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st64 Apr 2014
Spring comes little, a little. All April it rains.
The new leaves stick in their fists; new ferns still fiddleheads.
But one day the swifts are back. Face to the sun like a child
You shout, 'The swifts are back!'


Sure enough, bolt nocks bow to carry one sky-scyther
Two hundred miles an hour across fullblown windfields.
Swereee swereee. Another. And another.
It's the cut air falling in shrieks on our chimneys and roofs.


The next day, a fleet of high crosses cruises in ether.
These are the air pilgrims, pilots of air rivers.
But a shift of wing, and they're earth-skimmers, daggers
Skilful in guiding the throw of themselves away from themselves.


Quick flutter, a scimitar upsweep, out of danger of touch, for
Earth is forbidden to them, water's forbidden to them,
All air and fire, little owlish ascetics, they outfly storms,
They rush to the pillars of altitude, the thermal fountains.


Here is a legend of swifts, a parable —
When the Great Raven bent over earth to create the birds,
The swifts were ungrateful. They were small muddy things
Like shoes, with long legs and short wings,


So they took themselves off to the mountains to sulk.
And they stayed there. 'Well,' said the Raven, after years of this,
'I will give you the sky. You can have the whole sky
On condition that you give up rest.'


'Yes, yes,' screamed the swifts, 'We abhor rest.
We detest the filth of growth, the sweat of sleep,
Soft nests in the wet fields, slimehold of worms.
Let us be free, be air!'


So the Raven took their legs and bound them into their bodies.
He bent their wings like boomerangs, honed them like knives.
He streamlined their feathers and stripped them of velvet.
Then he released them, Never to Return


Inscribed on their feet and wings. And so
We have swifts, though in reality, not parables but
Bolts in the world's need: swift
Swifts, not in punishment, not in ecstasy, simply


Sleepers over oceans in the mill of the world's breathing.
The grace to say they live in another firmament.
A way to say the miracle will not occur,
And watch the miracle.
Anne Stevenson (b. 1933)
http://www.anne-stevenson.co.uk



Born in Cambridge, England, Anne Stevenson moved between the United States and the United Kingdom numerous times during the first half of her life.
While she considers herself an American, Stevenson qualifies her status: “I belong to an America which no longer really exists.”
Since 1962 she has lived mainly in the U.K., including Cambridge, Scotland, Oxford, and, most recently, North Wales and Durham.

Intersections and borders are common emblems in Stevenson’s work, though the land on which they are drawn is often mutable or shrouded in mist.
She is as comfortable in strict form as she is in free verse, and her poetry, according to poet George Szirtes, is “humane, intelligent and sane, composed of both natural and rational elements, and amply furnished with patches of wit and fury.”

Initially a student of music, Stevenson earned her undergraduate and master’s degrees at the University of Michigan, where she studied with Donald Hall, who encouraged her to pursue poetry.
Resistant to connections with any particular school of contemporary poetry, Stevenson has honed her art apart from many of her peers but within the larger conversation of the form.
As she says, “If I couldn’t overhear the rhythms and sounds established by the long, varied tradition of English poetry—say by Donne, Blake, Keats, Dickinson, Whitman, Frost—I would not be able to hear what I myself have to say. Poems that arise only from a shallow layer of adulterated, contemporary language are rootless. They taste to me like the mass-produced vegetables grown in chemicals for supermarkets.”

Stevenson slowly lost her hearing years ago, though her poetry continues to come first from sound.
In a 2007 essay, Stevenson wrote, “Although I rarely write in set forms now, poems still come to me as tunes in the head. Words fall into rhythms before they make sense. It often happens that I discover what a poem is about through a process of listening to what its rhythms are telling me.”

“Ever since I can remember, I have been aware of living at what E.M. Forster called ‘a slight angle’ to the universe,” she says.
“I have always had to create my own angular environment or perish. But that’s the whole point about borders. It’s the best place from which to be able to see both sides.”
A Poem for Three Voices

Setting:  A Maternity Ward and round about

FIRST VOICE:
I am slow as the world.  I am very patient,
Turning through my time, the suns and stars
Regarding me with attention.
The moon's concern is more personal:
She passes and repasses, luminous as a nurse.
Is she sorry for what will happen?  I do not think so.
She is simply astonished at fertility.

When I walk out, I am a great event.
I do not have to think, or even rehearse.
What happens in me will happen without attention.
The pheasant stands on the hill;
He is arranging his brown feathers.
I cannot help smiling at what it is I know.
Leaves and petals attend me.  I am ready.

SECOND VOICE:
When I first saw it, the small red seep, I did not believe it.
I watched the men walk about me in the office.  They were so flat!
There was something about them like cardboard, and now I had caught it,
That flat, flat, flatness from which ideas, destructions,
Bulldozers, guillotines, white chambers of shrieks proceed,
Endlessly proceed--and the cold angels, the abstractions.
I sat at my desk in my stockings, my high heels,

And the man I work for laughed:  'Have you seen something awful?
You are so white, suddenly.'  And I said nothing.
I saw death in the bare trees, a deprivation.
I could not believe it.  Is it so difficult
For the spirit to conceive a face, a mouth?
The letters proceed from these black keys, and these black keys proceed
From my alphabetical fingers, ordering parts,

Parts, bits, cogs, the shining multiples.
I am dying as I sit.  I lose a dimension.
Trains roar in my ears, departures, departures!
The silver track of time empties into the distance,
The white sky empties of its promise, like a cup.
These are my feet, these mechanical echoes.
Tap, tap, tap, steel pegs.  I am found wanting.

This is a disease I carry home, this is a death.
Again, this is a death.  Is it the air,
The particles of destruction I **** up?  Am I a pulse
That wanes and wanes, facing the cold angel?
Is this my lover then?  This death, this death?
As a child I loved a lichen-bitten name.
Is this the one sin then, this old dead love of death?

THIRD VOICE:
I remember the minute when I knew for sure.
The willows were chilling,
The face in the pool was beautiful, but not mine--
It had a consequential look, like everything else,
And all I could see was dangers:  doves and words,
Stars and showers of gold--conceptions, conceptions!
I remember a white, cold wing

And the great swan, with its terrible look,
Coming at me, like a castle, from the top of the river.
There is a snake in swans.
He glided by; his eye had a black meaning.
I saw the world in it--small, mean and black,
Every little word hooked to every little word, and act to act.
A hot blue day had budded into something.

I wasn't ready.  The white clouds rearing
Aside were dragging me in four directions.
I wasn't ready.
I had no reverence.
I thought I could deny the consequence--
But it was too late for that.  It was too late, and the face
Went on shaping itself with love, as if I was ready.

SECOND VOICE:
It is a world of snow now.  I am not at home.
How white these sheets are.  The faces have no features.
They are bald and impossible, like the faces of my children,
Those little sick ones that elude my arms.
Other children do not touch me:  they are terrible.
They have too many colors, too much life.  They are not quiet,
Quiet, like the little emptinesses I carry.

I have had my chances.  I have tried and tried.
I have stitched life into me like a rare *****,
And walked carefully, precariously, like something rare.
I have tried not to think too hard.  I have tried to be natural.
I have tried to be blind in love, like other women,
Blind in my bed, with my dear blind sweet one,
Not looking, through the thick dark, for the face of another.

I did not look.  But still the face was there,
The face of the unborn one that loved its perfections,
The face of the dead one that could only be perfect
In its easy peace, could only keep holy so.
And then there were other faces.  The faces of nations,
Governments, parliaments, societies,
The faceless faces of important men.

It is these men I mind:
They are so jealous of anything that is not flat!  They are jealous gods
That would have the whole world flat because they are.
I see the Father conversing with the Son.
Such flatness cannot but be holy.
'Let us make a heaven,' they say.
'Let us flatten and launder the grossness from these souls.'

FIRST VOICE:
I am calm.  I am calm.  It is the calm before something awful:
The yellow minute before the wind walks, when the leaves
Turn up their hands, their pallors.  It is so quiet here.
The sheets, the faces, are white and stopped, like clocks.
Voices stand back and flatten.  Their visible hieroglyphs
Flatten to parchment screens to keep the wind off.
They paint such secrets in Arabic, Chinese!

I am dumb and brown.  I am a seed about to break.
The brownness is my dead self, and it is sullen:
It does not wish to be more, or different.
Dusk hoods me in blue now, like a Mary.
O color of distance and forgetfulness!--
When will it be, the second when Time breaks
And eternity engulfs it, and I drown utterly?

I talk to myself, myself only, set apart--
Swabbed and lurid with disinfectants, sacrificial.
Waiting lies heavy on my lids.  It lies like sleep,
Like a big sea.  Far off, far off, I feel the first wave tug
Its cargo of agony toward me, inescapable, tidal.
And I, a shell, echoing on this white beach
Face the voices that overwhelm, the terrible element.

THIRD VOICE:
I am a mountain now, among mountainy women.
The doctors move among us as if our bigness
Frightened the mind.  They smile like fools.
They are to blame for what I am, and they know it.
They hug their flatness like a kind of health.
And what if they found themselves surprised, as I did?
They would go mad with it.

And what if two lives leaked between my thighs?
I have seen the white clean chamber with its instruments.
It is a place of shrieks.  It is not happy.
'This is where you will come when you are ready.'
The night lights are flat red moons.  They are dull with blood.
I am not ready for anything to happen.
I should have murdered this, that murders me.

FIRST VOICE:
There is no miracle more cruel than this.
I am dragged by the horses, the iron hooves.
I last.  I last it out.  I accomplish a work.
Dark tunnel, through which hurtle the visitations,
The visitations, the manifestations, the startled faces.
I am the center of an atrocity.
What pains, what sorrows must I be mothering?

Can such innocence **** and ****?  It milks my life.
The trees wither in the street.  The rain is corrosive.
I taste it on my tongue, and the workable horrors,
The horrors that stand and idle, the slighted godmothers
With their hearts that tick and tick, with their satchels of instruments.
I shall be a wall and a roof, protecting.
I shall be a sky and a hill of good:  O let me be!

A power is growing on me, an old tenacity.
I am breaking apart like the world.  There is this blackness,
This ram of blackness.  I fold my hands on a mountain.
The air is thick.  It is thick with this working.
I am used.  I am drummed into use.
My eyes are squeezed by this blackness.
I see nothing.

SECOND VOICE:
I am accused.  I dream of massacres.
I am a garden of black and red agonies.  I drink them,
Hating myself, hating and fearing.  And now the world conceives
Its end and runs toward it, arms held out in love.
It is a love of death that sickens everything.
A dead sun stains the newsprint.  It is red.
I lose life after life.  The dark earth drinks them.

She is the vampire of us all.  So she supports us,
Fattens us, is kind.  Her mouth is red.
I know her.  I know her intimately--
Old winter-face, old barren one, old time bomb.
Men have used her meanly.  She will eat them.
Eat them, eat them, eat them in the end.
The sun is down.  I die.  I make a death.

FIRST VOICE:
Who is he, this blue, furious boy,
Shiny and strange, as if he had hurtled from a star?
He is looking so angrily!
He flew into the room, a shriek at his heel.
The blue color pales.  He is human after all.
A red lotus opens in its bowl of blood;
They are stitching me up with silk, as if I were a material.

What did my fingers do before they held him?
What did my heart do, with its love?
I have never seen a thing so clear.
His lids are like the lilac-flower
And soft as a moth, his breath.
I shall not let go.
There is no guile or warp in him.  May he keep so.

SECOND VOICE:
There is the moon in the high window.  It is over.
How winter fills my soul!  And that chalk light
Laying its scales on the windows, the windows of empty offices,
Empty schoolrooms, empty churches.  O so much emptiness!
There is this cessation.  This terrible cessation of everything.
These bodies mounded around me now, these polar sleepers--
What blue, moony ray ices their dreams?

I feel it enter me, cold, alien, like an instrument.
And that mad, hard face at the end of it, that O-mouth
Open in its gape of perpetual grieving.
It is she that drags the blood-black sea around
Month after month, with its voices of failure.
I am helpless as the sea at the end of her string.
I am restless.  Restless and useless.  I, too, create corpses.

I shall move north.  I shall move into a long blackness.
I see myself as a shadow, neither man nor woman,
Neither a woman, happy to be like a man, nor a man
Blunt and flat enough to feel no lack.  I feel a lack.
I hold my fingers up, ten white pickets.
See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks.
I cannot contain it.  I cannot contain my life.

I shall be a heroine of the peripheral.
I shall not be accused by isolate buttons,
Holes in the heels of socks, the white mute faces
Of unanswered letters, coffined in a letter case.
I shall not be accused, I shall not be accused.
The clock shall not find me wanting, nor these stars
That rivet in place abyss after abyss.

THIRD VOICE:
I see her in my sleep, my red, terrible girl.
She is crying through the glass that separates us.
She is crying, and she is furious.
Her cries are hooks that catch and grate like cats.
It is by these hooks she climbs to my notice.
She is crying at the dark, or at the stars
That at such a distance from us shine and whirl.

I think her little head is carved in wood,
A red, hard wood, eyes shut and mouth wide open.
And from the open mouth issue sharp cries
Scratching at my sleep like arrows,
Scratching at my sleep, and entering my side.
My daughter has no teeth.  Her mouth is wide.
It utters such dark sounds it cannot be good.

FIRST VOICE:
What is it that flings these innocent souls at us?
Look, they are so exhausted, they are all flat out
In their canvas-sided cots, names tied to their wrists,
The little silver trophies they've come so far for.
There are some with thick black hair, there are some bald.
Their skin tints are pink or sallow, brown or red;
They are beginning to remember their differences.

I think they are made of water; they have no expression.
Their features are sleeping, like light on quiet water.
They are the real monks and nuns in their identical garments.
I see them showering like stars on to the world--
On India, Africa, America, these miraculous ones,
These pure, small images.  They smell of milk.
Their footsoles are untouched.  They are walkers of air.

Can nothingness be so prodigal?
Here is my son.
His wide eye is that general, flat blue.
He is turning to me like a little, blind, bright plant.
One cry.  It is the hook I hang on.
And I am a river of milk.
I am a warm hill.

SECOND VOICE:
I am not ugly.  I am even beautiful.
The mirror gives back a woman without deformity.
The nurses give back my clothes, and an identity.
It is usual, they say, for such a thing to happen.
It is usual in my life, and the lives of others.
I am one in five, something like that.  I am not hopeless.
I am beautiful as a statistic.  Here is my lipstick.

I draw on the old mouth.
The red mouth I put by with my identity
A day ago, two days, three days ago.  It was a Friday.
I do not even need a holiday; I can go to work today.
I can love my husband, who will understand.
Who will love me through the blur of my deformity
As if I had lost an eye, a leg, a tongue.

And so I stand, a little sightless.  So I walk
Away on wheels, instead of legs, they serve as well.
And learn to speak with fingers, not a tongue.
The body is resourceful.
The body of a starfish can grow back its arms
And newts are prodigal in legs.  And may I be
As prodigal in what lacks me.

THIRD VOICE:
She is a small island, asleep and peaceful,
And I am a white ship hooting:  Goodbye, goodbye.
The day is blazing.  It is very mournful.
The flowers in this room are red and tropical.
They have lived behind glass all their lives, they have been cared for
        tenderly.
Now they face a winter of white sheets, white faces.
There is very little to go into my suitcase.

There are the clothes of a fat woman I do not know.
There is my comb and brush.  There is an emptiness.
I am so vulnerable suddenly.
I am a wound walking out of hospital.
I am a wound that they are letting go.
I leave my health behind.  I leave someone
Who would adhere to me:  I undo her fingers like bandages:  I go.

SECOND VOICE:
I am myself again.  There are no loose ends.
I am bled white as wax, I have no attachments.
I am flat and virginal, which means nothing has happened,
Nothing that cannot be erased, ripped up and scrapped, begun again.
There little black twigs do not think to bud,
Nor do these dry, dry gutters dream of rain.
This woman who meets me in windows--she is neat.

So neat she is transparent, like a spirit.
how shyly she superimposes her neat self
On the inferno of African oranges, the heel-hung pigs.
She is deferring to reality.
It is I.  It is I--
Tasting the bitterness between my teeth.
The incalculable malice of the everyday.

FIRST VOICE:
How long can I be a wall, keeping the wind off?
How long can I be
Gentling the sun with the shade of my hand,
Intercepting the blue bolts of a cold moon?
The voices of loneliness, the voices of sorrow
Lap at my back ineluctably.
How shall it soften them, this little lullaby?

How long can I be a wall around my green property?
How long can my hands
Be a bandage to his hurt, and my words
Bright birds in the sky, consoling, consoling?
It is a terrible thing
To be so open:  it is as if my heart
Put on a face and walked into the world.

THIRD VOICE:
Today the colleges are drunk with spring.
My black gown is a little funeral:
It shows I am serious.
The books I carry wedge into my side.
I had an old wound once, but it is healing.
I had a dream of an island, red with cries.
It was a dream, and did not mean a thing.

FIRST VOICE:
Dawn flowers in the great elm outside the house.
The swifts are back.  They are shrieking like paper rockets.
I hear the sound of the hours
Widen and die in the hedgerows.  I hear the moo of cows.
The colors replenish themselves, and the wet
Thatch smokes in the sun.
The narcissi open white faces in the orchard.

I am reassured.  I am reassured.
These are the clear bright colors of the nursery,
The talking ducks, the happy lambs.
I am simple again.  I believe in miracles.
I do not believe in those terrible children
Who injure my sleep with their white eyes, their fingerless hands.
They are not mine.  They do not belong to me.

I shall meditate upon normality.
I shall meditate upon my little son.
He does not walk. &n
I told the swifts they’d got it wrong
I watched them glide and dip and play
The sky was of the richest hue
Without a the slightest hint of grey

But slowly as the day wore on
The clouds began to blot the light
And doubts began to fill my head
Could the swifts have got it right?

Of course they had, why even ask
No confusion in their feathery heads
The clues were plain, the signs were clear
The rain would come, as soon as said

And so it did, with lightening flash
With thunderous roar and constant pound
With drops the size of apricots
To slake the tired and parch-ed ground.

We mustn’t doubt our fellow creatures
They feel things that we’d never sense
Watch for signs and **** an ear
And bow to Nature’s sapience.


Stuart Williamson     August 2016     ©
A feather will drift but hard as is, you cannot catch a migrating swift. A tap will drip, a slow death rising from an evaporating pool, a cloud will steal what the sun will lift. Life will wilt and seeds will sprout, earth will provide what deity choked on drought. Promise will hibernate and people will pray, roots will remember and hope will stay, next seasons gorged seeds on which swifts will prey.
The Iguazu falls
Swifts slow dance through the waterfalls
Sun their wings on cliffs
Watched a documentary on dark swifts, and their life around the Iguazu Falls. Such a fascinating beauty!!
Paul Hansford Apr 2016
Such a wind today! The air
seems almost solid. Impossible
to go out in it.

Swifts invoking anti-gravity
lean on the air with sickle wings,
slice upward through it;
hang weightless at the peak,
then accepting the pull of earth,
hurtle downhill on kamikaze ski-run,
a mutual slalom, each avoiding
a hundred twisting obstacles;
alter their angle to the air, and rise again
up invisible gradients,
a swooping, soaring ballet with the wind,
its complex choreography
conceived in the tiny brains
of a hundred separate birds.

One pair, suddenly detached,
wings fluttering, wheel and plunge,
circle each other in an aerial
ice-dance pas de deux,
stunt kites without strings;
return to the flock, and are replaced
by another, and another, virtuoso couple.
The whole etherial stage is full
of improvisational star turns.

Such a wind! Impossible
for this earthbound human
to go out in it.
I'll stay and watch the show.
L B  Aug 2018
After Rush Hour
L B Aug 2018
On rising heat, killdeer flush
to decoy enemy--
threat to its young that roams too close
They rush to skim on hayish blur
wailing over wildflowers drying

Fretful twitter in perpetual flight
swifts-- twirl and hurl their bits of bodies--
debris
from a cumulonimbus of a late-day sky
toward a ridge of stag horn sumac
presuming horizon primordial
behind which time and city-- drift and wobble
on rising heat-- after rush hour

Rising Heat
Rising--
to meet my mind
on its way down
from my post behind
the laundromat
where I view it all--
rising--
where I usually go in search of quiet
to almost hear the ocean
     two hundred miles away
to strain words from wind
     in careless conversation
to wonder over
     missed whispers....

But not today
In rising heat, I went down
in search of something better--
     your eyes again
     solvent for my presence of mind
     dissolvers of hours and the order of things
But I need an excuse!
     To turn, to trespass, to disturb the peace!
     For your eyes again!
And still I need more-- being feverish, weak
Or?
Or... should I take the cure?
     To deny ...To deny

To deny what?
Overtones from a sea of years?
I don't know!  Whatever it was!
Nothing explain it...

I melt... I'm gone....
An old poem that keeps finding itself a need for expression.
K Balachandran Mar 2015
1.
Eyes, eager fish, in deep Himalayan blue, splash and swim
the ultramarine sky of the mind, gets color coordinated, in resonance
wind from across the ranges, incessantly chant  guttural "Öm"
gently spreads waves, that on ears, vibrate as music,divine
our feet get liberated from mind's control,  the trek becomes us.
2.
Eyes now, turn swifts, fly to the valley extending to horizon,
teeming with flowers of every hue, profusion of orchids,
rolling white clouds above,create *tantric patterns
of grace, swirls, swoops,scoops, somersaults,the trek goes on.
3.
Melting ice, fits well on the conical brown mountain tops,
a white bodice, perfect cover for her lovely peaks,
angular mounts gleam in the limitless avalanche
of light, an impulse for benediction is palpable.
4.
Simple folks of village, on the way side
in flowing colorful dresses *****, tall poles
festoons of bright colors, joyous prayer flags   flutter in wind
proclaims festive spirit, they vigorously wave.
5.
Now heart overwhelms, sings the paeans of
a sky that changes it's face from blue to white
and sometimes, a hue so bleak, deep gloom,
on red brown earth, sun light prances around.
6.
The grass bed then transforms quick,
mind drinks the dense benediction peace brings
that coils inside the soft blue waves, beating within and out
7.
Himalayan blue has taken us in to it's embrace
bird songs ring along the path of ancient sages,
who went in to the forest abode to contemplate, never returned,
became one with the hum of cosmos, they walk within us.
*Tantra-an esoteric practice which use" fractal diagrams' of complex geometrical formations  as a means to create resonant vibrations, to the level of cosmic energy,as a means to raise to higher consciousness.Tantra makes use of "Panchamakara"(Five Ms in Sanskrit)which are "Madya"(wine):"Mamsa"(meat),"Matsta"(fish)"Mudra"(esoteric gestures)"Maidhuna"(Ritualistic ***), as taboo braking elements to reach higher consciousness.This is the less travelled path and hence called "Väma marga"(Left hand path)
Owen Phillips Apr 2013
It's all gone out of me, the hammer falls and I'm not ready to answer
Trembling, weakness supporting a tub of jelly
The pollen-filled air flies past like the
Pelicans at the edge of the harbor
Taking us gliding for an unpleasant ride
Down the corridors of plastic colors
Through the one word answers that bubble forth from
10,000 years away in hyperspace
Where the mechanisms of language become so convoluted
That they disappear completely out at the vanishing point
Coming up behind you again to drag you into that smoky allure
You remember hating and pinching your nose from
And hiding in the car, but the new fear is of becoming addicted to it
Just like your addiction to ego games and
Intellect, just like your addiction to pleasure and constant validation

The validation's there in the eternal self, they say
But I'm an intellectual
Too impatient for meditation
And lost along the way to enlightenment
That I truly want,
But then I'll never have it if I continue to live this way

It's wilderness calling from a tame fool
Sticking up for you the overgrown horoscope signifies
The shapes of skydives,
He comes in and out of our dull lives
And there's an electric current that solidifies between
Him, Us, and his music
Iron rods jutting up from scorched earth
A broken paradise
Crumbling in a whisky tumbler
Blackened by fiber filters, creations
Unlocked by flowing ontological
Caricatures, open wounds gnashing
At attention-seeking osteopaths
Fortune seekers clamber down
Soccer field bleachers,
Somebody lost his sneakers in the woods
Once there was a set of barbells along the trail
We fell in line and started
Counting each other
One by one it seemed like the green apples would never fall
It was up to us to wait for the shower
It would feed our kin
We'd begin to rise up together
But it could never keep up with our pen
We wanted the ghosts to follow us and overtake our mortal foes
But we couldn't command the armies of the dead
We derive all our pleasures from films and campfire stories
We contrive our adventures but we wait for them to happen to us
We take a passive role in finding love
And it blinks lights at us across suburban streets through windows in the dark
The mind begins to writhe with new memories it composed of old
An idealized time of a child with the perverse mind
Of a hogtied adolescent
Guessing that the course of existence
Isn't determined by the speed of your calculations
Testing the warm water on a naked toe
We could dive in and forget to breathe
And the water could carry us forever
Alleviating gravity
All the obstacles we perceived in past lives
Remain with us like
Chimney swifts on the bottomless April days of a
Klu Klux **** telephone operator
Who believed in the spirit and the holy ghost
And burned a quiet altar to Satan's minions every Sunday night
Drinking nail polish and
Obscure references to the films of the
Ancient Greek philosophers, who
Saw the medium as a means to a message
And patronized the elitest filmmakers to study the ancient Runes
And reveal their findings to a power-hungry public
That would not outright reject it
But that would have to follow it down the rabbit hole
Through the wide mouth of the trumpet around brass fixtures
And into the tight hot moist mouth of the trumpeter
And the elemental warriors would strike oil beneath the whole affair
Ending the time we spent hoping for any entertainment to create itself before our barren psyches
Busying ourselves with incomprehensible tasks and letting our indolence take the reins until we found our heads again out there amid the vapors of
New car chem trails and old railroad bunkers where spruce and cedar grow through cement earth, they force apart the ground with just their roots

We weren't ready to keep watch the following weekend but we
Had no choice when the government bond expired
And we had only technological solutions left to hope for
And wrongly we abandoned our research posts to fight the enemies
With giant weapons and uncreative slogans
Our drummers played so fast we marched along and killed all that remained in record doubletime
Rendering the events of that victorious day immortal in the ingenious accounts of
Philosopher/poet/historian Michael Jackson
Who gave one final performance
To save himself from what must not be
We had blown through half the ***** and the drugs were nowhere to be found  in this oasis's of debauchery and bad decisions .
Bone had thrown his usual  temper fit and with his spoiled rich boy roots showed his *** in the worst possible way till someone finally shut him the **** up.

And after the ******* dude had knocked my sometimes friend most times pain in my *** sidekick out.
Looking to me in half spent rage and ****** knuckles asking now what the **** are you  going to do?

Well I'm going to have another round and play the jukebox now that someone finally shut that ******* up what you having amigo?
You mean your just going to sit there and let me get away with what I did to your friend that way.

Who that guy in the floor I don't know him.
But you came in here together **** you been sitting here drinking for at least five hours and your telling me you don't know him?

Oh that guy sleeping in a pool of blood in the floor?
Yeah stupid .
Nope never met him but he 's alright sometime when he's not ******* then he's well less a ***** and more just a regular ******* .

What are you ******* with me ******!?

The burly man asked as pure anger flowed like the Rio grand within his eye's
Some people have to build the rage up like some strange volcano to inflict damage on others and some are just ******* by design.
I wasn't sure of this man's type I just knew it was to dam hot to hit the highway and the cervasa was cold the music was right and I had no intention of leaving before my buzz kicked in.

What's to stop me from just kicking your *** like I did this ******* *******  ****** you tell me what's to stop me from taking your money and  rolling your *** right out of this place?

Mexico still bleeds of the past and it's people still show that passion for a good fight that at it's base is the true nature of man .
Not to be some violent nut but the passion for life at it's sharpest and most dangerous edge .

Well my friend I can think of a few reasons and probably none will be that pleasant.

I'm done with your games ****** .
The man moved forward fists clenched ready for round two I suppose
but his eye's sure were shocked when he found a barrel of a gun placed firmly between his eyes.

Now I told you this wasn't going to be pleasant sure you could have sat your angry *** down on a bar stool had a drink or two but no you had to play the ******* when I was just trying to catch a good buzz I swear some people have no manners .

The room went dead silent like some cheap spaghetti western right before someone was about to get killed minus that weird *** music so I guess it wasn't that silent at all as one old man turned his head then just went back to his drink like I don't give a **** as long as he doesn't bother me or make me stop drinking.


Oh **** ****** don't pull that ******* trigger  the man said his rage had turned more into a look of fear or maybe just a look of he just **** his pants honestly what's the difference well minus the smell.

with a gun in one hand and a beer in another I called the bartender down .
Mix me a mist and coke barkeep please.

No Whiskey just tequila senior .
What ! I replied in a fake sort of shock .
I swear no whiskey No women what kind of bar is this place I swear do I have to shoot somebody to get a bottle of whiskey ?

No no ****** the man at the end of the gun pleaded just get him some ******* whiskey Goddamit  he yelled at the bartender.
Really you don't have to be rude oh I'm sorry what's your name I been to busy holding you at gunpoint you must forgive my manners.

My names Gonzo I enjoy killing my liver hookers but only in moderation  like a good Christian  and ballroom dancing .
The man at the end of the boom stick lost all fear at least for a second.
Really ballroom dancing?

I'm kidding bout that one amigo but I do enjoy watching a good pole dancer  high five to that I mean I would  give you a high five if I wasn't holding a gun to your head and all .

Um you ever going to tell me your name bud?
I looked at this now downright scared shitless man who seemed to have a real issue with sweating from the strange puddle on the floor.

I swear you pull a fully loaded pistol on someone and point it to there head and everyone just acts so serious people are so strange these days.

Bill the man with a sweating problem replied.
Bill ?  Really what Mexican is named Bill ?
I mean I come all the  way down here get into some wild west kickass trouble and I find the only Mexican named Bill .
******* Machete you ruined my whole experience of what this was supposed to be like.

Sir. the man tried to speak up behind the  bar.
Don't interrupt me barkeep I'm on a dam roll here duh who you thinks writing this story imaginary person I created within my own demented mind.

You see Bill when I come across the border I expect a few simple things kick *** ****** cheap drinks and badass people like yourself named Razor or Spider  Or  El Nino or some sort of **** is that raciest sure put labels on what we have here amigo but I come for a kickass time in Mexico  and you really well you just killed it so I hope your happy.

I'm so sorry but please don't **** me Bill Replied .
Sir the barkeep spoke up again.

Okay what bartender being my whole trip has been ruined by Mexican Bill who honestly I feel if not for all this gun and life or death **** we could have a true connection but not like in a gone fishing on that mountain **** were those two cowboys corn hole each other  or maybe they just played corn hole once is fine I mean its not like I saw that movie and cried at the end cause duh I would never go see that in some cheap attempt to get laid by my teenage stripper girlfriend yeah don't ask.

Okay barkeep what the hell is it.
Well sir were not in Mexico.
This man was clearly more drunk than I for he didn't know what dam country he was in.

Amigo are you sure you know what your talking about.
Well yeah the barkeep replied your in Busch gardens theme park .
Well that certainly explains the ******* roller coaster and why that woman near it slapped me when I asked how much for a ******* boy do I feel embarrassed.

I knew I shouldn't have had that acid before leaving the house .
I did think it was strange that Germany was within walking distance.

So after nearly giving Mexican Bill a heart attack who was actually was Canada Bill once made me feel a little better because  honestly just for Nickleback and Justin Bieber  was grounds enough to pull a gun on him .

We sat  enjoyed some drinks as Bone laid passed out in the floor and said I don't want to go to school every time I kicked him cause I'm a true **** for a friend duh like you hadn't figured that out.

We laughed we rode rides we beat some dude up in France just because he was French .

And in the parking lot as we said are goodbyes.
I stood there and said you know Bill it's been great sorry bout the whole thinking I was in a foreign country and pulling a gun on you and stuff.

It's cool Gonz sorry about all my ****** music we pollute your airwaves with I know it's like being prison ****** by some dude called Harley .

Well I got to go and Bill  you stay crazy and by the way go take a ******* bath cause you **** your pants and it smells worse than Taylor swifts crouch okay .

Yeah the city landfill doesn't have **** on her .

We parted  are ways drunk and behind the wheel like good Americans .
And if that ****** you off just wait till my next write.

Duh it's just a story *******.
Stay crazy hamsters .

Your captain  

Gonzo
If there is anyone I have neglected to offend please feel free to contact me at.

Shady Pines Mental Facility.
PO box 3   27950
Nirvana Jun 2015
Reciting your enchanting beauty
My life swifts from river mode to sea
Where it is deeper and yet empty
Which drift/drives my life to agony

The wind of obsessity carries me
To a place I always dreamt to be
Placing my head in your lap I see;
A future where we could be happy

But gradually the dream gets over
As the obsessity wind gets slower
Revisiting the reality again
Introduces me to a familiar pain

The pain is not of losing you
You were not a reward to be won
But since now you're gone
I feel a friend is departing too


With shallow breath and watery eye
Trembling limps and left with a sigh
The heart beneath nearly die
The moment you said, goodbye...

I don't need drugs
To ruin my life
With an emotional outburst
Its hard to survive

— The End —