Cavescrabble – Notes in a cave, perhaps transcribed from a journal or on a luncheon napkin, or the back of a pocket-damp-receipt left over from summer, whereupon revisiting you realize with great frustration the near inability to interpret your own handwriting and intentions for what seemed at the time as the beginnings of a fine thought, which causes you in turn to begin etching possible interpretations upon the black smoldered walls by licking your fingers and removing the old fires’ smokey darkness, a slow process, but with time effective enough to allow some sense of your original thoughts, but at the same time permanently staining your mouth. You are soon known as The Black Tongue, rumored as the last of the cave crawlers. Shaman of black words and dark speak. An interpreter. The Old Editor. Visited by the city-clean who crave easy answers to their easy lives, your medicine is envied but feared. The aged journal you keep hidden, still very much a mystery to you, is filled with a script gone strange a lifetime ago, your Mystery Book of Elder Deeds. The language key for it is kept sacred on the cave walls and lit by the fire you protect with the slack tongue of forgetfulness.
Larry D. Thacker’s poetry and fiction can be found in over 200 journals and anthologies, including Spillway, Poetry South, The Lake, The American Journal of Poetry, and Valparaiso. His books include four full poetry collections, two chapbooks, as well as the folk history, Mountain Mysteries: The Mystic Traditions of Appalachia.
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