Caleb Delos-Santos

A Heavenly TV Evening.

 

While typing up a teaching slide

and watching Gilmore Girls,

I feel my pretzel-eating bride

caress my tired curls.

 

Beside her rests a fluffy friend,

an orange-gray month-old,

who sleeps until the credits end.

Then, purring joins the fold.

 

I praise the Lord for my abode

and play another episode.

The First Word.

 

Tacky

was the first word

of my prized manuscript

in junior high.

 

In time,

I lost each page

of that flimsy English notebook,

but words are funny.

 

Most symbols mold with history

or melt beyond obscurity.

 

But, others

survive in minds

subconsciously

or perhaps communally

or perhaps transcendently

or perhaps heavenly.

 

Jesus is a word.

Jesus is eternity.

 

So, transitively,

does this mean

that some words

are everlasting?

 

What about

Tacky?

Another Demon Dream.

 

We loitered in suburbia,

my family and me.

We clamored over nothing

until the starless night flushed everything

 

besides a homely white streetlight,

which sweetly hung above our gossip-spilling clump.

 

At first, this seemed like a simple, silly dream.

 

So, what woke me up?

 

Eventually,

Something

crushed our nothing-chattering.

 

It was a Sound

or Feeling

or some kind of Energy

that needed, more than anything,

to consume my body.

 

The streetlight started flickering.

My family ran away from me.

The lightbulb snapped, and knife-shaped glass engulfed me.

The darkened ground devoured me.

I screamed

 

until

Something

entered me.

 

What was this

Possessive Mythic Thing?

 

Fear?

Hate?

Anxiety?

 

A Xenomorph Baby?

 

Normally,

it wouldn’t concern me

because it was a dream.

 

But, upon waking,

I didn’t feel It leave.