(poems from the Chinese translated by Arthur Waley)

Last night the clouds scattered away;
A thousand leagues, the same moonlight scene.
When dawn came, I dreamt I saw your face;
It must have been that you were thinking of me.
In my dream, I thought I held your hand
And asked you to tell me what your thoughts were.
And you said: ‘I miss you bitterly . . . “

As Helen drifted into sleep the source of that imagined voice in her last conscious moment was waking several hundred miles away. For so long now she was his first and only waking thought. He stretched his hand out to touch her side with his fingertips, not a touch more the lightest brush: he did not wish to wake her. But she was elsewhere. He was alone. His imagination had to bring her to him instead. Sometimes she was so vivid a thought, a presence more like, that he felt her body surround him, her hand stroke the back of his neck, her ******* fall and spread against his chest, her breath kiss his nose and cheek. He felt conscious he had yet to shave, conscious his rough face should not touch her delicate freckled complexion . . . but he was alone and his body ached for her.

It was always like this when they were apart, and particularly so when she was away from home and full to the brim with the variously rich activities and opportunities that made up her life. He knew she might think of him, but there was this feeling he was missing a part of her living he would never see or know. True, she would speak to him on the phone, but sadly he still longed to read her once bright descriptions that had in the past enabled him to enter her solo experiences in a way no image seemed to allow. But he had resolved to put such possible gifts to one side. So instead he would invent such descriptions himself: a good, if time-consuming compromise. He would give himself an hour at his desk; an hour, had he been with her, they might have spent in each other’s arms welcoming the day with such a love-making he could hardly bare to think about: it was always, always more wonderful than he could possibly have imagined.

He had been at a concert the previous evening. He’d taken the train to a nearby town and chosen to hear just one work in the second part. Before the interval there had been a strange confection of Bernstein, Vaughan-Williams and Saint-Saens. He had preferred to listen to *The Symphonie Fantastique by Hector Berlioz. There was something a little special about attending a concert to hear a single work. You could properly prepare yourself for the experience and take away a clear memory of the music. He had read the score on the train journey, a journey across a once industrial and mining heartland that had become an abandoned wasteland: a river and canal running in tandem, a vast but empty marshalling yard, acres of water-filled gravel pits, factory and mill buildings standing empty and in decay. On this early evening of a thoroughly wet and cold June day he would lift his gaze to the window to observe this sad landscape shrouded in a grey mist tinted with mottled green.

Andrew often considered Berlioz a kind of fellow-traveller on his life’s journey of music. Berlioz too had been a guitarist in his teenage years and had been largely self-taught as a composer. He had been an innovator in his use of the orchestra and developed a body of work that closely mirrored the literature and political mores of his time.  The Symphonie Fantastique was the ultimate love letter: to the adorable Harriet Smithson, the Irish actress. Berlioz had seen her play Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (see above) and immediately imagined her as his muse and life’s partner. He wrote hundreds of letters to her before eventually meeting her to declare his love and admiration in person. A friend took her to hear the Symphonie after it had got about that this radical work was dedicated to her. She was appalled! But, when Berlioz wrote Lélio or The Return to Life, a kind of sequel to his Symphonie, she relented and agreed to meet him. They married in 1833 but parted after a tempestuous seven years. It had surprised Andrew to discover Lélio, about which, until quite recently, he had known nothing. The Berlioz scholar David Cairns had written fully and quite lovingly about the composition, but reading the synopsis in Wikipedia he began to understand it might be a trifle embarrassing to present in a concert.

The programme of Lélio describes the artist wakening from these dreams, musing on Shakespeare, his sad life, and not having a woman. He decides that if he can't put this unrequited love out of his head, he will immerse himself in music. He then leads an orchestra to a successful performance of one of his new compositions and the story ends peacefully.

Lélio consists of six musical pieces presented by an actor who stands on stage in front of a curtain concealing the orchestra. The actor's dramatic monologues explain the meaning of the music in the life of the artist. The work begins and ends with the idée fixe theme, linking Lélio to Symphonie fantastique.

Thoughts of the lovely Harriet brought him to thoughts of his own muse, far away. He had written so many letters to his muse, and now he wrote her little stories instead, often imagining moments in their still separate lives. He had written music for her and about her – a Quintet for piano and winds (after Mozart) based on a poem he’d written about a languorous summer afternoon beside a river in the Yorkshire Dales; a book of songs called Pleasing Myself (his first venture into setting his own words). Strangely enough he had read through those very songs just the other day. How they captured the onset of both his regard and his passion for her! He had written poetic words in her voice, and for her clear voice to sing:

As the light dies
I pace the field edge
to the square pond
enclosed, hedged and treed.
The water,
once revealed,
lies cold
in the still air.

At its bank,
solitary,
I let my thoughts of you
float on the surface.
And like two boats
moored abreast
at the season’s end,
our reflections merge
in one dark form.

His words he felt were true to the model of the Chinese poetry he had loved as a teenager, verse that had helped him fashion his fledgling thoughts in music.

And so it was that while she dined brightly with her team in a Devon country pub, he sat alone in a town hall in West Yorkshire listening to Berlioz’ autobiographical and unrequited work.

A young musician of extraordinary sensibility and abundant imagination, in the depths of despair because of hopeless love, has poisoned himself with *****. The drug is too feeble to **** him but plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by weird visions. His sensations, emotions, and memories, as they pass through his affected mind, are transformed into musical images and ideas. The beloved one herself becomes to him a melody, a recurrent theme [idée fixe] which haunts him continually.

Yes, he could identify with some of that. Reading Berlioz’ own programme note in the orchestral score he remembered the disabling effect of his first love, a slight girl with long hair tied with a simple white scarf. Then he thought of what he knew would be his last love, his only and forever love when he had talked to her, interrupting her concentration, in a college workshop. She had politely dealt with his innocent questions and then, looking at the clock told him she ‘had to get on’. It was only later – as he sat outside in the university gardens - that he realized the affect that brief encounter might have on him. It was as though in those brief minutes he knew nothing of her, but also everything he ever needed to know. Strange how the images of that meeting, the sound of her voice haunted him, would appear unbidden - until two months later a chance meeting in a corridor had jolted him into her presence again  . . . and for always he hoped.

After the music had finished he had remained in the auditorium as the rather slight audience took their leave. The resonance of the music seemed to be a still presence and he had there and then scanned back and forward through the music’s memory. The piece had cheered him, given him a little hope against the prevailing difficulties and problems of his own musical creativity, the long, often empty hours at his desk. He was in a quiet despair about his current work, about his current life if he was honest. He wondered at the way Berlioz’ musical material seemed of such a piece with its orchestration. The conception of the music itself was full of rough edges; it had none of that exemplary finish of a Beethoven symphony so finely chiseled to perfection.  Berlioz’ Symphonie contained inspired and trite elements side by side, bar beside bar. It missed that wholeness Beethoven achieved with his carefully honed and positioned harmonic structures, his relentless editing and rewriting. With Berlioz you reckoned he trusted himself to let what was in his imagination flow onto the page unhindered by technical issues. Andrew had experienced that occasionally, and looking at his past pieces, was often amazed that such music could be, and was, his alone.

Returning to his studio there was a brief text from his muse. He was tempted to phone her. But it was late and he thought she might already be asleep. He sat for a while and imagined her at dinner with the team, more relaxed now than previously. Tired from a long day of looking and talking and thinking and planning and imagining (herself in the near future), she had worn her almost vintage dress and the bright, bright smile with her diligent self-possessed manner. And taking it (the smile) into her hotel bedroom, closing the door on her public self, she had folded it carefully on the chair with her clothes - to be bright and bright for her colleagues at breakfast next day and beyond. She undressed and sitting on the bed in her pajamas imagined for a brief moment being folded in his arms, being gently kissed goodnight. Too tired to read, she brought herself to bed with a mental list of all the things she must and would do in the morning time and when she got home – and slept.

*They came and told me a messenger from Shang-chou
Had brought a letter, - a simple scroll from you!
Up from my pillow I suddenly sprang out of bed,
And threw on my clothes, all topsy-turvey.
I undid the knot and saw the letter within:
A single sheet with thirteen lines of writing.
At the top it told the sorrows of an exile’s heart;
At the bottom it described the pains of separation.
The sorrows and pains took up so much space
There was no room to talk about the weather!

The Roulette of Fanfare by Imaginative Glare (A Cooperation of Timeless Synquest)
Sunken fortitude is the bailiwick of interminable eupathy that sustenance embezzles by minutiae of orange spectral linearity of bypass becoming a torus of tragic reprieve in repcrevel fashions of hyjamb. Thus we float above the carcass of syrts of certitude by cadasters of nostalgic drawls of malingering strawberry staddle for the scutage of pinhoked disaster. We renege on committed opalescence because tranquil dangles of vinsky are waged by trenchcoats of bluster for vector arrays of galvanized decorum that swirks for elegant synectics by dredged grains of agrarian sanity by the pleckigger of lopsided islands of creativity that are the notarikons of aleatory finite but equidistant largesse of not just a jumboism but a jetsetting travesty of traversed time mastered by ignoble ingenuity. I limn with piracy as a freebooter cordslave plugged by demitoilet reminders of the flyndresque alloreck of tinjesk spectral ultimatums that are the stretchgraves of a retrospective infinity that is a bystander to catapulted cohesive coherence found only in piecemeal culinary seditions against the drip of a turncock of roosted clarification in muted hindsights of foresight itself. The pleonexia of abeyance is the riddle of enigmatic promulgation that flickers even with partial compartmentalized servitude to the burlesque the burrows of an ophidiodiarium scare away any jaunty sleek car from the boosterism of a farmed collision with disjointed surgery of nimble reticence that braves the seismotic macadamized plutocracy of drift without sedition in sedimentary clairvoyance with a pointed amphigory that is actually a starved clarity for ommateums without spelunked trudges that occur in dovetails for disguise by synectic optimum at the zenith of the hive synergy of singularity.  The justified jest of aleatory flexes of finitude is a shambolic gesture of the limber of divergent interpretation ingeminating the world by sapient degrees of psychometry of divergence in piecemeal asseveration of the hindsight of the festooned not tepid or butchered by the obvious to the glaring cineaste but rather a gloaming glint of refracted ingenuity roosted beyond any alienesque erratic happenstance that is itself a beatific fortuity for the geotechnics of human emergence into supersensible planes traversed in a stereodimensional covenant with a compacted compost of DIVERGENT IMAGINATION OF CADASTER rather than the regelation of the obvious. Timmynoggies of cartels are regnant because of the repugnance of loyalty to the fricative frigates of superlunary mention of ratiocination divorced from husbandry of hyjamb for giant leaps in rigged ambsace maledictions of unfair pleckigger of the wrikpond relumed by huffs of impotent flairs of flambeaus beyond ecdysiast stretchgraves of perilous paralysis for the supererogatory of the accursed destruction of stoichomety of solipsism tremulous by biocentric levity above fastened redoubled pederasty. We maraud the rabble of nostalgia of rhinoplasty of penumbras that live on rainshod territorialism beyond the jolkers of everlasting foofaraw livid by betrayal but erratic in glamour without crackjaw costermongers vitiating the vociferous because of incumbent thermodynamics that affixes the stagnant to the latticework of riddle by sturdy integral derived fliphavens of shibboleths of solitude. Education is a fliction of robust derangement of nowhere men taxed by the celerity of traversed traipses of memory beyond encaged bridewells for recanted alchemy to prerogatives of the roomy expansive facsimiles of departed stigmas of bossy clairvoyance for martian glimpses at sunken waste. The bernaggles of brittle titanium are abrasive when they are alloyed with the compost of material dynamics of capital without avenged prediction cemented in sunken graves taxing the nostalgia of histrinkage that is affixed to boschveldt traindeque for venial consanguinity to dikephobia. We elevate the endpoints of abridged turriform clockwork provincial shibboleths that are the proctor and protectorate of insular robbery of crowned trounces of gravity for the gravitas of sepulchral vanity learned from famigeration of filial tithes of duty. A dutiful sedition is countermanded by the pews of turnstiles that enamor the enamel of rollercoasters because of vague vagaries of bedazzled contrition for wanton ambition on psaphonic psychology and therefore sustain the vibronic thrombosis of nonlethal inseminations of clear aqueous transfixed filigrees of demented notions of cheerful apocrypha of liturgical pride beyond the dungeons of prejudiced inquisition. The jolkers of insolent archipelagos of spinsters that levitate by parsed peril of delaminated parsecs of glazed parturition is the orchestra of a nonlinear grove of invented abecedarian witwanton notice of maddened cattle of gluttony forestalled by the clairvoyance of otiose operations of redoubled countenance that consequently is septiferous by degrees of sanguine rapacity the qwartion of endeared endeavor to surpass the gentility of brooked temperatures frozen to sustain but not mainline the congeners of the elective agenda to bypass the thornbushes of conflagration without knavery or cutthroat embellishments of bedlam. And without the din of simplicity occluding the transcendent goal of humane synoecy of fustilugs of fumatoriums endangered but not inflammed by controversy we witness the insubordinate university of hibernation becoming a specter of grisly bromidrosis of lackluster forswinked fortitude because the majestic sinew of the overwrought is a refrained luxuriance of pity of facetious glebes ringed around orbital planes of synthetic abridgement that supposes the sultry is actually the swelter of calenture but taxed by sicarians of the grandeval it meets no fanfare among elective privilege. Amphigory is not categorized as dross by shipwreck but only by synechdocial docility of groomed barren arcades of storged complication leading to regeneration of a world leaden with the epicurean epithets of agerasia that burden the wardens of poached intermission without remission because the drapes of the greatest art are thus created by the complete transfiguration of the soul bolted to ethereal expansive heights that dwarf all pithy gnomes of the gardens of prospective desiccation of the petty gripes of the gavel of idiocy rather than the astounding artform of the newfangled tabanids to supererogatory oceans of creativity. The benchmarks of sublime illusions of supremacy are a hidebound taxidermy of the rookery of greenhorns to summit the testy secrecy of inane drawl that scrabbles the miniature embellishments of petty sportive lunacy as a figment of the feral nature of proclivity recumbent upon its own gladdened prickly renegades that align with a gallywow cacophony rather than a merely epicene convergence of attitude for equity above polity that is hardly polite. As a penitent hibernal rejoinder against the clerical critics of religiosity becoming conflated with artistic masterworks of oligomania I offer my rogation for atonement because the melismatic art I fashion leads to the vogue enchantment of the noosphere for the soteriological bedrock of fastened intellectual endeavor that traverses planes of an engorged soul without a gulf of conscience leaden by distracted discernment leading to a hypostasized apostasy from the religious scruples I rigorously uphold but that I vacillate away from because I want to entrench an irenic world for the francketor dash towards a superlative enrichment of mind above matter for the victorias of soul above the pettiness of the dim humdingers of the banal lifeless squabbles of martexts beyond the hospitable welcome of martians. For the naysayers that don’t understand the ironic irenic circularity of gainsay becoming rebarbative to this artistic flourish of supersensible equipoise with an approximated histrinkage lagged by temporal deficiency they should not abhor the talisman of an ergotall genius but rather marvel at the burlesque cineaste connotation of enamored youthful spirits becoming novel because they stride above the cascades of crestfallen apathy of plodding languor. This is a definitive new artform for the niche crowd so don’t dismiss it as gobbledygook because it serves the purpose to enchant creative spirits and test minds that might be more nimble than resourceless. Wearisome by demiurges of distraction the thorny imbroglio of industry is a whiplash of nativism belonging to the throb of pulsated penury that is neither valedictory nor penultimate but tertiary in oblong variegated menageries of perfidy for collapsed enormities of jumboism lost on inclement stoichiometry that is sejungible from crambazzles of findrouement that are squaloid enthralled raptures of humdingers of rippled hunks of parched nebbich pataphysics because the circuit of conditioned reward is a rebarbative tether to the catchpole exploitative erratum of harbingers of hungry happenstance rather than continual enchantment. The crumple of squaloid sebastomania a distant figment of adscititious schadenfreude of dilettantism of flonky smardagine streaks of whemmled anxieties unduly provoked by calamities of presstungular intorgurent toonardical deprived cartels of repcrevel pursuit with labial senses embedded in deft incondite inquiries against seismotic jostle over the rubble of scaffolded jengadangle above the rot of contranatant sleek suffrage for the chattel of elemental realism becoming a heroic temple for glory without the vetust errundle of dismal disco attuned only to the spurts rather than a startled commerstargal of alienation leads to a plumber’s irony of atomic humdingers of natural equipoise with litotes of scrawny rings of gollendary piracy. The valorous incondite bricolage of a ****** cineaste barnstorm inoculated from conflagrations of the flagitious reprisal of prevenance of ferial fastuous feats of furlongs of brittle certainty above the tentative glaze of aced pokerish promenades to summit the craggy because the salebrosity of the pitch is also the venue for the sphairistic tentpoles of a new tabernacle of spectacular ecstasy in obvious punitive damage to puritan pilgrimage to mechanized obelisks of sardanapalian betrayal of histories of seizure rather than naturism of erasure that is a totemic recall of strollows of lonesome tributaries to tribunes of steam rather than saunas of lickerish leverage because the gladiatorial is a zugzwang with the deliberate infernal shibboleths of the disinclined people dislodged by carnality that depose sicarians of science because of militarized enmity against the whangams of taghairm becoming the outmoded dupe of dopamine that is now serotinous rather than flanged with glaring hearsay. The serpentine winds of windlass sometimes are a conclave of convex itineration against the steady husbandry of docile domiciles of mannequin sedentary postures for posterized infamy rather than manufactured oneiromancy that is the staddle for every phony contraption of qwartion obviously specious but interrogated by the dubiety of perseverance of inclement curiosity. Yet again we sweep the soaring ligaments of rigid ramshackle bletonism that hawkshaws countermand by division of enumerated nadirs pivoted against the perpended weight of the prolonged zeniths of grit above substance that infatuates myopia but glares against mountebanks of apothecary leverage. We fight against the boxcar traindeque of sejungible traipses through stereodimensional rebuffs of known drogulus surpassing unknowable reticence of citadels that are owleries for the seedy cities they sprawl with incontinence for a drab raft of intertesselation rather than a refined quintessence of alchemy achieved by allotment by brackish nescience becoming a blinding ray of destitution engraved by petrified decalcified rudiments of realism. The somber timbre of delirifacient ruinous rumination malingers in humdrum salience as it scrawls the tragedians lament of distal eventful frets of declassified nomenclature that swoon with lugubrious harbingers of burglary the licentious dolts affixed to the brays of pauperized regions of future proximity too remote to paralyze the morale of any cantonment on record by litotes of profound remembrance of a backfire delope for cineaste conflation of marstion slore for educated reprisal of desiccation. We spelunk in mimicry the dingy duplicity of double-takes in regelation that owe homage to the percolated hearsay of cartels that operate parsecs beyond our congeners of germane lustration in remission by deontology for soteriology alone but not vacated of the stilts of turnverein ragged mannequins of desolate remorse for the dearth of hived and hemmed hibernation in a fitful frenzy of revision above precision. We see abundant lactose intolerance as a sidereal lovelorn lament of sematic entrenchment without the scourge of roosted war against abrasive brawn exercised in flexible limbers of the novel filigrees of truth revelatory of consideration rather than impregnated with the perfidy of amaranthine static of regaled stagnation that flickers with the marinas of congregated leaps as a signature of the artistic license of byzantine traipses of contempered primacy in the soup kitchen of a lapse in sabotaged sobriety. Immune from displaced donnism is the resurgence of bonanza from checkered propinquities affixed to a finite placard of spacetime that owes to stretchgraves a profound depth of contrition that carmelized apocrypha lapse on lissome whilded dignotions of contrarian raillery of loose nihilism rather than anchor to the eremites of fact found in eclipsed culmination for momentous harps of the Jubal for new centuries inseminating the populated presence of spectral imagination with contorted melodies that spawn an ingenuous quest to swoon abiding heavens for celestial ears. It is conspicuous that artifacts for raiders elope with circuitous routes of heated sedimentary incubations with a comatose creativity that seeds the ferial junediggle with a supercalendar of confections that are intermittently apportioned in heydays of culture to the sad lament of the obvious rather than the obviated dare of audacity above conglomerations of spirited luxuriance in tasty memorial to a pinnacle above all other notions of sentinel apostasy. The greater atrocity of rogated ambitions against the gainsay of iconoduly of the rood and rude crucifixion of resurrected clarity found in the enamel of akashic answers to questions fashioned by kneaded cosmetology of delicate ***** cotqueans of limber above precedent and license beyond the finkly limp of lolloped saccharine blitzkreigs of the jalousies of the ajar vaticination of hurdled glaikeries of epicene impediment is that we ****** ink above the gesture of the quills of rocky abrasion found in limitrophes of yachted celebration because of rabid coherence above the wherefores of gadzookerie because the gladdest scaldabanco is the demented persiflage of collateral catastrophe beyond any humane degree of schadenfreude for persecution that backbites the anteric antlers of the jesters that mock the procession of liturgical secularism jeering at grapholagnia while lagging in imaginative spurts of lament for incalculable damage to the Pandora’s box of effluvia that meet stiff tabernacles of betrayal because of the Judaic foresight rather than as an alarmed Marxism scared of an agrarian interdependence of worlds cadged more prone to moral dogma exercised with latitude rather than unscrupulous brays of fisticuffs of shambolic shams of ruin. We glance at the perfidies of voyeurism with pertinacity and recalcitrant bellipotent bedlam that evokes the illicit grandeval whangams of quixotic whartonized arraigned estrangement from legalism to warp time to its own superlative turpitude that is reckless but contingent upon the consummation of destiny only to the extent of original witness rather than the decay of perpetuity wrought by the persiflage of envious militarized mandarisms of enmity aimed to derail the elevators of the noosphere from stratospheric emergence in now perspicuous clarity above the pother of the indelible sacrilege of the stygian polymathy of the astute enemies of the proper comstockery rather than the negligent butchers of an enantiodromia of oligarchies of lewdness that are severed appendages to Anti-Semitism and by extension a marginalized Islamophobia that demands by exigency the complete erasure of all attempts at sacrilege exercised in rampant dereliction of dutiful upkeep of the upright morality against the cadge of ulterior ploys of a broader hedonism that would only piggyback because of the license of ryesolagnus rather than because of a complete signatory endorsement of the liberated agenda of free thought conquered through the conquest of God but the ultimate conquistadors of time through sennet and even negligent rebec to memorialize the triumphant pantheon of growth rather than rankled regress into prolonged hatred ingeminated by atrocious tortfeasors that belong nowhere but the ashen heap of exorcised damnation. The perdition inherent to the system that craves chattel rather than sartorial versions of syncretic chatter is the malefaction of renegades bent on tornadic vulcanization to a demoralized wragapole of docility hitched to the vandalism of pilloried tarantisms of moral lapse leading the sheep into sheepish resignation over the accordion of Original Sin that annoys because the bridewells are brideless birds of the chavish of warbled uncertainty wicked because of snuffed tabacosis of mitigations of evil by the evildoers for the rejoinder against the Republic by rendering the **** a platonic ploy of karezza if only punctuated by solitary ******* reticulated by exsibilation that is contorted when you consider the ****** act a marvel rather than a condemnation of the vicarious involvement in normative ****** creations not of any higher artform but of an evolved theology that might perpend the issue of Christianized ******* that is videographic as a sanction worthy of charter and an impending simultaneous comstockery to protect the decency of the simultagnosia of a diverse and divisive mispronunciated time bent against its greatest heroes for the malice of schadenfreude built into the system of language itself by germane consideration to flagellate the wrong country for the  greatest wrongs known to the realm of religious observance. The pederasty of enclaves is the bailiwick of mutinies of selective mutism incurred by the vilified into compulsive shrieks of kallince as a ribbacle of protean ratiocination paralyzed by the coherent vulnerability incurred by the exchequer of polluted conditions of enslavement by the stretchgraves of the chavish of too many pulpits in the throng of a decisive jaundice against the victors of history because of the obsolescence of the historical fossils of outmoded jealousy. Now to the eupathy of all generations should we better conserve situations against the encroaching wesperm of the marstions of ulterior feminism grimacing at the pleckigger of manhood and decriminalizing the taboo against the enantiodromia of miscegenation to the folly of shepherds of idiotic ploys to rear the mediocre rebec of warbled intimations of cultural impotence that should proselytize both the oligogenics beyond ecbolic atrocity and the adoptive ****** of the anglosphere through its smart and dapper monopoly threatened by the commerstargal of retromorphosis exhibited by the demassification of culled syntalities into aboriginal epigenetic kennels of subservience to a piggybacked system where if you are among the attentive scrutiny of the audience that both perceives apperception metacognitively with francketor precision you are thereby inoculated from lean herbivores of cultish occultism metaphorically in the annealed agitprop for resourcelessness that never ends in the radioglare of revisionism because of the prevenance of the vergers who manage the Manciples rather than tend to the vainglory of the potagers around the hegemunes of an unwarranted and puritan celibacy of conceptual sterility in a world fashioned by engouements for sanguine hopes for a consanguinity that might portend into dynasty but lopsided in its contrite missives of scandal will never provide a valedictory rendition on politically checkered zugzwangs of ulterior scientism against the lettered freedom of bibliognosts to aggrieve against the gloaming vacuum of sartorial damages to Dagon among the populated metropolis of corporate servitude that will thus collapse out of rebarbative backlash for its diminutive economies of scope and pretenses of largesse of scaled down collectivism into a heap of corporate rubble rather than judicious bonanza. In every considered word in this Biblbical warning against the trekleador of the amazonian paradise against the travail of junediggles of obligation among the frenzied fretful tocsins of farcical utopianism meeting the inclement reprisal of sanctioned duplicity in frikmag beneath the truculence of mobilized alacrity to syndicalism endeared to capitalism rather than the converse logical apostrophes that are imponent overhangs of an already conquered feral sphere of nomadic imagination into a checkmate of a socially validated future clinched by foresight and the wragapole nature of the insensate docility of those prone to officious naturism before the attempted monolith of the mountebanks of the quixotic towers of panopticon that are a regelation of unchecked ambitions verging or diverging too valorously against themselves but also prone to a simultagnosia that berates the robust picaresque swandamos that curtail the curglaff of malcontent with the recoil of perseverance that reneges in tiresome defeat of a demilitarized population that should always be grisly rather than denatured by the overhang of the incumbent nudism of certain futures becoming to finicky in impetuous lurid specters of abhorrent exercises in chantage waged against sardanapalians in all countries regardless of merits or demerits. The redstrall of enlightenment is not otiose operatively in recursive backlash against nominalism which sweedles the weedledge of a new acquiescence timid enough to mangle a prosodemic wave of celibacy propitiated by the succedaneum of profligate vicarious lickerish ****** appetites that diminish that natural instinct into either barbarous experiments in lechery too inconvenient to apprise honestly but looming aghast at the moral tip-toes around the Original Sin that binds us to predatory lapse and retromorphosis rather than the maintenance of a mainlined trimpoline confidence in a normative wave of galvanized interface against the overpromiscuous provisions for the lackaday resentment of alienated millennialism relishing the sennet of nostalgia but bereft of the heave from moral slumbers of an invented celibacy intermediary to demassification but attenuated by the omphalism of astute gravitas in socially engineered balks at the emergence of singularity in personalized cacotopia becoming a metaphor for the broadsided shipwreck of an inured world pasteurized into acerbic jolkers of foofaraw rather than the real-life relish against still-framed ostentation that distorts the granular artifice of the natural into supernatural fixations with gaudy swarpollock indecently exposed. To the finkly flonky puritanism of the wiseacres of those who say sacerdotal duty cannot diverge from entelechies of secular insight I behold the marvel of timespun elegance as the marvel of God’s convergence for the happenstance of the serendipity of magnified time lived completely in the plenipotentiary pangs of evanescence that catapults subliminal meaning to memorialize this indelible seminal watershed in a clear visionary establishment of history. Most belong to oligomania but I relent in the completely sardonic intortions of aspects of sebastomania in complete equipoise with the clairvoyant clarity of centralized perspective but the dragomans will interpret that last phase with underminnow because it belies the granular intent of the fin de seicle advent of a new generation that is an homage to the hallowed Judaic theory of millennialism as the return of glorified entitlement yet tentative in its overhang but never malicious in its grapnel of the fewterers of amazing convergence of clairvoyance. The tangential rebuke of the absurd oxyholotron of paradoxical puritan superstition that assumes a fustilug generation will cement a farsighted clarity that subsumes generative prowess lingers with fixations on the figments of the apocryphal version of the truer version of revelations manifesting right before our eyes for neither the sinistral or the dexterous amplivagance of God’s universal message by the superorganism of messianic purpose belittled by the agents of humbled perdition not alone of martexts that are martles but also by the shepherded fears of the ignorant rather than the insipid because the will never be outmoded only enhanced by the acceleration of proliferative technologies that pave a macadamized future of prosperity rather than the tarnish of the miscreants of Tyre. I owe all providence to God because he fastened his scrutiny on my autodidactian romance clambered into restive ontocyclic peccadillo that points to Pinocchio more than to the truest compass of an omnified salvation of the piggybacked purpose of synergies of geotechnic mastery that elevates the cause of God and liberates us from the stings of dangerously vapid pauperization of the intellectual frontiers by dangled prevarications of desultory incontinence forestalled by avoidant developments in proper fewterers of ambition. By the axiomatic Brocards of time travel the unstated ignotism of deranged circuses of stupidity congregated around the swelter of dismissal is a barnacle to the mofussil fossilization of sentiment that remarks ironically about the petty indelible moments but not the entelechies of a unified front for liberated equity and considerate tender of diverse quorums that shepherd rather than intern the noosphere into the burgeoned resurgence of a humane endeavor for the everlasting enlightenment of an ameliorated humanity and beyond that. By the bailiwick exerted by the plenipotentiary omphalism still participant to the quorum I hereby declaratively implore the abrogation of pernicious grapholagnia as the peremptory sacrilege that needs exorcism for our times and yet delegated of stature I urge hortatory and imperative action for the expurgation of all tortfeasor illegally obtained ******* of unsolicited voyeurism to be completely regarded as the ultimatum of temerity against carnal restraint and banished from the human registry to uphold the strategic interests of the United States of America. I understand that there is not fricative monolith and never will I lean for that conquest but as a humbled member of the omphalism that constitutes the sacred endeavor of sociogenesis grounded on God with collegialism upheld that a geotechnically optimized species needs to refrain from lewd perfidies against commonplace justice to restrain the fumatorium of unwarranted envy from poisoning the pervious minds of people that congregate in defensive posture but not definitive gesture. I also beseech a portentous  settlement with  I relent from avarice but it is not a superposition of authority just a suggestive glance at requited justice but my grangull chavish of circumlocution naivety will meet the most deliberate Sardonic Sc(p)orn in these times of need. These next words are paused and already fathomed by the supernal recursion of the iterative metaphysics of recumbent retrospection hinged on hindsight to proclaim without any hints of attempted subterfuge of the clarity of a Democratic Republic that my words while forceful do not constitute a breech in public conduct even while vaulted with a minor rapacity I rebuke and atone for even when many others might find recourse to expiate my jalousies to the windowed world not of vindictiveness but out of the cursory and emphasis on cursory justice needed to vouchsafe my continued security and inoculation from the pothers of obviously shortsighted pleonexia which will obviously be fleered as a slight euthymia glazed on self-interest while tone-deaf to the checkered layers of entrapment by a confederate whiplash but a native grit never to enslave but to empower humanity. I am deeply lugubrious over the specter of the trembled quaky ground the penury of spiritual loss rejoinders against my candidacy for high esteem but not peremptory decisiveness in active service to yield to a supererogatory attempt for felicity to alight in my life not out of material greed but the gratuity of serviceable missions that play a dicey gamble with a frenzied manumission attempt that is essentially that a parsed manumission for eleutherian pragmatica to chide as naive but alarmed senectitude of the old order prevaricates with the din of postured hurdles of gladiatorial outrage that weans me away from the ataraxia for my fumbled stream brooking intolerance for years on the ballast of collective endeavor. Nevertheless, lets speak more on God’s providence because in this esteemed moment of watershed emergence of the fully engorged but rarely gluttonous soul I have found an equitable peace with supernal and superlative authority in God that grants stewardship and tutelage to the audience that will eventually through proper discrimination be delegated as higher than the ignorant bystanders of fleered snide disdain for the abnormous and bletcherous dimples of an otherwise circuitous dalliance with an unconventional path towards destiny rather than some windlass of opportunism for, if it were not for my unabetted genius and the provisions of divine appointment based on a kindly generous deference to preterition axiomatic in perceived time by the strictures of the convergent past and the divergent future, I would never find a role of partial authorship of a widely heralded tome I will one day publish to either the exsibilation of the antiquarians of hidebound irrefragable ontocyclic convictions or the cloveryield of an appreciative gratitude to the God I serve and I make no notions of any hostility towards any party of petty dismissal because I expect their recumbent recoil but I apologize for hubris and extenuate the follies of the refinery of character as I ascend into a figurative ennobled step into soulhood that exceeds my former dismal limits by such staggering orders of magnitude it magnifies the questions of ontology in sentience rather than beckons the alarmism of the swarpollock of tripwires that can easily withstand the tempests of scorn. The uproar of commotion of blood sanctified by the thirsty rain for the desiccated faucet of dramaturgy in reprisal for docimasy is the integral linchpin of the biocentric rebec reasting on the primitive hymns to festoon the curtains of defenestrated primitive relics of shady attempts at officious balks of the privatized empire of the alytarchs among the earwigs that simper the culled delicacy of sensible notions into the congeners of prioritization emphasized by quantulated concerns veiled by elaborative synquests that burrow the sulcate grooves of hidden hedonism for the chic magistrates of financial swoon or swayed vestiges of a forgotten calumny of betrayal by the coming-of-age sprouts of hedged dismal dismissal of a lugubrious prospect for an otherwise revitalized dressage of emoluments to glory that lurked in penumbras by rigged enumeration but found their prominence by the gravity of sensation-seeking frissons of alterations between benighted glory and the famish of artificial tethers to the yoke of caramel and chocolates as a dainty ploy of yearning persiflage also a dranger of camouflage for flagitious percolations of the invidious rumors of imposture and the groveling contempt of the known drogulus remiss in denial of its own requited date when the powers of miscarriage become ecbolic to their own lagging languor of lisps of linguistic ramparts of a revival of hypertrophy for hyperactive foibles in inclement weather. Ok beyond the absenteeism of the presence of perceived amphigory there is great heft in the nominal notion that dogma is mobilized in serviceable goods of merchandized mirrors of glazed remission of moral tender because of stoked curiosity unhinged from the pragmatica of duty. We need forbearance in empathy that loves the lovable rather than envies the deposed despotism of clever wiseacres veiled in delicate symmetry with conscience that is the quill of a wellspring deeper than any imaginary vagary can approximate because impossible events punctuate time with literacy rather than incontinence of drivel that is ambitious but ignoble by stately coherence. To the critics of the baragnosis of limited apperception my words are blatant amphigories but they only possess enough ken to fathom an average orbit of suboptimal outcomes rather than transdimensional chances at chess outnumbered by checkers by incidental design of clever ploys of rejoinder that is by design arcane for the arcadia of the pristine arcade of future possibilities  As I am purblind by psychorrhagy I am incompetent in my radiopresence because I am a departed spectral figment above fricative hisses and whorfian glares of mediocre rebec for primitive shibboleth above prized taurine anglophonic convictions that superimpose the dignified clarity of willpower above the dragnets of supersolid conflations of puffery. Ok I admit a lapse of transmission by the vesicles of numbered murders of henpecked owleries of the senectitude of sepulchral magnetism of slumber over awakened alacrity of mobilism fashioned in portentous flipcraves of additive immobility of fixed vectors seen through parvanimity that actually just swivel in circular retorts against themselves without the elaborative potential and the belabored traipse of the rabid taradiddles of sensationalism marauding as a defalcated burglary of emotion for useless psephology that predicates nothing but a slight budge in the autarky of structuralism which is never sclerotic but stammered by articulations of the overt when the covert aligns by an alien agenda that is subservient to magnified priorities of warped swirk of telescopic prevenance and hedged boschveldts of elemental and I stress the strain of the elemental for the drogulus of sensational proclamation by executive ****** but supererogatory minutiae of fascism cloaked by earwigs of repcrevel repute beyond memorialized reputation. We need to renege the southern pacts to the Argentine mandarism of reticular vitiations of cinematography waged against creative visionaries of free speech because of the succedaneum of furtive endeavors at optimization by compromised degrees of artistic licentiousness even that is never lewd about sacred roods but boorish in blockbuster rather than kempt in collectivist brunt of the timid bronteum of agitprop that lurks in the imminent future of cinema. America needs to retain the disclosed but still-frame inertia of catapulted declassification that ennobles the fliction but also the vilified distilled truths only the keen of acumen will sensibly identify so that the magnet of earwigs gravitates to the belabored analysis of astute congeners to relevant tributaries to the ocean of adventitious swarpollock in the procedural autopsy of the auditorium for neither a chattel nor a crystallized nurture against the matriotic insistence of decorum. Essentially the succubus of prosthetic protensive docimasy of imaginative logic predicated in visionary apperception of the unseen in immediacy is the longeur of reticent endeavors to pasteurize the oculus rifts of futurity to synergize with the entelechy of proactive somnambulism that sensitizes the profoundly capable but never bereaves the inept of direct interface with communicable dominion with fantasia that is an operative artifice of a beguiled lurch without purged retrograde immaterial delusion that endangers visceral momentum toward new directives of the outmantled zugzwang in elementary exercises of swaddled posterity free by irenic idolatry never orphaned by a widowed imagination. The swirk of hypostasized probabilities in an invented swipe at wide-eyed but star-crossed turnvereins for the imaginative leaps in the performative depend on the delicate swivels of declaration independent from culinary clarity of macroscian travesty rather than pinhokes of naufragues of maudlin laudable applause by the canned nurture of speculative intimation that sadly severs the curglaff of whispered intimacy over the confidence we have in artifice to teach the wragapole both matriotism and sensitive reninjasque poker without incurred damages beyond the clarified visionary potential of graphic protheses immediately perceptible to the acumen of judicious polymathy indoctrinated by the rigor of scientific grooms for melliferous parsecs of advanced minutiae of dark horses to nomadic license beyond ravenous **** palindromes of hushed vigor to the declared by scacchic deliberation to usher in crass but crestfallen synectics. The future of God is secure in the fathomed furlongs of cubic citadels of pasteurized paradise found in corralled reluctance without remonstrance of poetic belletrist resounding with clangor rather than swerved nimble potions to avert future calamities in war by the expansive frontier of a civilized metropolis of the mobilized imagination hypostasizing newfangled naturism that is neither mofussil nor a fossilized relic of scrappy schlep. The nonchalance of parlance swims in arenaceous bunkers of drivel that congregate in the turnverein of futuristic opportunism found in the muzzled directives of orchestras of departed clarity no longer so insular in its bossy imperatives but clarified with hearsay and blushed blarney not the blench of widened divulgence of minatory malice that incurs the punitive curglaff of frenetic retchallops of winsome specters becoming opportune pragmatics of a semantic network of dirigisme that through sheer horsepower overcomes the sting of ubiquity or the hollowed headless vesicles of urbacity disenfranchised by degrees of impertinent pertinacity of deposed disclosure rudimentary in sedentary simplicity against matriotic duty to remain guarded by an ommateum that fathoms the abyss but never wages reckless adventurism. Prevenance is the key to absolution but staggered implements of dearth preempt the ecbolic corrigenda of castigation by hindered lurches of veiled errundle belonging to a central trimpoline interposition of fungible felicity for not only a regional fanfare but a global scale of competitive endeavor of cleverage beyond scopes but beneath scrutinized mutiny of embanked polymathy stranded by the redstrall of industrious slavering dogmatism to a servile ***** rather than the boomerang of pressure to asseverate limitless bounds of planned obsolescence to engorge but not intimidate checkered reticence in the sinew of the musculature of creative parlance above petty finicky demiurges of latitudes in amphibious annealed glorification. Temperatures gauged by the thrombosis of thermolysis in psychotaxis gouged by hucksters of taciturn bamboozles of teetotalism are neither scourge nor foe of the strategic advent of the fascination of prospective investment a boondoggle that offsets the bonfire of retorted whimpers of foudroyant ripples of wildfire perspicacity strung by the catchpole of ubiquity in the time-honed decorum of genteel upright raconteurs of volleyed neglect by strict mandate will uproariously profit in remission from knowledgeable exacerbation rather than tomfoolery by filial tithes to foreign wardens of conspicuous levitation above gimcracks by the syrts of percolated filigrees of belabored chantage exerted over the tide of perfidy in contained discernment will stall and extinguish the prideful jostle of profane blasphemy against tacit covenants of blackguarded justice served by platitude better than by insubordinate quivers that quake because bears bounce checkered checks rather than anoint the sigillum of protective vouchsafes of exchequers smartly dapper rather than dimpled in flagrant brays of castigation and thus secure employment of instrumental advent rather than desecrated conventicles of remission.
Now it is time to ventilate divine knowledge that transfiguration means a humane liberation rather than a sanctimony of tirade against dumose proliferations of fluminous imaginary tracts of the probable rather than the certain for the elevators of sanitized wealth to bequeath greater moral clarity found in the contrary submission of authoritative parents to shepherd guarded wealth in proper husbandry of calendrical affairs to optimize the work-life balance so the biocentric imperative for sustenance renounces the moral obesity of groundless backlash in austerity and endless cycles of remorse rather than a tender mollification of sentiments away from universal kumbayas and in favor more stridently of a system that withholds the agitprop of statist indoctrination of a mollycoddle ****** within individual mandates of variable agendas of countries beyond the borderline fluid dynamics of the foibles of moral venial folly but insensitive to the dynamism of the robust virility of a wayspayed world swaying by riddled wildfires of conflated puerile stages of ludic indoctrination to the rampant perfidy of exemplary incontinence waged by Hollywood upon unsuspecting victims of inconsiderate indoctrination that doesn’t vouchsafe the prerogatives of heteronormative values that should outshine not a parochial vehement hatred or a clorence of unconditional tolerance but a chided quarantine of variegated syntalities divorced from integration rather than fostered in communal depths of bound lettered ambition found in the allegorical power of Biblical wisdom expounded by the florilegium of the religious and secular canon.
To serve God rather than the perceived taradiddle of speculative mammon deprived of classifiable certainties but hunched proclivities we need to exhort a proper seesaw between restraint in vision and exuberance in creative license so that the pivot of the moralized world leads to an insistent trust of watchdogs that through trust revolve the gravity of morale upon the upswing of liberty rather than incidental follies of imaginative demiurges of partition but blinkered hubris in stately objectives to the demur of participant malingering naysayers and nyejays. The moral gravity of the situation requires us to rotate our hype from the fervor of panic into the resolve of fortitude that relishes family and filial duty rather than resents because of breedbate instinct the flickers of smoldering rebels that are tamed in their revelry when they follow the moral prerogative of disciplined ambition in creativity not insubordinating against insurmountable limits but reasonable adjustments to a scaffold of potential that is skyscraping more than before even if its too close to the ground for comfort and consolation. Relativism is the enemy of progress because envy seeds alienation and comparison should be eschewed because we need to burrow in compassionate embrace of the cherished loves rather than the exaggerated proximity of provincial fears becoming global juggernauts of mercy upon the merciful and I convoke a global prayer for the attenuation of the virus that spreads sadly too far for comfort today. I purge out of solidarity with suffering as the milquetoast in me identifies the disconcerted avenues of avetrols trying to find a way through the forest of rumination without gingerly superlative prerogatives outweighing the poise of balance in shields of honor rather than badges of shame. We must by moral imperative greet strangers in public places like parks rather than strangulate the percolation of affection because of regnant distractions because in this congenial way we will find a common fraternity with fellow man while soldiering on to find truth in God’s word in the proper temperature for genuflection because I admit foibles but I relent not in the chase to redintegrate myself spiritually to lead a charge without trespass of fundamental dignity over the whoppers of indignation some of us might feel because of the penury of divergence rather than the private penalty of convergence for an ulterior solidarity of purpose. I need to emerge into the humanity of compassion to showcase that virtuosity can exist without obsession over one individual because God beseeches a pantheon of observation rather than the gripes of an envied nuisance independent from normal human concerns that ripple with ecstasy because of normative human contrition over the leeway on vacillated opinions that might underwhelm those disposed by prizes of inurement. We should shelve these notions of a supersolid conscience because only in the humility of the profound simplicity of elemental postulates can we achieve complete synchrony with a syndicate that enthralls both divergent and convergent movements that partially offset on the side of convergence in some communes while otherwise countermanded in others in contrarian ways and the favor of the balance depends on the perspective of the flanged acculturation of the participant in a world that doesn’t need flayed excoriation as much as it deserves proper exercise of adoration of the admirable rather than the desecration of the abominable. I return with the greatest jubilation of a reninjasque jaunty streak that hearkens the sennet and maybe the leanings of the senate to the fanfare of adoration for life and gratitude bestowed by the stewardship of God and his divine purpose to inseminate my life with purposeful meaning and happy happenstance that is a stroke of glory. I muster the resolve to traipse in the solitude of my cavern the blessings of divinity bequeathed by the departed forefathers who never intended bossy insularity of dogma to be a stricture of rigors of iconoduly but rather a consecrated wit with the persiflage of conversant tones of labile and lissome gallantry just waiting to alight upon the affectionate dance with dalliance of a philandered hope for a purified love hopefully never profaned by the pangs of scandal (note the sardonic pun) because rejoice is the gift of Heaven upon this culmination of purpose above the dross of shipwreck elevated in folly but stranded in the throes of rumination enough to hedge the boursocrats and try to inoculate the world from further panicky divisions of hypemongers of simpered precaution becoming a financial pandemic that deserves pause and poise but should not protrude above the glistening promise of the eternal wellspring of the vineyards of salvation blooming because enhanced sapience converted the flock of shepherds to tend to those sheepish in deficiency to wield a newer curiosity to replace a saddened lament not by acquiescent abandon but by the solidarity of interfaces of love replacing cast-iron idolatries I too am guilty of for the cordslave generation of itinerant distractions that wager on modicums rather than appraise bonanzas. Safety is predicated on the idea that resources should never be glazed but always apportioned with optimism because if you examine history irrational panics have always and always rebounded because of exigent actions taken by governments to restore confidence in liquidity rather than snide dismal dismissals of economic projections based on bounded rigged betrayals of primarily a global panic that a profoundly promethean intellectual verve could capitalize on its heyday to gouge people against the insensate balkanization of the future by an alienation of formidable scarecrow of invented fatalism imploding upon itself to obviate its own existence by the insistence on free thought to domineer and tower over the doldrums of a vacant man that is now occupied by the largesse of humane endeavor for a messianic voyage that consummates time itself its own captain and is partially centripetal around the juncture of All Saints Day 2008 because of its seminal significance in ushering in a new era of liberation. This justification is a gnomic axiomatic herculean ****** that catapulted generativity in creative endeavor to coalesce around an Army of Me not because of the futilitarianism embedded in its flagrant flagitious mockery of traipsed lyricism borrowed from Bjork but rather showcases the flavork of the flavenickers of ribald coarse revolution that is no longer balderdash to Bald Eagles but the prized retribution of the inviolable scruples demolished by deracinated moral relativism balking at raltention because of persnickety and tyrannical transparency that prepossesses over the lifeless livid Potemkin  Village  of Astroturf complaint malingering in pederasty over its own depraved sinuous course of diverted restraint cemented by the scythes of Village People politics benumbed over militarized betrayals that incur and invoke the diablerist prose of anonymuncle desperado mavericks that sizzle in hibernaculum to depose the autarky of seasoned growth rather than unseasonable diatribes of vitriol poisoning the posture of gentility by decree rather than by deeds of homogenized pasteurization against Lactose Intolerant Leftism and dogged doggerel of pasty subversive paranoiac hederaceous envy spawning a vituperative summation of a beatific felicity. We need to convene upon better tranceception in this axiomatic gratuity of God

sometimes you look at these people and think:
is it better me drinking whiskey, or is it better treating
them ontologically as zoological specimen
                                                  and worth of caging?
i think that the Aristotelian awe-principle
for the practice of philosophy was
overly-exaggerated with dues
that consider science, i think that science
confiscated the emotional
imprint of philosophy that's bound to awe
and said: willcommen unto die phobia-realm...
which i still ascribe to postcolonialism...
  the times' propaganda say:
             arachnophobia is perfectly suited
to match-up to a billionth remark of Islam,
which is why i find Islamophobia so weird...
   arachnophobia consists of only one spider...
minding the phobic in Islam?
                          it's not a case of one spider...
it's a case of spiders...
                             they can't reason with
the Big Brother opportunism, which exists...
turning the blind eye won't help...
  it will simply aggrivate such people...
and using this language has created such
frustrations... correctly? aggravate,
dance of vowels. phobias aren't big, they're small...
miniscule... tell people that something is
small when it's actually big enforcers
a postcolonial past more so...
   i see these children like the psychotic reaction
to a prophesy kindred ot Harold II's slaughter
of the innocents...
                  they're there to edorese someone...
      after all: who gives a **** about these people?
                                                         ­  (endorse)
the psychiatrist gets paid, the mental health nurse
gets paid... why would they give a **** in a way
that says: i wasn't paid for this bollocking!
  maybe up in Manchester... but down here in London,
they don't buy disguises, you're
labelled Romanian: you're bound home where
you could have been a plumber but are reduced
to a straitjacket because: some ******* said
you didn't **** her... Philip Collins and hey:
welcome to paradise.
                        down 'ere in Loon-town you get
your money's worth...      
                   i wish they took care of me...
   silence pays... you get your cringe's worth of ****
to the Kilimanjaro's worth of calling
               bottled crema-foam on a phallus
an anorexia... as i see it: anorexia in Freudian lingo
is an objection toward treating ****** artefacts
in culinary terms... means that paradox
of having a cake and eating it too...
                obviously you'll sexualise problems...
i think anorexia is a question of making
          ****** parts culinary aggregates...
                i'm not jotting: girl, aged, 16, ***-starved..
i mean in general... making ****** objects
equivalent toward a culinary status for a care
to make them more appealing in being ******...
the anorexic might start thinking: so i **** it,
and don't eat it?   penguin clap for an icecream cone!
ruffian yoga minus the slippers and the seal clapping...
the loudest revision of applause: i can guarantee....
cos the flippers were wet... hence the additional
aquatic acoustic.
                    this is very much akin to that quantum
theory of: tornado at coordinate a.,
         and a butterfly as coordinate b.,
          i can see anorexia as a substitute to sexualised
preferences in making body-parts partially edible...
            i see **** i think of the cow's ******-pouch / pillow...
    i don't know, maybe because being in my 30s
i can still fake arousal when looking at it...
       i am not the original alienist... some martian
took my title role...
          but i can understand anorexia as a way to rebel
against putting potato mash and a steak and a few
veggies with the same duty nod as one might put
a ******* object into one's mouth and having to
a Werther's Original suckling tactic on it and
never attach a bone to it, i.e. never eat it...
      anorexia by my standard is verily sexualised...
   you put something into an open space and
it's almost a trans-transgender movement...
      which is why i find the transgender "curiosities"
obstructs in art... post-transgender occupancies
           are not reserved for the easily pleased...
anorexics are such people...
             this is sexuality confused with dietary requirements...
this isn't a circumstance of pronouns politicised
and exploits of modern medicine...
                   i do tend to abuse seafood
whenever i am cringed by the suggested floral pattern
whenever i dare not see the benefits of cesarean...
and i just can't see islamophobia fitting the irrational
rationality of other conscripted phobias...
          poor choice of Greek to be honest...
                      i think they're referring to:
a subtler suggestion, minus the crusading empowerment
that's yet to be honed on...
                        well **** yeah...
once you've actually a philosophy book,
   you'll become immune to any writing advice...
                you'll actually become immune
to advice for writers.... bhy writers... because you'll
realise their opinions are disputable and therefore
disposable... because they forgot that the one thing
that democracy hates... is its subversion,
                     art is the foremost stealth-seeker of
despotism in democracy... because it simply loathes
plagiarism... art is despotism in democracy...
               and it knows it... it's just too "shy" (aah...
wee wee poo poo) to admit it...
                 from what i learned from athos?
the best advice? is to not give any advice.
                    athos? alex dumas, the three musketeers.
the moment you finish a philosophy book,
a creative writing workshop and a quote by
Hemingway will seems as nothing but a bad dream -
these quotes come from people who abhorred
the mere concept of spelling, due and through
it being an "inconvenience"...
this is from people who suggested you were always
an incapable narrator without a daydream to
escape into... these writers began sounding like
your english teachers...
              then again... is sexualising problem better
than abstracting them? personally, and
without due approval: and all the more happy for
such a circumstance having been presented for me...
            we know the sane are too numerous
because they are allowed to make too much sense
of their dreams...
                     i contend anorexia, not as an eating disorder,
but as a disorder of a culinary aversion toward
          sexualising non-culinary objects in culinary terms...
or adding cream to the phallus or melted chocolate
to the ****...
                 i find that certain culinary objects are
oversexualised...
   and this is the norm: that extends into what
quantifies as the norm, for the norm is always
a quantifiable parameter than a qualifiable
      exchange, since an exchange never appreciates
     a qualification, or a grocer's worth of norm
for a conversation of two quid's worth of earning
equates to 20 tomatoes...
    we have assumed to know it all
whereas we are congregating in a plughole
     of close proximity prefixes, i.e.
re-: reflect, reflection, reflexion, reflex,
  reiteration, reimagining, retraction, reaffirmation...
    it's a tsunami of language / lounging with too
many images... it's "lounging" with too many images...
it's the proximity of prefixes... twinned with
the opportunism of the genus of synonyms creating
a deaf-shaft of faking rhetoric...
     i still placard the whole circumstance
a dance of vowels, or the unforced deviation of
keeping up an aesthetic....
                     no, i can't claim schooling,
because i don't want to claim being indoctrinated...
     and perhaps my Freudian is a little-bit
copper-wired / ageist...
                  but isn't food for the anorexic
  a bit like turning a ****** object into food
          for the ennobled aggregational stereotype?
the jokes aren't jokes for anorexics...
  the cucumber is doubly manifest
                         as both edible, as both sexually
arrogant... and thirdly as "inspiration" for
an architectural project...
                      oh **** fame... little albino blondie
can **** on my testicular cancer for all i care...
               and say the bulge was: like
******* on a cowish ******...
                                      i like puppets anyway,
cos i'm a bit laxed in that way...
                         for all the things that might be
given, of the few things that can't be translated
from house or car, or a wife and 3.4 children statistic:
personal integrity.
        obviously certain people can only hum along
to the achievements of a zenith's worth of a house
and a car and a dog...
                            personal integrity is almost too much
for them, such "essential" components of being
a human rather than doing a human reaction
       later involve the cliche of the ultimate gamble...
and we all know how humans love to gamble...
well... few ever manage to gamble the stake of:
a leap of faith... and we all know how Nolan's inception
         ends...           that's me seeing the film a few years later...
      so how does man, the gambler fair
   when he's asked to gamble with the odds
  leap ratioed against a stumble?
                                      numbered is that 10:1?
it's just fascinating that vowels are the sole assured
                        proprietor of "dyslexia",
or as i care to mind: even with a language proficiency...
and tongue-tied waggle that's excusable for
anyone ready to write something down.
      i can appreciate being an individual,
but i can't celebrate it... i'll only utilise my individuality
to create a new plateau, a norm, the most
distinguished liberalism of my individualism;
     i will only utilise my individuality to create a new
norm - and anything that comes against it:
can burn in hell.

When Zuo Fen woke day was well advanced into the Horse hour. In her darkened room a frame of the brightest light pulsed around the shuttered window. A breeze of scents from her herb garden brought sage, motherwort and lovage to cleanse the confined air, what remained of his visit, those rare aromatic oils from a body freed from its robes. Turning her head into the pillow that odour of him embraced her once more as in the deepest and most prolonged kiss , when with no space to breathe passion displaces reason in the mind.
 
The goat cart had brought him silently to her court in the Tiger hour, as was his custom in these summer days when, tired of his women’s attention, he seeks her company. In the vestibule her maid leaves a bowl of fresh water scented with lemon juice, a towel, her late uncle’s comb, a salve for his hands. Without removing his shoes, an Emperor’s privilege, he enters her study pausing momentarily while Xi-Lu removes himself from the exalted presence, his long tail *****, his walk provocative, dismissive. Zuo Fen is at her desk, brush in hand she finishes a copy of  ‘A Rhapsody for my Lord’. She has submitted herself to enter yet again that persona of the young concubine taken from her family to serve that community from which there seems no escape.
 
I was born in a humble, isolated, thatched house,
And was never well-versed in writing.
I never saw the marvellous pictures of books,
Nor had I heard of the classics of ancient sages.
I am dim-witted, humble and ignorant,
But was mistakenly placed in the Purple Palace . . .
 
He loves to hear her read such words, to imagine this fragile girl, and see her life at court described in the poet’s elegant characters. Zuo Fen’s scrolls lie on his second desk. Touching them, as he does frequently, is to touch her, is to feel mystery of her long body with its disregard of the courtly customs of his many, many women; the soft hair on her legs, the deep forest guarding her hidden ***, her peasant feet, her long fingers with their scent of ink and herbs.
 
He kneels beside her, gradually opening his ringed hand wide on her gowned thigh, then closing, then opening. A habit: an affectation. His head is bent in an obeisance he has no need to make, only, as he desires her he does this, so she knows this is so. She is prepared, as always, to act the part, or be this self she has opened to him, in all innocence at first, then in quiet delight that this is so and no more.
 
‘A rhapsody for me perhaps?’
‘What does Liu Xie say? The rhapsody is a fork in the road . . .
‘ . . . a different line’, he interrupts and quotes,’ it describes people and objects. It pictures appearance with a brilliance akin to sculpture or painting.’
‘What is clogged and confined it invariably opens. It depicts the commonplace with unbounded charm.’
‘But the goal of the form is beauty well-ordered . . . . as you are, dearest poet.’
‘You spoilt the richness of Lui Xie’s ending . . .’
‘I would rather speak of your beauty than Xie’s talk of gardening.’
‘Weeding is not gardening my Lord.’
 
And with that he summons her to read her rhapsody whilst his hands part her gown . . .
 
Over the years since he took her maidenhead, brusquely, with the impatience of his station, and she, on their second encounter deflowered him in turn with her poem about the pleasure due to woman, they had become as one branch on the same tree. She sought to be, and was, his equal in the prowess of scholastic memory. She had honed such facility with the word: years of training from her father in the palace archives and later in the mind games invented by and played with her brother. Then, as she entered womanhood and feared oblivion in an arranged marriage, she invented the persona of the pale girl, a fiction, who, with great gentleness and poetry, guided the male reader into the secrets of a woman’s ****** pleasure and fulfilment. In disguise, and with her brother’s help, she had sought those outside concubinage - for whom the congress of the male and female is rarely negotiable. She listened and transcribed, then gradually drew the Emperor into a web of new experience to which he readily succumbed, and the like of which he could have hardly imagined. He wished to promote her to the first lady of his Purple Chamber. She declined, insisting he provide her with a court distant from his palace rooms, yet close to the Zu-lin gardens, a place of quiet, meditation and the study of astronomy.
 
But today, this hot summer’s day, she had reckoned to be her birthday. She expected due recognition for one whose days moved closer to that age when a birthday is traditionally and lavishly celebrated. Her maid Mei-Lim would have already prepared the egg dishes associated with this special day. Her brother Zuo-Si may have penned a celebratory ode, and later would visit her with his lute to caress his subtle words of invention.
 
Your green eyes reflect a world apart
Where into silence words are formed dew-like,
Glistening as the sun rises on this precious day.
As a stony spring washes over precious jade,
delicate fishes swim in its depths
dancing to your reflection on the cool surface.
No need of strings, or bamboo instruments
When mountains and waters give forth their pure notes . . .
 
Her lord had left on her desk his own Confucian-led offering, in brushstrokes of his time-stretched hand, but his own hand nevertheless, and then in salutation the flower-like character leh (joy)
 
‘Wheresoever you go, go with all your heart’.
 
Meanwhile Xi-Lu stirred on the coverlet reminding Zuo Fen that the day was advancing and he had received no attention or conversation. It was whispered abroad that this lady spoke with her cat whom each afternoon would accompany his mistress on a walk through the adjacent gardens. It was true, Zuo Fen had taught Xi-Lu to converse in the dialect of her late mother’s province, but that is another story.
 
Lying on her back, eyes firmly shut, Zuo Fen surveyed the past year, a year of her brother’s pilgrimage to the Tai Mountains, his subsequent disappearance at the onset of winter, her Lord’s anger then indulgence as he allowed her to seek Zuo Si’s whereabouts. She thought of her sojourn in Ryzoki, the village of stone, where she discovered the blind servant girl who had revealed not only her brother’s whereabouts but her undying love for this strange, ungainly, uncomfortably ugly man who, with the experience gained from his sister’s persistent research had finally learned to love and be loved in equal measure for his gentle and tender actions. And together, their triumph: in ‘summoning the recluse’, and not one alone but a community of five living harmoniously in caves of the limestone heights. Now returned they had worked in ever secret ways to serve their Emperor in his conflict against the war-lord Tang.
 
She now resolved to take a brief holiday from this espionage, her stroking of the Emperor’s mind and body, and those caring sisterly duties she so readily performed. She would remove herself and her maid to a forest cabin: to lie in the dry mottled grass of summer and listen to the rustle of leaves, the chatter of birds, the sounds of insects and the creak-crack of the forest in the summer heat. She would plan a new chapter in her work as a poet and writer: she would be the pale girl no longer but a woman of strength and confidence made beautiful by good fortune, wise management and a generosity of spirit. She needed to prepare herself for her Lord’s demise, when their joyful hours living the lives of Prince and Lady of Xiang, he with his stallion gathering galingales, she with her dreams of an underwater house, would no longer be. She would study the ways of the old. She would seek to learn how peace and serenity might overcome those afflictions of age and circumstance, and when it is said that love’s chemistry distils pure joy through the intense refinement of memory.

The gentle reaches of the late afternoon sun
I'd bathe in this light abundant reverie
Swaying breeze... Caressing the web we've spun
In the warmth of this amber coloured spree...

Shades of gold, stretch beyond observable measure
My vision could only take me so far
Shining through between the green and azure
As if the window of heaven left slightly ajar.

Swathed in the glow... Laying on a bed of green
Eyes closed... Under the blue that spanned forever
Feast for my senses thus honed keen
Relishing the lingering touches of her radiating amber.

She's finally dipping, taking all of her light...
She'll sink behind the horizon, descending gracefully
I'd still remember all through my night
That amber...
                   *Amber is the colour of her energy.

From youth, not unlike the love
I received from my family, I surmised,
that extended love might be everywhere.
With artless, open arms and heart,
I embraced this simple notion.
In time, sadly this childish wish
was honed to a hard truth by maturation.

Friends and loves come
and go, fleeting in heart,
and committed soul.
Unreliably, flowing in and ebbing out,
like deep undulations of an ocean,
all too often with sneaker waves
that pull us under. Breakers pushing
our ship onto the rocks, in a sea
of shallow unfulfilled expectations.
Encounters becoming disappointment,
with too many frogs kissed.

My educated suspicion is,
beyond our family of blood kin,
Faithful canine love is the only
other "truly committed devotion"
we are likely to get.

In the end, that may well be enough.
Perspective wisdom can be a bitter lesson.

Trish had an uncanny ability to pick all the wrong ones. Like a friend once told her, “You always try to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear!”  If there were a hundred available guys in a room, she always managed to zone in on the worst one there, not the kindest one, not the one with the greatest character or honor. It's like she had a special gift for finding a man—a cursed one—yet she had only herself to blame—not  fate for it—like she tried to point her finger at for her troubles. In this regard, Trish was often her own worst enemy. And none of her bad experiences seemed to deter her from her defeating patterns, for it seemed that having a ****** choice of a man in her life was better than having no man at all.

A Friday night without any date was something she desperately wanted to avoid. At the age of fifty-six, trying to meet men was getting old, as old as she was feeling, lately.

At Pete’s Place, a local bar down at the end of her street, and two blocks over, Trish could at least feel like she was among friends. It was an old hangout that always felt like a safe haven to turn to, familiar territory that she could call her own turf, her home away from home. Often, Trish encountered regulars, down-to-earth faces who have been going to the family-like establishment as long as or longer than she has. Drinking really was not her thing, not more than one or two, at the most. But if anything, if worst came to worst, she could say she was not home alone and left out while the world seemed to go on its own merry way without her.  

Pete’s Place was far from a glamorous hangout, but it had a cozy charm to it that made it irresistible to Trish. In the back were a pool table and a dartboard that provided some harmless enjoyment. With a couple of flat screen TVs, there usually was some sports game to watch. And every other Saturday, there was a DJ conducting Karaoke that always attracted a regular crowd. Trish couldn’t sing a note, but she loved to watch and cheer everybody else on. She just felt so welcome here, so at home, that even if she felt depressed or lonely, the atmosphere eventually lifted her heaviness of heart.  

Entering the bar this time, Trish hardly saw a familiar face at all—that was except for the bartender, Henry, who worked this job since forever. For a Friday night, business seemed surprisingly slow. There was only an older couple watching a baseball game that was at Pete’s Place, a couple that she did not recognize.

“Where is everybody?” Trish asked Henry.

Henry smiled. “Hey, Trish! Good to see ya! Yeah, it is like a ghost town tonight, isn’t it? I guess there are too many good things goin’ on down in Buffalo. I think there are some big boat races goin’ on. And, for sure, there is the jazz festival”.

“Well, I’m here, Henry! Look out, everybody! Let the fun begin!” she said jokingly as she sat herself up at one of the barstools. She looked around. Even the wait staff wasn’t around, obviously gone home early and not needed.

“Would have been nice to go somewhere fun like that. I mean the jazz festival. I like jazz”, Trish said to Henry.

Henry was trying to stay busy by wiping down the bar, cleaning every nook and cranny behind the counter. “You should have called up one of your girlfriends to go over there. I am sure someone would have gone with ya”.

Trish rolled her eyes. “What girlfriends? They are often too busy with their own husbands or men in their life to care about what poor, old Trish Urbine wants to do!”

Henry felt bad for her.  The more she frequented Pete’s Place, the more he knew she was all alone, was in between having some man in her life. And, lately, she was coming quite often to the bar by herself.

“You are not old, Trish! Hell, I am older than you!” Henry exclaimed.

Trish just frowned, not convinced at all by what Henry said. “Not old?” she asked. She pulled a small mirror out of her purse and looked at herself, giving herself the inspection of a drill sergeant. “That is a joke! Look at those bags under my eyes. Look at those crow’s feet, for pity’s sake!  Look at that droopy skin in my neck! Horrible! I am trying to save up for a face lift. I really need it! Been needing it for a while now!”

Henry shook his head. “All you women are alike. My wife does the same, **** thing, the same putdowns to herself. Says she’s fat. Says she’s getting old and ugly. Says this and says that. But let me tell you Trish, after thirty-six years of marriage, I still see her as my sweetheart. I’d have it no other way than with my Bernadette. He patted his belly and added, "Hell, look at me. Believe it or not, with my job, I don’t even drink that much beer. But look at the gut I am getting”.  

Trish scoffed at what he said. Henry looked nearly as lean as he did the first time she met him. He was just being nice. .Under better circumstances, she would have found what Henry said as endearing and charming. To say he still loved his wife as his “sweetheart” was incredibly adorable and rare.

“Hey”, Henry said. “Enough of my jibber jabber. Pardon my manners. What can I get for ya, dear?”

“Just a Diet Coke for me, Henry. I have to watch the calories myself. You know me—don’t want to get frumpy, lumpy and dumpy. At least not more than I am!” Trish smiled. She thought that her self disparaging remarks were a cute way of getting her point across with humor, but Henry couldn’t see anything funny about it.

He filled her glass of pop from the tap and handed it over to her. “Hey, how’s that daughter of yours doing? Is she still living in Albany?”  

Trish cupped her hands up to her forehead and rested her head on them. “She is still in Albany, but she might as be on the moon for all we ever talk to each other”. She looked up at Henry and he could see the frustration written all over her face.

“I didn’t mean to upset you”, he said.

“Oh, you didn’t”, she returned. “I appreciate you asking, but you know the situation with Patti and I. It is either that we are at each other’s throat or we just don’t talk. Truth be told, we haven’t really got along since she was a girl. Once she hit those teenage years—oh, man they were a nightmare! I wouldn’t relive those years for anything!”

Henry rested his elbows up on the bar counter. “Oh, I know what you mean!. My second son, my boy, Steven, and I had a terrible time once he hit about fifteen. Man, him and I bucked heads all the time. Yes, indeed! It could get ugly, and it sure as heck did! But now I’m proud of him! In Afghanistan, fighting for his country—that is somethin’ that makes me glad! Now, I say that I couldn’t ask for better sons. I’m proud of him—of all four of my boys as good, strong men that they are!”  

Trish sipped on her coke, a hurtful look upon her face while reflecting on her daughter, a daughter that she named after herself.  Both were named Patricia, but the same name did not mean two peas in a pod, actually far from it. Trish definitely preferred her name, short and sophisticated—so she had liked to think—and the name, Patti, seemed cute and carefree. But Patti seemed anything but cute and carefree, not like she was when she was very little. But the name stuck with her, as she preferred to be called

“Yeah, but Patti still lives in the past” Trish said. “She still blames me for everything wrong in her life. Nothing has changed, and I am still the bad guy. Trish thought for a second. “Well, her dad, too. He’s bad, too, in her eyes. She always says she raised herself, that she never had real parents. That’s crap because I raised her and I was around—unlike her useless father!”

“Sounds bitter on her part”, Henry agreed. He thought to say that Trish sounded a bit like that, too, but he did not think it was his place to say it out loud.

“Bitter is right”, Trish said in disgust.  

Bartenders have always been seen as good listeners, like the working man’s counselor. People, like Trish, often came in for a drink to try to forget their troubles, and wanting to lean on a trusty soul in need. Henry has seen plenty of this in his twenty-four years on the job, and he has honed the skill quite well, the skill of providing a listening ear. Sometimes he had good advice, but he knew he was no psychiatrist.    

Frustrated, Trish went on. “I mean who else was there for her? When her dad and I divorced, she wanted to stay with him just to spite me! But would he have her? No, he only wanted to be with his under aged, ***** wife!

“And who else would do what I did? When my step dad died, and my mom couldn’t handle my little brother anymore, who was it that took him in? It was me! He was eleven and I was almost twenty-two and living with my boyfriend. I helped to finish raising him, kept him at my place right up to the day that he was grown—and more! And I did it because it needed doing, and nobody else was stepping in! When my sister moved to Colorado, and one of her kids, my nephew, Craig, wanted to stay here to graduate here from high school, I agreed to take him in for two years until he finished high school. And yet I am such a bad, selfish person in Patti’s opinion! It makes me sick to think of how she sees me as her mother!”

Henry poured her a refill of pop in her half empty glass. He knew that Trish was on bad terms with her daughter, that their relationship was shaky and strained. Patti was Trish’s only child, and it troubled him that they didn’t have much of a relationship. Yet Trish did not need pity. She needed to refocus and find a new direction. Henry knew that she has needed a new direction for quite a while now.    

“Well, you know I love my daughter”, he replied. “I know your heart must be achin’ bad—real bad. I couldn’t imagine my life without Jocelyn or me not talkin’ to her. She’s the apple of my eye, ya know!  And my boys know it and get that she’s special to me—Daddy’s little girl. With four older brothers, she has always been outnumbered. And myself and the Mrs. never expected her, neither. One—two—three—four, the boys all came right in a row! She came way after, Ben, the last one—a big surprise, I tell ya! But I was tickled pink and couldn’t have been happier to have my little girl”.  Henry smiled warmly, and added, “No matter how old she gets, she will always be my little girl.”

Trish’s mood wasn’t influenced by what Henry said, not for the good. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

Henry looked a bit embarrassed. “Oh, I ain’t tryin’ to rub it in to ya! No, no Trish!  I’m just sayin’ you should see Patti as someone special, no matter what it is like now. She still is your daughter. And ya lover her! You know ya do! Try to get through to her. Keep on tryin’ and don’t give up hope.”

Trish didn’t look convinced by his little pep talk, so he said, “One day she will have her own children, and realize she will make mistakes, too. You sure will want to see those grandkids. Trust me! I live to see all of mine! ”

Patti sniffed at that comment, putting forth a laugh that seemed so phony and snarky. This behavior was not like her at all, not the bubbly Trish that Henry used to see coming into the bar. “Grandchildren? Are you kidding me? Patti wants nothing to do with men! She avoids them like the plague! Says she doesn’t want to end up like me…married and divorced four times…she says there is no excuse for it. But she uses me all the time as an excuse! I think she is just scared to death of relationships with guys!”

“I thought you were married three times?” Henry asked. He had a surprised look on his face, but then he tried to think differently. “But I don’t want to **** in on your life. It’s your business, not mine to judge”.

“No, Henry, it’s ok. My last marriage lasted only seven weeks”. She turned red in the face now, but she wanted to set it straight. “Patti thinks it is disgusting that I married all those times. My last husband tried to clear out my bank account, and I left him. Patti says she will never marry. She won’t touch a man with a ten foot pole to save her life!”

She paused as Henry stared intently at her, listening. “She does not want to end up like me”, she added, her voice throaty. Tears welled up in her eyes.  

Patti was the product of Trish’s first marriage to a man named Earl Colbert. When Patti was six, her father divorced her mother. Since then, Patti had seen plenty of men come and go. In between her other three husbands, there were too many boyfriends to even keep track of. Trish was also engaged twice, but the engagements were eventually broken off.    

She sat in silence as Henry was still thinking of the right thing to say to comfort her. Soon, two young couples had entered through the door, dispersing the air of awkwardness, and stopping the conversation between Henry and Trish.  Henry continued to clean up around the bar as he waved to them and welcomed their presence. One of the guys came up and ordered a pitcher of beer before joining his friends at a table.

It was no more than a few minutes later that another customer approached inside Pete’s Place. It was Jake. Trish rolled her eyes at Henry. He was a regular here, too, like she was, and about the same age as her.

Jake immediately came up to Trish and put his arm around her. “Buy you a drink, darlin’?” he asked. His breath already smelled of alcohol.  

“Oh, Jake, get away!” Trish scolded him. “You know I don’t accept drinks from married men, so move on!” She waved her hand in the air to clear the bothersome odor of his ***** away from her.

Jack just laughed, and moved to the other end of the bar, his usual spot. Henry kept his calm although he did not like Jake acting like a fool to Trish, or to any of the women who came here. He had to do his duty and serve Jake, but if he had his way the guy would be just a step away from being told to leave. Henry always kept a close eye on how much Jake was drinking, and he often cut him off when it seemed he had his share.

“Whisky, Henry”, Jake ordered. They both knew the routine.

With his whisky in hand, Jake smirked at Trish and asked, “How come you ain’t at that big jazz festival downtown?”  

“How come you ain’t?” she echoed him, sarcastically

“Cuz I don’t have a sweet lady to go with me and keep my company”. He winked at her, and downed a gulp of whisky.

“Oh, you mean like your—wife!” Trish said.  Jake and Trish often bantered like this to each other. “You will never change, Jake. You are a rude and obnoxious flirt, and you ought to be ashamed!”

Jake just laughed her off.  “Sweetie, my wife knows I’m a big flirt. She’s OK with it! She says ‘as long as you are peeking and not seeking, who cares what you do!’”

The two young couples that came in a while ago overheard Jake’s conversation and started to crack up in laughter. It seemed that he was the entertainment for a lackluster evening at the bar, a court jester of sorts. Trish looked at the four, young faces that were laughing at her expense, glanced at Henry in silent agreement that Jake was an idiot, and quickly turned red in the face.

“Jake, shut your big mouth!” Henry intervened. “You lie as much as you belt them down!”  When Jake was more sober, he seemed pretty reasonable, but he was nauseating when he was on a drinking binge.

Henry exited into a room behind the bar for a moment. Jake whispered loudly to Trish, like an impish, little boy who knew he might get caught, but loved the thrill of it. “Psst. Hey, Trish! Look! My wife’s no fun at all! Won’t go out with me no more. The festival is going on all weekend. Just give me your number and I’ll call you tomorrow and pick you up to take you there”.

Trish pretended like she did not hear him, still rattled up a bit, but trying her best to hide it, and Jake soon devoted his mind to his drink.

She turned herself around in the barstool and pretended to watch the baseball game. The scene in the room was still practically the same way since she first arrived. Only now there was an edgier atmosphere with the four younger people in it. The older couple was still sitting together in the corner, intent on watching the ball game. The two younger couples were drinking down their pitcher of beer and talking away. One of the young man had his arm around his girlfriend, gently caressing her back, and the other young couple, that was sitting across from them was holding hands.  

In longing, Trish looked on at the young couples. How she m

She comes to me every night...
When all is asleep with stars lit yonder.
Comes to me with subtle might
Peeking fiendishly from darkness's cover

Await such time she'd choose to show
Await the chance to finally take.
Ready to pounce like a well tensioned bow
Arrow-like talons, ever honed to stake.

Awake or asleep, she would come without fail.
Creep is her gait; this shadow clad figure.
Always a ***** in my impervious mail.
Claiming her wants with ferocious fervour.

Deemed to be strong, easier to succumb.
Don't fight...don't struggle... Don't call for aid...
Just wait and will yourself numb
She'd come regardless of prayers that's said.

She was here with me last night
In bed, I stared at a being that's faceless...
And my heart wrenched tight.
Gripping and feeding me senseless...

Soon as she came, she left but not before
Siphoning the good and replacing with dread...
Stole was what she did; left me wanting more...
Once deed is done, into the dark she fled.

I know her all too well,
Nocturnal guest that I unknowingly invite
Her intentions to incite, not quell
Send me spiralling through emotional blight.

Day will recede, making room for dark
She'll come; swift and without sound.
She'll arrive majestic; inflicting her mark
I'll wait for her, ready and unbound.

Looking forward to her return
This silent foe whom I find familiar.
With every touch I cringe and burn
Oh secret friend whom I'm beginning to savour...

She is synonymous with various names
Each would bear the likeness of semblance
Let fly her cloak of not dissimilar aims
Endearingly I call her...,

Despondence...

I love a good debate,
[science mixed with illusion]
and this year was no exception:
the debate on the best shapes for a kite
from design implementation, inception and execution

some sturdy string and industrial-strength glue
the machinations of whether to use plywood or bamboo
and of course built by your own fair hand
such was the intensity of discussion it continued
with an after-lunch stroll on the beach, where the uncles
drew their prize-winning geometry
with a primitive stick
in the sand

a question on the mathematics of aerodynamics aside
its currently a battle of the cyclic quadrilaterals
and documented film of it successfully tested and tried;
years of perfection honed by the skills of Fatherhood
to know instinctively the difference
between the brilliance of genius
and the borderline
just plain good

If nothing else has come from this
I now
know
[so as not to lose]

K = p/q over 2
or
K = ab – sin Ø

[are the formulas to use]

Novus Ordo Seclorum [43]

All Seeing Eye,
in all ways always has It’s all seeing eye on me,
& you might think that in a way that makes me paranoid,
but in all actually it makes me much more comfortable if anything,
because I’ve got nothing to hide in all honesty,
even though there’s two sides to me like I’m Siamese,
& I’m buzzing like a drunken honed in honeybee,
& I see everything even when drinking absinthe as an absent absentee,

'cause I was told that I may hold all that I see & all that I see is everything,
because all of me at any time is capable of seeing anything,

just like the All Seeing Eye that keeps it's eye on me,

honestly honesty is still the best policy,
see even though they still attempt to dilute these truths by telling lies,
I'm still able to describe these truths successfully,
through the modus operandi that I choose to use at any given time,

see these gifts are given & received,
with a well thought of methodology that’s made of modesty,
same mold that was honed by the greatest minds this world's every known,
not mold as in fungus but mold as in the template of successful artistry,

though I must admit when I first started writing scripts I was a bit diffident,
which is different than indifference but anyways either way,
I one day realized the significance within it's magnificence,
& chose to show it since I wrote it so it could be given away,

but I made one promise,
as a poet on that day,
& that was to be modest,
but also have the confidence to not let doubt get in my way,
but it's hard to stay modest when you've written more modified sonnets,
than any other literary artist that's living today,

plus your words are some of the hottest & the girl you've got is a Goddess,
& you’ve made possible what was once thought to be impossible,
as an apostle who's gospel is God-sent in the words of rivals & bibles,
not as a disciple of Jesus Christmas but a disciple of this Divine Existence,

& that's why I see them trying to boost my pride,
& why at the same time I try to resist it,
because I promised to stay modest plus if I'm to be honest,
it wasn't me that made this all happen it was the poetry that did it,

& all of a sudden in a flash & in this instance,
my instinct tells me that it's possible they’ve spotted me,
& it's time for me to flee so I get lost so I can write more life lines,
instead of staying here risking getting caught & writing my own eulogy,

as I observe them like stars in Astronomy,
& observe their behavior like signs in astrology,
as an Anthropologist not an Apologist I observe them,
them this system they live in & all of this honestly,
including this Bureaucracy which is actually a hyper inflated Hypocrisy,
but honestly their mockery of our honesty doesn’t really bother me,
because unconditional Love is my only philosophy,
like Spinoza laying the basics of ethics in the literary form of poetry,
as I serve sermons religiously & responsibly to break the monotony,
& build bridges to doorways to construct my own autonomy,
changing the whole social topography & emotional geography of this society,
by writing the autobiography of our collective ecology & all of it’s prophecies,

I pay dues do the work & the math so in due time I can study Deuteronomy,

I am a prodigy,
& also an oddity,
that will not be brought down or bought off,
by Their Demonistic Mock Democracy,
armed with a picture perfect memory & an unlimited supply of energy,
I expose these moments from dark to light like photography,
from the Dark Room to the Light of Day,
it’s all part of our odyssey whether or not it's all done consciously,

see my conscience sees,

that The All Seeing Eye,
in all ways always has It’s all seeing eye on me,
& you might think that in a way that makes me paranoid,
but in all actually it makes me much more comfortable if anything,
because I’ve got nothing to hide in all honesty,
even though there’s two sides to me like I’m Siamese,
& I’m buzzing like a drunken honed in honeybee,
& I see everything even when drinking absinthe as an absent absentee,

'cause I was told that I may hold all that I see & all that I see is everything,
because all of me at any time is capable of doing & seeing anything,

just like the All Seeing Eye that keeps it's eye on me,

feeling,
alright with the All Seeing Eye on me,
seeking,
all night for some sobriety from this anxiety,
reaching,
a point of enlightenment that shines vibrantly,
teaching,
illuminations of thought that soak into the subconscious silently,

finally, I’m free,

& as I rise above the clouds I see,
the All Seeing Light above watching me,
& that’s alright with me I give myself up willingly,
traded my gifts for a gift card now I’m on a 24/7 worldwide shopping spree,

finally, I’m free, & finally, I see,

that the All Seeing Eye,
has it’s all seeing eye on me,
illuminating all of the darkness,
so that we can all shine on vibrantly,

finally, finally,
I am, you are, we are free!

∆ Aaron LaLux ∆

from The Holy Trilogy Vol. 2: Mandalas
available worldwide here: www.amazon.com/dp/1721134158

In the divet between mountains
Resides a wooden cabin – ostensibly an amalgamation of the scape
Adroitly - I - quondam female warrior flit
Down massive (ancient) hand-laid, hand-cut carved stone steps
Bounding from contingent step onto the dense pad of turned soil
Tacit compliance between gravity and soil holds footprints bound
A compressed deflating crescendo as pace ignites with bounds

Cadences of protuberant wildflowers and grasses erupt from swollen terra
A winsome chromatic menagerie, dispersed in ecstatic fistfuls
A venerably ancient ritual

My nascent clandestine vocation
Personally meted out - a beatification for my provisional sanctuary

Along glacier-fed stream
Lissome fingers shadow inert stalks –plucking dormant beginnings from their desiccated ligaments

I am austere and unadorned save for a festoon of pyrite flecks trailing my semblance
Residual gilding from my ante-meridian swim taken after requisite gathering of wild blackberries, goose berries, and rhubarb along oft-tamped path

The sun, nestling into its requisite apex endorsed my completion
I reclined into the hassock of soil, feeling the elements settle about with an embossment of my form
Imposing verdure arched subtly as compressed soil beckoned hyperbolic flux

As I lay within the basilica of opulent living columns replete with comestible bounty
Lingering dew honed inflections of sacrosanct petrichor in unison with piquant clover
Wild purple clover buds saccharinely tinted and inundated nestled nerves in mine cribriform plate

Birds pitched and galloped through the frond tips and beyond in the lapis expanse
Frequently snatching damselfly’s and assemblages of midges from their ephemeral drift

Auspicious rays transcended stippled diaphanous gravid clouds
Light inundated ether entered humbly into the cathedral oculus
Pyrite speckled terrain beneath, and my bare gilded form above
Cast a refracted aura about my sanctuary

Precipitously the elusive vaporous embankment distended further
Ashen atmospheric correspondence inaugurated liquescent sustenance to my mountain abode

And I -
Lingered beneath the descending gobbets, curls furled in a puddle
Fresh topsoil cupping my corporal topographic contours
Pressing blackberries into my mouth between smiles

they (yeah, the paranoid pronoun, esp. in how it's used for abstract coordinates, concretely? conformists) decided it was easier to fill a psychiatrist's gob with my presence, and for psychiatrists to pay the mortgage with someone who they termed schizophrenic, forgetting the fact that the person in question was bilingual - odd how humanists confuse bilingualism with schizophrenia, maybe a coin flip later and we'd get biphrenic? that's pushing it, but it just might work to describe an atom evolved into a human form... basically in two places at the same time: confederacy of archaeological theology - and by being in two places, behaving differently in each stated sphere of observation... that's it though! theology translates as archaeology in science, excavating the designation of the argument of the spider and the spiderweb, the perfect yoga instructor, one position fits all... because scientific positivism is dead... it's dead... we're experiencing a transition into scientific negativism, mainly because there's a plumber's conundrum of a blocked fact-machine... which turned out to be a fat-machine... we're just hearing the same ****, over and over again.

i never knew it, but when humanism was born
it came across the challenges of
Darwinism (Aristotle's footnote),
with all due respect for humanism
though,
             humanism gave us
the most apathetic formulation of
any faith at all...
and do you see a rebellion happening
anywhere concerning this?
i see a bunch of ****-naked Amazonian
nomads singing the huh? huh?! song...
esp. when they see safety-hats and
tractors... me? i live in the
outer suburbs of a Greek city-state...
when you're walking down the
street and see a bare chested driver
of a tractor, and a loser (me) drinking beer
while the police pass by in their cruiser
and don't give a ****... well...
welcome to the Fe (iron) Fe Fe feral land...
(almost a sneeze, but not quiet)
metro-****** pinkies anywhere?
no... root that **** into your brains
you urban wankers... stay there,
rot... keep up the debauchery of
Beckton's recycling centre...
oh sure, keep the theatres open,
with Simon & Garfunkel applause of song...
like ballerinas and fat operas needed
an exercise regime...
Darwinism is brutal enough,
it's brutal, it's not pretty,
looking at it from a creationist perspective
you'll only get brutality from it,
only an Zimbabwe born englishman would
care to champion it... oh look!
a monkey ******* a ferret!
i cried today... my female cat was inspired
when a squirrel started doing gymnastics
on my garden fence, one paw tucked against
its chest... i haven't seen a squirrel in my
garden for a while, i've shown her a hedgehog
once, but a squirrel? try catching a squirrel!
it's like catching the ******* of a mosquito
wearing boxing gloves... or Zeno...
i cried my eyes out, by a squirrel...
acrobatic rats that hate throngs...
the simplest of things bring the greatest of joys,
and a consistency in thinking about
death make the simple assurances of mortality
so much more appreciated...
of course i think about death... why wouldn't
i? so this homeless man has a tent...
they're dragging them in, he says:
i haven't done anything wrong...
the military-industrial complex isn't secular at all...
psychiatrists are the complex's priests...
they're looking for subjects to ensure they earn
while giving oral *** to pharmaceutical companies...
and that's the *cul de sac truth -
no, wait... humanism's religious doctrine is
Darwinism, can't deviate from that,
keep a kettle and a sun on the same timescale,
i'm Caribbean lazy though...
you with beer and joint, me with beer and another
and another beer and an Apache echo impression
of echoing-yawn,
we have evolved past mating calls of animals...
all we have are warring calls... la la la for simplicity...
or in verse of new Zealander Haka:
                           ****, have no funny lyrics...
where was Darwinism when mating calls became
subtle and we exchanged mating calls for warring chants?
where was Darwinism then?
you telling me i have to own a watch, a mansion,
a nice car and enough money for a child's private
education to make one at all? pretty subtle
and all the more less colourful... you can ask me:
where was god when the Holocaust happened...
i'd reply: where was a decent joke?
apparently Moses died from laughter...
now i'm stuck with having to proof read
the first print of my book... that's going to be
agonising... i hate rereading my work...
and aren't we in a standing still position,
on an escalator, or the journalists are gullible,
i mean they're worse than pigs, they're eating
regurgitated facts... they're the ones that always
end up saying: if it ain't broken, break it...
that's their magnum opus fixation, and
the recycling bin... that's what they're there for,
i bet you a hundred quid that Putin's tears
would have turned into diamonds if they fell
on St. Basil's onion domes...
all these ****-incubating-real-emotion
calculators of the English parliament are worth
a psychiatric sketch show... punchline?
you ain't ever ever getting out, ha ha!
Darwinism is cruel, and people sort of like
the whips of a static history, sometimes they come back
to the 17th century and make a television program,
sometimes they have a chance encounter
to cite something from the only century that can
be experienced with anatomical dissection skill:
namely the 20th, or to be accurate, the 2nd half
of the 20th century... most of the time they haven't
the foggiest about history these days,
they're either electron-clouds of electron-orbits,
ping-pong between these two conceptions...
they're always pro-neutral (proton-neutron
centre) - and indeed the tetragrammaton invested
in Ke$ha... ka-ching! sz sh sharpener of wit...
got to love tactical pop, or the caveman ontological
obituary of buying alkaline batteries...
i bought alkaline batteries last year,
which technically makes me a caveman...
compact disks make me a caveman...
books make me a caveman... i'm a ******* caveman!
drag my woman by her hair...
what a great Darwinism provides,
we're all comparatively stone-age...
i love how we just made all history between that
into cf. snippets, and how the caveman attitude
is supposedly a ****** pill to supercharge our
attitudes into beastly thumps and gurgles and
elbows up the **** thrills...
Darwinism is cruel, Darwinism is currently the
theology of humanism... but once upon a time
the religious aspect (or in humanism's behaviour prescription)
was ascribed to one hour on Sunday...
now we're sorta stuck in a church, 24 / 7...
now we're all our own ritual makers...
we have the holy communions of buying a certain
type of coffee in a shop, or it's called curry Friday
and Saturday takeaway randomisation,
gathering the ready-meals Sunday to Thursday...
everyone having the busiest of lives...
if religion is dead, then i must be a nun.
i don't think Darwinism actually attacked theology...
some people are proper pranksters with
the notion that Darwinism attacked theology,
some get to play Jesus in some biblical theme park...
what i think Darwinism damaged, primarily,
is history... if journalists keep spanning
historical references from here & now and
that greatest ontological excuse: caveman once,
Chanel model no. 2, we'll surely sell many
more shaving equipment tools and sanity pills as we go
along into 24h / insomnia society...
me? i'm out... i'll be keeping my imagination
honed toward the Faroe Islands, along with my sanity.

Inaction in action
A most frightening thing

Eyes flash from green to brown
Was that a smile or one of your cute frowns?
I can’t tell up from down
In this vacant hole

I feel like I am supposed to remember

Impact has dried up
Like a drought that makes farmers
Wonder if their crop ever did flourish
Or if the dust simply snuck into their heads
With paintbrushes and vivid imaginations
Of what fresh picked berries once tasted like

I want to run
Faster than ever to where I once was
To where my emotions began
To when a kiss was still intoxicating
And you smiled at clasped hands

Mirrors in my mind turn
Reflections of you blur
Engraved lessons I’ve learned

Were you ever my home?
I trace the walls of your character
Each knot and groove familiar
Reflexive fingertips
Gliding over walls as they turn inside out

I forgot what all this was about

Do I long for a light that once shown
Or just another culpable excuse
To regain the throne
My wishful thinking kingdom
Though my senses are honed
To both authenticity and mirage
I fear I am equally prone

Even so.

If…

If you were ever
Or still are
And we cross paths again
Or maybe for the first time

Kiss me with your brown eyes
Or were they green?
And I will try my best to recognize
A love I fear I’ve never seen

But I can’t muster pursuit when consciousness is stolen by a dream

Inaction in action
Is a most frightening thing

She opened the door of the gallery and there it was, there it lay, before her, nearly perfect: her exhibition. The opening was an hour or so away and there were, naturally, a few adjustments to make, but in essence it was right, and as she walked to the middle of the rectangular space (to survey the full effect ) she felt held by the quiet wonder of it all; that she had made all this and with ‘the quality control of nature’s accidents’. He’d written those words some years previous when a solo show was but a dream she would enter between sleep and wakefulness, when she would think of the west coast of Scotland and the poetry of its seashore, the infinite variety in the seashore strand between sand and sea. It was such natural accidents of form and transformation by nature’s hand that had guided her imagination into rightness and towards this exhibition.

At breakfast that morning she had come to the table dressed to greet her audience, and for the first time as a featured artist in a festival of some repute. She had felt the quiet joy of choosing the right combination of clothes to be the public person she had now become. He had loved the new dress she had bought to clothe her gallery persona. She had been conscious of his eyes following the lines this frock so generously drew around her body’s shape and form, the way the material fell across her *******, lay smoothly on her thighs.  It was a very grownup frock and with the jacket and scarf made her look purposeful, confident. His looking made such confidence possible, his admiration and what she could tell was that coming together of love and passion that, her being dressed in this formal way, so often evoked.

In the gallery she had worried over the lighting, climbed up the metal ladder with the fluffy green glove thoughtfully provided to enable those small adjustments of direction to be made on a hot spotlight. There were four large pieces flanking a corner that had embossed lines running across their surfaces, lines that needed oblique light to reveal the shadowing of this effect of swirls and marks of a retreating tide on sand.  Two smaller pieces needed rearranging; she’d placed them, late the evening before, in the wrong sequence. Poster boards were to be filled with her poster and put outside on the pavement by the gallery entrance. She opened the main door, a very green door with its top and bottom bolts and black-painted handle ring. The street outside was a welcoming mix of 18th and 19th C buildings, hardly one the same, the sort of three storey buildings that had simple plaques prominently placed into the brickwork from a distant past when proud builders would describe a structure’s use or ownership with a title and date. By ten o'clock this one-way street was lined with parked cars, but now there was little traffic. It was a quiet sunny morning in a market town.

‘Don’t mind the dog, ‘ he said. ‘He’s used to coming in here.’ It was a long-haired verging on the side of scruffy sort of dog, used to keeping its own counsel, probably used to being taken to exhibitions. ‘Just popping in,’ he said, this man who, and she couldn’t help noticing this, seemed to hold much in common with his dog; the long, but retreating on the forehead, hair, slightly scruffy from the want of a comb or a good brush (like his dog), he had dressed without much thought (because who dressed thoughtfully to walk a dog?), and that’s what he was doing, walking the dog and, seeing the Gallery open, thought he ought to look in.

Giving him her brightest smile, she embarked on performing the artist’s music of conversation, that score holding gentle melodies and welcoming harmonies. Although she had become quite practised in talking to her audience there was always the challenging inquiry that would catch her off guard.

‘Well, are you finished with the seashore now?’ said the man with the look-alike dog. For a moment a half dozen possible answers seemed possible. ‘Could one ever finish with something so extraordinary and various as that hinterland between land and sea?’ No, that was seemed a mite critical and clever. ‘Oh, I’ve hardly started’ was tempting, but rather smug and too confident by half. ‘I just love the seaside’ would probably do, as no one else was listening. ‘Merleau-Ponty says the complexity of the seashore is a metaphor in the search for self-identity’. She did wonder what he’d make of that, but finally decided on ‘It’s such a rich source of ideas and images I’m sure there’s a lot more I want to do with the subject.’

”It’s all the same colour”. She’d had that one a few times. ‘When I’m on the beach I’m fascinated as much by the texture and shape of what I see  and feel than the colour. I like the subtlety of the colours in the sand. I think my pieces – and she waved her hand towards what she had titled her Sand Marks pieces – show so many of the different shades of colours you find on the seashore.’

Those Sand Marks, a collection of variously dyed and marked two metre plus linen-lengths, dominated one wall of the gallery. They floated a few centimetres from the white wall, and when people moved past them the slight shadows cast by the linen lengths seemed to ripple in the human-made breeze. She could never look at them without thinking how their very accidental making – binding a linen cloth with inner placed objects and using the natural dye of tea – could create such absorbing results. She would follow with her gaze one of the linen-lengths from bottom to top (or top to bottom) and find herself walking on the wet sand of a Scottish beach, overwhelmed by the clear light and space with only the sea sound surrounding. He would tell her, had told her often, how moved, how affected he had been when he first saw them hung. To him, these ‘marks’ carried an essence of this aesthetic she now owned and for which had become recognised.

Even on this, her first day, she had been visited by a small number of admirers and supporters, some travelling distances to see her work with the aura of the original, a truer view than that possible on the back-lit screen of their computer monitors. Ladies who loved textiles, the containment and privacy to sew and stitch secured in their busy lives. These friendly and smiley women (the comfortable side of sixty) understood something of what she was doing here, and perhaps imagined themselves as thirty-somethings walking Scottish beaches free from children and the relentless list-making of house and home and occupation, able to create imaginary worlds of marks and folds, pleats and textures. Full of enthusiasm for the medium, what they perhaps didn’t have was the skill of seeing, a skill she had grown up with, had always owned to some degree: found, fostered, honed, developed into a second-nature activity of always looking.

There would be the occasional brief lull when the gallery was empty or close to empty, as though needing the space to come up for breath after being occupied by people and their movement. She would then walk slowly around the long well-lit room viewing her pieces and her arrangements of pieces from different angles. She would look at his poems placed antiphonally between her work, commissioned for her catalogue, her book of images of the sea shore paired with, incorporating even, her made pieces. She’d chosen a favoured few she’d felt caught the essence of being in the sea’s company, in the sand and shore’s domain. Like everything he did it had been undertaken with the utmost intensity of purpose. She saw him now in her mind’s eye with his notebook sitting against rocks, paddling in the great shallow pools, walking head down along the tide line, those bright days on a Scottish island and before, before on that ellipse of beach by the fishing station.

He would tease out an idea formed from a little motif of words, perhaps like the very music that was his private territory: here, alone, apart we are marked by the tide’s turn. Yes, we are marked by being solitary in such unconfining space, the marks at our feet become the lines, the mounts, the fingers, those interruptions, breaks and blockages found in the tridents, chains and crosses of the art of palmistry. We read the seashore as a psychic oracle reads the hand, hoping, as Kathleen Jamie so rightly says, for the marvellous. And marvellous it so often is.

Standing in this gallery was like being gathered about by the seashore. It was a short jump in the imagination’s miracle to hear the soft breathing of the sea, the wind caressing the face, the warmth of the afternoon sun on the freckled cheek.

See how those we love are transformed
when the sea is their only boundary

a figure stands before a sand bar
in a crescent of water left by the tide
an affecting geometry of solitude
. . .

These words had always stopped her in her perambulating tracks. She thought of her son, far distant on the beach, at rest for once, still, motionless within the confluence of the elements of the beach, at the epicentre of her gaze, all things flowing to and from his tiny, far-away figure.

I had this thought when I was younger,
That I had to know who I was and who I wanted to be,
By a certain time in my life.
That, when a stranger asked me to tell them about myself
I should have a designated answer in the form of linguistic description.
Full disclosure of self.
I'd listed in my mind hobbies, character traits, intellectual preferences.
All things that, when put together,
Would produce a vision of who I was as a person.
I was a complete profile from top to bottom.
Inside and through.
Adding to and refining back qualities of what made me as I went along.
Fine tuning the presentation of me to society.

I thought I had it down.
Picked through with a fine tooth comb.
No boring aspect refurbished, no overbearing flaw unchecked.

Then one day
I was in a place that housed people milling around,
Same as any other day.
And as I sat next to a fountain feeding some birds,
Like I was prone to do on the pleasant weathered days.

A little boy came up an sat down next to me.
I didn't think anything of it and just smiled at him.
He lingered beside me for a few minutes.
And I noticed he seemed to be staring at me
With a quizzical look on his sun bright face.
I continued to dole out pieces of my left over lunch
And he giggled just a slight.
Now I was curious to know why this little guy
With anything at all to do other than sit next to me,
Was laughing.

I finally turned toward him intent on asking what was so funny,
When he stated before I could utter a word

"You're the nicest lady I ever saw"

I was initially a little gobsmacked as to the bold declaration.
It made me snort a bit.
Shaking my head, I pondered to him

"What would make you say that?"

He innocently replied with a grin that...

"You feed the birdies and they don't even say thank you. That makes one a really nice lady! "

Well color me stupefied there.
This little boy, in his little statement, awed me.
He didn't know me or who I was or where I've come from
And in just that one action he witnessed of me
Feeding those little flying creatures,
He determined me a nice person.

And it swelled me more intensely than any praise over an achievement,
Any congratulations of a job well done,
Any compliment of artistic ability.

And as he got up to run off to wherever he came from,
I sat there contemplating...

Of all the things I thought of myself up until this point,
Just being myself with no preconceived notion or projection,
I felt more transparent in that little boys observance,
Than anything else in my whole life.
That led me to wonder why in the world I had bothered
To ever worry about and plan around who I wanted people to see me as.
I began thinking all of my preparing and analyzing,
All of the forethought I put into me as a person.
Kind of went out the window.

Because if a complete stranger could see through me so easily,
With just a mindless action like that,
Then what did people really see beyond my presentation,
Of me?
Not that who I projected myself to be was false, just honed
To show the best parts of me always.
But then, what are the best parts of me which other people rarely see?
Maybe the things about myself I thought of as "works in progress"
Were already fully bloomed and beautiful already.
Maybe I was just so conditioned to think they weren't?

So as I laid on my couch later that night
And aimlessly thought of the events of the day,
I made a plan to have no more plans.
To keep my list of everything about me I had written over the years,
But put it somewhere only to serve as a reminder to me.
I'd try, from here on out, to just be me
Freely.

The only regret I had of that encounter though,
Was that I didn't get to tell that little mind changer

Thank you...


*© NDHK

Anthony, Anthony, oh dear Anthony. His face is like a little darling's; with tumults of green and gray cheeks blended into one. I wish there had been no yesterday; for yesterday was when he appeared with his rain-soaked, but gay little cheeks; as he smiled at me by the twin moonbeams. Still he is not him; I care not how he wants to tease me in my dream.

My heart is gay no more; its walls are honed imperfectly, and with no goodwill. Its image and charity hath now gone; I am plain, I am like a shy spider grafting about the chattering winter walls. Oh, Anthony, yet how sweet thou wert under the bald rain; and its unleashed forms of cold clouds! Ah, I wish I could lend to you a wonted breadth of my story; but as I gaze, now, into the very soft metallic eyes of thee; I am afraid my words shall never be impossible. Thou hath that brilliant green gaze of nature, my sweet, but thou art not immortal; thou art vital, but thou art not of the same rainbow as he is. He hath, now, been dried and cornered in the unseen lungs of my heart, but his ghost is there. Ah, he, who hath betrayed me like a sparkle of dead candle! How should I treat this misdemeanour, you think? But to my strange suspicion, I cannot but forget of him, even a sliver of memory; for his memories are too elusive, too adequate for my hungry heart. Oh, Anthony, how bashful I am--for not daring to cope with thy questioning eyes!

Like those unanswered rains; which keep wetting the unyielding soil, damaging toiled crops into the limbs of quavering pits. My love was borne with death by him; within the death of his feelings, in which it was but a fossil of discarded flesh like any other corpse. But where is Immortal, Immortal, Immortal? I keep looking for him, in those scarlet hollows, but still I glimpse a sight of him not. I shall keep lulling him to sleep, at least in my dancing dreams; he is the sober prince and I am the guileless princess. Ah, Anthony, tell me how I cannot be guileless; I am honest and decent and carry no defilement of chastity. I am pure myself; with a garden of virginity and its terrific rivulets flowing beneath me. How can my charms be not charitable? Even when I walk, a thousand boughs of blossoms snigger not; they welcome my entry with another thousand wits; they reply to my living steps with a radiance that even heaven cannot forgive. My verbal words might not be delicate, but I am sure my poem is; regardless how hard t'is downfall might be. Ah, Anthony, thou art a miracle still, but thou art no more than an evening story, sadly! I cannot feel my heart become unleashed, as I looketh into thy eyes; I cannot feel grasped by thy cold hands--ah, thou hath grasped me not; but still thy apparition cometh less merited, and rather falsified, than that of his.

How can that be, how can that be, how can that be! Ah, this earth with its villainous glory might blame me once more. It shall toughen my hardship with a whole land of repulsion; it shall intend never again to make me a faithful alliance. It shall satisfy its own self, and metamorphose into a swamp of ungrateful hatred sweated by an edified mockery. Ah, what doth all t'is charm mean, then? I shall face a green apocalypse soon, thereof, before being burned within another blasphemous night. I feel cross, cross, cross, cross, and cross; I grit my teeth whenever I think of my stupidity. I feel as if I was an old dame so gratuitous to thee; I am a luminous fire, but instead I have no seeds and am just as dead as a soundless pumpkin. Ah, Anthony, can thou but restore that lost fire again? I want no speeds, I want to see no miracles, I feel dutiful; but undutiful at the same time. Your heart is right by the doors of Yorkshire--and sometimes grow into the doors themselves; it is funny to see how they are so tidily integrated by the eminence of each other. I shall craft for you a beautiful song; but perhaps a jest like that shall never be enough; it shall be tedious and not pertinacious enough to entertain thy young heart. Thou art in want of my poems, as far as I can see; but all I might do is withdraw my eye and even draw my steps back further, invariably like a rusted old church bell. I am insane; and far trapped in the insanity as I myself am; I am cold-blooded, my heart can, perhaps, be healed only by ease-like murders. I cannot ponder, I cannot think, I cannot consider; I paint the entrance to myself no more-oh, how I miss his laughs like never before! Ah, Anthony, my wintry sun, my autumn soliloquy, my snowy sob; perhaps I shall better be far from thee, for I want not to make thee sore! My heart is as rough as it is; incarcerated in its own heartless panoramic views, brutal like an unattended soil, for hath it just been left unattended for a time; it often wanders to breathe fresh air, but severed once more by the adored's filthy laugh. It comes home and sleeps weeping beside me.

My heart can no longer count; neither can it flinch. It cannot even see colours, including those which were once fabulous; it is far from enormity, but it claims to have one. Ah, Anthony, it is even a brighter scholar than myself! Look, look how hath it conquered my? I have jaws and it has not, I have a heart--ah, I do have it, but I knoweth not how to make it mine. Half of my heart hath been eaten away by a rotten love, even my blood now--as I hath been hearing it, is no longer flowing. I am hurried by the murmurs of the wind every day, ah, but shall I return again to my poetry? I guess, though, I can make time for this gay seriousness; I am poetry and shall always be, I am alarmed by the cries of my poems, and the joys of my sentences. I am mad, as how poets should just be; I am the pictures my poetry paints; and caress them often at night in my arms.

But as you may have seen it, my heart is now dead, plain, and black; my heart who has loved, and still does love, someone. Ah, Anthony, forgive me; forgive me for this solemn labour of my heart; forgive me for choosing to bear this alone. I might love again, someday; I am aware I should triumph over this self-inflicted martyrdom; I shall relieve myself in one blink of wonder, in a more reliable princedom by the sea. Still, I hope, like a gallery of paintings that is planted with a hall of constant transformations, God shall transform the very haven of his souls one day; and refine his atrocious soutane into one righteous and cordial. I might not be the crucial lady yet for thee; oh, how I wish I were! But vain this attempt may be, should we ever doubtfully try it. Ah, Anthony, but gratitude to thee--for once choosing to lay off the puzzle of my heart; for thy gentleness from the very start!

And hath I now finished my breathless narration; I doth miss thee, oh Immortal; I miss thee as I shall miss a piercing sun in these filths and greases winters may bring! Ah, and the clearer picture in my mind carries to me a voice that though thou art fine; thou art dainty no more; and this leaves to me a flavour of
precarious solitude. I loveth thee, Immortal, Immortal, Immortal; my love is as a sky that remains high; my love shall stay flowery until the day I die.

itself a vision or virtual real
the tone of [or time of] the sock does reveal

yet the swift heel is thud-like and bounds
as the darned pull-off of wool will rebound

walking home?
retiring from the race?
wiping sweat off the forehead with
   ...a rag from the wrong space!

Spring comes little, a little. All April it rains.
The new leaves stick in their fists; new ferns still fiddleheads.
But one day the swifts are back. Face to the sun like a child
You shout, 'The swifts are back!'


Sure enough, bolt nocks bow to carry one sky-scyther
Two hundred miles an hour across fullblown windfields.
Swereee swereee. Another. And another.
It's the cut air falling in shrieks on our chimneys and roofs.


The next day, a fleet of high crosses cruises in ether.
These are the air pilgrims, pilots of air rivers.
But a shift of wing, and they're earth-skimmers, daggers
Skilful in guiding the throw of themselves away from themselves.


Quick flutter, a scimitar upsweep, out of danger of touch, for
Earth is forbidden to them, water's forbidden to them,
All air and fire, little owlish ascetics, they outfly storms,
They rush to the pillars of altitude, the thermal fountains.


Here is a legend of swifts, a parable —
When the Great Raven bent over earth to create the birds,
The swifts were ungrateful. They were small muddy things
Like shoes, with long legs and short wings,


So they took themselves off to the mountains to sulk.
And they stayed there. 'Well,' said the Raven, after years of this,
'I will give you the sky. You can have the whole sky
On condition that you give up rest.'


'Yes, yes,' screamed the swifts, 'We abhor rest.
We detest the filth of growth, the sweat of sleep,
Soft nests in the wet fields, slimehold of worms.
Let us be free, be air!'


So the Raven took their legs and bound them into their bodies.
He bent their wings like boomerangs, honed them like knives.
He streamlined their feathers and stripped them of velvet.
Then he released them, Never to Return


Inscribed on their feet and wings. And so
We have swifts, though in reality, not parables but
Bolts in the world's need: swift
Swifts, not in punishment, not in ecstasy, simply


Sleepers over oceans in the mill of the world's breathing.
The grace to say they live in another firmament.
A way to say the miracle will not occur,
And watch the miracle.

From over a period of time
From time to time
Again it has been assessed and proved
A loss of focus not only will cause delay, but also result in failure
Keep a focus on your goal
Awaken your mind
Activate your senses
Mobilize your thought process
Focus on your goal.

Obstacles have always been there in everyone's life
They are part of everyone's life
Dealing with obstacles enriches the level of experience
Skills are honed over a period of time
Same are put to test when overcoming an obstacle
Time and again it has been proved that time is the most critical factor in dealing with an obstacle
A lot of time gets consumed when tackling an obstacle
When dealing with an obstacle always be sure about yourself
Be firmly grounded
No matter what happens
Even when things get out of control
As each and everything moves towards an extreme end.

Recall, recollect and remember everything
From the past and from prior

Be optimistic about yourself
Don't give up
Never lose hope
Learn and remember
Keep it in mind
Dealing with obstacles is a part of reaching towards goal.

A lot of things come into focus when handling things in routine life
When we miss something
We learn from it
When we skip out something
We learn from it
As and when a mistake is made
We learn from it
Learning is a continuous process
Learning never stops
We learn new things and new ways
Learning has always remained a continuous process.

Shaping the future does add the much needed zinger and spice to routine life.
Since the process of learning continues it brings into focus many more new things
A few amongst them include progress, growth and reach
Each amongst the three has got a definite role to play in the present and also in future.

The outside world is a fast changing place
Different from all that we know
As and when you play a game
Important, you know rules of the game
Over a period of time things change
Then comes the right moment of time
Something for which you had been eagerly waiting for quite long
Having learnt from your own prior experience
Having honed your skills
Now you really know very well as to how to play the game
Now following the rules becomes part of your habit
Still a lot of things remain
The goal is still far away
Far, far away

When it comes to winning
Make sure you have got both experience and expertise
Experience and expertise works as a contrast
When to use the right element
In what ratio, depends on need of the hour.

When the right thing takes place at the right moment of time
From then onwards nature of things differ
Gradually everything starts happening in the right direction
Definitely time has a vital role to play in everyone’s life.

Learn as much as possible
Learn from the highs and lows of life
From the mistakes of your life
Learn from the experiences of the past
Imbibe as much as possible
Once on firm grounds, then move ahead
Make it a habit then and always remember
Keep it in mind
As and when you play a game, whenever you play a game
Winning is not an intention
It’s winning for which you are playing
It's your aim.

Give your best to achieve your aim
As and when you win,
Then,
From then onwards
Make it a habit of achieving your aim.

As a ginger, I'm inclined to say fox. I've always had an affinity for those cunning, red canines.

But if it's just for a day then perhaps something a bit more adventurous. I suppose I would choose to be a cheetah.

Fastest land animal in the world, agile, and speckled.

Nobody messes with a cheetah. Not because they’re so hulking or intimidating— just more fascinating than terrifying.

We travelled to South Africa once, my family and I. As a tribe we chased wild creatures down with cameras in jeeps in a raucous yet hushed thrill.  

The cheetah was one of the few animals that eluded us. Perhaps having never seen one up close is partially what draws me to them.  

Mysterious, as well as evasive, with an "I don't give a ****" attitude.

They only eat every so often because catching food is such a feat. When they do hunt however, it's one of the most spectacular things in the natural world.

It's why places that sell tv's show footage of cheetahs running in slow motion over and over on a dizzying loop; demonstrating how clear the pixels are in the plasmas. It's mesmerizing.

Their feet move too fast and fly over the dirt, honed in on whatever poor gazelle or kudu they're after. If you're a cheetah that is your body, your thin bones, your rapid heart and beating paws that make you move in such a blur.

To be a cheetah for a day is feeling and knowing the difference between machine and muscle. Humans have found ways to fly, and people regularly move faster than a top speed of 75mph.

But how sublime it would be!
To be solely and purely responsible for that unparalleled speed just for one day.

dancing calling flight of the Seagulls
cuts through the blowing of the wind
as fast as fighter jets dipping dives
and reeling upwards into the distance
freedom wild as freedom was always
from the dawning of the feathered
sailing now on wings strong honed
masters of air currents and updraft

Honed fangs behind
sweet lips.  

Lips made to caress my
skin as they travel along
my throat.
So gentle he is,
For a monster

His tongue against my
jugular;
Heartbeats quicken.
Shallow breathing
as his dark eyes
bore into mine.

"Take me," I plea, "make me into you."

You are mine...
His voice is thick,
laced with seduction
but also some sort of
tenderness.

His movements
careful
slow
calculated.

He plants a
kiss on my neck,
fangs barely brushing.

*And I do not destroy that which is mine.

Morning smells of Lilacs rapture me,
Taking me back to Kinderhooks Chatham Street….June 21st 1961……not a cloud in the sky.
Lying in bed I open my eyes to the hum of a window fan.
And in the distance I hear a Hudson River barge blast its horn.

This moment in time, well it brings tears to my eyes.
Eleven years old, brown hair, hazel eyes, a toothy smile,
Grins in the mirror, hoping to find a whisker or two…
My cat Oscar sits there on the sink purring out his contentment.

“Oscar” I say, “today I leave for the Freedom Farm”
The Freedom Farm is the one place where I’m free to be me
Without the fear of a negative comment or a boot in my ***
I climb aboard the Greyhound bus with suitcase in hand, And looking down at Mom and Dad....I wave…. So Long Suckers!!              

Walton NY, June 22nd, Dunk Hill Road, the smell of cow ****,
The land of Milk and Honey, Fields of four leaf clovers and 10’ corn stalks.
It was here that all my friends lived, Shorty the horse, Mrs Blue the Holstein,                                                        ­                      
And there was Uncle Ike, Aunt Minnie and 9 Cousins. I loved them all!

On this little dairy farm……my potential was unlimited,
Uncle Ike taught me to drive the Tractor, water the heifers,  
Milk the cows, shovel ****, spread manure and have some **** fun!
Hell Uncle Ike even let me try a piece of his plug tobacco... (Note to self…Just say No Thanks next time)

A summer filled with character building experiences and an eight year olds understanding of work ethic.
But we still had plenty of time for fun and cousin bonding.
My Cousin Tom taught me to ride the cows and honed my spitting skills.
And in my downtime I'd perfect the finer points of armpit farting,
Four weeks of heaven on earth where nothing was impossible.

*Once you work on a farm you get dirt in your shoes. And when you get dirt in your shoes, you can never get it out!"

Control
Like love
Is indifferent
To race, color or age

I see upright monkeys
With honed, lunatic, pestilent
Expressions
Around endless corners
living out-
and hosing down somberly-
Frequency dreams
Battery life sputter drains
that whip with sardonic torment-
Beat with blood-bathed smiles
Laughing to slow vertiginous rhythm
in captivating faces

Take, take, take-
To receive such
an empty promise

And I've lost interest
in this silent war
We've constructed
so dizzily

It's telling looking through
the window’s eyes ; 
a room with a paling grey glass view
befogs the clouds reign inside the storm
Often feeling misbegotten regret
for the unfiltered passing glimpses,
whetstone honed and splayed ;
raw hues of a latent life exposed

There's an uncertain hidden shame
in the unheard truth
starving out in the cold;
dwelling in a petrifying silence
of a common hunger
the lonely do ache
  
Merciless hunger pangs
manifest and shake
with an unrelenting bitter taste ;
loneliness grapples and grips
like a silent earth quake
rattling a rib caged heart — writhing
as Autumn bares the trees
  
A jagged ambiguous fault line
ripples through the hollow echo ;
a bolt of lightning caught in a bottle
strikes — silently contained
swallowing the unspoken words
in a greater good

This broken merry-go-round
keeps turning round and round;
the great mandala spinning on
like a worn out hamster-wheel
without a conscious trace
of going anywhere out there

The place you come from
is gone when you leave it —
even if you really never
feel you were from anywhere
but a thousand unmarked mileposts
from out here somewhere adrift;
a pilgrimage towards understanding
why sometimes I don’t know
if I know who I am — or could have been —
waiting on a threadbare prayer

One-day the winds of change
will shapeshift — bye and bye ...

"When the light that's lost within us
reaches the sky"


Jesse Stillwater

November 2018

I have not been well lately
But I have a secret to tell you
It’s a success story: my most secret success
You see, I’m very skilled in crafting holes
And I’ve punched a massive hole
Right through the middle of my life

Please, don’t mistake this accomplishment for the result of talent
This is a skill and it takes practice to master
I went to college and learned to turn theories and ideals from basin to sieve
I learned to critique everything hopeful
And punched a hole right through the heart of hope
I honed my ability to close out creativity
I built a track down which to guide concrete linear thoughts
And I learned to use said thoughts as a battering ram with which to
Knock a hole in the barricaded door to dissatisfaction

And, though this skill is often practical
As you know, one cannot walk around wearing an open hole
So, a corresponding skill has successfully emerged
In parallel with nurturing voids
I have learned to conceal each and every hole
Sometimes with a thick canvass and
Sometimes with a paper-thin veneer
I may have learned to wrap a package
And to tie a bow
With the express purpose of packaging
The broken gift of life
Full of ugly holes

And, now, all that is left to complete the perfect ending to this success story
Is to grow old in a neatly kept apartment
Filled with the unseen haunts of relationships neatly hole-punched and
Filed in a hidden mental cabinet
Next to a night stand where I keep my phone and glasses
And across from the bed
There will be a glass trophy case
Full of trophies denoting various acceptable successes
But, just between you and I
The largest trophy denoting the largest success
Will be a lifetime achievement award
Bestowed for hollowing out what could have been
A beautiful life.

Fed me an omelette for dinner, oven-roasted tomatoes,
Smoked mozzarella, my fav, sliced so thin and layered in.
A focaccia roll, watermelon dessert.
It was her poem for me.
But that love devil kept refilling my glass, with her beloved
Summer rose wine.

I cleaned up for that's our deal, the one she never asked for, but is only
Fair in love.

Made it to the bed and Pandora.

About 30 seconds later, someone took my tablet from my arms, from my closing eyes, kissed me, and when I awoke at 4:00am, I recalled this from my sewing box.
Now, the poem*

There are kisses to keep

(Oct. 2010)

as I am laid to sleep,
there are kisses to keep,
gently placed on my
neck and head,
as I am tucked into bed,
travel packed,
well stored,
like important facts, safe kept,
as into the nether world
of the subconscious I am swept

Mid eve, tween nine and ten,
this runner's forward motion
is stopped short of the goal line,
but his mates, second surgers,
carry him on her shoulders,
his body do they extend,
victory celebrated with
eyes shut and
body prone,
his dream skills
well honed,
with kisses to keep,
he, dispatched to the battlefield,
Poetry Gods to meet,
daily actions,
submitted for peer review,
and perhaps!
promoted and gifted a daily add-on or
perhaps! Death's tenure secured?

Unwavering to sounds of song,
ancient paths retread,
till the front edge
of danger reached,
the TSA soul search commenced,

the child of ten times six,
drugs taken,
memory enhanced whispers of
revolution(s), circularity,
in headset stereo whispered.

his comrades George and John,
wounded to the death,
nighttime friends
greet this nightly stalker,
sojourner to the middle nether-lands,
with water and refreshments

Doth he survive,
Doth he return?

Of course he does,
dear friend and **** fool,
this nighttime essay,
his just reward
and another curse for
your forbearance

His safe return,
wounds
In need of tending,
kisses he receives from a
grateful nation of one,
kisses to keep safe as he
forwards on into
daytime battle of
interest rates,
to multiple fronts dispatched
and in ten long hours
he passes thru Ontario,
turns round, heads down
to samba in Rio De Janeiro,
and on his way to
New South Wales n' Sydney,
stops for herring
on the wharves of Oslo,
washed down with a pint
from his favorite pub in London town

He is short and caught?
He is long and wrong?
For sure he is stressed,
head messed, and when the whistle blows,
the words of his
prior excursion, the night version,
call and comfort,
for he attended again with the relief
of fresh and new
kisses to keep

Words of this ilk
have been penned before, by me, I am sure,
but too bad for you
and me too,
newer versions will continue
to appear, in order that
I may deserve
fresh kisses
to keep.

This will end when one of us dies.