The HyperTexts

Eric Mellen

Eric Mellen is a freelance writer who currently writes poems and short stories. He has been published by Poetry Quarterly, Poetry Life & Times and Nostrovia! Poetry and is currently pursuing multiple publishing opportunities. When he is not writing, he is studying English at Athens State University and hopes to be a technical writer.



My mother summarizes
A five year love like a faerie tale,
Reassuring me.



Thunderstruck

A calm rush soothes
My aching skin

Your whisper purrs
My ears at their fur

Your lips like volcanic
Ash disintegrating me.

I, left smaller than
A tadpole

Am now in your
Pool

A gear in your machine
To dance, and fall and die

And rise again.



My first memory

Once when I was a boy
I found a piece of glass in the backyard.
I picked it up and it cut me.
I bled.
I thought I would get in trouble so I lied
For the first time to my parents.
The devil manifested there as an entity
Outside usual experience.
A vexation and webwork temporarily
Impressed on my brain.
The webwork vexed me again when I had my psychotic break,
And his influence has punched and punished since.




Out of body dick

You looked at your dick.
Then it turned all shrively and small.
Then the balls seemed to deflate towards
The stomach.
Then you looked at it again
And said
Whose dick is this?



Building

I am 8 years old, building
A wall, block following block, while my
Inquisitive mind thinks the world
Is infinitely grand and I am so small:
My grandeur suspended until
They let me declare that I too am part of the fabric,
The web spellbinding us all.

My muse advised me to build a machine,
But I knew children were too young to
Build machines.

Gaia will surely smile on me
When I finally build my machine.

Gear and sprocket transcend
Futility, ratchet wrenching doubt,
Siphoning insignificance.

Not many people build machines,
But a creator’s reward is not of this world,
And echoes in the tired tomes of eternity.



Civilization

I was sitting on my porch
in my rocking chair one night.
I looked up at the stars
as they swam in and out of focus,
the trees swaying in their majesty,
my cat purring in my lap.

I began to muse
about our insignificance in
the vast scheme of things and
how my facebook post was moot
as an ant addressing an anteater.

Then I felt a connection.
Not to my generation,
my job, my friends,
my political party.

All that was stripped away
and I became singularly connected to
our civilization as part of a
planetary collection.

I thought there was something
significant and profound about my revelation
and that this newly found commonwealth
would serve me with clarity and peace.

I know there are others serving as well
or better than I, but I will keep the pace.

It is the only way we grow.



There I sat at Copper’s Point

There I sat at Copper’s Point,
my head lowered between my tattered brown britches’ knees.
My shift was over, (barefoot) watching that lonely lighthouse,
sandy beige, the same color as my beach hat,
and then, on the windiest day in September,
I remembered.
Zoo. A delicately conscientious zookeeper’s assistant,
those sunny days, wild you could say.
I ran from cage to cage, feeding―
orange
tigers, orangutans, monarch butterflies,
all waiting for the feast
and treats
which they got.
Hot.
I saw a team of cheerleaders
with mist machines cooling
their cheery faces, sweaty
and sentimental-looking.

I once gave a rose to one of the girls
but was shot down.
Bang!
A thousand thoughts collected into one emotion:
that much-disparaged feeling of rejection.
I knew it only too well.

That long-ago hell, sometimes grieving
sometimes relieving me of the boy
I was meant to be.
And then, there she was.
“Sarah”
was her name, and no rose for her,
not yet anyway.
This time a cool chat
relieving me of my duties.

I could go into detail.
But suffice it to say,
all the animals revelled in harmony
with me
that day.

"Blue",
Our love―
oh, the romantics would not have thought
of a more eloquent word to describe it.

She died yesterday,
And now I reside in this lighthouse
where we stood alone, and outside the window
I look around
and recognize
the "Blue" that is everywhere around me.

The HyperTexts