Flashing lights,
Chocolate delights,
crack a can, sip through it,
blast some music,
sounds like a party?
A party for one...
sorry Shania Twain,
ain't no party for two tonight...
this gal goin solo...

having lived in california until i was seven,
and then moving to virginia beach for one year,
and then living in chesapeake for the rest of my life,
my childhood feels scattered.

i don't remember california all that well.
i remember palm trees lining the streets,
and listening to shania twain with my mom.
i remember the ben & jerry's on a corner,
and i remember the two boxers next door.

i remember two people, too. mostly, anyway.
there's you, jacob. and you, kayla.

jacob, you were my first real friend.
our families were inseparable,
we lived right next door to each other.
we were inseparable too.

i remember digging around in the garden,
that we quickly turned into a mud bog.
i remember you having chicken pox,
and our moms letting us play together.
[funny, i didn't get it until i was nine.]

i remember watching you crash,
all the blood on your dirtbike and face.
i remember visiting your school...first grade.
god, two years seemed like such a huge difference.

i remember throwing you a softball,
and you missed it, and got a ****** nose.
i think that was the first time i felt guilt.

but most of all, i remember that game.
with the dinosaurs, and a big field,
and an even bigger maze inside.
and, of course, your room.
your twin sized bed, and the huge bean bag.
even then we couldn't close the door.

we received your pictures for a long time.
so i feel like i might recognize you on the street.
but not for who you are, really. more of a...
deja vu type of thing, if you will.
i miss you, distantly. but deeply.

and kayla, well.
what i remember most of us...
is the purple jewelry box full of notes.
because you were always grounded.
then i think about making mud pies,
as we sat on the fence between us.
and...unfortunately, that one night.
the raid, and not seeing you again.
hiding the notes, until they stopped.
i think you gave me my first broken heart.
but it's okay, i forgive you. it stopped hurting...
oh, about ten years ago. i think of you, though.
i hope your parents cleaned up,
and i like to think you're happy.

you two represent my innocence.
my childhood. thank you.
i miss it so very much.

Let me talk you off that edge
I can see your standing on
Your standing calm
But remember life is beautiful

Don't cut your wrist
Don't look for no tomorrow
Don't feel hate
Don't feel sorrow

And I've been there before
I know you won't hear
Unless I'm compelling
Please hear what it is I'm telling you

I have blood in my veins
Boiling times a Scorpio
My birthday was yesterday
Really was it happy?

But still I'm holding on
Can I be strong? And make the change,
I'm waiting on
I can't if I don't believe it

Well I believe
I believe
I believe in a bright tomorrow
I hope that you do to

You remember Byron from other poems
I told you about. You can look them up
Later. Most of what I said was true
(Same as Twain -  Mark, not Shania).
When I arrived for my visit, Byron's good friend,
Clive, was there, holding a cold one in his country hands,
Before the wood stove in Byron's man-cave.
They were talking about welding joints,
Or the pitch of a roof frame, or something
I know ******* squat about.
Both men, uneducated, but clever as hell.
Without writing down a measurement,
Or drawing a sketch,
Could reproduce the Taj Mahal.
Like Plato's cave dwellers, they just see it, make it, nail it.
I brought up the problems my daughter is having
With her toy poodle,
And Clive joined in about his disobedient
Great Dane. I'll call him Laertes,
Though his real name is Butch.
Clive says Laertes never stops barking,
Shock collars don't work.
Treats were to no avail.
Obedience School only worked at school.
I could see Byron's hand on his chin,
Looking off and up to his left,
Out the window over the wood stove:
Have you tried speaking Danish to him, asked Byron.
Enough said.

and when you hear: watcha 'tinking? your reply? mostly concerning a ****, & a fudge factory, & a few brownies, topped with some custard goo, what's that to you?, you skivvy missus?

yes, we alcoholics sometimes get the jerks,
what the junkies call the nods,
notably via unconscious irritation
when solving sudoku puzzles -
you know, those japanese blindspots,
waiting for a wet ***** entry re-entry into
the garden of eden -
and without diacritic indicators
you will state *shania -
                     i have lactose in my brain,
and the killer proteins are coming...
         alzheimer's:
     proteins       eating          fat;
i swear i swear i swear i was ready
with the dutch cheese sponge!
       holes? oh, nibbled through,
the blue cheese mouse trap didn't work...
oops...
           put the mice off,
as it would put off any known living thing...
**** making ice-cream with it to boogie
on the palette.
   a bit like mikey mouse replacing ol'
jack, in the box...
        hardly the ****** surprise;
what did you expect in the mousetrap,
a ******* cockroach?!
  wasabi irony... probably a bigger statement
of english than shakespeare,
added to the tongues of humanity.
now, the entry point of unessential aphorisms:

1. drinking does what ****** doesn't:
  keeps you focused,
and if you master the craft,
you get to sport a mid-day sun
with a lot of housewives...

2. **** it, whatever...

3. the led zeppelin vs. black sabbath debate
always misses the ****** of black purple...
  never learned to say the big o...

4. what a waste, being so lucky...

5. i might only make an incremental difference
in this world, but at least i still do not
disrupt the status quo totalis of humanity,
id est: at least people around me end up
living the boring reality of:
      the people around me...
kinda autistic, i admit, nonetheless true.

6. post scriptum of point V -
    a bit like a butterfly watching a tornado's
whirl, and then, unlike a fly incubated
in a spiderweb, watching the ballerina's twirl...

7. what's so poetic about philosophy in
english... i.e. the metaphor...
i.e. the " " membrane, the inverted
commas... commas?
    aren't they supposed to sit down
below, rather than be saintly halos of
the above? i'm guessing that's the source
of why the english tongue doesn't bother
diacritical indicators, inverted what?!
    commas? oh, so that's one citation
mark in a sentence?
      i'm getting really copernican confused...
smacker on the face for attempting
to be "smart": i know... never did anyone
any good...
                let's just call the " " encapsulation
of a word the poetic way...
that's called a metaphor...
   or it's really rather an ambiguity per se...
then again: i guess, no.

8. chinese, eh? as a language, everyone admires
it...

9. my grandfather always admired how
i rolled my tobacco,
making perfect rollies, and pretending
to be needle in hand,
  perfecting the rollie even further,
by warming up the tobacco in the roll-up,
my ex-gf always took the **** out of me
for not being able to roll the perfect
spliff, and then i did,
  and then, for some reason, she stopped
talking.

10. the chinese tongue in translation,
is the most unspectacular language in existence,
no wonder the origin of the haiku -
that's chinese for simple math (syllable
arithmetic) -
the chinese can only count up to a haiku -
and even though their phonetic encoding
is twice the spectacular endeavour of any man,
chinese in translation?
        about as spectacular as a cow's ****...
choo chow mein...
  chew chin mane?
                  i wouldn't even bother
trying to untangle that asiatic bowl of noodles...
rice crispy fortune cookies,
   a bowl of regurgitated maggots;
              cf. mongol!
    and what, arabic with its fiddly-squiddly
attempt at coherent, is not less an octopus
waving to imply hello?
  yeah, and i'm the next mary ******* poppins!
shim shimminy me away...
   oh right, forgot to mention,
you really wouldn't say the name shania twain
like that...
     you'd need syllable indicators,
hellfire / punctuation marks from above...
    hmm, how to cut up a lovely...
    sháníā -
       sha-nigh-ah:
   oh look, seems i'm an american linguist
after all...
   keeping the hyphen handy... turning into
a linguistic chemist...
  ever watchful of the electron migration diagrams...
pompous & sarcastic ****-wit i was
always supposed to be...
           which bring me to the final
observation:

11. i kinda figured that there's a law of prefix,
suffix & affix...
  but with tongues that prescribe their
phonetic units (i.e. letters) the status of names,
i figured it ought to be ease to understand
how they cut these names and leave the indicative
remaining stressor...
  akin to the hebrew, notably?
    via
yes yes, we know the caron on s (š) and the caron
on c (č) implies the english sh - and ch:
**** via cheap respectively -
  this amount of god is a sneaky ******:
loves to hide in punctuation marks,
whether from the godly diacritical perspective,
or the devilish rhetorically classical
punctuative.
point being... ehyeh...
                   yes, but how does the aleph
make it to be invoked in the word?
         א... aleph...
                      יה‎ה‎א -
and these names are burnt tattoos on my
psyche - i have enough raw bile to
do the opposite of dispersing the hebrews:
i have enough of the *******:
to make them congregate;
but tell me, how do you actually write
ehyeh (יה‎ה‎א) - by asking the prefix / suffix /
affix question? how do you cut upen
aleph, to extract the epsilon,
   disregarding the alpha the lambda or
the phi (φ)?
these ancient people are all the same...
the greeks are gay with their φ & θ -
   ε & η or o & ω...
         just like the hebrews with their gemini
zodiac orientation of ayin (ע) & aleph (א‎)...
sure, these languages are classic,
but they're also primitive,
which is why the "barbarians" brought
diacritical distinctions to rome,
                       enforcing it, stabilising it (it being
the latin, you can't even begin to imagine
how thankful they were to have
ditched the runic).

- i'm still fascinated by the geometry of language,
R actually does look like rolling...
   O is always going to be a wheel,
and Y will always remain a yew tree,
or the beginning of satan's entry into
the world of talk.

Aguiyo
Pacquio
Shania
Mariah
Shenequet
Kennekuk
Lend a hand
But take a message to Maria?
Shania you handle it?
and Mark Aguirre?
Maybe
He's wiry enough
Hank wasn't

Shania ngarra Nelvin
he said in an SMS
she showed me,
grinning.

Smoke lingering in the kitchen,
a bucket catching drips of liquid
filling the silence with a comforting
consistency. A figure in the corner
with a cigarette in a chair

“we really get the snakes through here.

You know those lines carved in the desert by rainbow serpents brought me.
And the trains used to come by here, it was the train station.
On the grass I would make baskets and talk to the boys with my artwork.
cute ones, ones with diamonds to spare”

Outside; two lapwings, guarding
their nest in military formation.
On the roads, armored vehicles with armored people.
Police checking the parks for alcohol.

The palms wilting down, dead
brown, tangling the canopy
light in sporadic glimpses
on the concrete walls.

I remember a dark and weary night, slowly losing sight—
A sense of lost—an absence, if you must.
Forevermore I slowly waste away—Sort of like rust.
As I slept the night away—A nightmare awaits me.

The darkness tonight is curious and awfully strange—
The starlight that lights the way—Guides the wise men astray.
No fear or hesitation stops the day.
forevermore, the fear overwhelms me—
Like a vicious stray dog ready to attack.

I slowly begin to fade away—Again!
Into a deep sleep or call it a somber.
I am dreaming—Of death and bombers.
Forevermore I awake—it's already another day.
Like it never happened— Again I wander.

The day is loud, and full wandering wonders—of a child.
Excitement throughout— the valley of death.
A war! Another fret? Another death! The children are dying!—Innocents.
Mothers are crying— for the death of the younger one—
Now nightmares are appearing.

BOOM! BANG!!—The loud bangs.
A deadly bang that rings throughout the land.
Awake— reality seeping through these veins—
As if they were chains digging in the fragile skin.
Fevermore—do only nightmares wander?

Those wandering wonders are dead.
Lead to the valley of death—Where the unsaid is said.
Nevermore shall there be wandering wonders.


~Shania