faces.

The Traveler

A cavern and a fire at its mouth. A light for the prey he painted what he hunted with clay and color beat out of a flower; he gave her the remnants and called it bouquet. Along the walls, svelte antelope, bison, mastodon. Along the walls, scores of dust. The children stole his symbols and ran off. He could never count on them anyway. They were too weak to hold a name. He held an edge of shale to his ear and gestured a cut. She