Anansi Boys

"Stupid birds," he said, cheerfully. He pulled himself up on to the windowledge.
Flamingos are not famed for their cutting intelligence, nor for their problem-sloving abilities: confronted with a twist of wire, and a bottle with something edible in it, a crow might try to make a tool out the the wire in order to get to the contents of the bottle. A flamingo, on the other hand, would try and eat the wire, if it looked like a shrimp, or possibly even if it didn't, just in case it was a new kind of shrimp. So if there was something slightly smoky and insubstantial about the man who stood on the windowledge insulting them, the flamingos failed to perceive it. They glared at him with the crazed pink eyes of killer rabbits, and they rushed towards him.

(By Neil Gaiman from the book Anansi Boys)

Marbles

The touch, as light as a feather,
Barely there, but there all the same.
Soft, so soft, I can hardly feel it
Almost like the lips craving for the taste of rain.
The lights are dimmed, my eyes unseeing
Search for what they've searched so long.
The darkness is all around me,
I welcome it as the music of a song.
My breath is deep, my body warm,
My hands find the way instinctively.
I will not stop, I will not forget,
The reason that I guard so protectively.
Once it's finished, once it's done,
All that's left are fading memories.
I drop them like a bag of marbles,
struggling to catch the scattering stories.
Those that I retrieve, I hold on to firmly,
I will not let them go.
But, for now, I will not look behind,
Never will I stoop so low.