Valhalla

Find the nearest yearbook. Open it. Flip through the pages. Remember the things you or anyone else did that year.

Now close it. The pictures are so innocent - well, maybe not innocent. But happy, and memorable. High and low points. Memories.

You should see them when no one's looking.

They stream out of their borders, racing through hallways of empty photographs. Words ambush moving blurs of color, slippery ink staining the pages. Riots break out, photographs are torn apart.

The moment light touches the pages, they scramble back again. Take up old positions in their picture frames, whole again, grinning to each other about battles won, people killed, their own destruction. Laughing secretly. Feasting on memories, forever and ever, until eternity ends.

They die, sort of. All of them at some point. More like a destruction. You only live once, so it follows that you only die once, and they've already died.

You can laugh. I'm laughing. But remember:

At the end of the world, they will pour out of the pages and fight whomever their master wishes them to. Their master, that's you. You own them. Who you want to destroy is your choice. Whether you live or die is another matter.

They are the Einherjar, the best warriors slain in battle. They have died, been destroyed, over and over. They can kill you without a second thought.

Where do they live?

Valhalla.

Summer Time

     I remember the times at the farm. Sitting under the grape vines, licking my sweet and sticky fingers after almost eating myself sick. I would lie there, full and content, resting in the soft shade and sucking on mint leaves. The dirt was warm and fine, almost like an earthen cushion. It was summer, and that only meant freedom. When I got thirsty, I would sip some water from a freshly carved watermelon, and then leave it to the birds.

     When it was almost dusk, I would head towards the boysenberries. I'd pick handfuls and handfuls, heaping them into a fold I created in my shirt. Swatting the flies as I headed back, I felt so content in the fading rays of the sun.

I Like Pickles

The sonnet is a poem that conquers all

And reverence I heap upon this form

With fourteen lines in rhyme and meter's thrall

The beauties of it rise above the norm

Yet this poem's subjects always seem so grim

About the dark and shadows, peace and love

My love for sonnets teeters on the rim

And crashes after falling from above

But hark! Complaining mine is at an end

For pickles in a sonnet sound just right

The marinated stuff a hand can lend

And help me when the grim and silly fight

Thus pickles salty are my only hope

Of them I write, and maybe I can cope.

Nothing lasts forever; all things end. This applies to Nothing as well: of course there was a Nothing before our Something, and someday our Something will go back to Nothing.

In the Nothing before Something, there was something, despite the strict laws of Nothing that state there must be nothing even though rules are something. Nothing was complicated back then.

There was a word, and it was hope.

In reality, the word was pickles, but because no one seems to understand that pickles are indeed hope, they changed it to hope when they wrote the story of the universe. Remember, though, that pickles mean hope, and where pickles are, there is hope also. 

And because Nothing has rules that supposedly mean nothing and are nonexistent, the pickle was given life.

I am alone in the universe, the pickle yelled, minuscule in the silence and nothingness of Nothing. It was a mere speck of dust. But again, because we will never know or understand the rules of Nothing, it existed in a place where Nothing and nothing existed, and it survived, marinating in the absence of objects alone.

I am alone in the universe.

Nothing blew up.

Lies

What are lies? Are they really the opposite of truth? Or are they just distorted information that is not divulged properly? Can we rid ourselves of this furtive evil? Or do they just naturally reside within us? But the real question is whether they are heroes or villains, because, as the common saying goes, "ignorance is bliss."