The Bachelor

Ron Koppelberger

The Bachelor

Rendered in pleasant ignoble pastures of escape, the bachelor yielded the temptation to cleave to sensual creams and flaxen flowers, to rubies in rose rush and eyes of emerald allure. He gripped the counter and growled, “Must not regress, MUST NOT REGRESS!” He crossed his legs and pounded his bosom, “ARRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAA!” he screamed. Labors of love and scented bouquets in amazing coquet danced like sweet savory transport and dream before his bulging eyes.
“Oh succulent mistress, seductions of mascara and rose tincture, tempt me in chaste realms of restraint!” He repeated in frayed consciousness and desire, the mazy mists circled him with passionate possessions of promise. Cut to an end, a postponed fate, a snug umbra and womb, an alien rapture, he conjured the int6rinsic art of blazon tethers and strange confines as he separated the curtains, an entertaining masquerade, a drama in horizons of azure and ash, the ash of a smoldering ruin and a dismal abandonment, he was in summons to the ships dilemma. A broken transport the refuge of astronauts and pilgrims searching the new vistas. The ship was beyond repair, smashed and scattered destroyed by design, perhaps by gods design.
The brood stood outside the small vagabond shelter, milling about in the grainy dust of a barren planet, they numbered in the thousands.
He dreamed and dared a glance, beauty and hell, frail yield in the from of a maw. A crowd of women in waiting suspicions of pregnant desire, and yet…….their teeth, beneath the full pouting lips, desolate sandpaper flesh….it looked so soft…….breathing smoke and were those flames coming from their mouths…….it couldn’t! “Oh God!” he moaned. They waited with open arms in vast chains of claim to his seed to his heirs.
They sang the song of sirens and hydras in cobwebs of mystery and illusion, the witches of the rift between earth and far distant planets.
The bachelor sighed and opened the door to slavery.

A Blessed Blossom

Ron Koppelberger

A Blessed Blossom

The naturalness of the gentle blossom was in fine-spun magic with the seasons of both ash and harvest. A bloom in blushing chagrin with the accounts of angels and saints, full in sleep and boundaries of frayed glory. There was a perplexing innocence in the beginnings of reflection and birth, bearth and gusty meandering sanctity.
It came in sad sorrow of shadow and shade, a departure from love and animate intimacy. It was a cold proposition in favor of demons and blackened berserkers, the season in rebuke, the time of parched acquiescence and discreet dark diversion. It was the bane of passerby, the wane desire of soliloquies in bone dust, rattle and gossiping devils.
The flower cringed and withered in lieu of passion and sated cycles and in the miracle that defines the amaranth it found purchase in a new day as the specter of loves lost and declared diabolic dissolved into the soils of perdition, passing without further fanfare. A bloom in crowns of possession, a soul in search of harvest hearth, the amaranth of dark confessions.

Bears and Amber

Ron Koppelberger

Bears and Amber

He consumed the savory bee wrought toil of honeycomb and syrup in great gulping gasps, adamant in his swallowing cadence. “GGGGGGGRRRRRRRROOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRRRRR!” the bear grumbled and rumbled in sticky sensations of satisfaction and belly full fashion.
The zodiac sparkled heavenward and the wind coursed through his dark ebony assay of fur in refined miasmic mists, the perfume of bears and wild beasts in frenzied fuming hunger, wild in tandem with a rare rose and the drizzle of pine sap drifted in the lazy tendriled currents.
The baby cooed and the bear nuzzled its tender flesh, just a bit of honey and the chewed remnant of a briar hare, the baby suckled and ate. Laughing the baby touched the mother bear with outstretched fingers, tiny wrinkled and pink.
The bear drizzled a bit of honey from it’s maw and amber droplets of honey sang in dewdrop nourishment as the tiny child cooed a lyric cry of survival and adaptation. The lyric of bears and man, babes and wild claims of springtime miracle and as our elders say the mystery of the baby perfect in wild and tame, in bond and instinct, the mistress sings,

“Vanguard in reflection

Souls in perfection,

A tidy boarder breached

The lord in angels we beseech,

The lyric tale of babes and beasts,

Mans amend to the festival and the feast,

He portends the light in the wood

And the glow in what could,

The first burning passion in human force

And divergent shades of summer course,

The cleft between will and untamed lands of harvest mill,

Asserting the covenant between bear and babe,

Mystery and rave,

In ancient sums of harmony and song,

In rest of days eternally long.”

*And the babe was named chance for the wont of mans unease with the world.

Sleeping Yolk

Ron Koppelberger

Sleeping Yolk

The times were in fine, crumbling dusty leafs of interposed faded ink. A bit of scarlet and a touch of indigo in English script, the photographs, hidden unbidden secrets of wise dialogue and ancient duty lay old and tattered as the remains of another world.
He shifted in lazy contemplation of the aged texts and alternately he thanked god for the distraction. There were unbroken words in bold underline, they proclaimed a time gone by, a result in lieu of love, peace and harmony. No sated homespun blessings hidden there he thought. He was in secret safety, the Supine Papery would never follow him into the gossip of the ancient town, an umbra foe his breed. He3 sighed and considered the undead Supine’s, the ancient texts made no mention of the Papery yet several proclamations held fast; one headline read,
“MILITARY SEVES DECLARATION OF WAR” and another read,
“VIRALS IN OUR FOOD AND WATER, PRESIDENT DECLARES IT TO BE HARMLESS!” and yet another read simply, “MILLIONS DIE!” He ruffled the pages and coughed as dust plumed into his lungs. The Supine Papery had been the resultant counterclaim to mans dominance on earth. He thought for awhile the made a bed in the crumbling news.
For prosperous futility and the folly of man, his grandfather had said of the Papery.
For the present there was sleep and oblivious yolks of burden lashed by the hand of fate. He slept and the evening moved forward.

Island 429.1

Ron Koppelberger

Island 429.1

She enchanted the lyric with her endless sashay and when she was done something fluttered near the brim of his hat. She secreted the sweet natured gambol of soul and substance with tender recollections and fate. She yielded the evening sky and as nightingales flow so did the tide of moonlight and indigo ebb.
He sat listening to the chirp of a million crickets and the grunting, rooting pigs as the night took shape around him. An island of desolation the fates seemed to say and yet he was in good company with the song of moon and shadow, sun and wild adventure.
The boat lay in splinters near the sandy shore of island 429.1, an uninhabited secret and his salvation. He tended the few scraps he had salvaged, wood planks and palm scrub in rapt interest with the coals of a new evening hue, bright flaring silhouette and crackling embers of orange. The blissful array of ceremony was a picture that defined sailor and a sated rescue from the dragon of the roaring surf. He culled the broken clam shells and his belly was full of abundant muscle. He thought on his fate for a moment and he realized that the sovereignty of a man’s spirit lay in rocky shores of unknown reception, in truce with survival.
The sudden rush of wild boars and feral pigs surprised Pluto South. He had heard them rooting and crashing in cause and romping possessive rule. Pluto edged away from the smokey flames of asylum to the waters edge as another dozen or so of the pigs meandered toward the campfire. They ran back and forth grunting as something much larger tramped closer to the sandy beach. The ocean sloshed at his heals and he grabbed a rum barrel from the wreckage of the boat. He eased into the surf using the barrel as a ballast. Floating on the half full barrel of rum he watched as the beach bristled with the bodies of dozens of the tusked pigs.
Pluto watched as a monster crashed through the underbrush of the deserted isle. It stood nearly fifteen foot tall and was the length of five or six horses. Its tusks were great graduated lengths of bore ivory, deadly and worried by naught.
It trampled the flames of his tiny fire and screamed an echoing rendition of war at deaths doorstep. The fire puffed out in tendrils of smoke and shadowy silhouette. The giant pig seemed to dance in victory.
Swimming along the shore he wondered what other secrets island 429.1 held.

Secret Trains

Ron Koppelberger

Secret Trains

It was entirely dappled with the crimson droplets , the box, the damn crate. Will Sky stood near the end coach at the rear of the Evening Bullet; the train sang the ever moaning rails with grunts and pounding rhythm, with complaining progress, she had been making the route for a lifetime.
The mystery of the cargo that the dark train carried was an empty, vague illusion draped in shadow and passion, vague like the motes of dust that infer a distance, age and an old character. Will touched the red beaded spray covering the heavy oaken crate, “ What the hell is this?” he wondered.
Will felt older like the tinctured blood of a rusty machine, oil, blood and oil, moving at a snails pace. Oil, human……yet what had happened to this curious rider, the owner of the blood. A Murder had perhaps taken place, who knows he thought.
The train moved closer to its conclusion through darkness and wild advances.
The box ballooned and swelled before Wills tired eyes, unveiled, laid bare it throbbed and proposed secret enormity and a dark hazy mist. Will watched as the nails holding the framework of the box popped free, one by one. Blood poured in streams from the edges and seams of the box. Like some dark magic the box fell open and terrors and surreal dreams prevailed in a cloying mix of blood and oil. Was he an innocent passenger on a midnight train to oblivion, a desperate rider, “Oh god, what is it, Oh god!”
Unclad the doppelganger stared naked beneath an ashen gray sheet covered in oil. What was this…….it had his face……it was him! How, he thought, this can’t be…..“I’m me not this thing!” he gasped aloud.
Exactly like him the sheeted man stood and showed him the wounds on his hands, deep, deadly, final. Will trembled in fear split between curiosity and phantasmic unreality. The doppleganger sang an old song and collapsed to the floor of the box in a heap of gray cloth, oily rags and smoke. Afterward Will looked at his hands and sighed, he must have had something evil to eat he thought wondering about the hallucination.
* Later there was a fire on the night train. Someone had stored oily rags too close to a lantern and the entire car had gone up in flames. Will had run to the front of the car and pounded on the locked door separating the cars. There was a small window between the cars and Will smashed it with his bare hands cutting him severely and mortally wounding hi,.
Thus the cycle moved forward as did the train to futures told in blood and smoke, each car a different story, Wills only one of many. All told by portent and fortune, the Evening Bullet moved ahead on the tracks and for some it was just a way home, for others an endless cycle of revolution, turns given an end to an end to an end………

A Picnic Betrothal

Ron Koppelberger

A Picnic Betrothal

Gamble Awe studied the humble embrace of green grass and wild forest daisies. The Picnic basket weighed heavy in his right hand. “Sweet eras of youth and gentle dreams of beauty.” he sang aloud.
Setting the basket down he surveyed the small clearing in the dense forest. The scent of fried chicken and the promise of chilled Burgundy excited his grumbling and gauntly defined stomach. Gambol opened the wicker basket and pulled out a crisp blue sheet checked and faded from use. After laying it across the grassy leaf strewn slope and shadowy clearing in the path he sighed and whispered, “For only a moment the view coming to a lovers request, an aged wish for a companion dream.”
Gambol sat on the sheet his aching arthritic legs consenting to the rest. The chicken was sealed in a green plastic bowl and the Burgundy in a small thermos; unscrewing the lid he let the fragrance flow into the air.
The creature hid in the thistle and Palm scrub, watching, she relaxed and hummed releasing her instinctive balance, a fawning desire to restore the man, to fulfill his wish and her need to remain secret. He ate and sipped at the perfumed drink. She sniffed the air with slender tend riled coils and silky fluttering wings, great mosaics in hues of scarlet and gray. She rustled the bushes around her and shivered as she edged closer to the man.
Gambol took a bite of chicken and froze. He sensed something in the thicket near the far side of the clearing. He quickly emptied the thermos and his head swam in heady mists. Peering into the woods with aged blurry eyes he said, “Show yourself, I can hear you!” He considered the possibility that a bear or a curious Raccoon had made the noises.
The brush shook and parted; he screamed, “Oh my God………what!”
She moved to the man and touched him softly, he fell and slept. She coiled a long tendril into his hand and pulled him upright. He was frail she thought as she restored him, lines of age disappearing and strength, she returned his strength.
When she was finished she opened her great motley wings and flew to the tree tops away from the man. She had revealed herself to him, he would search for her and the idealist in her hoped for communion with the man, nevertheless she took the memory from him. He would remember roses and sunshine instead.