Write Now! This is an experiment by Skydax and Wingwrite (both can be contacted at the address below -- the e-mail address, not the guest-book). We are people who love writers, readers, and anyone who appreciates the wonder of human language. If you would like to submit stories, poetry, wig-bubbles, blips, sketches or anything that expresses your heart and mind through words...please submit by the same address. Please do not submit graphics, as we do not have the memory capacity yet. We do welcome your ideas or suggestions. Please include your name and e-mail address with your submissions. Thanks!

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These are the most recent pieces of writing (most recent at top of page):

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The Quiet Road
by Robyn Nye

She walked down the frozen road
With nothing but her heart of gold.
But little good was a heart of gold
Against the fierce, freezing cold.
So for a coat, her heart was sold,
But without her heart, she wasn't cold.


               

© 9/28/98 -robynN

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untitled

by

Valerie Beasley

© 7/18/98

 a poem may be a rhyme
                      or a piece of lines
                      it could  be about a dime fitted on a queen's 
                      behind
                      any way that you find them
                      they don't need to be written EVERY WEEK!!!
                      
                      with all my poetry love
                      valerie


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"Rae"

by Robyn Nye

© May, 1998

part one...

Rae lived in a small, cramped apartment, but she didn’t really mind.  
She spent most of her time at work, waitressing.  She was one of only 
three waitresses plus the cook, Sam, and the owners, Carl and Anne.  
Rae wasn’t really sure how The Open Inn could stay open.  They had 
regulars, but only about seven, and they hardly ever saw new faces.  
When they did, they were usually out-of-towners, which meant they 
probably wouldn’t be back.
Rae was only twenty-two, but she had already worked at The Open Inn 
full time for over a year.  She liked it there.  It wasn’t crowded, 
she knew most of the customers, and she had a lot of free time to 
think.  She thought about all kinds of things, trying to figure out 
how or why things work, but mainly she thought about herself, her 
life.

Sometimes she thought about the oddest things, like why people 
believed in God.  Kids seem to naturally believe their parents about 
God and his/her existence, yet most of these kids don’t listen to 
their parents about other things like drugs or alcohol.  She 
wondered why that was.  Perhaps because most had some sort of 
religious ceremony shorty after birth.  They had been raised to 
believe 
in God since birth, not since their tenth birthday.  ‘Knowing’ 
something for that long, you don’t question it.  Or maybe a hangover 
just isn’t as bad as eternal damnation. 
Religion was something that intrigued Rae.  People seem so skeptical 
about most things, yet can put all their faith in one place without 
question.  And you don’t really have a choice.  You follow whatever 
faith your parents were and their parents before them.  And how can 
there be so many faiths?  And how can each faith be so sure they are 
right and all the other faiths are wrong?  What if it’s your faith 
that’s wrong?  Would you go to heaven and be denied entrance because 
you believed in the wrong religion most of your life?  It probably 
wasn’t even your choice.  Sometimes Rae came up with explanations 
and sometimes she didn’t.  But she almost always ended up with a 
headache. Rae was not the most educated person, but she was always 
thinking,  sorting things out.  Rae had decided she was an ‘undefined 
character.’   

She listened to eulogies and interviews a lot and always heard what 
other people thought of the other person, but when Rae thought of 
how other people would think of her, she was confused.  Perhaps they 
would say she was nice or kind or something, but overall, she had 
yet to be defined.  No one would say she would do anything if you 
asked, or that she made her own rules to live by.  Rae had come to 
the decision that she should become something.  But she couldn’t 
decide what type of person she was going to be.  She wanted to be 
known as giving, her own person, determined, sweet, the kind of person 
who didn’t tell a lie, didn’t hold back their opinions, couldn’t say 
a thing if it hurt someone else.  But these all clashed.  

If you didn’t hold anything back, you couldn’t be one of those people 
who couldn’t hurt anyone's feelings.  Such a puzzle.  
Was this the type of thing you could choose?  Are you just who you are?  
This is about the time her head would start to hurt.  Time to 
watch a soap or something, her  brain needed the break.





Her Crowded Room

On the top shelf of her closet sat a box
Filled with old holiday and birthday cards.
Closer to eye level, sat hats,
Once her grandmothers.
On top of a cabinet across the room
Was a crystal box,
Engraved with her grandfather’s initials.
And spread across her desk and dresser
Were pictures of friends and family.
A pink stuffed elephant given to her ten years prior
>From her best friend
Was carefully displayed.
On her dresser sat a trinket box,
Received on her birthday from her aunt.
Next to it, a card from her brother, in a golden frame.
A leather pouch filled with tumbled stones from her father
Hung off the bed post.
And nearby, a music box
>From her mother, played
“My Favorite Things” many nights.
These little things were carefully woven
Throughout the room,
Adorning it.
Making it hers.

-- Robyn Nye -- copyright 4/24/98

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WILLOW TREE

I am floating in a dark oblivion inside a willow tree.
I don’t understand. It’s an enigma to me.

I think this oblivion holds all the things I am trying to forget or
deny.
Can somebody help me? I will take any reply.

My posture is curved and my eyelids hang low. 
I have lost the will to live; I no longer glow.

Can someone redeem me from this pain of mine?
Make me smile let me shine?

Can I place my sorrow in your hand?
And will you crush it up into grains of sand?

Or am I the only one who can redeem me?
Swim out of this oblivion and chop this tree?
Open my eyes and stand up straight?
Start a new life with a clean slate?

Can I glow; can I shine,
If I accept the things that I decline?
Love, happiness, peace and more
Are the things I fear to explore.

I guess I have to wake up and see,
That I can only do this for me.

Others tried to love me, but I pushed them away.
And that’s what led me to fade away.

Megan Hoover--2/98
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                     The Last of the Pythagorians

                            by Steve Mooney
                              
                         copyright -- 3/31/98

  Banishing the subterranean darkness in glorious illumination, quicker than
thought, the blazing inferno of Earth's sun rose to its ultimate apex in the
azure noon sky.  Finally the sun rose above the lip of a deep shaft,
somewhere in driest East Africa to shoot tongues of fire upon the wretched
inhabitant of a dusty hole.  The occupant flinched back into a not-quite
delirious state of consciousness.  Clarity of mind returned to him only after
burst of fresh agony as his broken bones wrought deeper despair with his
body's shift of position.  A hysterical laugh/moan rose from his parched
lips, up from the hole in the ground to greet the sun, which was now exactly
overhead.
  
  If this isn't the mother of all ironies  thought the man in the hole.  He
was now confined to thinking (rather than talking) to himself, on account of
his cracked ribs.  How fitting.  For centuries in light and in darkness
(always in secret) we of the order of Pythagoras have met to render down the
patterns  of the universe.  We have tried to break down reality; however in
the end it is reality that breaks us.  I, Anonymicles, disciple of Abd
al-Azrad, last heir to the legacy of Pythagoras and destined to unravel the
elder secrets of nature, meet my demise at the hoof of a malnourished donkey,
and now succumb to thirst at the bottom of an unsanctified well in the
backwaters of Africa.

  The sun didn't seem to recognize the humor of the moment, it just blazed
with redoubled fury on the man in the hole, and the desolate landscape
around. That landscape told the chances of the unfortunate fellow being
rescued.  Slim to none, odds favoring none.  Against his will he found
himself computing those odds, even though his chances were a matter of
rhetoric.  Possibly a merchant will pass by, see the well, and think there is
water.  Perhaps a shepherd will happen along.  Perhaps...  Computation and
contemplation dwindled away to nihilism.  What good are odds to a man dying
of thirst?  Can he drink them? Can the secrets of the universe bind wounds,
deliver a man from suffering?   

  Not even a dune or mesa to pay him homage.  Just cracked hardpan and a low
ridge of sandstone marking the grave of one of the greats. He gave himself a
mental chuckle. In the long afternoon, night, and morning since his downfall
his wearied mind had passed through dejection and despair to a mood of
resignation.

  It was my dumb ass that landed me here,  he thought neither in English nor
in so colloquial a manner, but such was the spirit of his words.  His actual
thoughts conformed to the strict linguistics of Latin, (now not so dead a
language) though with ease he could couch his thinking in Greek, in Hebrew,
or (befitting this locale) Arabic.  Again, he laughed in idle muse.

 Where is that stupid beast?  He hadn't seen anything of the pack-mule since
his unfortunate tumble. Most likely it would be halfway to Crete by now.

 Fitting:  In three-week's journey  into this cursed land, I can't goad that
donkey to more than a leisurely stroll, despite cursing like a slave-driver
aboard an Imperial war galley.  Then the foul animal sprints away  swift as
an arrow at the first sight of an asp at its hooves, kicking and baying the
whole time.  Not once did his beast of burden peer over the edge of the hole
since the two parted company.  He replayed for the thousandth time the whole
incident in his head as he giggled half mad.  What are the odds?

 Just as he had finished his calculations, just after the sun had hit its
zenith on the equinox, over a nameless place in the wastes, fate had
intervened.  He had recorded all his data as per the methods that led to true
power.  He was about to begin his interpretations.  He needed to consult one
of the dozens of scrolls in  his saddlebags, hauled all the way from the
library of Alexandria through the sheer willpower of man and mule to this
dust pit, a little south and east of the Red Sea, across from Asia Minor.  He
needed to look up an exactly derived value of an exactly derived angle. He
did not trust his copious memory of the resultants of the trigonometric
ratios for a matter of this importance.  The shape of the world to come
depended on the accuracy of this project. 

  A simple sine chart, the most accurate tabulation of the needed values that
he could find in the Roman sphere of influence, would hold the key to this
quest.  Measurements and formulae and computations filled the inky papyrus in
his hand as he strode around the lip of the well to his donkey, which was
tethered to the crumbling water-raising apparatus. He started rummaging
through the saddlebag.  He fumbled with his materials, so enthusiastic was he
with the zest of his discoveries. This is the day!  he thought, giddy with
excitement over the import of the computations he was about to make.  The
very shape of the world, even its approximate curvature and size, if my
theories are correct!   The harmonies, tapestries, patterns, and permutations
of the natural world whirled stroboscopically through the mind of
Anonymicles, last of the Pythagorean Order.

  All through trigonometry, using the angle of the sun in relation to the
bottom of a well, which was serendipitously located on his proposed line of
circumference of the earth, which like it or not was about to be proven
round.  This was the equinox, when day and night were equal, so the proposed
angles of the sun would be directly perpendicular to the lay of the land,
allowing one to see the bottom of the well in full sunlight.  Along with the
measurement of the time it took for the shadows of the well's sides to return
to normal, and a few other measurements and computations, a
mathematically-minded man could unlock the keys of the universe.  The earth's
size, its shape, the relationship between Earth, sun, and the heavens, all
could be defined and calculated.  All of nature lay open to the understanding
of man. If the wise and the bold could only do as he had just done:  think it
through, experiment, and learn.  This was his life's purpose.

 Men such as Anonymicles were rare as whiskers on a eunuch in the best of
times, but now they were especially thin on the ground.  He reflected on his
motivations.Had I given one hoot for the Empire, I'd be engineering the rain
cover of an aqueduct running uphill into an especially boorish and decadent
pleasure-polis, and making civil servant's wages for the lot.  Or perhaps
computing the logistics of nail-manufacture for  he legions, allowing me to
contribute to the crucifixions of fellow free-thinkers throughout our beloved
Empire.  Bah!   A Pythagoreans's place (any thinking man's place, for that
matter) is in the field, discovering what needs to be discovered, putting
order to a chaotic universe in the endless catalog of facts and truths...

  Just then, a dun-colored serpent slithered around a rock outcropping at the
donkey's feet.  The beast went wild, pitching scrolls, papyrus, and clay
tablets everywhere, and managing to land its owner a telling kick to the
stomach in its rage.  The breath had left his lungs and he had plummeted down
the narrow well, many times deeper than he was tall, to strike the dry and
dusty earth at the shaft's bottom with the sickening crunch of bone.

 He knew himself dead when he regained consciousness many hours later.  The
well, curiosity of nature, was bone-dry, for all its importance to the great
mathematicians and astronomers of the Western world.  It was unforgiving upon
impact, and he could not muster the strength to climb up the smooth flags of
porous stone that lined the shaft.  This area was nowhere near to
civilization, and even if it were, he could not summon breath to make his
plight known to any passer-by.  He was doomed, and he could take comfort only
in the knowledge that he who intercepted his wayward donkey in its wild
flight would also find his notes: volumes of notes ,in half the civilized
tongues of the world, that outlined this project in detail.  Along with his
preliminary research into the matter, and the calculations from other wells
in other places (in accordance with the equinox), others would take up his
work.  His discoveries would not be lost, even though he would be. With wry
amusement he mused that, upon the next equinox, his successor would find
Anonymicles' dessicated body staring up from the bottom of the well, fully
illuminated by the enlightening sun.

 Breath was getting harder and harder, but the mind worked on despite the
flagging of the body.  Calculations flickered through the heightened
awareness of Anonymicles, equations and values swirling together in his last
moments of genius.  There.  A pause...That's it?  At long last, the size of
the earth!  The value shocked him, but as he checked and rechecked the work
of his mind, there could be no doubting it.  The world is a very small place.
 Continuing on its blazing track across the sky (or not, if Anonymicles'
astronomical theories are to be believed) the sun's beams slowly departed the
bottom of the well, and cold greeted the shadowed, shattered figure in the
depths, leaving him once again in darkness.  His hand thrust feebly outwards
in a warding gesture, the pentagram branded upon his palm giving a last
farewell to light.

 He reflected on his discoveries.  I was wrong the whole time. Law, theories,
formulas, logic?  Maybe in a world without madmen, or donkeys, or asps, or
anything else in the mix,  you'd have to be a god to plot everything out, for
good or for ill, and measure it, and quantify it, and back it up with solid
proof.  Luck, fate, accident, and error :  these are the  driving forces
behind this universe.  What are the odds? The mother of all ironies!

 Silence! He thought no more.

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Nonsense

by Robyn Nye

I am not stubborn
I don’t care what you say
I am opinionated
But I don't always have to have my way

I am not stubborn
And you will not prove me wrong
I know I am not stubborn
My will is simply strong

But stubborn I am not
And that I know for sure
You are the stubborn one
That’s right!  Not I, but her!

She is the insistent one!
Need I prove more?
I am not the stubborn one
And what are you staring at me for?

-- copyright, Robyn Nye 3/30/98

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Forgotten Chant

It was a chant I would say so softly
and dear to myself each passing hour,
It sent feelings through my soul
that exploded the world’s outer limits,
and were discarded as child’s play
to the passing bodies that were never 
capable of feeling such a miraculous thing.
It allowed me to feel content with myself 
and made me beautiful in a land 
of shriveled minds.
As a ship at sea,
it paid no heed to the gulls overhead,
for their foreign tongue spoke nothing 
of truth.
It was a thimble upon my own finger, 
that guarded me against the inharmonious objects
that pierced through the night.
Holding me tight, as to not let me go,
it restrained me from running paralyzed with fear 
from the formidable waves that came
crashing down onto my cold, shivering
body each and every moment,
and stood beside myself
with no empty breath between us,
only one cold flesh pressed soundly 
against a warm soul,
so as to stand firmly against
the rushing, speeding liquid,
and be capable of lifting our
heads above the rush and roar,
and place our eyes upon
the sunlit sky
that brightens the mind, 
and clears our thoughts.
Growing old,
it becomes lost among
all the things gathered upon the shore.
Now left to face fear alone,
I recall sweet words that
once touched my lips so often
gather again,
and whisper them softly,
so that one day they may travel to the
forgotten lying upon the shore,
and bring life once again.

-- Valerie Beasley



-- copyright May, 1996

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