Limestone Under Sunset Siege:

I walked the path today,
Saw the crumbling limestone,
Foundations a shadow of when,
Simpler has gone or so we'd say,
Blacktop paved prairie paths,
Between tame milkweed ponds,
Canada geese sail a spring fed gravel pit,
And the only signs of amber waves,
Are crumbling limestone squares,
Planters for shrubs and trees,
Reminders of where children dreamt,
And people lived close to the land.

The sunset swore soft pastels,
It was late December and warm,
Barely ice on the water,
No speck of snow to see,
Just Canada geese and crumbling limestone,
In almost hidden shrub covered squares,
Buried under Prairie grasses seemingly freed,
I wonder how long the herons will be gone,
In this only place they still make little herons.

The ghosts are trembling amidst the crumbling limestone,
Under the barely chill sunset rays,
Looking at the sunfire on water,
Tied to disappearing haunts,
Even Winter holds their trembling ethereal hands,
Walking with them into faded memory,
Like the sun at the end of a beautiful day.

AquarianM

By: Daniel A. Stafford
(C) 12/27/2003

Author's Comments:
It all seemed to come together, the fading sun, the crumbling ruins you barely knew were there, the lateness of Winter. The world changes and it only seems slow.

Last Breath:

The Oil Demons breathed their last breath,
It was thunderous rejoicing,
Children need not die in the sands,
In the streets or in the far countryside,
Winter could someday come back home to stay,
Poison could leave the land and lakes and seas,
In the silence of golden sunlight,
In the peace wrought of whirling white blades,
In the bountiful cascade of rolling waters,
In the field of golden harvests,
The treasures of gold and heart,
Home again to stay, to stay,
And once the people finally believed,
That was when the monsters were no longer needed,
And we could all walk closer to what God gave us,
Even though it took so much horror and filth to understand,
Cleanliness IS next to Godliness,
Just expand the concept,
Because the entire world is your home.

AquarianM

By: Daniel A. Stafford
(C) 12/24/2003

Author's Comments:
My biggest Christmas wish is that people will truly see what oil is doing
to us and add their voices to the clamor for a clean life and world. It's
worth it!

"In the six kinds of fantasy I inhabit, in the lands where my mind must go,
I will picture resolution's face in a blur, and yet it shall come to be what I see."

Belief is a powerful thing. Many practice this mejik without understanding it in the least. So many have been told of the doom of fire for so long that their beliefs demand it to appear - and so it does. Yet in the understanding that beliefs can change is where the answer lies. There is a solution to the rising heat of the *Monotnussverse*, and it will be found by those who believe it will be found.

When China Comes Calling:

The dust bowls that are a quarter the size of the USA,
Blow hard on the minds of the prescient,
The rise of the Yangtze River screams the death knell of temples,
As the peasants climb away from home,
The grain stocks are almost gone and crops are failing,
Oceans rise and push inland slowly,
Squeezed between hungry blowing Earth and drowning swamps,
The deserts, oceans, and river are coming,
But who's going to feed that nearly a billion,
When China comes calling?

AquarianM

By: Daniel A. Stafford
(C) 12/18/2003

http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/Update31.htm

By: Daniel A. Stafford
Author's Comments

The Earth Policy Institute's analysts believe that China's grain storage will be completely depleted by 2004 - and that the huge country will for the first time in history turn to grain exporters such as the USA for food imports - In such quantities that US citizens will be competing with Chinese import companies for food. At the same time, crop yields worldwide are declining due to the advance of global warming. See the report at the link at the end of the poem.

THe structure was somewhat unusual. It was entirelty crafted of some yellow metal. I couldn't for the life of me tell where the seams or joints were, it looked like it was all one piece.

Also, the ice was on the verge of turning to slush, so I had to stop my descent and set up a shield bubble spell. The shield bubble would stop any physical matter from getting through by diverting anything that touched it into a random mejiverse on the entry side and returning it to it's original mejiverse on the exact opposite side of the bubble. This could present problems for living beings, considering that their trip through the random mejiverse could take them through either a mejiverse with hostile phylaws that didn't allow life to exist, otr through an environment that was hard on living tissues, such as rock or hard vacuum. For this reason, the shield bubble spell also had a component that caused a blood red glow on the outer edge of the shield. This didn't serve as an effective warning to every life form, but at least 85% of known life forms are carbon based, and most of those in oxygen rich environments and using an iron-based liquid oxygen carrier for blood. Perhaps it's a superversal, but for some reason nearly all creatures stop when they see red. There could possibly be a psychic component to itas well. That would also qualify as superversal, but mejikal research was still in progress on the question and had been for a few millennia without a concrete answer.

Once the shield bubble was glowing, I advanced through the remaining ice between the yellow metal structure and myself until I was within three meters or so. At that point, I conjured a rubber ball out of the superverse and hit it with a slight impetus spell. The ball shot through the ice and hit the side of the structure. No reaction. I even set up a sensate spell and listened in for vibrations on the physical plane of the deep rumbling sort that usually proclaim danger in adventure stories. Nothing. It appeared that at least this portion of the structure was deserted. Perhaps it was too cold for watery life forms at this level. At any rate, I started up an Oxyjen spell to keep the air in the shield bubble within my phylaw tolerances for gas composition and temperature, and headed downward looking for an entry point.

I was flying quietly around a planet in the Snowbelt - basically just a little ice ball that you couldn't see through. It appeared to be wobbling in it's orbit, but I wasn't quite sure. I took a six sided divination spell out and popped the mejik on it. Sure enough, the little tyke was wobbly.

Now, in this particular mejiverse, planets do not get wobbly, especially ice ball ones, unless they have some sort of life force field around them. You see, the laws of physics in various mejiverses vary, so I had to check the rule star in this one. (A rule star is basically an old black hole with three white dwarfs circling it's LaGrange points.) I checked the distances and orbital speed of the marker stars orbiting the rule star and got a rough read on the set of phy-law in this mejiverse. It was relatively close to my home mejiverse, but not identical. Of particular note was a rune marker left on the log asteroid in L-5. It noted specifically that life could be detected in this mejiverse by orbital wobble of planetary bodies due to a fairly strong interaction between gravity waves and life force emanations in this mejiverse.

Another interesting note was that the upper speed limit for physical travel in this mejiverse was four times the speed of light, provided the travel was including living entities. It seems that the life force in this universe also had a tendency to weaken inertia by twenty five percent or so once the life forms got clear of deep gravity wells such as planets, etc.

Now, it was already known that semi-intelligent humanoid creatures were evolving on the second rock from the parent star in this particular little planetary system. The parent star was of interest, as well. It had a high content of violet in it's light spectrum, giving everything a distinctly lavender tint, and looking similar to a blacklight bulb from any appreciable distance. An interesting side effect was the luminescence of anything white in the vincinity of this star. Hence the little ice ball not only was wobbly, but the ice had a slight chalk content to it, making it glow like some kind of pagan tree ornament.

I took stock of my current spell catalogue and found what I was looking for. It was a McKintosh Ice Borer spell. With it, I could travel through ice as if it were air, because my body and belongings would vibrate at a specific frequency that caused my atoms to miss the atoms of ice. I did what any third year novice mejishun would do, and verified it by landing on the surface and ice boring a marble through an ice chip on the surface after first using an Emerald Stare And Compare spell on the marble. (The Emerald version is compatible with 99.99999999999999999 percent of mejiverse phylaws.) The marble checked out perfectly after being bored. It's a good thing to be careful not to lose your marbles, you never know what they might be useful for.

On that note, I used the McKintosh to get bored. I floated in at about twenty knots for starters, and sure enough I came upon a layer of liquid water at a depth of fourty five fathoms. At that point I pulled out a Nucleustide Submarinating Particle accelerator spell and began diving in earnest. I was careful to use a Visifilter spell to utilize the ultraviolet penetration in order to see. That allowed me to blend into the natural setting here on Iceball. (I like the name, kind of catchy.)

I neared a hundred sevent fathoms and suddenly a clearly artificial structure loomed out of the darkness. I stopped the Nucleustide and pulled out a majorscrying spell to investigate.