SpagettiOs and Cherry Licorice

by wm. butler

Arthur Ellis was eight years old when his family moved from Taipei to Shanghai. Arthur’s father Henry was a manager for Esscore a company that provided components for cellular phones. Henry was the supervising director of Asia and often traveled between Japan, Taiwan and China. Arthur’s mother had been a Pilate’s instructor, but had recently changed over to Hot Yoga. She spent her time working out, having lunch, getting manicures and spa treatments and having cocktails with other Expat wives that lived in their compound on Haumu Lu near Century Park in Pudong, which was the new district of Shanghai. Arthur rarely spent time with his parents as his father was always traveling and when he was in town he spent most of his time at the office or entertaining clients for business purposes. Arthur’s father liked to call what he did bringing home the bacon, Arthur’s mother often referred to it as “stuffing the bacon any chance that son of a bitch got.” Arthur’s mother was always out “trying to have some semblance of a life” and would leave Arthur with Mrs. Zhang the Ayi.

Continue reading…

dead & buried – lost poems from a blue suitcase I

whaler’s lament

by W.M. Butler

the heart as an octopus

by Butler

the fishmonger

by Butler

Breakfast

by W.M. Butler

He stood at the counter top, an egg in his hand. With one sharp crack he brought the egg down on the edge of the metal mixing bowl, a perfect glob of sunshine yellow yolk chased by the transparent glop of egg white spilled into the bowl, egg number three. He opened the drawer nearest the sink and rummaged about. Not finding what he was looking for he instead checked the drawer nearest the microwave, plunging his hand in again with one quick stroke he came out with a whisk. With deft flicks of his wrist he began beating the eggs into a frothy lather, with his free hand he reached over and turned on the tap. He washed the whisk thoroughly, holding it up to the light from the window to make sure that no residue remained, taking a dishtowel from the hook on the cupboard he took his time drying the it and with great care placed it back in the drawer. Strangely he began whistling a song from my childhood, Greensleeves. I tried to remember the tune, whenever I had tried to whistle the song in my sparse sputtering rasp of a whistle it would always turn into the song the Seven Dwarfs sang in Snow White. He turned and directed his gaze at me. His teeth peeked out from behind his lips as he slipped me the faintest of smiles. He was a handsome man, neat in appearance and with only a little spattering of grey in his otherwise jet black hair. He wore a charcoal grey suit with a sharp crisp cut. The tailor who made this suit wasted not a stitch of fabric; it was clearly not “off the rack”.

I love scrambled eggs, how about you?

I did not respond. He tilted his head to the right and looked at me with pursed lips and a squinted eye then turned back to the business of his eggs. He moved partially out of my line of site from where I was I could only see the rounded edges of the powder blue Electrolux fridge door open. He shut the door and moved back to the mixing bowl. In his hand he held a carton of whole milk, he opened the top and raised it to his nose, timidly smelling to see if the milk had curdled. Seemingly satisfied he splashed some into the eggs. Opening the fridge door again he placed the milk back inside. Judging from his previous behavior I could only assume he had placed it back exactly where he had found it. Taking the bowl containing the eggs he walked the 5 paces to the stove where earlier he had preheated one of my cast iron frying pans given to my by a great uncle who was a gypsy. It was my prized possession, I felt a sharp twinge of anger, maybe jealousy that this man had the nerve to use it, but those feelings quickly passed, as nothing really seemed  to remain that important to me.

His back was turned to me now and I could not see in which manner he was scrambling his eggs, but the whole process only took a minute. With a click he turned off the gas range slid open the drawer next to the stove and took out a fork. He turned towards me and moved just far enough from the edge of the stove so he could lean against the counter.

Would you like some?

I didn’t respond. I was not hungry and for the life of me could not seem to formulate a response no matter how hard I tried. He casually shrugged then dug into his meal right from the pan. I found it strange that being a careful man he would not place his eggs on a plate or even sit down at the table to eat. It seemed odd that he was now acting so out of line with his earlier behavior.  Soon he had finished his eggs and again he broke character by leaving the frying pan on the countertop. Instead he returned to the bowl with fork in hand, taking both to the sink. He washed, dried and replaced both back where he had found them. Why not the frying pan? I wondered. Why everything in it’s place but the pan?

Thank you, but I must leave now.

I nodded my head in a lolling sort of way. He smiled again but this time with more teeth.

I’ll let my self out.

He stepped over my body, careful not to disturb the leakage of blood slowly trickling from my jugular and pooling on the floor. Walking to the door he took his coat from the rack, put it on and kindly locked the door from the inside on his way out.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

More stories from W.M. Butler

love letters to genghis khan

by W.M. Butler

i have seen history unmade
the facts changed
blind nationalism
from the so called
young and educated

i hide out in this city
with a “chinese” heart
and a beard like marx

a dizzy mix of hyper-capitalism
and mao suits

red-letter days
blame
written on walls

replaced with
brand names

i’ve locked myself in
for national day
writing love letters
to ganghis khan

i have a carton
of double happiness
and the bloody
carcass of a panda
shoved under my
mattress

if they want me
they can come
get me.

Wormhole

by Owsley Beck

We punched through the ether with a pop. The decelerator was scratch, we had to do a cold stop with full shields too the hull of the ship. The Rømer buffers groaned as we slid her on her side to bounce of the rings of planetary entity Gobi 8. The virtual lag of the trailing ether lit up with a noxious green flare and everything smelt like scorched atmosphere. We had to strap ourselves in with Metal rubber running tubes from the core of the ship, metal rubber is an indestructible polymer that was invented in the early 21^st century. It was those tubes that saved our lives, held us in when nothing else would, when space-time started to layer and form rips in the fabric. That and a shit load of “Whip-It Good” whipped cream substitute smeared over our entire bodies. It was that whipped cream substitute that stopped us from melting, stopped our flesh being flayed from our very bones. The heat of doing a cold stop out of light speed is never good and that little Whip-It trick had saved my life and the lives of my crew on more than one occasion.

So there we were drifting on the dark side of Gobi 8 a dead planet in a twisted system.  The whole place was off kilter causing the outlaying planets to start a slow spiraling drunken stagger out of the dying suns pull. The ether was heavy here which is why we choose this place to come out of light speed. The ether along with the punch drunk spin of the planets causes a slowdown of any object moving within thier directional arc. It was a dangerous procedure to be sure but it was doable. The problem actually didn’t lay within doing a cold stop but with getting back out of the system and it’s swaggering sloth like effect that it had on anything that had the misfortune of ending up inside. The whip creamed substitute would help with that. It would help us move at a more reasonable pace so that we could be about repairing any damage to the ship and it’s navagational computers. What we had to worry about was making sure that the ship didn’t tear up when we sparked the Omega Drive. The wave that the drive omitted wouldn’t be slowed down by the ether and pull, as nothing can stop light but the ship itself may well be deboned like chicken due to the lag leaving a neatly skinned skeleton of a ship floating forever through the blackness as little cream covered human-cicles bobbed through eternity or until eventually they drifted into a new system and fell into the gaping furnace of some alien sun or rouge planet’s atmosphere, but as any spacefaring man knew the possibility of something as small as your won puny sack of skin hitting anything out here was like winning a Katherian sea camel race; possible but not likely. Space is a cruel bitch mistress.

The only chance we had of getting out of here was to harness enough ether with our tractor beam then funnel it into the Rutherford Disks, from their we could theoretically reverse the threads turning our Omega Drive into Alfa Drive thus creating a temporary wormhole that we could escape through. This is of course is all theoretical but we have little choice at this point. Fuck it. I give the order and the crew jumps into action. Reports start coming in from around the ship, the damage isn’t as bad as it could be, judging from what is being said we should be ready to attempt forming a wormhole within the next two hours. I inform the crew to lather themselves up in as much Whip-It Good as they can so that they can work at top speed. The sooner we are out of this god forsaken system the better. The hell if I’m going to be stuck here in the armpit of outer fucking space for a millinium.

The crew is tip top, they manage to get the ship in working order in record time. I give word to the helmsman to search our vacinaty for tears in space-time. She finds one just off starboard. I give the go-ahead to start the tractor-beam to start pulling in the ether. The engenieers had managed to rig up a funneling system using some outdated firing capsules and some duct tape. Those box heads can be handy in a pinch.

Untitled Project

by W.M. Butler

*when this american woman whose thighs are bound in casual red cloth comes thundering past my sitting place like a forest-burning mongol tribe the city is ravished and brittle buildings of a hundred years splash into the street and my eyes are burnt for the embroidered chinese girls already old and so small between the thin pines on these enormous landscapes that if you turn your head they are lost for hours standing in a hotel room in san diego with her hand pressed between her legs dreaming of the man that i would one day become but for now for her i do not fully exist i remain faceless i am nothing but pixilated poetry on a screen  a pseudonym a stranger that she has yet to meet digging like some sort of virus i have cleverly managed to take control of a long forgotten corner of her mind she stands in front of a full-length mirror wearing a pink go-go dress red panties pulled down and stretched tight over her thighs a full blush to her cheeks her mouth open breathing i have yet to listen to the shallows and squalls of your voice  the ebb and tide of your words these things do not exist for me they are only rumors that have not yet formed lips teeth or tongue they have not yet mastered the breath of air or speech they have not yet been born you are a ghost a trick of the light you are a sliver buried in my palm you are a photograph of a stranger you are a bruise on my arm that will not fade a correspondence incomplete letters become words caught by wires sent speeding across the pacific ocean until video the patron saint of long distance lovers captures our likenesses and beams them over invisible webs so that words tempered by tongues served cold over the telephone or with qwerty little keys in black and white start to flake away on the back of lust bursting in technicolor dreams her thighs round and smooth and open i began to thaw my fingers recede leaving their invisible history across the fall of your lower back i get tangled in the hollow and trip on the rise star clusters like pin pricks or one thousand blinking eyes forge feathers where bone once cried speaking of evolution in the night a day away a plane was boarded an ocean was crossed until she stood amidst a great undulating crowd of chinese arriving home from overseas she found me before i found her i gathered her up to take her to place her under the harsh light of the hotel’s bathroom my hands moved with chivalry though one could not place blame if a wayward finger accidently grazed across the milk pale plain of her belly the place where hair hit shoulders secret places that have never felt another’s touch or those that have gathered the dust of years spent lonely she too begins to thaw as i lift her from the cold floor into the hot bath water which tints her skin scarlet for the duration of our first night spent teaching each other what hands and lips are for until my mornings out number yours by one my nights cut deep and long frigid against the back breaking crack of winter a funeral song a march a broken ivory comb pulled through hair one hundred times smoothing out the kinks the chinks of armor rusted gutted out with old blood old lovers wail quaking in the cold ground where i placed them where i laid them down to die we are the same yet we sleep at different times you keep me hidden i let you roam i wear you across my shoulders and in the eyes you keep me in a box you let me out sometimes let the ghost of my hands move beneath your blouse flush and rough stranded and disenchanted in aisle 5 of the supermarket i dance her beneath the high blue sky ceilings of the departures terminal as rare sunlight rumbles through monolithic glass walls i fancy myself a lover and a thief or a fool of the highest degree she leaves with jet streams trailing behind her bourn up on the shoulders of time zones i stalk through the herds of lovers and families whispering final good-byes like a hunter wearing his pray displayed across his shoulders later she tells me that she wept all the way back across the pacific ocean all the way back to the desert were she had started from only to find herself in the grocery store a can of peas in her left hand my voice strung with telephone wires burrowing beneath her dress.

*When this American Woman
By Lenard Cohen
Appears without permission

The Suitcase

W.M. Butler

Susan,

Buried twelve feet below the rich black soil of Battle River you will find a blue cardboard suitcase.  The belly of this suitcase holds eight years worth of my writing, consisting mostly of poetry written between 1996 and 2004. The majority was type written on once clean white paper using my ancient green Remington, though what effect years spent suspended in the fertile earth of that river valley has done to that suitcase, to those words is a question that cannot be answered until it is dug up. If it can be dug up and found under the crumbling remnants of a one hundred year old foundation that once belonged to a one hundred year old farmhouse.

If the suitcase ever surfaces, if the ground gives it up, if the suitcase climbs out of the murky depths of what was once most assuredly a vast ocean before an ice age or two had its way with that little piece of land; before mountains scraped their bullying stone feet across what is now a sea of grassland. If it does come up for air again if you open it, it will yield those pages like the whale delivering Jonah to the shores of Nineveh. Though I doubt the words held within my battered old suitcase could inspire such as the word of God inspired an entire great city of people in worship to Ishtar the goddess of Love, War and Death, Daughter to Anu to cover themselves in ash and repent. Nor could those words serve as Jonah did to inspire the foundations of the Bahá’í faith nor lead a man like Bahá’u’lláh to become a latter day prophet holding his place with Muhammad, Jesus and Buddha.

What those words might inspire is now beyond me and is of no consequence, as I am now dead, as I must assuredly be if you are reading this. What you do with them is up to you. How, if you choose to distribute them is up to you. If you wish to leave them where they lay that again it is of no consequence to me. Do as you will but if you do find them and you do read them I hope they at least lead you to understand me, to know me a little better then you did before I left.

Inside that box you will be introduced to the people that I knew, the people that where apart of my life. You will learn of a time when I did not exist for you. What I was, who I was before I met you is a mystery as I had only ever told you pieces, fragments of that life and never did I lay out my history in a coherent timeline for you to pick over with shoulders hunched in serious study late at night, eyes straining under the nakedness of a sixty watt bulb. You know only what I told you, what I let you see. Inside that box you will find who I was and how I became the man you knew up until such a short time ago. If you read what you find, you will meet four old lovers and my dead grandfather. You will learn of a night deep in the biting teeth of winter where I almost died under the rumbling chaos of a freight train and how I was delivered flat on my back beneath the constellations spinning, embraced by a bed of the whitest snow. You will read tales of piracy and daring do involving my father and brothers. You will be introduced to a woman I never had the chance to love but did anyway, you will find her at the bottom of an icy blue lake sleeping high in the Rockies. You will learn of my sins, my confessions and my shame. You will read of many, many things both great and small, my fears and my hopes. You will see me, as I knew myself to be. A coward at times to be sure but fearless too, when it mattered (I hope). Everything you pleaded for me to show you, give you, share with you can be found in those pages, all the good and the bad.

I am reminded now of what Steinbeck wrote in the dedication to East of Eden (one of the greatest books ever written.) to his dear friend Pat Covici,

Dear Pat,

You came upon me carving some kind of little figure out of wood and you said, “Why don’t you make something for me?”

I asked you what you wanted, and you said, “A box.”

“What for?”

“To put things in.”

“What things?”

“Whatever you have,” you said.

Well, here’s your box. Nearly everything I have is in it, and it is not full. Pain and excitement are in it, and feeling good or bad and evil thoughts and good thoughts—the pleasure of design and some despair and the indescribable joy of creation.

And on top of these are all the gratitude and love I have for you.

And still, the box is not full.
John

That’s what is in the box, that old blue suitcase buried twelve feet down deep under stone and clay, under soil so soft. What you will find there is most everything that is me, about what I saw, what I experienced and perceived in this world. It’s yours, all of it and of course it is still not full, it is not all of me, but it’s near enough as matters now, as could ever really matter.

All my love,

B.