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Nat Lipstadt May 2013
There Is But One Law (The Dancer's Coda)


There is but one set of laws,
One that need be obeyed,
One that brooks no heresy,
One that gives no absolution.
One that needs no priests, no canons,
One that that refuses disobedience.

We all bend knee at altar invisible,
Though feasance never requested.

The Laws of Physics.

A body at rest, a body in motion.
Laws immutable, unconditional,
Equations, proofs, demonstrable,
Inequalities inexcusable, banished.

Dancer says:

I am heretic, even these laws I refuse.
My body denies limitations,
My mind believes I will make do
What it could not, but yesterday.

Defiance from wire to wire is the
Fuel in my veins, fear but a detail,
Leaping from from ten meters more,
My Declaration of Independence.

My body plastic, my mind ethereal,
Some mock, call it trickery,
Some hail, call me hero.

There are forces greater than mine,
Forces irrevocable, mathematically superior.
Each day my force grows as well,
Visions imagined supersede the
Tedium of definitions, of boundary lines.

Bend the law, conquer the null, fill the void.

Each day sketch, devise, organize a
New rebellion, follow only one command,
Honor but a single battle cry.

Leap, then fall!

That dancer, your only law,
That heretic, thine only coda.
Action is freedom.

For you are dancer,
Whisper as you leap:
The Fifth Freedom I possess,

The Freedom to Fall.

May 17th, 2013
May 17th, 2013
Octavio Paz  Jan 2010
Coda
Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world.
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable.
To learn to see.
Your glance scattered seeds.
It planted a tree.
     I talk
because you shake its leaves.
JV Beaupre  May 2016
Then and Now
JV Beaupre May 2016
Canto I. Long ago and far away...

Under the bridge across the Kankakee River, Grampa found me. I was busted for truancy. First grade. 1946.

Summer and after school: Paper route, neighborhood yard work, dogsbody in a drugstore, measuring houses for the county, fireman EJ&E railroad, janitor and bottling line Pabst Brewery Peoria. 1952-1962.

Fresh caught Mississippi River catfish. Muddy Yummy. Burlington, Iowa. 1959. Best ever.

In college, Fr. ***** usually confused me with my roommate, Al. Except for grades. St. Procopius College, 1958-62. Rats.

Coming home from college for Christmas. Oops, my family moved a few streets over and forgot to tell me. Peoria, 1961.

The Pabst Brewery lunchroom in Peoria, a little after dawn, my first day. A guy came in and said: "Who wants my horsecock sandwich? ****, this first beer tastes good." We never knew how many he drank. 1962.

At grad school, when we moved into the basement with the octopus furnace, Dave, my roommate, contributed a case of Chef Boyardee spaghettios and I brought 3 cases of beer, PBRs.  Supper for a month. Ames. 1962.

Sharon and I were making out in the afternoon, clothes a jumble. Walter Cronkite said, " President Kennedy has been shot…”. Ames, 1963.

I stood in line, in my shorts, waiting for the clap-check. The corporal shouted:  "All right, you *******, Uncle and the Republic of Viet Nam want your sorry *****. Drop 'em".  Des Moines. Deferred, 1964.

Married and living in student housing. Packing crate furniture. Pammel Court, 1966.

One of many undistinguished PhD theses on theoretical physics. Ames. 1967.

He electrified the room. Every woman in the room, regardless of age, wanted him, or seemed to. The atmosphere was primeval and dripping with desire. In the presence of greatness. Palo Alto, 1968.

US science jobs dried up. From a mountain-top, beery conversation, I got a research job in Germany. Boulder, 1968. Aachen, 1969.

The first time I saw automatic weapons at an airport. Geneva, 1970.

I toasted Rembrandt with sparkling wine at the Rijksmuseum. He said nothing. Amsterdam International Conference on Elementary Particles. 1971.

A little drunk, but sobering fast: the guard had Khrushchev teeth.
Midnight, alone, locked in a room at the border.
Hours later, release. East Berlin, 1973. Harrassment.

She said, "You know it's remarkable that we're not having an affair." No, it wasn't. George's wife.  Germany, 1973.

"Maybe there really are quarks, but if so, we'll never see them." Truer than I knew.  Exit to Huntsville, 1974.

On my first day at work, my first federal felony. As a joke, I impersonated an FBI agent. What the hell? Huntsville. 1974. Guess what?-- No witnesses left! 2021.

Hard work, good times, difficult times. The first years in Huntsville are not fully digested and may stay that way.

The golden Lord Buddha radiated peace with his smile. Pop, pop. Shots in the distance. Bangkok. 1992.

Accomplishment at work, discord at home. Divorce. Huntsville. 1994. I got the dogs.

New beginnings, a fresh start, true love and life-partner. Huntsville. 1995.

Canto II. In the present century...

Should be working on a proposal, but riveted to the TV. The day the towers fell and nearly 4000 people perished. September 11, 2001.

I started painting. Old barns and such. 2004.

We bet on how many dead bodies we would see. None, but lots of flip-flops and a sheep. Secrets of the Yangtze. 2004

I quietly admired a Rembrandt portrait at the Schiphol airport. Ever inscrutable, his painting had presence, even as the bomb dogs sniffed by. Beagles. 2006.

I’ve lost two close friends that I’ve known for 50-odd years. There aren’t many more. Huntsville. 2008 and 2011.

Here's some career advice: On your desk, keep a coffee cup marked, "No Whining", that side out. Third and final retirement. 2015.

I occasionally kick myself for not staying with physics—I’m jealous of friends that did. I moved on, but stayed interested. Continuing.

I’m eighty years old and walk like a duck. 2021.

Letter: "Your insurance has lapsed but for $60,000, it can be reinstated provided you are alive when we receive the premium." Life at 81. Huntsville, 2022.

Canto III: Coda

Honest distortions emerging from the distance of time. The thin comfort of fading memories. Thoughts on poor decisions and worse outcomes. Not often, but every now and then.

(Begun May 2016)
Nigel Morgan Nov 2012
She said, ‘You are funny, the way you set yourself up the moment we arrive. You look into every room to see if it’s suitable as a place to work. Is there a table? Where are the plugs? Is there a good chair at the right height? If there isn’t, are there cushions to make it so? You are funny.’
 
He countered this, but his excuse didn’t sound very convincing. He knew exactly what she meant, but it hurt him a little that she should think it ‘funny’. There’s nothing funny about trying to compose music, he thought. It’s not ‘radio in the head’ you know – this was a favourite expression he’d once heard an American composer use. You don’t just turn a switch and the music’s playing, waiting for you to write it down. You have to find it – though he believed it was usually there, somewhere, waiting to be found. But it’s elusive. You have to work hard to detect what might be there, there in the silence of your imagination.
 
Later over their first meal in this large cottage she said, ‘How do you stop hearing all those settings of the Mass that you must have heard or sung since childhood?’ She’d been rehearsing Verdi’s Requiem recently and was full of snippets of this stirring piece. He was a) writing a Mass to celebrate a cathedral’s reordering after a year as a building site, and b) he’d been a boy chorister and the form and order of the Mass was deeply engrained in his aural memory. He only had to hear the plainsong introduction Gloria in Excelsis Deo to be back in the Queen’s chapel singing Palestrina, or Byrd or Poulenc.
 
His ‘found’ corner was in the living room. The table wasn’t a table but a long cabinet she’d kindly covered with a tablecloth. You couldn’t get your feet under the thing, but with his little portable drawing board there was space to sit properly because the board jutted out beyond the cabinet’s top. It was the right length and its depth was OK, enough space for the board and, next to it, his laptop computer. On the floor beside his chair he placed a few of his reference scores and a box of necessary ‘bits’.
 
The room had two large sofas, an equally large television, some unexplainable and instantly dismissible items of decoration, a standard lamp, and a wood burning stove. The stove was wonderful, and on their second evening in the cottage, when clear skies and a stiff breeze promised a cold night, she’d lit it and, as the evening progressed, they basked in its warmth, she filling envelopes with her cards, he struggling with sleep over a book.
 
Despite and because this was a new, though temporary, location he had got up at 5.0am. This is a usual time for composers who need their daily fix of absolute quiet. And here, in this cottage set amidst autumn fields, within sight of a river estuary, under vast, panoramic uninterrupted skies, there was the distinct possibility of silence – all day. The double-glazing made doubly sure of that.
 
He had sat with a mug of tea at 5.10 and contemplated the silence, or rather what infiltrated the stillness of the cottage as sound. In the kitchen the clock ticked, the refrigerator seemed to need a period of machine noise once its door had been opened. At 6.0am the central heating fired up for a while. Outside, the small fruit trees in the garden moved vigorously in the wind, but he couldn’t hear either the wind or a rustle of leaves.  A car droned past on the nearby road. The clear sky began to lighten promising a fine day. This would certainly do for silence.
 
His thoughts returned to her question of the previous evening, and his answer. He was about to face up to his explanation. ‘I empty myself of all musical sound’, he’d said, ‘I imagine an empty space into which I might bring a single note, a long held drone of a note, a ‘d’ above middle ‘c’ on a chamber ***** (seeing it’s a Mass I’m writing).  Harrison Birtwistle always starts on an ‘e’. A ‘d’ to me seems older and kinder. An ‘e’ is too modern and progressive, slightly brash and noisy.’
 
He can see she is quizzical with this anecdotal stuff. Is he having me on? But no, he is not having her on. Such choices are important. Without them progress would be difficult when the thinking and planning has to stop and the composing has to begin. His notebook, sitting on his drawing board with some first sketches, plays testament to that. In this book glimpses of music appear in rhythmic abstracts, though rarely any pitches, and there are pages of written description. He likes to imagine what a new work is, and what it is not. This he writes down. Composer Paul Hindemith reckoned you had first to address the ‘conditions of performance’. That meant thinking about the performers, the location, above all the context. A Mass can be, for a composer, so many things. There were certainly requirements and constraints. The commission had to fulfil a number of criteria, some imposed by circumstance, some self-imposed by desire. All this goes into the melting ***, or rather the notebook. And after the notebook, he takes a large piece of A3 paper and clarifies this thinking and planning onto (if possible) a single sheet.
 
And so, to the task in hand. His objective, he had decided, is to focus on the whole rather than the particular. Don’t think about the Kyrie on its own, but consider how it lies with the Gloria. And so with the Sanctus & Benedictus. How do they connect to the Agnus Dei. He begins on the A3 sheet of plain paper ‘making a map of connections’. Kyrie to Gloria, Gloria to Credo and so on. Then what about Agnus Dei and the Gloria? Is there going to be any commonality – in rhythm, pace and tempo (we’ll leave melody and harmony for now)? Steady, he finds himself saying, aren’t we going back over old ground? His notebook has pages of attempts at rhythmizing the text. There are just so many ways to do this. Each rhythmic solution begets a different slant of meaning.
 
This is to be a congregational Mass, but one that has a role for a 4-part choir and ***** and a ‘jazz instrument’. Impatient to see notes on paper, he composes a new introduction to a Kyrie as a rhythmic sketch, then, experimentally, adds pitches. He scores it fully, just 10 bars or so, but it is barely finished before his critical inner voice says, ‘What’s this for? Do you all need this? This is showing off.’ So the filled-out sketch drops to the floor and he examines this element of ‘beginning’ the incipit.
 
He remembers how a meditation on that word inhabits the opening chapter of George Steiner’s great book Grammars of Creation. He sees in his mind’s eye the complex, colourful and ornate letter that begins the Lindesfarne Gospels. His beginnings for each movement, he decides, might be two chords, one overlaying the other: two ‘simple’ diatonic chords when sounded separately, but complex and with a measure of mystery when played together. The Mass is often described as a mystery. It is that ritual of a meal undertaken by a community of people who in the breaking of bread and wine wish to bring God’s presence amongst them. So it is a mystery. And so, he tells himself, his music will aim to hold something of mystery. It should not be a comment on that mystery, but be a mystery itself. It should not be homely and comfortable; it should be as minimal and sparing of musical commentary as possible.
 
When, as a teenager, he first began to set words to music he quickly experienced the need (it seemed) to fashion accompaniments that were commentaries on the text the voice was singing. These accompaniments did not underpin the words so much as add a commentary upon them. What lay beneath the words was his reaction, indeed imaginative extension of the words. He eschewed then both melisma and repetition. He sought an extreme independence between word and music, even though the word became the scenario of the music. Any musical setting was derived from the composition of the vocal line.  It was all about finding the ‘key’ to a song, what unlocked the door to the room of life it occupied. The music was the room where the poem’s utterance lived.
 
With a Mass you were in trouble for the outset. There was a poetry of sorts, but poetry that, in the countless versions of the vernacular, had lost (perhaps had never had) the resonance of the Latin. He thought suddenly of the supposed words of William Byrd, ‘He who sings prays twice’. Yes, such commonplace words are intercessional, but when sung become more than they are. But he knew he had to be careful here.
 
Why do we sing the words of the Mass he asks himself? Do we need to sing these words of the Mass? Are they the words that Christ spoke as he broke bread and poured wine to his friends and disciples at his last supper? The answer is no. Certainly these words of the Mass we usually sing surround the most intimate words of that final meal, words only the priest in Christ’s name may articulate.
 
Write out the words of the Mass that represent its collective worship and what do you have? Rather non-descript poetry? A kind of formula for collective incantation during worship? Can we read these words and not hear a surrounding music? He thinks for a moment of being asked to put new music to words of The Beatles. All you need is love. Yesterday all my troubles seemed so far away. Oh bla dee oh bla da life goes on. Now, now this is silliness, his Critical Voice complains. And yet it’s not. When you compose a popular song the gap between some words scribbled on the back of an envelope and the hook of chords and melody developed in an accidental moment (that becomes a way of clothing such words) is often minimal. Apart, words and music seem like orphans in a storm. Together they are home and dry.
 
He realises, and not for the first time, that he is seeking a total musical solution to the whole of the setting of those words collectively given voice to by those participating in the Mass.
 
And so: to the task in hand. His objective: to focus on the whole rather than the particular.  Where had he heard that thought before? - when he had sat down at his drawing board an hour and half previously. He’d gone in a circle of thought, and with his sketch on the floor at his feet, nothing to show for all that effort.
 
Meanwhile the sun had risen. He could hear her moving about in the bathroom. He went to the kitchen and laid out what they would need to breakfast together. As he poured milk into a jug, primed the toaster, filled the kettle, the business of what might constitute a whole solution to this setting of the Mass followed him around the kitchen and breakfast room like a demanding child. He knew all about demanding children. How often had he come home from his studio to prepare breakfast and see small people to school? - more often than he cared to remember. And when he remembered he became sad that it was no more.  His children had so often provided a welcome buffer from sessions of intense thought and activity. He loved the walk to school, the first quarter of a mile through the park, a long avenue of chestnut trees. It was always the end of April and pink and white blossoms were appearing, or it was September and there were conkers everywhere. It was under these trees his daughter would skip and even his sons would hold hands with him; he would feel their warmth, their livingness.
 
But now, preparing breakfast, his Critical Voice was that demanding child and he realised when she appeared in the kitchen he spoke to her with a voice of an artist in conversation with his critics, not the voice of the man who had the previous night lost himself to joy in her dear embrace. And he was ashamed it was so.
 
How he loved her gentle manner as she negotiated his ‘coming too’ after those two hours of concentration and inner dialogue. Gradually, by the second cup of coffee he felt a right person, and the hours ahead did not seem too impossible.
 
When she’d gone off to her work, silence reasserted itself. He played his viola for half an hour, just scales and exercises and a few folk songs he was learning by heart. This gathering habit was, he would say if asked, to reassert his musicianship, the link between his body and making sound musically. That the viola seemed to resonate throughout his whole body gave him pleasure. He liked the ****** movement required to produce a flowing sequence of bow strokes. The trick at the end of this daily practice was to put the instrument in its case and move immediately to his desk. No pause to check email – that blight on a morning’s work. No pause to look at today’s list. Back to the work in hand: the Mass.
 
But instead his mind and intention seemed to slip sideways and almost unconsciously he found himself sketching (on the few remaining staves of a vocal experiment) what appeared to be a piano piece. The rhythmic flow of it seemed to dance across the page to be halted only when the few empty staves were filled. He knew this was one of those pieces that addressed the pianist, not the listener. He sat back in his chair and imagined a scenario of a pianist opening this music and after a few minutes’ reflection and reading through allowing her hands to move very slowly and silently a few millimetres over the keys.  Such imagining led him to hear possible harmonic simultaneities, dynamics and articulations, though he knew such things would probably be lost or reinvented on a second imagined ‘performance’. No matter. Now his make-believe pianist sounded the first bar out. It had a depth and a richness that surprised him – it was a fine piano. He was touched by its affect. He felt the possibilities of extending what he’d written. So he did. And for the next half an hour lived in the pastures of good continuation, those rich luxuriant meadows reached by a rickerty rackerty bridge and guarded by a troll who today was nowhere to be seen.
 
It was a curious piece. It came to a halt on an enigmatic, go-nowhere / go-anywhere chord after what seemed a short declamatory coda (he later added the marking deliberamente). Then, after a few minutes reflection he wrote a rising arpeggio, a broken chord in which the consonant elements gradually acquired a rising sequence of dissonance pitches until halted by a repetition. As he wrote this ending he realised that the repeated note, an ‘a’ flat, was a kind of fulcrum around which the whole of the music moved. It held an enigmatic presence in the harmony, being sometimes a g# sometimes an ‘a’ flat, and its function often different. It made the music take on a wistful quality.
 
At that point he thought of her little artists’ book series she had titled Tide Marks. Many of these were made of a concertina of folded pages revealing - as your eyes moved through its pages - something akin to the tide’s longitudinal mark. This centred on the page and spread away both upwards and downwards, just like those mirror images of coloured glass seen in a child’s kaleidoscope. No moment of view was ever quite the same, but there were commonalities born of the conditions of a certain day and time.  His ‘Tide Mark’ was just like that. He’d followed a mark made in his imagination from one point to another point a little distant. The musical working out also had a reflection mechanism: what started in one hand became mirrored in the other. He had unexpectedly supplied an ending, this arpegiated gesture of finality that wasn’t properly final but faded away. When he thought further about the role of the ending, he added a few more notes to the arpeggio, but notes that were not be sounded but ghosted, the player miming a press of the keys.
 
He looked at the clock. Nearly five o’clock. The afternoon had all but disappeared. Time had retreated into glorious silence . There had been three whole hours of it. How wonderful that was after months of battling with the incessant and draining turbulence of sound that was ever present in his city life. To be here in this quiet cottage he could now get thoroughly lost – in silence. Even when she was here he could be a few rooms apart, and find silence.
 
A week more of this, a fortnight even . . . but he knew he might only manage a few days before visitors arrived and his long day would be squeezed into the early morning hours and occasional uncertain periods when people were out and about.
 
When she returned, very soon now, she would make tea and cut cake, and they’d sit (like old people they wer
Cné Jul 2017
HIM
Hello love, ya I just got into town
Well I just thought, you know
If you were going to be round....


HER
The lover of my dark desire just calls.
He beckons with a smile.
"Come hither." whispers husky voice
alluring me with guile.
My heart compels me to comply.
My brain says "This is wrong."
And yet, I find my feet move toward
the magnet of his song.

HIM
Did he ever wonder, about that one time
Does he know that those were mine
You know she would surely die
If I ever left her high and dry...


HER
Shhh ... a finger on his urgent lips,
"the rest let's just forget"
I'm aroused by heated passion
igniting lust within ... I'm wet

HIM
No one can know what tomorrow will bring
But for tonight my love, it's you for me
Behind the gas station I just couldn't wait
I put her up against wall in trance like state


HER
Penned against the wall with parted lips
A kiss to potent to breathe
Not nearly private enough, still
my legs part, spread with his knee

HIM
So willing as I pulled up her dress
Gasping for lust with erratic breaths
No need to be bashful when freaking at night
Three moons were shining vividly bright


HER
I surrender. I give up.
Release me from the spell.
No recourse now exists for me
but succumbing to ecstasy, as well.

HIM
Such passion for life
Breeds a hunger for lust
Fulfilling and satisfying
Yet I can't get enough
Her smell on my fingers
As I take to the road
Another memory
Worn into flesh and bone


HER
{CODA}
A chill descends upon my heart
as I watch him drive away.
And as I've done so oft' before,
I wish for him to stay
And though I know he must go
back to his life there.
I close my eyes and smell his scent
dreaming of all we shared.

by
Traveler Tim
&
Cné
We just can't help ourselves...
Just for fun
Dorothy Parker  Jan 2010
Coda
There's little in taking or giving,
  There's little in water or wine;
This living, this living, this living
  Was never a project of mine.
Oh, hard is the struggle, and sparse is
  The gain of the one at the top,
For art is a form of catharsis,
  And love is a permanent flop,
And work is the province of cattle,
  And rest's for a clam in a shell,
So I'm thinking of throwing the battle--
  Would you kindly direct me to hell?
MS Lim Mar 2016
A BETTER RESURRECTION

I have no wit, I have no words, no tears;
My heart within me like a stone
Is numbed too much for hopes or fears;
Look right, look left, I dwell alone;
A lift mine eyes, but dimmed with grief
No everlasting hills I see;
My life is like the falling leaf;
O Jesus, quicken me.
(Book
: The Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath)


Coda of mine:

Is there light after the darkness
if so, how would we know?
we mortals are born to suffer alone
in life's stormy and unfriendly waters wherever we go

but the spirit of man
is larger than man---in suffering he will grow
(purified by a better resurrection)
and richer seeds of wisdom he will surely sow.
* reposted by Weeping Willow, a fellow-writer in HP--many thanks, WW
Build in a very humble way
Its architecture redolent of Europe,
Plain and honest in structure,
The vestibule at the entrance
Replete with old hardbound books
Dust covering the jackets
In their agony of human oblivion,
Every section has shelves under lock
Only to be open on permitted access.

Located in the desert like an oases,
But the desert of readers not waters,
But like any other oasis, it is useful,
At most to the genuine users.

There are books and books all over,
Windows only open after adjustment,
You start at the door step with classics,
Indian, European, American and global classics,
I pumped into Leo Tolstoy at the first glance,
Finely juxtaposed; Anne Karenina after War and peace.

I opened war and peace and I chanced on Napoleon
Then thrill of intellect and bliss of art
Began flowing into my guts like a river
I kept on wandering why Leo Tolstoy
Never became a Christian sub religion,
To be added to the two testaments,
For it to begat the post-modern holy Bible.

My physical peregrination of the hand
Led me to a vase of rosy wine
Its intellectual whiff surpassing all,
The psalms of David and songs of songs
This was nothing but precious discovery;
A thousand Rubiyats of Omar Khayyam
The shoulder of wisdom and love of God
The hero of Sufism and demystifier of heaven,
When in fact I came unto his 69th Rubiyat;
I have heard people say
that those who love wine are ******.
That can't be true, that clearly is a lie.
For if lovers of wine and love are bound for hell,
heaven would be quite empty!

I chewed and chewed fortune out of Rubiyats,
I went through all the thousand Rubiyats,
Only hot Sun and desert sand storms of Lodwar
Are my witnesses among the myriads of bystanders
As life of a reader is similar to the life a writer,
They both derive energy from solitude’s power.

I moved on again to Alfred Jarren
The son of France, the father of mystery;
Pataphysics the science of fantasy
It has the realm beyond metaphysics,
His survey of pataphorical world
Has remained witchcraft
Beyond my simple soul’s grasp.

Paradox is one other worldwide wonder
As I look at an illiterate Turkana Man,
Guarding the library, club in his hand,
His ever week from stubborn hunger,
His sires never go to school, perhaps culture
I looked at him often in my pause for muse,
Why guard knowledge that you can’t use?

I again came upon the Quran
I read it voraciously over and again,
In expectation of great knowledge
Always making Muslims to be noisy,
I have found nothing great in the Quran,
Only regular subversions of Biblical grammar,
Let Muslims sober up to respect Jesus Christ,
His sermon on the Mountain is perfectly enough
as an impeachment to crazed pataphoricals
That Muslims often dare the world with.

I read the Bible again in repetition
Of what I had did ten years ago,
I read psalms, Job and Isaiah,
Gospels and epistles are more nice,
Chronicles and Habakkuk are so dull,
Lamentations are somber poems,
Revelations are esoteric lies,
Kings and Samuel full of chauvinism,
Proverbs and Ecclesiastes are mere clichés
My idea is; mankind can fear God
Minus Jewish intervention.

Now I chanced upon The synagogue of Satan,
A book written by one other crazy American,
His name is Andrew Hitchcock Crichton,
The book is long and spellbinding,
Having historical facts from early centuries,
Chronicling mysterious growth of Jewish empire,
Arranging facts one after another
Dismissing Bush’s anger against Arabs,
Over the bombing of the twin towers
When they are the Jews who Bombed America
As a decoy to induce American wrath,
Thus twin towers bombing was Jewish war ploy
To put Arabs into a rat’s corner.

I came across one funny book
Written by a Indian sage
Its title was Secrets of ***
From male perspective,
I don’t liked the book
For its prurient content,
But to my sad chagrin it was the most read
Its leaves were dog eared and use worn
I spied into the rumour about its tearing,
T it was a hot cake among nuns and priests
Presently living at Lodwar cathedral.

You could also wonder my dear brother
Why a Christian library has works of Marx?
This was my muse as I read Karl Marx,
I mean everything written by Karl Marx,
From Das Kapita to Germany Philosophy,
Selected works to Poverty of philosophy,
18th Brumaire to Integral calculus,
The Manifesto to the letters,
I read Karl Marx as if I was in Russia,
I wondered why Catholics are Liberal
They fear not those who contradict them.

The Holy Grail is visibly placed
In fact at right hand corner,
At the far end on your entrance
I chose to read it
Because of its voluminousity,
The book is about ****** life
Of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene,
This book shares out that;
One time Jesus was found hiding,
Kissing Mary Magdalene, the Grail
In the most affectionate manner ever.

The catholic Library at Lodwar is bad news
It swallowed me like waters of Indian Ocean,
It is located at place called Lokiriama,
It was established by Bishop Mahoni
One other man deserving my respect
He was humble and catholically wise,
Very intelligent and consciously bookish,
His mission was to make the Turkana people
A modern community, but he failed,
He was so disappointed to his hilt
He transferred to the Archdioceses of New-York
Where he began facing problems of the law
On allegations of him being a *******,
I curse the devil for such temptations.

I did meet Yan Martel in this dome of books
His famous book; Life of Mr. Pi
It was my eye opener?
It transformed me from a village bumpkin
To a modern reader of global literature,
I read this book amid my fear of Tigre
But I was thrilled, to my bone marrow
When the main character drunk the blood,
Warm salty blood of the sea turtle.

I got another book with folded pages,
At its mid was the red book marker
Baring the name of the respected priest,
The book was entitled; How to excel as
A ****-******, chapter one focused on gays
Chapter two  focused on lesbians,
But the rest of the book was all homosexuality,
In nothing else, but rosiest terms.

On such encounters I once again went back,
To re-read 89th Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam
It has the following quatrain to echo;
Looking for peace on earth? Foolishness.
Believing in eternal calm? Foolishness.
Once dead your sleep will be short. You may
be reborn as a clump of weeds that will be
trodden underfoot, or as a flower that
will wither in the sun's heat.

African writers were stuffed on one shelve
Labeled African books of English expressions,
But on my request to the project manager,
His name was Peter Kebo, he was Flamboyant
And physically indifferent to Turkana poverty,
We agreed with him to rename the shelves
As; African literature in English Language,
Nobel Laureates are in this section;
Soyinka, Lessing, Coatze and Gordimer
Not forgetting the Egyptian literary tiger
In the name of Mahfouz or Maguiz
I clearly don’t know,
Sembene Ousmane is also here
I read him again for the fourth time,
It’s when I found out the simple truth,
That God’s bits of wood, translates as;
The wretched of the earth,
I read Lessing’s Grass is singing,
She likes ***,
I read Gordimer’s July’s people,
She likes menstrual blood,
I read everything here
As published by James Currey
In his Africa writes back,
I also read the White African Nobelite
Joshua Maxwell Coetzee
He is a wizard of Narrative literature,
I read his life of Mr. K.
I found amusing plots and amusing themes,
I also read Ngugi’s Wizard of the Crow
It is nice; Ngugi is still fighting dictatorship,
Not physically but in a metaphysical manner.

I was again lucky enough
To chance on Caribbean literature,
Is when I read Vitian S Naipaul
The humourist Marxist of Marxists,
I read his Mr. Biswas’s house,
With avidness of an aphrodisiac cur,
His characters like taking a long time
In the toilets, Naipaul is good,
I again chanced on George Flamming
In the Castle of my skin
Caribbean literature stinks of slavery
And counter-slavery.

My landing to the shelve of Latin America,
Was a total blessing; Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Stood out like tor of literature among others,
I began with his Big Maria’s Funeral,
Then I moved on to Love in Times of Cholera,
And then You Can’t Write to the Colonel,
As I spiced my intellect with Melancholic *****,
Then finally I revisited his Stories from Africa
And the Hundred Years of Solitude,
The following morning when I came back,
I read in the newspaper that;
Gabriel Garcia Marquez is dead!
It was sad and poor of me, I mourned him
With long essays and somber poetry,
Then I fell in love with the literatures
of Spanish origin in language sense,
I read Octavio Paz and Pablo Neruda
From Octavio I enjoyed coda,
Between Coming and Going and so on,
Neruda thrilled me with his sense of Marx
Especially his poem; on burying the dog.

European classics section arrested me
I never easily moved out of there,
I chanced on ****** and annals of Goebbels,
Reading Russians like Tolstoy,Chenkov,
Gorky, Gogol and Shelynetsyn was lively,
Chewing Shakespeare from cover to cover
Not spearing Pushkin nor Homer,
Victor Hugo was a relish. Emile Zola
And Maugham, I too enjoyed…

Then my holiday in Lodwar was finally over,
But I am soon going back for my Xmas,
I will directly go back to the European section,
I also remember having come by;
The Satanic Verses of Salman Rushdie,
I will have to  re-read it with passion,
It is my prayer that this time comes
For I to resume my holy duty
In the Catholic Library at Lokiriama
In Lodwar Dioceses of Turkana County
In the Savannah desert in North West
Regions of my country Kenya.
Nat Lipstadt Jan 2014
Dreams of a Child
Created: Jan 23, 2011 5:44 AM
Finished: Jan 30, 2011 4:23 AM
Posted here  Jan 2014
Warning:
a very, very long poem, but within , I promise,
there is a precise stanza about, for you.  
Take it as my gift.
Let me know which you took home to play.

~~~~~~~


Some poets care not
for the
discipline of rules,
laws of punctuation.

Why bother brother,
with putting poems
in antiquated jailhouses,
prisons of vertical bars,
or afford the reader,
the courtesy of horizontal lines?

Question and quotations marks
these day refuted,
as a Catcher In The Rye
conspiracy symbology of big lies,,
political interventionism,
to the creative, most natural
right to be crude.  

Inconvenient impositions,
symbolic flailings, of an
over regulated civilization
in the throes of declination

Punkuation is but a
societal annoyance to
today's creative geniuses,
periods, commas,
nothing more than
a pause to think -
who needs 'em?
when we want to stink
up the atmosphere with vitriols
of half truths and inhuman
but oh so gleeful,
concentrated disparagement
of any person worthy of
nationwide late night mocking merriment.

Such free spirits, vivid animations,
within me do not reign,
though upon occasion,
boy got permission slips  
for breaking bad by invention
of an occasional new word.

New words, white truffles
vocabulic incantations,
my own cupcake creations,
meant to burr, or purr,
their tasty meanings, always,
were readily apparent.

Sometimes we rhyme,
sometimes  we can't;
doth not a reading of a
poetic periodic table
of rants, chants
love poems, and paeans
to a shhhh! pretend,
overarching, poesy ego
require some minimalist format?

How I envy you,
kind observer,
possessor of literary powers
untoward and untold,
delicate touches of a fingertip
rule and rue
poetic invention.

You can zoom away or in
for a closer examination
of unscripted revelations,
incinerate them like an
yesterday's newspaper,
thus demonstrate contempt for
less-than-historic ruminations,
as time has done before.

Witness the crumbled ruins of Ozymandias,
king of kings,
and how the critic's machinations
with a dash of tabasco time,
his works, now museum pieces,
in the Tate Modern's room of
Laughable Human Aspirations.

Don't panic, sigh or groan,
kind observer,
infection inflictions,
content of discontentment,  
ancient whinings that the publisher
long ago listed as discontinued,
will not herein unfold.

What has all these mumbled asides
to do with the Dreams of a Child?

Apologies prolific I distribute
for this long winded profligate prologue;
and even for prior invasions
of your contemplative fantasias,
but my intention certain:
**** out the weak chaff eaters,
feigners of faux interest,
who stanzas ago deserted us,
this confessional lore.

These prior lines conceived
to mislead and deceive,
to refer and deter
send away, the hangers-on
who litter our lives,
with whimpered falsehoods.


So, we begin anew:

Today's lecture entitled
Dreams of a Child
were formatted on a silver disc;
this communication's originations,
seedlings of block
roman black letters
on background of cleansing white,
re things that jar me in the night.

Easy slights that waken
from a fitful, pitted rest,
mental paintings
natured in gem colors,
tourmaline auras,
and vibratto hues
of blue zircons.  .  

I have never lain upon the couch,
in the inner holy of holies,
where one whispers
to the Father Confessor
an original composition,
subject, title and inspiration
of said unique origination,
decidedly of one's own choosing,
roots of the essay's telling,
harvested in the root garden
of one's dreams,
where grow herbs,
spicy ones,
flavors of childhood.

The lush and wooded smells
of a forest of childhood scars,
and it's concomitant
putrefying, fruited rot,
awoke and brokered
a stilted, tremulous sleep.

Went to bed a a man
of modest success,
of modest scenes,
a bond trader, who trades
exactly that:
his word, his bond,
his blessing to his
deal constructions,
all of which, ended with an
irrevocable cri of "Done!"

Yet like you,
I am oft undone.

Dreams.

In truth, not dreams, but
spectral moments of
our lives relived,
a melange of ancient lyrics,
taunts of childhood abusers and
peer humilators
who could
teach the CIA
torture techniques
of WORD boarding, par excellent.

Angelic faces of human ****
that birthed in me a holy duality,
anger and a,
love of words,
my vaccination serum.

Granted a love of
human kindness
from teachers who cherished their
high and mighty tight
to publicly humiliate,
knowing full well
that human laws could not
attempt to have them
justly incarcerated.

Where, where were
the supervisors
who let me be spit upon
in the back seat of a
Fifty's station wagon,
by the brothers of
a sainted dead shepherd?

I am still eight,
sitting on a stoop in the
modest side of town,
towel in hand, so handy,
to wipe the tears shed
for cause,
for the car-pool of suburban boys
who "forgot" to pick me up for
Sunday swim night.  

In high school,
in the back row,
I silently ******
the juice of a Sarte lemon and
essayed a term paper,
upon multiple mirrored
reflections of a man
called Camus.

As another self styled, only living
teenage expert
on "alien nations"
received with pride and trepidation,
a sentence of Ninety Eight,
on my term paper,
but the pedantic predators
deemed it an accident
for I, was  inscribed in their
Upper East Side
Coda of Prejudice,
as merely,
"just" a
man of USDA,
B grade quality intellect.  

Hand me downs
I did not get
as I was the
younger, sole brother,
but worn lint lines
of humiliation
when and where my pants
were "let down"
to accommodate growth spurts
were my growing marks of Cain.

Those growth lines
were economic reality signs,
and were rich fodder for
childhood monsters,
Scions of Income Superiority
who lived in ranch homes in
two car, color tv garage slums,
wearing band new Levis.

In the Sixties,
time of my unsilent spring
wore a cross of
teenage hood,
my hair,
worn long,
Jesus style

Worn with labor pride,
for it was
Made in the USA,
I was a most conventional
revolutionary.

In the parochial jail
of educated guesses,
where society's lesson plans
of all that was bad
were O so well taught,
I was apart, ahead,
of Our Crowd,
but not too, radically.  

But a spiteful
Principal of No Principle,
deemed my locks a
disruptive influence,
so to exorcise my rebel streak,
so to crucify his "Jesus Freak,"
so to exercise his diminutive spirit
a pompous uber man,
he had me shorn
like a sheep,
thrice
in just one day,

He loved his full employment
of his pharoic entitlement,
The Educator's Power of Abuse,

I was so denuded
of human strength,
the Italian barbers of the
East 86th Street subway station,
wept for me,
their cri du coeur,
Angels in Heaven did hear
and from God
did dare demand
an explanation!

He roared in manner celestial,
"Is he not my child too,
and if he be treated
in style *******,
it is purposed and willful."

Pornographic compilations of
slaps across a child's face,
I've got plenty
of and in My Space,
should you care to
add your own,
down under,
got plenty of room
for all comers    

In a Facebook world,
I pride, not pretend,
that having fewer "friends"  
is my honest and true
reflection of who I am, and,
life lessons learned -
quality, not quantity.  

Victims of discrimination
can be most discriminating
in matters of
human games, associations.  
****** or word,
lack of taking care
is not heart healthy.

Tried to forgive
the despotic progenitors,
of some of that which
is good within me
that, irony of ironies,
they can claim the title,
creator;

Tried to give them
what I had gotten -
from the happy malcontented  
evil spreaders,

That grace, grace is
the only methodology,
an inestimable but
valuable lost leader,
the only way
to survive on
this planet of
hardtack and
caste striation.  

Though still quick to anger
at the cutters and denigrators
I am quick still to
confess my own failings, and forgive those
of plain and honest folk.

Unfortunately, kind observer,
you had to share my brunt,
syllabic Iwo Jima battles
of a decaying verbal moonscape
to reach the denouement,
for now we have,
mostly arrived

Most likely you too
have long ago
deserted me like
so many others,
no matter,
this modulated breath
was born and released
from my heaving chest and
as I knew it,
know this:

My Absaloms
where ever you be,
presumably and hopefully in hell,
I give you thanks
and a mini bar drink
of absolution.
a tin medal of appreciation,
for the
Marked Improvement
you inadvertently nurtured
in this restless,
voyagered soul.

My ancient enemies
till now, be advised,
forgive and forget
was and has not  
fully formed
in my penitential template,

Unlike your natural capacity
for cruelty and mean
birthed unto you
in your third rate
genetic melange,
forgiveness is taught
in a Master Class
at a famous school of Ethical Drama,
that I did not attend

Though resident in
a better place,
my root garden,
the bitter herbs you planted
still grow but,
are welcome in sweet brotherhood,
until the selah days
of just one flavor.

Though the universe's expansion
is of a pace such that
time and space definitions
will stretch and warp
and need be
refined, replaced,
the governing principle here.
need not be rephrased.  

For goodness
from evil
doth come
and should your
evil spectres
once more try
for resurrection
in my benighted
dream world.
you will find the doors
locked and barred,
upon them a sign
not verbose,

**Done.
Whew.
Steele  May 2015
Al Coda
Steele May 2015
Keening high notes mark our eyes
with scattered tears that multiply
with every breath we take in vain
and every longing lover's sigh.

Cellos resonate our hearts.
Timpani drums announce our march,
and when choirs sound like screams of pain
I know what it feels like to remain apart.
                            
                                                     Al Coda
                                                Let's try this again,
                                                ere this depression,
                                                this lonely obsession,
                                                eats away at my brain.

Keening high notes mark my eyes,
because I know what it feels like to remain apart.
It's the requiem of a broken heart.
It's the sound of a Lark Ascending
that falls before the symphony's ending;
The caged lonely bird that dies at the start.

— The End —