It happened several years ago
But it is a true story in the flow
A Senior Citizen woman being my Grandmother
She was a strong woman like no other
She worked as a Board Of Education Lunchroom Manager at P.S. 202 in Brooklyn, New York
As my Grandmother was leaving on a regular day, a Mugger was getting ready to pounce
It all happened on the busy street of Atlantic Avenue
My Grandmother was on her way to the Doctor
But when she got in the middle of the street, the mugger showed his attack mystique
However, the Mugger didn’t know he was in for a surprise
Yet my Grandmother showed that Mugger her realize
She literally knocked the mugger off his feet
The Mugger tried another attempt in attack being another retreat
Well my Grandmother showed that Mugger, this senior citizen was determined to not be beat
What do you think happened?
The Mugger got sacred and ran off
Now my Grandmother 5’ 5’ being short, but I never said she was weak
Big things come in small packages
My Grandmother being the Biblical David and defeating Goliath being the Mugger
My Grandmother’s response being her slugger power
She reigned supreme and that Mugger knows what that means
This is a true story and I am being honest
Senior Citizen’s have more power than Social Security, and their strength being their unity.

Dear reader,

This is not a poem. This is not a letter. This is not really much of anything, for that matter. I hope you'll continue reading because it kind of helps knowing that someone somewhere out there is reading what I'm going to say next. I just hope you, my dear reader can benefit from my story.

It's merely 3.41AM and I am feeling empty. It's not the kind of emptiness that overwhelms you in tsunamis of water, neither is it splashes of water. It just didn't seem to have a place, it wasn't really anywhere, it was kinda just there. Haunting me.

I had just finished my O level examinations, and where I come from, it's one of the most major exams in my life. It determined my future. So like any other schooling teenager in this country, I studied for it. Not just the kind of studying where you listen in class or read the textbook and do your homework. The kind of study where I could go on without sleep for days or taking shot after shot of expresso just to keep myself going or regurgitating word for word an entire essay. All because I knew how important this was to me and my family and my future. Every day of the week was dedicated towards memorizing, every minute of the day was devoted towards practicing, and every second of the minute was committed towards reading. Basically, every millisecond was crucial. And this was something I abided by religiously. But despite my efforts, I was still struggling. I simply couldn't do well. And when you put your heart and soul into something and it just doesn't go how it's supposed to, you get really broken, destroyed. You never know what went wrong and you question many things about yourself and you start running in circles, thinking and digging. The failure I was faced with consumed me with defeatism and self hate. I broke down more often than I should as the days to my exam drew closer, and I grew more anxious and scared. So ******* scared of the future.

Bear with me, please.

Anyway, the week of my exams came quickly. Despite my efforts to slow down time, time had done just the opposite. It was the most painful and suffocating weeks of my life. And although I am one to say that lightly, this easily took the crown. I have never, ever in my life felt this close off the ledge. And there were many times were I have came very close off the ledge. My exams lasted for around 3 weeks, and each morning I had to have at least a triple shot expresso and each night I before I went to sleep, there would be these images and thoughts telling me that I didn't deserved to sleep and I shouldn't even think about it. But when I did catch some sleep, the constant fears in my day had took over my nights. I would always dream about failing the exam, or being late for the exam, or forgetting to bring something to the exam, or killing myself before the exam. It was impossibly horrible and I could actually feel my soul getting depleted by the minute. Like the 'me' in my body was slipping away and there would soon be nothing harboring my body. I often find myself crying to sleep, and waking up in tears. I couldn't stand being so weak and vulnerable, but I felt absolutely defenseless against everything around me. Even the ones that loved me couldn't make me feel human, I felt like I was already dead and my body was still alive. I felt like I was constantly suffocating and nobody could see it. Each day felt so purposeless, ironically. (It being my exams week) Waking up each and every day was draining and having to face my eminent fate was painful. A physical kind of pain where you felt lightheaded and spinning but yet caged and choked. It's hard to describe.

So, it isn't hard to tell that I wasn't in the right state of mind to take my exams. I just dragged myself through those past couple of weeks, doing what I could. Each breath felt labored and each thought in my head wore me down greatly. I broke down frequently before my papers, and there would always be this couple of schoolmates who say things like "You'll do fine, stop worrying." Or "Just do your best. Whatever will be, will be." My parents would even try to tell me to take it easy and "We'll be proud as long as you've tried your best." I know that they mean well. But no, you don't understand. I have worked too ******* long and too ******* hard to watch it all slip away from me just like that. It isn't just some national exam I have to study for, it was my godforsaken passport for the future. All that I have done for this exam, all that I have forsaken, all that I have gone through was for myself. It was the dedication of every ounce of strength that I had so that I could let myself believe that hope existed. And I had just watched it being snatched away from me, right before my own sunken in, swollen eyes. And it hurt like hell knowing that I've tried my best for it, and it is a reflection of what I've worked for. Nobody's going to look at C's and D's and see the reflection of an "overnight mugger", they'll see what comes to mind first: a lazy, complacent teen. And as the saying goes, "The lie, if repeated a hundred times, becomes the truth." All my hard work will be forgotten. And it will be like it never existed before.

Maybe some might think that all this is stupid. All this I go through for one exam, I know many of my schoolmates think that way. But the complex feelings that I experience for this exam isn't just because of my future. My life depends more than it should on this exam because it will prove to me that I am not a failure and I am not as stupid as I think I am. I want to know where my best truly is and where I stand. Because I have never worked for anything in my life but this exam has been the great exception. It was the key driving force of my life, it was what wore me down and spurred me on at the same time. I don't want people to tell me that I am capable and that I am smart, because I will never believe you. I need this exam to show me that I am capable and I am smart. I want to believe it too.

So I lie in bed at 4.17AM now feeling so afraid of the future. And I used to be the kid that depended on the prospect of a better day. I have yet to meet my impending doom, and if you are wondering, I collect my results next year in January. So now, I am lost and alone. And empty.

Thank you if you've read this far, I just hope that you, my dear reader, if you've ever felt useless, or not good enough or you're just hurting, know that you are not alone and there is someone that knows how you feel. I would tell you to be strong, but only you can do that for yourself. Just hang in there.

k.m.

At the mailbox, again:
“Who loves me, baby?”
Well, let’s see: there’s a flyer from Mercury Insurance,
Reminding me that most middle-income customers
Save an average of $4 million smackaroons when they switch too.
The Penny Saver USA.com is here,
Thank God, almighty!
So now I know that Thomas Roofing & Paving
Is having a special on 20-year leak-free flat roofs;
"All work guaranteed & insured.
No job too big or small.
Free estimates/Emergency services/License # I8U-69."
And thank you, Jesus,
For another $4.99 Farmer Boys 3-Egg Breakfast
Combo with Coffee coupon, and that
Little Caesars Hot-N-Ready, $5.00 cheese or pepperoni,
Mae-West-“why-don’t-you-come up and see me sometime?”—mailer. And, of course, another technology Siren’s song:
Verizon FiOS delivers entertainment this big,
Dish me up some dish NETWORK, $19.99 a month . . .
Are you ******* me?
For 12 ******* months?
AT&T;: whack me off on 120 channels.
DIRECTV.com - DIRECTV® Official Site‎
Worry-free 99.9%  . . . cue Joe E. Brown,
"Some Like It Hot“ Osgood:
"Well, nobody’s perfect!"
Time Warner/Sprint/T-Mobile;
And ******* Leather, Polk Street, San Francisco.
******* leather?
Must be for my neighbor: that ***** ****!
And here’s the weekly 8-page color fold-out from Stater Bros:
Lowering prices every day, large cantaloupes
(Jessica Lange, are you back?)
10 for $10.00, 32 oz. Gatorade
Or 24 oz Propel in 30 assorted varieties @ 79 cents
+ CRV: California Redemption Value?
Nice euphemistic cover-up for a TAX.
Nice, nice, very nice, CA elected state officials;
Nicely done, Sacramento.
Everywhere else in the country you get real money—
A fixed number of pennies, nickels, or dimes—
For your plastic bottles and aluminum cans.
But in California, the licensed recyclers
Get to pull the market price out of their *** each morning.
California Redemption Value?
What ******* genius government kleptocrat thought that one up? Conspiracy Alert: who gets all that CRV money?
And what are they doing with it?
Feeling plain, Jane?
Marinello Schools of Beauty, want you,
Offer you hands-on training in cosmetology,
Skin care esthetics, manicuring and vaginal deodorizing—
Just kidding, Babaloo.
Food tip for the Third World:
Never try to write poetry on an empty stomach.
Sizzler 6 oz juicy & succulent.
RENEGADE DEAL:
El Pollo Loco guacamole chicken sandwich,
Coupon free, small drink and small chips,
When you purchase a guacamole or jalapeno sandwich,
includes pepper jack cheese and a southwest sauce.
Gardenas sandia con semilla, 7 lbs 99 cents.
GARDENAS: “en precios, servicio y calidad, nadie nos iguaia.”
Bud Gordon’s Quality NISSAN:
One at this price after a $1500 factory rebate.
TERMINIX: get them before they get you!
The Kingdom Animalia, Phylum Arthropoda, Class Insecta
Bug up my *** again.
And a form letter from the VA
Asking me to please update my whereabouts.
And a form letter from the VA asking me
To please update my whereabouts.
And miles to go before I sleep.
Bite me, Mr. Frost!

An outing, at last.
I am going for a walk around the inside of my gates.
I live in one of those gated over-55 lunatic asylums.
There are gates. It is gated. Get it?
GATED! We feel safe here.
Probably a good thing at our age:
Self-imposed institutionalization,
Putting oneself in an asylum to ferment and die.
The fact that so many of us
Need it so bad at only 55
Says something itself about the current state of
Baby Boomer metal-fatigue.
I am now standing at the far end of the golf course.
I wait at the far end of the 18th Hole.
A ball bounces past my head and
Rolls off past the green into the far rough.
The 18th Hole is perched atop a small plateau,
Out of sight, far above the horizon for anyone teeing off.
I am Puck, invisible and impish.
I pluck the ball up.
I scamper to the green.
I pop the ball into the hole.
Which is better than popping a hole in the ball,
Surely, kind of a drag,
As we were once fond of saying.
Deflated Ball.
Deflator Maus.
OPERA can be ****.
Bodice-ripping corsets, whorehouses and naked ******!
Hardly what you might expect from
A night with the Welsh National Opera,
But they found their way into this production of "Die Fledermaus."
Ripe language, contemporary jokes and
Toilet humor thrown in, adding immensely
To the pleasures of Strauss’s operetta.
"Die Fledermaus," or The Bat’s Revenge,
Is all about drunkenness and adultery.
Despite being written in the 1870s,
It remains equally pertinent to today’s pub culture of excess.
Daring; Colorful; ****: PGA golf.
I steal a golf ball on the far end of the 18th Hole.
I pick up the Titleist and stick it in the hole
(Steady Jessica, not yours.
I hide behind your bush.
(Cue up PSA, First Lady Bird Johnson’s 1960s
Nationwide Beautification Campaign:
“I want everyone in America to plant a tree,
A sherrrr-rub, or a booosh.”)
The golfer now searching frantically:
Why is the cup always the last place they look?
Then, wham, bam, he looks:
A legend is born.
A hole in one,
His name forever immortalized
On a plaque over the bar, the proverbial 19th Hole.

As you know, I speak for all mediocrities,
Safe in my 55+ gated-community.
I go next to the Club House,
"The Lodge" as it’s called.
Each afternoon, the usual suspects
Claiming first come/first serve tiered mini-theater seats
Where Netflix matinee gems are screened.
It is two minutes to DVD show time.
I walk to the front of the room.
I stare at my audience.
I count the house slowly,
Making meaningful eye contact with each wrinkled face.
I cup my hands behind my back and speak:
“I assume you are all here for my lecture on Kierkegaard.”
No one reacts.
I turn to leave but do a double-take and smile.
One old woman in the top right corner of the amphitheater laughs, Perhaps the one other human being within the gates
Who has also smoked a joint today.
For an instant, I am overwhelmed with paranoia,
Perhaps I’ve gone too far over the line:
No longer “oh-he’s-a-character;”
I am now “that creep is ******* nuts.”
Is it time for someone to approach my family,
My next of kin, my “who-to-contact-in-event-of-emergency” number? Who will make the call on behalf of the HOA—
The Homeowner’s Association—
The Tsars, the Duma, the Supreme Soviet in these parts?
They are the power inside the gates;
Those who determine the state’s enemies,
Who govern its community norms.
Power within the gates.
Law within the asylum.
Little Hitlers one and all.
Hopefully they reach my sister first.
She’s been briefed.
KEY POINT IN THE NARRATIVE:
The new narrative is non-linear.
We can no longer sustain a narrative understanding of ourselves;
We are each an individual stream of consciousness,
All of us random, non-linear and disconnected.
We grow more and more disconnected from others.
We may be neighbors in space and time,
But we remain deprived of any significant human contact;
Any spiritually significant human contact.
Our social circle narrows to what can fit in The Telescreen;
We become more intimate with a legion . . .
Did someone say a legion? SPQR:
Am I having some sort of genetic-linguistic seizure here?
Am I channeling Benito Mussolini again?
Il Duce speaks to me from the grave,
Still blowing smoke up my Hopi-Jew-*** ***,
Filling in my insecurities,
Plugging the holes in my character
With delusions of classical Roman grandeur, glory and empire. Hmmmm? Quite an appetizing pitch for the average *****,
A message so completely, so ethnocentrically slick,
Olive oily, and so seductive.
A non-Italian would have thought
American Legion or Legionnaire’s disease,
Or The Foreign Legion, The French Foreign Legion.
The French: a virulent, promiscuous people.
Do you want fries with that, Simone?
No, I don’t get out much.
Only an occasional brisk walk around the asylum,
In and around the golf course, around but inside the gates. (LINKS) Bill Gates. Daryl Gates. Billy Bathgate’s Gates? Ghiberti’s Gates? The Hot Gates? Thermopylae? 300 Spartans/700 Thespians:
“The noun causing idiots to think of
Two girls sloppily eating each other’s mighty vaginas,
When they hear mention of someone being an actor.” http://www.urbandictionary.com
Not even close.
No, I rarely venture out.
This is Hemetucky.
There are methamphetamine-stoked
Teenage zombies at the gate.
Note to costume control:
Perhaps camouflage clothing is the safe choice?
No loud red Hawaiian.
No garish Indonesian batik.
Fleet of feet are these Hemet tweakers,
These cranked up Riverside County teenage barbarians,
These Huns & Visigoths,
These amped up, ravenous jackals.
And why stop there?
These Vandals & Vandellas.
A Motown flashback:
“Nowhere to run, baby, nowhere to hide.”
With or without Martha—
They remain dangerously lethal.
Yes, let it be camo clothes for me.
Those **** heads may be young.
They may be fast.
They may be able to run me down
On a dry grass dog-legged fairway savannah,
Tearing the meat from my carcass.
But the sons-a-******* have to see me first.
Besides, we know who are real friends are.
Hooray for our media peeps!
We become more intimate with a legion
Of television personalities on 125 different channels.
Most of these we know by name and context.
We know their families, their friends,
Their histories, their tragedies,
Their favored hyperbole and manner of speech.
Sometimes we establish intimacy with celebrities
Strictly on the basis of universal body language.
At times–in the absence of any other
Empathetic facility of identification–
We connect on instinct alone.
Instinct: perhaps animal at its core,
An animal kingdom affinity group,
Connecting on a bio-linguistic level,
Particularly when the Korean, or Spanish,
Mandarin, or Arabic,
Japanese, or even Hebrew language version is broadcast.
All languages cryptically alien,
A dense boundary, a barrio border wall,
Undecipherable, impenetrable concrete.
But we’ve never spoken to our neighbors,
Nor do we know their names.
Celebrities are the neighbors we know best;
Although the intimacy is an illusion,
Permission to invade their privacy presumed,
Tacit in the relationship between celebrities and their fans.
I am an independent contractor now,
An outside consultant to the NSA.
Try as I might I cannot crack the enigma,
Kim Kardashian remains far beyond my code-breaking prowess.
I repeat myself:
We can no longer sustain a narrative understanding of ourselves;
We are each an individual stream of consciousness,
All of us random, non-linear and disconnected.
We are more and more disconnected from others.
We may be neighbors in space and time,
But we remain deprived of any significant human contact;
Any spiritually significant human contact.
Our social circle narrows to what can fit in The Telescreen; we become more intimate with a legion . . .
Back to you, David Ulin:
“Sometime late last year—I don’t remember when, exactly—I noticed I was having trouble sitting down to read. That’s a problem if you do what I do, but it’s an even bigger problem if you’re the kind of person I am. Since I discovered reading, I have always been surrounded by stacks of books. I read my way through camp, school, nights, and weekends; when my girlfriend and I backpacked through Europe after college graduation, I had to buy a suitcase to accommodate the books I picked up along the way.”
Thank you, David L. Ulin.
I cannot help myself.
I grow more eccentric each day.
My eyeballs glued to that flat screen!

Cosmo Kramer: "The bus is outta control.
So I grab him by the collar, I take him out of the seat,
I get behind the wheel, and now I’m driving the bus."
Jerry: "Wow!"
George Costanza: "You’re Batman."
Cosmo Kramer: "Yeah, yeah, I am Batman.
Then the mugger, he comes to and he starts choking me.
So I’m fighting him off with one hand,
And I kept driving the bus with the other, ya know.
Then I managed to open up the door,
And I kicked him out the door, ya know,
With my foot, ya know, at the next stop."
Jerry: "You kept making all the stops?"
Cosmo Kramer: "Well, people kept ringing the bell!"
(Share this moment with a stranger.)

I speak for all mediocrities.
I am their champion, their patron saint.
Boom Chaka Laka. Boom Chaka Laka.
Boom Chaka Laka. BOOM!
Isn’t it time Salieri tempted Constanze–
Frau Mozart–with a plateful of Capezzoli di Venere:
“******* of Venus.”
You had me at hello, Kidman.
I know you too well, Nicole.
I knew you from before,
Way before Tom’s Oprah couch freak show.
Listen to me, Nicole:
We are face to face
With the most profound question in American literature:
"What is the grass?
The flag of my surrender?
The flag of my disposition?"
I resort to Socratic maxims: Know yourself;
The un-****** life is not worth living.
Is it stress? Is it lack of conviction?
Everything Jeff Lebowski neither wants nor needs in his life?
I watched you *** in "Eyes Wide Shut," Nicole.
Now I know you with my eyes and your legs wide open.
Thank you, Sidney Pollack.
Sidney knew.
Sidney dealt us cards
From his Hollywood Tarot deck.
We are intimate, Nicole.
I watched you squat.

‘You know Orion always comes up sideways.
Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains,
And rising on his hands, he looks in on me
Busy outdoors by lantern-light with something
I should have done by daylight, and indeed,
After the ground is frozen, I should have done
Before it froze, and a gust flings a handful
Of waste leaves at my smoky lantern chimney
To make fun of my way of doing things,
Or else fun of Orion’s having caught me.
Has a man, I should like to ask, no rights
These forces are obliged to pay respect to?’
So Brad McLaughlin mingled reckless talk
Of heavenly stars with hugger-mugger farming,
Till having failed at hugger-mugger farming
He burned his house down for the fire insurance
And spent the proceeds on a telescope
To satisfy a lifelong curiosity
About our place among the infinities.

‘What do you want with one of those blame things?’
I asked him well beforehand. ‘Don’t you get one!’

‘Don’t call it blamed; there isn’t anything
More blameless in the sense of being less
A weapon in our human fight,’ he said.
‘I’ll have one if I sell my farm to buy it.’
There where he moved the rocks to plow the ground
And plowed between the rocks he couldn’t move,
Few farms changed hands; so rather than spend years
Trying to sell his farm and then not selling,
He burned his house down for the fire insurance
And bought the telescope with what it came to.
He had been heard to say by several:
‘The best thing that we’re put here for’s to see;
The strongest thing that’s given us to see with’s
A telescope. Someone in every town
Seems to me owes it to the town to keep one.
In Littleton it might as well be me.’
After such loose talk it was no surprise
When he did what he did and burned his house down.

Mean laughter went about the town that day
To let him know we weren’t the least imposed on,
And he could wait—we’d see to him tomorrow.
But the first thing next morning we reflected
If one by one we counted people out
For the least sin, it wouldn’t take us long
To get so we had no one left to live with.
For to be social is to be forgiving.
Our thief, the one who does our stealing from us,
We don’t cut off from coming to church suppers,
But what we miss we go to him and ask for.
He promptly gives it back, that is if still
Uneaten, unworn out, or undisposed of.
It wouldn’t do to be too ******* Brad
About his telescope. Beyond the age
Of being given one for Christmas gift,
He had to take the best way he knew how
To find himself in one. Well, all we said was
He took a strange thing to be roguish over.
Some sympathy was wasted on the house,
A good old-timer dating back along;
But a house isn’t sentient; the house
Didn’t feel anything. And if it did,
Why not regard it as a sacrifice,
And an old-fashioned sacrifice by fire,
Instead of a new-fashioned one at auction?

Out of a house and so out of a farm
At one stroke (of a match), Brad had to turn
To earn a living on the Concord railroad,
As under-ticket-agent at a station
Where his job, when he wasn’t selling tickets,
Was setting out, up track and down, not plants
As on a farm, but planets, evening stars
That varied in their hue from red to green.

He got a good glass for six hundred dollars.
His new job gave him leisure for stargazing.
Often he bid me come and have a look
Up the brass barrel, velvet black inside,
At a star quaking in the other end.
I recollect a night of broken clouds
And underfoot snow melted down to ice,
And melting further in the wind to mud.
Bradford and I had out the telescope.
We spread our two legs as we spread its three,
Pointed our thoughts the way we pointed it,
And standing at our leisure till the day broke,
Said some of the best things we ever said.
That telescope was christened the Star-Splitter,
Because it didn’t do a thing but split
A star in two or three, the way you split
A globule of quicksilver in your hand
With one stroke of your finger in the middle.
It’s a star-splitter if there ever was one,
And ought to do some good if splitting stars
‘Sa thing to be compared with splitting wood.

We’ve looked and looked, but after all where are we?
Do we know any better where we are,
And how it stands between the night tonight
And a man with a smoky lantern chimney?
How different from the way it ever stood?

Your daisies have come
on the day of my divorce:
the courtroom a cement box,
a gas chamber for the infectious Jew in me
and a perhaps land, a possibly promised land
for the Jew in me,
but still a betrayal room for the till-death-do-us-
and yet a death, as in the unlocking of scissors
that makes the now separate parts useless,
even to cut each other up as we did yearly
under the crayoned-in sun.
The courtroom keeps squashing our lives as they break
into two cans ready for recycling,
flattened tin humans
and a tin law,
even for my twenty-five years of hanging on
by my teeth as I once saw at Ringling Brothers.
The gray room:
Judge, lawyer, witness
and me and invisible Skeezix,
and all the other torn
enduring the bewilderments
of their division.

Your daisies have come
on the day of my divorce.
They arrive like round yellow fish,
******* with love at the coral of our love.
Yet they wait,
in their short time,
like little utero half-borns,
half killed, thin and bone soft.
They breathe the air that stands
for twenty-five illicit days,
the sun crawling inside the sheets,
the moon spinning like a tornado
in the washbowl,
and we orchestrated them both,
calling ourselves TWO CAMP DIRECTORS.
There was a song, our song on your cassette,
that played over and over
and baptised the prodigals.
It spoke the unspeakable,
as the rain will on an attic roof,
letting the animal join its soul
as we kneeled before a miracle--
forgetting its knife.

The daisies confer
in the old-married kitchen
papered with blue and green chefs
who call out pies, cookies, yummy,
at the charcoal and cigarette smoke
they wear like a yellowy salve.
The daisies absorb it all--
the twenty-five-year-old sanctioned love
(If one could call such handfuls of fists
and immobile arms that!)
and on this day my world rips itself up
while the country unfastens along
with its perjuring king and his court.
It unfastens into an abortion of belief,
as in me--
the legal rift--
as on might do with the daisies
but does not
for they stand for a love
undergoihng open heart surgery
that might take
if one prayed tough enough.
And yet I demand,
even in prayer,
that I am not a thief,
a mugger of need,
and that your heart survive
on its own,
belonging only to itself,
whole, entirely whole,
and workable
in its dark cavern under your ribs.

I pray it will know truth,
if truth catches in its cup
and yet I pray, as a child would,
that the surgery take.

I dream it is taking.
Next I dream the love is swallowing itself.
Next I dream the love is made of glass,
glass coming through the telephone
that is breaking slowly,
day by day, into my ear.
Next I dream that I put on the love
like a lifejacket and we float,
jacket and I,
we bounce on that priest-blue.
We are as light as a cat's ear
and it is safe,
safe far too long!
And I awaken quickly and go to the opposite window
and peer down at the moon in the pond
and know that beauty has walked over my head,
into this bedroom and out,
flowing out through the window screen,
dropping deep into the water
to hide.

I will observe the daisies
fade and dry up
wuntil they become flour,
snowing themselves onto the table
beside the drone of the refrigerator,
beside the radio playing Frankie
(as often as FM will allow)
snowing lightly, a tremor sinking from the ceiling--
as twenty-five years split from my side
like a growth that I sliced off like a melanoma.

It is six P.M. as I water these tiny weeds
and their little half-life,
their numbered days
that raged like a secret radio,
recalling love that I picked up innocently,
yet guiltily,
as my five-year-old daughter
picked gum off the sidewalk
and it became suddenly an elastic miracle.

For me it was love found
like a diamond
where carrots grow--
the glint of diamond on a plane wing,
meaning:  DANGER!  THICK ICE!
but the good crunch of that orange,
the diamond, the carrot,
both with four million years of resurrecting dirt,
and the love,
although Adam did not know the word,
the love of Adam
obeying his sudden gift.

You, who sought me for nine years,
in stories made up in front of your naked mirror
or walking through rooms of fog women,
you trying to forget the mother
who built guilt with the lumber of a locked door
as she sobbed her soured mild and fed you loss
through the keyhole,
you who wrote out your own birth
and built it with your own poems,
your own lumber, your own keyhole,
into the trunk and leaves of your manhood,
you, who fell into my words, years
before you fell into me (the other,
both the Camp Director and the camper),
you who baited your hook with wide-awake dreams,
and calls and letters and once a luncheon,
and twice a reading by me for you.
But I wouldn't!

Yet this year,
yanking off all past years,
I took the bait
and was pulled upward, upward,
into the sky and was held by the sun--
the quick wonder of its yellow lap--
and became a woman who learned her own shin
and dug into her soul and found it full,
and you became a man who learned his won skin
and dug into his manhood, his humanhood
and found you were as real as a baker
or a seer
and we became a home,
up into the elbows of each other's soul,
without knowing--
an invisible purchase--
that inhabits our house forever.

We were
blessed by the House-Die
by the altar of the color T.V.
and somehow managed to make a tiny marriage,
a tiny marriage
called belief,
as in the child's belief in the tooth fairy,
so close to absolute,
so daft within a year or two.
The daisies have come
for the last time.
And I who have,
each year of my life,
spoken to the tooth fairy,
believing in her,
even when I was her,
am helpless to stop your daisies from dying,
although your voice cries into the telephone:
Marry me!  Marry me!
and my voice speaks onto these keys tonight:
The love is in dark trouble!
The love is starting to die,
right now--
we are in the process of it.
The empty process of it.

I see two deaths,
and the two men plod toward the mortuary of my heart,
and though I willed one away in court today
and I whisper dreams and birthdays into the other,
they both die like waves breaking over me
and I am drowning a little,
but always swimming
among the pillows and stones of the breakwater.
And though your daisies are an unwanted death,
I wade through the smell of their cancer
and recognize the prognosis,
its cartful of loss--

I say now,
you gave what you could.
It was quite a ferris wheel to spin on!
and the dead city of my marriage
seems less important
than the fact that the daisies came weekly,
over and over,
likes kisses that can't stop themselves.

There sit two deaths on November 5th, 1973.
Let one be forgotten--
Bury it!  Wall it up!
But let me not forget the man
of my child-like flowers
though he sinks into the fog of Lake Superior,
he remains, his fingers the marvel
of fourth of July sparklers,
his furious ice cream cones of licking,
remains to cool my forehead with a washcloth
when I sweat into the bathtub of his being.

For the rest that is left:
name it gentle,
as gentle as radishes inhabiting
their short life in the earth,
name it gentle,
gentle as old friends waving so long at the window,
or in the drive,
name it gentle as maple wings singing
themselves upon the pond outside,
as sensuous as the mother-yellow in the pond,
that night that it was ours,
when our bodies floated and bumped
in moon water and the cicadas
called out like tongues.

Let such as this
be resurrected in all men
whenever they mold their days and nights
as when for twenty-five days and nights you molded mine
and planted the seed that dives into my God
and will do so forever
no matter how often I sweep the floor.

Pastor Grovell writes as follows.....

I am often asked to interpret the Ten Commandments as they seem sometimes a bit out of date and irrelevant (and hard to understand by some of the more ******** folks). So here goes with the update we use in our own godly congregation. These are my revised and corrected commandments.  The originals are in the beloved King James version but where that is unclear I quote a more modern version too to assist those of you who are more or less illiterate. In the bible, the commandments are unaccompaned by the punishments you will get if you disobey them so I have updated that too, according to STRICT biblical scholarship.

===================================================­=================

1st Commandment: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me". This seems quite unequivocal to me but of course it was written BEFORE Jesus came to save us so here is the new version:

PG's NEW NUMBER 1: WORSHIP ONLY GOD (INCLUDING JESUS WHO IS PART OF GOD ANYWAY) & DO IT FREQUENTLY OR GOD WILL CRUSH YOU!

=========================================================­===========

2nd Commandment: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.

That seems a bit wordy to me and there is a bit of overlap with Number 1! In any case, it's a bit out of date as not many people worship idols, giant earthworms or fish these days. Perhaps a modern update would include not worshipping the TV set!

PG's NEW NUMBER 2: DO NOT WORSHIP THE TV SET OR ANYTHING SIMILAR OR GOD WILL BE VERY ANNOYED INDEED AND WILL PUNISH YOU AND ALL YOUR DESCENDANTS & THEIR DESCENDANTS TOO SO WATCH OUT ALL YOU HEATHEN COUCH POTATOES!

====================================================­================

3rd Commandment: "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain." Again a bit long-winded, and the vain bit will confuse some people.

PG's NEW NUMBER 3: DO NOT BLASPHEME OR GOD WILL CRUSH YOU IN AN INCREDIBLY PAINFUL WAY & SLOWLY AS WELL!

========================================================­============

4th Commandment: "Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work; But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates; For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it."

This is a difficult one to observe nowadays, what with Sunday opening at the shopping mall. The solution seems to be that non-Christians, Jews and Muslims can work to serve us whilst we go shopping. It shows why God created heathens and other infidels so they can sell godly people bibles, hymnals and religious artefacts on the Sabbath, even though they will probably go to Hell themselves as a result. And the bit about animals not working on Sundays seems pointless today so we'll skip that section.

PG's NEW NUMBER 4: WORK HARD FOR SIX DAYS A WEEK INCLUDING SATURDAYS AND THEN HAVE A NICE REST ON SUNDAYS BUT GET IN A LOT OF PRAYING ON SUNDAY OR YOU WILL BE PUNISHED IMMENSELY BY GOD!

=========================================================­===========

5th Commandment: "Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee."

Seems clear enough; particular the 2nd bit which people forget. This is particularly important as people live much longer nowadays and often old folks have to be put into a home which can be expensive, but God wants us to do it. Also, do not skimp on the private facilities - do you really want your old wizened parents to share a bathroom with other incontinents? No I don't think you do. Also, one must remember that a lot of people are ******* and don't have the vaguest idea who their father was. Often the mother has no idea either, filthy ****.

PG's NEW NUMBER 5: RESPECT YOUR PARENTS NO MATTER HOW MUCH IT COSTS OR GOD WILL SHORTEN YOUR OWN LIFE AS A PUNISHMENT & YOU WILL SUFFER A LOT! IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHO YOUR PARENTS ARE, YOU ARE A ******* AND WILL GO TO HELL.

========================================================­============

6th Commandment: "Thou shalt not ****." This one is a real problem for so many of us! What should we do if a mugger comes and tries to rob us? What should we do if someone threatens to **** and **** our womenfolk? What if heathens attack our nation? What about the inalienable American right to bear arms and **** unarmed protesters? What about the British right to rule over inferior races and shoot rebels? I think God was insufficiently insightful here, so my version is quite a radical improvement.

PG's NEW NUMBER 6: DO NOT **** PEOPLE UNLESS IT IS NECESSARY OR IF THEY ARE BURGLING *******!

====================================================­================


7th Commandment: "Thou shalt not commit adultery."This is OK as far as it goes but it is totally inadequate to deal with the amount of ***-SIN which is about the place in the modern world, so I have expanded this to deal with the problem. Also remember that King James was a rampant and blatant sodomite and pervert and so maybe had this one censored in his version of the GOOD BOOK to cover his own back, so to speak.

PG's NEW NUMBER 7: DO NOT COMMIT ANY ***-SINS INCLUDING UNMARRIED FORNICATION, EXCESSIVE FRENCH KISSING, HEAVY PETTING, ******* (MUTUAL AND/OR SOLITARY), ADULTERY, *******, BUGGERY, ******, HOMOSEXUAL ACTS OF ALL TYPES INCLUDING LESBIANISM OF ANY SORT, *******-READING OR THINKING FILTHY ***-THOUGHTS UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES OR YOU WILL BURN IN HELLFIRE FOR EVER AND EVER WITH THE MOST AWFUL AGONIES, AND ALSO MINIMIZE ALL LEGAL MARITAL *** TO OCCASIONS WHEN YOU WISH TO PROPAGATE AND KEEP IT BRIEF & IN THE DARK EVEN THEN!

========================================================­============

8th Commandment: "Thou shalt not steal." This one seems OK to me, with a bit of modernization.

PG's NEW NUMBER 8: YOU MUST NOT STEAL OR MUG OR ROB OR BURGLARIZE OR YOU WILL BE PUNISHED UTTERLY & VERY EXTENSIVELY BY GOD IN ALL HIS MIGHTY POWER!

=======================================================­=============

9th Commandment: "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour." This is a bit too narrow as I think non-neighbours and maybe even foreigners should be included as well. Also there needs to be a reminder of the dreadful punishment liars and falsifiers face.

PG's NEW NUMBER 9: DO NOT ACCUSE ANYONE AT ALL FALSELY AND DON'T TELL ANY LIES EITHER OR GOD WILL PUNISH YOU REALLY APPALLINGLY & YOU WILL SHRIEK IN AGONY FOR EVER!

========================================================­============

10th Commandment: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ***, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's." This one really is totally out-of-date and inadequate. It should apply to everyone and not just neighbours. Also, how many people can afford servants or keep oxen? And the "***" bit is open to obscene ***-SIN misinterpretation and blasphemous sneering by wicked ***-SINNERS. So this needs a complete re-write to bring it into the 21st century and to guide godly people into the way of righteousness. And some of the modern translations of the Bible are even worse, e.g. "Do not desire another man's house; do not desire his wife, his slaves, his cattle, his donkeys, or anything else that he owns." How about if you wish to sell your own house and move to a nicer one - what is wrong with that? How about if you wish to sell your low-grade animals and buy better ones? What is this ******* obsession with donkeys and ***** - sheep can be equally tempting to s degenerate ******* ***-SINNER. So I go for a nice simple revision which covers most eventualities:

PG's NEW NUMBER 10: DON'T BE JEALOUS OF OTHER PEOPLE'S BETTER FORTUNE, MAYBE THEY DESERVE IT & YOU ARE INFERIOR; STICK WITH WHAT YOU HAVE NO MATTER HOW GROTTY IT IS OR GOD WILL PUNISH YOU MORE THAN YOU CAN IMAGINE! AND KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF THE LIVESTOCK OR YOU WILL SUFFER APPALLINGLY IN DEEPEST HELL WITH RED HOT POKERS UP YOUR ****** FOR ETERNITY.

====================================================­================

So there you have it: Pastor Peter Grovell's recommendations for a life without sin. But remember to pray every single day to Jesus and under no circumstances confuse the wooden images of Jesus which the Catholics use with the real living invisible Jesus. If you fail to do what God wants, he will be left with no option but to condemn you to eternal Hellfire.

And a final point: God did not hand down to Moses any instructions about alcohol. Did He say, "Thou shalt not have a pint of beer!" NO! Did He say, "Thou shalt not have a bottle of wine!" NO! Did He even rule out a shot or two of gin, whisky, ***, brandy or any other alcoholic refreshments? NO He did not! He even transformed water into wine on several occasions, which shows he liked a glass or two down his local Jewish "pub". So there is no harm in drinking alcohol but only if it does not lead you to do ***-SIN, ******, ****, THEFT, BUGGERY, ***-COVETING or IDOL-WORSHIP!

Pastor Peter Grovell D.D., C.S.M.F.,
Founder, Ultra-Strict Reformed Church of Jesus.

Space and dread and the dark--
Over a livid stretch of sky
Cloud-monsters crawling, like a funeral train
Of huge, primeval presences
Stooping beneath the weight
Of some enormous, rudimentary grief;
While in the haunting loneliness
The far sea waits and wanders with a sound
As of the trailing skirts of Destiny,
Passing unseen
To some immitigable end
With her grey henchman, Death.

What larve, what spectre is this
Thrilling the wilderness to life
As with the ****** shape of Fear?
What but a desperate sense,
A strong foreboding of those dim
Interminable continents, forlorn
And many-silenced, in a dusk
Inviolable utterly, and dead
As the poor dead it huddles and swarms and styes
In hugger-mugger through eternity?

Life--life--let there be life!
Better a thousand times the roaring hours
When wave and wind,
Like the Arch-Murderer in flight
From the Avenger at his heel,
Storm through the desolate fastnesses
And wild waste places of the world!

Life--give me life until the end,
That at the very top of being,
The battle-spirit shouting in my blood,
Out of the reddest hell of the fight
I may be snatched and flung
Into the everlasting lull,
The immortal, incommunicable dream.

I bought myself a gun today.
I’ll give you a moment to process the mental paper work.
Is he serious?
Is this guy for real?
Is this a metaphor? Is it loaded?  

Are these questions
you might ask?
Isn’t this supposed to be a poem?

I said I bought myself a gun today.
Do you feel better?
Safer?
Do I
seem more dangerous?
Are my words more weighted now--
with violence?
with virility?
with *******?
Are you looking at my crotch
for an extra bulge?
How do you feel
about me now
knowing that I’m packing?

I bought myself a gun today,
And just like that
I’m a gangsta upholding the second amendment.
I’m a citizen of the constitution
holding up my right
to bear arms,
and raise my hand in a fist--
a fist, that’s gripped in tension
a fist that’s an extension
           of man and invention
           and I really should mention
          I can blow your ******* head off
          without the slightest intention.

I bought myself a gun today,
Are you scared:
that I don’t know how to use it?
That it might want to use me?
That I might become
overwrought with emotions,
and respond to an argument
“Arnold” style with, an,
   “I’ll be back?”--
that I might settle things
once and for all
with my noisy neighbor
in a language he might finally understand?
Are you scared?

I bought myself a gun today.
Does that make you worry?
You know what the statistics say,
That I have a better chance of shooting
myself,
than some intruder,
or mugger, or ******
or therapist even.
Are you worried about my self-destruction?
that I might I might accidentally
have an
accident?
Or, maybe, you may think,
that it might be on purpose?
that I might be singing
the, “Barrel-in-the-mouth blues?”--
not just fantasizing
about ‘em,
but singing ‘em with a with my mouth wide open,
and feeling them for real for real:
feeling the cold steel ‘cross
my tongue,
choking
on the taste of cordite,
really singing, “I can’t breathe,”
and how much
this ***** and having
the means to put and end to it all--
Are you worried about that?
If you are
then don’t,
‘cause I’m not thinking about that at all.

I bought myself a gun today.
Wouldn’t it be great
if we all could say:

I bought myself a gun today.

I'm the spark
That started
The fire when
The retirement
Home burned alive,
I'm the guy who
Sold the quarter
To Cianci's daughter
That bought her
A place
In that lake
Of boiling water,
I'm the knife
In the mugger's hand
That ended the life
Of a family oriented
American man
For an American Made
Minivan that was
Worth less than
A single grand,
I'm the hand on the arm
That held the pen
That signed the plans
To build the bombs
That were dropped
Upon Japan,
I'm the disease
That multiplied the cells
That sent Bukowski
Swearing
His way
Down
To Hell,
I'm the wind
That fueled the fires
When the towers
Fell,
I'm the blade
That took the sight
From Oedipus
When he took delight
In his mother's kiss,
I'm the cold
Air in an
Empty grave,
I'm the corner
Of the stove
On which you always
Stub your toe,
I'm the snow
That slicked the road
And sent your brother
Into reality's
Reunion show,
I'm the smoke
That filled the throat
Of a crying infant
And choked it
Into a memory,
I'm the repititious lie
That sent the witches
To burn alive
In Salem
And Spain,
I'm the trigger
On the gun
That blew the brain
Of Kurt Cobain,
I'm to blame
For the way *******
Destroys the lives
Of the otherwise sane,
I'm the voice
That told Sam's son
To wipe the smile
From America's fat face
While satisfying
Their perverted taste
For people dying,
I'm the nails
On the fingers
That Barkovitch
Used to scratch
The long-walk-itch
When he ripped
Out his own throat,
I'm the one
Who swung the vote
To elect a bush
As dumb as a goat,
I'm the bullet
That pierced
The vest on
Kyle Joe's chest
And laid him to rest
In Exeter,
I'm the snake
That charmed
The leaf
Right off of Eve,
The way that
Hemopheliacs
Bleed
And
Bleed,
The constant
Antagonist
You seem
To need.

Or maybe you're just in a
Bad mood, and I'm still the
Same dude who sat with you
While the three day fever
Ripped through your body,
Stroking your hair and
Wiping the sour sweat from
Your forehead while you
Hallucinated demons that
Emerged from your chest,
Slightly below your left
Breast, to fly in patterns and
Synchronized formations
Through the caverns of your imagination.

Maybe I'm still the guy who
Held you through the night
Your mother died, wiping
Every tear that you cried,
Spending that hour sitting
Outside while the jewel
Encrusted air surrounded us
Like a never ending chasm of
Golden despair, splitting
Myself like a uranium atom
For you to be warmed by the
Reaction inside.

Maybe I'm still the one you
Saw from across the smoke
Filled dive saloon with a pint
Of Harpoon, who saw you as
The only shining light in a
Darkened room, who talked
To you and told you stories
And complimented the
Sundress you bought off Tobi,
Even though you
Told me really,
The weather
Wasn't quite right for it.

Maybe I'm still the one you
Wake up to in the middle of
The night, sweat sticking us
To the sheets and each other,
Because the heat's been
Broken going on seventeen
Weeks and we fell asleep
Without opening the window again.

Maybe I'm still the man who
Makes you breakfast every
Morning so you can sleep in
A little bit, so you can read
The latest Dig with your
Coffee and cig before you
Head to the ******* lab that
Makes you feel sick twelve
Hours later, the man who's
Waiting at home after to
Listen to your complaints
About the day and say the
Things you want to hear

"You're totally right,
They're completely wrong,
I love you dear,
Your hair is a song
That fills the air
And fills my ears
And fills my stomach
With warmth and light"

Maybe I'm a fool.
Maybe people don't change,

Or maybe they do, overnight,
And I'm to blame.

Either way,
I still feel
The same
As when we took
The same last name
Ten years ago
Yesterday.