Steven Harz Music

I am happy and humbled to have won the inaugural Iron Writer Challenge Summer Solstice Open.  The Iron Writer Challenge (www.theironwriter.com) give 4 writers 4 days to write a 500 word story or poem – the catch is that the writers are given 4 disparate elements that must be included.  This week’s elements were: an incubus, and 8-track tape, The Towers of Silence, and a coconut land crab from Nuie Island (I needed Wikipedia for the last two!).  Anyway, here is my piece:

Kingsfoil

You sing me morning dove lullabies on a Kingsfoil night

after spending the day with my hand in your back pocket

watching your Ferris Wheel halo and cotton candy smile and

thinking that our love is as fragile as a shopping center carnival goldfish

or as angry as a South Pacific coconut land crab so close to the coast

where we spread out beach towels and look past the waves to the west

It is no secret that you are my Achilles heel kryptonite

in our combat boot love affair rich with

depth charge kisses and camouflage espionage

and rather than hitching a ride from a funeral procession

we hotwire a 1976 Duster and its racing stripes and snakeskin roof

and when we can’t drive another mile or town

we click the dashboard mounted player to track 1 of

‘Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy’

driving between sunsets and city limits arguing which one of us is which

and questioning whether our love is still green and growing or dry and gone

my words gasoline and your touch a lit match

needing to set fire to ourselves in order to have light to read the map

that will take us back to the shore where our love can bloom or at least tread water

or to the middle of the planet where it will die among the empty sand dunes

but not knowing which we throw our rope from our Tower of Babel to a Tower of Silence

and walk the tightrope between misunderstanding and the bleaching bones of the dead

where my fear of dying alone is replaced with a fear of dying without you

we become each other’s’ incubus and succubus hovering in unison and

trying to spawn a fulfilling forever from erotic evil dreams

and scraping the dirt beneath us while prowling for hope

refusing to throw in the beach towel as we’ve done too many times before

—

copyright 2013 Steven Harz