but here's a bit of what I'm working on anyway, even though I said (to myself?) not to post any more of my 'writing' online for fear that I will stop writing it:

The Devil holds Four Wands

T believes M’s children are the spirits of trees, and he tells them he is the wind. He is the wind behind his departure, transcending its and his frame past borders and mountains and time. He sees them when they are 2 then 4 then 6 then 11, all of them, those tree children, growing essences eking their knowledge from soil. He brings them to tents and rubble and old Volkswagens, and finds them a home in the gear shafts. Theirs are the cobwebs, the briny stones. When he decides upon the futility of salt, the smart one collects licks from the fields, and when he is gone, they gather in a circle and suck salt and tell stories, their candles lit, their hair grown long against scapula. Tree children talk about their mother and school, about apples, skateboards and rubbish. / T rides his bicycle into the fields, past the forests; he hears the whisper of the relentless social posture scolding him and he laughs, collects the rent like magic from post office, buys himself new gear shafts and lays in a course for the Eaten Slag or the Giant’s Paintbrush, his red eyes burning to see that purple just one more time, his mind full of tears when he does. T’s third child sings the fourth and fifth under the stars while the first pokes a shrinking stick about the fire.

The Empress

M is the last of her kind. Thirteen and pregnant, she’s keeping her baby because of the poison hidden within a gland that (and this is merely a hint) is in the left-hand side of her body. Her mother unaware, her family dazed and unaware, her father completely unaware, M is a red wine, a pomegranate placed on the top of a concrete wall. She sucks her lips as close to teeth as they will come, and dreams of leaving rain forever, with the nine-month-old child tucked within one of her armpits (Why, she wonders, do they start counting at birth? For the parasite has already been sucking blood and drooling in caverns for months when it deigns to cease its spelunking. Do kangaroos get their names when they emerge from the pouch?). / M is not going back to school. M is not being home-schooled. M’s lids are permanently half-lowered and if she thinks a good thought, it is for the sake of her baby, that it might not be born a pineapple. A pineapple through the eye of a needle. M puts on her rubber galoshes and goes outside with the dog and walks through the puddles and imagines a next beginning.

Eight Pentacles above the Tower

A is a light, a rush, her fingers and toes scrabbling the tile. She intermits between holding the chalk in her teeth and the thorns on the tip of her nose. Sometimes she pulls those brazen protections off bushes and licks their shorn tips, tasting a mutual bitter and stampeding anger. But who is to blame, whom can we blame but ourselves and our lack of contract with reality. We needed to stipulate, she thinks. / A is in danger, A has taken herself to Spain, where under a yellow roof in a house with an incessantly curious elder and allergy-inducing flotillas of cat fur, she stalks the terrace outside her room and looks out at all the falling denizens. A thinks of an immigrant’s slow unfolding, but she throws stones against the tiled roof below her only when she thinks of K, whom she lost squarely if not fairly. Threw away, he said with a voice wrenched like a branch from tree. / A is losing her limbs again, A holds chalk in her teeth and writes of love like she’s just realized that all the light in the sky comes from stars that died years before she was born. / N holds her sister’s name in fists, breathes warmly between the tight fingers when the winter hoar bleats like a lamb in the morning.

La Stelle

The holes E cuts in socks are not a removal. / E would want you to understand the busyness of her mind. Rephrased, it’s not the actual convolution she’d want charted, but reality of atlantis, the validity of cyclops and stone gods. E spends most of her time in an open structure, but in the part that she doesn’t, she’s trying to repeat what you say enough so that you hear what she has added. / C waits for her on the bus, C who gets out and puts her arm through the wreath. D shakes her hand when she comes in, and all day long, industry makes a kind of bearable chance, a weapon against thermodynamic law, and E creates holes in socks in gratitude for the astrological tandems she’s found within the inevitability of her body. So E clogs the toilet, E has something in her pocket that belongs to another, E doesn’t want to but then she does, and she’s content with that change, even if nobody else is. / E’s determined the specific latitude of an answer, but a specific longitude yet eludes. This is why she’s always smiling sneakily when you look at her.