And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightening of flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully-grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park or capture it
More thoroughly.  You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open

Sadly,
you can take the boy
out of the jungle,
but you can
never
take the jungle
out of the boy.
- mce

Having defied gravity
(not me personally
but by proxy
namely through
a dog, monkey and Soyuz
and fruit flies and bullfrogs
and lately through NASA)
I defy humility
I brave it, I challenge it
for there’s too much hypocrisy
in humility
For humility is such
that it never speaks its name
For when it speaks of Humility
it is Sans Humility
Take me
for example -
you hardly hear me
mention myself as Saint Humility, do you?
But that’s what I am, my other name: Humility
But people keep insisting on calling me Saint Humility
But I defy Humility


POSTSCRIPT
I also defy repetition
and over-emphasis
and contradiction, paradox
But, it must not be left unsaid -
in defying humility,
I think I’ve also
quite inadvertently
defined humility: *Saint Me

Eyes. Heartbreak is her sunlit memory barely held by a wooden clothespin. It hangs and glares before your eyes, mocking as it fades into an empty filmstrip. Heartbreak is a lost soul left to perish in her ghost-town, and warmer sunsets are lifetimes away. A wonderwall left standing, pinned polaroids, desperate scratches. You had fought hard and long, for this, but homes are made for breaking and crumbling and leaving, especially in the losing side.

Mouth. Heartbreak is a paper-tag of a goodbye caught in her lips. It is a metaphor that melts at the soft space under your tongue, a certain bittersweet taste made for drowning with a cold lager, a stranger’s whispers, and the perils of his unfiltered cigarette kiss. Heartbreak is taming a manic scream into a delicate, defeated sigh, out of sync with the way she breathed. But then sighing still hurts, and breathing still hurts because you’re alive – you’re so ******* alive for this unbuffered pain.

Chest. Heartbreak is begging your chest not to break amid a listzomaniac rush. Heartbreak is a prosaic throbbing, a treacherous ***** stuck in your ribs, begging to be held like it doesn’t hurt. Heartbreak is a site of buried lavender lithiums, asking for a eulogy; but silence is equally as oppressive. It is your body betraying you, like a city undone by its smokes. It is a quiet word – not a poem, because poems are beautiful despite the pain, and this isn’t. This isn’t.

Hands. Heartbreak is your shaky hand flipping through the last three pages of a tragedy — a heroine dies, a stray star falls, a maiden leaves on a horse-drawn carriage. There is no changing of the ending. Heartbreak is reaching for the empty space in bed, leaving your fingers in technicolored bruises. How can emptiness break one’s bones? Heartbreak is scrubbing your skin dry, raw, and untouchable where she once laid her kisses. Heartbreak is your nails digging through her letters in utter despair — for invisible ink, a promise in the postscript, an estranged lover in familiar flesh, only to find torn sheets, spilled wine, and finality.

Legs. Heartbreak is coming home to ***** laundry all over these cold, wistful floors. Heartbreak is walking in hushed tiptoes only to trip and fall down a memory lane – a kaleidoscope of all the wounds that can possibly hurt. It is catching an empty train to somewhere unloving her is possible – doable. Heartbreak is teaching your legs to run away from the chaos of her naked skin, and not to fall at her feet. But still, you fall and you fall and you break what’s left of your bones chasing after something that’s already gone – long before it has said goodbye. So turn your back and hold your heart — it breaks harder, louder, and worse before it settles down and sits as quiet aching: a forgotten filmstrip, a soundless breath, a calm poem, a serene night.

You know, my love, that the worlds we have each created for ourselves
are galaxies apart.
Our language games are mutually untranslatable.

We never had a chance, my love. Even I know that.

We would never have been able to achieve an understanding of each other
deep enough
to overcome our fear of the unknown, (and utterly unknowable),
that we symbolize for each other.

The logical, brutally rational part of me knows that we could never have made each other happy.

So why must I, though you have been gone now for quite some time,
keep my mind on you all the time?

Why do I still feel this way, thinking about you every day?
And I don’t even know you.

I write this not to try to change anything.

I have lived long enough not to hold out for what cannot be.

Despite my unwanted, embarrassingly unrealistic romantic dreams from Hell,
well, not exactly Hell,
say, from the dark cave out of which fly the blind bats of activated archetypes,
inevitably,
we still would have had to face eternity, or the lack thereof, alone.

You are still looking forward to an eternal life with God and, I realize now that, ridiculously,
I still can’t stop dreaming of an earthly paradise with you.

Nasty business, my love, that we are each in love with an illusion.

What if we lived in a world in which our longed for illusions
were not just desperate self-delusion but pointed at some kind of Truth?

Do you think that would make us happy?

Isn’t it pretty to think so, my love? Isn’t it pretty to think so?

Part 1 At the Saint’s Book Store (Singapore, 1970)


when I was just 15
and just after
a trip to the National Library
I saw a slim volume
at the Saint’s Book Store
(named after a TV series
and true to the borrowed name,
a second-hand book store)
and its spine said: Kama Sutra


Now that’s a title
they don’t have at the National library,
I mused
and I took it down off the shelf
and stood, agape -
transported to Ancient India
by the very seductive picture
on the cover page;
didn’t make me feel like a saint at all


but my reader’s instinct
got the better of me
and so I opened the book
in which the Introduction
ran boringly longer
than the main meat of the text
and so I went on to
Vatsyayana’s
own enigmatic words


This I must have-
I said to myself,
after only five pages of Vatsyayana
and the sticker label on the
used book replied: $2.50
I bought the book
and walked home
and had no lunch that day






Part 2 ***** Science


What are you reading?
asked little Somu,
a year younger than I was


It’s a Science book,
I said, turning away from him

If it’s a Science book,
the little rascal said,
why are you hiding it behind
another science book?


Mind your own business,
I said,
Hardly taking my eyes
off Vatsyayana’s classic


I’ll mind my own
if you tell me what it is;
otherwise dad
will come to know of it-
and you won’t be able to tell
him to mind his own business


Oh! I said, angry and afraid,
and I threw down my books
(the cover book and the hidden book).
You’re too young for such things.


But he looked at me
as only a dangerous blackmailer can
and I yielded to his request -
I would summarize aloud each chapter
for him as I finished reading each
(That’s the trouble when
fate throws you in
with siblings who don’t read)



And day in and day out
over the next few weeks
I summarized the Kama Sutra –
no, I don’t think I summarized,
I extemporized,
I added details, I confess –
for the benefit of non-reading Somu
that silly pumpkin of a brother
who didn’t understand a word of what I said!






Part 3: Weird History



That night as we lay
on our mats on the floor
Somu asked me:
You know…I was thinking.…
ever since you provided
your summary of the Kama Sutra
delivered in such melodramatic actor’s voice…
I’ve been wondering….Do you think Dad knows
the Kama Sutra?



Oh, I said immediately.
How would
dad know
about the Kama Sutra?
It’s been banned In India
since the middle ages.
He only knows
Hare Rama, Hare Rama…
Now, maybe it’d do you good
to repeat the mantra 100 times
and go to sleep…
You might end up in Vaikunta.


And then insomniac Somu said:
What’s that book you were reading
this afternoon
covered behind your
school History Text Book?


Oh God! Nothing escapes the eyes
of this sibling who came a year after me;
and I had to make an honest reply
or he’d pursue me to the ends of the earth:
Oh, it’s another book
I found at the Saint’s Book Store;
it’s called The Perfumed Garden;
it’s in Arabic and you won’t understand a word;
you can read it when you’re fifty
because that’s how long it’ll take me to translate the work


Somu, the silly sibling ever,
sat up on his mat and looked at me suspiciously:
When did you learn Arabic?
You can’t even read Tamil properly,
you monolingual Indian!



And irritated, I said:
Oh shut up and sleep…
Don’t you go digging into what I do.
I learn all sorts of things in my own time –
and you’re best, little brother,
to stick to Hare Rama, Hare Rama
Or Hara Hara, Siva Siva…




And for that,
the traitor of a brother told all our school mates
I was reading ***** Science
and weird History!







Part 4: The Puritans Come Home



What is a young boy
just turned fifteen,
said the outraged visitor to my father
doing with a copy of Kama Sutra?
And he pointed his bony finger
at me, sitting with my brother Somu
and his thirteen-year-old son Kittu;
we kids sat on the floor
and the dignified adults
sat elevated on the sofa

And he continued:
So, tell me,
what is a young boy like
that doing with erotica?
Is this the time for him?
This is the time for him to study
his textbooks and do his homework.
And the outraged father
pointed his finger at my sheepish father
and he continued:
Your son goes to the same school as my son –
and I’m afraid he’ll be a bad influence.
At History lessons and Literature class,
my son reports,
your boy asked the teachers why
they don’t teach Kama Sutra.
This is outrageous and crazy!



My father looked at me
but couldn’t see my eyes
thanks to my state-welfare
horn-rimmed glasses
and he said to the outraged visitor:
I don’t know…
He reads all sorts of stuff…
He discovers all these books
at the National Library
and bookshops…
He’s read Gandhi’s biography…
and now it appears
he’s discovered Kama Sutra…
Should we really stop him?



The uncertain father slumped in the sofa;
but the outraged father jumped up
dragged his son Kittu to the door
and he turned around and said:
You call these discoveries?
Get him to stick his nose
in his school textbooks!
He will come to no good!
He will bring you shame!
You call these discoveries?
I’m not coming here anymore –
and turning to his son
he said:
Don’t ever talk to that boy;
don’t you ever be near him!

And off they went,
Outraged Father and Trembling Son
into Dusty History.





Conclusion


My father and I looked at each other;
not a word was said –
and he is not here today
for a translation of what I write here now


As for my little brother
that traitor who had told Kittu,
I took both books
The Kama Sutra and The Perfumed Garden
and hit him smack on his head:
and he has remained
stunted physically and mentally ever since








Postscript



What’s that thick book,
said Somu two weeks later,
on the shelf?

That’s Origin of Species
by someone called Charles Darwin,
I said.

Is it one of those ***** books?
he asked.

I think so, I said. I heard some religions
have it blacklisted
so it must be *****.

And what’s that one beside it?

That’s Shakespeare, I said. Complete Works.

Is it another of your ***** books?
said Somu.



Well, I said to this juvenile sibling
just a year younger than I.
There must be many ***** parts in the volume…
You can never escape dirt…it’s all part of life.

<>
"for the vanity of man is as porous as dust...and, in their supreme wisdom, because of this failing, the Gods have decreed, that mankind deserveth no more, no less than his designated allotment of being.
And such it shall be."
writ by
The Marshal Gebbie
June 2023
<>
rise up, rise up,
son up, sun up!
see for yourself a newly birthing day,
the early rays licking the unlocking of a grinning earth's face,
humbling humans and their perpetuity e~mo/notions of eternity.
how are the daily~we, to measure ourselves, versus our ancestry,
by whom shall we~be set forth as examples to our posterity
what tools we fools think, we possess, an etch~a~sketch,
to imprint of who we are,
what we were, and
who we might become, and
be  beauty becoming,
marking our time with ensigns of
words of integers in some giant network
authored, offered, up unashamedly

and even though the sun
does not always greet & meet
the discombobulated human riffraff
every diurnal,
daily identical,
when it shines,
it shines for us all
in an equality of glorious,
it shines upon us all in equality,
it, great equalizer, who restores and
replenishes our colored planets blue green,
a methodology of air, soil and water interactively,
for we are all chemicals, forever effervescent rebirthing

and so it goes.
our cells, are a
rare earth depository,
we plant ourselves
eternally, fed by
foodstuffs of
our ancestors cells,
their brewed ***** dust,
and thus each of us singly
is thus remembered, reconstructed
as are we, both, individually and collectively,
from dust we are, to dust we return, this matériel future prepped


postscript

We Hebrews have a knowingly foolish,
a most beauteous custom, gifted to us by
our forefather Jacob, who when espying a
solitary grave by the road, a nameless marker of
piled-on stones, marking an unknown person last remains,
added one more, add-on to ensure this nameless one yet remembered,
so we too do not pass by without adding a stone, a tiny pebble,
we encumbered, to solidify, perpetuate, renew, ever sustaining,
cannot pass by without adding another rock,
another pebble, that time will surely shift,
but as long we follow this custom,
spiting time's erosive nature and until today,
yet the same, for at a cemetery, every grave,
all marker, ego big, humbled small, topped,
festooned, with small stones, we top them
signaling that this, very spot here, here!
for now, until for ever
shall never
be forgot

<.
and so this peculiar, deteriorating canister places
one more smoothed handy beach pebble, upon
this, his unmarked resting spot
nml
<>
Monday morning
7:10am
an august, August dream day
specified as the 11th day of this
eighth month in one particular
calendric methodology
and as the
17th of Av 5785
in his ancestral calendar