You have given me a face,
and now I am golden --
rest, rest.

median
(c. 1998); published in Winter 2002 Melic Review

there are few pleasures on the earth as hurtling down tight corridors of foliage and asphalt (blue roof unseen) in nimble craft, open to the temperate air, music flared, fighting forces, joy in a curve. light teases, glowing ground effect in eye's corner, visible shafts stabbing down before vulcanized footfalls, level specular flutters briefly bursting upon the retina, and in 150 degree hairpins, God runs the gamut in a slideshow with heavy thumb. risk, speed, illusion, centripity; forgive me designer topiary, my haste through your measured glory, i'm lost in jazz.

[Ed: Every writer's phantasm of grace and speed is a footnote to High Flight. Over the years, I searched for more of Magee's work, to discover he wrote this piece only months before his death, returning from a World War II convoy patrol -- at the age of 19.]

The Trouble With Timothy
(c. 1998)

With much forethought and prethought and postthought, with water on the brain, and saddle in his harem (harrumph!), with addled cells, and grey consolation, elephantine perturbation, and rarefied cerebration, he produced a fluberring elocution, a pitiful excitation, a forever levelled elevation.

Monstrous!, they all shouted. That such should happen to you, who taught us three things we wouldst never forget, the chorus chorus'd. That, one, the little girl in the front solos with digit aloft, a tree basking in black as well as noon, foments certain indescribables (the ba-ba-bles seem to go on longer than they ought), depending on gravity's gregarious nature, and knocking heads just when they secretly will themselves to be knocked. Trees produce genius! And do not forget two, the boy in the back who never speaks except when there isn't a doubt he's right (much like myself), that marvelous things emit from bog holes and flashing forests, under wicked stuff and after pervasive entropy: order from odor (the girls go eewww -- hush, says the teacher). Oh, and three, sir, from the do-gooder femme with the hidden insight, that one must shy away from the folks that loaf, the wrongthink that breeds, the wretch that canst act when action is breath! (Very serious, isn't she?)

Yes, all I have said I have said in a wink,
for not other could I do, it is how I think,
but it is my horror to tell you a thing I have found,
when I ruffle the tethers of life'skein, I am bound,
the one and the all, it all goes to: blink!

And they were gone.