The Ache is leaving. Three years languished by dead end jobs, drugs and friends. Last week above a bagel store, the sun morphs mute amidst travelling clouds, indifferent fluctuations of light on an otherwise featureless day.

You arrive a tight knot of anxieties over a moment in time that could only have arrived after its departure. The Ache welcomes you into their sparse interior. You trace last month’s 21st across the black mould complex; navigate piles of stacked boxes, unsure if anything is inside of them.

“I always make the best friends in departure,” the Ache says, flipping a plushy up and down by the waist.

“Maybe you can only love that which is already lost,” you reply, with an insight a friend will give you a week later.

The acid tastes bitter under your tongue. Small marks your body bursting, a glowing radiance of interconnections you’d always had but only now begun to feel. The Ache follows suit and you sit on the couch together to watch .hack//Legend of the Twilight. The come up entangles you in the spectacle; the screaming boy protagonist, the chipped tooth gag, the moe sister in need of saving from the liminal space of dead code. You take part in it; you revel in it. Bodies morph on the surface of the screen in hyperflat obscenity, their parts interchangeable to the affect of the drama. Faces invert, break and disfigure, before reformation into the self-same identity form.

A month earlier, you’d hosted a house show at your flat. Too anxious to perform you’d dropped a tab as you’ve done now. An overbearing sensation of too-much-ness — of sickening reality — washed through the nexus of your being. You writhed on the ground screaming into a microphone as a cacophony of sounds roiled through you. Everyone cheered.

The floor rose later that night. A damp, disgusting intensity that triggered contractions in your throat and chest. Pulled to the ground, you fought off your bandmate’s advances, too shocked to express your revulsion and horror, to react accordingly, to reconstitute a border of consensual sociality. You broke free and slurred “I’m no one’s! I’m no one’s!” before running out of the room. Hours later, you tried to comfort them. Weeks later, you realised how ******* ******* that had been. Months later, you learnt their friend had committed suicide days before the show.

Back in the lounge, a prince rides onto the screen on a pig. You turn to the Ache and say “This is ******* awful.”

The Ache responds “I know right?”

Outside the world burns blue with lustre. The Ache trails you and falls onto their stomach. “Oh my god,” the Ache blurts, “this is why I love acid. Everything just feels right.” They gaze wistfully at the grasses and flowers before them; catch a whiff of asphalt and nectar, intermingled. “Like, gender isn’t even a thing, you know? Just properties condensed into a legible sign to be disciplined by heteronormative governmentality.”

“Properties! Properties!” You chant, stomping around the Ache with your arms stretched out. You wave them in the air like windmills. You bare your teeth. “Properties! Properties!”

“You know what I mean, right?” The Ache asks, pointedly. “You know what I mean?”

You continue chanting “Properties!” for another minute or two, before spotting a slug on a blade of grass beneath your feet. You fall to your knees and gasp “It’s a slug!”

You and the Ache stare at the tiny referent for an indefinite period of time, absorbed in its glistening moistures. Eventually, the Ache says “I think it’s actually a snail.”

You used to read postmodern novels on acid. You loved their exploration of hyperreality; their dissection of culture as a system of meaning that arises out of our collective, desperate attempts to overcome the indifference of facticity. Read symptomatically, culture does not reveal unseen depths in the world, but rather, constitutes shallow networks of sprawling complexity — truth effects — illusions of mastery over an, otherwise, undifferentiated and senseless becoming.

Then one day, the world overwhelmed you. Down the hall, your flatmates sounded an eternal return. As they spoke in joyous abandon you traced the lines from their mouths — found their origin in idiot artefacts of Hollywood Babylon. The joy of abstraction you once relished in your books took on an all too direct horror. You recoiled. You bound your lips in hysteria, for fear of becoming another repeating machine of an all too present culture industry. Better dumb than banal — better to say nothing at all, than everything that already was and would ever be. You cried and cried until everyone left — until you were alone with your silence and your tears and your nonexistent originality.

Dusk falls in violet streaks. You reach your room on the second floor of the building, open the bedside window and stick your legs out into a cool breeze. The Ache joins you. Danny Burton, the local MP, arrives in his van, his smiling bald face plastered on its side like an uncanny double enclosing its original.

“Hey look, it’s Danny Burton, the local MP.” Danny Burton turns his head. He glares at your dangling feet for a few seconds before entering his house. “You know, this is the first time in three years he’s looked at me and it’s at the peak of my degeneracy.” You turn to the Ache. “One of my favourite past times is watching him wander around the house at night, ******* and unsure of himself. He always goes to check on his BBQ.” You bounce on the bed in mania.

“See this is what people do, right?” the Ache says, mirroring your excitement. “Like, look at that lady walking her dog.” The Ache motions, with a cruel glint in their eyes, to the passerby on the fast dimming street. “What do you think she gets out of that? Doing that every night?” Without waiting for you to respond, the Ache answers, in a low, sarcastic tone “I guess she gets enjoyment. Doing her thing. Like everyone else.” The lady and the dog disappear beyond the curve of the road. Another pair soon arrives, taking the same path as the one before.

A few months back, you’d met an old friend at an exhibition on intersectional feminism. After the perfunctory art, wine and grapes, she drove you home, back to your run down flat in an otherwise bourgeois neighbourhood. She sat silent as the sun set before the dashboard, then asked how anyone could live like this; how anyone could stand driving out of their perfect suburban home, at the same time every morning, to work the same shift every day, for the rest of their stupid life. The dull ache of routine; the slow, boring death. You said nothing. You said nothing because you agreed with her.

“Life began as self-replicating information molecules,” you reply, obliquely. “Catalysis on superheated clay pockets. Repetition out of an attempt to bind the excess of radiant light.”

It is dark now; a formless hollow, pitted with harsh yellow lamps of varying, distant sizes. The Ache flips onto their stomach and scoffs “What’s that? We’re all in this pointless repetition together?”

You respond, cautiously “I just don’t think that being smart is any better than being stupid; that our disavowed repetitions are any worthier than anyone else’s.”

The Ache returns your gaze with an intensity you’ve never seen before. “Did I say being smart was any better? Did I say that? Being smart is part of the issue. There is no trajectory that doesn’t become a habitual refrain. When you can do anything, everything becomes rote, effortless and pointless.

“But don’t act as if there’s no difference between us and these ******* idiots,” the Ache spits, motioning into the blackness beyond your frame. “I knew this one guy, this complete and utter ****. We went to a café, and he wouldn’t stop talking about the waitress, about how hot she was, how he wanted to **** her, while she was in earshot, because, I don’t know, he thought that would get him laid.

“Then we went for a drive and he failed a ******* u-turn. He just drove back and forth, over and again. A dead, automatic weight. A car came from the other lane, towards us, and waited for him to finish, but he stopped in the middle of the street and started yelling, saying **** like, ‘what does this ******* want?’ He got out of his car, out of his idiot u-turn, and tried to start a fight with the other driver — you know, the one who’d waited silently for him to finish.”

You don’t attempt a rebuttal; you don’t want to negate the Ache’s experience. Instead, you ask “Why were you hanging out with this guy in the first place?”

The Ache responds “Because I was alone, and I was lonely, and I had no one else.”

It is 2AM. Moths dance chaotic across the invisible precipice of your bedside window, between the inner and outer spaces of linguistic designation. There is a layering of history here — of affects and functions that have blurred beyond recognition — discoloured, muted, absented.

In the hollow of your bed, the Ache laughs. You don’t dare close the distance. Sometimes you find the edges of their impact and trace your own death. All your worries manifest without content. All form and waver and empty expanse where you drink deeply without a head. Because you have lost so much time already. And nothing keeps.

Months later, after the Ache has left, you will go to the beach. You will see the roiling waves beneath crash into the rocky shore of the esplanade, a violence that merges formlessly into a still, motionless horizon, for they are two and the same. You will be unable to put into words how it feels to know that such a line of calm exists out of the pull and push of endless change, that it has existed long before your birth and will exist long after your death.

The last lingering traces of acid flee your skin. Doused in tomorrow’s stupor, you close your eyes. You catch no sleep.

There was an Old Person of Burton,
Whose answers were rather uncertain;
When they said, 'How d'ye do?'
He replied, 'Who are you?'
That distressing Old Person of Burton.

For the fifth year in a row, Kering and Parsons School of Fashion rolled out the ‘Empowering Imagination’ design initiative. The competition engaged twelve 2016 graduates of the Parsons BFA Fashion Design program, who "were selected for their excellence in vision, acute awareness in design identity, and mastery of technical competencies." The winners, Ya Jun Lin and Tiffany Huang, will be awarded a 2-week trip to Kering facilities in Italy in June 2016 and will have their thesis collections featured in Saks Fifth Avenue New York’s windows.

The Kering and Parsons competition, which is currently in its fifth year, is one of a growing number of design competitions, including but not limited to the LVMH Prize, the ANDAM Awards, the Council of Fashion Designers of America/Vogue Fashion Fund, and its British counterpart, the Woolmark Prize, the Ecco Domani fashion award, and the Hyères Festival. among others.

In the generations prior, designers were certainly nominated for awards, but it seems that there was not nearly as intense of a focus on design competitions as a means for designers to get their footing, for design houses to scout talent, or for these competitions to select the best of the best in a especially large pool of young talent. Fern Mallis, the former executive director of the Council of Fashion Designers of America and an industry consultant, told the New York Times: “Take the Calvin [Kleins] and the Donna [Karans] and the Ralph [Laurens] of the world. Some of these people had money from a friend or a partner who worked with them, but they weren’t out spending their time doing competitions and winning awards to get their business going.” She sheds light on an essential element: The relatively drastic difference between the state of fashion then and fashion now. Fashion then was slower, less global, and (a lot) less dominated by the internet, and so, it made for quite different circumstances for the building of a fashion brand.

Nowadays, young designers are more or less going full speed ahead right off the bat. They show comprehensive collections, many of which consist of garments and an array of accessories. They are expected to be active on social media. They are expected to establish a strong industry presence (think: Go to events and parties). They are expected to cope with the fashion business that has become large-scale and international. They are expected to collaborate to expand their reach, and while it does, at times, feel excessive, this is the reality because the industry is moving at such a quick pace, one that some argue is unsustainably rapid. The result is designers and design houses consistently building their brands and very rarely starting small. Case in point: Young brands showing pre-collections within a few years of setting up shop (for a total of four collections per year, not counting any collaboration or capsule collections), and established brands showing roughly four womenswear collections, four menswear collections, two couture collections, and quite often, a few diffusion collections each year.

The current climate of 'more is more' (more collections, more collaborations, more social media, more international know-how, etc.) in fashion is what sets currently emerging brands apart from older brands, many of which started small. This reality also sheds light on the increasing frequency with which designers rely on competitions as a means of gaining funds, as well as a means of establishing their names and not uncommonly, gaining outside funding.

The Ralphs, Tommys, Calvins and Perrys started off a bit differently. Ralph Lauren, for instance, started a niche business. The empire builder, now 74, got his start working at a department store then worked for a private label tie manufacturer (which made ties for Brooks Brothers and Paul Stuart). He eventually convinced them to let him make ties under the Polo label and work out of a drawer in their showroom. After gaining credibility thanks to the impeccable quality of his ties, he expanded into other things. Tommy Hilfiger similarly started with one key garment: Jeans. After making a name for himself by buying jeans, altering them into bellbottoms and reselling them at Brown’s in Manhattan, he opened a store catering to those that wanted a “rock star” aesthetic when he was 18-years old with $150. While the store went bankrupt by the time he was 25, it allowed him to get his foot in the door. He was offered design positions at Calvin Klein (who also got his start by focusing on a single garment: Coats. With $2,000 of his own money and $10,000 lent to him by a friend, he set up shop; in 1973, he got his big break when a major department store buyer accidentally walked into his showroom and placed an order for $50,000). Hilfiger was also offered a design position with Perry Ellis but turned them down to start his eponymous with help from the Murjani Group. Speaking of Perry Ellis, the NYU grad went to work at an upscale retail store in Virginia, where he was promoted to a buying/merchandising position in NYC, where he was eventually offered a chance to start his own label, a small operation. After several years of success, he spun it off as its own entity. Marc Jacobs, who falls into a bit of a younger generation, started out focusing on sweaters.

These few individuals, some of the biggest names in American fashion, obviously share a common technique. They intentionally started very small. They built slowly from there, and they had the luxury of being able to do so. Others, such as Hubert de Givenchy, Alexander McQueen and his successor Sarah Burton, Nicolas Ghesquière, Julien Macdonald, John Galliano and his successor Bill Gaytten, and others, spent time as apprentices, working up to design directors or creative directors, and maybe maintaining a small eponymous label on the side. As I mentioned, attempting to compare these great brand builders or notable creative directors to the young designers of today is a bit like comparing apples and oranges, as the nature of the market now is vastly different from what it looked like 20 years ago, let alone 30 or 40 years ago.

With this in mind, fashion competitions have begun to play an important role in helping designers to cope with the increasing need to establish a brand early on. It seems to me that winning (or nearly winning) a prestigious fashion competition results in several key rewards.

Primarily, it puts a designer's name and brand on the map. This is likely the least noteworthy of the rewards, as chances are, if you are selected to participate in a design competition, your name and brand are already out there to some extent as one of the most promising young designers of the moment.

Second are the actual prizes, which commonly include mentoring from industry insiders and monetary grants. We know that participation in competitions, such as the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, the Woolmark Prize, the Swarovski, Ecco Domani, the LVMH Prize, etc., gives emerging designers face time with and mentoring from some of the most successful names in the industry. Chris Peters, half of the label Creatures of the Wind (pictured above), whose brand has been nominated for half of the aforementioned awards says of such participation: “It feels like we’ve talked to possibly everyone in fashion that we can possibly talk to." The grants, which range anywhere from $25,o00 to $400,000 and beyond, are obviously important, as many emerging designers take this money and stage a runway show or launch pre-collections, which often affect the business' bottom line in a major and positive way.

The third benefit is, in my opinion, the most significant. It seems that competitions also provide brands with some reputability in terms of finding funding. At the moment, the sea of young brands which is terribly vast. Like law school graduates, there are a lot of design school graduates. With this in mind, these competitions are, for the most part, serving as a selection mechanism. Sure, the inevitable industry politics and alternate agendas exist (without which the finalists lists may look a bit different), but great talent is being scouted, nonetheless. Not only is it important to showcase the most promising young talent and provide them with mentoring and grant money, as a way of maintaining an industry, but these competitions also do a monumental service to young brands in terms of securing additional funding. One of the most challenging aspects of the business for young/emerging brands is producing and growing absent outside investors' funds, and often, the only way for brands' to have access to such funds is by showing a proven sales track record, something that is difficult to establish when you've already put all of your money into your business and it is just not enough. This is a frustrating cycle for young designers.

However, this is where design competitions are a saving grace. If we look to recent Council of Fashion Designers of America/Vogue Fashion Fund winners and runners-up, for instance, it is not uncommon to see funding (distinct from the grants associated with winning) come on the heels of successful participation. Chrome Hearts, the cult L.A.-based accessories label, acquired a minority stake in The Elder Statesman, the brand established by Greg Chait, the 2012 winner, this past March. A minority stake in 2011 winner Joseph Altuzarra's eponymous label was purchased by luxury conglomerate Kering in September 2013. Creatures of the Wind, the NYC-based brand founded by Shane Gabier and Chris Peters, which took home a runner-up prize in the 2011 competition, welcomed an investment from The Dock Group, a Los Angeles-based fashion investment firm, last year, as well.

Across the pond, the British Fashion Council/Vogue Fashion Fund has awarded prizes to a handful of designers who have gone on to land noteworthy investments. In January 2013, Christopher Kane (pictured below), the 2011 winner, sold a majority stake in his brand to Kering. Footwear designer Nicholas Kirkwood was named the winner 2013 in May and by September, a majority stake in his company had been acquired by LVMH.

Thus, while the exposure that fashion design competition participants gain, and the mentoring and monetary grants that the winners enjoy, are certainly not to be discounted, the takeaway is much larger than that. These competitions are becoming the new way for investors and luxury conglomerates to source new talent, and for young brands to land the outside investments that they so desperately need to produce their collections, expand their studio space, build upon their existing collections, and even open brick and mortar stores.

While no one has scooped up inaugural LVMH winner Thomas Tait’s brand yet or fellow winner, Marques'Almeida, it is likely just be a matter of time.Read more at:www.marieaustralia.com/short-formal-dresses | http://www.marieaustralia.com/formal-dresses-sydney

Feel empty in your post apocalyptic City of Angels,
Where not even your pets are real!
An electric android, a sheep or a frog,
The whir-flutter of micro-electrical wings of a butterfly.

Good, and so you ought.

Now grab the handles of your empathy box,
And in a shared virtual hallucination –
Feel: empathy, depression, pain, delusion and despair,
The outré myriad gifts of consciousness.

Billions of discombobulated and disconnected wrecks:
Adam's sons; Eve's daughters,
And among them simulations too,
Fakes! androids!
A phony circuit of implanted semi-conscious memories,
A hive of neural malaise!
Welcome to our world;
know how dead inside I am.

You, yes, you:

Need a pet to make you more complete?
Maybe you can afford
A Fake Fakir Flake like me who looks like Jude Law,
Sounds like Richard Burton,
And silently romances you like Rudolph Valentino.
Come and stick what’s left of your mind,
In here,
In hair,
Hear her:
har, har, har…

A box of lies...

A voice, Mercer's,
With texture from an age you neither lived in nor dared in:
Al Jerry's, a TV actor,
Droning on in pre-selected tones.

The real thing, the men, the women, the children - their animals -
Made in the wild, wild desert,
In the green pulsing savannah,
On the open crusted sea;
Now too, washed, choked, and drained,
Too many spliced and diced mutations,
Iterating your image:
The thing that was my heart,
My Child, now its imitation.

Gather his things, don't mention his name
I'm afraid he's gone for a burton
Someone saw him go down in flames
He's not coming back that's for certain

There is no time for grieving now
We'll shut him out of our minds
Keep him in our memory though
In the hope of better times

Tomorrow a lad will take his place
Newly trained, freshly faced

We'll tell him everything's fine

i only started collecting a library, because, would you believe it, my local library was a pauper in rags and tatters; apologies for omitting necessary diacritic marks, the whiskey was ******* on icecubes to a shrivel.*

ernest hemingway, e.m. forster, mary shelley,
aesop, r. l. stevenson, jean-paul sartre,
jack kerouac, sylvia plath, evelyn waugh,
chekhov, cortazar, freud, virginia woolf,
philip k. ****, dostoyevsky, aleksandr solzhenitsyn,
oscar wilde, malcolm x, kafka, nabokov,
bukowski, sacher-masoch, thomas a kempis,
yevgeny zamyatin, alexandre dumas,
will self, j. r. r. tolkien, richard b. bentall,
james joyce, william burroughs, truman capote,
herman hesse, thomas mann, j. d. salinger,
nikos kazantzakis, george orwell,
philip roth, joseph roth, bulgakov, huxley,
marquis de sade, john milton, samuel beckett,
huysmans, michel de montaigne, walter benjamin,
sienkiewicz, rilke, lipton, harold norse,
alfred jarry, miguel de cervantes, von krafft-ebing,
kierkegaard, julian jaynes, bynum porter & shephred,
r. d. laing, c. g. jung, spinoza, hegel, kant, artistotle,
plato, josephus, korner, la rochefoucauld, stendhal,
nietzsche, bertrand russell, irwin edman,
faucault, anwicenna, descartes, voltaire, rousseau,
popper,  heidegger, tatarkiewicz, kolakowski,
seneca, cycero, milan kundera, g. j. warnock,
stefan zweig, the pre-socratics, julian tuwim,
ezra pound, gregory corso, ted hughes,
guiseppe gioacchino belli, dante, peshwari women,
e. e. cummings, ginsberg, will alexander, max jacob,
schwob, william blake, comte de lautreamont,
jack spicer, zbigniew herbert, frank o'hara,
richard brautigan, miroslav holub, al purdy,
tzara, ted berrigan, fady joudah, nikolai leskov,
anna kavan, jean genet, albert camus, gunter grass,
susan hill, katherine dunn, gil scott-heron,
kleist, irvine welsh, clarice lispector, hunter thompson,
machado de assisi, reymont, tolstoy, jim bradbury,
norman davies, shakespeare, balzac, dickens,
jasienica, mary fulbrook, stuart t. miller,
walter la feber, jan wimmer, terry jones & alan ereira,
kenneth clark, edward robinson, heinrich harrer,
gombrowicz, a. krawczuk, andrzej stasiuk, ivan bunin,
joseph heller, goethe, mcmurry, atkins & de paula,
bernard shaw, horace, ovid, virgil, aeschyles,
rumi, omar khayyam, humbert wolfe, e. h. bickersteth,
asnyk, witkacy, mickiewicz, slowacki, lesmian,
lechon, lep szarzynski, victor alexandrov, gogol,
william styron, krasznahorkai, robert graves,
defoe, tim burton, antoine de saint-exupery,
christiane f., salman rushdie, hazlitt, marcus aurelius,
nick hornby, emily bronte, walt whitman,
aryeh kaplan, rolf g. renner, j. p. hodin, tim hilton... etc.

Page 1 The first time I met Duke, I was tripping on shrooms. In fact, it was the first time I dabbled in psychedelics as well-- just don’t underestimate me in the marijuana department. The moment I can recall vividly comprised of the walk from the music hall which brought us to underneath the Moody Towers residential buildings, where there is wind and benches. A square of dirt rests behind the two benches facing one another; the distance apart from the benches being just far away enough to notice the gap of distance when conversing with someone on the other side. There was a main square of dirt, consisting of hundreds of butts twirled within the earth, scraggly weeds, and one relatively low sitting, yet ominous tree. This tree often glowed during the segments of the day in which the sun found itself to gazing down on the towers and its delinquent inhabitants. On many occasion during these occurrences you could find me, or perhaps Duke, basking in the serenity of the simplicity of the slivers of light breaking free through the emerald green mass of the tree. On this particular night I’m recalling, it was nighttime, causing the yellow of porch lights to dim the other color palettes. Except the sky was royal purple, and the grass in the distant hillside was writhing and crawling and breathing-- according to the mushrooms. Half of the bodies there that night were standing, half sitting, and there couldn’t have been more than a dozen of us. Here is this person in my indirect line of sight, and I couldn’t quite pinpoint the gender, but cute regardless. My guess of girl pursuing boyhood turned out to be correct. Small, almost delicate frame like mine, only he attempted to conceal his when I had long ago grown out of that. With a plaid button down and the collar poking outside of his oversized dark casual suit blazer. It was tied off with baggy khaki pants and clunky black sneakers similar to the ones the chefs in the cafeteria wear with a sense of longevity.
Page 2 His hair took inspiration from the typical pubescent teenage boy, straight and shaggy, and nearly covering the ears and eyes with a combination of strips of platinum blonde, ***** blonde, and light brown wisps. His almond shaped almond colored eyes were framed with black, square and thick glasses, but they seemed to help compensate for size with the natural petiteness of his face. Pink snakebites resided beneath his bottom lip, emphasizing the common nature of his lips that often formed a tight line, even when speaking. I only saw him from a distance that night. We didn’t introduce ourselves to each other until the next day, at that same location. There were less people now, and I was no longer in an altered state of mind. Well, to be honest, I still most likely was, but it certainly wasn’t shrooms. I don’t remember who began the introduction first, but I know his was accompanied with an abundance of compliments on my outfit and level of cuteness. As masculine as his mind was, he could still have an appreciation for the arts, for unique style, as any natural born writer would be so inclined. So there, underneath moody, I met him, within a social circle so new to me yet so familiar within the ebb and flow in the air of cigarette smoke, sometimes so pungently thick and keen against the tide of stimulating conversation. I felt a sense of belonging new to me.
Page 3 And there again and again, I saw him. The central station of our friends. There I slowly got to know him. I learned he lived about an hour away from Houston, he was a creative writing major, he was a freshman just like me and lived in the same building as me. We were both INFP’s on that Meyers-Briggs personality test. I had never met another INFP. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more his general profile seemed familiar to me. And then I remembered. RoomSync, an app the university had us use to select a random roommate. I remember considering someone’s profile that possessed all the qualities of Duke, before my current roommate reached out to me, unfortunately. Duke might have been my roommate in another reality-- remember the Multiverse Theory. I wonder if that would have even changed anything. But that thought process is futile. Once, in the initial stages, Duke had been rambling about modern horror and the author of the fight club, and where the two converge with the product of a gruesome short story. Not many accepted Duke’s invitation to read the short story, but I volunteered. But that is when I remember the beginning of Duke’s admiration for fight club. The concept of it. In fact, one of the first nights, I remember vividly as the Fight Club Night. Where Duke insisted on starting up our own Smircle fight club sometime, what what better time to do so, he thought, then right at that moment with his buddy Otis while drunk on ****** life and four lokos and *****? They were both at least eight shots deep in their sorrows when they ended up disappearing for what seemed to the rest of us like mere seconds. When we found them, we had ventured that way due to the need and ability to smoke a bowl behind the dumpster a few steps nearby. And when we found them, only one was standing. In the recounting later, Duke had apparently taken a nasty blow to the stomach after slamming a few hits in himself.
Page 4 As he lay there, sprawled face-down on the pavement, disoriented and disheveled, for a solid eight minutes at least until he determined he wasn’t going to puke. The remainder of the night was spent accompanying the rest of the group with Otis, forever refusing to let go of the moral dilemma that had just been established by this pseudo-fight club on which it is incorrect on all accounts to punch a drunk person in the stomach, because they are, in fact, drunk. This might appear annoying after a while, but the radical and lively energy that would radiate from the banter of Duke and Otis made this situation anything but.

Page 5   And so were my first stories of Duke, and so it was for many stories to come. Our stay at this place began to feel more permanent as our bodies would steadily adjust to the ranging, sporadic temperatures outside and as our eyes took in absorbing the physical evidence of the seasons. As it was, at any time throughout the day, my route would take me down to our spot underneath Moody, where Duke might or might not be there himself, shmoozing around with cigarettes and doodles on pen and paper noteworthy of Tim Burton. I got to know Duke. He seemed to have mastered the skill in which I prided myself most in, and that is the warmth near him that urges someone near him to just open your heart and reveal your thoughts and secrets-- that blind trust. Duke had a way of getting to exactly what was on my mind. And in exchange of me sharing, out came the stories of Duke’s life, the sad, ****** up, abusive stories. I heard those the most, for they were also the most compelling, and most exciting, and ******* sometimes Duke could even make them funny.

These days, Moody feels empty. Just because of minus one.

Hi, I'm Jackie. I am 18 years old and I'm a senior at Brennan Burton High School in Frederickson, New York. Frederickson is the suburban wasteland that you've doubtlessly seen and read about in countless movies, TV shows and books concerned with life in these mind-numbingly dull pockets of land. If you can even call it "life", that is. However, I find that the aforementioned depictions of the people and happenings in towns like mine are, more often than not, completely wrong. It makes me wonder if the people writing these shows and films have ever taken the initiative to actually venture out of their modest little apartments in SoHo to see for themselves what an actual suburbia feels like. But, I digress... Sort of. The purpose of my story is to try to prove to you that what you think about suburbia is probably all wrong, or mostly wrong.
     Now, where to begin?
     OK. I live in a two-story house that was built in the wake of World War II. It was one of those houses that government built for the soldiers who were returning from the war to live happy and prosperous lives in with their smiling families. That was a long time ago though, and now it seems like most of the houses in my town are occupied by single mothers, single fathers or familial units that include a step-mother or step-father. And my family is no different, being made up of my father, Henry (everyone calls him Hank) and my little brother Huxley. My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer only a few months after Huxley was born. They did everyting they could for her, but the cancer was advanced and she passed away only a few months after her initial diganosis. I loved my mother. She was a strong woman, she went to college, got a well paying job and gave birth to two kids. Sounds like a busy life, especially when you take into account that she was only 38 when she died.
     Thinking about her too much kind of shifts me into slow-mo, so I'm moving on. I love my dad, too. He's had a hard life. He grew up in a hard part of the city and had to drop out of school to start working at around 14 or 15. Not too long after he started working to help his family out, his father disappeared. Supposedly, my grandfather was involved with some sketchy people and, without a doubt, probably was involved in some sketchy dealings. Anyway, after he disappeared, my father was forced to work 18 hour days, 7 days a week. My grandmother was an alcoholic and a pill popper before my grandfather disappeared, and afterward it only got worse. One day when my father got home from work, he found his mother drowning in her own ***** on the kitchen floor. He rushed her to hospital, but it was too late. And to top it all off, when he got home, floating in the inch deep puke, he found her suicide note. That's when my father decided to pack his bags and move out of the city. Soon, he found work in an autobody shop and started saving money. Not long after that, his boss introduced him to his daughter who was around the same age. His boss's daughter turned out to be my mom.
     Sorry if all this background is annoying, but I figure if you want to read my story, you might as well know my parents' stories too. After all, if there were no them, then there would be no me. But yeah, my father. He's a good guy. Always quick to make light of any situation. You'll never catch him bringing the emotional air of a situation down. That;s just not how he operates, and now that I think about it, I can see why. If he had made a habit of that, he no doubt would've ended up like his mother. I'm very appreciative of him and everything that he does, I just wish I got around to tell him that more often.
     Then there's my brother Huxley. He's 9 years old, in the 4th grade and was named after Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World, my mother's favorite book. The name is eerily fitting too, almost as if his being named after a famous author was a foreshadowing of sorts. While his best friends are playing the latest PlayStation game, Huxley is devouring a novel. Basically, if you put it in front of him, he'll ****** it up and be quoting it the next time you see him. He's a smart kid, a really smart kid and I couldn't be prouder as an older sister, especially these days, when the only ting kids read are text messages and Facebook statuses. Whenever I go to the library to finish schoolwork, I always try to pick something up for him. The last one I got him was Carrie by Stephen King, one of my favorite authors. After he finished it though, he told me he'd much rather me bring him home another Nicholas Sparks book. I can't say you would ever hear those words coming out of my mouth, but I admire the kid's openness. I picked him up The Choice a few days ago, and when I checked in on him that night his smile was never brighter. He quickly kissed my cheek and told me he only had a few chapters left so I had to leave him be. All in all, he's quiet, shy and sensitive and I love him for that.

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I took my ****** sister Marigold to the cinema,
she had asked specifically and eventually
(she doesn't speak a lot on account of her awful stammer
and amazing cleft palate which has won prizes)
so I knew that this was something she really wanted,
and I teased for her bad taste
when she told me that she wanted to see
"Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Charlie
and the Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Chocolate Factory".

It was a Saturday evening and the local picture house
was showing a re-run of the classic starring Gene Wilder
as the enigmatically stylish ***** Wonka,
and not that steaming great pictorial **** served up by Tim Burton
and I knew that town would be busy with oiks
so as a treat I dressed her up better than usual,
and even gave her a hosedown to get rid of the poopy pong.

She had stopped crying by the time the feature started
and I think the Ooompa Loompa costume grew on her
but that maybe the orange paint was a bit of a bad idea
as people had stared as it was Day-Glo and she stood out
like a bulldog's *******, but I stand by my decision
to dye her hair green, it had taken thought and planning;
it was meant to add to her excitement of the day,
so I meant well, even if I was ineffectual in the end.

I sat her on my lap in the picture house
but still paid for two seats but I do get one ticket half price
though because of her disabilities, so it wasn'€™t all bad,
every cloud and all that, you know what I mean?
She tends to get a little down every now and then
but a £1 cinema ticket partly makes up for being born legless.
I knew from past experience that the cinema staff
prefer me to carry my stunted sis rather than wheeling her in
(I do recall that the time I taped her to her skateboard
proved somewhat a disaster - but really, the fat usher
had a torch and should have watched her step
or otherwise she wouldn't have bust her neck).

The Ooompa Loompa costume allowed Marigold
to amuse herself during the screening
(as there were no leggings to the costume).
She barely noticed when the fat little hero
got blown up on screen except to dribble "chocolate"
from her own little chocolate factory.
It was, all in all, quite an eventful outing
and one I might consider repeating but
probably in a different cinema next time,
mainly because we got banned for life
when the manager saw the condition of the seat.

Virginia Lee Burton

It’s all in there, a blueprint
for living, my sacred text

perfect replacement for a world
of tired hotel Gideon’s, this tale

of a plucky fellow with an Irish
surname, unencumbered, set free

to roam at will, picking up work here
and there, more hedgehog than fox, a man

who did one thing and did it well.  He
wrestled with private doubts in the dark,

stretched out on top of Mary Anne,
the nights warm and clear, sky smeared

with stars, a man who knew how to
back up a claim, take a risk, court failure

and humiliation at the bottom of a deep,
perfectly excised hole, all four corners

neat and square.  My idea of a perfect ending,
a second chance, a mulligan, quietly tending

the boiler with a pipe and a good book,
waiting for you and your homemade pie.

S H E


She softly came into my life without her crown

To whisper, to shed light and to turn me upside down

As soft music, she spoke through her pictures

And once I saw them, I adored her features

Something is daily pulling me to her marvellous cave

To appreciate her fountain of beauty  to which I crave

She gave me something I won't lose

Even if I drank too much *****

She gave me something to keep in heart

So that we won't ever part

Something I look at and see her in mind

Then slowly move to heart to bind

Now that I am totally stunned and sedated

It is too hard for me to be eliminated.



Sam Burton ©



Today is Sunday, Oct. 5, the 278th day of 2014 with 87 to follow.

The moon is new. Morning stars are Jupiter, Mars and Uranus. Evening stars are Mercury, Neptune, Saturn and Venus.



In 1876, the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, now Texas A&M;, opened. It was the first public higher education institution in Texas.

In 1883, the Orient Express train made its first run.

In 1895, the U.S. Open men's golf tournament was first contested. It was won by Horace Rawlins.



A thought for the day:



You can become a winner only if you are willing to walk over the edge. -- Damon Runyon





QUOTES for the day:



It is the desire of the good people of the whole country that sectionalism as a factor in our politics should disappear...

------------------------

He serves his party best who serves his country best.



Rutherford B. Hayes



You're dealing with the demon of external validation. You can't beat external validation. You want to know why? Because it feels sooo good.





Barbara Hall, Northern Exposure, Gran Prix, 1994



“So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.”

Peter Drucker



"A champion is afraid of losing. Everyone else is afraid of winning."



Billie Jean King



POETRY





AEDH Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven



W.B. Yeats


Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

About this poem


"Aedh wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" was originally published in Yeats' collection "The Wind Among the Reeds" (John Lane, 1899).

About W.B. Yeats


A poet and playwright, Yeats was born in Dublin in 1865. He received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1923. Yeats died in France in January of 1939.

*
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience.


This poem is in the public domain.
Distributed by King Features Syndicate







Vocabulary

"Bona fide" is used to mean good faith, sincerity. It is the evidence of one's good faith or genuineness -- often plural in construction; evidence of one's qualifications or achievements.

Health and Beauty



Pumpkin Seeds



Have you ever toasted pumpkin seeds at Halloween? Don't wait until the holiday to eat them. Pumpkin seeds are a great source of iron, zinc, calcium, and magnesium, and area also high in omega-3. One handful a day makes a big difference.





CHINESE FOOD

In Canada, Thanksgiving is just over one week away. As an alternative to turkey, how about serving Cantonese Roast duck for Thanksgiving dinner?



Cantonese Roast Duck



By Rhonda Parkinson



Author Deh-Ta Hsiung writes: This is the duck with a shining reddish-brown skin seen hanging in the windows of a good Cantonese restaurant.

Serves 10 - 12 as a starter, or 4 to 6 as a main course. (Note: total preparation time does not include the time needed to dry the duck before cooking).

Ingredients

    One 4 1/2 lb (2 kg) oven-ready duckling
    2 teaspoons salt
    4 tablespoons maltose or honey
    1 tablespoon rice vinegar
    1/2 teaspoon red food coloring (optional0
    about 1/2 pint (280 ml) warm water
    For the Stuffing:
    1 tablespoon oil
    1 tablespoon finely chopped spring onion
    1 teaspoon finely chopped fresh ginger root
    1 tablespoon caster sugar
    2 tablespoons Chinese rice wine (or dry sherry)
    1 tablespoon yellow bean sauce
    1 tablespoon hoisin sauce
    2 teaspoons five-spice powder

    Prep Time: 30 minutes
    Cook Time: 60 minutes

    Total Time: 90 minutes

Preparation

Clean the duck well. Remove the wing tips and the lumps of fat from inside the vent. Blanch in a *** of boiling water for a few minutes, remove and dry well, then rub the duck with salt and tie the neck tightly with string.

Make the stuffing by heating the oil in a saucepan, add all the ingredients, bring to the boil and blend well. Pour the mixture into the cavity of the duck and sew it up securely.

Dissolve the maltose or honey with vinegar and red food coloring (if using) in warm water, brush it all over the duck - give it several coatings, then hang the duck up (head down) with an S-shaped hook to dry in an airy and cool place for at least 4 - 5 hours.

To cook: preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. (200 degrees C./Gas 6). Hang the duck head down on the top rack, and place a tray of boiling water at the bottom of the oven. Reduce the heat to 350 degrees F. (180 degrees C., Gas 4) after 25 minutes or so, and cook for a further 30 minutes, basting with the remaining coating mixture once or twice.

To serve: let the duck cool down a little, then remove the string and pour out the liquid stuffing to be used as gravy. Chop the duck into bite-sized pieces, then serve hot or cold with the gravy poured over it.

Courtesy of Deh-Ta Hsiung.

JOKES



Skeleton in the closet



A very large, old, building was being torn down in Chicago to make room for a new skyscraper. Due to its proximity to other buildings it could not be imploded and had to be dismantled floor by floor.

While working on the 49th floor, two construction workers found a skeleton in a small closet behind the elevator shaft. They decided that they should call the police.

When the police arrived they directed them to the closet and showed them the skeleton fully clothed and standing upright. They said, "This could be Jimmy Hoffa or somebody really important."

Two days went by and the construction workers couldn't stand it any more; they had to know who they had found. They called the police and said, "We are the two guys who found the skeleton in the closet and we want to know if it was Jimmy Hoffa or somebody important."

The police said, "It's not Jimmy Hoffa, but it was somebody kind of important."

"Well, who was it?"

"The 1956 Blonde National Hide-and-Seek Champion."



Quick Quotes



"It was different when we were kids. In second grade, a teacher came in and gave us all a lecture about not smoking, and then they sent us over to arts and crafts to make ash- trays for Mother's Day." --Paul Clay

---

"We should have a way of telling people they have bad breath. 'Well, I'm bored...let's go brush our teeth.' Or, 'I've got to make a phone call, hold this gum in your mouth.'" --Brad Stine

---

"Doesn't it bother you when people litter? The most creative rationale for throwing an apple core out the window is 'It will plant seeds for other threes to grow.' And, of course, our highways are lined with apple trees--right next to all the cigarette bushes." --Nick Arnette



Republican or Democrat?



A woman in a hot air balloon realized she was lost. She lowered her altitude and spotted a man in a boat below. She shouted to him, "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don't know where I am." The man consulted his portable GPS and replied, "You're in a hot air balloon, approximately 30 feet above a ground elevation of 2346 feet above sea level. You are at 31 degrees, 14.97 minutes north latitude and 100 degrees, 49.09 minutes west longitude.

She rolled her eyes and said, "You must be a (political party)." "I am,"replied the man. "How did you know?" "Well," answered the balloonist, everything you told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to do with your information, and I'm still lost. Frankly, you've not been much help to me."

The man smiled and responded, "You must be a (political party)." "I am,"replied the balloonist. "How did you know?" "Well," said the man, "you don't know where you are or where you're going. You've risen to where you are, due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise that you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. You're in exactly the same position you were in before we met but, somehow, now it's my fault."



Birthday Gift

A husband went to buy a birthday gift for his wife. Some friends had been invited over that night to celebrate her fortieth, and he wanted to get something special. At the store he spotted some cute little music boxes. One blue one was playing "Happy Birthday."

Thinking they were all the same, he chose a red one and had it gift-wrapped. Later, at dinner, he gave it to his wife and asked her to open it...

When she lifted the lid, out came the tune to "The Old Gray Mare, She Ain't What She Used to Be!"



Blonde Convention



80,000 blondes meet in the Kansas City Chiefs Stadium for a "Blondes Are Not Stupid" Convention. The leader says, "We are all here today to prove to the world that blondes are not stupid. Can I have a volunteer?" A blonde gingerly works her way through the crowd and steps up to the stage. The leader asks her, "What is 15 plus 15?" After 15 or 20 seconds she says, "Eighteen!"

Obviously everyone is a little disappointed. Then 80,000 blondes start cheering, "Give her another chance! Give her another chance!" The leader says, "Well since we've gone to the trouble of getting 80,000 of you in one place and we have the world-wide press and global broadcast media here, gee, uh, I guess we can give her another chance." So he asks, "What is 5 plus 5?"

After nearly 30 seconds she eventually says, "Ninety?"

The leader is quite perplexed, looks down and just lets out a dejected sigh -- everyone is disheartened, the blonde starts crying and the 80,000 girls begin to yell and wave their hands shouting, "GIVE HER ANOTHER CHANCE! GIVE HER ANOTHER CHANCE!"

The leader, unsure whether or not he is doing more harm than damage, eventually says, "Ok! Ok! Just one more chance -- What is 2 plus 2?"

The girl closes her eyes, and after a whole minute eventually says, "Four?"

Throughout the stadium pandemonium breaks out as all 80,000 girls jump to their feet, wave their arms, stomp their feet and scream...

"GIVE HER ANOTHER CHANCE! GIVE HER ANOTHER CHANCE!"





Have a super nice Sunday!

The thrush fly from up north
locomotives leave at 05.20 precisely,
they follow weeping  miners
with ballletic dreams
sipping  Burton ale.

She stunned me when I first saw her looks
Never seen like her even in books

An angel who dropped from the sky
To say to me "Sam! Hi!"

She instantly got my full attention
And I at once shown no pretention

She lives now in the corridors of my mind
You won't find a lady so gentle and kind

Now I miss her as I miss the air when I stop breathing
She lives in me, so God help me her seeing

Sam Burton (C)


Today is Friday, Oct. 10, the 289th day of 2014 with 82 to follow.

The moon is waxing. Morning stars are Jupiter, Uranus and Venus. Evening stars are Mars, Mercury, Neptune and Saturn.



Quotes for the day:



"Correction does much, but encouragement does more."



Johann Wolfgang von Goethe



"The first requisite for success is the ability to apply your physical and mental energies to one problem incessantly without growing weary."



Thomas A. Edison



POETRY

Israfel





Edgar Allan Poe



In Heaven a spirit doth dwell
"Whose heart-strings are a lute";
None sing so wildly well
As the angel Israfel,
And the giddy stars (so legends tell),
Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell
Of his voice, all mute.

Tottering above
In her highest noon,
The enamored moon
Blushes with love,
While, to listen, the red levin
(With the rapid Pleiads, even,
Which were seven,)
Pauses in Heaven.

And they say (the starry choir
And the other listening things)
That Israfeli's fire
Is owing to that lyre
By which he sits and sings -
The trembling living wire
Of those unusual strings.

But the skies that angel trod,
Where deep thoughts are a duty -
Where Love's a grown-up God -
Where the Houri glances are
Imbued with all the beauty
Which we worship in a star.

Therefore thou art not wrong,
Israfeli, who despisest
An unimpassioned song;
To thee the laurels belong,
Best bard, because the wisest!
Merrily live, and long!

The ecstasies above
With thy burning measures suit -
Thy grief, thy joy, thy hate, thy love,
With the fervor of thy lute -
Well may the stars be mute!

Yes, Heaven is thine; but this
Is a world of sweets and sours;
Our flowers are merely - flowers,
And the shadow of thy perfect bliss
Is the sunshine of ours.

If I could dwell
Where Israfel
Hath dwelt, and he where I,
He might not sing so wildly well
A mortal melody,
While a bolder note than this might swell
From my lyre within the sky.



BEAUTY AND HEALTH TIP

Strengthen your nails



Before you go to bed every night, use a nail-strengthening cream on your nails (and under, if they're long). This also keeps them hydrated, which is essential for healthy nails.



Trivia

Where did the name “Revlon: come from?



Nail polish distributors Charles Revson and his brother Joseph, along with nail polish supplier Charles Lachman, who contributed the "L" in the Revlon name, gave birth to the Revlon cosmetics company in 1932. Starting with just one nail product a nail enamel unlike any before it the three men pooled their paltry resources and developed a unique manufacturing process. Using pigments instead of dyes, Revlon was able to offer to women rich-looking, opaque nail enamel in a wide variety of shades never before available. In only six years, the company became a multimillion dollar organization, launching one of the most recognized cosmetics names in the world.



How many atoms are there in the universe?



Astronomers believe that the universe contains one atom for every 88 gallons of space.



How do animals influence the weather?



Living creatures create tiny weather systems called microclimates in their nests and burrows. For instance, bees fan their wings at the hive entrance during hot weather. This makes a cooling draft blow through the hive.

VOCABULARY



Splenetic

adjective



:


marked by bad temper, malevolence, or spite



Examples:



I know David was in a bad mood all day, but the splenetic tone of his reply to Brenda’s question was not necessary.



"If he were 10 or 15 years younger (or at least looked like he was), [Charlie] Sheen would be perfect as the splenetic, screed-spouting anti-hero of John Osborne’s 'Look Back in Anger.'" — From an article by Ben Brantley on the New York Times Arts Beat blog, May 26, 2011



Did you know?



In early Western physiology, a person's physical qualities and mental disposition were believed to be determined by the proportion of four ****** humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. The last of these was believed to be secreted by the spleen, causing feelings of disposition ranging from intense sadness (melancholia) to irascibility. This now-discredited association explains how the use of "splenetic" (deriving from the Late Latin "spleneticus" and the Latin "splen," meaning "spleen") came to mean both "bad-tempered" and "given to melancholy" as well as "of or relating to the spleen." In later years, the "melancholy" sense fell out of use, but the sense pertaining to ill humor or malevolence remains with us today.





Courtesy of Merriam-Webster, Inc.



JOKES



Female Comebacks



Man: Haven't I seen you someplace before?
Woman: Yes, that's why I don't go there anymore.

Man: Is this seat empty?
Woman: Yes, and this one will be if you sit down.

Man: Your place or mine?
Woman: Both. You go to yours, and I'll go to mine.

Man: So, what do you do for a living?
Woman: I'm a female impersonator.

Man: Hey baby, what's your sign?
Woman: Do not enter.

Man: How do you like your eggs in the morning?
Woman: Unfertilized.

Man: If I could see you naked, I'd die happy.
Woman: If I saw you naked, I'd probably die laughing.

Man: Your body is like a temple.
Woman: Sorry, there are no services today.

Man: I would go to the end of the world for you.
Woman: But would you stay there?





Seminars for MEN




(Prepared and Presented by Females)

1. Combatting stupidity

2. You too can do housework

3. ***: Learn when to keep your mouth shut

4. How to fill an ice tray

5. We do not want ****** underthings for Christmas: give us money

6. Understanding the female response to your coming in drunk at 4am

7. Wonderful laundry techniques (formerly titled, "Don't wash my silks")

8. Parenting: It doesn't end with conception

9. Get a life; learn to cook

10. How not to act like a ******* when you're obviously wrong

11. Spelling: Even you can get it right

12. Understanding your financial incompetence

13. You: The weaker ***

14. Reasons to give flowers

15. How to stay awake in public

16. Why it is unacceptable to relieve yourself anywhere but the bathroom

17. Garbage: Getting it to the curb

! 18. You can fall asleep without it if you really try

19. The morning dilemma if IT is awake: Take a shower

20. I'll wear it if I **** well please

21. How to put the toilet lid down (formerly titled "No, it's not a bidet")

22. "The weekend" and "sports" are not synonyms

23. Give me a break: Why we know your excuses are bull

24. How to go shopping with your mate and not get lost

25. The remote control: Overcoming your dependency

26. Romanticism: Ideas other than ***

27. Helpful postural hints for couch potatoes

28. Mothers-in-law: They are people too

29. Male bonding: Leaving your friends at home

30. You too can be a designated driver

31. Seeing the true you (formerly titled, "You don't look like Mel Gibson when naked")

32. Changing your underwear: It really works

33. The attainable goal: removing "****" from your! vocabulary

34. Fluffing the blankets after flatula! ting is not necessary

35. Techniques for calling home before you leave work





The Bacon Tree



There are two guys who have been lost in the desert for weeks, and they're at death's door. As they stumble on, hoping for salvation in the form of an oasis or something similar, they suddenly spy, through the heat haze, a tree off in the distance.

As they get closer, they can see that the tree is draped with rasher upon rasher of bacon. There's smoked bacon, crispy bacon, life-giving juicy nearly-raw bacon, all sorts. "Oh my, Pepe" says the first bloke. "It's a bacon tree!!! We're saved!!!" "You're right!" says Pepe.

So Pepe goes on ahead and runs up to the tree salivating at the prospect of food. But as he gets to within five feet of the tree, there's the sound of machine gun fire, and he is shot down in a hail of bullets. His friend quickly drops down on the sand, and calls across to the dying Pepe.

"Pepe! Pepe! What on earth happened?"...

With his dying breath Pepe calls out...

"Ugh, run, run!... it's not a Bacon Tre! e...

Scroll Down...













...it's a Ham Bush"





HAVE A SUPER NICE FRIDAY and a GORGEOUS WEEKEND!

He was one of those guys who marry money.
And you can grok that in any sense you desire.
But be forewarned, my friend,
I am well-versed in a multitude of
Marry-For-Money manifestations.
Take, for example, marrying the Boss' daughter.
Come with me, for illustration's sake,
Join me in one such dis-functional household:
George & Martha's place on campus--
A classic Tudor-revival home,
Ivied & plushly-appointed,
A coveted faculty perk
Which goes along with the gig.
And the gag, for that matter.
I speak, of course, of Edward Albee's
Two perversely miserable humans,
Married to each other, to wit:
George & Martha, leading lives of
*****-scratching desperation, in
"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
She's the only daughter--
Daddy's precious jewel--
Only girl-child of the President
Of a small, rural college.
He's the middle-aged professor
With no great pedagogic or research prowess.
His working-class perspective,
Viewing the quiet academic life to be
A significant step up in genteel existence.
Except--and there's the rub:
Mere existence is a far cry from
Living the good life Dan Draper &
The rest of Satan's Mad Men minions
Taught him to take for granted.
So George & Martha,
In terms of core values,
Have little in common;
More like opposites, in fact:
His starvation diet as a child &
Her helping out Mom at the
Food Bank on Saturday mornings.
It's those formative razzmatazz years,
He lacked the behavior blueprint,
The overwhelming fatigue of acting.
He's perpetually memorizing lines,
Practicing ****** expressions &
Physical gestures & phrases.
Guard up, another Oscar-worthy performance,
Burton is superb & Elizabeth Taylor
Showing us precisely why she is &
Will continue to be revered as an actress.

George knows she has his number.
The thing about the play is the
Intense malice the couple feel for each other.
For the audience, an experience in stage drama
Best classified as an intensely painful morality play.
A good thing to remember: Live Theater
Adds value to a community.
Give generously, please!
But I digress.

What a shame
When someone loses fame
For doing nothing
Because of a shortcoming

For days, he was liked
Taken care of and prized
But once he had to be away
Got forgotten and castaway

He was called a liar
To be put on fire
He was blamed
Accused and defamed

For, frankly speaking, no reason
Yet he was charged with treason
Days ago was a family member
Now he's put at stake of timber

Indeed, very odd is man
When he is subject to ban
When jealousy driven
And heart-striken

Lucky is a freeman
Who refuses to live in a can
Lucky is the man
Who is not fried on a pan.

Sam Burton(C)







Today is Friday, Oct. 11, the 284 day of 2014 with 81 to follow.

The moon is waning. Morning stars are Jupiter and Venus. Evening stars are Mars, Mercury, Neptune, Uranus and Saturn.
In 1845, the U.S. Naval Academy was formally opened at Fort Severn, Annapolis, Md., with 50 midshipmen in the first class.

In 1886, Griswold Lorillard of Tuxedo Park, N.Y., fashioned the first tuxedo for men.

A thought for the day:

We all should rise above the clouds of ignorance, narrowness and selfishness. -- Booker T. Washington


Quotes for the day:

A good traveller is one who does not know where he is going to, and a perfect traveller does not know where he came from.

------------------------

All women's dresses are merely variations on the eternal struggle between admitted desire to dress and the unadmitted desire to undress.

Lin Yutang

"What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise."

Oscar Wilde

"It takes but one positive thought when given a chance to survive and thrive to overpower an entire army of negative thoughts."

Robert H. Schuller

My boyfriend and I broke up. He wanted to get married and I didn't want him to.

Rita Rudner

It is only by following your deepest instinct that you can lead a rich life, and if you let your fear of consequence prevent you from following your deepest instinct, then your life will be safe, expedient and thin.

Katharine Butler Hathaway


TIVIA


What made Lucky Lindy so special?

Charles Lindbergh was not the first man to fly the Atlantic. He was the sixty-seventh. The first sixty-six made the crossing in dirigibles and twin-engine mail planes. Lindbergh was the first to make the dangerous flight alone.

Can your brain hurt?

Only figuratively -- Pain from any injury or illness is always registered by the brain. Yet, curiously, the brain tissue itself is immune to pain; it contains none of the specialized receptor cells that sense pain in other parts of the body. The pain associated with brain tumors does not arise from brain cells but from the pressure created by a growing tumor or tissues outside the brain.


Where can you see a lot of magnets?

More than 7,000 magnets are on display at the Guinness World of Records Museum and Gift Shop, located on the Las Vegas Strip. The exhibit is a portion of the more than 26,000-magnet collection of Louise J. Greenfarb, dubbed "The Magnet Lady," whose accumulation was designated by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's "Largest Refrigerator Magnet" collection.



Poetry

Evening Star

Edgar Allan Poe

'Twas noontide of summer,
And mid-time of night;
And stars, in their orbits,
Shone pale, thro' the light
Of the brighter, cold moon,
'Mid planets her slaves,
Herself in the Heavens,
Her beam on the waves.
I gazed awhile
On her cold smile;
Too cold- too cold for me-
There pass'd, as a shroud,
A fleecy cloud,
And I turned away to thee,
Proud Evening Star,
In thy glory afar,
And dearer thy beam shall be;
For joy to my heart
Is the proud part
Thou bearest in Heaven at night,
And more I admire
Thy distant fire,
Than that colder, lowly light.


Vocabulary

Strudel

noun

: a pastry made from a thin sheet of dough rolled up with filling and baked

Example:

Strudels are usually made with high-gluten flour to increase the malleability of the dough.

"The Supremes belted out a song on the radio, their voices as smooth and flawless as the ribbon of cream Kirsten poured from the pitcher onto her father's strudel, and the whole house smelled cheerfully of pork and spiced apples, laced with a note of butter. — From Rebecca Coleman’s 2011 novel The Kingdom of Childhood



Health and Beauty Tip

Mineral Water for greasy hair

If you have oily hair, use a shampoo that contains zinc. It's okay to condition if you feel you need it -- just don't use it on your roots and scalp.


JOKES

Funny News

From the Churchdown Parish Magazine:
"Would the Congregation please note that the bowl at the back of the Church, labelled 'For The Sick,' is for monetary donations only."

-o-

From The Guardian concerning a sign seen in a Police canteen in Christchurch, New Zealand:
'Will the person who took a slice of cake from the Commissioner's Office return it immediately. It is needed as evidence in a poisoning case."

-o-

From The Times:

A young girl, who was blown out to sea on a set of inflatable teeth, was rescued by a man on an inflatable lobster. A coast-guard spokesman commented: 'This sort of thing is all too common these days.'

-o-

From The Gloucester Citizen:

A *** line caller complained to Trading Standards. After dialling an 0891 number from an advertisement entitled 'Hear Me Moan' the caller was played a tape of a woman nagging her husband for failing to do jobs around the house! . Consumer Watchdogs in Dorset refused to look into the complaint, saying, 'He got what he deserved.'

-o-

From The Barnsley Chronicle:

Police arrived quickly, to find Mr Melchett hanging by his fingertips from the back wall. He had run out of the house when the owner, Paul Finch, returned home unexpectedly, and, spotting an intruder in the garden, had visiting Mrs Finch and, hearing the front door open, had climbed out of the rear window. But the back wall was 8 feet high and Mr Melchett had been unable to get his leg over.

-o-

From The Scottish Big Issue:

In Sydney, 120 men named Henry attacked each other during a 'My Name is Henry' convention. Henry ****** of Canberra accused Henry Pap of Sydney of not being a Henry at all, but in fact an Angus. 'It was a lie', explained Mr Pap, 'I'm a Henry and always will be,' whereupon Henry Pap attacked Henry ******, whilst two other Henrys - Jones and Dyer - attempted ! to pull them apart. Several more Henrys - Smith, Calderwood an! d Andrew s - became involved and soon the entire convention descended into a giant fist fight. The brawl was eventually broken up by riot police, led by a man named Shane.

-o-

From The Daily Telegraph:

In a piece headed "Brussels Pays 200,000 Pounds to Save Prostitutes": "[T]he money will not be going directly into the prostitutes' pocket, but will be used to encourage them to lead a better life. We will be training them for new positions in hotels."

-o-

From The Derby Abbey Community News:

We apologise for the error in the last edition, in which we stated that 'Mr Fred Nicolme is a defective in the police force.' This was a typographical error. We meant of course that Mr Nicolme is a detective in the police farce.

-o-
From The Guardian:

After being charged 20 pounds for a 10 pounds overdraft, 30 year old Michael Howard of Leeds changed his name by deed poll to 'Yorkshire Bank Plc are Fascist! *s.' The Bank has now asked him to close his account, and Mr *s has asked them to repay the 69p balance by cheque, made out in his new name.

-o-

From The Manchester Evening News:

Police called to arrest a naked man on the platform at Piccadilly Station released their suspect after he produced a valid rail ticket.

-o-

An Austrian circus dwarf died recently when he bounced sideways from a trampoline and was swallowed by a hippopotamus. Seven thousand people watched as little Franz Dasch popped into the mouth of Hilda the Hippo and the animal's gag reflex forced it to swallow. The crowd applauded wildly before other circus people realized what had happened.

-o-

An elderly woman at a unit for sufferers of senile dementia passed round a box of mothballs thinking that they were mints. Eleven people were taken to hospital for treatment.

Confessional Etiquette


The new priest is nervous about hearing confessions, so he asks an older priest to sit in on his sessions. The new priest hears a couple confessions, then the old priest asks him to step out of the confessional for a few suggestions.
The old priest says, "Cross your arms over your chest and rub your chin with one hand."

The new priest tries this. The old priest suggests, "Try saying things like, 'I see,' 'yes,' 'go on,' 'I understand,' and 'how did you feel about that?'"

The new priest says those things, trying them out. The old priest says, "Now, don't you think that's a little better than saying, 'Whoa... What happened next?'"

So Funny

A guy purchased Willie Nelson's hair for $37,000. ***** removed his braids and the guy bought them for $37,000. This is the kind of decision you make after spending the day on Willie's tour bus.

David Litterman

Did you hear what happened to Willie Nelson's hair? They sold it. There was an auction this week and a pair of Willie Nelson's braids sold for $37,000. It's a good deal because each braid has a street value of $80,000.

Jimmy Kimmel

Quick Blonde Jokes

Q: Why did the blonde keep putting quarters in the soda vending machine?

A: Because she thought she was winning.

Q: Why did the blonde take 16 friends to the movies?

A: Under 17 not admitted!

Q: Why did the blonde bake a chicken for 3 and a half days?

A: It said cook it for half an hour per pound, and she weighed 125.


Have a very nice Saturday!

i have a tim burton tree
growing inside of me
i nourish it with the cacophony of the mind
that relentlessly
speaks to me about my inadequacy

the stronger the tree the weaker i feel
no will power left to undo the theft
the black branches have committed
they were found guilty
of hijacking my presence
my higher self, my essence

the real me retreated
without putting up a fight
was it because it knew
i was not even worth the try
alone in the dark, i looked for the light
but still, cannot even find a spark

nothing else to do
but to water the plant
and the hope
that maybe one day i’ll understand
what could, should, or might be
without this darkness taking over me

Fashion designers love foraging through the antique markets of Clignancourt in Paris and Portobello Road and Alfie’s Antiques markets in London snuffling out vintage pieces for inspiration. The flurry of romantic Victoriana on the catwalks for autumn can clearly be blamed on this obsession.

There has been an undercurrent of reserved, covered-up fashion ever since Pierpaolo Piccioli and his former co-designer Maria Grazia Chiuri introduced a more demure aesthetic to Valentino five years ago. Longer skirts, prim higher necklines and covered arms have become the slow trend of recent seasons creating a hyper-feminine look.

Riccardo Tisci at Givenchy and Sarah Burton at Alexander McQueen have long been beguiled by the Gothic romanticism of Victorian fashion with their use of corsetry and dark dramatic lace and velvet for eveningwear.

In fact, London-based vintage fashion dealer Virginia Bates admits she doesn’t remember there ever being a time when Gothic Victoriana didn’t feature in at least one designer’s collection. “The fascination with the romantics, poets, artists and even horror [classics and films] give designers a great source of inspiration,” she says. “It’s an irresistible era.”

Certainly a lot of it has appeared on the catwalks this season at McQueen, Marc Jacobs, Burberry (shown only a month ago in the see-now, buy-now collection), Simone Rocha, Preen, Bora Aksu and Temperley London, as well as at smaller brands such as Alessandra Rich, Three Floor created by Yvonne Hoang and A.W.A.K.E.

There were dark distressed Linton tweeds, unravelling knits and black tulle in Simone Rocha’s autumn collection. Rocha was pregnant when she started designing it and was inspired by Victorian dress and motherhood, in particular the nightgowns and matrons.

“All the wrapping and swaddling of babies,” she says, before elaborating on how “the Victorian ideals of properness were made perverse with the conservative and covered-up pieces contrasted by the sheer and embroidered fabrics.”These gauzy vaporous fabrics succeeded in making her eerily romantic silhouette look rather contemporary and daring.

Subversion is key to making such a prim and proper period in fashion history modern and relevant for women today. Marc Jacobs, for instance mixed long Victorian coats, ballooning crinolines and crochet doily collars with sweatshirt tops and laser-cut leather for skirts and jackets together with some scary Goth horror make-up. Nothing is, or should be literal.

As Justin Thornton of Preen says “we love the Victorians, the laces and the white shirts, but it is the vintage pieces rather than the era that inspire us”. His partner Thea Bregazzi has collected aristocratic laces and ruffly vintage shirts from Portobello Road market for as long as he has known her and these frequently find their way into their collections, “but linings would be ripped, garments will have holes in them – it is a deconstructed look”.Virginia Bates once owned a famous vintage fashion emporium in Holland Park with a client list including the biggest names in fashion from John Galliano to Donna Karan and Naomi Campbell. Now she only works with private clients and designers and they, especially, she says were looking for genuine Victorian pieces when planning their autumn collections.

“A black fitted jacket with inserts of handmade lace [that is] embellished with crystal and jet beads, ***** and silk lined ... How exciting and inspiring is that? Silk and fine lawn shirts, soft and flowing with ruffles. Don’t we all want to wear one and live the dream?”

Thankfully a few designers do right now, and there were lots of heavenly creatures in fragile asymmetric lace dresses toughened up with leather corsetry at Alexander McQueen, and richly coloured swishy dresses at Bora Aksu. While Christopher Bailey cherry-picked the centuries in his Burberry collection, lighting upon frilled white cotton shirts, nipped in jackets and military capes from the Victorian era. Given that Victoria reigned for more than 60 years there is a lot of history for designers to plunder, so this will not be the last we will see it.Read more at:http://www.marieaustralia.com/short-formal-dresses | www.marieaustralia.com/red-carpet-celebrity-dresses

We look like Tim Burton characters
In stature and mind.

feminism is pretty much a failure like communism... the latter wanted the workers of the world to unite... but they didn't... each working man took too much pride in his earnings an expenses to the extent that he sought no idealistic solution... the self-preservation element... feminism is very much alike to communism... it comes from the same source, the bourgeoisie caste... which explains why prostitutes in France defended their pundits... they basically said: ******* little Freudian undecided *****, with us it's 100 ***** a week... with you it's only about 100,000 interpretations of a **** in clingfilm at a Hollywood premier: your choice, either 100 *****, or a ***** and the cinema of the would-be agonies or a man resembling Richard Burton, sober, and being a Swedish patent for a house-husband, and a closet poet, and a chef, and a, and a, and a... can i suggest a kaleidoscope as the safest investment?

imagine sitting in a brothel waiting room,
there's about 10 of them -
and they're looking at your like you're
their father and they're about to skin you alive
like piranhas with their eyes -
it can be quiet intimidating,
what for £10 entry fee and £110 and hour
baggage of silenced ******* -
you're basically ******* Ferraris and Lamborghinis -
but it's worth the while,
you genitalia turn into a pavlova before
it's baked mush - your testicles are soaring
angels with the ticklish bits added
to what feels like a shiver of goosebumps -
you sit there for a while, it's the hardest time
to be making choices, you ask for a cup of water
(i always did),
you get it, Keith Lemon is doing his talk show,
the older prostitutes are un-amused -
they're the ones who'd skin you alive,
pick one and she turns into a sadistic
vacuum cleaner in the realm of oration -
you think these terrorists and so-called
martyrs would have the ***** keep up with an ante-chamber
like that? these women can sniff out perversity
like they might sniff out a woodlice in damp wood...
or the spiders that complete their weaving
and never take the central role on the stage,
but ****** their spiderweb before scuttling
into the frenzy of making a body of other insects
into immobile dough to **** into on the sidelines,
they're the out-of-body experiencing their architecture,
there's no ego in them, not central nervous system...
i always thought that spiders compensated the
cartesian problem with their spiderwebs -
they extended their nerves through their *****
into an architectural project of nerve endings / extensions...
see, that's the thing about poetry: pure narration...
no technique, no nothing, no need to create a
third person or first person ******, no characters
to study and incubate into a thrill ending: poetry
is the purest form of narration, easily a ricochet
into digression that in fiction would only mean another
grey matter character to involve in the plot.
. and - (dot and hyphen, as suggested by Nietzsche,
is steaming along forgetting the semi-colon).
- i swear insects are the perfect telescopes into
alien life... on that micro level you get to
understand the many hazards of differentiated life
elsewhere... it's the microbes you need to
mind as the real hazards and blizzards -
but this one time i broke the brothel rule
denoted as choice: i didn't make one.
i asked for one to make a choice for me...
one talkative gall said i shouldn't be asking...
so i replied: well aren't you the talkative one...
you'll do. told you a butcher's supermarket -
i turned myself into a piece of meat -
the ***** butcher said: he'll have to do,
he prompted me to talk the heretical *credo...
the outer-body experience, prostitutes are the experiment,
i asked of the 10 present and my penguin **** solo
shrivelled up newspaper of ******* to chose -
and she did... it's funny giving choice to someone
who you payed to choose from... these Muslim martyrs
will find it had to keep it level headed like Solomon -
these boys will really struggle to reap their rewards...
they just blow up ten people but never sat in
the company of ten prostitutes...
ten blown up, in the company of ten prostitutes...
you really don't know what it's like trying out
whether you could stomach a harem, let alone keep
one like a walrus...
ever stole a kiss from a ******* who's saintliness
involved never giving one but merely ******* more ****?
hmm? oh i can get pornographic after all...
it's a joyride troupe of force in thinking the joys i
nourished in such places... although i have to admit
Amsterdam would never feed such poems...
it's just common place everything's worth clapping
(or too much clapping by the serfs at a Bolshoi ballet),
you need the thrill of something being illegal...
in the case of itemising England it's the brothel owners
that are the culprits, not the prostitutes, nor the pundits,
which is why i asked to perform oral *** once in a while
for the extra undocumented 10 quid... that didn't fall
into the hands of the madame... so it ends...
feminism alright for you, in that ivory tower of yours,
unscathed, belligerent and with sulphuric toxic gas
to **** out from your mouth as the proper argument?
the heart not steady? i see... i guess you have a hard fight
ahead of you... young men go to prostitutes undiscriminating
their age and **** as **** would do too,
but young women don't go to prostitutes,
professional women do... and they'd always probably
**** some young dude... see the difference?
young men go to prostitutes... young women have all
the eye-to-**** candy they can have... older women order
**** and limousine, a night out, a date, a dinner...
young men are like: broken pipe, need a plumber,
stillson pipe wrench! and where's that ******* spanner?!
and contrary to popular beliefs, cats have
a second weak spot other than petting their heads
and playing with their whiskers... the point
between the evolve coccyx and the spine...
they really love a rub when the coccyx turns into
a tail... it's almost like a reverse test for prostate cancer...
every cat sitting down when rubbed in that area
will do a marching army band salute of raising its
hind in anticipation of a rainbow -
and yes, urinating with ******* is pretty much as
exciting as a woman massaging her ******* with
a shower head with pulverising pressurised water.

A lot of people think they can write or paint or draw or sing or make movies or what-have-you, but having an artistic temperament doth not make one an artist.


Even the great writers of our time have tried and failed and failed some more. Vladimir Nabokov received a harsh rejection letter from Knopf upon submitting ******, which would later go on to sell fifty million copies. Sylvia Plath’s first rejection letter for The Bell Jar read, “There certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice.” Gertrude Stein received a cruel rejection letter that mocked her style. Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way earned him a sprawling rejection letter regarding the reasons he should simply give up writing all together. Tim Burton’s first illustrated book, The Giant Zlig, got the thumbs down from Walt Disney Productions, and even Jack Kerouac’s perennial On the Road received a particularly blunt rejection letter that simply read, “I don’t dig this one at all.”

So even if you’re an utterly fantastic writer who will be remembered for decades forthcoming, you’ll still most likely receive a large dollop of criticism, rejection, and perhaps even mockery before you get there. Having been through it all these great writers offer some writing tips without pulling punches. After all, if a publishing house is going to tear into your manuscript you might as well be prepared.

1. The first draft of everything is ****. -Ernest Hemingway
2. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ***. -David Ogilvy
3. If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy. – Dorothy Parker
4. Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? “She drove me to my practice at four in the morning,” etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write is: leave home. -Paul Theroux
5. I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide. — Harper Lee
6. You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. ― Jack London
7. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. — George Orwell
8. There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. ― W. Somerset Maugham
9. If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time — or the tools — to write. Simple as that. – Stephen King
10. Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong. – Neil Gaiman
11. Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die. – Anne Enright
12. If writing seems hard, it’s because it is hard. It’s one of the hardest things people do. – William Zinsser
13. Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college. – Kurt Vonnegut
14. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration. – Ernest Hemingway
15. Write drunk, edit sober. – Ernest Hemingway
16. Get through a draft as quickly as possible. Hard to know the shape of the thing until you have a draft. Literally, when I wrote the last page of my first draft of Lincoln’s Melancholy I thought, Oh, ****, now I get the shape of this. But I had wasted years, literally years, writing and re-writing the first third to first half. The old writer’s rule applies: Have the courage to write badly. – Joshua Wolf Shenk
17. Substitute ‘****’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. – Mark Twain
18. Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that — but you are the only you. ― Neil Gaiman
19. Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative. – Oscar Wilde
20. You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. ― Ray Bradbury
21. Don’t take anyone’s writing advice too seriously. – Lev Grossman
image – christine zenino

Camelot was really a place
where you parked camels –
yeah, the Egyptians traded everywhere;
and sure the round table was true –
King Arthur asked Sir Circumference to
fashion him a round table
because, as a matter of strategy,
it’s never good to be cornered

And what did the Egyptians do
after they parked their camels at Camelot?
Oh, they enjoyed the knight life
and the Musical
and they eyeballed Guinevere and Julie Andrews

So really, in spite of Thomas Malory
and Richard Harris and Richard Burton
in spite of all skills literary and vocal,
and Hollywood special effects -
Camelot was just a night club;
the English have always loved a good drink

klatka: or cage -
don't ask me about the etymology.

czesław śpiewa, or: the prodigal son returns from
his hiatus in Denmark - talks accented slavic
and can't mustard the danish either - hello applause
of the mediocre crowd! intelligence? on the *bruk!
(threshold).
                  just enough distance
between you and me and a sniff our a cinnamon stick
being sizzled. i'd love to love women like richard
burton -
   but i'd prefer women to liked to
be women loved by richard burton:
if that makes sense -
            the story goes that since wwii
women embraced enough feminism
to drive all the manual labour to china -
and in fluster were cited as shouting:
come back! come back! no to be, honey....
which is why men of a certain age
turn to reenacting the battle of hastings
of 1066... Darwinism has created
a historiology dynamic: rather than a historical
dynamic - oh sure, there's a logic (wording)
behind it, but we're not really writing history
these days, we're writing something
that attributes history of expression,
but is nonetheless merely celeb culture.
i see more body-parts in my cognitive
reflection that in my ****** reflexion -
             the ego is my right hand (since i am
right-handed), and so and so forth.
                   we've moved beyond history
and what sort of environment is needed to
write history: incompetence, sadism,
patriarchy, Versailles, an Ottoman harem -
generally speaking, strife;
the only thing that keeps us thinking of
a merciful god are the elements we're exposed to,
and on water we strive, and by water drowned.
        we haven't got that,
we have d.n.a. augmentation and for those
that are actually creationists in robotics -
de-humanoid: never have we become so
dehumanised by being cultured and educated -
i find more humanity in an unread scaffolder
than i dare to poke and pierce the yoke of
a librarian's gusto -
               apparently a fifth of 10 to 12 year old girls
have never experienced concentrating
         on encoded sounds -
and even more never managed to
               ballerina twirl an R into an Я:
Narcissus kept them barren with wasted hours
in-front of the mirror.
i have absolutely no idea (other than the accent-diversity
argument) why the Anglos never applied
"punctuation" / diacritical marks to the encoding -
but as Darwinism teaches us:
  even the bible doesn't state why snakes
don't have eyelids, let alone limbs:
i think that not having eyelids is more of an agony
that slithering across the platitudes -
mind you: cats are serpents in disguise:
and they a pair of eyelids: hence that nausea of endless
sleep.
         sroka = magpie. some words really do sound
better in other languages...
                       they really do.
30 years on this earth and i've never bedded an English
or a Polish lass...
       African (tick), Russian (tick), Ukrainian (tick),
                    half-Indian (tick),
                           Thai (tick), Bulagrian (tick)...
****, i'm not picky -
i'll **** anything that moves; oh well, thank-****
that confession is over: or that's how i rationalise
the hot-air of conspiracy theories, and only believe
in things that really scare me;
and yes: you can be a really ******* on paper
after a drink or two, but as Adellè said:
                                       write not a word sober!
i mean, is sober literature even acceptable in that
Venetian banquet of fakery & blossoming?
     it just means you got tired of living
and started to chisel epitaphs on gravestones -
       if i wasn't in some ways impaired to do
what i used to do: i wouldn't have descended into
the Tartarus of Heidegger, and kept myself
afloat in the Hades of Stendhal and Dumas:
reasons all pointing toward posterity and
the love of weekend escapades to Stockholm Paris:
my my... Paris... or of what once was:
                                                          ci­rca 2004,
on the steps of Montemartre: **** you Heraclitus!
  which is the point: as man of individuated
surrounding we're but rivers, elongating and despairing
apart - but once in a century a man comes and
applies a transcendental overthrow of commoners such
me and Heraclitus: where there's no talk of a river
or the flux: instead the sea and the turbulence of
a tsunami, akin to Napoleon, ******, J.C.
all they said was universally true to all of them,
**** it, stampede!
          and it came to such blows of lost conscience and
massed mind virus: i really do care to say
    that such individuals (if we are to embrace
what's become a Cartesian dichotomy rather than
a duality, which is the case) are viruses:
collective manias: a Sydenham's syndrome
                                              (née st. Vitus' dance).
my interests in all of this?
    etymology is the wording of archeology when unearthing
plainer, dumber: etymology = archeology.
sure, there's the fashionable vocabulary,
there's also the standard Oxford vocabulary,
   then there's the cool kid slang something -
and then there's the individuation of vocabulary
toward idiosyncratic endeavours: on the palette:
a character study.
                   most people are familiar with
the archaic, like they're familiar with the magical -
but etymology really is archeology on paper -
     and the clear cut-off points? runes and
the Rosetta stone -
      i even find it believable that they're trying to
make Greek dodo (extinct) - if not for the Cyrillic script
i fear it would be so:
heh, half of infinity (∞) is ascribed to α (alpha):
if one follows less puncture dotting and more orchestral
   waving of a harry pooter wand
and the incantation: abraham **** dabble
(snoop in the b.c.) / abracadabra - case in the law courts
vs. the easter bunny: i'm starting to suspect
  there's a cliche involved with a magician
and a top-hat... the pyramids were feasible,
Auschwitz was ****** feasible:
the hanging gardens of Babylon? insane
(have a building where a garden is above the heavens?!):
oh look, here come the three "wise" (magi) men from the east!
            and all those known deviations from beer:
ale to the west (stale non-carbonated liquid cereal)
while mead (meed) to the east - or miód pitny
          (mew'd p'eat'nee - ee hollowed out) / drinkable honey.
                          or as i once said to her:
you try to bring me down: i'm going to do the trick
of pulling the tablecloth from a table with chandelier-like
preciousness of china or crystal: and fail to pull
that tablecloth neatly off the table: a bull
in a chinashop, me.
  - are we really still trying to sterilise ourselves
with the "sanity" of the sort of language english teachers
taught us in the first place? really?
well... as a poet i can't be considered a "respectable"
citizen... unless i have a rich husband and i'm a woman...
feminism, premature depression, chinese industrialisation,
         i would be accepted as a "respectable" citizen
if i wrote poetry on the side, but primarily
    had my lil' richard made into a patent for a *****
or decided to be a merchant selling all things
excluding the Quran: perhaps toothbrushes or bow-ties?
yep, Judas spilled the salt (whoever thought
that actual white meant we learned to do the Pavlov
trick, and everything tasted better and
no one wanted to snorkel at the great barrier reef
of what would be an acid trip otherwise) -
         i just find the new testament poetics exhausted,
everyone in the west knows this,
which is why all protestant nations decided
to read the nag hammadi library: literally.
well sure - this is the second coming, he's been coming
back since the year of the discovery of the library
(1945 a.d.) -
                          but i'm not buying it...
only because there's that undercurrent in the background,
that requires a little more patience with reading
    (a faux pas these days) and no chastity to be
redeemed when praying, if praying at all.

"Terence, this is stupid stuff:
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can't be much amiss, 'tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.
But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,
It gives a chap the belly-ache.
The cow, the old cow, she is dead;
It sleeps well, the horned head:
We poor lads, 'tis our turn now
To hear such tunes as killed the cow.
Pretty friendship 'tis to rhyme
Your friends to death before their time
Moping melancholy mad:
Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad."

Why, if 'tis dancing you would be,
There's brisker pipes than poetry.
Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
Or why was Burton built on Trent?
Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to man.
Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter ***
To see the world as the world's not.
And faith, 'tis pleasant till 'tis past:
The mischief is that 'twill not last.
Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
And left my necktie God knows where,
And carried half way home, or near,
Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:
Then the world seemed none so bad,
And I myself a sterling lad;
And down in lovely muck I've lain,
Happy till I woke again.
Then I saw the morning sky:
Heigho, the tale was all a lie;
The world, it was the old world yet,
I was I, my things were wet,
And nothing now remained to do
But begin the game anew.

Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure,
I'd face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.
'Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour
The better for the embittered hour;
It will do good to heart and head
When your soul is in my soul's stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.

There was a king reigned in the East:
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all that sprang to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white's their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.
--I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old.

how over pretentious of me...
islamophobia and russophobia...
odd bedfellows...

Mатвей Дракон: profile name...
but it's in russian and no one is willing
to stretch a darkening of humour...
to the extent of monty python...
because there's no canned laughter...

and there will never be...
not since i realised...
those four bottles of cider get me
more drunk than half a liter of
ms. amber... because the drinking
is measured and can reveal itself
in the process - rather than wait,
concentrated... and only expand
into more hours of sleep than
i could ever wish for...

but at least the russians speak of
russophobia as a reality -
the evil genius mantra...
which they are...
but there's no sense of: via irrational
arguments we will counter this
irrational fear...

so... the scuttling spiders announce!
and we will have ourselves
an orchestra!

even i thought this was too much,
too pretentious...
it's not a study... it's teasing...

a study in greek, hebrew, cyrillic and possibly sanskrit... because i'm not a monolingual hyper-inflation that will solve a crossword puzzle... when めば (eye-spot) is already... available? In a name there's a name in oh so many other languages... should i rely on relapsing into "gender-neutral" pronouns i'll cite... the noun-status extensions of letters, akin to a' into alpha... o' into omega... etc.

めば (eye-spot): that much is true...
sudoku...
i have made the following circumstance
plain...
there is no chance of me rising above
this already apparent crab-bucket intellectualism...
perhaps...
burden of rhyme...
it's only a "poem" if it rhymes...
rhyme is somehow identifiable with poo'etics...
ask an anne sexton... or perhaps:
no, don't bother...

she to burdens herself with rhymes -
and maybe she doesn't...
but this endless expectation to rhymes...
yes: plural was indicative of
the irony...
sometimes it's not even available...
to look back at this tool we have been given,
perhaps perfected better -
or not - since most of the time i find
myself: without an inch of belief
in catching some oratory / rhetorical
tsunami to... be the crow that croaks
the most and the loudest in this wake...

at least the russians acknowledge russophobia...
oh they're pay privy diligence to it...
they know they're the evil geniuses of this world...
they allow this irrational fear to sink in...
and then they rationalise it...

too bad for islamophobia...
it's not an irrational fear to begin with...
it's... more or less... a rational fear...
i think russophobia is an irrational fear...
after all: Kiev was founded by Vikings...
and apart from crown russia that's still
pretty much in Europe...
the asiatic branch of russia is too far away
to matter for either st. petersburg
of paris...

it's not convincing to be "reassured" while
the "enemy" persists to look bewildered
as if: no event is ever to happen
in the world - or also include him...
muslims? oh no... oh no at almost every turn
it seems...
sacred cows walk the streets of new delhi
while the people starve...

no dire warning: tiresome from the perspective
of a wormhole -
the count and the next count
the measures and what's to be left
dwindling... which is never a spectacle worth
reserving...
like putting on a vinyl and watching
the vinyl on a gramaphone...
or lighting a candle with a sulphur-sparked
match and sitting and "waiting"
watching while the candle burns...
and feeds a schtick of "anorexia"
absorbs all the shadows and stands at
midnight noon: with no wax to burn...

that feeling of having just ****** off
and then... prostate cancer pains
of having to make it absolutely necessary
to take a ****... to clean the ducts...
i still don't know why this "event"
is so precious for the quasi-cenobites...
it's no big deal...
just another genocide done into
the tissue later flushed...
perhaps if i were... shooting eggs
without the yoke it would somehow
matter...
perhaps i am...

but there's no zeitgeist to be had
concerning something that i make synonym
with wiping my *** asking
for nutella... and a skippy crunchy...
because: that's going to be the decade
defining EVENT!

funny... you ******* for no real reason...
nothing procreative...
gym-bro bollocking and that's not even
as much fun as going to a turkish barber
for a shave...
by then: everything concerning your
being - that is not going to be a moral
tool to raise children...
limbo in ego or the ego in limbo -
and that's never self or i...
but after an *******...
the most desperate need to take a ****...
to flush and make the ducts pristine... wiped
with ***** disinfectant...

about as odd as the bass guitar rising above
the drums - the oddity bass "rhyme"
and please... no guitar solos...
no metallica death to the bass
all that i hear is solo and rhythm guitar
and the drums...
they never got over the death of cliff burton...
or: how the rock band killed
the jazz band... focused on the rhythm guitar
and drums... but no trumpets just the vocals...
but still... no better use for bass?

it's always either: all that's music and...
it was always going to be not enough ***...
enough *** or just ***...
i went down the route of playing the brothel
roulette to catch up with the girls...
who i expect will later play bingo...
and we will probably try to age...
and be all romance...
and the man idiotic will still preserve
himself as unable to lie...
and she will... m'eh ah and all that litany
of sighs find the purse and the penguin
dancing the foxtrot from out
of the antarctica of his own ***...

russophobia: yes, an irrational fear -
even the evil geniuses of moscow acknowledge
this burden...
islamophobia... and... what?
milk and honey and yeast
and comatose black gold of ms. saudi of
the dinosaur arabia plucked...
a leaf... a laurel... from the pages of history
of: who's the good dog willing
to aport on call of command?!
into iraq and iran?

i can't hear a counter...
when it comes to it being anything rationalised
equal to the russian monologue...
claustrophobia and... it's irrational to me...
esp. when long winding...
when the cube talked to a field about...
abstract thinking -
at least claustrophobia is a metaphor
for abstract thinking - the lesser -

islamophobia is a ***** word...
esp. the -phobia suffix...
it's a perfectly rational fear...
given the mouse-and-leans have the gears
the fuel and the poker and backgammon "rules"...
as someone who might appreciate
a well sung adhan more than
an operatic aria...
well...
what's not to love?

at least for some it's known:
a drowning man will attempt to grip
a razor's edge without hope that it might be
an edge of a floating raft...
and they will always purse their mouth...
and waggle their tongue for
the pennies like sand shrapnel from
the payers for the goods...
an emirat sheikh and... the bore of the world...
if only the lottery of oil...
somehow... landed... in mongolia...

this world is a tiresome place...
given that arabs have the money...
and the chinese have: g.i. joe factories...
it's such a drab place...
such a clone furnace of the numbers
of mandarins...
and oh that niqab cinema...
even if you sell me something swedish
in black & white drab...
or some proto-turkic propaganda movie
to convert the "al-qaq" kurds (qa-eee-d'ah?)

welcome to europe... ghetto west of berlin...
back east there are needles...
walking about on the mountains
of camel humps...
notably in west warsaw coach station...
but the ukranians are always rather:
rowing the boat and the boat is always
heading into the furnace...

crab-bucket intellectualism...
these words are words that should be printed
and left on the northern line tube carriages...
like some free journalism paper wipe-my-***-with-i-wish,
why of course!
the highest i.q. renovations bottom-up to the top
always spreschen rhapsodies in wrap...
wrapping akin to:
i imagine the rappers chasing those...
john moschitta jr. is not a wrapper... rapper...
he's the add guy... and no rap on radio
adverts... when the T&S clauses are stressed...
and the muzak is dead and the lift is... falling...
like a ice-pick on the one dancing foot
of a burning burning with epitome given
the name... malchik trotting trotsky...

otherwise: blah - and endeavours into the bland...
some call it a guillotine...
i call it manglonia in england -
tiresome safe -
i almost pray to feel dangerous having
to acquire a straitjacket -
straitjacket bungee jump into conversation
like a rabid hive of the persona non grata:
of the commentary left-overs a priori
to the: walking onto the stage -
and talking with a gag in the mouth...
to speak a language for moths.

When Michael Collins came, first from the courts of England,
which in low and lofty Londoun lately were helde,
while Thames there with treachery and treasoun did truly ring,
was Ireland ill split and beset with ignoble stryfe.  
Yet there a land lately formed was, where still folk lyve on mydllerde.

Though it is not in this warlike time of Dev that we our tale do set,
after these tymes of troubling stryfe, contentioun salted still the land.

Fine Fail and Fine Gael, then foes many yeres remained
till noblest amongst them, in qualities none lacking,
did do battle in old Dublin and vanquish the dred enemy.  
That mon who dreded nought, nightly then held his court in fair Dail Eirinn.  
Enda was called that man, and everysince has his noble courte endured.  

There, as Chrystmasse came, was assembled his cabinet fayre:
there Sir Wilmore the red, who waited on the grete lorde in readiness.  
There with grete courtesey, the kings coins to keep, sat Sir Noonan the balde.  
There Sir Reilly, learned in lore of leach and herb, who on erde had little left to lerne.  
Eek Sir Varadkar the gaye who granted was, the grete kinges horses to groome.  
Laste, the lovely layde Burton, who, the rede rose of Wilmore would long after carry.  

Other knyghtes numerous were there, but of these now, nought will I
tell,
for fallen to feasting were this fayre companye al and fayne would I not,
in tedious trials of descriptioun, your patience for to trye.

When Adam and Eve played love's old game
We thought early romance a little too rough
We wanted kinder and gentler rules
We looked at it good and added our touch
We turned it sideways and looked at some Masters
Cleopatra and Marcus, Burton and Liz
We looked through history and weighed each technique...
Studying hers and studying his

        We re-invented love
        Applied TLC without the big rush 
        Someone had to do it; it was way overdue
        And no one gets in it quite like me and you
        Making it perfect, re-inventing love    

We wanted to see the sexes more equal
From Rome to Paris we studied their style
We watched new positions in old Kuma Sutra
In Mumbai and Murmansk to the banks of the Nile
Now when they ***** a great Hall of Fame
The applause will come down falling on us
They'll put our names upon a big plaque
Everyone marvelling and making a fuss

        CHORUS

Bridge:   Now the cave man technique is gone from romance
                Barbarians no longer can come to the dance

        CHORUS

you know you take
words and some cement and glue
and you make them all stick together
into verse and poetry;
and you gather love like a rolling stone
and you blow wild seeds in the air
and you’ve got fine diction
and refined sentiments
and it’s made into a poem
and it all makes sense
oh baby,
it all makes too much sense

you work like Vivaldi
and make poems about seasons
or you work like Goethe
and pour roaring poetry
to outdo Shakespeare
and you frighten Edgar Allan Poe;
and you have great insight
like the Buddha or some Great Prophet
or Only One Savior
and you give us mighty fine inspired poetry
pure, pure spirituality;
or you just take Revelation
like the countless mindless followers
the Great Being has been plagued with since Inception
and you make verse
and oh, it all makes sense
it all makes too much sense
and you take my foibles, our foibles
and your poems
laugh at them
or you put fine words together and string beads of harmony
like a millions-dollar necklace
Richard Burton might have offered Liz Taylor
oh you know you make poems
that come across time and cyberspace
and they all maketh perfect sense
but
how about
baby
you and me make verse
that knocks out sense and makes no sense?
poetry that takes the mickey out of meaning?
no, not for a change -
but forever?
no, not for entertainment
but for nonsense?
so that senses is knocked senseless
and we escape you and me
to North Caledonia
to Paradise of rhythm and senseless-beauty
and we have a beat
and we have a pulse
and the street gang says in awe:
Oh, hey
see these two babies move
they’ve got the style
they’ve got the swing
Yeah, they’re a fine couple of babies!
so we got no sense
and sense-less is meaningless
so we got no sense in nonsense either
or senselessness for that matter
we got nothing baby
(well, nothing on as well)
but plenty of rhythm and sway
we drop all fine subjects
that determine our lives
so we are all freed of lies maybe
(we don’t know what will happen)
and we got the spirit of poetry
beyond sense and line and word and form and intent and purpose
and that gets all the universe rocking
(no doubt, there’s enough rock already)
baby
in one baby-making sway
how about that, baby?
you and me
abandon sense
and dance naked between planets and stars?

Ingrid would mostly get out of bed in the mornings last of all after her sister had done and her father had gone off to work and she had heard the front door go and knew it was safe to go wash and dress and brush her hair and sit down to breakfast her mother had prepared(if she was up) or she'd get her own cereal and mug of tea(stewed after her father had made it) and listened to the radio some ladeeda voice talking about something she didn't understand or music by so and so's orchestra watching her sister mouth in her cereal or her brother chewing the doorstep slice of bread he'd cut she sat in the wonky chair sitting still in case the leg broke and her dad'd leather her for being reckless when he got home she mouthed her cereal slowly knowing her mother'd say you got to chew it properly Ingrid you don't half gobble your food down like a blooming turkey you are and her brother sat opposite looking at her pulling a face now and then or poking out his tongue or her sister sitting back lounging as her mother called it and if her mother was up and dressed she'd be brushing the carpet in the other room or putting the copper on for the wash or hanging out washing from the night before on the line her dad put up out on the balcony Ingrid scratched her nose looking at the small television set in the corner the small black and white number her uncle said fell off the back of a lorry and no questions asked no lies told he'd say laughing she gazed at the mantelpiece with the old clock and a few small statues of birds and animals she tried to sit comfortable as she could tried to avoid sitting on her right buttock too much where her dad'd hit her the night before for a tear in her school skirt think we're made of money do ya do ya? she moved to her left ate the last mouthful and sipped her tea stewed or not at least it was still sweet and hot and it made her inside warm it was near time to go to school she thought looking at the clock only half listening to her brother talking about some bird he had been out with the night before oh yes she was up for it he said but up for what Ingrid didn't know or care her sister sat mouth open gazing at him the spoon half way to her mouth as if frozen in time and I fancy her a bit and said I'd take her to see that new picture that's out and we can sit in the back row and well he laughed you know what it's like in the back row but Ingrid didn't and looked away and wondered if she dared have a biscuit from her father's tin she liked the chocolate ones he bought for himself but if he found out there'd be hell to pay and he'd say it was nothing but theft and give her a good hiding no best not to risk it she thought getting down from the table and getting her coat and satchel ready to leave don't forget to brush your teeth her mother bellowed from the other room you know what the dentist said last time about your teeth as how you don't brush them enough OK I am Ingrid bellowed back going into the kitchen and taking her pink brush from the cup on the red tiled shelf and dipped it in the tin of tooth paste and brushed as hard as she could until her gums bled staring at herself in the small mirror her dad shaved in staring at her teeth the gums bleeding the toothpaste white and red her brush held by her mouth and washed her brush under the cold water tap the getting a handful of water she washed out her mouth until the bleeding stopped then wiped her mouth on the towel behind the door get a move on her mother bawled from the living room or you'll be late OK just going Ingrid bellowed back over the clutter of sounds from the radio and her mother banging around and she opened the front door and closed it behind her nosily so that her mother would know she'd gone and not bellow anymore and so off she walked along the balcony looking over at the Square below wondering if Benedict had left yet hoping he hadn't wishing to see him she went down the concrete stairs until she reached the entrance and out into the Square where she walked by the other flats on the ground floor looking ahead to see if Benedict was about but she couldn't see him and so walked on down the ***** towards the road then along by the flats wondering if he r mother was watching her walk along from the flat window above and behind her that's how her mother knew about Benedict and her how they walked together to school and sometimes they stood on the balcony in the evenings looking at the sky darkening or the down at the Square below but Benedict wasn't with her this morning maybe he'd gone earlier or maybe he was late leaving but she couldn't wait in case and besides her father didn't like Benedict said he was a bit up himself a bit soft what with his reading books and collecting stamps and so on but that was what she liked about him he was different and he was kind to her and didn't tease her like most of the boys did didn't call her four eyes or say she stank or that she had fleas(which she didn't except that one time she got them from Denise) or try to lift up her school skirt to see the colour of her underwear like some of the boys did or tried she went into subway the lights glowing the echoes of voices in her ears the hum of traffic above the sense of being walled in the smell of ***** where tramps had slept and **** the walls when she came out the other end she saw Benedict waiting for her by Burton's clothes shop his hands in his pockets a big smile on his face and she felt all warm inside all safe and happy as if blessed by the good God's grace.

sometimes you sit next to me,
and golly, gee, good gosh - i get all old fashioned,
and squirmy and quiet and corny,
you'll have to forgive me, it's just that oh man,
your big book on computers and your orchestra t-shirt
and how your hair's all ruffled and curly - these things thrill me
and how you're always so **** collected and relaxed and not drowsy
not even at nine in the morning when i forgot coffee and look like tim burton designed me

you make me want to look good - i've taken to staring at my wardrobe
waiting for nice summer clothes to appear out of nowhere,
waiting for a genie to make me a prince, to throw a parade where i'm the
star, all eyes on me, because maybe aladdin was a fake
but it's better than what i've got.

You've even got cute teeth, how are teeth cute, that's too much, stop it -
no don't, please, ever, geez - my brain forgets to talk to my limbs and my lungs and
so i just get kind of quiet and silly, and
excuse me teacher but are you expecting me to learn like this?
but i do learn and you learn and we learn, we're so cool we say,
we know this language, we can just move to this country right now,
let's go, you and me, let's pack our bags and say who we are loud and proud,
because that's really all we know, but it's awesome, and this is awesome
and so different from that awful plan with buses and begging and stupid. *******. decisions.
this is joking at its purest, and you understand that - you're so
rational, wow, and that is something i think i've been craving for a
long
****
time.
so hey,
your seat's open -

oh.

except
except, wait -
it's not.
sometimes it's not.
sometimes some big, brutish boy who doesn't give two *****
flops into your seat, hunched over to laugh with his stupid friend in front,
and you come it, a little later than usual, and pause when you see that *******
- and that pause, oh that pause -
maybe i'm reading too much into it, like a **** up in a literature class,
but i hope not, because gosh, it'd be great if we could get coffee,
or see the new documentary at that independent place tucked away just for us,
or even go to a game and sweat away in the seats for five hours,
and maybe that pause is telling me that could happen, maybe?
I hope so.

I am the ghost in the machine
You raise the curtain and what Tim Burton told you would be there is
I will feast on your Innards and cast without regard to your suicidal aunt
a hand gun and tell her to have fun
I am the devil and it's not evil I seek it's retribution.
Join my clan; you don't still believe you're part of some godly plan!
Ahahahahah! You're so cute when you’re terrified. Go on try and run, you'll never hide.
but behind your eyes I smell desperation.
And any chance at rehabilitation would be *******
And yet you have hope behind those eyes. Your mind racing with possibilities that I might be lovable and changeable.
But I’m the devil and hell is my navel
I control the universe.
Your dog got hit by a car.
Blame me,
He looks better as tar
he makes a great floor mat. Should have trained him in hand to paw combat.
Your mum is terminally Ill
Send me the bill.
You best friend dies, hate to say it but did he even try.
I control and contort; I do not send hope or
Comfort. I am the devil. They say third times the charm
Maybe this Time you'll remember I'm here only to do harm.
I'm the ghost in the machine.
But I'm only as strong as you make me seem.

Baruch could hear
Fay's father
bawling her out
along the balcony

his  Catholic platitudes
filling the air
he watched
from a safe distance

as Fay's fair hair
was caught
by sunlight
her father's

dark expression
like black clouds
on a summer's day
Pater Nosters

rose and fell
then he went indoor
and left her
standing there

the echo of his voice
staining the air
Baruch waved to her
and she descended

the stairs
to the balcony below
and along
where Baruch stood

what was that all about?
he asked
the nuns
reported me

meeting you
after school
the other day
she said

your daughter
is meeting the Jew
they'd said
he said

Fay looked back
behind her
as she touched
Baruch's arm

you're not to meet
the Jew boy
he was shouting
said he'd give me

a good hiding
if I saw you again
she said
looking up

at the balcony above
Baruch looked
at her fair hair
let loose

unfettered by bow
or ribbon
over her
blue dress

guess we mustn't
be seen then
he said softly
by Burton's window

in half hour
she said
and fled
along the balcony

and up the stairs
to her father's flat
Baruch watched
her go

the sway
of her dress
the hair in flow
then gone

from sight
just going out
he said
to his mother

at her ironing
in the front room
ok
she said

be careful
and so he
went down the stairs
and across the Square

down the *****
and along Rockingham Street
under the railway bridge
and along by

the back
of the cinema
and on to
the New Kent Road

down the subway
along the echoing passage
thinking of Fay
and her father

and his ways
he whistled
as he walked
his sound echoing

along the walls
a Hebrew tune
he'd heard
whistling loud

like a noisy bird
then up the steps
to the place to meet
by Burton's window

on the corner
of St George Road
traffic
racing by

waiting for Fay
her beauty
to greet
his Jewish eye.

**** Burton examining Liz Taylor's ****** sphincter for blood.
      That's love.
            ****** love. Pornographic, anthropological, primate love.

                           --------------------------------------

Newton wrote the Principia
      So only serious mathematicians would comprehend.
            "I've been faking my way through life," he lied.

                           --------------------------------------

They say the white pine whispers
      What the wind can't say.
            In the blowdown there's a slow ballet.

                           --------------------------------------

I am a citizen of the empire.
      Moonlight & heartbeat.
            Zach's feet stink.

                           --------------------------------------

One hawk.
      Flying low, scaring crows.
            No snow.

                           --------------------------------------

Watres pipyng hoot.
      First, entertain. Then expectorate (spit).
            Lapdancer, spiderweb.

                           --------------------------------------

Summer morning, rabbit in my garden.
      Let it be or send a warning.
            Let the rabbit eat my peas.

                           --------------------------------------

Avoid the I,
      Avoid yourself, and enter the void?
            I think not.

And leave it to Turturro
To steal the movie again,
A tour-de-force in a single character,
Repeatedly, consistently . . .
Except maybe one time.
"Raging Bull" 1980:
Turturro was "Man at Table,"
Uncredited, of course,
A man of no words,
A role difficult, constraining for any
Would-be Richard Burton,
Some shrew-taming Petruchio,
Over the top & out of a job,
Again.
Ask any director who
Directed in the 1950s and 60s?
"Difficult to handle," says Unanimous,
Auteurs & Schlock Filmmakers,
Alike.
Turturro too, needs special handling,
Or Jesus Quintana will chew up the scenery,
Emilio Lopez will be sneaky-sneaky-sneaky,
Materializing without warning over & over
Again.
Turturro: veteran of 60+ films,
Barton Fink, Miller's Crossing,
Fading ******, The Color of Money,
Do the Right Thing,
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Turturro TV: Frazier, Monk & Miami Vice.
And others.

Turturro: a Brooklyn boy, Italian,
Roman-Catholic, the son of Katherine,
An amateur jazz singer who worked in a
Navy yard during World War II, &
Nicholas Turturro, a carpenter &
Construction worker who fought as a
Navy sailor on D-Day.
Turturro: attended the State University of
New York at New Paltz, completed his
MFA at the Yale School of Drama.
A life most worthy, capped off with
Amedeo & Diego, his two sons.

So, I'd like to thank The Academy,
In advance yet decades overdue:
A Lifetime Achievement Award, Johnny.
Recognition over the long haul.