Stage
If all the world’s a stage,
I’ll flip to the next page
of this script handed me
and learn who I will be
when the lights go down.
Every laugh and frown
becomes reality;
it’s all you’ll ever see.
The actor learns his role
but never bares his soul.
Stephen Brooke ©2026
nothing very serious or ambitious
a bit of doggerel
Choosing
Mary Anne or Ginger? they asked;
I told them I’d take one of each.
One for back in the hut,
One for down on the beach!
How about Rachel or Monica?
That very much depends,
but if they were to move in next door,
I’m sure we would all be good friends!
Deanna or Beverly, then;
with whom would you choose to trek?
If that Betazoid read my mind,
it’s going to be all hands on deck!
So Daphne or Velma? they reached.
(Did we save the best for last?)
If the Mystery Machine starts rocking,
they’ve added me to the cast!
Stephen Brooke ©2026
Imagine
I asked Camus should we
imagine Prometheus happy.
He wasn’t sure but felt
the eagle might be, his daily
pecking filling his life.
I wondered if he even
liked liver and if it mattered.
I wondered if he told
the titan of all the things
he saw, winging above
the world on his way
to work. I could only
imagine such things.
I could imagine the eagle
and Prometheus
and even myself, happy.
Stephen Brooke ©2026
I have been dropping all those ‘evil’ digital companies and sites, over recent years. Twitter, Amazon — you know the ones. Now it has come time to do the same with Meta. I already bailed on Instagram and Threads earlier this year, and now it comes time to break with FaceBook. Three pages will definitely go; I might hang onto the personal account a little while, just so I can keep track of a few friends and relatives. But it is no longer viable as self-promotion for me.
Not to mention the ‘evil’ thing (which I just did mention). I admit to hanging onto some GoodReads author pages, despite the site’s Amazon connection (I neither buy nor sell on Amazon). I don’t interact there but simply list the published books.
So, what about the only sort-of evil companies, like Microsoft, Apple, and Google? I’m willing to use them but don’t really depend on them. Yes, my websites (as well as this blog) is hosted on Google. For now, I’ll leave things like that. But I use open source software, or that from smaller providers, as much as possible and have very little to do with Microsoft or Apple.
As far as social media goes, I’m concentrating on BlueSky, Mastodon, Tumblr, as well as WordPress blogs. If I reach fewer views and sales, so be it. I’ll just keep creating anyway.
Dance
God sings in each of us
however differently
we dance. And if we tread
on one another’s toes
some times, it’s no great deal.
The music will go on.
Stephen Brooke ©2026
Men created clocks and calendars
but the hours and years pass without them.
I have waited, not counting the time;
someday you will return to the home I built.
Is that your voice I hear calling at last?
No, only a distant hiker echoing across the hills.
Stephen Brooke ©2026
I put summer
away, neatly folded,
and lay out winter.
It does not seem too frayed
for one year more of use.
Stephen Brooke ©2026
sorta-kinda tanka-esque
Accomplishments
I feel I am accomplishing things;
it could be an illusion
but I’ll just keep on plugging away,
ignoring reality’s intrusion.
Each day another page gets written,
a bit more lawn gets mowed;
each day I grow a little older
and travel down my road.
I count up these accomplishments,
I add them to life’s sum,
while ever avoiding asking myself,
will there be more to come?
Stephen Brooke ©2026
started out as light verse but gained weight as I went along
Come Forth
The monsters now come forth
in the noonday light,
seeking not the shadows,
the dark familiar haunts
of their ancient brethren.
These are the ones I most fear.
They wear our faces, yours,
mine, we who released them.
They point into each mirror
they pass, blaming tomorrow
for our yesterdays,
and I hide myself
in the dark places they
abandoned. Will they call me
monster when I come forth,
into that noonday light?
Stephen Brooke ©2026
What Bird Calls
I know not what bird calls across the dusk;
seeking southern forests, it will sing there tomorrow.
Silent wings beat through my darkened skies; in dream
only can I fly, to distant sun-lit lands.
Sleep now; morning comes and I must once more
prepare for winter, not expecting spring.
Stephen Brooke ©2026
somewhat in the shape of a sijo
Flat
Once, the Earth lay flat. Horizons marked
the rim of life; the world goes this far
and no further. Sail away, young man.
Seek out those isles that swim along the edges
of the sunset, following from star
to star until the world rounds itself.
Stephen Brooke ©2026
Beard
This beard, I complained,
makes me look too old;
I shaved my chin clean —
yes, I felt quite bold!
A glimpse in the mirror
should show a new truth —
a face that revealed
my lost inner youth!
I turned and I twisted,
examined it well;
damn! I still looked
older than hell!
Stephen Brooke ©2026
We Go
Our seasons here are nearly run;
it’s time to seek the Southern sun.
In the fields the farmers mow;
we gather now in each fence-row.
We go, we go;
this is all we know.
Heeding Summer’s fading song,
telling all we not have long;
when the cold winds start to blow,
when the weather cocks all crow,
we’ll know, we’ll know,
it’s time for us to go.
Dawn comes late now, chill and gray,
as leaves scatter, borne away,
and we too must join the flow;
our world has been ever so.
We go, we go;
this is all we know.
In night’s darkness voices sigh;
brothers passing through the sky.
Far below us, stag and doe
make their passage through the snow.
we know, we know,
it’s time for us to go.
Stephen Brooke ©2026
possibly for a children's book, should I write any more of them
Hill
Paradise is found beyond that hill.
I climbed it once, to look upon the golden
and secret distance of horizons I’d
not dare. It lies there, that land, in the mists
of every morning, in my stars of night.
A glimpse I had, no more, before descending
again to worlds known, those journeys never
begun. Climb if you will; climb, and cross over.
Stephen Brooke ©2026
The End
The end of the world
has come once again;
was it just last week
it vanished in flame?
I’ve lived through it thrice
at least, I am sure,
though I could be dead,
a ghost, nothing more.
We’ve scheduled the end
again for next month;
perhaps on a Tuesday
nobody likes those.
Stephen Brooke ©2026
doggerel of the day
Recreation
Though I destroy infinite worlds, infinite worlds remain. The goal is not destruction itself but the infinite joyous act of destruction.
Elsewhere, infinite others revel in the act of creation. Each of us wields our hammers to our own purposes and our own purposelessness.
We adorn the courts of timeless kings. See how well that illusion hangs? Tomorrow and every tomorrow it will be torn down.
Yesterday and every yesterday it will be recreated. The word erased remains written on infinite pages.
It may leap from the first book you open, ready to your desires. It may hide in fear of such gods as we.
Let it go. There are infinite others of its kind.
Stephen Brooke ©2026
Prehistoric humans of various sorts have shown up in some of my stories. Although the dwarfs and trolls of my fantasy work would seem to be related to Neanderthals, we ignore this in the tales so I’ll do the same here.
We do meet Neanderthals in my time travel science fiction novel, ‘When Man Was Young.’ These are straightforward denizens of Italy, c.60,000 years ago, so there is no fantasy element involved. I endeavored to be realistic with them instead, and probably succeeded reasonably well.
Then we have the Larnagians in the sci-fi novel ‘Alienese’ (written as Oliver Davis Pike). These are the descendants of ancient Earth humans who learned how to teleport via their brain power and went off to colonize elsewhere, forgetting the way home. A hundred thousand years ago? Two hundred thousand? Who can say? They definitely look like humans of an earlier time, heavy of brow, robust of build (especially the men). They could be Homo longi (Denisovans) or perhaps they come from around the time when Heidelbergensis morphed into ‘modern’ humans. All these I consider to be races* of Home sapiens, actually, and the Larnagians are mutually fertile with Earth humans.
Now the ‘First Children’ of the Malvern novel ‘Valley of Visions’ are almost certainly Heidelbergensis, or closely related. Again, able to breed with modern humans. And, as the Larnagians, not quite as bright** as us, on average (but not that far off). These are a much more gracile sort; that may be their ancestry or they might have evolved that direction during their residency on Exura. The Wizard-Lord Hurasu has kept them under his protection in a sort of reservation high in the mountains, but all are gone — at least from that spot — in a couple thousand years.
They, and the Larnagians, are dark of skin. Not so the ‘beast men’ encountered on an island in a later Mora novel, ‘Warrior of the Moon.’ These are rather hairy with pale skin beneath. With the protection from the sun provided by a heavier pelt, plus a somewhat dim forest environment, dark skin serves no particular purpose (as with chimpanzees). They are far more primitive than the First Children, building rude huts and not knowing fire. Probably some sort of Homo erectus? That would be a good guess but I’m not saying one way or another. After all, who knows what sort of humans and near-humans exist out there in the infiniverse?
_______
*True races or sub-species — all humans today are one race, from a scientific view.
**This was for the sake of the stories. I would not be at all surprised if the real ‘primitive’ humans were every bit as intelligent as us — or even smarter.
Utilitarianism believes in the greatest good* for the greatest number of people. This is something with which I totally disagree. Every person is equally important. Their needs are not to be subordinated to those of some hypothetical ‘humanity,’ but neither should they be elevated over those of another.
This is, to be sure, more difficult in practice than in theory. We are bound to place the needs of our loved ones ahead of those we don’t know. Humans have a certain amount of built-in tribalism, both for better and worse. The dynamics of all this is certainly useful fodder for the fiction writer. I rarely write of actual politics in my stories but one can probably detect an undercurrent of a left-libertarian (that is, anarchist) viewpoint.
Fortunately, most of my protagonists are practical sorts and can work with this.
____________
*Not that anyone can agree what this is. Some say ‘happiness’ but I can be quite happy being unhappy at times.
I’ve been world-building all my life. Or, at least, going back to when I was four or five and laying out large scenarios with my toy soldiers and dinosaurs and usually a few native Americans too. I could find roles for all of them.
I’m told when I was seven or eight I was creating similar fantasy worlds for my playmates at school. I do not believe they took them as seriously as I did. A few ideas took on more concrete form eventually. I think the first to actually ‘exist’ as a world, one where I wrote things down, drew maps, etc. came when I was about fourteen. That would have been the South Seas fantasy world. Basically a ‘lost world’ sort of thing at that point, an undiscovered island. I was encountering such worlds in my reading, E.R. Burroughs and others.
Then there was my apocalypse world, post-atomic war style. It grew in all sorts of directions and became fairly well-developed eventually, with quite a lot of it on paper. Did I attempt to actually write stories in either of these worlds? Sure, but I never really followed through very well on them. I suppose I just wasn’t ready to write fiction yet (poetry was quite another matter and took much of my attention for a long time).
In time, I abandoned the post-apocalypse concept in favor of another world, and went to moving all those ideas there. And, since there was room for it, the South Seas ideas followed them. So was born the ‘Izan’ world (or infinite worlds, actually) in which the bulk of my fantasy is set.
Thus my Mora novels (beginning with ‘Coast of Spears’) derive fairly directly from that earliest South Seas world-building. Before I wrote any of them, however, I turned out the four short novels (or one long novel — one can look at it either way) that make up Donzalo’s Destiny. There’s no denying that my maps of the region in which they are set were originally based on the southeastern USA. I changed them quite a bit, including flipping east and west, adding mountain ranges, and so on, before the geography became set. And, while I was at it, I drew up the rest of the world.
Too late to change any of that now — I’ve set too many stories in that world. To be sure, I’ve built other worlds since, some for multiple novels. Any well thought out world should be capable of supporting almost endless story-telling.
Incidentally, I still have the map (included here) I drew of the unknown island when I was like fourteen or so. And it is the basis of part of that complete world map. The beautiful Polynesian princess I imagined then also survived. All that’s in the tales; best to just read them if one wishes to learn more.
Wholesome
To make my writing as wholesome
as a loaf of whole-grain bread,
I stir in some moral fiber,
and keep the reader well fed.
Oh, I could feed them pastries
and sugary treats instead,
but I’d rather keep them regular
as it passes through their head.
Stephen Brooke ©2026
a bit of light verse I threw off in a couple minutes for a prompt on Mastodon
