The Three Songs of Origin

The first song emerges from the soft hum of the warm tube radio, flees the much younger room, flees my incredulous ear and the pink fleshy folds of tall tales and toothless giggles, flees the womb, flees another womb and many wombs and the first womb, flees the ever decelerating accretion disk and the first transparency and folds into the soft hum of the warm quark-gluon plasma, with all the other songs.

The second song grows only in my mind. I cross the bridge where someone has placed a box of cheap snack mix and a bottle of clear liquid next to two flaming red flowers I cannot name. It looks unceremonious but not to some. The violins have enough time while I meander. On a sturdy bench sits a simple man silencing the river, and as I reach the lake the reeds and winds grow to a crescendo of possibilities, but the solo is disappointing.

There is no third song.

Saviours

As I rise and step into the light, I find a tiny soul, torpid after the long night, clinging to life and balcony. The impostrous sun of March punishes the eager.

I return and place carefully: one drop of gold and one of silver.

“The honey of my fathers and yesterday’s dew,” says the bee. “Why are you kind?”

“Bees are our friends,” I say.

“You’re not kind to your friends. You speak in tongues and abandon the unsettled.”

“Save the bees!” I say. I once read that on a yellow T-shirt.

“Save first your own kind. You didn’t save—”

“Don’t say it.”

“But I saw. We all saw.”

“Don’t say it. I wish I could have.”

“Wish for tomorrow, not the empty cells of yesteryear.”

“Every being, no matter how small, deserves to live.” Mother.

“You don’t live. You’re being lived. This honey tastes strange. There is anger in this water.”

“There is anger everywhere.”

“Yes. But we are blessed only once, and it tears our bodies apart and we are reborn.”

And the bee’s wings unfold and break the warmth of the reluctant sun into a million faces and, with a soft hum, he rises.

“Will you dance for me when you return to your brothers?”

“Ah. Now I understand.”

God in the lighthouse

God in the lighthouse can only look in one direction and nobody has cleaned the glass in so long and the steps are steep and slippery and the salt has eaten the latch and in a storm like this the whole lighthouse sways so God in the lighthouse stays in the round bedroom with the burlap curtains drawn and watches reels about how to fix his gamer neck and how he’s been folding his laundry wrong and God in the lighthouse jumps off the heart-shaped bed and pulls all his clothes from the wardrobe and beginning with his favourite Dead T-shirt he folds and folds and as the alarm clock tolls he smites it with the power of all hands lost and he does all his shirts and blue jeans and the comfy bottoms and mum’s harlequin socks and as he folds the new perfection God in the lighthouse hums, softly.  





Jan Hassmann writes in beautiful Plovdiv, Bulgaria. His work has appeared in HAD, Maudlin House, BULL, Blood & Honey, Dishsoap Quarterly, and elsewhere.

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