Bryan's contribution to this week's assignment

Having been hit by a preposterous proposal from one Samuel J. Ledley of Cambridge, who in his desire to explore the fashion trends of the Franco-Prussian war illuminated the many arguments of historians seeking to unearth the origins of buckled shoes (and whether the soles of which could be entirely fabricated from the cartilaginous gristle of discarded tendons found wholly in subsidized Scottish lowland farms), I was forced to promote a matrix within the relatively small social circle of Merovingian scholars at Saxonbury that directly correlated four points: that Portugese bluebills could, in fact, be indirectly related to sandpipers and as such prove a land link through evolution to exist much in the way some Galapagos species are thought to have similar lineage to more pedestrian mainland creatures; that the study of said species’ biology could also prove some link between cultures of the Andean foothills and their counterparts in other parts of Europe as they relate to how these animals were hunted and gathered; that the bird is, indeed, the word; and that subcutaneous ridges in their lower sedimenta and just below bluebills’ ankles could in fact prove that the utilization of these appendages could justify the cultures of 1650-1820s Prussia’s use of spats.

Marcy's Assignment for This Week

A poem by Sir Marcus Hambone Muzzlefoot
On the first day of spring
1602

Awakening with the dawn I sigh.
My eyes protest the intrusion of sun’s essence.
It is warm and golden,
But still I drag winter in my bones.

I step out into the morning
And in an instant I am Illuminated.
The equinox is upon the world.
The air smells of wet earth,
A muddy gristle of dirt and worms,
And a faint waft of hyacinths.

I walk to the beach, the sun stirring movement,
I can feel the blood of the trees slowly beginning
To move within their bark encrusted shells,
Sap flowing through soft plant matrix
I feel it too, as my bones warm.

A sandpiper chirps, my shoes sink in the wet sand.
Tide has moved out, and the sea has revealed
The morning’s treasures.
I pick up a seashell, pink and orange
Something’s home it was.
I breathe in the sun as the waves lap at my ankle.

And I thaw.

This Week's Writing Assignment

By Brian - AKA - "BriHack"

The wrinkled vellum of the illuminated scroll, matched the skin texture of the ancient man's gnarled hands painstakingly unfolding it. Would the old relic live to read the prophecy it contained?

How much could a boy pretending to be the musty mage's apprentices take?

Wilted greens and roast-beast shot through with gristle matrixes every day broken up by the weekend when the shriveled monks served up some kind of sandpiper jerky.

I ask you, would you eat it? It's enough to make me want to string the palate-dead cooks up by their ankles and roast them for dinner. Well, there would be time enough for that when all this was over. For now it was time to read the prophecy.