Up on the hill.
Stood the Vikings son.
King of the land.
Now ruled everyone

Flames licked the boat
the cremation took place
The Vikings did gather
pain in their face

(Glade, World, Master, Boy, Hero)

                                                 GLADE

There is a glacier.
Its blue tongue’s tip just tastes a frozen gorge.
There is a gorge, its walls shattered by cold; a once-green thing that, in dying, birthed a thousand aching fissures. It works its jagged way downhill, round ragged rifts and drifts until it comes upon a little frosted wood.
There is a wood, an island locked in ice.
Within this wood the gorge descends. It wanders and it wends; it brakes and all but ends outside a clearing wet with sun. And there, forking, its bent and broken arms embrace a strange, enchanted glade.

There is a glade.
And in this glade the black bears sleep, though salmon leap fat between falls. Here the field mouse draws no shadow, the eagle seeks no prey; they spend their while caressed by rays, and halcyon days are they. Here rabbit and fawn may linger, no longer need they flee. For in this timeless, taintless space, the Wild has ceased to be. (Outside the glade are shadow and prey, are ice and naked death. There blood may run freely. There the eagle, that thief, is a righteous savage, a noble fiend. But once in the glade he is dove, and has no taste for blood, running freely or otherwise).
And in this glade there nests a pool:  a dazzling, blue-and-silver jewel; profoundly deep, pristinely clear. All who sip find solace here, for this is the Eye of Being. They lap in peace, assuming blear, not knowing it is seeing. And ever thus this pool shall peer:  a silent seer, reflecting on—all that Is, and all Beyond.
(Outside the glade there lies a world where rivers ever run, where ghastly calves in random file revile a bitter sun. East, the day is born in mist. West she dies:  her rest, the deep. And North…North the Earth lies mute. Wind gnaws her hide, wind wracks her dreams. Wind screams like a flute in her white, white sleep).
But in the glade are tall, stately grasses, sunning raptly, spinning lore. Roots render the rhythms, blades bend without breeze, as signals ascend from the glade’s tender floor. (In this wise the glade weaves its word, airs its views. All the glade’s flora are bearers of news). They do not wither with fall, for in the glade there is no fall. They do not bind or wilt or brown—they gesture, spreading the mood, the mind; conveying, indeed, the very soul of the glade. As ever they have, as they shall evermore.
Bees do not hum here; they sing. They fatten the dream. Mellow and round are the timbres they sound, sweet is the music they bring. Birds do not sing here—they play. They carry the theme. Dulcet and warm are the strains they perform. Gifted musicians are they. (All in the glade are virtuosi. They were born to create. Melody, harmony, meter…are innate). Now the performance is lively and bright, now full, now almost still. For, though all in the glade may lean to the light, they must bend to the maestro’s feel.
And yet…there was a day, long ago in a dream, when this ongoing opus was torn. And on that day (so the lullaby goes) the wind brought a scream, and Dissonance was born.
There was a noise.
Moose tensed, their coffee eyes narrowed, their patient brows creased. Bees mauled the tempo, birds lost their place. The grass stood *****, all blades pointing east. There was a crash, and a shriek, and a naked, bleeding beast burst stinking through the fern, fell stumbling on its face.
Moose scattered:  unheard of. Sheep brawled, geese burst out of rhyme. The symphony, forever endeavored to soar sublime, fluttered, plunged, and, for all of a measure, ceased.
The pool was appalled…what manner brute—what kind of monster was this? Furless flank to forelimb, hide obscured by blood. As for its face…it had no face; only a look:  of shock frozen in time, of horror in amber. A deep welling rift ran temple to chin, halving the mask, caving it in. Such a grievous wound…the pool watched it stagger, on two legs and four, thrashing about till it came to a rise. There it labored for air, wiped the blood from its eyes, lashed at illusion, looked wildly round. Beholding the pool, the beast tumbled down.
And there this wretch plunged his thirst, drank his fill, fell back on his haunches.
The pool became still.
The two traded stares.
The glass read his features:  that durable eye pondered the wreckage and probed the debris. Revolted, the pool sought the succor of sky. But that thing remained—that face…in all creation…surely there could be…no other creature so ugly as he.
And he gazed in the glass.
Beneath the surface were…images…swimming in currents of shadow and light. He saw half-shapes and fragments…hideous men, exotic beasts…saw blue worlds of water, saw white worlds of ice…it was all so vague and unreal—yet somehow strangely familiar. Deeper he peered, but, as his mangled face neared, the sun smote the pool and the shapes disappeared. The brute pawed the ground and, dreaming he’d drowned, shook his head sharply and slowly looked round:
There were starlings at arm’s-length, transfixed with suspense, their tail feathers trembling, their dark eyes intense. Fantails and timber wolves, stepping in sync, paused for a sniff, stooped for a drink. Bees, pirouetting, threw light in his eyes. Seizing the moment, the pool pressed its hold.
And the glade revolved.
The freak watched it spin—saw the ferns’ greedy fingers reach round and close in, saw the tall grass rise high in an emerald sheen, swaying to rhythms from somewhere obscene. This place was madness; he struggled to stand, but, weak as he was, keeled over cold.
And the glade heaved a sigh, and the tall grass reclined, in curious patterns once rendered in whim. Far off in thunder the hard world replied, as iced pines exploded and screamed on the breeze. Down bore the sun, a chill just behind. The pool, grown blood-red, fended frost from its rim. Details dissolved in the oncoming tide. The pool dimmed to black. Night seeped through the trees.
Now flora found slumber while, pulsing below, the pool was infused with a soft ruby glow.
Soon birds bearing beech leaves, and needles of pine, laid down a spread and returned to the limb. But breath from the North blew their blanket aside. The wind grew in earnest, the air seemed to freeze.
And the wolf and the she-bear, of contrary mind, abhorring their task approached, looking grim. They sniffed him for measure, then, loathing his hide, growled their displeasure and dropped to their knees.
All night these glum attendants flanked his naked quaking form. The rising moon drew dreams in gray.
In time the man grew warm.

Morning swept through the glade in one broad stroke of the master’s brush, dappling the foliage with amber and rose. The pool was roused by the sweet pass of light. He opened his eye and the glade came alive:  into the whirlpool of life a thousand colors swam, chasing the scattering eddies of night. The magic of morning began.
Bluebird and goldfinch descended in rings, primaries clashing with robin and jay. Dollops of sun, repelled by their wings, spattered anew on the palette of day. Banking as one, the hues struck away.
There was a crowd.
And in this crowd that oddity sat, its chin on its chest, its rear pointing west. Its forepaws lay leaning, upturned and at rest. ***** and blood messed its muzzle and breast. Passed overnight. Or perhaps only dozed…tendril by tendril, claw by claw, the crowd decompressed:  the ring slowly closed.
And the stranger cried out and shifted his seat. His eyes sought his feet—rounding the arches, and topping the toes, the tall grass was questing. The little brute froze.
And the fauna took pause, and the flora went slack. Leaves followed talons, stems followed claws. Hooves tromped on paws as the crowd drifted back.
Not a breath taken. Not a move made. Stillness, like fog, enveloped the glade.
Now the grass tugged his feet, now the sea of jade splayed—left hand and right, the slender shafts reared. Gaining momentum, blade followed blade. The green field was torn till a deep swath appeared. The swath hurtled west, reflecting the sun. A hundred yards distant it died. Once more the grass stood, its tips spreading wide. The swath, born again, repeated its run.
Plain was the message, and clearly conveyed. The newcomer gawked. Confusion ensued.
The tall blades were swayed by the pulse of the glade.
But the swath was not renewed.
Something tiny bounced by. He ventured a peek, barely rolling an eye.
A chocolate sparrow, with pinfeathers black, popped past an ankle and paused to look back. The bird cocked its head, rocked in place, hopped ahead. It fluttered. It freaked. It glared and stopped dead. Vexed to its limit, it burst into flight.
The sitting thing watched till it passed out of sight.
Now a breeze bent his back, picked him half off his stern. The wind, done its best, grew flustered at last. It trailed to the west, thrilling lilies it passed. It wound round the willows and didn’t return.
So the fauna repaired to the live oak’s shade.
A strange kind of stupor fell over the glade.
From deep in the wood came a shape through the trees—a pronghorn, perhaps, or an elk swift and sure. But up limped a moose, a flyport with fur, low in the belly and wide at the knees. Wizened he was, scarcely able to see. Neither vision, nor vigor, nor velvet had he. He hobbled abreast, then groveled or died, his nose facing west, his tail flung aside.
The brute merely glazed.
But the glade was unfazed.
Those long shafts reshuffled. A tense moment passed.
The ominous shadows of badgers were cast. Three left their holes, as if to attack. They pedaled like moles and the stranger jumped back. He stumbled, fell flailing, and, kicking his guide, threw out his arms and tumbled astride. First he stepped on his tail, then he stepped on his pride. The moose bellowed twice and shook side to side while the little pest clung to his high, homely hide.
And the old moose unbent to his knees by degrees. He reeled like a drunk down the path of the breeze. Together they lurched through a break in the trees. And all morning long, and on through the day, both beggar and bearer would buckle and sway. The moose lost his temper, but never his way.
And the wind blew the sun to its deep ruby rest; the scrub, in obeisance, inclined to the west. Their slow taffy shadow in slinking would seem to slip round the rocks like a snake in a dream.
And the sun became a beacon, and the underbrush a stream. The wide Earth took their weight in stride, and the wind named him Hero.

                                               WORLD

When the sun was low the old moose began to stumble, at last limping to a halt beside a swift river lined with stunted pines. He’d half-expected a somewhat graceful dismount, but Hero, dug in like a tick, wasn’t about to let go. The moose knelt until his joints objected, shimmied, bucked, and with a sudden whirl sent the little bother flying.
Hero scraped himself out of the dirt and looked up forlornly. The ancient moose, his good eye gone bad, glared a long minute before hobbling away, his bony **** rocking with dignity, his scraggly tail fighting off imaginary flies.
Hero managed a few steps and dropped, staring in disbelief as the moose disappeared between half-frozen pines. He remained on his knees for the longest time, his jaw hanging, waiting for the moose—waiting for anything to show. At last a ruckus to his left snapped him out of it. His head ratcheted around.
Fifteen feet off the bank, three screaming gulls were dancing on an immense stone outcropping, fighting over a rapids-tossed sockeye. Hero was instantly famished. He wobbled to his feet and stumbled twice wading out, only regaining his balance by leaning against the current while rapidly wheeling his arms. The shrieking gulls reluctantly backed off as he stepped in slow-motion through the rushing water. Hero lunged at the slapping fish, cracked an ankle on the rock, and hopped around howling with both hands holding his shin. One foot was as good as none in the surging water. He went right under. Before he knew it he was being swept downriver.
This was glacial meltwater, so cold he quickly lost all sensation. Hero swallowed a mouthful and surfaced fighting for life; too disoriented to combat the current, too numb to realize his waving arm was striking something solid. That solid something turned out to be a swirling clump of rotted birches tangled up in scrub. He embraced one of these trunks as the mass slammed against isolated rocks, kicked his feet wildly, and somehow hauled himself aboard. The raft ricocheted rock to rock until repeated impacts sent it spinning. Giddy from the whirling and soaking, he clung freezing to the trees, retching continuously while the river roared in his ears. Through spray and tears he made out only cartwheeling fragments of the world.
But then the river was widening, its fury dissipating. The raft was approaching the sea. Hero gasped as the seemingly boundless Pacific swallowed the broad red belly of the sun. And as he spun he was treated to a panoramic, breathtaking spectacle:  the great indigo ocean with its slow traffic of driftwood and ice—voiced-over by the dismal calls of foraging gulls, and broken rhythmically by intermittent glimpses of the river’s rocky banks growing farther and farther apart. Whirling as it went, the dying man’s soul was taken by the sea.

At the 59th Parallel in winter, the Pacific coast plays host to numberless floes and minor bergs orphaned from Alaskan coastal glaciers. Hero cruised into a watery gridlock on a boat of ice-glazed birches, one bit of flotsam among the rest.
The cold wouldn’t let him move, wouldn’t let him breathe, wouldn’t let him think. He lay supine, feet crossed and hands clasped, terrified that to budge was to roll. An ice patina grew over the tangled trees like a white fungus—this growth soon webbed his fingers and toes, speckled his chest and thighs, glazed his hair and face, danced and disintegrated with his breath’s tapering plumes.
Floes and frozen-over debris tended to group with passing collisions; Hero’s married birches bit by bit accrued a mostly-submerged tangle of trunks and branches, all becoming fast in a creeping ice cement. Night came on just as resolutely, until land was only a flat black memory. The raft moved silently over the deep, still accepting the occasional gentle impact. And the floes became thicker and wider in a freezing doldrums; soon the proximate sea was all a broken field of packed ice, bobbing infinitesimally with the planet’s pulse.
Long ghostly strands of fog came striding over the torn ice field. They leaned this way and that, their mourners’ skirts tearing and patching and leaning anew. The ghosts were there to seal it:  their locked fingers and gray diaphanous wings were quickly becoming a wholly opaque descending shroud, its boundaries lost in the soughing wind.
Collisions came less and less. Darkness and silence, breaching some previously impenetrable barrier, began to take up residence in Hero’s chilling marrow. From his very center broke a weak little cry of refusal, of denial, as mind mustered frame in one desperate bid for freedom. His skin, frozen to the raft, peeled right off, and at that his inner brave succumbed. Hero’s smashed head arched back. His face contorted frightfully while the little lamp fluttered and paled within.
A raucous chorus slowly worked its way through the mist. It emerged a few hundred yards off—a tiny, terrified barking, growing in clarity as it grew in volume and urgency. It was a sound beacon. Hero strained eagerly, and when for one excruciating minute the beacon was cut off by a large passing body, was certain death had claimed him. Then it was back, and his heartbeat was quickening. He caught a heaving sound…something was moving his way down a wide tributary between floes. Hero could hear a gasping and snorting, accompanied by a hard slapping and splashing. The sounds vanished. In a moment the raft was rocked from below.
A sputtering muzzle blew salt in his eyes. A cold slimy flipper flapped across his chest and slapped about his face. The fur seal barked directly in his ear. Whiskers raked his dead cheek. The seal barked again.
Back below the surface it slipped. Hero listened anxiously as the splashing sound retreated whence it came.
The seal swam off perhaps a hundred feet and began barking hysterically.
From much farther off came a profusion of answering barks.
The seal swam back to Hero’s raft, circling and calling, circling and calling, while the responders approached en masse.
Now a sallow beam could be seen cutting through the fog. Several more showed vaguely along a plane yawing with some huge, barely discernible object.
A herd of northern fur seals burst into sight, barking madly, beating through the ice. They converged on Hero’s raft, really bellowing now.
Those odd yellow beams came in pursuit, and soon were close enough to eerily illuminate a gigantic wooden vessel parting the ice. The seals barked ferociously. Whenever the vessel leaned away, those nearest Hero’s raft would absolutely howl.
The fog deepened, condensed, crystallized, and then the collective light of a dozen lanterns was playing over a low, listing nightmare. Hero could hear the shouts of many aggressive men, but the waterborne seals, rather than scatter, boarded the ice and redoubled their din, fighting their way onto his quickly mobbed raft.
The sealers hurled serrated spears even as they clambered down rope ladders. When these men reached the ice the seals snapped and gnashed madly, refusing to be dislodged. The sealers lost all composure with the thrill of the hunt:  wielding clubs, spears, and hatchets—sometimes using iron bludgeons or any old utensil handed down—they crushed skulls, dragged carcasses, hooked animals still spurting and bleating. Clinging though he was, Hero was flabbergasted by the way the slipping and scampering men went about their butchery, hacking and smashing more with passion than with precision. But not a single seal attempted to flee—throughout the carnage they barked all the louder, egging on their slayers, carcass by carcass drawing the impassioned sealers to Hero’s ice-locked raft.
It was all so hazy and macabre. Hero’s eyes rolled back, and the next thing he knew he was sitting hunched on the vessel’s sopping deck. Two men were rubbing his limbs while another poured warm water down his back. He looked around in shock. The very notion of a boat containing more than one or two individuals—a sort of floating tribe—was way beyond his ken; so to see it, to have it come looming out of nothingness, was an experience almost supernatural.
He remembered some of those fur-covered men force-feeding him mouthfuls of halibut and seal fat, and he recalled a small group standing around him, shouting words that made no sense at all. After that he had a very vivid memory of their angry little chief repeatedly punching him while hollering one angry little word over and over and over. Hero couldn’t make out his inquisitor’s face, for the large feather-lined hood quite engulfed the man’s head, yet he could see those quick eyes flash as they caught the oil lamps’ light. Finally this man stopped boxing Hero’s ear. He stared hard. In these remaining decades of the tenth century it was fully within his power to administer as he saw fit—he could have ordered Hero’s immediate execution and not a man of his crew would have objected. He hesitated only because there wasn’t a hint of resistance in his prisoner’s pinched and frightened eyes. He leaned forward, studying the wound that all but split Hero’s face in two before grunting, raising his right arm, and yanking down its seal hide sleeve. Attached to the stump of his forearm was a primitive prosthesis consisting of a thick oak cap strapped to the arm with lengths of gut, and, hammered squarely into the center of that cap, a broad, cruelly hooked blade chiseled from a narwhal’s tusk. He held this obscenity in front of Hero’s eyes, traced the face’s deep diagonal rift, and once more demanded his captive’s identity. Hero then vaguely remembered being dragged along a tilting deck and thrown into the ship’s tiny hold. He retained a strong mental image of landing in a place of musty odors and dank projections.
There came a soft scuffling in the darkness, and presently a blind and exceedingly old woman felt her way to his side, mumbling as she approached. Her speech was comprised not of words; it was rather a running gibberish of cooing vowels and clucking consonants. The old woman was as mad as her circumstances; sick with sea and solitude, bedeviled by age and confinement. She sat cross-legged, patting her withered palms up his arm until she came to his face. Her strange mumbling soliloquy rose and fell as her bony fingers daintily explored the newly opened wound. Hero let his head fall back in her lap. A pair of hands like emaciated tarantulas scurried through the filth and tiny bodies until they came upon an old otter’s pelt bag that held her secrets. The woman loosened the bag’s cord and extracted an assortment of herbs, sniffing each in succession. She then scooped a handful of blubber from a bowl made of a previous occupant’s skull, kneaded the selected herbs into the blubber, and commenced gently massaging the wound, clucking and cooing while the black rats watched and waited.
For nine interminable days Hero remained in that cold, stinking compartment, rocking back and forth between life and death. The old woman never gave up on him. She clung to him during his seizures, rubbed his limbs vigorously when his blood pressure fell. She gathered various accumulated skins and, using woven strands of her own long hair, sewed him a multilayered, body-length wraparound with arm sleeves and very deep pockets, working by touch with a needle formed of a cod’s rib. By this same method she was able to fashion a pair of heavily lined snug-fitting moccasins. The old woman made him eat; she masticated the cod and halibut their keepers pitched into the hold, then shoved the results down his throat with a long gnarly forefinger. She called into his screaming nightmares, talking him out of sleep and back into their foul little reality. Together they lowed in the dark, while the keel groaned along and the waves beat time.
At the end of those dark nine days his strength was restored, but not his mind. Once again he was taken on deck.
The vessel had reached a chain of remote wind-swept islands, rocky and treeless, naked except for patchy carpets of hardy grass. These islands stretched far to the west, shrouded in mist. The ship was making for the smallest; just a chip on the sea. When they reached depth for anchorage Hero was hustled into a rowboat and lowered over the side. He looked up, saw two men climbing down by rope. These men positioned themselves at the oars and slowly rowed toward the islet. Seated between them, Hero felt like a man being led to his execution. He snuck a peek. The rowers’ heads were lowered, their features completely obscured by the heavy feathered hoods; they had all the somberness of pallbearers. Not a word passed between them as they rigidly worked their oars:  the only sound was the dip-and-purl of wood in water. Hero looked away. Against his will, he found his eyes drawn to that rocky islet waiting in the fog.
Not a bird, not a sea lion, not a shrub. It was lonesome beyond imagination.
Upon landfall one of the men used a spear’s point to **** Hero ashore. While his companion steadied the boat, he removed a skin sack full of half-frozen halibut, followed by a few armloads of precious tinder. These articles he tossed at Hero’s feet. He resumed his place at the oars and, without looking back, used the blunt end of his spear to shove off.
Hero watched the boat moving away, watched the men climbing their ropes, watched the boat being hauled aboard. As the mysterious vessel receded he saw a number of those silent men standing at the stern, stolidly returning his stare. Their hooded forms grew smaller and smaller, finally becoming indistinct. The vessel was swallowed up in fog.
Hero looked around, at a desolate world of rock and drifting ice. In the sunless pools at his feet a few purplish, flaccid sea anemones were waving in a sickly phosphorescence; along the rocks ran a tattered quilt of wild grass and lichen. It was the end of the world. He began to pace in his anxiety, only to crumple bit by bit inside his furs. At last he just sat with his face in his arms and wept. When he could weep no more he raised his head and opened his red, swollen eyes.
There were gulls all around him, staring like statuary in a madman’s garden. Standing in their midst were auks and puffins and murres, absolutely spellbound, unable to lean away. The silence was broken only by a wild, fitfully pursing wind—a wind that seemed, eerily, on the verge of producing syllables. And on that wind a flock of terns was rising slowly, their beady eyes fixed on the lone sitting man. The terns watched as he trembled, and banked as he swooned.
Then, beating as one, they threw back their wings and blew into the sun.

There was a blaze.
Behind that blaze a pair of black, bug-like eyes met his and immediately withdrew. A man wrapped in caribou hides stood abruptly, drawing angry swarms of sparks.
The Aleut peered queerly into the icy Pacific, his craggy profile merging seamlessly with a jumble of rocks showing just beyond his shoulder. The man was very tall, closer to seven feet than to six, and thin almost to emaciation.
He was also a mute. Soon enough he would display a talent for communication through gutturals, but now his body language spoke louder than words. It told the shivering stranger that he was not only disliked—he was feared.
The islander removed the hides he’d piled on the sleeping man. He produced a bone awl and strategically pierced a caribou hide, draped the hide over the old woman’s handiwork, and ran a cord of tightly woven tendons crosswise through his made holes, knotting it at the bottom to create a kind of cloak. He then killed the fire, heaped wood, fish, and remaining hides into Hero’s arms, and led him to a tiny cove where his long skin canoe lay in the grass. This was not the one-man kayak used by his people for centuries, but an actual canoe modeled on the graceful vessels he’d observed under the control of northern coastal tribesmen. After dragging it into the water he perched Hero in the fore, placed the cargo in the middle, and stepped into the rear like a gaunt furry spider. The Aleut dug out a paddle and began pulling with smooth strokes of surprising muscularity, his black eyes trained on his quiet companion’s back.
So began their long island-hopping journey. They stepped the chain one stone at a time, living off the sea. But much as the islander disliked Hero’s vapid company, it was not in his nature to proceed expeditiously; his people, remote as they were, had learned to count not in days but in generations. Given this, the Aleut took his time. He showed Hero how to build shelters of skin and gut; during bad weather the two would sit on an island in utter silence while rain hammered on their stretched seal-intestine window. And one very clear night he pointed out constellations while attempting to demonstrate, using broad gestures, just how the brighter heavenly bodies were in perfect alignment with the Aleutians. Hero followed his guide’s gestures as a pet follows its master’s movements and, like a pet, soon became bored. The Aleut did not grow flustered. He grew ever more wary:  behind that granite, weather-beaten exterior squirmed a very primitive imagination. Superstitious as he was, the Aleut was almost certain Hero could read his mind. So one time, and one time only, he threw a searing look at the back of Hero’s bowed and listing head. After a long minute of vigorous thought-projection he shifted his gaze aside. The brute appeared to feel this shift, and gently turned his head. And both saw the ocean break rhythm, and watched as otters and sea lions surfaced, noted their progress, and slipped without tremor beneath the waves.
In spring the fogs lifted. The grimness gave way to serenity, a generous sun buttered the dappled sea. On the islands grass grew lushly. Wildflowers leapt on the color-starved eye.
And one day the islander’s nape itched. He turned to see a flock of arctic terns casually tracking them under a gorgeous, white-plumed sky. As the day progressed the terns came drifting high overhead, slowly but surely taking the lead.
The Aleut squinted against the sun. He’d never known these birds to pursue a westerly migratory pattern—the terns were distributing themselves into a rough wedge shape, much like geese on the wing.
For a while he let the flock be his guide. Then, to test his stars, he cunningly steered his canoe north. At once the wedge disintegrated. Not until he’d lowered his eyes and pulled purposefully to the west did the disrupted pattern reassert itself. He peered up timidly. The wedge was now in the shape of a perfect arrowhead.
Just so were the fates of mariners and aviators inextricably entwined. At night, once the Aleut had landed his canoe on the nearest pearl, the terns would light in a quiet circle and remain until sunrise. As the Aleut and Hero took to sea, the flock would quickly form that same authoritative pattern.
In time the Aleut paddled his companion clear to the westernmost islands of the Aleutian chain. His people had dwelt, even here, a thousand years and more, but no contemporary islander knew for certain what lay beyond. Legend told of an enormous land mass forever gripped by cold, where a cruel people waylaid innocent seafarers for barbaric sacrificial rites.
So here the islander paused. But even as he vacillated he noticed the terns were veering south.
If the Aleut had been able to curse aloud he would have been vociferous. He was being compelled to follow an even less desirable course—that of the unknown open ocean. Now he looked upon his passenger’s hunched back not with fear but with loathing. He took a deep breath, rolled his shoulders, and defiantly continued west. The wedge broke up immediately. The terns dive-bombed the canoe, whirled around the windmilling Aleut, tore skyward and hovered determinedly. Something huge broke surface behind them, but the Aleut was way too frayed to turn. He dropped his head, a beaten man, and began paddling south. Little by little the birds returned to formation.
The tiny canoe had no business going up against the mighty Pacific. It would soon have been swallowed and smashed, had not the terns veered in close formation whenever the distant sea appeared too rough. Once he’d lost his bearings the Aleut religiously followed their serpentine course.
The days began to warm.
Now the sea’s bounty all but leapt in the canoe.
It seemed the Aleut was forever catching the finest currents, practically sliding down a corridor entirely free of peril. In this manner he was able to safely navigate waters no such craft had mastered before.
They were proceeding south by southwest, awed children of a plenteous, generous sea. The going became easier by the day, the ocean heavier with cod.
Nights the Aleut drifted comfortably, but a lifetime of wariness made him wake off and on. He’d slowly rise to find Hero sitting quietly under the stars, and soon he’d see, pallid in moonlight, a large body neatly pleating the ocean’s surface. The shape would precede them a while, only to vanish without a ripple.
All this strangeness kept the Aleut’s heart in a whirl, though he took pains to maintain his poise.
To allay his fear he kept a flat black stone planted squarely between them. It was his oldest treasure; an oddity he’d taken off the body of a mauled Tlingit woman when he was a child. Who she was, and how she’d come by the stone, were mysteries far beyond him, for no such piece had ever been known to Aleut or Inuk.
The stone was smooth and had been worked perfectly round. Bright yellow specks were scattered about its dull black face.
Long ago someone had etched a quaint and clumsy rune on that flat black surface—it was the crude, universal symbol for sun:  a broad circle surrounded by several rays. When the stone was rubbed against a pelt it possessed the curious property of growing quite warm and bright in the rune’s grooves, while the surface remained cool and dull.
This stone, both friend and overlord, had always “spoken to him”. It caused him to become restless when it was time to move on, and allowed him to relax when a destination had been reached. In this way he’d come to the familiar islet and discovered the unconscious little man. Just so:  the stone, he was sure, was responsible for making him “feel bad” as he watched the stranger shiver, and “feel better” once he’d built him a life-saving fire from the small pile of tinder he’d found nearby.
By now, however, the Aleut was wholly disenchanted with his stone, and deeply regretted having done its mysterious bidding. Never before had he been so long from sight of land, and never before had he felt so very, very small. The unimagined immensity of the Pacific was really starting to get to him when, after all their while at sea, a gray, seductive haze broke the horizon. They had reached another chain of islands, an Asian chain, the dark and smoky Kurils. Here a cold current kept the climate cool and foggy, and the chill, along with the prevalence of otter and seal, made him feel almost at home.
But this place gave him the creeps; he was a stranger, a trespasser somewhere sacred. There was a looming quality to the island mountains that made him extraordinarily aware of his transience, his pettiness, his puniness. He grew more and more cautious, sure their progress was being monitored—he could have sworn he saw wraiths in the trees, and wolves padding warily in the brush. The big islands looked on breathlessly. All along the rocky cliffs, thousands of auks and puffins followed the canoe in dead silence, their heads turning simultaneously, their countless tiny eyes peering redly through the fog. As the weeks passed, the Aleut’s anxiety was manifested in tics and sighs, and he’d cringe each time the crimson sun sank behind those black volcanic summits. In his imagination the mountains would rise right out of the sea, as though to pluck him. But the islands, in all their dignity, would always refuse to acknowledge so meek a stranger, and return their eyes to sea. The Aleut would hang his head, and timidly paddle by.
Then for days and days he pulled his weary canoe west—through a strait parting two mighty islands not part of the chain, and thence across a sea that was a warm, enticing bath. Spring had come to the East Asian coastal waters, and the Ainu, alone and in groups, were venturing deeper in search of increasing bounty. The Aleut, absorbed in his thoughts of sweet climate and bitter fate, was unaware they’d been spotted.
This first meeting between strangers of different worlds was a brief and awkward one. A lone Ainu fisherman, seeing the Aleut come paddling out of the unknown, dropped his net and turned to stone. The Aleut, for his part, instinctively froze with his body turned half-away to make the leanest target possible. Their stares locked. Never had the Aleut seen a face so heavily bearded, and never hair so fair. The Ainu began banging on his bronze catch pail. Other fishers soon appeared from the north and south, effectively cutting off the canoe. The Aleut caressed his stone and looked to the sky. The wedge had vanished. He put down his head and paddled for all he was worth.
With the word out, uncountable fishing craft appeared out of the blue and broke into hot pursuit, their pilots determined to force the canoe ashore.
Suddenly they were in sight of land, and the sea was absolutely riddled with watercraft. A train of small boats cast off from the mainland, even as a posse of two-man coracle-like tubs began to surround the battered skin canoe, their inhabitants calling back and forth in astonishment at the sight of these dark, savage newcomers. But the pursuing little coastal men, banging excitedly on the sides of their boats, were not Ainu. They had very straight black hair, prominent cheekbones, and strangely slanted eyes. And their speech, oddly marvelous as it was, was a rapid series of coos, chirps, and barks. Their boats formed a tight semi-circle around the canoe, forcing the Aleut to approach the mainland. The little men banged their boats maniacally, with more joining in as the canoe neared shore.
A bit farther south was a natural harbor swarming with fishing vessels of every description. As the canoe was forced into this harbor, people along the rocky coast began banging whatever they could get their hands on, until the air was filled with their lunatic percussion.
Tiny brown men came running along a soft yellow cliff overlooking the harbor, gesturing wildly. The canoe was squeezed between a chain of tubs and the shore, and, as it slowed, the tempo and ferocity of the banging decreased accordingly. When the canoe came to a halt the banging and shouting stopped. Hero creaked to his feet. The first North American to set foot on Asian soil stepped out shakily.
There followed the profoundest silence imaginable.
A second later it was as if a dam had burst.
Hundreds of hysterical, yammering voices erupted from hundreds of hysterical, clinging men and women. Hero was spun around, jostled about, handed along. He stared into their astounded, pinched little faces, and the sun, pulsing between their heads as he was turned, repeatedly stabbed his eyes. There came an excited outburst and frantic splashing which could only have been the Aleut’s violent demise, and then Hero was somehow limping alongside a primitive fishing village, blindly following a narrow dirt path that hugged the yellow cliff’s base. The warm spring sun caught the dust as he shambled. He rounded a bend and stopped.
Half a dozen children stood in his way, too fascinated to run. A chatter and scuffle rose behind him. He looked back to see that he was now in the midst of a small crowd of these children, and that more were running up with cries of amazement.
A stone struck his shoulder. As Hero turned another glanced off his chest.
A moment later he was being pelted from all sides, and the giggles and gasps had become something wildly unreal. He dropped to his knees in a hail of hurled rocks, covered his head with his arms, and slithered up the path on his belly.
A new voice broke in; an older, authoritative voice.
The children scampered off squealing.
Hero, shaken to his feet, found himself face to face with a diminutive, shouting, incomprehensible old man. The old man threw his arm around Hero’s waist and, jabbering all the while, led him to a secondary path cut into the cliff’s face. This path sloped gently upward over the waves. Together they picked their way to a place maybe halfway up, where the cliff’s face was honeycombed with natural alcoves and dug-out caves. Most of these spaces were used as one-man shelters; a few, cut deeper in the earth, as family hives. Strange gabbing people slid out of these holes like worms, reaching, but the little old man, who was evidently a little old man of some stature, embraced his find possessively and shouted them back inside.
The path narrowed as they climbed.
At its summit spread the upscale end of the neighborhood. Hero was led to a hovel nestled amid dozens of similar hovels, all scattered around a dainty stream wending between patches of stunted vegetation.
The old man’s place was basically a one-room hut fashioned of earth and salvaged boat hulls, with a slender side-yard surrounded by dry, dusty hedges. But inside it was clean and tidy, with rice paper partitioning and, built into the far earthen wall, a miniature stone fireplace. The old man sat his guest in the exact center of the room. There he fed him scraps from his bowl, using long sticks to pluck out bits of fish and clumps of tiny, starchy white pellets.
He studied the brute closely, watched him chew, walked round and round him. He poked here. He pinched there.
And that night he lit a fire on his crushed-shell hearth.
Hero curled up on a mat where the gossip of flames could reach him. Nearby, at his delicate wicker table, the old man sat in semi-darkness, illuminated only from the waist down.
But his eyes were alive. They spat and darted as they reflected the fire’s light, and, when at last they’d begun to sputter, his scratchy little voice came pattering out of the dark, muttering something vile and oddly modulated, sometimes in a whisper, sometimes in a gathering snarl.
Hero feigned slumber, unable to ignore those paired ominous flashes. Still, the room was cozy, and the fire warm, and the play of light and shadow kicked sleep in his eyes.

In the morning he woke in the old man’s side-yard, his head pounding, a rusty iron clamp securely fastened around his neck. This clamp was attached to the outermost link of a crude three-foot chain, and the link at the other end to a long stake driven into eight inches of solid rock. The chain and stake, like the clamp, were hammered of local iron. The clamp was too tight for comfortable swallowing, the chain too short to make standing possible. Hero could, however, spread out on his chest and stretch an arm to a low row of hedges. By parting the tangled undergrowth he had a limited view of the fishing village below, and of the harbor beyond. As the days passed he was able to tweak himself a view-space discernible only from his peculiar vantage. He accomplished this by gently breaking small branches strategically, then guiding their interrupted growth with the utmost tenderness. It was his secret garden.
He had no memory—none whatsoever—of being staked here. Obviously the old man hadn’t set this up overnight. Hero’s mind prodded timidly…how many others had been chained to this spot, and why?
But over the subsequent weeks and months he went beyond caring. Each day was the same:  just after dawn the old man would storm into the tiny side-yard swinging his reed whip wildly. The lashings were savage and unremitting. The old man, except for his eyes, would be mute. Only his whip need speak. And the snap of his reed had but one message:  when you see this whip you go down, and you go down immediately.
The naked savage, scarred head to foot, learned to go prostrate on the moment. Even so, the old man couldn’t resist the temptation to indulge in the occasional good old, all-out thrashing. And after each session he would toss the prisoner a vile mess of dead fish and rotting leftovers.
Hero lived like this for many months, lost in a confused world of pain and anticipation. Perversely, he came to look forward to the bite of that whip, for, whether he flogged him in passion or just for sport, the old man was always sure to make it personal. It seemed their relationship might go on forever.
But one day there was a great commotion in the sleepy little fishing village. Hero parted the leaves and beheld a small train of oblong coaches at rest near the harbor. Large oxen yoked in pairs lolled between the carriages, immune to the clamor around them. There were dark shaggy horses and colorfully dressed Bactrian camels. The horses and camels were tethered in the rear, but were occasionally paraded around the carriages by little men wielding long painted bamboo poles. The whole affair was exotic and mesmerizing, eccentric and profane. Hero watched all day in amazement, infected by the hubbub, though he was totally mystified by the crowd’s fascination on the carriages’ far side.
And late that afternoon he saw the old man come walking out of that crowd, talking heatedly with another man. The stranger was shorter and broader than the old man, with long stringy hair and long stringy mustaches. He saw them climbing the path, saw them crawl inside a hole lashing furiously. They were lost from view for a minute, then popped up big as life. Hero glowed and curled up eagerly as they approached.
The old man and stranger came into the narrow side-yard still arguing. The old man grabbed Hero by the hair and twisted until he was facing the newcomer.
The stranger had oily, porous skin, and a round but grave countenance. His highly slanted eyes were bright and restless. He studied Hero’s mutilated face with keen interest before borrowing the old man’s reed. When Hero scraped at his feet he grunted and returned the reed.
The stranger pulled out something shiny and hefted it in his hand. He then raised his other hand while considering Hero, as though weighing him too. The old man’s eyes glinted, and for an instant his expression became grotesquely servile. The stranger and old man, facing, nodded curtly in unison. The stranger dropped the shiny thing onto the old man’s itching palm. The old man whipped Hero frantically before taking a small ax to the chain. A few hard blows split a link, the broken link was bent back by the tool’s shaft, and the prisoner was at last released.
The old man handed the stranger a short hempen rope. The stranger bowed deeply. He then tied an end of the rope through one of the remaining links and began dragging Hero along. Hero’s hands sought the old man, who kicked and cursed him all the way to the path. The three stumbled single-file to the bottom. The old man waved his arms and shouted hysterically, trotting behind until he ran out of breath. But he got in a final kick and, before he came to a gasping halt, managed to lash Hero once for old time’s sake, and to spit on him twice for luck.

There were five carriages; a long one in the center hitched to four oxen, and two smaller coaches in the front and rear with a pair of oxen on each. The carriages were old and battered, built of splitting wood slats and rusted iron braces. Various hides, spare wheels, and a hundred odds and ends were tied to the sides and roofs. Hero’s new master, using him as a ram, shoved him through the crowd to the long carriage. He hauled him up the single wood step and watched the crowd’s reaction. Children hid behind mothers, mothers hissed and jeered, men spat in that smashed, disgusting face.
Satisfied, Hero’s master twisted the rope tighter and dragged him through the hide flap that served as the carriage’s rear wall.
A strange ruckus began at their entrance.
Inside the carriage were bulky shapes and quirky movements, yet the immediate and overwhelming impression was one of unbelievable stench. Hero, instantly covered with flies, was kicked and shoved down a foot-wide aisle. The carriage’s walls were riddled with black flecks of old dried blood, the floor coated with standing *****, a variety of small carcasses, and some clinging, indefinable slime. But the living contents of this hell were so horrifying, and so unexpected, that Hero at once dropped to his knees. Observing this, master grabbed a whip off the wall and lashed him along the floor.
A number of bamboo cages lined either side of the carriage, each four feet high, four feet wide, and three feet deep. In the first cage to their left, a quadruple amputee dangled in a leather harness in a cloud of flies, jealously gnawing a chicken carcass balanced on his belly. The second cage held a man who had been burned over ninety per cent of his body, and the third a middle-aged woman with no eyes or tongue, her head shaved. The next cage housed a fully grown black leopard, its bright eyes fixed on the horrified newcomer. Then an empty cage, and finally a cage containing a demented man whose long yellow nails were busily raking a face deeply scarred and bleeding.
The first cage against the opposite wall held two girls rolling in their own excrement. Siamese twins unable to part, they had developed a unique method of locomotion, and now executed a three-quarters cartwheel in Hero’s direction, their mangled, severely bitten hands attempting to reach him through the bars. In the cage next to theirs a naked dwarf glowered menacingly, his eyes following coldly as Hero’s master shoved him down the narrow aisle, occasionally pausing to lash a cage. The hissing and howling increased as each prisoner beheld the new neighbor.
The third cage held an intensely sick adult Bornean sun bear, so confined it was entirely unable to move. Its hide was a patchwork of scraggly fur and grayish skin, glistening with odd eruptions. It rolled its sunken eyes in Hero’s direction, its muzzle twitching feebly.
The next cage contained a man who was frightfully diseased. Broad fungal patches covered his face and limbs, terminating in waxy folds that dangled like a rooster’s wattles. Welling sores spotted his chest and back. His eyes were bugged and sallow; his lower lip drooped below his chin. He barked wetly at Hero’s passing legs.
The second-to-last cage housed a rare, completely hairless Chinese albino, and the last cage a very tall, skeletal woman. The albino snapped at Hero while repeatedly banging his head against the cage. The woman hissed and coiled like a snake, her spine arching amazingly.
Master hauled Hero to the empty cage on his left, swung its door open with his foot, and forced him to his knees by pushing down with all his weight. He kicked and punched until Hero had been squeezed inside, then shut and secured the wide bamboo door.
Master inched his way back down the carriage, hammering the **** of his whip on each cage as he passed. There was a glimpse of daylight as he lifted the flap.
Once he’d departed, the carriage grew eerily silent.
Hero cautiously turned his head. Less than a foot away, the black leopard was frozen in place, one paw waving hypnotically in his face. The beast’s fangs were bared, its ears straight back, its eyes glistening. Hero turned ever so slowly, until he was looking into the eyes of the demented man in the final cage. The man cocked his head quizzically. A second later he was screaming his lungs out in a bizarre downward spiral.
At once the carriage erupted. The freaks shrieked and scrabbled, the leopard spun in place. Directly across the aisle, the albino hurled himself against the bars of his cage. He batted his face with his fists, threw back his head, and just howled and howled and howled. The snake woman curled even tighter, her long scrawny legs entwined behind her head.
Hero sat with breath held, absolutely silent, absolutely motionless. He very, very slowly closed his eyes.

Later that night the flap was flung high. The menagerie came alive as master, weirdly illuminated by moonlight, slowly made his way down the aisle carrying a skin sack oozing blood. He stopped at each cage to toss in a dying chicken and a handful of smelt.
When he reached Hero’s cage he looked down thoughtfully.
He extracted a quivering chicken and held it above the cage so that blood dripped on the brute’s deeply pleated forehead. Hero lowered his eyes. Master’s face darkened. He smashed the bird against the cage, over and over, a vein throbbing in his temple. Finally he hissed and displayed the limp chicken high over the albino’s head. The albino yelped and kicked, thrusting his hand up between the bars and jerking it back to lick away the blood rolling down his forearm.
Master eyed Hero coldly before pointedly dropping the chicken into the albino’s searching hands.
Master hissed again. He slowly made his way out.
Soon there was a commotion outside. The carriage rocked a bit before settling. Hero, turning in his cage to peek through a rift in the wood, saw horses being urged forward. He could hear men shouting. The carriage rocked again. He looked up and saw the gibbous moon suspended in mist. For just a second something wedge-shaped cut across its soft white face.
But then the oxen were grunting, the wheels had been freed, and the horses drawn abreast. Master’s lash spat left and right, and the show proceeded…west.

                                              MA­STER

She was very round and very small, with very short, very shaggy black hair. Her arms bore the scars of numerous bites from beast and man, and around her neck ran long wheals from a particularly savage owner. Hero, having spent the better part of the morning watching master storm in and out of a strange screaming house, now watched him drag the little round woman through the dirt. For a while he listened to the song of his master’s lash, waiting for the woman to break. But there was never a whimper.
It had been a difficult transaction for master, and an altogether difficult morning. For hours he’d paced up and down the main carriage, alternately murmuring affectionately into, and lashing at, each cage he visited. The sun bear, long dead and stuffed, had been taken outside for barter. It had soon been returned.
Master had lingered over Hero’s cage for a good while, staring critically. He’d begun shouting, and three of his men had burst in through the flap, unlatched the demented man’s cage, and dragged him out by the feet for trade, master personally stomping on his torn and groping hands.
And now master was kicking and shoving the little woman down the aisle as his men restrained her by the hair and throat. Upon master’s command these men stripped her naked and commenced pinching and slapping while making threatening faces and mocking noises. The freaks sat right up in their cages.
The woman looked as though she’d fainted:  her arms were lax, her eyes rolled up. Her whole face seemed to purse, and her body, head to toe, began to run blue. Her fingers quivered, arched, and clawed—the woman was self-asphyxiating. Master fairly leaped with delight while the cages rocked around him. He had the men slap her awake. Once she was fully conscious they stuffed her into the demented man’s old cage next to Hero’s.
Master then looked in eagerly, one to the other, his hands balled into fists. The woman buried her odd round face in her forearms as she squeezed herself into her cage’s deepest corner. Hero gazed indifferently and went back to his peephole.
Master exploded. He smacked and kicked the cages over and over, swore up and down, ran the shaft of his whip back and forth against the heavy bamboo bars. Eventually he calmed somewhat. He stared coldly at Hero, made a ***** smile, and spat right in his eyes. A tense minute passed. Master slowly made his way outside.
Hero automatically relaxed. Across the aisle the albino ****** his face between his cage’s bars to sniff the newcomer. The leopard, bobbing rhythmically, emitted a high-pitched squeal that gradually descended to a steadily throbbing growl.
Hero looked the stranger over. Once she’d lowered her hands he saw that her eyes were crossed, her jaw slack, her face as round as the full moon. He looked closer. There were scars all over her throat and arms:  plainly, the small round woman had been treated very badly. Hero instinctively slid a foot between the bars; the woman cried out and scrunched even deeper. Across the aisle the albino quickly extended an arm. Without knowing why, Hero turned on him. The albino flinched, his eyes tearing into Hero’s. A second later he was stamping his feet and grinning wildly. Hero went back to his peephole.
Next morning master and two of his men dismantled the bamboo walls separating Hero’s and the woman’s cages. They bound the frames with broad leather bands, making a single cage of the two.
A common door was fashioned and secured. Master used his broad blade to shear away Hero’s rags. The men hunched around the long cage expectantly.
The naked couple backed away. Master was instantly exasperated—he shouted, lashed furiously, stamped and screamed, jabbed a broken shaft between the bars with malevolent intent, whirled and hurled the shaft at nothing. The carriage’s inmates went out of their minds. At master’s bellowed command a man scurried outside, returning with a long rope of woven leather strands. Master opened the cage and, applying all his weight, pinned Hero and his new mate in an awkward embrace while his men tied them together.
Again master and his men bent over the long cage to watch.
When Hero realized his predicament he made a desperate attempt to reach his peephole.
The men, misreading his struggles, babbled and cheered, but master threw up his hands. He then, through gesture, ordered his men to drape a number of hides over the long cage. Once these hides were in place he very quietly bent to one knee and placed an ear against the cage. After a while he cursed and rose to his feet. He shook the cage and stormed out, whipping and kicking the howling inmates.
In the semi-darkness the man and woman quit fighting their bonds.
A muffled patter began on the hide-covered roof.
Rain, as always, had a calming effect on the carriage’s occupants, causing the freaks and beasts to slip, one by one, into lethargy or slumber. Under such a spell, the attainment of master’s goal was inevitable.
It was a coupling both innocent and vile, without passion or celebration. Occasionally the freaks would surface, register their excitement by shrieking, shaking their cages, or otherwise clamoring…but very quickly the air would stifle them, weighing their heads and confusing their impulses. The atmosphere grew heavier by the minute. And, when night rolled over the carriages, the rain came down in sheets.

Leaning ******* the woman’s cage, master slipped his gnarly hand between the bars and slowly rubbed her belly in a counter-clockwise motion, his sinister features soft in the candle’s light. And he told, in nonsensical cooing whispers, of a lovingly secure and impossibly prosperous future.
How large and promising that belly had become! And how wise was he, the cunning and aggressive master, in his far-reaching business decisions. He turned his affection to the motionless gaping brute; stroked the battlefield of its face, tossed in another lizard. Master rubbed his palms together. From now on it was extra lizards daily, for both the woman and her mate. He remarked, with only passing interest, his star player’s continuing indifference. They didn’t know each other, didn’t need each other.
There’d been months of shows on the road now, broken only recently by this sensible rejoining of the mates at conception.
Hero’s horrible disfigurement was unquestionably top draw; he was a guaranteed crowd pleaser at every stop. So now master looked him straight in the eyes and smiled. He held the reeking candle high. The carriage was absolutely silent. Master smiled again, rose to his feet, tiptoed away.
Hero watched him retreat until the flap had fallen. He returned to his peephole, saw master round the rear of the carriage and slowly crunch by. For a time he could see nothing but the half-shapes of junipers bathed in starlight. There was a tentative movement to his right and a large shape came to obstruct his view.
The horse stood for a minute in profile. It slowly brought its head to rest against the carriage, applying its eye to the peephole. Hero froze. The two remained fixed, eyeball to eyeball, while a breeze played odd tunes on the outer wall’s hanging paraphernalia. The horse’s big dark eye rolled nervously. A long moment passed. Slowly the horse backed off. It stood uncertainly for a while, staring at the peephole. Then it quietly moved away.

Master kicked the cages one by one, left hand and right, as he slowly made his way down the aisle. Into each cage he delivered a personalized warning in passing—a growl, a hiss, a bark—but he was quickly losing control. Animal electricity hopscotched the carriage, cage to cage, ceiling to floor, front to rear and back again. Master froze. Much more of this excitement, he feared, could seriously agitate the woman—with grave consequences for master.
She was splayed on her back, in labor’s throes, her ankles and wrists bound to the long cage. Hero had been removed to give her room, and now sat hunched atop the snake woman’s cage, two men holding him by the throat and legs.
Master gnashed and snarled, listening to the woman scream, watching her stupid round head bounce up and down and back and forth. He knew it! He’d been suckered, hoodwinked, scammed—ripped off like a common rube. The woman was too ******* to handle even something as natural as childbirth. Still…it was too late to second-guess himself—all these months he’d been patient—he’d been supportive and vigilant and now he would not be denied. He flogged one of the men to alleviate his tension.
The blue lady was very slowly, very dramatically arching her spine. Master wiped the sweat from his eyes. When the bars were pleating her big round belly, her shoulders began drumming on the straw-strewn floor.
Master screamed one very colorful expletive.
A razor silence came over the carriage. Not a body moved or breathed.
At last two men tiptoed around their purpling master and leaned into the cage. One obediently ****** a foot between the bars. He pushed ******* her right knee while using a hand to grip the left knee, spreading her legs wide. The other man drew a broad leather strap between her teeth. After lifting the woman’s head he pulled the strap behind her neck, knotted it to make a gag, and yanked a skin sack over her face. He looked up anxiously. Master licked his lips and nodded. The man made a fist and frantically punched the woman’s face until her muffled screams ceased. She moaned gently throughout her contractions.
Master genuflected, brought a spitting candle in tight, and took a deep breath. As he raised his hand the candle’s light bounced off his knife’s chipped and scored eleven-inch blade. Master swore and reached down carefully. He flicked his wrist twice and the menagerie went mad.

The child was a tremendous disappointment.
Master had eagerly anticipated an infant ******* and deformed; something embracing the best qualities of its parents. He had even designed a special cage that could be expanded by degrees as the spawn developed. There also remained the tantalizing option of a family display, though such an undertaking would require the eventual construction of a structure even larger than the cage its parents now shared. Master anguished over the logistics, knowing it would break his heart to have to cut one of his jewels’ throats just to make room for a growing child. Nights he would slowly pace the carriage with all the possessiveness of a jealous suitor, one hand maneuvering a sputtering candle, the other tenderly rapping his whip’s **** against each visited cage.
But the boy was a flawless specimen; a beautiful, undemanding baby. From the moment master angrily tossed the placenta he felt cheated, even betrayed. He grimaced as it peaceably took to its mother’s breast, despite the surrounding horrors. Master hated it, immediately and entirely. The ****** thing was so docile it was almost charming. He drew his knife and was just reaching down, when an overwhelming sense of dread shook him like a rat in the jaws of a mastiff. Sweat poured down his squat, pig-tailed nape. He knew he would live to regret it, but decided to not cut the child’s throat right away. It was the oddest feeling. His knife hand had trembled for the first time in his life, and he had found himself momentarily contemplating right and wrong at the outset of a perfectly simple and commonplace procedure. That was it, then. His business instincts were letting him know there was a good, albeit unknowable, reason to let the sweet baby live. Master left the carriage anxiously, muttering in his ambivalence.
The boy grew to embody his worst expectations. Not only was it a poorly oriented child, clinging to its father rather than its master almost from the moment of weaning, but it soon proved a lousy draw with the patrons. Those who paid to view the child dangling in its special cage inevitably departed unsatisfied, some vocalizing, strangely, an acute sense of shame. So once again master entered the carriage with his knife hand steady, and once again he exited trembling, his heart in his throat and his soul in a whirl. He whipped the dwarf savagely before leaving. What place conscience in the mind of a businessman?
Soon as the boy could walk, master put him to work fetching and feeding. But the brat was slothful in his chores, preferring to hang around his family’s cage while staring wistfully at his father. For their part, the parents were wholly disinterested. Master would fume while Hero gazed for hours out his peephole—even as the mother lolled, perpetually ill. Sometimes that accursed woman’s condition riled poor master to no end. She could teeter at death’s door for months at a time, her body changing hues to the fascination of customers, only to bounce back with a hardiness that was of interest to no one. But at the peak of her performances the blue lady could really hold a crowd. Master produced an entire outdoors extravaganza around her:  within concentric rings of raging torches his men would slowly strip her naked before wild audiences, then allow the dwarf and albino to take her while the leopard strained against a gaily festooned chain. Master circulated his crew through the crowds to encourage his patrons’ cult-like behavior of breath-holding and fainting. No getting around it:  the customers were crazy about her—village to village, master’s Bactrian vanguard’s colorful robes shouted her approaching fame. And Hero’s popularity continued to soar. Many were the nights when master, pacing the perimeter, wondered just what devilry could have produced the lovely boy.
Overall, Hero remained his master’s favorite conceit and hottest property. Part of the little brute’s appeal was, of course, his exoticness. And certainly the ugliness arising from his deformity was compelling…but there was a detachedness about him that fascinated every soul with a fistful of copper cash coins. Whether they ****** him, cudgeled him, or spat in his face, he remained unflappable, staring only at the aching sky. Though many would leave uneasy, master noted with deep satisfaction that they almost invariably returned.
The boy soon evinced an amazing affinity for animals. No matter how agitated an ox or horse became, the child could pacify it with one hand on a lowered brow. This was a source of endless fascination for the crew. Wagers were made. The boy was pitted against oxen whipped to a frenzy. But they would not harm him; they would rather go prostrate and take the lash. Master tried to work this knack into a viable act, but his patrons just weren’t buying. They wanted freaks.
When the lad was a mere five years old, master had him trained in the peripheral art of the pickpocket. The boy worked well alone, and had all the makings of a fine little flimflam artist. Master sighed, his chronic nightmares a thing of the past. As ever, his business instincts were guiding him well.
Then late one afternoon he found the boy squatting outside his parents’ cage. The boy had done the unthinkable:  he had deposited his day’s pickings at the feet of his father instead of bringing the ***** to master. Master flew into a rage and raised his whip to give the little traitor the lashing he deserved. But before he could deliver a single stroke his other hand shot to his chest and he staggered back against the albino’s cage. He blinked down at the boy, who regarded him steadily while scooping the plunder into a little pile.
From that day on the boy placed whatever he could get his hands on at his father’s feet. As time passed he became ever more adroit at thievery, growing into a youngster both admired and despised by master and his crew; admired because theft was a cinch for him, despised because they were all that much lighter in their possessions.
Now, for eleven long years the strange little train had bounced along, sometimes camping outside villages for months, occasionally pausing on connecting roads. The show traversed the heart of Manchuria, skirted the Gobi in the north, and so eventually crossed almost the entire width of Mongolia before proceeding north to the confluence of the rivers Yenisey and Ob’. Much silver and copper had come to master’s coffer, much fame to his name, but he now sat looking over a vast, unmapped Siberian wilderness. The mostly nomadic characters they’d been encountering spoke in tongues unfamiliar even to his personal valet-translator-accountant, and the tone of these nomads had been unmistakably hostile.
Master huddled surlily under a canopy of sopping hides. Night was falling hard during a merciless rain, the wind was picking up, and his supplies coach was bogged in a growing sea of mud. At that moment he accepted the whole end-of-the-line concept, and knew he wasn’t going anywhere but back. And when he got back he was going to shine! He jumped from the coach.
The earth took his weight for a heartbeat—and he was up to his chin in muck, splashing about on his hands and knees, sliding forward on his palms and toes. He did a belly flop into a rain-filled depression and churned to his feet with the devil in his eyes. Wallowing in mud and bile, master stomped to the supplies coach and kicked wildly at the stuck rear wheels.
Somewhere between kicks he lost it completely.
Master broke for his whip. One minute he was blindly lashing his men, the next he’d succumbed to a mindless ferocity. He thrashed about like a berserker; whipping the beasts, the coach, the very night. His men were scarcely able to move in all that mud, but their dread of his savagery kept them hopping. They gathered as one and shoved the coach recklessly; slipping, splashing, shouting. A minute later, three lay splayed underfoot, but the mired wheel had been freed.
Throughout all this the oxen had swayed nervously, while the horses softly tramped their hooves in place. Master had his men turn the oxen about until the rickety train was pointing dead east. He checked the hitches and personally applied the lash. The oxen didn’t budge. Master swore and wiped the rain from his eyes. He had the horses hitched ahead of the oxen, but they were even less obliging. Master flew into a spectacular rage. His men, fearing for their lives, ran liberally with the lash.
The swaying of oxen picked up until the entire train of carriages was rocking. Yet the oxen could not, would not be compelled, under any amount of prodding, to take an eastward step. Master looked around in exasperation.
The night had gone insane.
Horses were fighting hitches, oxen walking on fire.
Master cursed the rain and mud and lashed all the harder. His men, seeking to please, whipped maniacally until the horses and both lead oxen broke their hitches and bolted west. The men immediately embraced the rear oxen, but the hitches shattered and the beasts stormed off. The remaining horses blew it, kicking at everything and nothing.
Inside the long carriage all was chaos. The albino was neighing and screaming, the aged leopard spinning in its cage. Hero stared out his peephole, amazed at the blur of figures stumbling by in the rain.
A pair of clopping blows rattled the opposite wall. Three slats cracked. A tremendous impact, and a huge section collapsed. A thrashing, hysterical mare burst through the breach in a veil of rain.
The horse went mad, killing the albino and snake woman in a flurry of hooves. She fell ******* the near wall, crushing the cages. The leopard shot into the air like a rocket, slashed at the mare’s throat and vanished in the rain. The horse reared above the family cage. She was just coming down in a wheeling storm of hooves when something made her freeze. Her stare locked with Hero’s, and a second later her eyes were rolling in their sockets. The mare kicked crazily and came down ******* her left flank, smashing the long cage’s side. She whirled upright and leaped outside.
For a tense minute the family sat in the rubble, rain bombarding their eyes. Nothing in their years of captivity had prepared them for such a situation. But by the end of that minute the son had taken full command. He rolled onto his back, braced himself, and kicked his parents across the aisle, through the remnants of the opposing cage, and out of the carriage. They all fell about in the mud and rain. To the west, the mare stared back strangely as she splashed into the night. The boy wedged himself between his parents, threw his arms around them, and pushed with all his might. Their bodies found a common center of gravity. Fumbling drunkenly, the family staggered through the rain in the wake of the mare.

The boy was the natural leader.
Master’s innocent-looking little ex-student could quickly assess and exploit almost any situation. He did the foraging and the figuring, slept with one eye open and one fist ready. He got what he wanted by charm or by stealth, slipping off at nightfall, returning at daybreak with small slaughtered animals and chunks of dark peasant bread. He also pilfered any bauble or oddity he could get his paws on, to be placed reverently at his father’s mangled feet. Breadwinner and watchdog, he faithfully held the family together; a nuclear son. He sewed hardy feather-lined cloaks of reindeer hide, and turned a cache of marmot pelts into a kind of side-slung backpack. He was doting nurse during his mother’s episodes, and unbending apportioner of calories in lean times. Dauntless when it meant crossing mighty rivers, relentless when it came to finding mountain passes. But the endless marching, the unreliable diet, and the countless predators made the three wanderers lean, haggard moving targets. There were times when the little lamp of family was all but extinguished, and long stands in places that seemed absolutely impassable. Still, the boy would work things out. He would stoop to any level to feed Hero, and for a stranger to threaten his father was to summon a psychotic, unyielding monster. He was both spear and shield.
The toughest job of all was maintaining a tight unit, meaning he was forced to become a hard-nosed ******* whenever his father was ready to wander off, which always seemed to be whenever the mother was hurting most. She’d become a tremendous impediment to Hero’s compulsion, and therefore her son’s chief nemesis. It wasn’t a big-picture concern anyway; the writing was on the wall. The blue lady’s attacks were increasing spectacularly on the steppe; her world had always been an enclosure of some kind, and the great horizon was proving just too much. Perhaps these intense affairs served as links to Hero’s suppressed memories, for at the onset of each attack he’d turn and hike, and then only exhaustion could curb him. The boy would press his mother on, dragging, shoving, and smacking—he could be mean when necessary, and though circumstances had made him the nucleus, their worlds unquestionably revolved around Hero. Where he sat, they sat. When he rose, they did the same. In this manner they marched for years across the vast steppes, single-file—father, mother, and son, respectively—unmolested, lacking possessions, always following the sun. Long before they could be measured they had drifted into obscurity.
The woman’s end came quickly and dramatically, in a rocky little depression on a half-frozen field. One moment she was responsive to her son’s prompts, the next she was flat on her back, her eyelids fluttering. That night she leapt from fever to chill, from alertness to stupor. The boy, squatting beside their campfire, watched her face and hands run cadaver-blue to fish belly-pale and back again. While he was staring her eyes popped open and her hands came scrabbling. He sweated through the clawing embrace until he could bear it no longer. He oozed out and ran down to fetch his father.
When they got back Hero watched incuriously for a while. His mate’s face was scrunched up and her skin the color of sapphires. She wasn’t breathing.
His gaze became glassy, his eyes returned to the night. As he rose the boy immediately grabbed an arm. Neither moved for minutes. When the boy at last relinquished, his father casually stumbled off.
Strange things were going on in Hero’s world. Some days he would notice how animals regarded him oddly, in a manner that seemed almost personal. He found, for instance, that particular creatures were recognizable even over great distances. A number of times he would sit with one in a stare-down, waiting patiently, until the animal’s natural disposition caused it to bolt. Though the meaning of these encounters was way over his head, he would watch, and he would listen.
In time he noticed an increasing skittishness in some of these familiar creatures. Something had them spooked. He then observed a number of lean gray wolves moving in and out of the picture with an air of complete indifference:  these wolves weren’t hunting; they were loitering—lounging in the grass, lackadaisically padding to the rear, filing by slowly in the distance. Once in a while a lounger would raise its head, yawn cavernously, and drop back out of sight. So unobtrusive was their behavior that even Hero’s ever-vigilant son began to take them for granted. They paused where the family paused, and halted whenever the woman broke down. Perfectly camouflaged by the gray boulders and dire sky, they were completely forgotten in the drama of her passing.
There were other, far subtler events existing for Hero’s senses alone. He could perceive patterns in everything around him; in the manner vegetation gave way wherever his heart was leading, in the way so many animals appeared to be not merely mirroring, but making his course. And wind, rain, running water:  these phenomena had voices. Yet not for everybody. No one—not his mate, not his son, not another soul on the planet could hear this call, for they were all of a sort. They were static, they were temporal. Hero couldn’t have cared less about the lives of his family, or about the mundane goings-on in the encampments and small tribes they skirted. Such beings lived in a world that was defined by the moment. They shouted, they banged, they clamored.
But west—west was music.
For his boy, once again watching Hero shamble off, the moment of truth had arrived. He looked back down, at his mother’s death mask being remade by the dying light of their campfire. As the flames dwindled he could have sworn he saw shadows creep into the wells of her eyes, while others, crawling up around her jawline, drew her bluing lips like purse strings. He hopped to his feet and ran for another handful of tinder. When their little fire provided enough light he dropped to his knees and looked again.
She was sinking right before his eyes, every aspect of her expression in collapse. The boy watched clinically, fascinated. As the flames began to sputter he thought he could see large purple bruises spreading across her cheeks like the seeping limbs of overflowing pools. He bent closer.
From deep in the night came the longest, the leanest, the saddest wail he’d ever heard. He turned to see the starlit ghost of his father, facing away, staring at a low barren hill. Uncountable stars embroidered the spot. The boy made out a low shape moving along the hilltop, cutting off patches of stars as it passed.
The wolf howled again; a mournful, spiraling cry to nowhere and nothing. Hero’s head notched upward. He began to hike.
Halfway to his feet the boy stopped dead.
It took a minute to sense why he’d frozen in place, and a good while longer for his heart to quit pounding. He was aware of a nervous padding, and, once his vision had adjusted, of a lazy stream of eyes gleaming in the dying campfire’s light. The eyes bobbed around him, glared momentarily, returned to the ground.
A massive gasp, and his mother was tearing at his wrist. He watched her hyperventilating, saw her bulbous yellow eyes sinking in a wide violet pool. With a sizzle and pop the last tongue of flame was taken by the night.
Then her clammy hands were all over him, pulling and demanding, caressing and beseeching. He had to pry them off like leeches, had to place them clasped on her shuddering arched belly.
A silky snarl rose almost in his ear.
With a little squeal he sprang to his feet, even as something nearby jumped back in response.
The boy stood absolutely still while the panting thing padded nearer. They stood very close, smelling each other. He instinctively extended a hand, palm forward. But it was no good; his arm was shaking out of control. The snarl rose again, not so tentatively this time. His mother’s nails tore at his ankle.
The boy gently stepped away, only to find himself surrounded by the shifting silhouettes of half a dozen gray wolves. They approached in a calculated manner:  two from the left, one from the right, another from behind. He was being goaded away from his mother; he could hear her fists beating the ground, and a few seconds later the sounds of a nauseating assault and ravaging.
He shakily raised his other hand. Now both arms were extended, and their message was clearly one of defense rather than control. Two snapping wolves stepped aside, leaving him a gateway into the night. A cold wet nose bumped his wrist.
Screaming like a woman, he took off after his father just as fast as his feet would carry him.

                                                  BOY

Alon­g the great Kazakh Steppe a man could wander a lifetime and never meet another of his kind—especially if his kind happened to be Alaskan Inuk, and if he happened to be the teenaged patriarch of a two-man family going nowhere.
Here history is mostly mute.
Upon this continent-spanning steppe, unnamed communities were scattered and rebuilt, lives blown about by the wind. The only centers of humanity a traveler might encounter, far removed from the Silk Road at the very crack of the new millennium, were temporary encampments of civilization at its rudest—shifting holes of cutthroat commerce existing solely for the barter of silk and spices and hapless souls. Life here was revered far less than merchandise, and the longest-lived men were those who kept their distance.
Hero and his boy hiked over permafrost and tundra for years; their meandering course a drunken mapmaker’s scrawl. Chronological entries along this imaginary line would reveal that they’d stopped, sometimes for months at a time, when the father had grown too weak and disoriented to continue. Hero’s internal compass was long-sprung, and his weight had fallen considerably. He’d sit on his lonesome, scarecrow-scrawny, wistfully scrolling a 360-horizon while his boy scouted and scavenged. Then, for no apparent reason, he’d just up-and hike—sometimes northwest, sometimes along a tangential plane that always threatened to spiral. It was brutal:  winters were frigid, summers, by odd contrast, running steamy to baking. Season by season these marches lost their tenaciousness, and eventually their heart. Hero’s obsession was becoming his demise.
Now, to a hypothetical observer, the ratty pair of woolly camels materializing out of the rising August heat might have been mirages.
These beasts were novelties here, and pioneers, for they were way beyond their normal stomping grounds. They’d tramped for months with a mind-numbing monotonousness, a thousand miles and more; round the Urals to the south, and through the hard territory braced by the Volga and Voronezh, avoiding anything that even smelled of men. They’d been wild camels; ugly, ill-tempered, and unpredictable, until the boy tamed them by touch…but this new pattern was a literal change of pace…for weeks the frail little man and his dark teenaged son rose and fell with the animals’ rhythm, lulled by it, sick of it, dreaming of lands far removed from hoarfrost and peat moss. In this manner they were borne clear to present-day Belarus, whereupon the camels’ stupefying march began to quicken. Mile by mile they put on steam, until one day they reached a broad area distinguishable from its bracing terrain only by its many deep surface cracks. Here the camels’ behavior became erratic; they crouched at an angle while tramping, their long necks oscillating, their noses bobbing along the ground. Eventually they came upon a dingy pool nestled in a pebbly depression. The local brush surrounding this pool was situated like iron filings about a lodestone. The boy hauled back his camel’s neck and laid a hand on its brow. The brute slowed to a halt. The other camel imitated its partner, move for move. Simultaneously the animals dropped to their knees.
The boy jumped off, catching Hero as he fell. The camels stood watching stupidly as son maneuvered father, but after a while grew nervous and began tramping their hooves in time. They slowly stepped to the pool’s rim and knelt woozily, their noses poised just above the surface. Their whiskers danced on the pool’s face, their lids became heavy, their hindquarters quivered as they drank. Their nostrils, having fluttered in unison, remained agape. They appeared to be asleep.
The boy began filling skins.
The water was quite warm; he slurped a palmful and almost immediately felt intoxicated.
He flicked it off his fingers; the water was bad.
Three heads were now mirrored in the pool; the camels’ at ten o’clock and two o’clock, the boy’s at six. He watched their reflections continue to ripple, long after the pool had become still. His face, melting and firming, rapidly fluctuated between extremes of age, and between his own recognizable features and those of some…monstrosity. The effect was hypnotic. He felt his joints stiffen; his eyes became weak, his thoughts muddled…his face was irresistibly drawn to the pool’s surface, and for a moment he was in real peril of drowning. He ****** his head aside and creaked to his feet.
Where the camels had knelt were only the prints of their bellies and knees. In the distance they could be seen galloping all-out for the horizon, right back the way they’d come. The boy watched until they were swallowed by their dust, and when he turned around his father was long gone.
Now he knew it was all just a matter of time.
And sure enough, after eleven more days of feebly staggering along, Hero completely ran out of gas. The boy bundled him up in a shawl, like an old woman.
Sitting there, cradling an unresponsive man weighing less than eighty pounds, he couldn’t help but let his morbid fantasies run wild. He was now old enough to realize his father had at some time suffered severe head trauma, and honest enough to accept that the man was rapidly approaching a vegetative state. This understanding accompanied him like a shadow, and that night he questioned, for the very first time, his own convoluted rationale.
He was just beginning to sense that his will was not his own.
He built a semi-permanent camp west of the Desna and foraged in a tight spiral, always returning in a straight line. Some days he came back feeling uneasy, sensing another presence. Then it was every other day. It bugged him to no end. At last, when it became every day, he hauled his father to his feet and began a resolute march to the west.
Again he became anxious, and after only a dozen yards.
He turned slowly while hunching, certain something bulky had just dropped out of sight. Nothing looked suspicious, everything looked suspicious. He walked Hero some more, occasionally peering back over his shoulder. There was…something.
He whirled:  only masses of rock and high brush. Yet, when he really strained his eyes, he was sure, pretty sure, that he could make out a large crouching body continuous with the rocks. Heart in his throat, he began a slow steady creep, only to pause, positive the bulge, whatever it was, had shifted in response. The boy very gradually raised his arm until it was level with his eyes, faced the palm outward, and extended the arm parallel with the ground. He could almost feel some kind of current passing between his itching palm and…nothing. He walked over to Hero, stopped again. There’d been the subtlest sense of traction. The boy propped up his father in a cloud of flies and waited.
In a minute the bulge drew *****.
Out of the brush strolled a furry gray wild ***, her back inclined from countless weary miles; stretching her neck, pausing to nibble, taking her sweet time. Grungy as she was, she fit right in.
At the boy’s first casual step she immediately hit the dirt and remained flat on her belly, one big dark eye staring between her hooves. Another step, and her **** bunched up. The closer he got, the higher her rear end rose. When he was almost at arm’s length she sprang back and danced away, seeming to bound with delight. But not to the east, as she’d come.
To the northwest.
She backpedaled while the boy came on whistling and cooing, matching him step for step. But the moment he threw up his arms in resignation she spun round as though cued, dropped on her belly, and peered over her shoulder.
The boy was first to blink. This time he approached fractionally, keeping movements to a minimum. She rose just as carefully, sauntering northwest in reverse, and at the first sign of hesitation turned, dropped, and cautiously gazed back. The boy glared at that huge mocking **** and broke into a sprint. She easily danced out of reach, plopped down, and continued to stare.
He began hurling stones, with venom and with accuracy, until she’d scurried into the brush.
But on the way back to his father he could feel her tagging along.
Twenty feet behind she halted, looking bemused.
The boy nodded ironically. He walked Hero over, murmuring baby talk all the way, and firmly placed a palm on the animal’s muzzle once her breath grazed his fingers. She stroked his hand up and down with her whiskers, gave a kind of curtsy, and waited on her knees while he helped his father mount.
At Hero’s touch a shudder ran down her body. She stood up straight. Her eyes became set, her back absolutely stiff. She put down her head and began the long trek northwest, never once breaking stride.
It was an amazing march, an impossible feat. For a little over three days and almost four hundred miles she progressed like an automaton, driving herself without rest, without food or water.
After trotting alongside for an hour the boy climbed on and force-fed his father berries and smoked meat, his dark eyes constantly searching the countryside. Occasionally he’d see a run of red foxes to their left, watching intently, padding cautiously. Sooner or later they’d vanish, only to be replaced by a train of feline or equine pursuers. Packs approached and receded while, high overhead, flocks formed triangular patterns that continually broke up and reformed. There was a peculiar rhythmic quality to this ebb and flow that lulled his senses further. The boy shook his head to clear it, but his exhaustion was deeper than he’d supposed—even the brush appeared to be leaning northwest.
That first day he grew numb with the pace, and that night the relentless pounding of her hooves drew him into a miserable slumber. He wrapped his arms around his sleeping father and lay half atop. When he couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer he tore strips from his skins, then looped his tied wrists round her neck, his ankles round her belly.
On the second day she was breathing hard, but her back was still high and she showed no signs of faltering. Her eyes remained focused on the ground dead ahead. She always sensed the best routes; finding mountain passes, fording wetlands.
But by the third day they could feel her ribs quaking against their legs. Her breath exploded as she marched, blood frothed and caked about her nostrils. Still she pushed herself on, her pace so steady it was almost metronomic.
On the fourth day her legs were gone. She veered and stumbled, shuddering every few paces. The boy hopped off for the umpteenth time and tried to bring her to graze, but she wouldn’t be turned. He ran behind her as she staggered along, unwilling, or unable, to rest.
At last a foreleg gave and she went down hard. Sobbing and snorting, she plowed her muzzle back and forth in the soil, the useless leg repeatedly pounding the ground. After a minute she raised her head and brayed at the sky, her neck muscles taut, her head slowly swinging side to side. Her cry went on and on.
With a tremendous effort she pushed herself upright and butted the boy aside. Every part of her body was shaking. From her depths a low moan grew to a steady bray, and finally to a wild, pulsing howl. She came to a rise, but was too weak to climb without sliding. Stamping in frustration, she managed a few feet, reared feebly, slid some more. The boy got behind her and applied his back; it took all he had to assist her almost to the top. With a desperate lunge she crashed on her belly.
Amazingly, she dragged herself on, her howl now a scream, her head whipping left and right. When she could pull herself no farther she ****** forth her neck to its very limit and, with a shudder that ran from the tip of her nose to the tuft on her tail, shoved her muzzle straight into the dirt and died.
The boy hauled off his father and fell back. The animal’s eyes were fixed upwards, seeming, even in death, to be straining for a glimpse of what lay just beyond the rise. The boy half-dragged Hero the last few yards. They collapsed at the top, and together looked over the cold Baltic Sea.

At water’s edge a haggard fisherman sat on his boat’s ravaged deck, blindly staring out to sea. His was a queer vessel; a family structure built more like an aft-cabined barge than like seacraft typical of that period. The fisherman’s boat, like his mind, had been abused beyond repair.
He’d lost much in his life. Time had taken his dreams, pox his face, hardship his back and shoulders. And, more recently, a brawling band of drunken Baltic pirates had ***** his wife and daughter before butchering them along with his two fine sons, while he sat helplessly bound to the mast. Finally, to further their delight, they’d set the boat aflame and sent it crackling against the sun; knowing he could hear their hoots and howls, knowing he would drift undead, accompanied only by this last unspeakable memory.
But a squall, without prelude, had doused the flames and blown his home ashore.
There he’d remained for a full long day, staring at nothing, his shattered life caught on the rocks. On the second day he’d worked himself free and commenced staggering about in his memories, gathering shards. It was a pathetic claim. He made a pile of all the old bedding and linen and usable cords, and set about sewing a sort of mementos sail. All that third day he had sewn, and on the fourth he had hoisted this sail and been moved to see it billowing in a northwest-blowing breeze. Again he just sat and gaped. And later that day he’d become aware of a commotion taking place on the long grade leading down to the water, where a writhing mass of seagulls was proceeding like a tremendous slow-motion snowball. He’d never seen anything like it. It wasn’t uncommon to find gulls in a group of many dozens or more, but there must have been two, maybe three thousand of the birds now swarming toward his boat. They were making an incredible racket. In the midst of this cloud could be seen a couple of slowly walking figures; as they neared he made out a small man accompanying a boy in his late teens, both dressed in odd skins. When they reached the rocks his eyes were drawn to the small man’s face. It was a foreign face, brutish and dark, with a deep cleft running from above the right temple to the jaw’s left side. Whatever instrument had felled this man had been devastating—everything in its path was smashed, and with permanence. The forehead was caved in. There was no bridge to the nose, the left cheek was completely collapsed, one side of the mouth was a mangled mess. The jaw itself had set improperly, so that it jutted to the side. The general impression, especially from a distance, was of some unforgettable circus freak’s countenance puckering at an angle. It was a face right out of a nightmare. But there was nothing frightening about the eyes. They were the eyes of a child.
Maybe half the gulls hopped screaming on the rocks. The rest circled overhead.
The boy considered the fisherman curiously before placing a foot on the charred deck. His gaze went around the boat, lingered on the makeshift sail, returned to the slumped figure. He passed a hand before the eyes. No response. He then leaned in close and placed his fingers on the man’s forehead. Immediately that bleak expression became fluid, brimming over with horror and heartbreak. Tears rolled down the fisherman’s cheeks as he gasped, shuddered, and backed up the scorched mast to his feet. Thus propped, he squinted at his visitors and was overcome by a wave of homesickness so strong he had to turn away. The feeling bewildered him, for this vessel, and this sea, were all the home he’d ever known. He clung to the mast while the boy helped his father board. Once he’d collected himself, the fisherman tore a heavy crossbeam from the toasted cabin. He and the boy used this as a lever, and together they shoved the boat off the rocks. The wind picked up nicely, and the little craft was swept across the water.
Exploding off the rocks, the gulls shot after the boat as if it were brimming with fish, the loudest and orneriest vying for favored positions directly overhead. The melee attracted additional gulls—they came shrieking in their hundreds from all sides, banking and calling in the oddest manner, until the mass grew so thick as to cast a permanent shadow on the boat. All day long the clamor continued, and all that night. The fisherman rolled with the rudder, listlessly, allowing the sea to control him. Eventually he let go, that the wind might bear them where it would. His sail ballooned but held firm, and the boat fairly zipped across a sea somehow smooth as glass, broken only by the vacillating ripples of bottleneck dolphins and migrating humpback whales. The three tiny sailors sat hunched together, motionless, all throughout the next day, until the black coast of Sweden loomed in the twilight.
As the boat neared land the cloud of gulls broke up, shot to shore, and landed in groups of a thousand and more; a dizzying, wildly uproarious reception committee.
The dung-covered boat slammed into the rocks, shattering the fisherman’s trance. He intuitively walked his **** up the mast and, swaying there, watched the boy draw his father over the side and lead him to a clearing at wood’s edge. There in the dusk he made out what appeared to be a hefty spotted runaway heifer hitched to a rickety wood wagon. He saw the cow gallop up to meet them, saw the boy look around warily, saw him help the little man into the wagon and climb in beside him. The animal immediately began picking through the woods, the large brass bell round her neck clanging forlornly.
The clarity of that bell made him realize just how quiet it had become. He craned his neck:  there wasn’t a gull in sight. He fell back against the shot mast and slid onto his tailbone with a clacking of teeth. His eyes were misting up. In the gathering dark a few sail fragments flew past and were ****** into the woods. The boat rocked and relaxed. After that there was only the sound of the receding bell’s sad, monotonous song being batted about by the wind.

The little cow strode through moonlit woods until she came to a path formed by the rutting of wheels over many years. She followed this broken, serpentine track throughout the night, and by morning was passing farms and, occasionally, crossing broader paths that might realistically be defined as roads. All day long she bore down that ragged track, until she came in late afternoon to a clearing near a village. Here many such tracks converged. And here the boy slipped away while she grazed.
Sometime after dark he returned with a load of straw, a couple of pilfered blankets, and a fat iron kettle. Crammed in this kettle were salt, tubers, cheese, a few loaves of rye, legumes, and a plump foot of lamb sausage. Most of this ***** he’d brought in tied to the bowed back of a huge, puffing, highly amenable black pig which, thus laden, now followed the boy’s every step like a fresh convert tracing the heels of the messiah. The boy built a fire under the stars, filled the kettle with creek water, and commenced simmering their dinner. While waiting, he couldn’t help but note an odd feature of the local flora:  plants, especially trees, all seemed inclined to a northwesterly disposition, though no amount of wind could account for it. He shooed the pig. But rather than run along, it backpedaled in a nervous circle, round and round in reverse, until it lost its balance and fell on its ****. There it remained, a yard behind the wagon. The boy fed his father and lined the wagon with straw. They settled in for the night. The boy must have nodded, might have dreamt, but while he was drifting he became aware of a stirring in the woods. He sat up, saw the pig’s eyes gleaming inches from his nose. And there were a number of animals, some wild, some strayed from farmsteads, arranged in a broad circle around the wagon, their eyes glinting with moonlight. Not a rustle, not a peep, was lifted from the woods.
In the morning he woke to find the pig still staring. The fidgeting heifer, impatient to roll, began her long day’s march while Hero and his boy were yet stretching and scratching, and the ******* pig, galloping heavily, fell in close behind. Each new day this routine was repeated. They banged past farms and small communities until the ruts intersected a broad rocky road wending halfway across the kingdom. The cow addressed this road with vigor. They picked up followers—a goat here, a couple of sheep there—which hurried after the wagon as best they could. The cow stomped on with resolve, mile after mile, day after day, her bell keeping steady time. That bell’s peal attracted foals, lambs, and kids into the wagon’s narrowing wake. Hares hopped between hooves and wheels, boars and blue foxes fell in and withdrew. White falcons, normally solo fliers, whirled into wedge shapes high overhead.
At night the entire train would camp on the road while the boy raided proximate farmsteads, always returning fully laden. And as soon as the fire died the colony grew, creature by creature, and the moment the sun broke the horizon the heifer came to life and moved on, but each day a bit more resolutely, as though straining to meet a deadline. The march took on a sense of real urgency. The cow pressed on with attitude, the clang of her bell more strident with each passing mile. Soon her followers numbered in the hundreds, as animals deserted their farms or crept out of the woods to tag along. Tillers and traders stood dumbfounded, amazed by the bizarre flow.
Once they’d crossed into Norway the frothing cow veered hard to the west. The pace really picked up; no longer were Hero and his boy afforded the luxury of a night’s sleep in one spot. Days blurred into a single variegated flow as the bashed and lopsided wagon continued building its entourage; the riders were surrounded dawn to dusk by a confused and confusing scurry. Word of the flow’s weirdness preceded it clear to the Norwegian coast, so that now plowmen and merchants, wearily gathering their goggling families, found themselves lined in anticipation along the king’s highway. Horsemen went pounding to and fro with news of the procession’s progress and particulars, children ran through the streets banging pots in imitation of the cow’s approaching bell. Livestock wheeled and stamped, fowl leaped and crashed.
The slobbering cow broke into a run.
Bystanders trotted behind, calling back and forth excitedly, while the wagon’s permanent following squealed and squawked between their heels. The cow made a hard turn onto a widening swath in the brush. This swath, seeming to strain against the soil, ran straight down to the crest of a low hill overlooking the Atlantic. On either side a crowd had been studying the phenomenon for some time, but now all eyes swung to the dark and disfigured man and his son, clinging to the disintegrating wagon behind the careening spotted cow.
The trailing people traded views as they ran. Most—at the very outset of the new millennium, with Christianity burgeoning throughout Europe—leaned to the miraculous. Others, just as superstitious but prone to a darker point of view, threw looks of horror at the deformed little man. Yet they ran no less eagerly.
The galloping crowd made for the seaside, where only one local event of any moment was brewing:  on the coast a Greenlander Viking was preparing his longship for the rough voyage home. Impetuous son of the great island’s first permanent European settler, he’d just been baptized in Olaf’s court, and was now eager to sail—but not as a warrior—as a missionary. While his spirit remained in a tug-o’-war between his father Erik’s will and that of gods old and new, his duty was clearly to his king. And Olaf had charged him with the Christianization of pagan Greenland.
Something on the wind now made this destined man turn his head. From behind the gentle hill to his rear came a kind of thunder. Heads popped up, followed by a confused explosion of voices, and seconds later a frantic bug-eyed heifer burst into view, dragging the wheel-less skeleton of a shattered wooden wagon. On the wagon’s splayed frame a man and teenaged boy clung for their lives as the spewing animal made a beeline for his ship.
The new missionary, still egocentric enough to assume his Maker might actually toss him a personal, surreptitiously rolled up his eyes. The sky yawned at his arrogance. At his side a smallish cowled man rose irritably, but the missionary sat him right back down. He then snorted, squared his shoulders, and signaled his men to halt their preparations.
Knowing it was expected, he gathered his hard Nordic pride and coolly made his way into the crowd.

The priest clung to port, gagging above the waves.
After a completely uneventful minute he leaned back and stared through tearing eyes at the distant backdrop of gathering mists. Weeks now…a man of his constitution had no business at sea.
Along, too, were a quirky little man and his fiercely devoted son.
Through his pantomime, the boy had been so persistent in begging their passage that refusal, under the circumstances, would have been unbecoming not only a man of God but a man of the world.
So there it was:  a priest who couldn’t hold his lunch, a witless eyesore who couldn’t sit still, and a surly teenaged protector who snarled at the first hard look. This crossing just had to be some kind of divine test—of mortal patience as well as moral values. Norsemen weren’t made for babysitting.
The mists condensed.
And the shifting shape became a hard familiar coast.
And the longship was mooring, and the crew were jostling and clambering, and the big missionary had booted off the haunted little freak and his hypersensitive son, and was condescendingly half-escorting, half-carrying, the green priest ashore.
And they were home.

Priest in tow, Leif quickly took up the Christianization of Greenland’s Western Settlement, as per Olaf’s command. The mangled little man and his son followed him around like dogs, slept outside his door and annoyed his visitors, ultimately proving far easier to adopt than to shake. Barely tolerable shadows…still, the lad was simply amazing with livestock…and though the youth’s useless father seemed time and again to be just begging for a whooping, his son’s presence bore some ineffable quality that always curbed the missionary’s hand. Several times he’d witnessed the father approached by settlers bent on abuse. Each time the boy had stepped in, and each time the troublemakers were mysteriously repelled. The missionary of course didn’t attribute any kind of celestial intervention to these episodes, and certainly the popular notion of devilry was a natural reaction to the pair’s outrageous exoticness, but…in the son’s company, and even under the sharp eyes of his fellow Norsemen, Leif more than once found himself oddly moved to protect the father. And so the deformed man and his boy day by day blent in—as village idiot and mystic guide. And when in time a ****** brought tales of an unvisited land to the west, it was only natural for the restless Greenlander to buy that ******’s boat and, before stalwart comrades, weary family, and whimsical God Almighty, reluctantly accept the eccentric father and son as sort of seagoing mascots.
Hero was from then on irrepressible. During preparations he would pipe and stammer in his half-mute way, brimming with a confounding anxiety that kept him underfoot and at odds with all. On frigid nights he perched on the westernmost rocks, moaning to the horizon in the strangest fashion while his son stood guard. He positively spooked the locals; they’d gossip, nervously and with bile, of an answering wind that came wailing off the sea like a banshee in labor. The whole island wanted rid of him. And when his champing beneficiary, still clinging to the notion of Christian charity, bundled him aboard with his son and a crew of thirty-five, not a single settler was sorry to see him go.
Almost from the moment they cast off everything went wrong, as all attempts to control the longship were met with some kind of unknowable countermanding force. Vikings were not renowned for passive resistance—they fought, squaresail and steering oar, leaning oarsman to oarsman, until the ship rocked on the waves like a bucking bronco. An erratic weather system pursued them, worsening dramatically at each minute variation in heading. The Norsemen doubled down, and when the clouds finally burst wide, the cowling sea went mad. Dervishes whirled about the hull, crisscrossing winds bedeviled the sail. Patches of kelp belonging to much warmer waters came heaving alongside, fouling the work of the oars, while far to the west a humongous fog bank formed, eradicating the navigable field. The lightning-streaked horizon was a throbbing gray slit.
The longship became locked in a slow westerly current.
Fatigued crewmen complained of headaches and hallucinations, and of a nasty, slightly metallic tang to the air. There were numerous walrus sightings; bobbing flippers and snouts amid drifting ice chunks that came prowling the North Sea like a circling pack of famished white wolves.
Worst of all was the boy’s father—instantly agitated by everything and nothing, prey to some primitive impulse that caused him to periodically incline his head, shudder to his feet, and loop his arms as though embracing the sky. Leif would watch him scrabbling at the prow like a cat at a tree, furs snapping in the wind. He’d watch the boy re-seat him for the hundredth time, and for the hundredth time be filled with an immense contempt. By now he’d acknowledged that it takes a special kind of strength to shoulder charity and tolerance. That brown little freak struck him as an enormous malformed barnacle, slowly working its way back up the prow. Trying so hard to go unnoticed, looking and listening so intently, though there was nothing to see other than the growing shelves of fog, and nothing to hear save the rising, almost hysterical voice of the wind.
Leif sniffed the air, his ******’s instincts nagging him. This was a foul current, and a fool's errand; he took a deep breath and tentatively ordered the longship brought about.
The ship kicked twice, as though an enormous submarine hand had seized and released the hull.
A whirl formed in the water, causing the keeling ship to sweep around like a clock’s second hand. All about them, those drift-ice ghosts cruised dangerously near.
But they’d been liberated from that accursed current. Leif fiercely urged on his rowers, and at last the ship broke free. They made a bead due north.
Night came and the temperature plummeted.
Small sheets of ice converged, drifting between the hunks. The Norsemen, instinctively huddling amidships, passed out one by one in a massive pile of fur and flesh. In the freezing silence the floes bumped and recoiled, bumped and gathered, bumped and bonded. The tiny ship, swallowed whole, was dragged along in a labyrinth of black sea and interlocking slabs of ice.

The Norsemen came to in a surly, foul-smelling heap, lost at sea. While they were still groggy a voice cried out that a darker patch was developing in the fog. The men all fell to port. Under the confusion of their voices could be heard a distant rumble.
At this Hero hauled himself up the high curved prow. A half-light began to penetrate the fog, barely illuminating the irregular faces of drifting ice. The missionary stormed forward and indicated by gestures that if the boy didn’t restrain his father he would have the man tied down.
The longship stopped dead in the water.
The men found themselves regarding a perpetually frozen coastline swathed in bluish veils of mist. Directly before them loomed an immense ice cliff hundreds of feet high. Rising beyond this cliff were endless snow fields, where lean violet shadows seemed to drag about of their own volition. And upon those bleak fields a thin howling wind prowled, kicking up brief white dervishes, leaving a strange zigzagging signature.
Even as they stared, a darker shadow high on the ice cliff’s glistening face began to widen, accompanied by a cracking sound that could be felt before it was heard. With the illusion of slow-motion, a stupendous chunk broke out of the cliff and came screaming toward the sea. It hit the water like a bomb. The thunder of its separation and the explosion of its impact took a moment to reach them. Then, out of a spewing crater of crests and spume, the new calf came lunging, tromping the sea so hard the longship, fully a mile to sea, was swept out and ****** back in like a cork. The floundering mountain of ice bobbed and lilted, generating huge waves which continued to rock the ship long after the monster had settled. In a while the roaring in their ears subsided and there remained only the swirling, nerve-wracking howl of the wind.
The missionary’s eyes swept left and right. Whatever this place was, it sure wasn’t the fair shoreline he’d been promised. Hero again scrambled up the prow, and Leif again yanked him down. This time he made good his threat; he had the little nuisance bound, though he was half-tempted to let him take his chances overboard.
From somewhere deep in the haze grew a soulful, otherworldly call. It went on and on, electrifying the air, bottoming out once the ship had merged with that previously fought westerly flow.
By now Leif’s nerves were shot. He ordered the oars raised.
The longship began to drift. Ship and ice were pulled due west.
The clouds fell far behind as the ship embarked upon an amazingly calm sea—so calm its entire visible surface was featureless except for the faint wakes provided by the ship and its hulking ice companions. To the east a huge fog bank appeared on the horizon, and a while later a smaller bank to the north. Then a very dense one to the south. In time these banks converged, imperceptibly becoming a single mass that closed about the ship, bit by bit creating a slowly heaving dome. Tiny beads of water appeared on beards and eyebrows; in a minute everything was soaked. The only sound was that of the dragging steering oar. The men were now sopping ghosts, speaking only with their eyes.
Directly ahead the fog began to dimple. The dimple became a hollow, the hollow a cave, and then ship and ice were being towed through a low, ever-extending tunnel in fog. The current increased its pull. Ship and drifting ice accelerated through the tunnel.
After a while the missionary quietly stepped forward. He stood with one hand on the prow’s neck, listening to the mist, so motionless he might have been a carved extension of the longship’s aggressive design. Not a man breathed. The tunnel’s dilating and contracting bore was producing an all but seamless series of oscillating, near-phonetic sounds. Leif almost tiptoed back. No god, pagan or Christian, could account for the strangeness of this situation.
They were borne on a course that grew more southerly, and the following day beheld an inhospitable shoreline glazed by dazzling white beaches. Their course held. Two days later they came upon a far pleasanter, thickly wooded coast. Here the current released its hold, and here the missionary untied Hero and personally placed him and his son in a tiny oak faering. He was just as sick of them as he was excited by this promising new land. Once the rowboat had been heaved over the side, he and another man stepped aboard and took up the oars. They began rowing with easy, powerful strokes.
When the boat kissed sand the missionary stood unsteadily.
The first European to set foot on North American soil now placed one hand on his crucifix, the other on his sword’s hilt, and awkwardly plunged his leg into the thigh-deep, ice-cold surf. Before he could take another step the boat lurched as Hero leapt headfirst into the water, followed an instant later by his son. The Greenlanders watched sourly as the two splashed their way into a mad dash for the waiting pines. Leif wished them both good riddance and turned to grin wryly at his fellow Norseman. He must have blacked out for a second, must have been blinded by a shaft of sun, for he found he was staring stupidly at a point midway between his companion and the longship. It felt like he’d been kicked between the eyes.
Everything was dissolving.
He studied the beach and pines closely, but saw nothing of the man or his boy. He turned back, disoriented. With what seemed a superhuman effort he took up his oars. He rowed out sluggishly, in a dream, and the fog rolled in to meet him.

The boy broke into the trees and embraced a trunk, fighting for breath. What happened next happened so fast and so unexpectedly he didn’t have a chance to react.
Three savages stepped from behind the pines and beat him to his knees. They twisted his arms behind his back and hauled him to his feet. He’d barely processed the impression of a wild painted face when something sharp struck him ******* the temple and tore down his cheek to the jaw. Two of the assailants manhandled him into an upright position and held him in place while the third brought his weapon down again and again and again.
All but dead, he watched a nightmare countenance shouting through a shot veil of blood, and behind that image a reeling crimson sun. He lay there gushing while the savages went through his rags. They propped him against a pine and shrieked with triumph, tore the hair and gory scalp from his skull, threw back their heads and screamed at the screaming sky. Tooth and nail, they ripped apart his face and throat and, certain he would die, split what bits of fur were left and let his carcass lie.

                                                HERO

The weeks stretched into months while he fought his way back into the light.
He progressed in stages; only half-conscious, stumbling along in a blood-red stupor punctuated by a slow strobe of frequent blackouts. Days loomed and decayed, nights pounced and were gone; the backlit, swirling gray cosmos collapsed and expanded on every missed beat of his pulse. A thousand times he broke down to die, and a thousand times he clawed to his feet, driven to pursue a tiny, ghost-like figure fluttering in his memory.
Everything conspired to check him.
A bay like an immense landlocked sea was skirted over months or years—it was all the same. Cold locked him in, Hunger drove him afield, that rude ***** Wind lashed him blind, wore him like a shoe, screamed for his skin while he worked his way west.
Somehow he ate, somehow he avoided being eaten; the instincts that had served him halfway around the planet were still vital beneath the abused exterior. His simple burrows became sturdy temporary shelters. He relearned the art of fire, and began to cook what he killed. He manufactured crude snares and weapons and, when his recuperation was complete, paid closer attention to the on-again, off-again trail he’d been following…forever.
Sometimes this trail would call to him like a lover. Other times he stood peering uncertainly, trying to recapture meanings and aims. Then the ground would turn spongy and the sky revolve, and once again he’d be lying all but dead in the woods, while from the face of the sun emerged a vile winged horror, its ugly pale head lashing side to side, its cruelly hooked beak dangling something that glistened in the wild pulsing light…then the fat moon, rising like gas against the icy black night…the feel of the wind:  the slashing of her nails, the chafing of her hem…the sound of things crunching and pausing and sniffing…then the sun, blazing anew. And again that thing, descending, its wide black wings beating slowly, metronomically—but none of that mattered any more. For his mind had quit him, had flown howling into ice and pine to roost with things surreal. In the day his madness might muddle and run, or spend the light stalking, cat-like, watching and waiting. But at night it came creeping from all sides. Sometimes it came in waves. It could gnaw like the devil, or wrap around him like a warm second skin. But none of that mattered either.
The only thing that mattered was the trail—whether it was lost for good, or for only a while. He’d been following it through his episodes, always north, wondering just who and where in the world he was, and trying to shake a ridiculous notion of being led on a wild goose chase.
The cold was unbelievable.
The deeper north he delved, the more confused he became. He grew starved for colors and scents, finding nonexistent patterns in the stark contrast of shadow and snow. He thought he could detect a kind of otherworldly design in the overwhelming number of dead ends he encountered, and, too, in the diabolically frustrating locations of natural obstacles. He seemed to be forever fighting the wind—a hulking, despondent snowman, he hiked face down and focused, while another aspect of his attention floated just behind, disembodied, watching his silent pursuers…leaving no tracks, blending perfectly with the environment in their clever winter coats…not predators, but creatures that normally should have been hightailing it away from him. By the time he could turn, they’d become nothing more menacing than snowdrifts. But they pursued him nevertheless.
And so his paranoia increased…had there ever really been a trail…and when did this miserably cold, miserably anemic crusade begin…his long-term memory was falling apart a chunk at a time. It just got colder and colder and colder until at last, one snippet of a day during one blur of a year, he found himself utterly lost, and clueless as to his history or objective. His mind was a blank, as colorless and featureless as the endless world of ice around him. He’d come this far solely to learn that the only trail he’d been following was his own—and now even that trail was succumbing to ice. On all sides there was nothing to see but an infinite field of glaring whiteness, and nothing to hear but the ululating wail of the tubular polar wind. It was the loneliest, the unholiest, the creepiest sound imaginable. But it wasn’t insanity that made him wheel. It was his self-preservation instinct.
And then he was somehow on his knees in the woods, facing a furious setting sun.
Whole seasons had passed from his memory like chalk from a board. His only recollections were those of a broken, haunted animal:  of being perilously sick, of fearing the unseen, of blindly struggling across a solid-white wilderness. That he’d survived such an ordeal meant nothing to him. And that he had in some indecipherable manner stumbled across the cold-as-stone trail did not fill him with amazement or with thankfulness—there simply wasn’t anything visual or emotional left to draw on. A significant part of his life had been whited out.
But now he could focus entirely on the trail. And before he knew it, the fuzzy area between fantasy and reality found a seam. He began to analyze and plan. He paid attention to hygiene, and kept a kind of running mental journal. Things were sorting out. Yet there were nights when the old sickness would resurface, reestablish its hold, and leave him sweating and uncertain under the stars. Then, paradoxically, his perception would become razor-keen. And so he would see, on a distant hilltop, a pair of scrawny silhouettes, one on four legs and one on two, slowly crossing the faintly pocked face of the setting moon. He would become strangely excited, and thereafter retain crystal-clear images of himself, as if seen from above, hurrying with adroitness through the silent, graveyard-like setting of black and blue night and white-frosted trees. Then the fuzzy area would broaden, and it would be the next morning, and he would be staring at the prints of man and elk in snow. And he would see how the elk’s prints doubled back, and how the man’s prints terminated where he had obviously mounted his guide. An unfathomable glow would bring tears to his eyes. But, even as he gathered himself, a fresh snowfall would wipe out the prints. And once again the world would plummet into white. And the wind would howl as the snow hammered his eyes. And he would ***** on.

A haggard animal sat shivering in a small grove of frozen pines, watching his campfire die. His eyes were fixed. Like the fire, he was running out of warmth, running out of fuel. There wasn’t a whole lot of tinder round his bones, and not much feeling left in his limbs. The slowly heaping downfall was burying him alive, but he was too numb to care.
It had taken him six long years to cross an entire continent, and during that time he’d known only cold and excruciating pain. The pain was leaving him now. The cold was making it right. His eyes glazed over.
Along a narrow plain to the west a herd of caribou filed dreamily through the snow, cutting across a panoramic backdrop of dazzling white mountains. The slow-motion parade was hypnotic. After a while it occurred to the drifting man, in a roundabout way, that he was dying, that he was nonchalantly freezing to death. Concurrent with this notion there rose in his chest a wonderful liquid warmth. His eyes slowly closed and, once shut, began to set fast.
He was jolted from within. It was as if he’d been kicked in the heart.
He ****** to his feet, pounded his fists on his thighs, felt nothing. The breath spurted from his mouth in small white clouds as he stumbled downhill after the slow caribou train. He swam through the snow, hallucinating, imagining that certain individuals in the herd were mocking him by slowing and accelerating, while others glanced back with expressions of contempt.
As he burst into their midst the animals stepped aside indifferently. A few galloped ahead to keep up the herd, but most simply sidestepped while he danced there, stamping his feet and smacking his hands. The herd grew thinner, until only the old and infirm were filing by. The man desperately embraced a hobbling female for warmth, but she cried out and kicked, triggering a panic reaction in the herd. Clinging for his life, the man was dragged along beside her as the herd stormed into a maze of flying ice and snow. His weight caused her to stagger sideways until they slammed against the flank of a sick male. The man instinctively threw an arm over the male and, thus draped between them, was borne across the drifted plain for upwards of a mile, his freezing feet alternately dangling above and dragging through the snow. The herd broke into a hard run, forcing him to assume a broken trot. Soon his legs were stinging. Sensation rushed through his body.
Now the herd, still picking up speed, began to contract, jamming him between his bearers. There was a quick jolt to his right and he was lifted clean off his feet, nearly straddling the bucking female. It had become an all-out stampede. Through hard-flung snow he saw the cause:  just ahead, the caribou had run head-on into a solid wall of galloping wood bison, and both frantic herds had blindly veered to the east; were in fact running side by side down a deep, ragged canyon—were pouring over the canyon’s lip like a cataract. He was approaching, at breakneck pace, that very place where the converged herds so abruptly swerved. The hanging man snarled as he was borne inevitably to the point of deflection.
There came a concussion at his left shoulder, followed by a blast of snow. In an instant the ailing male was tumbling head over heels to the east, ****** into the stampede’s plummeting mass by the fury of its descent. The man and female, rebounding from this impact, were shot to the west in a crazy jumble of flailing legs. The caribou lost her footing, flew nose-first into a snowbank, and came up running. Kicking off, the man used the last of his strength to heave himself astride. At first she fought to shake him, but the spell of the run was too strong. She and half a dozen others went pounding in the opposite direction of the stampede, quickly joined by a number of bison that had likewise splintered from their herd. The riding man could make out their huge hulking shapes thundering by in a blizzard of flying ice, could hear their heavy gasps and explosive grunts. One passed so close he felt its massive flank brush his leg. He peered to his right and saw a black, pig-like eye regarding him excitedly, moving up and down like a piston as the beast ran alongside.
The eye shifted, focusing on the gasping, completely obsessed female. The bull dropped its head and slammed into the caribou’s side, sending her and the man careening down a ***** to the west. The caribou brayed hysterically and her backside went down, but she managed, despite the weight of her rider, to return to all fours and frantically continue along the *****. Again the bull charged, crashing into her shoulder. The man and caribou were launched sideways into the white searing air.
He sat up carefully. The huffing bison was straddling him like a bully laying down the ground rules. Its big wiry beard came right up to brush his chin. The stench of its breath was stupefying.
The bull stamped and snorted, thrusting its stubby horns left and right as the man used his elbows and heels to back away. The bull followed, move for move. When the man collapsed under his own impetus the bull shoved him along with its snout, bellowing furiously. Clear down the ***** they lunged, shoving and lurching, until the man lay sprawled on his back; up to his chin in snow, completely helpless. The ton of a bull butted and kicked, but only glancingly:  those hooves could **** with a blow. At last the man, in one clean sequence, spun on his rear, dropped to his side, and went rolling down the ***** using his elbows for ******.
At the bottom ran a narrow fence of frosted saplings marking an ice cliff’s precipice. He lay face down in the snow, too done in to do anything but **** at an air pocket.
And there came a high-pitched crackling, a sound like the protracted gasp of embers in a dead fire. He turned just as those saplings began leaning to the west, their frozen skins cracking with the strain.
The bison bellowed menacingly.
The sprawled man looked back and saw it still standing with legs spread wide, silhouetted against the sky. In a moment it began huffing downhill, lurching side to side, surfing the snow between lunges.
It chased him through the genuflecting saplings straight into a frozen gully where, protected by a few feet of insurmountable verticality, he was able to slide on the ice between its stomping hooves, downhill out of reach, then downhill out of control—spinning just in time to glimpse a breathtaking vista:
Partly framed by the gully-straddling saplings was a vast crescent of jagged white mountains seemingly huddled round a small stretch of snow-draped pines. The little wood these mountains surrounded was isolated in a broad lake of solid ice. Hundreds of fissures radiated crazily throughout this packed ice field, appearing to issue from somewhere near the frozen wood’s center, which was completely obscured by a ring of rising mist. Above this thumbnail panorama the sun showered gold.
Then the gully dipped radically, and he was skidding headfirst, slamming back and forth against its slick white walls. This uncontrollable plunge had the positive effect of getting his blood flowing. Yet it tore him up. Had the gully concluded in a cul-de-sac, or had further progress required a single calorie of uphill effort, his struggle would certainly have ended here. He would have been too weak to move, and death would have been swift.
But there was a glacier—a great river of ice pouring slowly out of the clouds. The gully, terminating in a little scoop formation near the glacier’s base, spat him flailing onto its gnarly glass hide. He went head over heels, bits of skin and fur flying like chips from a band saw. Somehow he gained his footing, and then he was running against his will, tumbling and recovering and tumbling again.
He didn’t catch much of that crazy run. He half-glimpsed whirling walls of ice, felt a fickle surface underfoot, and broke through an assaultive mist that clung to his ankles and arms. He remembered having the ragged hides torn right off his body, and then being skinned alive. And he remembered reaching the glacier’s base and crawling like an animal; round its sweeping drifts, past its peaked moraines, all the way to a twisting frozen gorge.
And he followed this gorge down; ricocheting wall to wall, delirious, small plumes of thrashed snow marking his descent.
Through a freezing wood he fumbled. In a veil of mist he tumbled down a steep and verdant grade. As cold consumed his closing breath, he fell upon, near-blind, near death, a strange, enchanted glade.

There is a pool.
And in this pool a man lay purged, his broken body half-submerged.
The stumbling man stopped. He knelt to weep, but lost his thread. One hand took a bicep, the other, the head. With a twist and pull the corpse emerged.
That visage…that face—misshapen mask, contorted, bleached; of life’s deposits fully leached. Essence dispatched—a void, sodden wretch.
He let it fall and the glass was breached. All a freak, all a stretch:  upon this act his grip detached.
And the bridge collapsed…one vagabond grasp…what were these feelings; recaptured and trashed…a span elapsed…who was this puckered mass…he hauled it by the waist and thighs…slid it in, watched the pool react:  purse and recover, expand, contract. The glass reformed, now silver-backed…a sudden mirror…the man leaned nearer…saw his reflection, just smashed, remade intact.
The pool grew still.
Within its depth a shadow stirred—visions gathered, some distinct, some obscure. What they meant, and who they were, was much too much to fathom. The glass became blurred.
He closed his eyes, let his heavy head fall, fell back on his haunches, felt the sweat seep and crawl. The air was a pall—as he struggled to rise, a nib crossed his wrist.
He opened his eyes.
Between his fingers the blades poked and crept. Round his knuckles they ventured, up his forearm they stepped:  they seemed to be triggered by prompts from the ground. He shook his head slowly and dully looked round.
There were jays grouped about him, their black eyes aglow. Red hens came running, their fat chicks in tow. Gophers engaged in a weird hide-and-seek. Bluebells and buttercups craned for a peek. Sparrows hopped past and, paying no heed, burst into flight. He watched them recede.
Westward they flew.
Bewildered, he slumped.
Bumped from behind, he jumped to his feet, flabbergasted to find an ancient gray moose near-eclipsing the sky, with grit in his snarl and fire in his eye.
The old moose took aim.
The man turned to flee and stumbled, then tumbled and fell on a palm and a knee.

But there lies a world (so the lullaby goes) where rivers ever run.
Poked from behind, pushed out of his mind, he staggered into sun.







Copyright 2020 by Ron Sanders.

Contact:  ronsandersartofprose(at)yahoo(dot)com

. h'america is as much an ideology as is... islam... this... the best... pig-farmed english you could somehow... not teach... not have mustered from a slav... a pseudo-russian... inconvenience ego... contender? satellite pawn: your... *****-slave yugoslav bourbon... excavations of: the lost flood of mongolian: tribe-folk... the pakistani with the surname: khan... your peoples... prior... no-guilt... island strapped... peruvian conquistadors... or... better strapped... less the cerveza folk... more... the belittled sort of: sorting folk... blah blah...

it's honestly hard to write anything -
when one is still... shell-shocked...
fromwhat could be cited as a devil's decade:
13 years...
                 from the age of 21
through to: aged 34...
            one of those relationship remainders...
we both got into smoking...
well... she was well ahead of me
in the cigarette domain...

       no... however i will attire the event...
whatever verbiage...
it doesn't allow a "justice" to trickle down...
it just so happens that i want
to listen to some depeche mode...
and not some tool / porcupine tree...

13 years of smoking... from the nadir of
40 a day... locotomotive breath...
iron on the tongue... phelgm pancakes
harked in the morning from
a tobacco "hangover"...

                  oscilating around 20 per day...
for some time...
and all it took was a week... 10 days...
and i'm still in possession of 3 cigarettes...
and those two i reserve for the end
of the day ritual...
    smoking the first is like:
finding oneself with a belly-full of
a child of gravity...
otherwise: gravity... unless falling...
to look up at the stars and the moon
and the sea: it's something you don't
exactly feel with two feet strapped
to the orb... no movement of
the tectonic plates...
sometimes with *******...
index and middle... of the left hand...
pushed under the right arm-pit...
to feel the pulse of the arteries...

i hardly think this is a call for celebration...
13 years can disappear like...
nothing even took place...
to substitute the habbit with...
reading... playing video games?
nibbling on carrots... nuts...
or just... waiting for the tide to recede...
and for a sea of patience to come
with tomorrow's tide...

all that... and none of it...
at the end of the day... the two cigarettes
are like a metaphor fo crack *******
or syringe strapping imitation
leech...
        clear thinking: or therefore none...
no spaghetti muddles...
at best: imitation of biting into ice...
or... stretching a rubber-band until...
well: you can't feel it about to snap...
since it snaps...

                 a second gravity...
                all concentrated in the stomach...
and esp. when the legs have not been
"properly" used up...
but remain tight-and-fidgety with goosebumps
when the ****** of tobacco lines the nerves...

i don't know why i can't celebrate this...
it's such a private event... such an exslusivity...
after all... in linear fashion:
to experience speed... a concentrated
exploration of space... within a hyper-dictum
of time...
        in a linear way...
but a second gravity: without falling?
but otherwise whirling in the stomach?

a devil's decade: 13 years...
              3 more... otherwise a dozen...
which is only 1 more...
the devil's dozen...
          simon peter, andrew, james, john, philip,
bartholomew, matthew, thomas,
james son of alphaeus, simon the zealot,
judas son of james and judas iscariot...
count hey-zeus out of the equation...
                                               there's paul...

and that's what eminem does...
when rapping... on white h'america?
changes the subject - a personal tirade over...
somehow i too link certain aspects...
13 years of...

this... oh so mediocre...
           because: clearly... i don't know what
to make of it...
                 thank god i retained those
two cigarettes at the end of the day...
than have been hooked on nicorette chewing
gum / patches...
                or the usual "a.a." support...
support: "support":
         help yourself: by every single
and no dead or alive guru...
            
                i really don't have anything
to write...
                 i'm walking away from
a 13 years of tobacco addiction...
   and what i'm really thinking about...
the first thirsts of cold-turkey are long gone...
it's been under a week...
over a week... whatever...

             what i'm really thinking about...
well...
   how would it feel like...
to farm animals...
                  how does it feel to... pet animals...
a completely different dynamic...
after all... a farmer would own...
petting-worth animals...
like a cat... for... catching mice...
or a dog... to... warden... sphynx...
cerberus... watch-over the property...
how some would make the dogs
so ferocious... that a chain would
sometimes not be withstanding
to the ferocity of the barking...

           eh... it's slightly off-putting...
to pet animals...
when you're being given a factory
edit of the original moo!
  or snorkling in knee-deep-**** and mud
and rotten potatoes of pork...
i don't mind... the end product
is what interests me...
the **** is silk? tapeworm ****?!
or there-abouts...
       but... it's so much different...
when you... farm animals...
     lucky for me... my... somewhat...
immediate family still owned a farm...
and chickens in the yard...
oh yeah... catching a chicken is one thing...
amnesia of the chicken shack...
catch one... sure thing...
then with axe onto the stump...
head sticks to the stump...
last traces of life while the eyes roll back
and the tongue protrudes from the beak...
while... all the other chickens gather...
and start drinking the blood...

a bit like the two tiers of people...
some people must feel inclined to become
these... sociopathic farmers...
there are the humans you herd...
there are the humans you pet...
the ones you pet will probably find about
you herding them...
and rebel... since... you're not...
some gargantuan: ****** obvious...
miracle of a god descent... crown, pomp...
circumstance... all that was borrowed
from god... in splendour... heavens!
lo! behold... versailles was built!

the future charles III of england...
started 8pm today... on classic.fm with his own show...
i tuned in for a minute or two to hear
his voice...
      i do hope that when ol' lizzie is dead...
he doesn't cower... he dons! he dons the title:
charles the third!
  i ****** well hope... he doesn't become...
no... he can't become: george VII...
formerly known as charles: the prince of wales!
he has to be! charles the third!
he has waited this long!
he has to retain his name!

but that's the beauty of the monarchy...
it's so ******* pompous and omnipresent...
it doesn't hide... in... secular... grey-matter
of deep-state... there are just too many tiers
of power... even though... there's only symbolism...
but a reverence for it: nonetheless!
grey-matter of shadow-people in grey suits!
blinking: for god's sake! blinking black-holes
of hush hush: what was once...
the aristocracy... that's too replaced with...
the burden of crazed-loon bureaucracy!

i've quit smoking... well... "quit"...
2 cigarettes from 20 a day... circa...
  is much better than a nicorette patch...
         or some: pepperspray tasting chewing gum...
it's not a cigar... if you were asking...

but the original idea...
    farming animals...
             petting animals...
                    dogs... the ideal pets...
i'm sorry... i can't put on a leash or a muzzle...
a chihuahua can bite like a piranha...
i don't see the excuses needed to comfort
people afraid of big dogs... alsatians...
dobermans... that's the freedom allowed with cats...
if you get a chance to build their characters...
they will tend to take a dump in your
neighbour's garden...
yes... me... following sherlock feline...
with a black plastic bag and *****...
permission to... be allowed entry into your garden?
or are you... going to trebuchet that ****
back onto my lawn?

dogs or "petting" tarantulas? serpents?
the idea of petting went out of the window...
when... people started to fathom the...
what adjective?! to pet a ******* tarantula...
yes... me... running to the shop that sells
tarantulas... with caption: free tow-twos...
how about you keep that freak-****
in the jungle with all those gimp-suit sexed-up
antics... and i... get to...
farm a chicken... i get to... farm a pig?

no... of course no... although...
who couldn't be teased with latex jill and her
spider annex: library of "misdeeds"
for the library of: hard-ons...

now that you mentioned it... sure... i have a...
pressing concern... how to not...
over-cook pork...
see... pork is a bit like pasta...
you can serve it undercooked like beef...
but... it's also like chicken...
and beef... combined... you don't want
to serve it... overcooked...
only barbarians are fond of well-done beef...
probably arab...
    they only stomach well-done steaks
or minced beef...
they have no palette for tartare steaks...
too much inbreeding with stinking lamb
does the trick...
whatever they might say of pork...
the aesthetic meat... leather too... shoes and belts...
lamb? for the slaughter?
eh... stinking puritanical meat worthy
of teacher 'ebrew and righteous son:
mecca ibn sudan.

because... ha ha... it's one thing being racist...
you know... detailing the physiognomy
differences between blacks and whites...
choccies and porky pies...
and the cinnamon people in between...
that's one thing...
it's like everyone was asleep...
the whites were racist...
the only people... ever...
but that's one thing...
   i find it harder to digest...
there's no name for it...
  kosher-ism... halal-ism?
         to be... more racist than racist...
almost a vegan / vegetarian taming...
   someone is being critical... of what you eat...
i imagine... malcom x being given a free
pass as a black totem in mecca...
shot dead... when converted... because...
still shuffled pork on the sly...

beside skin deep: please leavde your leather
shoes and belts... lace
beside the concept / concern for the mosque...
racism: morphed into an ideological
manifest...
for a while... let us leave thse
turban and tent dwelling folk
with their newly acquired riches
to the ***** of:
if i am to prepare lamb meat...
i treat it liky chilly...
the meat... stinks of something beside...
death... innocence prescribed...

           you are told... wrong...
when ingesting the fruit of eden... somewhat...
these nomads of quasi-sikh turbans
for the women: the niqab girdle-grooms...
their wetted-appetites:
unable to satiate gyrocentrism leftovers...
and... pass from the living...
toward the theatre of the would be alive...
less the circumcised mess: misantrophes...

it's one thing to be chockie...
another to be porky-pink'ish...
     but what you eat?
that's... somehow... off-putting?
    puritan with some crab-meat
in this numbed jaw?
no one the persians rebelled against
the camel-jockey prescription of:
words only... no images...
pasta squiggles of phonetic encoding...
arabic... tironian a posteriori notations...
then again: one could argue:
tironian a priori notations...

shrimp-**** and eyes that would
resemble... at best... squinting from too much
sun... and at worst... ******* on a lemon...
12" of **** and the twelve-pounder
juicing worth of ***...
her ***...
                for me to comment
on the mongol horde esque libido of
the fellow woman of my race...
no... the islamic idea of a heavenly harem...
mind you: it would satisfy her:
if she was to be crowned the juggling act
of three: at least one to compete with
the da vinci sodomites...

to be told you can't eat something...
i'm already a bad joke as:
"bweetish" as it comes...
tucked away with the afro-saxon...
the anglo-slav...
                 you just have those lips
that look like full-bloom best:
imitation: floral patterns of a ******...
best equipped for *******...
i swim: you sink...
you run... i start an arithmetic of catching
my breath...
the cinnamon people are...
if they are equipped with a polytheism
of the raj... and are saved with
culinary ambitions...
"we'd" call them the blue indians...
and that's also: to mind...
their elder: sanskrit...
              पअरउत
र - or how the englishman lost the trill:
rattle-snake R: for rolling...
when he... became: the nuanced... keeper...
vanguard... of the Raj...
perhaps... the anthropomorphic genesis
in africa: givenz zee apulus... apex: gorrilolulz...
but... the sribbles and *******?
india the basin... akapit: paragraph:
the tear of sri lanka...

i.e. so much for me succumbing to the anglican:
we'z all wo'z allz: ex afri-ka'ka'kazia...

oh sure... sure... we... the sensible:
secular post-christians of the protestant wealth
of the west...
happy to afford the dumbed-down
congregations of the newly conscripted...
believers of africa and south h'america...
carrot dangling: run donkey! run!
one of your own: a pope! a cardinal!
poland is still running on that...
remark of... the passing of power...
the first pope to be given status of... saint...
john paul II the saint of:
kissing airport tarmac...

             and then of course...
the hyped intricacy of the orthodox branch
of the bureau of hierogylphics and
synonymous litanies...
          the events of the baltic sea:
would never be...
the sort of ****-show...
that... the events of the mediterranean sea...
hell... the events of the black sea...
christianity isn't merely dumb...
it's just... over-hyped...
               the pork the pork... the pork!
who would require...
a criticism of pork and pig and ms. porky
to suit... alliance...
no matter... i'm on the cusp of quitting
smoking...

we can caricature our physiognomy...
but... how do you... caricature...
what you eat... your... sustenance?
you, black... have a pillow for a nose...
me, white... have a death's lack of...
           i don't have a nose...
i have... a death's clench sucker...
       i have a pinch nose...
        so much for over-inflated lips...
and... my missing... elongated...
myth elves: the protruding ears...
like: no body...

                 current / the currency of
the now h'america... and the immediacy
of nostalgia: as a history: moving forward /
anywhere but back...
nietzsche opened up a nostalgia for ancient
greece...
  h'americans... opening up... a nostalgia...
for 1950s h'america...
how can you write a future history...
from a stand-point / stand-off...
of nostalgia...
this... immediacy of nostalgia...
who's who and who isn't citing...
a richard brautigan... or... a frank o'hara?!
because: there's the sucker and no punch
for the next verse of...
****'s sake... walt whitman?!
o captain! my... john keating...
                 no... it's not about glorifying
the original intent... mr. president...
the english teacher...
mr.! thomas! bunce!

               how can any history be written...
when there's... a nostalgia: impediment...
the hsitory of an immediacy
lacklutered by a past...
the past: however framed...
before... the dead are allowed to
turn and grovel in their graves...
i have 'ere... my gobble-whick of...
pretending: no shadows will
ever exist... at noon...
scrathing... timidy bed-fellows...
loitering squat...

we are to grovel for the cousin
imps and apes of: first born:
english born... navajo...
     tortilla...
the old fling of england...
and the spanish...
             the conquistadors...
loose nouns dog **** flinging applause:
i fall asleep in a bed:
i welcome the new day...
most... egregious (archaic)...

  these western lands...
mmm... they're not very much akin
to our flavour...
that they dictate... refurbishment...
unless it's para-english...
alter- proto- welsh...
  kashubian... masovian...
silesian...
                    kres...
                    
ei hhynnal coch.. and it:
pronouns neutral: does... ****-wit...
gender-fluid-retardo: perfecto...

and i too wish i had...
themes of crusader songs...
but... i have none...
these that i marked...
teutonic knights of no order...
       barbarossa being pickled...
livonians... prussians...
lithuanians...
                    i'm sorry...
that i'm too far away from
you to return to europe
from your: hubris...
             in crafting... the...
                conscripts: shikhs...
ask the russians! ask the rush-******-whips!
agony of a tongue: beside their own!
the post-colonial powers
return!
the post-colonial powers! make a return!
so much for those of us...
not having... a colonial past!
are we to pay for... such...
benevolent gracing
of gratitude from the people
"made"... under... colonial... rule?!
from the perspective of the strong...
why... am i... expected to treat
these care-bears with...
the right: equipped
manchester shovel?

          you spike my drink
or am i... to... simply...
take the right, godly ****...
into all the urns...
the rest of you are to drink from?

i see my forehead glee: akin to my elbow...
and i call that phenomenon:
something benevolent of *****....
yep... not s'unni... but... shyte...
****.. persian: rebellion of camel-jockey...
****'ite... macron i...
dot's the worthy due: guillotine...
echo of the baltic sea...
we somehow: managed...
to lessen the romance...
unlike the english...
the romans conquered:
romanced the ******...
the vikings conquered...
romanced the ******...
the mongols never made it...
nor the huns..
so much for "brexit":
with your lineage of currency...
and your status as an island...

glory! vistory! ******* and all!
because: best felt!
in... places... akin to... devon!
a londoner will abhor someone...
with origins in the vicinity of bristol...
like... because...
there's no other?

n'ah... this night is pretty much worth
all the other nights...
it's worth sleeping...
it's not worth... whatever: leftover...
"worth" of...
this... this "apparent"...
yep... leftover... be...
something for the worth of yale
h'american... or...
dignitary president...
              officiated cul de sac executive orders...
it's... such an anglo-saxon fetish for...
*** beside the boudoir...
    dodo, lilac... gimp... latex...
      dickens...
                  liberty at:
i feign to allow myself to have... lapsed...
in what? good question...
even i... do not... attempt to baron
myself: over;
pithy... not pity... me...
you god-sucker...
******* ******* son's of eire...
me good-son...
    term me: years! under...
the tsarina! *******...
new yawn-ker...
       big mouth... no new bullseye...
the same old manchester...
the same ol'...
porky pies...
the same ol' chimneys and:
love's all... at cul de sac:
southend... porky pie munch:
luvvie: ol' guv.

yem: yup... ol' groove.. zzz-tizzle...
smart bruiser:
geezer with a sneeze pops up
at random places and jokes...
retards... lobotomy cruiser...
rhymes like... a cockey...
prior... to... tourettes... the lost...
the last... and what's:
the remains of...
the always... last...
and the worst... told... chalk of joke.
se relationship remainders...
we both got into smoking...
well... she was well ahead of me
in the cigarette domain...

       no... however i will attire the event...
whatever verbiage...
it doesn't allow a "justice" to trickle down...
it just so happens that i want
to listen to some depeche mode...
and not some tool / porcupine tree...

13 years of smoking... from the nadir of
40 a day... locotomotive breath...
iron on the tongue... phelgm pancakes
harked in the morning from
a tobacco "hangover"...

                  oscilating around 20 per day...
for some time...
and all it took was a week... 10 days...
and i'm still in possession of 3 cigarettes...
and those two i reserve for the end
of the day ritual...
    smoking the first is like:
finding oneself with a belly-full of
a child of gravity...
otherwise: gravity... unless falling...
to look up at the stars and the moon
and the sea: it's something you don't
exactly feel with two feet strapped
to the orb... no movement of
the tectonic plates...
sometimes with *******...
index and middle... of the left hand...
pushed under the right arm-pit...
to feel the pulse of the arteries...

i hardly think this is a call for celebration...
13 years can disappear like...
nothing even took place...
to substitute the habbit with...
reading... playing video games?
nibbling on carrots... nuts...
or just... waiting for the tide to recede...
and for a sea of patience to come
with tomorrow's tide...

all that... and none of it...
at the end of the day... the two cigarettes
are like a metaphor fo crack *******
or syringe strapping imitation
leech...
        clear thinking: or therefore none...
no spaghetti muddles...
at best: imitation of biting into ice...
or... stretching a rubber-band until...
well: you can't feel it about to snap...
since it snaps...

                 a second gravity...
                all concentrated in the stomach...
and esp. when the legs have not been
"properly" used up...
but remain tight-and-fidgety with goosebumps
when the ****** of tobacco lines the nerves...

i don't know why i can't celebrate this...
it's such a private event... such an exslusivity...
after all... in linear fashion:
to experience speed... a concentrated
exploration of space... within a hyper-dictum
of time...
        in a linear way...
but a second gravity: without falling?
but otherwise whirling in the stomach?

a devil's decade: 13 years...
              3 more... otherwise a dozen...
which is only 1 more...
the devil's dozen...
          simon peter, andrew, james, john, philip,
bartholomew, matthew, thomas,
james son of alphaeus, simon the zealot,
judas son of james and judas iscariot...
count hey-zeus out of the equation...
                                               there's paul...

and that's what eminem does...
when rapping... on white h'america?
changes the subject - a personal tirade over...
somehow i too link certain aspects...
13 years of...

this... oh so mediocre...
           because: clearly... i don't know what
to make of it...
                 thank god i retained those
two cigarettes at the end of the day...
than have been hooked on nicorette chewing
gum / patches...
                or the usual "a.a." support...
support: "support":
         help yourself: by every single
and no dead or alive guru...
            
                i really don't have anything
to write...
                 i'm walking away from
a 13 years of tobacco addiction...
   and what i'm really thinking about...
the first thirsts of cold-turkey are long gone...
it's been under a week...
over a week... whatever...

             what i'm really thinking about...
well...
   how would it feel like...
to farm animals...
                  how does it feel to... pet animals...
a completely different dynamic...
after all... a farmer would own...
petting-worth animals...
like a cat... for... catching mice...
or a dog... to... warden... sphynx...
cerberus... watch-over the property...
how some would make the dogs
so ferocious... that a chain would
sometimes not be withstanding
to the ferocity of the barking...

           eh... it's slightly off-putting...
to pet animals...
when you're being given a factory
edit of the original moo!
  or snorkling in knee-deep-**** and mud
and rotten potatoes of pork...
i don't mind... the end product
is what interests me...
the **** is silk? tapeworm ****?!
or there-abouts...
       but... it's so much different...
when you... farm animals...
     lucky for me... my... somewhat...
immediate family still owned a farm...
and chickens in the yard...
oh yeah... catching a chicken is one thing...
amnesia of the chicken shack...
catch one... sure thing...
then with axe onto the stump...
head sticks to the stump...
last traces of life while the eyes roll back
and the tongue protrudes from the beak...
while... all the other chickens gather...
and start drinking the blood...

a bit like the two tiers of people...
some people must feel inclined to become
these... sociopathic farmers...
there are the humans you herd...
there are the humans you pet...
the ones you pet will probably find about
you herding them...
and rebel... since... you're not...
some gargantuan: ****** obvious...
miracle of a god descent... crown, pomp...
circumstance... all that was borrowed
from god... in splendour... heavens!
lo! behold... versailles was built!

the future charles III of england...
started 8pm today... on classic.fm with his own show...
i tuned in for a minute or two to hear
his voice...
      i do hope that when ol' lizzie is dead...
he doesn't cower... he dons! he dons the title:
charles the third!
  i ****** well hope... he doesn't become...
no... he can't become: george VII...
formerly known as charles: the prince of wales!
he has to be! charles the third!
he has waited this long!
he has to retain his name!

but that's the beauty of the monarchy...
it's so ******* pompous and omnipresent...
it doesn't hide... in... secular... grey-matter
of deep-state... there are just too many tiers
of power... even though... there's only symbolism...
but a reverence for it: nonetheless!
grey-matter of shadow-people in grey suits!
blinking: for god's sake! blinking black-holes
of hush hush: what was once...
the aristocracy... that's too replaced with...
the burden of crazed-loon bureaucracy!

i've quit smoking... well... "quit"...
2 cigarettes from 20 a day... circa...
  is much better than a nicorette patch...
         or some: pepperspray tasting chewing gum...
it's not a cigar... if you were asking...

but the original idea...
    farming animals...
             petting animals...
                    dogs... the ideal pets...
i'm sorry... i can't put on a leash or a muzzle...
a chihuahua can bite like a piranha...
i don't see the excuses needed to comfort
people afraid of big dogs... alsatians...
dobermans... that's the freedom allowed with cats...
if you get a chance to build their characters...
they will tend to take a dump in your
neighbour's garden...
yes... me... following sherlock feline...
with a black plastic bag and *****...
permission to... be allowed entry into your garden?
or are you... going to trebuchet that ****
back onto my lawn?

dogs or "petting" tarantulas? serpents?
the idea of petting went out of the window...
when... people started to fathom the...
what adjective?! to pet a ******* tarantula...
yes... me... running to the shop that sells
tarantulas... with caption: free tow-twos...
how about you keep that freak-****
in the jungle with all those gimp-suit sexed-up
antics... and i... get to...
farm a chicken... i get to... farm a pig?

no... of course no... although...
who couldn't be teased with latex jill and her
spider annex: library of "misdeeds"
for the library of: hard-ons...

now that you mentioned it... sure... i have a...
pressing concern... how to not...
over-cook pork...
see... pork is a bit like pasta...
you can serve it undercooked like beef...
but... it's also like chicken...
and beef... combined... you don't want
to serve it... overcooked...
only barbarians are fond of well-done beef...
probably arab...
    they only stomach well-done steaks
or minced beef...
they have no palette for tartare steaks...
too much inbreeding with stinking lamb
does the trick...
whatever they might say of pork...
the aesthetic meat... leather too... shoes and belts...
lamb? for the slaughter?
eh... stinking puritanical meat worthy
of teacher 'ebrew and righteous son:
mecca ibn sudan.

because... ha ha... it's one thing being racist...
you know... detailing the physiognomy
differences between blacks and whites...
choccies and porky pies...
and the cinnamon people in between...
that's one thing...
it's like everyone was asleep...
the whites were racist...
the only people... ever...
but that's one thing...
   i find it harder to digest...
there's no name for it...
  kosher-ism... halal-ism?
         to be... more racist than racist...
almost a vegan / vegetarian taming...
   someone is being critical... of what you eat...
i imagine... malcom x being given a free
pass as a black totem in mecca...
shot dead... when converted... because...
still shuffled pork on the sly...

beside skin deep: please leavde your leather
shoes and belts... lace
beside the concept / concern for the mosque...
racism: morphed into an ideological
manifest...
for a while... let us leave thse
turban and tent dwelling folk
with their newly acquired riches
to the ***** of:
if i am to prepare lamb meat...
i treat it liky chilly...
the meat... stinks of something beside...
death... innocence prescribed...

           you are told... wrong...
when ingesting the fruit of eden... somewhat...
these nomads of quasi-sikh turbans
for the women: the niqab girdle-grooms...
their wetted-appetites:
unable to satiate gyrocentrism leftovers...
and... pass from the living...
toward the theatre of the would be alive...
less the circumcised mess: misantrophes...

it's one thing to be chockie...
another to be porky-pink'ish...
     but what you eat?
that's... somehow... off-putting?
    puritan with some crab-meat
in this numbed jaw?
no one the persians rebelled against
the camel-jockey prescription of:
words only... no images...
pasta squiggles of phonetic encoding...
arabic... tironian a posteriori notations...
then again: one could argue:
tironian a priori notations...

shrimp-**** and eyes that would
resemble... at best... squinting from too much
sun... and at worst... ******* on a lemon...
12" of **** and the twelve-pounder
juicing worth of ***...
her ***...
                for me to comment
on the mongol horde esque libido of
the fellow woman of my race...
no... the islamic idea of a heavenly harem...
mind you: it would satisfy her:
if she was to be crowned the juggling act
of three: at least one to compete with
the da vinci sodomites...

to be told you can't eat something...
i'm already a bad joke as:
"bweetish" as it comes...
tucked away with the afro-saxon...
the anglo-slav...
                 you just have those lips
that look like full-bloom best:
imitation: floral patterns of a ******...
best equipped for *******...
i swim: you sink...
you run... i start an arithmetic of catching
my breath...
the cinnamon people are...
if they are equipped with a polytheism
of the raj... and are saved with
culinary ambitions...
"we'd" call them the blue indians...
and that's also: to mind...
their elder: sanskrit...
              पअरउत
र - or how the englishman lost the trill:
rattle-snake R: for rolling...
when he... became: the nuanced... keeper...
vanguard... of the Raj...
perhaps... the anthropomorphic genesis
in africa: givenz zee apulus... apex: gorrilolulz...
but... the sribbles and *******?
india the basin... akapit: paragraph:
the tear of sri lanka...

i.e. so much for me succumbing to the anglican:
we'z all wo'z allz: ex afri-ka'ka'kazia...

oh sure... sure... we... the sensible:
secular post-christians of the protestant wealth
of the west...
happy to afford the dumbed-down
congregations of the newly conscripted...
believers of africa and south h'america...
carrot dangling: run donkey! run!
one of your own: a pope! a cardinal!
poland is still running on that...
remark of... the passing of power...
the first pope to be given status of... saint...
john paul II the saint of:
kissing airport tarmac...

             and then of course...
the hyped intricacy of the orthodox branch
of the bureau of hierogylphics and
synonymous litanies...
          the events of the baltic sea:
would never be...
the sort of ****-show...
that... the events of the mediterranean sea...
hell... the events of the black sea...
christianity isn't merely dumb...
it's just... over-hyped...
               the pork the pork... the pork!
who would require...
a criticism of pork and pig and ms. porky
to suit... alliance...
no matter... i'm on the cusp of quitting
smoking...

we can caricature our physiognomy...
but... how do you... caricature...
what you eat... your... sustenance?
you, black... have a pillow for a nose...
me, white... have a death's lack of...
           i don't have a nose...
i have... a death's clench sucker...
       i have a pinch nose...
        so much for over-inflated lips...
and... my missing... elongated...
myth elves: the protruding ears...
like: no body...

                 current / the currency of
the now h'america... and the immediacy
of nostalgia: as a history: moving forward /
anywhere but back...
nietzsche opened up a nostalgia for ancient
greece...
  h'americans... opening up... a nostalgia...
for 1950s h'america...
how can you write a future history...
from a stand-point / stand-off...
of nostalgia...
this... immediacy of nostalgia...
who's who and who isn't citing...
a richard brautigan... or... a frank o'hara?!
because: there's the sucker and no punch
for the next verse of...
****'s sake... walt whitman?!
o captain! my... john keating...
                 no... it's not about glorifying
the original intent... mr. president...
the english teacher...
mr.! thomas! bunce!

               how can any history be written...
when there's... a nostalgia: impediment...
the hsitory of an immediacy
lacklutered by a past...
the past: however framed...
before... the dead are allowed to
turn and grovel in their graves...
i have 'ere... my gobble-whick of...
pretending: no shadows will
ever exist... at noon...
scrathing... timidy bed-fellows...
loitering squat...

we are to grovel for the cousin
imps and apes of: first born:
english born... navajo...
     tortilla...
the old fling of england...
and the spanish...
             the conquistadors...
loose nouns dog **** flinging applause:
i fall asleep in a bed:
i welcome the new day...
most... egregious (archaic)...

  these western lands...
mmm... they're not very much akin
to our flavour...
that they dictate... refurbishment...
unless it's para-english...
alter- proto- welsh...
  kashubian... masovian...
silesian...
                    kres...
             ­       
ei hhynnal coch.. and it:
pronouns neutral: does... ****-wit...
gender-fluid-retardo: perfecto...

and i too wish i had...
themes of crusader songs...
but... i have none...
these that i marked...
teutonic knights of no order...
       barbarossa being pickled...
livonians... prussians...
lithuanians...
                    i'm sorry...
that i'm too far away from
you to return to europe
from your: hubris...
             in crafting... the...
                conscripts: shikhs...
ask the russians! ask the rush-******-whips!
agony of a tongue: beside their own!
the post-colonial powers
return!
the post-colonial powers! make a return!
so much for those of us...
not having... a colonial past!
are we to pay for... such...
benevolent gracing
of gratitude from the people
"made"... under... colonial... rule?!
from the perspective of the strong...
why... am i... expected to treat
these care-bears with...
the right: equipped
manchester shovel?

          you spike my drink
or am i... to... simply...
take the right, godly ****...
into all the urns...
the rest of you are to drink from?

i see my forehead glee: akin to my elbow...
and i call that phenomenon:
something benevolent of *****....
yep... not s'unni... but... shyte...
****.. persian: rebellion of camel-jockey...
****'ite... macron i...
dot's the worthy due: guillotine...
echo of the baltic sea...
we somehow: managed...
to lessen the romance...
unlike the english...
the romans conquered:
romanced the ******...
the vikings conquered...
romanced the ******...
the mongols never made it...
nor the huns..
so much for "brexit":
with your lineage of currency...
and your status as an island...

glory! vistory! ******* and all!
because: best felt!
in... places... akin to... devon!
a londoner will abhor someone...
with origins in the vicinity of bristol...
like... because...
there's no other?

n'ah... this night is pretty much worth
all the other nights...
it's worth sleeping...
it's not worth... whatever: leftover...
"worth" of...
this... this "apparent"...
yep... leftover... be...
something for the worth of yale
h'american... or...
dignitary president...
              officiated cul de sac executive orders...
it's... such an anglo-saxon fetish for...
*** beside the boudoir...
    dodo, lilac... gimp... latex...
      dickens...
                  liberty at:
i feign to allow myself to have... lapsed...
in what? good question...
even i... do not... attempt to baron
myself: over.

this is truly a welcome break from:
freeing all the drafts -
which i imagined to be equivalent, or rather:
the 2nd parallel of the original adjecent -

i imagined it would feel like:
releasing doves with laurel branches firmly
lodged in their beaks -
just as the waters of the flood would recede...

but it truly felt like:
the inversion of the diarrhoea-constipation
"paradox"... because it felt like both,
but never giving me a clue as to
what was more prominent -

the sharp edge of a knife -
or the horizon when the sky becomes
the sea far away....

i'm not ashamed to throw this onto the fore...
it happened to me once...
but on purpose...
i wanted to compensate marquis de sade's
antic in a brothel when he implored
the ******* to turn the crucifix into
a ***** into his decapitated precursor
of a mary antoinette... puppet...

profanity in images and all the other seances
of the senses...
i wouldn't go as far as to make the crucifix
profane... or do anything profane
with it...

only the words...
hic (est) mea corpus - hic (est) mea cruor...
this is my body - this is my blood...
and i am aware the mead is the gods' ****
when they're in a good mood - all... jolly...
and that beer is the gods' **** when
laughter hits a dry run...
and that ms. amber or whiskey is but:
the blood of the gods...

i had to corrupt it...
to prove to myself: that i am not a god...
it was quiet simple...
once upon a time i was drinking
a glass of wine...
and as you do... on a whim...
i decided to **** into it...
perhaps all that drinking prior would
give me something to elevate the palette
of exploration that was to come...

hmm... at least that sorts out
hic: mea cruor... *** urinae...
but back then i did that on purpose...
and if only this was a desert scenario...
and i would have to drink my own *****
to survive...
well... i just thought: here's to starving
from a lack of better imagery...

i will come unto some Horace in a minute...
i don't know how i managed to find
this citation - it's only very losely related...
and yes i will showcase another draft from
May of last year...

but today i was unsure...
did i leave yesterday's pepsi max bottle
with only the stale pepsi left...
or did i forget to do the lazy sly wee whizz
jumping out of bed in the middle of
the night...
but i already poured this "cocktail"
over two shots of whiskey...
and i'm hardly desperate but...
my original intention of alligning myself
to the profanity of the crucifix...
i had to somehow make profanity
of the wine...

since i am... thinking how to compensate
being satisfied with wine...
how the ancient world was always
satisfied with wine...
the story of the 3 ambers of the north...
the beer, the mead and the whiskey...
all in a varying degree...
but i will not bow before the blood of a god
that's so... diluted...
whiskey yes... that can be blood indeed...
otherwise it's down in the trench
with gods' **** - mead if they are in a good
mood... beer if they are in a talkative mood...

thank god i wasn't thinking:
better salvage those two shots of whiskey
and drink this cocktail of the "ultimate" surprise...
and apparently eating a woman's
placenta is good for you...
as was... apparently once... breastmilk...
funny... give me the milk of a cow or a goat
and i'll show you: one dislocated thumb...
one dislocated distal + intermediate phalange
from the index finger of the right hand's
proximal phalange... no broken bones...

knock-knock... who's there? touchwood superstition.

it's not as bad as it sounds...
stale, yes...
but i am also known for sometimes
performing the antithesis of drinking tequilla...
*****... i'll sprinkle some cigarette ash
onto my hand... lick it... take a shot of *****
then throw one or two black peppercorns into
my mouth for the crunch...
each drinker and his own myths... right?
i call that the black cracovite...
cracow being so close to aushwitz...
and once it snowed and they thought it was
snowing... sure... ash from the furnaces
of aushwitz... here's my ode to... the dead...
in a drink...

hell better a cracovite than a cracowite, white?
i mean: right? seriously: low hanging fruit,
the elephant's testicles...

i will never understand this whole veneration
of wine: in vino veritas...
these days wine is better drank by women
and castrated monarchs of the clergy...
i had to check... so i ****** in my holy grail...
and guess what didn't come out
the other end? gods' **** (beer and wine)
or gods' blood (whiskey and wine)...
just this stale, almost bland...
water with a pinch of grape that has been
left to sit in a puddle on some
industrial estate in dagenham enjoying
the ripe downpouring of chemicals
that leave it with a rainbow of diluted
petroleum...

akin to: try shoving that sort of doughnut
into this kind of pile of ****...
not that i would...
but i have also been prone to test
99.9% spirits... or 96% absinthe...
with a locust mummified in the bottle's neck...
from Amsterdam...

i had to rethink: why become engaged...
when chances are...
to the displeasure of someone who read:
but never bought my work...
the self-editorial process...
the self-publishing process could be...
guillotined on a whimsical constipation
of a "dear reader"...
as it might happen...

again... Horace and the perfect example
of poetry with conversational overtones...
poetry as prosaic...
my god... paper was expensive back in old
Horace's days... surely you would need
something spectacular to write:
like a psilocybin trip account word for word:
wrong!
a certain don juan said to a certain
carlos castaneda: don't bring back words from
such experiences...
but of course: they did...
upon once upon a time loving the beatniks...
i started to abhor them...
getting drunk and smoking "something"
is one thing... exposing the altars of solipsism
of such experiences: words intact...
is a profanity...
each dream is individually curated
to the dreamer... the introduction of words
to relate back... for some next be disciple...
the "drugs" / portals of escapism are already
contaminated...

why wouldn't i: even if these are only
objective recounts of an experience?
perhaps because... they are subjectivelly null...
there are only the comparable heights of Gideon...
such experiences are best: kept to each individual's
right to enjoy... a freedom of thought...
and of silence...
each keeps a secret...
but what secret is left?
when the objective parameters have already
been stated?
i see no point... better down and finding
it at the end of a bottle...
or... ******* into a glass of wine
and drinking it...

they have been contaminated by words that
have been retrieved from such experiences
that (a) no one should talk about...
(b) surprise! the objective reality already
being stated as altered...
am i going to a ******* cinema with my body...
or am i going to a surprise
gallery with my thought?
doesn't matter... word contamination...
bigmouth struck his final last time!
at least the remains is what gives me
the labyrinth... the blood the **** you name
it the three sisters amber... for all i care...
it's readily available: make do...
with what's already been given.

me? i drink for that very special date...
monday 9 march 2020...
when all the orthodox jews get drunk...
that's one of those celebrations i wouldn't mind
being a part of... purim, festival of Lots,
funny... that period of history...
the Persian aspect of the hebrews...
never made it to the big screen...
seeing modern day Iran as day-old Persia
in muslim garbs...
we're still only seeing the: African adventure...
perhaps once the dust has settled...
we will get the Persian installement...
and then... oh... **** it...
we're all in it for the long run...
then when christianity is no longer useful...
the Roman bit of history...
and how the hebrews conspired with the greeks...
2000 years later we'll probably see
some prince of egypt cartoon movie
of the pristine romance and a mention of germany...
not yet... ****'s still to ripe to entertain
the universal child and children...
no screen adaptation from "their" time in Persia...
songs... we have songs!
Verdi's Nabucco - the chorus...
perhaps only in song from Persia and always
with movies and hieroglyphs when from Egypt...

but the festivity... of course! i'll celebrate...
cf. though... Puccini's coro a bocca chiusa -
the humming chorus...
before the band enigma... i am pretty sure my mother
would crank up the volume to at least
one of these songs... should they come on the radio...
i'm still to hear christopher young's:
something to think about - to be on air...
and to also be treated as a piece of classical music...
if wojciech kilar's dracula soundtrack can be treated
as classical music... what's wrong with a little
bit of hellraiser?!

perhaps, "again" is this desecration of the sacred not,
simply hanging in the background,
all, the, ******, time?
who is to celebrate wine giving it a god's blood
status in sips? one is expected to somehow become
drunk on the passion!
no one is here for crumbs of sips!
first they came for the loaf of bread...
and said you should fast and eat only a crumb...
then they came for the bottle of wine...
and said you should abstain and drink only a sip...
then they came for *** and by then
vatican was a monaco with better tax protections...

it's an investement: having to **** into a glass
of wine you're about to drink...
worse... you accidently "forgot" about
******* into some left-over pepsi max
and you're making yourself a cocktail
with one of the graeae ambers - 2x -
and you wonder: is this the proper state
of carbonated water, stale?
but i'm hardly going to bash the crucifix...
i'm here for the words...

the... transfiguration of the wine into blood...
and i say of my gods:
and here is their **** - beer and mead...
and here's their blood: the three graeae ms. ambers...
see no: clearer? no... happier?

i will get onto ancient roman poetics
with its conversational overtones in a minute!
first we have to settle the sacraments!
the metaphors and the sacraments!
i have no ivar the boneless claim of god...
season 6? to be honest...
i'd rather watch an english soap opera...
at least the intricacy of the plot remains...
even though it has been recycled
so many times...

i can't **** out the gods' ***** even if it was
stale beer... or ideal mead...
as i can't leisure a Seneca's bath filled
with the blood of the immortals...
problem solved... "problem":
as if it ever was...

why, Horace? a very short rhetorical retort:
if Dante had his Virgil...
why can i have my Horace, as guide?
again... what Roman poet could venture for
ambitions among the myths -
or extend his "consciousness"
to devastate the land and become
the mad Xerxes wanting the waves
of a sea whipped into submission?
why, Horace? if Dante could have his Virgil...

poetry... at least among the roman poets
there's no boxed in a box "without" a "box"...
the conversational overtones are ripe...
the almost complete lack of
character dimensions... beside their dimensions
from anecdotes...

to difuse wine, to desecrate the hic mea cruor...
**** in it!
then drink it...
or have one of my antithesis of a tequilla surprise
with me...
smoke a cigarette... drop some ash on the lick-part
of the space between the thumb
and the index metacarpal... lick it...
follow it with a shot of *****...
then throw some black peppercorns
into the hades of your gob
and we've arrived at the black cracovite...

and also the day when the orthodox jews
recant their story of their time
in Persia... the festivity of Lots...
when they become blind drunk and pretend to
have the sort of alcohol intolerence as
the Japanese... 1 shot! just 1 shot:
and hey! they throw their kippahs in
the air and we can all dance the ukranian 'opak!

looks good to me!
but only looks good...
when there's this plump drunk playing the accordion:
i.e. me,
and there's the sort of adrew rieu directing
an upcoming crescendo of a poliushko polie...
and we can all leave the auditorium
feeling, less than russophobic...
and then i can be told...
you young to be old yet still
profane pan-siberian peasant root!
indo-european leftover!
well... at least then i have been allowed
the scrap i'm supposed to see
before i showcase my *****, frost riddled fangs!
of the lesser wolf that i am:
as a rabid dog!

since the crescendo will come...
what better fathom of it...
esp. just beside a cemetery... twirling to the music...
ear-plugs out seancing my time in a grand
orchestral hall... plucked from the ears...
the crescendo is coming...
but... plucked... the orchestra of buffalo-sized
snowflakes... and... the worst kind of ballet...
a male soloist... doing his crazy
ukranian folk... maestro! the music never ever
dies! even in the silence of the universe!
however micro- or macro- this theatre will take
form... the music remains playing: uninterrupted!

but the snow was there,
the "ballerina" was also there...
the night was there,
the music was there -
albeit no grand orchestral hall -
couldn't ask for a better canvas
than a cemetery -
and all the heart's content!
comparative "literature"
to love like a muslim...
or to love like a sparrow...
or to love with a grudge like a crow...
mind you; site note...
i have been many a pigeons attempt
fornication unabashed...
i've never seen two crows attempt it...
perhaps they do "it" in the night
and never in the open?

crows... pedantic priests of the kingdom...
and where the widower king
and the widow queen among the swans?
where i and you will have probably left them...
admiring a family of ducks...

as asked by the serpent of the swan...
you and me of the same birth in a Fabergé egg...
me with serpentine spine...
while you: with a crooked neck?
silly... it really is...
of a being.... that was once
a t-rex roar... now a pickled brain
in pickle jar... boasting about being...
pure spine and tingles and...
the better part of what... becomes the mammalian
hibernation...
hibernating "hibernating" upon the
impetus of digestion...
a serpent would ask a swan about
a crooked neck?

because what would a **** sapeins look toward,
as he is always prone to to look elsewhere?
if not to borrow the fixed, rigid ontology
of other animals?
i better from the birds, solely...
the swans and the crows...
perhaps the fox...
rarely something that has lent itself
to being curated by man's leash and grip...
collective the known herd...
otherwise the refined bonsai tigers...
perhaps the fish without a knowledge
of a tide or a wave...

i call a dog the noble friend,
the swan the sombre monogamist...
the crow the priest...
the furry spider one's own reflection
dealing with aracnophobia...
the snake the old "say-what?"
or that pickled spine with a brain
the worth of brine juices...
the extinguished remnant
of a dinosaur's toothache... or some
transcendental exploration
of the carpals of the wrist
extending into the length of a spine...

i'm not going to cry over this one...
skål!
i feel disinhibited from writing a memorandum!
slàinte!
gasoline to the peddle and... off... we, go!

i am bound to get this translaton right...
at some point of hinging-on... i.e. beginning with...
and most probably at the opposite end
of having to finish...
hence "open bracket"... prefix-
and -suffix allowance given the archeological
excavation began with:

-seu pila velox molliter austerum studio
fallente laborem, seu te discus agit, pete cedentem
aera disco: *** labor extuderit fastidia, siccus,
inanis sperne cibum vilem; nisi Hymettia mella
Falerno ne biberis diluta. foris est promus,
et atrum defendens piscis hiemat mare: *** sale
panis latrantem stomachum bene leniet. unde putas
aut qui partum? non in caro nidore voluptas summa,
sed in te ipso est. tu pulmentaria quaere
sudando: pinguem vitiis albumque neque ostrea
nec scarus aut poterit peregrina iuvare lagois.
vix tamen eripiam, posito pavone velis quin
hoc potius quam gallina tergere palatum,
corruptus vanis rerum, quia veneat auro
rara avis et picta pandat spectcula cauda:
tamquam ad rem attineat quidquam.
num vesceris ista, quam laudas, pluma?
cocto num adest honor idem?
carne tamen quamvis distat nil, hac magis illam
inparibus formis deceptum te petere esto:
unde datum sentis, lupus hic Tiberinus
an alto captus hiet? pontisne inter iactatus
an amnis ostia sub Tusci?
laudas, insane, trilibrem mullum,
in singula quem minuas pulmenta necesse est.
ducit te species, video: quo pertinet ergo proceros
odisse lupos? quia scilicet illis maiorem natura modum
dedit, his breve pondus: ieiunus raro stomachus volgaria
-temnit.

it's translated, isn't it? no
stefan gołębiewski or no 1980 warsaw...
is to know...

- nec meus hic sermo est, sed quae praecepit Ofellus:
these are not my words, this said the simpleton
Ofellus - neither of which of us is a laurel-leaf
adorned Orpheus...

that via a living "game": stoking up an appetite
with this entertainment the appetite increaes...
as does one health...

sorry... pagans... bloodthirty people...
trouble with the translation...
apparently the mud slinging
***** and bricks are nothing new...

or when you "minus" the disk,
litter the distance, head with the wind into
competition!
after hardships of the body is good and
the meal is simple -
(apparently all of this is still "connected",
scratch of the ol' 'ed and we're fine...
we're ******* sailing!)
Falern will not hurt "us"...
seasoned by honey from Hymettis,
before the entré. Safaz left,
the sea rumbles, the zephyr of fish it protects,
storm, fishing made unsafe;
stomach grumbles, bread with salt:
excuisite; you do not have any better! why?
taste does not reside in the scent of dishes,
but in your self alone.
toil merely increases appetite's presence.
he who over-eats, will not know the taste
of an oyster, nor a turbot, nor chickpeas,
the northern bird.
perceptions take the scalp of the mountain
above the actual taste of the dishes
(one might scalp... but never eat the scalp)...
you will not take a chicken onto a tooth,
when you are given a peacock,
you will trust your delusion:
a rare bird, worth its own weight of gold,
a most rarified tail, how it sparkles
with subtle hues!
as if the tail were to lead -
and there was no head to be found!
do you allow yourself to judge the hue
of the feathers as precursor for the adjecctive:
that's it's "also" tasty? the meat, of course?
the old - judge a book by its cover...
is the oven baked... also as delicious / beautiful?
chicken meat... or peacock meat?
almost without difference.
therefore: light... albeit...
although only vanity lures the peacock
(to be compared to a poultry)...
let's go further... i want to know: after what
do you recognise this, that a pike
with its gaping mouth was left:
from the sea... or from the Tiber fished?
somewhere among bridges... or from some
conrete estuary? idiot-kin of the surname whim...
you admire a three-pound mullet!
do you take size... for the gauge of all measure?
when you... cut the bell?
then why... why... with disgrace
do you demand in appreciation:
elongating pikes!
evidently nature: this greater gave the proper
measure... and with it: the lesser weight -
an empty stomach will rarely -
being fed a simple thing - despise -
what is...

an empty stomach - rarely despises -
simple matters.

how true... i was allowing myself the time
it would take to drink,
and translate into the vulgate...
but... from no better source...
and i am still to add to this one of my...
"freeing of the drafts"...

as promised...
"draft"...

- a most confiscated man -
no italics included...

.the original draft:

binges, worth the count
of a liter of whiskey
per night,
for a year, if not more...
become so...
so unspectular...

          the world either
screams, or yawns,
generally:
it exhaust a desire
to toss a coin,
agitate the vocab.,

a grand canyon
huddling
in the "depths" of
a glass of water...

baron science
comes with his rubric
of bore,
      and:
i find myself,
most idle:
while the world
orientates
itself in keeping
itself busy,
bothersome,
always the prime concern,

the ant-colony coup,
the:
i always find friends
in the orientations
of an empty glass,
but prior to:

i drink
before no altar,
no mirror,
no confidante...

     pure flesh revels itself
in a blank's worth
of prior to dictum's
  allowance of, a page...

bothersome
the knot of the pretentious
anti- in scold of
the passing fancy:
expression...

            poker charm
of a love's affair...

_

i sometimes entertain myself
with ancients proverbs,
one slavic proverb reads:
better a sparrow in your hand
than a dove on your roof...

what, could, possibly be,
the interpretation?
care for the small joys in
your possession,
than, for the peace of your household,
which is, on the roof,
but not in your hands...

if i were paid? would i be more
honest?
probably not...
        what i see, is what needs
to be seen...
  em... simple pleasures talk...
once upon a time,
donning long hair, implied
you were a mosher...
a metal-head...
    now? three days +,
long hair, and you're not a
grunge fanatic?
  trans-, etc.?

   a man of simple pleasures,
i know what long hair,
jealousy, associated with
putting it in a french braid,
does to a camel jockey ego...
ruins and ruins as far as the eyes
can see...
    he replicates...
he grows his hair long...
at the same time boasting about
haivng a premature beard...
then you grow a beard yourself...
you start fiddling with it...
****, ***** on my face...
and then...
the "question" of a girlfriend
flies out of the window...
i'm happy with a beard,
thank you, very much,
i don't, exactly want to wish upon
myself, a female, company...

*** protest all you want...
the *** differences between men
and women, to my sort of understanding,
are, unrepairable...
     they were, never,
bound, to being, repaired...
savvy?
            i take my route,
a woman took her route...
  we're even...
                
      since what can only frighten a freed
woman, beside a monarch,
a free man?
                   a man with...
a gamble...
         i am a man with a gamble...
i don't like being told what
to be, or what to think...
like any man,
and like any man:
i don't like being forced
ownership over a being:
that can share my sense of freedom...
so...
    i find myself,
thrilled with relief,
at now having to answer to
a woman's subjugation...
like a woman, and, i have learned
from women: i like being
my objective's self...
rather than a "self" made subject...

i like that: thank you...
i can start feedings the pigs and the peasant
the diatribe life, and lie,
of: there being an existential cricis,
a need to reproduce...
and i, and i am, being demeaning
in this, way, for a justified reason...

once the peasants attack you:
you attack, the peasants...
you demean them in the same way
they demeaned you...

once upon a time i thought:
greater good came from the number
of innocents being salvaged
than for the few great of grand bearing
being salvaged...
even if bound to an ill will:
an ill command,
of a will, predisposed to pretend
actions of the blind...
but now i see...

   the many: if beside fulfilling
their petty deeds,
having to stand outside of those,
petty deeds,
  have ambitions equivalent
to their emotions...
            akin to something worth,
pity, akin to something
worth: as little as a rat's heartbeat...
petty, primitive bull-*******...
and all the amount of sorrow,
or pity,
or mercy...
              that, these, ******* allow...
are worth the same response
Pontius Pilate gave...
       there isn't enough of water,
in this world,
to wash my hands, clean,
of these people...
   even if innocent blood plagues
them,
    not enough waters have run their
due course,
to... release me from the indentation
of memory upon my mind...
and i am plagued by an elephant's
memory...
        we've reached the conclusion
of: some people...
  just do not see an insult,
             past the insult's eloquence!

i am a most conflicted man,
i binge watched vikings
for a while now,
and right now, i'm ready for
an extraction of what i have learned...

believe me: i am not someone
who has the sort of ego-presence
to fate myself in the role
of the protagonist...
     i'm too pedantic to have to
market my body and deeds,
for the fates tio see,
and history to ascribe fame unto me...

even homer was off too war
with troy,
   and blessed he became...

because? time morphs,
the longer something is kept,
the more, "unreal" is becomes,
a fairy-tale...
esp. now, with the onslaught
of journalism...
two things in this world
are insomniac,
money never sleeps,
and, now, apparently,
journalism doesn't sleep either:
well, given its ******
bed-fellow of political liars...
why should it?

             Rolo... a semi-minor character...
but i feel his angst at the already
fervent dichotomy,
(dichotomy, modern variety variant
of schizoid-affective...
or bilingual in turn)...

            music...
                    all these modły...
gesticulations of prayer,
phantom conjuring,
               lunatics with candles
at high-noon...
                  i am fated by music,
i am perverted by music,
i am swayed by music...
who is the god, patron,
of music?
who is the angel (demi-god),
patron of music?
         i do not seek the highest
influencer...
the minor one...

   when Archangel Sandalphon
met St. Cecilia...
but as such, i am, conflicted...
even though, this is the first time
i have heard of Sandalphon...

Rome, never reached my peoples,
the Vikings did...
   weren't the ugly vikings the founders
of Kiev?
  so they must have passed via
the Polen (field) land, no?

feelings are not important,
facts don't care about your feelings...
granted...
but i'm not hear for facts,
contra, feelings,
i'm here for the rivers...
what i feel, what my heart yearns for,
needs to attain an equilibrium
with my mind...
for that: i need to clarify my feelings,
to hush my heart, silence it,
in order to listen to my mind,
and the mind, needs to feed into
heaving the heart: to do,
what, the heart, desires,
autonomous to what the heart
"thinks", is right...
                    that's how it was forver
going to work...
consolidated...
and yes, i much envy the punctuation
of king Ecgberht,
a man of cunning: much admired...
abstract thinker...
        and a reality...
        pun-ctu-a-tion...
the delivery of one's speech...
   much admired, as much as...
                the crude brawl possession...
the chief protagonist of the story?
as important as is: the required from
Atlas... burden upon burden...
a man burdened with the illusion
of freedom...

so why am i conflicted,
but becoming less and less so?
    it was always the music...

songs...

           chavelier, mult estes guariz...
wardruna - helvegen...
           da pacem domine...
             agni parthene...

you know... there's much more beside
being a jazz enthusiast or
a classical music snob...
         there's folk... there's religious and pagan
chants...
if there's one thing to benefit from,
in terms of the Byzantine context...
the chants...
        let the barbarians do the thinking
from now on: you do the sing-along...
no people ever reinvented themselves
from an ancient glory...
   new blood had to come to the fore...

like today...
       i spoke with my father and my mother...
about the names of apples...
we must have talked for an hour,
we named so many lost "breeds" of apple...
nouns i will not write,
nouns i wish death to write down,
i want Samael to have,
beside the book of my deeds in hand,
i want him to have
my dictionary in hand,
my knowledge of the sacred script,
i want to listen as he recites me the words
i've used,
notably today's conversation
            about the many types of apples...
e.g.: shogun apples...
             kox...
                    szare renety...
          papierówki...
                    marabella prunes...
that's all i ask of Samil.

Ragnar Lothbrok world became half shook, throw a hook, stole and took, solid gold, sacrifice for Oden sacrificing for all your homes, Bjorn, Ivar the Boneless coming like a storm, wakeup and absorb, praying to the gods, going to conquer lands, watch out for Floki he killed Athelstan

I will re-visit
The modern picts,
The viking border people
Comparing *******
And slapping bellies
While giving dheagh shlainte.
They've plundered their last village;
It's been a while since they protected the walls
While sleep sets in.
They raid the pubs,
Raise a glass shield,
Weild a shot glass
Singing shlainte,
The dragon ships have sailed.

why did i ever go out on a friday night?
drinks with "friends" and hitting the essex
club "scene" -
well - no much of a scene -
there was never the music you'd want to listen
to: come friday or saturday -
even mid-week when all the rock kids
were "hanging out" -
what would be chances of being your own d.j. -
catching something really new...
POIZON - church is poizon -
cool mom - something between a crossbreed
of cage the elephants and nirvana on blew -
3rd view - moi -
but i used to: and i remember that gehenna of
a sobering walk - alone after a night out -
like some furious son of sam -
when youth still had the adrenaline with it
and a sense of anger ******* around with
disillusionment -

those were the friday nights: bon jovi highlights
and long hair and milking a somewhat androgynous
look - sometimes the mascara would come out...
those were the days of having milk skin
and a proper shave -
the long hair and the waistcoast and cravat: semi-,

the lonesome story before i met my beard:
fwyday mordaithceirch -
i actually have a name for it...
i forgot what's already the designated
whittle pecker mr. pritchard of the down down:
below...

oh, oh so what...
rough friday nights in my youth -
on the clubbing "scene" -
and always that moral hangover when it came
to drinking with others -
ever since i started drinking by myself:
i forgot the mirror and that bucket
of warm water beside my bed to put my hand
in before going to sleep...
once or twice the company was worth the drink -
but most of the time you only kept
such company: because you were drinking -
drinking was never an afterthought -

now... i like drinking alone -
at least i can keep fact-checking the company
and the odd vocab peacock taking to the catwalk
of a ruminating free-fall tongue waggle
and rummage - the needle in the haystack
adventure - or... the ******* bucket
of deshelled oysters...

there have been some awful friday nights -
but: seeing how i started to give my beard
a welsh name borrowed from a willem dafoe
novel - and how it simply became pointless
to wake the dead with the angry tantrums
of youth: and how i seem to have
forgotten where my 20s "went" -
somehow rooted in: da-sein and how
i "wasted" 2 years on one book by kant -
2 years on one book by heidegger -
and: how i didn't have the time to "catch-up"
on the greek classics -

oh these island dwelling people -
i try to imagine them not being a seafaring:
and their messiah / superiority complex -
with their breakfast that could hardly
be digested come the hour of noon -
or no messiah / superiority complex -
the traffic: indeed - works like clockword...
from left to right...
sidenote: what of fahrenheit and
the feet and inches - stones and pounds?
ounces?
the metric of: baseline 0 here,
baseline 00 over there...

no... Michele Campanella piano solo take
on wagner's das rheingelt: entry of the gods into
valhalla - it's hardly anemic -
it's... the last leaf of autumn falling -
because the crescendo has already happened...
a befitting closure...

the superior island folk and their...
hyphens and germanic loan words -
how almost all names in chemistry are still
in their germanic: intact form of: no hyphen:
broken leg or broken arm...

woodwinds... perhaps... the violins providing
the humming of birds:
chirp chirp: no chirping -
and of course the horn - but the horns never
as prominent as those drank from...

something has happened today -
but i am... left without having any english
sensibility / egalitarianism -
somehow i always equate egalitarianism with
the english - the islanders -
a firework went off in the background -
mr. sloth awoke mrs. slouch after 3 years
for a firecracker celebration...

because who would want to be ruled
over by unelected: chocolatiers...
esp. after their trial run in the Congo -
but i have certainly had worse friday nights...

it can't exactly get much worse than...
say... listening to the siegfried idyll...
multitasking: drinking a cider, smoking a cigarette,
balancing act of folded leg sat on
perched on a windowsill solving a no. 11,289
sudoku from the 27th jan. 2020...
otherwise prior to:
imagine my disbelief at the pleasure -

with numbers to somehow escape thinking in words:
no grand arithmetic linear gymnastics -
of the end result -
certainly no logical statements -
just a whirlwind of numbers complimenting
these few words...
and what a fine friday night it has become:

the pizza was made - god save me from the perfume
of yeast... or checking on the rising dough
from time to time -
the leftover yeast gave me the opportunity
to bake an imitation sourdough crust pretty-as-a-picture
loaf that: would make any mushroom blush
and shy away from unfolding into an umbrella pose...
or a Y... curling outward-inward into an upsilon Υ...

because how could i forget the pleasure of
sifting through numbers?
by the time i attempted puzzle no. 11,290
i had to write a "map"

           a             b             c
      x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x  
1)   x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x
      x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x
      x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x
2)   x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x
      x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x
      x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x
3)   x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x
      x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x

come to think of it... where's a subscript?
if i'm going to use 1, 2, 3...
to tier the allocation of squares...
tennis and sudoku...
tennis: a game of 7 rectangles -
and how many judges and ball boys / girls?
sudoku - a puzzle of 10 squares - perhaps...
if i'll use tiers 1, 2, 3: a1, b2, c3...
what if... sudoku invoked letters rather than
numbers?

much later... oh believe me...
this is the antithesis of knausgård
writing about using googlemaps...
        
           a             b             c
      x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x  
1)   x   x   x   3   x   x   6   x   4
      x   x   x   2   x   4   x   8   9
      x   1   9   x   4   x   x   6   2
2)   x   x   x   7   x   x   x   5   x
      x   x   2   x   x   8   x   4   x
      x   2   x   x   x   x   x   x   x
3)   x   x   6   1   9   5   x   x   3
      x   3   8   4   x   x   x   7   x

it's still a schematic - the narrative is yet
to begin... otherwise...
there's nothing smart about this...
i have tired eyes sometimes:
i succumb and have to allow myself
to no acid-bath these eyes in words...

esp. since i speak so rarely -
imagine... in england and i spear
the bare minimum of english -
i can: i have to: i will - when being prompted -
but i can't remember the last time
i had an honest: informal exchange
of letters... lapped up by the glutton
tongue... i looked and looked
and with my silence i can attest:
there's a speech-impediment -
a stutter that's not born from nervousness...
but... an allusion to a "stoic" through
my lack of conversation...

at least on paper i can exfoliate -
enough cider and enoug whiskey and i'm all
sparrow McDermott!
ugh... the devolved scots and the likewise
welsh... devolved nations...
only this aspect of Brexit is... well...
imagine the "evolved" status of post-Yugoslavia...
Kosovo...
this is the only aspect of an otherwise:
fair enough that's... well...
if you lived for 3 years among the scots...
you'd get to appreciate them...
this is the only aspect of this whole affair
i will ever appreciate...
i would pour blood and **** into
the Welsh continuing their...
preservation of the iaith...
forever and the more - i would love to see
scotland start to dig trenches and
forget trainspotting gaelic -
parading like ponces and humpty dumpteys
with "harkccents"... glasgewian bull-runnings...
cousins aye and wee -

a thing of beauty: a thing of union...
but this... they were bullied in brussels...
they came back and started to bully the scots...
if you have lived -
the betas of cardiff - but they tongue: remains!
look far back and wales would encompass
cornwall -
ignorant i of a 26 year "servitude" on these isles...
quiz me on outside of London:
no point...
perhaps i too would wish for the lost
theta in Dublin - towing: to t'ink...
as any sanskrit H-surd does matter...

           a             b             c
      x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x  
1)   x   x   x   3   x   x   6   x   4
      x   x   x   2   x   4   x   8   9
      x   1   9   x   4   x   x   6   2
2)   x   x   x   7   x   x   x   5   x
      x   x   2   x   x   8   x   4   x
      x   2   x   x   x   x   x   x   x
3)   x   x   6   1   9   5   x   x   3
      x   3   8   4   x   x   x   7   x

but if i will replace... the side tiers of numbers...
the numbers in the puzzle will have to become
letters - greek... probably iota, epsilon and upper-case
gamma...

the bullied have returned from the palance
of the chocalatiers and: back to their old ways
of bullying the rest of these island folk...
because: it's infantile for me imagine
a resurrection of the crown (poland)
and the grand duchy of lithuania -
the commonwealth -
but somehow the united kingdom is not
fated to become the next yugoslavia -

i can confirm - up in edinburgh i was
confirmed by having the hat of Knox having
scalped me -
never is always metaphor: vaguely -
as in literally - in these quasi-paragraphs...
so it's not... infantile to even "think" that
the british empire can be revived?
zee window-licker spezials of
cross-breed h'americana postcards sent?
i nibble to attempt a joke...

oh i can bulldozer this whole narrative...
turn into a berserker -
i've saved enough money to deal
with the label loser...
all it will take is me having drunk enough -
sightseeing the slums of london's east end
and then hitting the brothel:
like an iron-head... to the pillow
and the ***** of a *******...

because i have had worse friday nights...
terrible company...
if i were not a michel de montaigne or a knausgård:
me me me, me me, me me me me,
write enough of that and:
to meme to grafitti... or to...
why are there no diacritical markers in
the english language worthy of recognition?
why would i...
rhoi fy **** y Cymraeg enw?
give my beard a welsh name?
and why is that not a cedilla C but a ******* K?
why not... Çumraeg?

on foreign shores i have made it adamant that...
this sense of foreigness does not
peppermint my presence with hopes to:
add to - an integration -
just borrow what the local have made: left-overs...
and work with that...

(insert snigger) - the neu-vikings of
northumberland...

           a             b             c
      x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x  
1)   x   x   x   3   x   x   6   x   4
      x   x   x   2   x   4   x   8   9
      x   1   9   x   4   x   x   6   2
2)   x   x   x   7   x   x   x   5   x
      x   x   2   x   x   8   x   4   x
      x   2   x   x   x   x   x   x   x
3)   x   x   6   1   9   5   x   x   3
      x   3   8   4   x   x   x   7   x

this really does have a linear narrative...
here goes...
3(c1), 9(c3), 1(c1), 2(c3), 2(c1), 2(a1), 9(a3), 8(c3),
4(c3), 8(c2), 8(a2), 5(b2), 7(c2), 3(b2), 3(b3), 8(b3),
7(c1), 5(c1), 7(b3), 5(c3), 1(c3), 6(c3), 1(c2), 3(c2),
9(c2), 9(b2), 6(b1), 6(b2), 6(b3), 2(b3), 2(b2), 1(b2),
1(b1), 9(b1), 9(a1), 8(b1), 8(a1), 5(b1), 7(b1), 7(a1)...

and then a "gamble" in the narrative...
the (7a2 and the 5a2 - interchange)....
it's a pleasure - not a chore -
5  9  4
2  8  7
3  6  1
8  1  9
6  4  3
7  5  2 - this line... what if it was 5  7  2?
1  2  5
4  7  6
9  3  8
if i want to solve this puzzle - i will solve it
and not read a tabloid article /
whatever the hell has become of youtube...
my diamond jukebox...

otherwise the "narrative" continued from
7a2 and the 5a2 interchange:
7(3a), 4(a3), 4(a2), 6(a1), 4(a1), 5(a1), 5(a3),
1(a3), 1(a1), 3(a1), 3(a2), 6(a2)... end result?

           a             b             c
      5   9   4   6   8   1   2   3   7  
1)   2   8   7   3   5   9   6   1   4
      3   6   1   2   7   4   5   8   9
      8   1   9   5   4   3   7   6   2
2)   6   4   3   7   1   2   9   5   8
      7   5   2   9   6   8   3   4   1
      1   2   5   8   3   7   4   9   6
3)   4   7   6   1   9   5   8   2   3
      9   3   8   4   2   6   1   7   5

because i can imagine this not being:
the most difficult Finnish sudoku...
i can almost imagine this puzzle
to be in greek...
where: 1ι, 2ζ, 3ε, 4χ, 5Σ, 6δ, 7Γ, 8β, 9ρ...

in the background all i hear is:
corvus corax' la i mbealtaine...
the greek version of the japanese puzzle...

           a             b             c
      Σ   9   χ   6   8   ι   ζ   ε   7  
1)   ζ   8   7   ε   Σ   9   6   ι   χ
      ε   6   ι   ζ   7   χ   Σ   8   9
      8   ι   9   Σ   χ   ε   7   6   ζ
2)   6   χ   ε   7   ι   ζ   9   Σ   8
      7   Σ   ζ   9   6   8   ε   χ   ι
      ι   ζ   Σ   8   ε   7   χ   9   6
3)   χ   7   6   ι   9   Σ   8   ζ   ε
      9   ε   8   χ   ζ   6   ι   7   Σ

half-way... i just wanted to "selfie" what
will become of this... i no longer write: i paint...

            a             b             c
      Σ   9   χ   δ   8   ι   ζ   ε   Γ  
1)   ζ   8   Γ   ε   Σ   9   δ   ι   χ
      ε   δ   ι   ζ   Γ   χ   Σ   8   9
      8   ι   9   Σ   χ   ε   Γ   δ   ζ
2)   δ   χ   ε   Γ   ι   ζ   9   Σ   8
      Γ   Σ   ζ   9   δ   8   ε   χ   ι
      ι   ζ   Σ   8   ε   Γ   χ   9   δ
3)   χ   Γ   δ   ι   9   Σ   8   ζ   ε
      9   ε   8   χ   ζ   δ   ι   Γ   Σ

going... going... gone...

            a             b             c
      Σ   ρ   χ   δ   β   ι   ζ   ε   Γ  
1)   ζ   β   Γ   ε   Σ   ρ   δ   ι   χ
      ε   δ   ι   ζ   Γ   χ   Σ   β   ρ
      β   ι   ρ   Σ   χ   ε   Γ   δ   ζ
2)   δ   χ   ε   Γ   ι   ζ   ρ   Σ   β
      Γ   Σ   ζ   ρ   δ   β   ε   χ   ι
      ι   ζ   Σ   β   ε   Γ   χ   ρ   δ
3)   χ   Γ   δ   ι   ρ   Σ   β   ζ   ε
      ρ   ε   β   χ   ζ   δ   ι   Γ   Σ

i don't mind a people being right...
but the overt-gloating...
without having to work around the sort
of paranoia associated with:
how the russians are not allowed to glutton
themselves on gloating -
because they are always made
to feel suspcious - the russians can't gloat
like most of the anglo- speaking world...
always suspect: russophobia evil genuises...
tip-toeing goliaths - less the blundering
fudge-packers of "global ****"...
and i kissed a boy and i liked it...
my genitals started shrinking
and my *** started to exfoliate with:
welcome all! welcome all hard and on!
and that tongue in my mouth always helps...
but imagine my surprise when
i started to navigate my hands
but the reply came:
timbuktu and mt. kilimanjaro will not be found
attached to this sort of torso...
wrong dog, wrong tree...

some things really do require numbers...
i once had a mathematics teacher in high school
bemoan the origin of modern numbers
and how we once: upon a time used these letters...
but did our arithmetic with visual aids
akin to the abacus... because...
you'd have to "read braille" when counting...
to differentiate the already: lettered numbers
and the letters being letters -
and all arithmetic functions
were "spoken of" but never depicted...
i.e. there was no VII + III = X...
there was no XV - XI = IV...
eh?! arithmetic was cat-intuitive...
not spoken of - done by either the visual
aid of fingers when haggling
in a market place -
or by the abacus aid in a bureucratic office!

i said this was the most perfect friday night...
what did i have to offer?
no clickbait title - some gems of wording
in between?
the patient reader - as ever - most rewarded -

but... oh my god... the sensation of
changing the bed sheets...
it's friday night and you're... changing your bed sheets...
and they are more crisp and clean
than any political event that the journalist leeches
are milking -
and you do it with a saving private ryan precision -
you will sleep in this bed: well into
11am of a today to come...
believe me: that you will...

- in that i am still walking among the germanic people -
if the germans will sing a: bretonisher marsch...
then the two peoples are alligned by
their sentiment for the crow as their godhead:
alles menschen totem...
what could possibly make me feel welcome?
french grammar is polish grammar...
matin de printemps - poranek wiosny -
spring morning in reverse in germanic...
how many more examples would i ever wish
to give?

there was a moment in my life where...
i realised my faults... i should have read
the Pickwick Papers... anything by C. Dickens to be sure...
instead came Stendhal, Voltaire, Balzac...
because if you said to me...
BBC radio 4... the archers...
and... thomas hardy: madding crowd?
you'd accuse me of being ignorant of:
London is a bustling cosmopolitan in-waiting
from the busy-body industrial proto-Beijing
it was of 100 years ago?    
the French had cosmopolitan intellectualism
100 years prior to the english...
100 years later and it's still not much...
is anyone about to cite me william hazlitt?!

the trouble with the english is that they hold dear
to that one old 19th century idea -
this waiting for: awaiting a revival of darwinism...
the "blatantly" obvious needs a resurgence!
because a michael faraday must most surely
be forgotten!
how many times will this already painful reality
need to be emphasised once more:
intellectually - via a darwinism?
no one stresses the copernican "upside-down"...
or what is copernican "west" up in space?
how does acknowledging the sphere
of the earth - ease you reading a flat map -
moving from point A to point B?

earlier this week - for once in my life i was
ashamed of what i wrote -
so i wrote for scribli per se: scribbles for
scribbles themselves -
the darwinian germanic folk who say:
alles von afrika...
how the hebrews debased themselves
in both aushwitz and breaking their bones
on the emoji hieroglyphs -
alles von afrika: ja... so sicher... so wahr!

ask any slavic person among the germanic
peoples...
where from? wir (ar) sind lesen und schreiben
"afrika": i.e. Indu...
if the african challenged the hebrews
with... "the best they had": egyptian emojis...
why would i not stress my birth
with pseudo cedilla Ş / इ... ☦ -
this indo-european is not... at home with
these african-germanoids...
pseudos and quasi -
these chocolate frenzied busy-buddies!

from the caucasian and further still from
that whittle sub-corinthian quote: continent...
somehow, "somehow" this part of this story
is read: south to north... always a grand
marker missing when the people went
east, squinted... learned skeleton existence,
atoms... and the frenzy of letters:
owls and ******* **** flinging beetles
back in the north eastern tip of
africa: in that egyptian haemorrhage of "idea"...

i assure myself... perhaps the form came from
africa... but sure as **** the tongue only arrived
in the lap of the Dalai Lama...
as did the "thinking" and the music
across prior to the Mongol's curiosity
over the tundra of Siberia...
something had to be placed on a loan...
and coming back to the cradle and the crux
had to happen like so...
not this current: ergo: so...
quickened and: what news from Damascus?!

first impressions count...
i made my bed... it's newly washed...
as crisp as falling onto a bed a prawn crackers...
without the crumbs' itch...
like listening to some german:
juggernaut... this will do... i can fall asleep
with this: grab hören zu der winderhall...
mehr flöte - weniger violinekratzen!
schlechtdeutsche? alle deutsche ist gut deutsche...
erwarten etwas isländisch zu sein
gesprochen insel von insel: auf diese inseln?!

to make a crisp bed of freshly washed sheets...
to sleep in them alone...
given the grammar is not that far removed...
are the french even remotely translated
as a germanic "sort of" people?
"they" or "we" share the same grammar...
and there are celtic freedoms that would
never be allowed to exfoliate under
strict anglo-ßaß obligations...

oh sure! great people! steam engine: choo-choo!
newton et al...
shakespeare: when they taught us shakespeare
they should have taught us bernard shaw...
when they forced jane eyre down our throats
we should have been reading
the pickwick papers...
the music will remain german -
because as much as vaughan williams...
holst and händel were "were" english...
esp. latter with his umlaut that spread over
toward i-and-j...

why wouldn't you **** at the pillar of the empire:
a past most assured - dust, books and moths...
like hell will i come to correct my ways
to state the: pish-poor Elgar... this poo'em too...
himmel... sky...
leerenhimmel - empty sky -
nein sonne während der tag:
das englischnebel: bedeckthimmel...
nein mond während der nacht...
nur so...

i of the lesser men of this world duly bow
my presence before the altar of the higher men
of these isles...
and hope and pray that their wisdom
will not bestow upon them any major calamity...
with not irony or ridicule i wish upon
these peoples... the right sort of oars
to turn this rooted island
into the people's imagined langboot...

there are only one british people a people
who will pursue to gloat having been
conquered by the romans...
being raided by the vikings...
integrating the anglo-ßaß...
a second viking coming via the Normans...
the push-over remains of the celts...
that somehow translated itself into
the: empire...
ideal: to compensate...
the islamic fervor for the... resurrected
caliphate...
jokes about the dritte ***** and the vierte *****...
that's pretty much the precursor jokes
surrounding: ein zweite ***** -
auf welche die sonne nimmer setzt -
ever wonder how that translates with the increased
cases of insomnia?!

again: bad german is better than
no german.

preliminary explanation

before i really begin the project i have a few scatterings
of thought that made me do this, without real planning,
a different sort of impromptu that poetry's good at,
less Dionysian spur-of-the-moment with an already
completed poem entwined to a perfect ensō,
as quick as the decapitation of Mary Boleyn with the
executioner fooling her which side the swing would
be cast by taking of his hard-soled-shoes -
i mean this in an Apollonian sense - i know, sharp contrasts
at first, but the need to fuse them - i said these are
preliminary explanations, the rest will not be as haphazardly
composed, after all, i see the triangle i'm interested it
but drawing a triangle without Pythagorean explanation
i'm just writing Δ - i'll unravel what my project is
about, just give me this opportunity to blah blah for a
while like someone from an existential novel;
what beckoned me was the dichotomy of styles,
i mean, **** me, you can read poetry while in an awkward
yoga position, you can read it standing up, sitting down,
eating or whatever you want - obviously on the throne
of thrones taking a **** is preferred - the point being
what's called serious literature is so condensed for
economic reasons, font small, never-ending paragraphs,
you need an easy-chair and a bottle of cognac to get
through a chapter sometimes - or at least freshly mowed
grass in a park in summer - it's really uncomfortable because
of that, and the fact that poets hardly wish upon you
to be myopic - just look at the spacing on the page,
constantly refreshing, open-plan condos, eye-to-eye -
but it's not about that... the different styles of writing,
prose and the novel, the historical essay / encyclopedia
or a work of philosophy - what style of writing can
be best evolutionary and undermine each? only poetry.
poetry is a ballerina mandible entity, plastic skeletons,
but that's beside the point, when journalism writes history
so vehemently... the study of history writes it nonchalantly,
it's the truth, journalism is bombastic, sensationalist
every but what courting history involves -
a journalist will write about the death of a 100 people
more vehemently than a historian writing about the Holocaust...
or am i missing something? i never understood this dichotomy
of prose - it's most apparent between journalism and history...
as far as i am concerned, the most pleasurable style of
prose is involved in the history of philosophy, or learning per se,
but i'll now reveal to you the project at hand -
it's a collage... the parameters?

the subject of the collage

it weighs 1614 grams, or 3 lb. and 8 7/8ths oz.,
it's a single volume edition, published by Pimlico,
it's slightly larger than an A5 format,
3/4 inches more in length, and ~1 centimetre in
width more, it has a depth of 1 and 3/4 inches in depth,
a bicep iron-pumping session with it in bed -
i was lying with this behemoth of a book
in bed soothing out a semi-delirium state
listening to Ola Gjeilo's *northern lights
and flicking through the appendix, and i started thinking,
no would read this giant fully, would they?
the reason it's a one volume edition is because
the only place you'd read such an edition would
be in a library, at a desk, and you'd be taking snippets
out from it, quotes, authentic references points
for an essay, esp. if you were a history student,
such books aren't exactly built for leisure, as my arms
could testify... after the appendix i started flicking
through as to what point of interest would spur me
onto this audacious (and perhaps auspicious)
act of renegading against writing a novel (in the moment,
in the moment, i can't imagine myself rereading plot-lines
after a day or two, adding to it - that's a collage too,
but of a different kind - and no, i won't be plagiarising
as such, after all i'll be citing parallel, but utilising
poetry as the driving revision dynamic compared
to the chronologically stale prose of history) - i'll be
extracting key points that are already referenced and not
using the style of the author - the book in question?
Europe: a history by Norman Davies prof. emeritus
at U.C.L. - the point of entry that made me mad enough
to condense this 1335 page book (excluding the index)?

point of incision

Voltaire (or the man suspected of Guy Fawkes-likes spreading
of volatility in others) -
un polonais - c'est un charmeur; deux polonais - une
bagarre; trois polonais, eh bien, c'est la question polonaise
(one pole - a charmer, two poles - a brawl, three poles -
the polish question) - mind you, the subtler and gentler
precursor of the Jewish question, because the Frenchman
mused, and not a German, or a Russian brute...
and i can testify, two Polish immigrants in a pub,
one senior, the other minor, one with 22 years under
his belt of the integration purpose, one with 12 years,
the minor says to the senior about how Poles bring
the village life to cities, brutish drunkards and what not,
it was almost a brawl, prior to the senior was charming
a Lithuanian girl, before the minor's emphasis on
such a choice of conversation turned into idiotic Lithuanian
nostalgia about the disintegration of the Polish-Lithuanian
commonwealth, primarily due to the Polish nobility.

10,000 b.c.

looking that far back i don't know why you even
bother to celebrate the weekend -
i mean, 10,000 years back Denmark was
still attached to Sweden,
England was attached to France,
and there was a weird looking Aquatic landmass
that would become a myth of Atlantis
in the Chronicles of Norwich,
speedy ******* Gonzales with the equivalent
of south america detaching itself from Africa...
mind you, i'm sure the Carpathian ranges are
mountains. they're noted here are hills or uplands,
by categorising them as such i'm surprised
the majority of Carpathian elevations as scolded
bald rocky faced, a hill i imagine to have some
vegetation on it, not mountain goats with rock and roof
for a blacksmith in a population of one hundred...
at this point Darwinism really becomes a disorientating
pinpoint of whatever history takes your fancy,
Europe - mother of Minos, lord of Crete,
progenitrix / ******* and the leather curtains
of Zeus's harem (jealous? no, just the sarcasm
dominates the immortal museum of attachable
****** to suit the perfect elephant **** of depth
the gods sided with, by choice, excusing the Suez
duct tightening of a prostate gland... to ease the pain
upon ******* rather than *******); mentioned by Homer
the Blind tooth-fairy, the Europe and the bull,
Europoeus and the swan, same father of wisdom to mind,
on the shores of Loch Lomond -
attributes a lover to the bull, Moschus of Syracuse,
who said earring Plato cured him of where the ****
should not enter even if it shines a welcome
in the disguise of Dionysius... revisionists bound to Pompeii
named Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens Veronese
and Claude Lorrain revived the bulging bull's *******
and her mm hmm mm, too gracious my kind, hehee...
Phonecians from Tyre and Io - so too the Sibyl of ****** -
and unlike the great river civilisations of the Nile,
the Ganges, soon to be the Danubian civilisations
and gorged-out-eyes-that-once-sore-colour-but-lost-sight-of-
colours-­after-seeing-the-murk-of-the-Thames...
soon the seas overcame civilisations of the rivers,
as Cadmus, brother of the thus stated harlot said:
i bring you orbe pererrato - hieroglyphics of the cage,
but not an owl or a hawk inside it -
so let's perfect speaking to an encoding by first
rummaging into learning how to procure the perfect
forms of counting - i say left, you say I, i say right
you say II, left right left right, what do you say?
VI. bravo! the Hellenic world just crossed the Aegean
and civilisation bore twins within the cult of a lunar-mother,
Islam of Romulus and Remus, a she-wolf
a canine of the night - according to another -
tremulae sinuantur flamine vestes - or so the myth goes -
a cherished phantom of what became the fabled story
of sole Odysseus with his ears open and the remnant
sailor's ears waxed shut - as if the bankers of this world,
revelling in culprit universal fancy than nonetheless
bred the particular oddities - lest we forget,
the once bountiful call of the sirens to the oceanic
is but a fraction of what today's sirens claim to be song,
a fraction of it remains in this world, the onomatopoeia
of the once maddening song, the crude *******
arrangement of vowels bound to the jealous god's
déjà vu of the compounding second H.

from myth to perpetuating a modern sentiment

you can jump from 10,000 b.c. to the Munich Crisis
of 1938 - 9 with a snap of the fingers,
imitating quantum phenomenons like gesticulating
a game of mime with Chinese whispers necessary,
if Europe is a nymph, Naples her azure eyes,
Warsaw her heart, Sebastopol and Azoff,
Petersburg, Mitau, Odessa - these the thorns
in her feet - Paris the head, London the starched collar,
and Rome - the sepulchre.
or... die handbuch der europaischen geschichte
notably from Charlemagne (the Illiterate)
to the Greek colonels (as apart from Constantine to
Thomas More in eight volumes, via Cambridge mid
1930s)... these and some other books of urgency
e.g. Eugene Weber's H. A. L. Fisher's, Sr. Walter Ralegh,
Jacob Bronowski... elsewhere excavated noun-obscurities
like gattopardo and konarmya had their
circas extended like shelved vegetables in modern
supermarket isles, for one reason or another...
prado, sonata sovkino also... some also mention
Thomas Carlyle (i'd make it sound like carried-away isle,
but never mind); so in this intro much theory,
how to sound politically correct, verifiable to suit
a coercion for a status quo... Europe as a modern idea,
replacing Imperum Romanun came Christendom,
ugly Venetian Pirates at Constantinople,
Barbarossa making it in pickled herring juice
in a barrel to Jerusalem... once called the pinkish-***-fluff
of Saxony, now called the pickled cucumber,
drowning in his armour in some river or Brosphorus...
alchemists, Luther and Copernicus were invited on
the same occasion as the bow-tie was invented,
apparently it was a marriage made for the Noir cinema,
beats me - hence the new concept of Europe,
reviving the idea of Imperium Romanun
meant, somehow including Judea in the Euro
championship of footie gladiator ***** whipped
narcissists, rejecting the already banished Carthage
(Libya / Tunisia by Cato's standards) and encouraging
the Huns, the Goths and the even more distant Slavs and
Vikings to accept not so much the crucifix as
the revised spine of the serpent but as the geometry of
human limbs, well, not so much that, but forgetting
Norse myths of the one-eyed and the runic alphabet
and settling for ah be'h c'eh d'ah.
dissident frenche stink abbe, charles castel de st pierre
(1658 - 1743) aand this work projet d'une paix perpetuelle
(1713) versus Питер Великий who just said:
never mind the city, the Winter Palace... i have aborted
fetus pickles in my bedroom, lava lamps i call them.
the last remaining reference to Christianity?
Nietzsche was late, the public was certain,
it was the Treaty of Utrecht, 1713, with public reference
to the republica christiana / commonwealth was last made.
to Edmund Burke: well, i too wish no exile
upon any European on his continent of birth,
but invigorate a Muslim to give birth on it
and you invigorate an exile nonetheless:
Ezra expatriate Pound / sorry, if born in eastern
europe a ***** Romanian immigrant, pristine
expatriate in western Europe, fascist radio has
my tongue and *****, so let's play a game:
Russian roulette for the Chinese cos there's
a billion of them, and no one would really mind
a missing Chow Mein... chu shoo'ah shaolin moo'n'kah!
or a cappuccino whenever you'd like to watch
classic Italian pornographic cinema with dubbing
with nuns involved... Willaim Blake and his
stark naked prophesy, pope pius II (treatise 1458)
even though Transylvania, Tharce and Hungary
shared the same phonetic encoding with diacritical
distinctions like any Frenchman, German,
or Pole at the Siege of Vienna (1683)
to counter the antagonising Ottoman - i swear historians
do this one purpose, juggle dates and head-of-state figures
prior to entering a chronology - they must first try out
a ******* carousel before playing with the toy-train...
broadcasting to a defeated Germany public, T. S. Eliot
(1945) ****** import to into Western Germany
and talk of the failing moral fabric, China laughing
after the ***** intricacies of warfare of trade,
what was once wool we wished to be silk...
instead of silk we received vegetarian wool, namely
hemp, and Amsterdam is to blame... nuke 'em!
that's how it sounds, how a historian approaches
writing a history from the annals, from circa and
circumstance and actual history, foremost the abbreviations,
the fishing hook standards, the parameters,
the limits, and then the mathematics of history,
one thing culminating into another... contra Lenin
N. S. Trubetskoy, P. N. Savitsky, G. Vernadsky
Russian at the perks of the Urals - steppe Tartar shamans
or salon pranced pretty **** boys? where to put
the intoxicant and where to put the mascara... hmm,
god knows, or by 21st calculations, a meteor;
they say the history of nations is a history of women,
then at least the history of individuation
and of men who succumb to its proliferation
is astoundingly misogynistic.
Seton-Watson, among the the tombstones too reminded
of remarkable esteem and accomplishment
with only one gravedigger to claim as father...
as many death ears as on two giraffe skeletons
stood Guizot, men of many letter and few fortunes,
or v. v., incubators of cousin ***** and none the kippah
before the arrogant saintly diminished to
a justly cause of recession, ha ha,
by nature's grace, and with true advent of her progression
as guard-worthy pre- to each pro-
and suggested courteous of the ****** fibre,
oh hey, the advent of masqueraded woofing,
a Venetian high-brow, and jealousy out of a forgotten
spirit of adventure that once was bound
to hunting and foraging... forever lost to write  history of
a king dubbed Louis the XIV...
crucibles and distastes for the state to be pleased,
once removed from Paris, forever to Angevin womb
accustomed once more, at Versailles released -
as cake be sown so too the aristocratic swan necks
for worth of mock and scorn - and the dampening rain
rattle the blood-thirst of the St. Bartholomew's Day
slaughter, to date, the rebirth of Burgundy,
of Anjou, and with the dead king presiding, to be
of no worth in judging himself a king before god or pauper...
saluer Antoine Quentin Fouquier-Tinville!
that i might too in stead rattle a few bones prior to burial
with the jaw that will laugh and chatter least
had it been to my kingly-stead a birth so lowly.
then at least in satisfactory temperament i procure a
judgement of the noble like of a *****
for an hour's worth of pistons and jarring tongues...
as if from a nobleman then indeed as if from a *****,
for who sold Europe and said: Arabia, if not the
Frenchman, the Englishman, the Spaniard?
the former colonial conquests served you not enough?
i imagine the reinstatement of Israel like
the Frankish states under Philippe-August...
precursors to a cathedral dubbed Urban the 2nd's..
there were only Norwegian motives in the Ukraine
and the black sea... Israel to me is like plagiarism
of the Frankish states of the middle-east, with Europe
slightly... oom'pah loom'pah mongolian harmonica.
some said Rudyard Kipling poems,
some said Mr. Kipling's afternoon tea cakes -
whichever made it first on Coronation St.
some also say the Teutonic barbecues -
it was a matter of example to feed them hog
and cannibalise the peasants for ourselves,
a Prussian standard worth an army standard of
rigour - Ave Maria - letztre abendessen nahrung -
mein besitzen, wenn in die Aden, i'd be the last
talking carcass...
gottes ist der orient!
gottes ist der okzident!
nord - und sudliches gelande
ruht im frieden seiner hande.
germany's lebensraum, inferiority and classification,
inferior slavs and jews, genetics and why my
hatred of Darwinism is persistent, you need
an explanatory noting to make it auto-suggestive
for Queen & Country? diseased elements,
Jewish Bolshevism, Polish patriotism,
Soviets, Teutons, the grand alliances of 1918
or 1945? Wilsonian testimony of national self-determi

In the woods outside my home town
Mushrooms grow in clusters shaped as dead vikings.

The soil rich; thick -dense- with history.
Lean your face on the ground. Feel the warmth

Of blade-based battles on forest grounds now buried
Under centuries of rot, moss and everyday oblivion.

Rust-warped swords pulled from deflated tractor tires
By angry farmers' hands so far from unlikely

Related to those who -fifty or more generations ago-
Forged the ancient nuisance.

.i cannot do justice to Hölderlin's invocation of Hyperion, but i also have no intention to, but i'll begin with, what isn't regarded as a pristine, classical constellation:

it begins with a punt volant,
on first observation,
   ・
      which descends in brightness
         ano teleia -
romanic interruption of the added
comma beneath it,
like a tail dragging the head along...

    the constellation?

        a dismembered man,
a crooked pentagram,
and a trinity of sorts...

                              .          .        
    ­            ・                   .    
                                           .
        .

                       .

                                       .

this, the dislodged man,
with a trinity of stars floating
outside of him...

the trinity is faint...
when you first spot the ano teleia
star with its brightness...
yet that is a mishandled
pentagram...

which brings me to the argument,
some people send their DNA
to companies that
discover their genetic makeup,
i also read a newspaper article
that stated:
why bother?
you genetic make-up
also consists of what
you gravitate to,
culturally...

    so... i'm reading an article
on Hyperion...
and then i follow several links...
all i know is that the Vikings
were the founders of
Kiev...
                
   and to get to Kiev from Norway...
you have to go past the land
i was born in...

   then working from an article
on Emperor Julian, the Apostate...
then onto an article on Mardonius...
then on the article on the Goths...

Goths?
  Swedish "vikings"...
  who had established settlements
in the region of Poland were
i was born,
by 250BC...
                  
   so... why would i cling to
Nordic folk songs,
or their revisionism,
if i... suddenly hear a song,
and react with goosebumps on
my cheeks from hearing it?

or what about the remnants
of Scythia?
           boiling in my veins?

that newspaper article was right,
i don't need to send off my DNA
sample to companies,
i can read my DNA from the culture
i'm migrating toward!

     Hyperion,
i have abandoned the Athenian gods
of Olympus,
i've looked elsewhere,
to the mountain that became
the pit of Tartarus...
look back at Uranus, and sampled
the wintry perfumes of Gaia...

          swam in the ***** of Pontus...
and i have...
seen how both the gods,
and the titans...
   are the source of etymological
classification,
unlike what the judeo-christian tranditions
teach...
Adam didn't name the birds
and the animals from an a priori
posit / advantage point
of some obscure inheritance...

        first come the grander things...
man conjures up the existence / non-existence
of either gods, or titans...
to spin the wheel and gain etymological
momentum!
            
of what became the ****** of the affair
between Helios and Gaia...
    however true...
   or untrue...
      there is still an etymological foundation
for the existence of said
names...
   the names / not beings...
that spawn more names to be attributed
to such miniscule things
as flies, centipedes and pebbles...

from the word Uranus, comes the word
Helios,

from Selene comes the word
which coincides
the words Pontus, Oceanus, Poseidon,
and subsequently the
moon's influence of the tides...
the... παλίρροιες (palirroies,
siblings of the furies, the rivers,
and all other nymphs)...

      but however ridiculous applying
these nouns is...
they are rigid evolution
of words, formerly grunted,
or expressed in a barbaric way...
these are the words first defined...

Gaia probably became perfected
when there occurred a syllable
arithmetic... well... "arithmetic" is a lose
term of addition...
    the syllable g'ah! g'ah!
combined with i'ah!
                            
stealthy *******, this Jewish god,
he knew it all along...
hide in the letters,
hide in phonetics,
hide long until...
there's a second Belshezzar moment
in history...
when he's seen a second time...

i see him!
the surd H and the laughter
instigator H of the tetragrammaton...
you sigh when you write AH...
you express a vague awed-surprise
when you write OH...
    H represents the breath...
and the soul...

i see him!
i write too much to not be able
to dis-guide you from doing likewise...
the breath enter with an AH
and an OH...
   ah as in wonder with a surprise,
oh, as in counter: so i was wrong?

ooh... like something is teasing
you...
    uh? as in an element of disgust...
but?
HA?
       the point...
the point being?
laughter...
                    how else can you
express laughter,
if not balancing on the Jewish
definite article,
i.e. HA, i.e. HA-shem (the-name?),
how?!

but the Greeks were of some use...
their names of Titans and
Greeks?
   etymological boot-camps...
what we began with,
and, ultimately,
what we return to,
not for bowing, prayer,
belief...
but?
            *momentum...
    
we already that Zeus is actually
Thor,
   who's father, Odin,
is Uranus...
                    so, technically...
Zeus is Thor...
                     Prometheus is Loki...
etc. etc. etc.,
      point being...
these similarities, these correlations?
they're not, they're not,
plagiarisms...
                        they would be plagiarisms,
if they had similar etymological
beginnings...
they're not plagiarisms,
because even now,
not everyone on this earth is a bilingual
entity that could
support a globalist agenda!
      if bilingualism was rife,
then the liberals could have their
globalist "unity"...
              but since bilingualism is the lesser
half of the polymath...
    no...
              isolated communities
have isolated ideas...
they look as if they were plagiarisms
now... but then?
   the only globalist artifact left these days,
the Socratic argument for
universal, convergent purposes -
and particular, divergent practicalities...
these religions were not
plagiarisms...
   do you really think that
plagiarism is a pulverizing motivational
tool for the perpetuation
of a people's existence?
   i don't think so...
                      plagiarism doesn't drive
people...
it's just a strange coincidence that
there are similarities that could be conceived
as plagiarisms...
but then again...
****... me and this Mongol share
a very similar physiognomy...
  and... oh ****... we're standing up-right...
have five limbs...
   and we use fire to cook food...
yeah... the religious plagiarism issue is
really suspicious...
we weren't, ever, to make a similar conclusion...
since we all, supposedly led a mass
exodus from Africa...
     like **** we did...
     perhaps...
               but the story doesn't begin
with an origins...
   more... what happened in what
became localized eventualities of segregation...
hey... i might have, 100 year... ha ha!
yeah right... to write my own narrative...
i don't like the antithesis of
doubt: of the perfected plethora of
the antithesis of both faith & denial...
     i like my rainbow plethora of doubt
to "counter" faith & denial...
   given that i also don't like
the pseudo-schizophrenic dichotomy of
faith, contra denial.
- makes for a more exciting
content of the heart... what? doubt;
doubting Thomas
  with a heart like a sinking stone,
and fire in his eyes,
                    a, second Belshezzar.

daj, do wynagrodzenia: reszty.
daj: to niby: siebie;
a... dam... dam...
ale pierw: powiem:             to!
(ich) nicht werden
                  geben (ihr) das nacht!
first... i'll punch myself
hard enough to give myself
a plum-eye: ******* pacifists...
and then?
    then i'll strap a trouser belt
to protect my knuckles...
and then... then...
                    then: we'll "talk":
who might find a translator
ready...
   god...
i'm gagging for a
knuckle exchange...
        almost... itching!
like i might await
a shaving... from a Turkish
barber... in Essex...
of all Danish palaces;
and why would i want to allow
consort with these women?
considering the fact that
the russian ones believe in trans-national
grievance taxation:
of someone... who hasn't...
actually died...
              you know what?
*******...
suffer...
       watch me wipe my ***
with a satanic smile
ennobled
by a coulrophobia...
excesses of vogue
                      atypical models...
how is it... that...
coulrophobia doesn't translate
in reverse?
  and what's up
with the black privilege of
jass music, akin to white mozart...
as...  
  sure as ****, the drum would be
the first, and only thing,
prior to the people learning
the ******* clarinet!

oh drop me your ****** ***
holocaust dead bomb
on a polish ***...
     i triple, quadruple dare you!
you *******... ivory coast
   centipede!
               i'm *******...
as watts: wild-eyed...
       unstrap me from this
"unreality" of conversation...
then undo the internet banking...
and the rest of it...

             not adam watts!
    glitter & doom....
who?      tom waits...
oh **** me... blue valentine?
if that's not a **** with me
album... what is?
                 live circus?
        
do i look like a ******* ****-
(see the hyphen?
it's a prefix... the english are
lazy sometimes: couldn't,
i.e. could not,
remnants of shakespearean
english...

       i'll always cite macbeth...

  time, thou anticipat'st my dread
exploits: the flighty purpose never
is o'eertook, unless the deed go with it.
from this moment, the very firstlings
of my heart shall be
  the very firstlings of my heart.
   and even now, to crown my thoughts
with acts, be it thought and done.

it's hardly a racial slur, ergo...
why so ******* sensitive akin to a french
footballer or a ballerina?
   ****- (hyphen! hyphen!) ergo a prefix...
as already mention:
no, no...
   it's not: no iraqi ever called me a pa-ki
      (pákí)... yeah...
and you never called an afghanistani an
afghan, ever, no?
   pure camaraderie in that part of
the world... all the way... yeah yeah... yeah...
-stani (suffix) is sometimes missing
because... the english like to shorten words...
e.g. why is daniel: dan,
why is matthew: matt?
  why is muhammad: mo (farrah)?
                                    ******* pansies...
police your circumcised penises fiddling
english teenager girl, first,
come after my vocab. justifications: after;
savvy?

or a gypsy?
   by now...
     i'm looking like any
traveler...
and the world...
       forever resembled
a world,
  in the confines of
      a claustrophobia...

but... if there's a bigger concern for
a world...
  and a freedom...
i want a bare knuckle fight...
a black eye...
namely...
you bring  BOXING GLOVE...
and i'll bring...
     a LEATHER BELT...
wrapped around my knuckles,
and the wrist...
    like i might care to give
a second attempt to smile...

ah... the men... who care
about minding, if not in the least,
keeping women...
      bye bye, bye bye...
       and i've allowed myself
to know my grandfather...
as i did the slap in the face...
and...
the key question:
in the unfathomability of counting
the 32 / 4 ratio...
alas... one fist... one smile...

and countless... dentistry encounters...
because?
   because the rest?
the cultural artifacts of a today?
  lost to h'americana...
            as i might have wished...
for my prior genes
to make an autobiography
in **** germany...
  
   what?
  
      well... obviously: the oops.

no, for the crescendo...
you know...
           i'm getting this funny vibe...
gott ist tot... it's not really spectacular...
nietzsche really believed in eternity,
to the point where he pointed:
what does science offer, only old age...
what does religion provide? eternity...
oh nietzsche was big on eternity...
   gott ist tot is as unspectular as:
is it: how to do you pronounce x,
or is it: how do you pronunciate y?
debate:
              everyone says around here
the former... since no one wants to be a *****...
pro-nun-ci-ate (pro-nun-cíate)...
   might as well replenish the vocab. bank
and replace the word with:
how do you elocute z? / recite)....

gott ist tot / gott ist tod...
    "same ****, different cover"...
you know why i believe in god?
    not the christian reference points...
salvation blah blah, saviour and hide & seek blah blah...
n'ah... where would i derive all my vocab.
hunger if not from him?
   some men derive their vocab. from
women or gambling...
            i am not in the position of their
luxury... so god it is...

            primarily though?
               god is metaphysics...
             ergo? his judgement is not clouded
by metaphysical questioning...
it's impossible to receive a metaphysical
answer from a metaphysical question
when engaging with a metaphysical
ontological paraphrase of one's own search
for meaning in this mortal frame...

oh sure sure, my belief in god is as juvenille
as anyone else's belief in humanity's
clarity when it comes to jurisprudence
and its application...
    i've experience "jurisprudence" once...
drive-by phone theft...
me and three fwends...
   i catch the number plate...
i tell one of my fwends to note it down,
police station, report, culprit found,
a sit in at a barkingside police station
looking at mug images,
spot the ****** (it was dark when the mugging
took place, photographic memory, **** happens)...
a court session, australia is playing england
at the ashes (****, i missed it)...
in court the defence lawyer shows me
another picture of the culprit...
back then photogrpahs had dates
attached to them...
the photograph? over 4 years old...
i tell him: but this photograph is 4 years old!
how can i identify if this is the same
person: i, myself, will probably
don a beard in four years time!
      a simple slip-up...
        now that i have a beard:
it's so much more fun than growing your
hair long... i hated the nickname
chewbacca back in high school when i was
growing mine for a french braid...
i walk out of the court,
come to terms with the detective...
and i see the same hunger in him as i see in me...
will justice be served?
highly unlikely... since the victim
didn't recognize the *** in the mug-shots...
justice was probably not served...

   and this is how god plays into all of this,
hell or heaven, blah blah...
man created the figure of domina Iustitia
as blind... god created death to be blind...
justice was never supposed to be blind,
death was: the unfortunate deaths
of teenagers in car accidents,
among all the other freak accidents...

clouded with so many metaphysical questions
i don't appreciate man's ability to adhere
to jurisprudence without being
subjectively contaminated...
i have more belief in an "imaginary"
god than belief that strains me to belief
in man's sense of justice...
          the nuremberg trials are a rare exception...
but only when the culprits are
unabashed and fathomable by a collective
sense of pride... a blidness...
i believe in god, because i'd love to experience
the judgement of a post scriptum of
metaphysics...
  personally? i have been wronged...
heavily...
            i will not name names....
i know when and how i was wronged,
and by whom...
                2007... Canterbury...
      i won't name names: i'm not a rat...
man is too clouded with metaphysical questions
to begin with, god isn't,
he's a metaphysical ontology "bias"...
which is why, he is primarily a jurisprudent
answer...
   i'd love to experience divine jurisprudence,
hell or heaven are not of my concern...
and i don't imply divine jurisprudence
associated with the polytheistic take of
jurisprudence via a solipsistic mechanism
of a minor god and the person in question
without the hurt party...
in monotheism the god is solipsism personified...
these days: also the personna non grata...
so no... gott ist nicht tot...
            he's a personna non grata...
i just don't appreciate the human *******
of law, law governance...
   come on, in england you can receive
an a.s.b.o.s. for your cockerel being too loud
in the morning, your dog barking...
           would you trust man with
jurisprudence?
  a woman was cleared of the ******
of her husband
       when she hammered his head into a pancake:
over an abusive relationship...
police, weren't, "there"?!
sure sure... the hammer will do...
i believe in god without a sense of reward...
i just don't think man is capable of
passing justifiable laws...
no man could ever pass the eternal laws,
gravity... 100°C for the boiling of water...
i need a being  who has groundwork
in eternal laws, in unshakeable laws...
the ten commandments aren't:
you shall not...
   more... maybe, you shouldn't...
they are the most pristine jurisprudent
laws available... the: maybe you shouldn't,
eh, chappy?

       i just don't like playing the thesaurus game
on the more tight-knit game
of "passing" the wink-wink of Solomon's
judgement...
please, **** me please,
i'll eat 20 raw herrings in a cream sauce,
slurp 30 oysters,
eat 40 strawberries on a hangpverl
eat out about 50 harem virgins
like a castrato if you ask me, nicely,
**** camel cockey:
lucly i landed on a black gold slurp
with plenty of bangladeshi slaves:
******* of riyadh...
     what did muhammed tell you?
you camel jockeys / sand *******
have clearly forgotten...
******* arabs: short attention span...
you need to remind
the retards...
the dajjal would come from the east...
a palace of gardens...
well obviously the prophet wasn't
thinking about genghis khan...
            
  hmm barbarians...
vikings, arabs: yet so inclined to like poetics...
funny, that...
the civilized peoples banished
the poets...
            the ruling class and their cushioned
people: sacrosanct sycophants...
wankers, basically.

    the hajr? muhammad spoke of the dajjal
coming from the east,
and the east being a city of gardens...
where isn't riyadh and where is mecca?
isn't riyadh east of mecca?
was the dajjal to come from the outside
of islam, or from wtihin?
      last time i checked...
sh'ite islam isn't friendly to sunni islam...
if islam was the one true religion...
would have a shcism have occurred?
i don't think so...
   a persian would never bow before
an arab... that much os true...

oh i believe in god...
given how man practices jurisprudence...
is it some sort of, a, thesaurus game
i wasn't told about?
to me the human quest for jusctice is
a thesaurus game...
man is incapable to pass but one,
eternal, law...
he's great at nuanced laws...
laws allocated to sports...
i mean, **** me, cricket?
the best vocab. you'll ever pick up...

even god isn't as pertinent
in making the sort of music associated
with the limited alpha-to-beta
of A, B, C, D, E, F, and G...
wow! seven... seven?!
how many heads does the beast
of revelation have? oh... 7!

i'll stop tolerating islam, and start respecting it,
when it, acknowledges its presence
as a character study in the book of revelations...
then i'll just move on,
having made my point...

until that time comes...
    it's 600 years shy of becoming what
degenerate christianity has become,
oh and it's ripe...
it's gagging to implode!
600 years and wait for it to become
the next secular vasal conglomorate...

the warning muhammad gave
about "the best from the east"
was in point of question:
   a reference ti gneghis khan...
more like ibn saud:
  thst fat diabetic one eyed ogre...
and the legacy of decadence he left
behind...

saudi men with slavuc girlfriends,
buying up pink cushions and *******
chihuahuas...
**** after ****...
  you know the three slavic proverbs?
1. better a sparrow in your
hand, than a dove on your rooftop?
explanation?
better the small joys at-hand,
than impossible possibilities out of reach....
2. a drunk can spot east,
past mecca, whenever honing
the safety of his own bed... even at night...
not much of a proverb...
3. i don't care to rememeber...

once toleration comes into play,
i will, respect... just a waiting game...
i'm pretty sure no iranian will
bow down to a sunni camel jockey...
i like proud *******,
it implies: there are absolutes,
un-moveable goal posts...

                      if you are ever to bind yourself
in supporting a "side" outside a sports' dynamic,
always the outsider...
always the outsider... in this case?
the ****'ite islam brigade...
       the persians...
the sunnis can shove it...
   *****, bones, whatever....

                   ****'ite islam i can
fathom, even respect,
sunni islam i just tolerate...
  as much as iran takes claims for the
big satan in ref. to h'america...
well... if h'america supports the infantile
saudi arabia, who's to blame them?

you know that polonaise joke about
about the pacifism of jews in
2nd world world war poland?
the joke ran along the words:
weren't the jews shooting the nazis
using crooked elbows (rifles)?
they always seemed to miss them,
taunted into walking into gas chambers,
the ******* hobbits...

          what? some bolshevik Brooklynian
jewish rada is to spare me
                 the pay-up diffrential
telling me, i was wrong?

  as i said before: the nazis lamented
when the warsaw uprising happened...
no, st. paul's doesn't stand proud
because, because...
   even with the blitz...
                 the luftwaffe were told:
you drop a bomb on st. paul's: firing squad...
and when notre-dame de paris -
last time i checked...
   the nazis didn't luftwaffe the **** out
of paris... did they?!

                  the nazis weren't mongols;
no people so well versed in chanel in terms
of their military being so well
   suited & booted could ever make such a
                              architectural sacrilege...

what?! people under the silicon curtain
are gagging, begging even: for nazis!
can i be the first?!
i just want to please the hungry!
if not punk then moving swiftly into ska...
am i the first?
   siliziumvorhang...
well, **** me... from under the eisenvorhang...
what's with these neo-communist pseudos?

and the hebrew god?
a jealous god... so a god with the knowledge
of the existence of other gods...
why wouldn't a jealous god have
no knowledge of other ("imagianry") gods?
to be jealous of only one's own existence?!

3 / 1: that's the ratio....
that's the only ratio... 3 times i experienced
love at first sight:

when i fell in love at first sight...
malina, samantha, janina,
priya....

equal measure: isabella of grenoble...

in reverse:
magda, promis, ilona, kot (i forget her name,
7 years old, first kiss, you can be forgiven
to forget, she had two twin sisters
and she was the senior,
her fasther drove a distribution truck,
milk, i think)...

****, i actually mismanaged
that ratio...

i believe in "a" god...
since i find too much of human jurisprudence
to be riddle with the thesaurus...
i don't think man can pass
law, he can "suppose so"...
but he will never pass the sort of law,
made forbidden,
or absolutely allowed....
i don't believe in a god akin
to the sort of a pontous pilate god
where i'll always find myself
outside of punk evolving into ska...

         mind you...
i'd hate to be trapped within
the confines of an atheistic exclusion zone
of intellect,
      to be trapped in nothing is one
thing, but to be trapped inside
the confines of an atheist's "nothing"
is quiet another....
i don't like being a hamster inside
a cognitive wheel of another...
   god is the jurisprudence spirit,
man the metaphysical spirit...
and i would very much like to stand
in the light of divine law being passed
to finally feel my shadow...

kult: brooklyńska rada żydów...
  not familiar?
  i forgot punk a long time ago...
esp. when californians came up with their
version, ergo? ska...

i'm currently taping a film
about the silesian vampire...
how strange, that the prussians came
back into the ***** of the polonaise...

growing a beard is so much fun!
fiddle after fiddle: and no violin!
atheists bore me
as much as the theistic hags
who's only ambition are
the thrill associated with Sunday
h'america and cinema...
               i can imagine only one
heaven...
where i am blind and given
               a large library of music.

.chris rea: god's great banana skin...

/ such random thoughts are a blessing, esp. after you've been walking for over 2 miles, in the cold and in the rain, with the setting sun... continually impressed by the nature of polyester clothing, how you feel the cold, but aren't cold at all, how you go back home and: you're dripping with sweat... /

the random thought?
about a saying, here's the schematic

synthetic a priori

                    4 + 6 = 10
                    IV + VI = X

                                         analytical a posteriori

which statement is true?
within the questioning parameters?
i think it's a trick question...
how else would you be able to
teach these statements and make
replica understandings of
said, statements?

(****... quickfire shots of syrupy
*****... **** me... give me the sweats,
and i'm not even constipated,
it must be the ***** doing
the magic... yeah... sober me?
doesn't like thinking...
but oddly enough, the drunk me?
pulls out philosophy,
no, not as some pretentious
high-brow interest...
   i just looked at philosophy as
a genre in literature,
nothing more)...

numbers, like letters...
or in the case of Roman numerals
(letters are numbers)...
i'm unsure whether you can arrive
at crafting them into existence
by analytical parameters,
i don't actually think
that you can conjure up numbers
from analyzing a priori,
given the ad continuum:
but... there was a point in time,
when / where: numbers weren't used...

Kant was a theist,
sorry...
  he says it plainly at the end
of his critique of pure reason...
in the transcendental methodology...
sure... he takes a "schizophrenic"
moment to write a thesis
and an antithesis on subjects like
cosmology...
but he's inclined, as i am,
counter to an atheist...
yes... god is probably a monster...
but a ******* gorgeous monster...
kinda like a femme fatale...
so what's not to like?

    but this thought didn't arrive
randomly,
and my consciousness
didn't hone in on it...
i didn't vector this thought
to an immediate conclusion...
the thought arrived,
and then: i had to make shrapnel
out of it...
the original thought was complex,
i had to make shrapnel out of it,
in order to put it back together,
so that a cognitive 3 seconds
could be rewritten in under 30 minutes
explaining, why the thought arose...

you know... when thinking
is detached from the moral (θ)-ought
you get to experience these "things"...
here's another schematic...

I + Φ (you put a key into a lock),
   Θ (you turn the key), O (the door opens),
hey presto... a free radical iota...
detached from both phi and theta...

i am free from making
a moral ought (i) or the immoral: ought (i) not?
i'm free, hence my concern for...
abstract questions...

back to the original schematic...

synthetic a priori

                    4 + 6 = 10
                    IV + VI = X

                                         analytical a posteriori

this actually has a theological
dimension,
supposing i am god...

   if i propose an analytical a priori
with a synthetic a posteriori...
well then...
             i can't change anything,
i can't actually make changes to...
with my omnipotence,
omniscience etc.
i already analyzed, a priori
the Kantian elevation to theology
comes, via me, stating...
if i analyzed the entirety of
creation...
            a priori ex nihil
(from the prior out of nothing)
how can i make a synthesis
in the a posteriori domain,
of the already existing things,
which didn't exist a priori,
since there was nothing,
and i already analyzed the potential
of nothing, and this potential
was realized as everything i would
know to exist... and i went along
with it anyway?

i'm starting to think that
the realm of analytical a priori
doesn't exist for mortals...
the gods can muse this ****-show
of a dimension over and over again...
we're more (being mortals)
synthetic a posteriori...
oh don't get me wrong,
i believe we have the capacity
to comprehend analytical a priori
but it's an analytical a- priori...
we've reached the limits
of the microscope, the telescope,
and the hadron collider...
or on our way to exhaust that...
still being left with an intact mesh of...
the orbits... summer, winter, autumn, spring...
but this thing with this schematic:

synthetic a priori

                    4 + 6 = 10
                    IV + VI = X

                                         analytical a posteriori

how can i conjure an understanding
of IV + VI = X...
analytically a priori...
when... i have no hindsight /
prior to understanding of said rubric?
well... with Roman you could say:
analytical a priori,
given the Ancient Romans already
had the letters I, V, X...
but... if you didn't have the concept
of measurements prior,
of arithmetic...
how can you analyze something...
that doesn't exist?
so... you had to synthesize a priori,
working from the letters I, V, X...
to conjure up "numbers"...
  numerals... you had to create these
numbers by a synthetic a posteriori
method...
and the 4 + 6 = 10...
        well... you analyzed the a posteriori
synthesis, and threw I, V, X out...
and began the second wave of mathematics...
and this is where, authentically...
analytical a priori comes from...
based on I (1), V (5), X (10)...
                    came IV (4), came VI (6)...
don't mathematicians treat their language
as that of or equivalent to the gods?

now... for the cultural exchange program
that i promised...

on the great British isles...
you have a variety of languages
& dialects,
i'm so sorry that the Scottish
"forgot theirs"...

but when you have something
akin to

English: red
Cymru: coch

or right... they have their Pict
Gael?

Pict Gaelic: dearg
Irish: dearg
Cornish: rudh

we'll require a second word...
what word, what words..
life!

English: life,
Cymru: bywyd
Pict Gaelic: beatha
Irish: saol
Cornish: bewnans...

back, "home"...
we also have sub-groups
in terms of linguistics...

there are the Kashubians...
and there are the Silesians,
and, there are...
the Kurpie...
akin the Welsh, the Pict,
the Ire,

and their language looks like so...
again, borrowing from
red and life...

Polak: czerń
Kashubian: czôrny...
  but that can be disputed...
why?
     czerwień is not actually
a noun, but an adjective...
a quality of being associated with red...
czerwony? that's a male
adjective...
   and the female adjective
is czerwona...
                ****...
a color has to be something...
the noun adjective that's blood...
Polak: krwawy (czerwony)
Kashubian: czerwiony
Silesian: čerwůny
ah...
   Kurpian... high polish?
Masovian?
harder to find the words...
have to use alternatives...

Kurpian: caban
Polak: tępak
Kashubian: osoł
  Silesian: yjzel...
(idiot, imbecile)

you know how hard hard it is
to find a Kurpian to Polak
translator?
i can't find one to boil down
to the examples or either
red or life,
i'm reduced to choosing other
words...
like...

   Kurpian: chwat...
Polak: chłopak
Silesian: bajtel
Kashubian: knôp...
(boy)

Kurpian: jédło
Polak: jedzenie...
Kashubian: jedzenié
alternative to Silesian:
  jadło, i.e.: it ate...
past-participle in
the verb...
let's see what the Silesians
call it...
Silesians: well.. a variation..
chlyb
godka
mietła
masa... all things you can eat...
(edible food)

only a word, like the Kurpian
word akin to kotnå
reveals that Vikings passed via "us"...
kotnå?
  an impregnated sheep...
with young...

Kurpian: łańï truń!
Polak: nie mów!
Kashubian: ni gôdac!
Silesian: ńy godka!
(don't speak!)

mind you... Kurpian translation
is hard to find...
and you almost wonder...
at the British isles...
you think, us, Polaks...
do not have sub-linguistic groups
in our ranks,
like your Welsh, your Pict,
your Irish?!
guess again...
you had them all along...
and you thought...
the Polaks were
a homogenous culture...
all this time...
primarily because our culture
wasn't multicultural...
oh but it was... but on the subtle side
of history...
mind you...
defenders of the galaxy?
i knew gamora wasn't white...
but... **** me...
even if black or hispanic...
she looked so **** attired in green...
i was thinking:
absinthe cherub, absinthe cherub...
and forgot about glorifying
Zoe Saldana in all that choc...
what?
   a green skinned chic?
                    if i can forget about
the existence of chocolate...
i'll just anything that moves...
but i knew she wasn't white...
i hate chocolate...
          give me an absinthe girl any
day of the week...
       yeah...
only the English have complex
ethnicity encompassing
a single language...
only the English...
                 like **** they are...
at least my linguistic variation
is suited to a bundle of words...
Welsh?! Gaelic?!
  completely different languages...
at least in my part of the world
all that is deviating
is a choice of variant nouns!
but then again, the English
speaking world....
        how's the new pronoun
dictum coming along?
you keeping up with...
   appeasing the new crazies?
oh... you are?!
    well... kudos and applause!

p.s. guess what happens with appeasing
the new crazies... guess...
i'll tell you...
you **** around with grammar,
some grammatical pedant will raise
his head up from the crowd and say
something like:
               what?!
and then the old crazies rise up...
and... your, ahem, little discussion
about changing the rules of grammar
to "ensure" that the language is
kept, "intact"?
      see... mm... hmm... the old crazies?
the old crazies have their own
methods...
they're of the obligation:
let my gun do the talking...
  and then...
  you get pol *** arithmetic,
of skulls...
           being counted in an abacus
of heaping up, "debris"...
         see... these new crazies
are bugging me...
  they're bugging me...
because the old crazies didn't
attack grammar,
and whatever delusion they had...
i couldn't see it...
the new crazies?
they're attacking grammar,
and the delusion they have...
is... associated with something
i can see as being self-evidently untrue...

the new crazies...
******* spinners... fakers...
    i prefer the old crazies...
at least their delusions had ambitions
to deceive in the realm of
the unseen...
       the unproved, and never to be
proven...
these new crazies...
i am supposed to speak asylum talk?!
so... society is the new asylum
with the past asylums being
abolished?!
who gave caffeine to these news
crazies?!
******* sane people's naive pandering...
while the depressed man?
hey boy... hey, hey, hey boy...
noose!
i've lost all sympathy for
the victims of a psychotic
version of a repressed P.T.S.D. example...
the mad have hijacked language,
disorientated grammar...
and... b'a'ah, b'a'ah...
                 no...
                              i'm with the old
crazies...
                    at least they're the ones
that can inflict genuine grievance...
rather this policing of restricting
     the orthodoxy of the use of language.

p.s.
i found only two paradoxes in this
world...
    schadenfreude: feeding a pleasure
from the misery of others...
as...
  finding wisdom in others' own
forsake of an antithesis of
universal application...
  mainly that, associated:
            to a self-gratifying benefit...
the joke ends within the confines
of schadenfreude...
as does passable "wisdom" attached
to instragram novelty of the "maxim"
by your wisened sages
of the selfie...
  
                  i've been among the russians,
i know what the true uber looks like...
you hitchhike...
hitchhiking? forget that?
ponzie scheme albatross thingy
of a worth of a british mensch?
    funny... a people can so easily
forget the practice of hitchhiking...
so easily: entertaining individual rights...
and: innocent until proven
guilty until some next
               teddy bundy comes along...
and then it's all: ooh! ah! woo'ah!

   you know, i don't like the cartesian
chiral dynamic,
the whole: nietzsche take...
sum ergo cogito...
          i don't like the:

innocentes quoadusque (qua esse)
                           reus....    inversion...

an innocent man might hang...
well... if you have the death penalty:
too late to regurgitate the
original statements...

but? where's the element of redemption
for the innocent man?
why are so many people captivated
by the shawshank redemption?
there's a redemption story...
   in the inverted game?
a jimmy saville walks off scot-free...

the continental model doesn't make
sense with a death penalty...
but without one?
redemption... the atlas "paradox"...
one man usually burdens the fate
of a reciprocate of the unit of one...
but not the many...

me getting laid or not getting laid
is as important to me as:
whether i know about last year's
snowfall...
*** *** ***... all that sort of
******* in the western minds...
*** *** but no children!
recreational procreation without...
any procreation... to begin with...

         i'll admit...
english humour is funny...
but schadenfreude is a borrowed term...
hence the lost in translation
element...
           the english are terrible at
appreciating if not simply applying
the original zeppelin bomb...
after a while: the english just became
annoying toy-whips
of ***** replicas...
       the english knew elevated slap-stick...
with monty python...
with fawlty towers...
          they borrowed a term like
schadenfreude and completely lost the plot...
they once, upon a time,
chanced to play a game of linguistic
comedy...
            
                 i'm pretty ******* sure
the germans relate to schadenfreude in a different
way... i'm guessing:
the deutsche are not prone to ridicule as
the english are...
               the aunglisch are prone
to ridicule out of a sentiment of spite
than out of a repose for giggles...
        
          i don't understand the german sense
of humour,
     but understanding the english attempting
to "understand" the german sense of humour
is an enigma in an enigma in a per se...

such integrated back into
the ol' continental ways...
                       kudos to the brits...
bringing back the commonwealth to stereotype
us europeans with a negative "circumstance"...
now them: ******* up to "correct"
their integration policies... for the commonwealth
peoples of the united wordly wealth of
made in china plastic toys!

     a **** among the brits has
the audacity to tell a german he's not
supposed to feel at home on these isles...
sure... and i will never feel quiet at home
in Islamabad either!
               so? equal count of hubris!
that's the only thing that ****** me about
these isles... god i love this language...
but... when you get your afghani hounds
on me to do your ***** work?!

      even though i'm not: deutsche?!
i'll ******* pretend to be deutsche!
           i'm not here to mop up your failed
integration policies...
i settled on keeping my language...
they settled on keeping their sharia,
their **** pajamas and curry...
while adamantly rejecting their language...
in order to implement their desired changes
by subverting your language...
and you gave your language on a *******
platter...
    
    by subverting your language
to accept their cultural tattoos...
  let me tell you: if a people don't respect
their own culture,
by way of god, by way of language...
and they are "integrating": without speaking
their native mutterzunge?
they're not respecting either culture...
mongrels ahoy!
   what happened to the african-h'americans
not speaking a word of african?

what will they do, ascribe themselves
to ******* scots,
left with no gaelic and more a finnegans' wake
accent gymnastics of some irvine welsh?
nae for no: some glaswegian smart-***
excess of nouns?
      
hell... they would have never built
a colliseum if they saw:
1 + 4 + 6 + 9 = 20
   i.e. I + IV + VI + IX = **
            imagine... a society where letters
worked perfectly as sounds
and as arithmetic concepts of measure.

lucky for me the roman empire never
conquered
the lands i come from...
always with the brits being...
oh so so proud having been conquered
by the romans...
what's the prize... archeological sites?!

much respect as great britain...
but... *****... please...
don't pucnh below the waist...
importing your commonwealth dogs
to mark you out among all the other
europeans like some prized asset with
an inkling into h'american affairs...
thanks to you: i'm bored of looking up
the telescope of h'american ****
with their waning cultural export
of a worthwhile entertainment of appreciating
their music.