Aspen Writes Poetry

A Note for Readers: This piece takes its inspiration from Aesop’s classic fable,  The Leap at Rhodes  (often remembered by the Latin phrase  Hic Rhodus, hic salta ). In the original tale, a boastful athlete returns from foreign lands claiming he executed a world-record long jump on the island of Rhodes with countless witnesses. A weary bystander, unimpressed by the rhetoric, simply draws a line in the dirt and tells him:  “Here is Rhodes; jump here.” He tells it from the podium, every night. How down in Mar-a-Lago, on that sun-bleached isle, he took a running start against the fake, rigged wind and cleared the harbour in a single, perfect bound. A leap so vast, he says, the generals wept. A golden arc across the wine-dark sea. He wears the story like a heavy, gilded ring, turning it on his finger till it shines. You should have seen it,  his small, pursed mouth mouths. The crowd size. Millions. The sheer, impossible height...

It is a common misconception that the Patriarchy is a fortress. People picture high stone walls,  portcullises,  and perhaps a moat filled with tiny,  litigious accountants.   In reality,  it is mostly held together by an incredible amount of filing,  a slight draft beneath the doors,  and the collective,  unwritten agreement that if everyone stops pretending to listen to the Chairman,  the whole building will simply dissolve into a light grey dust. The system relies entirely on your presence to explain where the spare staples are kept. Leaving,  therefore,  is surprisingly low-tech.  It does not require a dragon,  a battering ram,  or a particularly dramatic speech delivered from the top of a table.  It mostly requires a coat with functional pockets and a complete,  clinical refusal to nod along. First,  you must recognise the primary weapon of the structure: The  Extremely Long Explanation . When...

It’s always a quiet message in the dark, a notification blinking on a screen, a voice over the line saying  you ought to know, naming the blood that runs inside your veins. They call it an allegation,  soft as gauze, wrapped up in courtly,  legalistic prose, while behind the hedge the cameras wait like flies to feed upon the rotten family tree. Not all men,  they sing,  a tedious chorus hummed by the ones who sit upon their hands, yet there is always a father,  a cousin,  a uncle,  a prince, enough of them to sour the milk in the glass, enough of them to make a woman turn her head and vomit in the immaculate porcelain sink. You build a castle out of silk and gold, you leave the country,  change your name,  your clothes, and still the old man’s shadow crawls the floor, smelling of yellowed paper,  greed,  and spite. How neatly they carve the daughter from the stone, demand her tears,  demand she answer for the sins brewed i...

The Great Red Ox of the Valley had a great deal on its mind, mostly concerning the fact that a large, iron-booted giant was currently standing on its chest and methodically setting fire to its home. The Ox had been standing there for a very long time.  It was bleeding,  its pasture was gone,  and its children were trapped under a pile of very heavy,   very expensive rubble. High above the smoke,  sitting comfortably on the tip of the Ox’s left horn,  sat a small,  ginger-furred Gnat. The Gnat was famous.  Across four continents and three oceans,  millions of other insects paid substantial amounts of sugary nectar just to hear him buzz soft,  rhyming tunes about falling in love at a tavern.  He had a very soft voice,  a very clean acoustic leaf,  and a management team that advised him,  above all else,  never to express an opinion on weather,  giants,  or the sudden absence of pastures,  as it ...

They say a single word can ruin a man’s future. But I’ve seen the lists: fifty-seven names preserved, grown-ups hiding truths in secret files. Strange, how a whispered warning is heavier than fifty-seven names, louder than the silence keeping watch. They hunt for her name, a shadow in the dark, ignoring the wolves still standing in the light. Quicker to unmask the whisperer than to name the men who made her run.

The problem with trees, as the History Harlots have often pointed out, is that they tend to take a very long-term view of punctuation. A comma to an oak tree is roughly three centuries of looking at a rock, and a full stop is usually an ice age. Therefore, when an elder tree somewhere near the wetter edge of Bower upon Bough developed a sudden, violent case of What-If, the locals immediately blamed the towns lack of budget. It started with the towns third-best cider, which had fermented (forgotten) long enough to achieve a mild philosophical insight and a distinct gray goatee. The tree, let us call her Mrs. Scrope, because trees that have stood in a parish for four hundred years usually acquire a surname by sheer squatting rights, had spent the better part of two centuries listening to a dry-stone waller named Caleb complain about his knees, his sheep, and the complete lack of proper butter in the valley. Caleb was sixty-two years old, which, in geological terms, made him approximately...

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western electoral district lies a small, unregarded blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so astonishingly dim that they still think a pint of warm bitter and a grievance about wind farms are a suitable substitute for a civilisation. In these parts, "Community" is generally defined as an exclusive, mildly damp members' club designed to uplift whoever happens to be holding a microphone in front of a gastropub, provided they possess that particular shade of perpetual grievance usually associated with mislaid car keys or a deeply offensive beige cardigan. Mutual aid has long since been filed under "Anomalous Nuisances" right next to logic and basic human decency. True British values now consist entirely of pointing a trembling, slightly nicotine-stained finger at someone else while wearing a tweed jacket that smells faintly of historical irrelevance and private school overdrafts. The...