(Glade, World, Master, Boy, Hero)

                                                 GLADE

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

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

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

                                               WORLD

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                              MA­STER

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

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

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

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

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

                                                  BOY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                                HERO

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

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

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

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







Copyright 2020 by Ron Sanders.

Contact:  ronsandersartofprose(at)yahoo(dot)com

Out of lemon flowers
loosed
on the moonlight, love's
lashed and insatiable
essences,
sodden with fragrance,
the lemon tree's yellow
emerges,
the lemons
move down
from the tree's planetarium

Delicate merchandise!
The harbors are big with it-
bazaars
for the light and the
barbarous gold.
We open
the halves
of a miracle,
and a clotting of acids
brims
into the starry
divisions:
creation's
original juices,
irreducible, changeless,
alive:
so the freshness lives on
in a lemon,
in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,
the proportions, arcane and acerb.

Cutting the lemon
the knife
leaves a little cathedral:
alcoves unguessed by the eye
that open acidulous glass
to the light; topazes
riding the droplets,
altars,
aromatic facades.

So, while the hand
holds the cut of the lemon,
half a world
on a trencher,
the gold of the universe
wells
to your touch:
a cup yellow
with miracles,
a breast and a ******
perfuming the earth;
a flashing made fruitage,
the diminutive fire of a planet.

Stood rigidly to attention either side of the hearth, the two bronze fire-dogs had been struggling to maintain that British stiff upper lipidness, which up until earlier that evening had best befitted their station in life... indeed, for the last half hour at least had become brothers in arms to the dying embers filtering through the bars of the cast-iron grate, passing from the present here and now, having lost every thermal attribute necessary to sustain any further vestige of life... to the shortly forthcoming and being at oneness with the Universe... only to fall foul of the overflowing ash-pan below.  This premature cashing in of the coal fire's chips could only be attributed to the recent and prolonged thrashing from the Baronial poker... and a distinct lack of enthusiasm from the family retainer, whom it appeared, required spurring along in a like manner... and while unseen mechanisms were heard to be engaging, then resonating deep within the Hall... that unless summoned... and quickly, the housekeeper had little intention of making an appearance of her own choosing and re-stoke the Study fire while the BBC Home Service were airing 'Your 100 Best Tunes' on the wireless, leaving the heavily tarnished pendulum to continue measuring the hour.

     An indistinct mutter and snap of a closing door latch sounded in the immediate distance as the unhurried shuffle of domestic footsteps... not too dissimilar from those of Jacob Marley's spectral visitation to Scrooge... echoed ever closer along the ancient, oak panelled hallway without.  Their sudden cessation, allowing the housekeeper ingress to  the book lined Study, was by way of sporadic groans from unoiled hinges, door furniture that voiced the same overwhelming lack of attention as that of the fire-grate set in the wall opposite and presumably, from the same overwhelming lack of domestic servitude.
                                        
     "Had his Lordship rang...?" the Housekeeper wailed dolefully, giving her employer what might casually pass for a courteous bob... and in lieu no doubt, of Marley's rattling chains, padlocks and dusty ledgers... "and would there be anything further his Lordship required..." before she took her leave for the evening.  The notion of a sticky mint humbug warming the cockles of his ancient, aristocratic heart gave her pause for thought as she rummaged through her pinafore pockets, then thought better of it, after all, confectionary didn't grow on trees...  In bobbing a second time she noticed the malnourished, yet strangely twinkling coal-scuttle lounging over by the hearth, whose insubstantial contents had taken on an ethereal quality earlier that evening and had now transferred its undivided attention to the recently summoned Housekeeper, who was quite prepared to offer up a candle in supplication come next Evensong were she mistaken, but the coal-scuttle's twinkle bore every intimation of giving what appeared to be a very suggestive 'come-on' in return... and had been doing so since she first entered the room... 'and did she have any plans of her own that particular evening', the coal-scuttle twinkled suavely, 'perchance a leisurely stroll down by the old coal cellar steps...'  Now perhaps it was the lateness of the hour which had caused the Housekeeper's confusion that evening, or perhaps an over stretched imagination, brought on through domestic inactivity, but it wouldn't take a great deal to hazard that a lingering fondness for Gin and tonic played no small part towards her next curtsey, which she did, albeit unwittingly, in the unerring direction of the winking coal-scuttle.

     With the household keys as her badge-of-office, jangling defiantly from the chain around her waist, the housekeeper began inching back the same way she came, back towards the study door and freedom... and back into the welcoming arms of her 1/4 lb. bag of peppermint humbugs and the pint of best London Gin she'd had to relinquish prior to 'Songs of Praise...' and which was now to be found... should you happen to be an inquisitive fly on a particular piece of floral wallpaper... half-cut, locked arm in arm with the bottle of Indian tonic water and in the final, intoxicating throws of William Blake's, 'Jerusalem...' hic.

     "Ha-arrumph..." the elderly gentleman cleared his throat... "ah Gabby" he said, lowering his book and placing it face down upon the occasional table set beside him.  The flatulent groan of tired leather upholstery made itself heard above the steady monotony of the mantle-piece clock as he stood and chaffed his hands in the direction of the bereft fire, "Oh! I'm sorry your Lordship, then there was something...?" as she maintained her steady but relentless backwards retreat unabated, the double-barrelled bunch of keys taking up a strong rear-guard action and away from the well disposed coal scuttle... "and was his Lordship quite certain that he required the fire stoking at such a late hour..." she dared, "perhaps a nice warming glass of port and brandy instead" gesturing towards the salver, long since tarnished by the half hearted attentions of a proprietary metal polish... "and would he care for..." then thought better of offering to plump the chair cushions herself, having discovered Mort, the household mouser in the final stages of claiming them as his own, deftly rearranging the Victorian Plush with far more than any noble airs or graces.

     "Poor Mrs Alabaster, you will recall Sir, I'm sure..." a pained expression crossed the Housekeepers face as she collided with a corner of the Georgian writing bureau and bringing her to an abrupt halt... "her late Ladyships lady" she continued, indiscreetly rubbing her derriere, "whose services your Lordship dispensed with at the onset of last Winter, shortly after the funeral, God rest her late Ladyship... when you made her redundant... and how she's been unable to find a new situation ever since on account of her lumbago flaring up again, seeing as how it's been the coldest January in living memory", which in all likelihood meant since records began... "and SHE didn't have any coal either... or a roof over her head for all anyone cared... begging yer' pardon, yer' Lordship", letting her tongue slip as she attempted yet one more curtsey... "and it's wicked-cruel outside this time of year Sir, you wouldn't turn a dog out in it..." and how ordering the coal used to be Mrs Alabaster's responsibility...

     "Oh no, Sir", as she unsuccessfully stifled a hiccup...she would be only too delighted to rouse the Cook, especially after that dodgy piece of scrag-end they'd all had to suffer during Epiphany, but it was only last week that the Doctor had confined Cookie to bed with the croup... "as I'm sure your Lordship will recall..." as she attempted a double curtsey for effect, the despondent coal-scuttle now all but forgotten, "that below-stairs had been dining on pottage since a week Friday gone... and it tends to get a little moribund after almost a fortnight your Honour... and that Mrs Cotswold's rheumatism was still showing no signs of improvement either by the looks of things... and was having to visit the Chiropodist every fortnight for her bunions scraping... and how she's been advised to keep taking the embrocation as required".

     As a young woman, any disposition her grandmother may have had towards sobriety or moral virtue had quickly been prevailed upon by the former Master's son taking intimacy to the next level with the saucy Parlour Maid's good nature.   Shortly thereafter, having been obliged to marry the first available Gardener that came along, she was often heard to say "a bun in the oven's worth two in the bush" for it was with stories 'of such goings-on'  that made it abundantly clear to the Housekeeper, that it was far more than old age creeping up... and that if she didn't keep her wits wrapped tightly about her, as she threw a sideways glance at the winking philanderer... then who would.

     As for the Gardener, "well... he couldn't possibly manage the cellar steps at this late hour, yer' Lordship, wot' with the weather being the way it is right now Sir, seasonal... and him with his broken caliper... and bronchitis playing him up at every turn, even though his own ailing missus swore by a freshly grown rhubarb poultice first thing each morning", but oddly enough, "how it always seemed to work better if the young barmaid down in the village rubbed it on, especially around opening time..." even his brother, Mr Potts Senior, ever since their Dad passed away... "God rest his eternal soul", as she whirled, twice in as many seconds, a mystical finger in the air... had said how surprised he'd been to discover that it could be used as a ground mulch for seed-cucumbers... it was truly amazing how The Good Lord provided for the righteous... and even as she spoke, was working in mysterious ways, His Wonders to Behold... "Praised-Be-The-Lord".

     And how the entire household, with the possible exception of Mrs Alabaster, her late Ladyships lady, who doggedly refused to be evicted from her 'Grace n' Favour cottage...' the one with pretty red roses growing around the door, that despite a string of eviction notices from the apoplectic Estate manager... had noticed what a fine upstanding Gentleman his Lordship had steadfastly remained since her late Ladyships sudden demise... "God-rest-her-immortal-soul..." and may she allow herself to say, "how refreshing it was to have such a progressively minded and discerning employer such as his Lordship at the helm, one filled with patient understanding and commitment towards the entire household..." much like herself...

     Fearing an uncontrollable attack of the ague, which invariably took the form of a selfless and unstinting dereliction to duty and always flared up at the slightest suggestion of having to roll her sleeves up and do something... which incidentally, was the first mutual attraction by common consent to which her parents, some forty years earlier had discovered they both held in tandem... and "would his Lordship take exception..." feigning a sudden relapse as she gestured towards the nearest chair, were she to take the weight off her feet... she plonked herself solidly upon the Chippendale before his Lordship could decline... "perhaps a recuperative drop of brandy" she volunteered, "just for medicinal purposes", she swept her feet onto the footstool, then crossed them with a flourish that would have caused Cyrano de Bergerac to hang up his sword... "the good stuff, if his Lordship would be so kind, in the lead-crystal decanter... over in the corner by the potted plant", she caught sight of the adjacent cigarette box, also tarnished... "just to keep body and soul together, may it please 'Him upon High'..." and just long enough to brave the coal cellar steps and refill the amorous scuttle... "if only it were a little less chilly", she gave an affected cough... on account of her diphtheria acting up again, she felt sure that his Lordship understood...  Moving over to one of the book lined alcoves, the elderly Gentleman lifted several tomes from the shelves... 'My Life in Anthracite', an illustrated compendium' "to begin with, I think... followed by... hmm!" 'The History of Fossil-Fuels, a comprehensive study in twelve breath taking volumes' "and we'll take it from there" as he threw the first on the barely smouldering embers...

                                                      ­     ...   ...   ...**

a work in progress.                                                        ­                                                         1859

I.  ****** Transient

Overnight takes on new meaning
when the sun never sets and will never rise.

This time i didn’t bring words, i brought lines.

And Esmeralda danced circles around my eyes.
You gypsy ***** You.
Leading me confused,
                  with knees low and back hunched,
                                    into a labyrinth of solitude.

Embarrassed of what exactly?
i’ve barred scars more deep than scars
like profound pools of black sticky tar
that almost suffocates with its gluttony
and still You wouldn’t look away.
And now i pay a price as images intertwine
                           creating zebra patterned designs
                                             on the alcoves of my mind.
         Black, White
They contrast in spite of the connection.
         and I wear this contrast like an emblem,
                  hanging from my throat,
                           heavy on my heart.
                                    yet with the delicate touch of some
                                             slippery silvery chain…
                                                      It almost rids me of the pain.


Back turned or give me the front,
i still want either way.
A petrifying carnival of desire,
making my eyes tire of this display
and my lips itching to play,
a lilac purple tongue,
and bronze arms on the way.

You feign revolution by shutting the door in my face.

A shuddering sigh and flutter of a heart,
                           as caged ribs start to part,
                                   liberated room for more,

i’ve become an emotional *****,
lips wet with anticipation,
pulsating with a passion,
that You defined as infatuation.

And that i just couldn’t define.

-or rather-

defined as a transition in time.

****** Transients* would abstractive-ly be the best,
         but the abstract, once put to the test,
floats past concrete lines,
and creates a world of its own where, even as a stranger,
                  i feel right at home.
                                    Lioness of the abstract dome.


Razor sharp You
        sliced a tingling into the souls of my feet,
        and week after week i did nothing but smile at my own loss
        of balance.

The feminine reemerging as the phallus,
and the phallus in comfort with its feminine home.

         i patiently wait for my Special Kinder Surprise,
                                    and meanwhile,
                                             satisfy myself with imagination,
                                                    ­           to which an interpretation,
         would require the use of a million scholarly texts,
                                    which still wouldn’t attest to this degree
Of Vulgarity,
         or this degree
Of Sexuality,
         or this degree
Of Spirituality.

Like the slaughter of fowl for mythological pride;
                           You hide behind an altar,
                                    and with all the holiness i posses,
I intend to pull through and impress with Determination.
                           --and the petrifying realization—
that You are Artemis and i soon to be set upon by the hound
                                                           - choking ego to the ground.


But ****, it was worth it.

worth the,
vulnerability
worth the,
audacity
worth the,
ecstasy,
-It naturally dissolved within me.

Only to be pushed down by an incessant flipping of the door,
an incessant call to reality.

is the overnight truly Over?
      —or pray mercy and tell me its begun.

The rising Sun seems determined to puncture the fun,
And the valiant battle with Apollo seems already to have been won.



II.  ****** Ensnared
  
I’m getting tired of this ****.

A tantrum fit as if we were kids of three.
Stomping on adult realized priorities.
We wear our hair like a mask,
                  we analyze our clothes,
                           personify the persona we wish to adapt,
         and commend that same personal persona
         complimenting its research studied aura.
                                                    
--I’d rather stay in this dream forever.
  (you judged me by my hair
   yet remained unaware
   to what it masked.)

Please don’t preach to me about consideration.

The obliteration of that term in action shocks me.
Truth be told?—I’m quite Angry, and I feel used,
Yes, believe it or not, Abused.
Infiltrated and Dominated.

And I am a Leo at heart.

So to part with my throne will only be met with roars of defense;
                                                        ­       to be direct, Aggressiveness.


My interlude is met with seclusion—
         isolation to the utmost degree—
and I see that the world agrees, as I’m met
with a phone with no tone
and a power-cut of electricity,
while the world contracts visibly
and the static in the air
ensnares my fiery wrath,
and storms overhead
are weighed down with
anxiety and dread
that express themselves
in raindrops, that I lovingly
call tears.


I fear this is me at my limit---
        And I exhibit nothing but ferocious gloom.

This room which contains me is not enough,
And I will huff
And I will puff
Until the walls come down.
                  And the only sound to be heard,
                           is the numbing effect of silence.

My Rifle stands ready to be shot and plunge through that stubborn heart
of yours until it is rejected or until the reflected opinion dominates. Is it
too much to ask for a change of heart?
Empathy? Understanding?
Basic societ-ical handling?
Apparently yes.
So I detest
having to put in.

The waterworks that I display
convey nothing but submission
to your inconsideration.
                  And the devil in me crosses her fingers
                  for experience by example,
                  as elephants trample over logic
                  and the symbolic is simply symbolic.
                                             That’s too much reason for my taste.
                                             And I see that it was a waste
                                             Trying to impress with determination.

****** Ensnared has denied a nation of people their feelings,
                  listening, with unappealing resolution
                  satisfying herself with this conclusion:
                  “Let them eat Cake.”


--It’s true.
You can’t have your cake and eat it too.



III. ****** Verbalize

On a park bench it took me quite by surprise,
my eyes met with scripture
recognizable though not to my hand,
the band on my finger tightened and
yet the anger seized.
         -- How could I not have surmised ****** Verbalize to enlighten me?--


“Your Majesty;
         I owe you My Apology-
                  And I couldn’t be sorrier for my selfish self
                  has decided to rest after this long period.

For She was too busy
trying to make you feel safe and home
--She was too busy trying to suppress her ****** up
whipped cream so that you can have you cake and eat it too—
But She failed.

        You believe ****** is selfish,
then I’m afraid you never knew ******.
                  --****** loved you with wide arms open and she
                  Was pleased to meet you.

She hopes it was a useful transition for You.

.THE END.
The ******”

My legs carry me mindlessly through the white-washed walls of the intensive care unit. I am stuck in a labyrinth in which there is no end, there is merely alcoves on either side which take you even further into the maze. Nurses with faces as pale as their uniforms pass me like zombies, their minds calculating numbers on charts which directly correlate to a list of symptoms that equate to something less than diagnosable. I am nothing more than a distant shadow in their busied brains.
Unknowingly, I begin counting the rooms after I pass through the double doors, remembering that yours is the ninth on the right. My heart rate steadily increases, no longer in tune with the clicking monitors that surround me like locusts, calling out to those just as alive and lonely.
I rest my hand on the doorframe of room number ninety-four as I attempt to collect myself. Just as I inhale a deep breath, my vision blurs and every emotion I have (until now) successfully shoved into the deep recesses of my chest now rises up my stomach and into my mouth. I press my lips together, holding back the bile that has taken up unwanted residence on my tongue. Warm tears squeeze their way out from behind my eyes as I swallow it back down, suppressing it once more. I attempt another deep breath, and another, until I realize I am unable to procrastinate any longer.
I hear the rustling of stiff sheets and the slight give of a hard mattress. You're awake.
I clear my throat softly, wanting you to be aware of my presence, although I am certain that the heartbeat that reverberates my eardrums must have given me away miles ago.
A white curtain hangs from the tiled ceiling, held up by metal clamps looped around a pole for easy accessibility and I can't help but wonder if that pole would be strong enough to hold me. But just as I begin planning what sheet and what knot I would use around the pole, I step into view of you.
My hand is pulled to my lips like a magnetic force that is out of my control as I take in the sight of you. Your left eye, which once shone a more brilliant blue than the clear waters of the Caribbean, is now bloodshot and swollen. The left side of your head is bandaged and half of your pale blonde hair is shaved down to your bruised scalp. Your lips, which were once so thin and precious, are now bloodied and blown-up like red balloons. Your bones jut out from beneath your skin, as though your collarbone is rejecting you and begging to be freed. Down your arms I notice the scabs and scars and marks from unsuccessful attempts to hook you to an IV. But there is more than just one bag hanging beside you, and I realize that the other is Morphine.
I take a step closer to you, waiting for your eyes to flutter open like they did so many mornings when I'd wake you with your favorite breakfast (two plain pancakes and a cigarette). Your head tilts slightly to the right but your eyes remain closed. I take another small step, and another, until my waist is just inches from the seemingly disjointed hand hanging limply from the edge of the bed. I reach out and press my shaking fingertips to the hard palm that faces me, hoping for your hand to turn and clasp around mine, silently accepting my every apology.
But your hand remains stiff against my touch.
I memorize the new lines on your hand, the crescent-shaped bruises on your palm and the shallow scratches on the back of your hand where I pressed my lips more times than I could ever possibly count. I trace my way up your arm, my fingertips traveling over the hills of your veins, a familiar territory, and the streams of tubes filled with fluid, an uncharted area. Just as my hand begins the climb up your forearm and into the crease of your elbow, I feel your arm move. But rather than moving towards me, an invitation to venture even closer, it is pulled away from me, a protest.
I take a step back and inhale a deep breath, feeling the rush behind my eyes again, as I notice your right eye is now looking right at me, into me. I search the depths of your gaze in the hope that I will resurface with a strand of hope or affection that I can hold on to for the rest of the day, but I come up empty-handed. All that I can find in your eyes is a direct reflection of the pain that both your heart and body are enduring.  
"I'm so, so, so-"
But before I can even begin to utter my sincerest of apologies, your hand is held inches above the mattress, silencing me. I dive into your eyes again, deeper and deeper, realizing that if I can't find any form of redemption, then I'd rather just drown in them. But you **** me back to reality with only two words.
"Please leave."
I feel the tidal wave crash into my chest as I take another step back.
My worst fear has been realized - you don't want me here.
Suddenly every argument, every fight, every "I'm sorry," every "you don't mean that," every "I love you," every "don't say that," was another wave throwing my helpless body against the cliffs and coral reefs. I am lifeless, my body thrashed beyond recognition, my heart ripped to shreds.
Tears gather behind my eyes and burst through, falling upon my cheeks as though the depths that I have drowned in have finally consumed me.
I reach out once more, my shaking hand yearning for the touch of your skin.
But you pull your head from me, wanting nothing to do with me.
An earthquake shakes my chest and threatens to pull me in half as I backpedal out of the room, temporarily getting wrapped up in the white curtain that I had admired just minutes before.
The rush returns to my head and I can no longer see anything but frothy waves that continue to pull me under, and I can no longer hear anything but the sound of water filling my ears.
My shoulder connects with a sturdy boulder and I fall to the ground, collapsing into nothing more than a puddle, the aftermath of the hurricane that has wrecked my body, and you are no longer able or willing to save me.

Moody blue waves go black with mischief in her moves,
Always flowing,
Spraying secrets untouched into the salt-heavy air above,
A slow smile spreads that far and wide away towards the sun,
Also turning on her tides.
Moonlight illuminating her curves and gestures.

Deceptive and lovely, a woman.
Never to be owned or won. Never to consider not being.
Magnificent. In her alcoves and her storms.
Gestures of night and paradise.

THE EUPRAXIA OF  PRISOPTOMETRY SIDELINED BY THE SOPORIFIC PROMACHOS OF ABSOLUTION MIGHT WE CONVENE THE CABOOSE OF ANACUSIC TALENTS FOR SURDOMUTE  REGALIA IN THE MUGIENCE OF  DUGONG BECAUSE OF EXASPERATED DECREES SEEKING TO TRIGGER SARANGOUSTY IN PRIMIPARA PENTAPOLIS THAT ARE SCREWBALL WITH ANTERIC RAGE PRIMARILY BECAUSE OF A HOPSCOTCH MORALISM RATHER THAN A EUHEMERIST LAXISM. DUGONG DUCDAMES OF EISOPTROMANIA AGAINST  THE PODEX PNYX BECAUSE OF TRUTINATED CNICNODES OF SCENOGRAPHY FOR SCAPPLE AND STANNARY PLAGIARIZED FROM THE CLAVATE OF MOST STERLING ELITISM BROCKFACED IN BRONCHOS BECAUSE OF BRADYDACTYL FEATURES  OF TOWERING GIANTS OF THE TADPOLE MACROPTEROUS WINGS OF INSIPID OR ORGANIC ORGANITY IN THE SCHWERMERIE THAT IS A SPANGLED BANNER OF RADICAL TRUISMS OF CATAMOUNT CATALLACTICS AMONG THE CORDWAINERS THAT SWITH WITH COUNTERFOIL BRAZEN IN ALL CARNAPTIOUS FRIZZ AND FOMENT ENDOWED WITH THE FUMATORIUM OF EFFLUVIA UNSPOKEN PRIMARILY BECAUSE OF HACHURES OF DURAMEN AND THE ARGALI OF MEGALOGRAPHY FORSAKING THE OLMS AND ESBATS OF PECCADILLO AND REGAL SECRECY PRIMARILY TO ACCELERATE THE TAGHAIRM BECAUSE OF THE ARTIFICE OF RUDENTURE IN MUGIENCE WHEATEN EXASPERATINGLY WITH POIGNANT GRAPPLING-HOOK TENACITY SUCH THAT WHEALS AND  WARDCORNS ARE ZUGZWANGS OF NARRISCHEIT FORMATIVE IN THE PROWESS OF TIRED DROOPY EYES AIMING AT  GEOSELENIC SATURNALIA OF THE PANTOGLOTS OF PARVANIMITY ACKNOWLEDGED BY THE PASILALY OF GUBERNATORIAL REMEMBLES OF REPINE RATHER  THAN OPINION OF SCARAMOUCHES THAT BECOME RAFFISH FOR LAFFY TAFFY JOLLYBOAT JOLLY RANCHERS BECOMING CENTRIFUGAL TO THE MAGNETS THAT ONLY THERBLIGS OF ERGOGRAPHY CAN ESTEEM THE STELLIFIED STELLIONS OF IMMORTAL DEGREES OF CREANCERS BOOMING IN THE SEMPITERNAL FLAGRANT FOUL DELUSIONS OF A CASTRATED DESTINY AGAINST ORTSAC PRIORITIZATION OF A SECURE WORLD OF OCREATED ARCEATION OF ELAPHURES THAT IN UNSEELED RIGMAROLE OF JAUNDICE CREATED AND SUSTAINED BY IMBREVIATED KNAVERY OF BLESBOKS TRYING TO PLAY OPERATIVE CHESS IN A CHECKERED HUBRIS SPANNING THE GAMUT OF SPEED RUN HYPOCRISIES NEVER FULLY FLESHED OUT BECAUSE OF RIBALD CORSAIRS OF COCARDEN. SKELDERS OF SCAZONS OF BRUTAL INTEMERATION OF CARTHAGIAN GLADIATORIAL WRIKPOND WREPOLIS MERGERS OF THE PRIZED ANTIQUITY DEFINED BY SUBERIC VINTNERS OF PLACKIQUE THAT BARNSTORM WITH FERVID SPUMID SPURIA OF THE SCORIAS THAT STARTLE THE STRICKLE SUCH THAT NOT A SINGLE  WAGERED PAXILLOSE STRETCHER EVER FALLS BY THE AERONAUTICS OF ARENAIDAN FORESIGHT CONTUMELY ENAMORS IN SLEDGEHAMMER DEFECTED CRAVEN BRITTLE REDSHORT SELACHOSTOMOUS SEDERUNTS INVOLVED IN THE SENNET OF REGULA BECAUSE OF LAVADERO IVORRIDE OFTEN OVERRIDED BY EUCRASIA AND NEVER BY THE ACCIDIA OF PAST TENSE RIGORS OF CALUMETS ESTRANGED FROM WIDDERSHANCY BECAUSE OF THE CONVENIENT WANCHANCIES THAT WE DEPLORE DESPITE THEIR DISCRETIONARY ADVANTAGES OF GALLOP POLLING GALLOPING HEADLESS HORSEMEN OF THE VERDERER AS THE PERCURRENT CENTURIES ELEVATE DUGONG FOR DIDDICOYS OF ART TO LICENSE THEMSELVES BROADCLOTH MASTERY OF WUNDERKINDS THAT CARESS THE COSSETED COGNOMEN OF THE CORRIGENDA BECAUSE OF THE RIBALD PALLOR OF CRETACEOUS OLASIN EPOCHS OF MACROBIAN SENTIENCE EVOLVED FROM EMOTIVISM TO VOUCHSAFE THE METEMPSYCHOSIS OF JOCKO JOBBERNOWL FINFIGUAL NIHILISTS AMBITIOUS TO DEBUNK EVERY THEORY THAT PROVOKES THE POIGNANT TRIBULOID QUALMS OF A RADICAL MURENGER CHARGING MURAGE IN HIS SPRINGHARE OBSESSIONS. IN DOOMSTERS ADEEM WITH SUCCULENT SACCHARINE TONSILECTOMY SUGAR OF APIKOROS NOVANTIQUE SPRAWLING IN EVERY CREATIVE DIRECTION OF FUSIONS OF CREATIVE NUCLEOTIDES THE CENTERPIECE OF A NIMBLE PATRIARCHY WED TO PRIMIPARAS OF MULIEBRITY SUCH THAT GALLANT ARGALI LEAPS OF AUGENDS TOO COMPLEX TO TURBINATE BECAUSE OF TUBIFACIENT LORE SLOGMARCHING INTO URBANE BOWERIES SUCH THAT COUNTERFOIL IS COULROPHOBIC AND THE BALLAST BRONTEUM OF ALL CIVILIZED RANSACKED FOSSORS OF THE MOST ELOQUENT OF TIMES. THE CODSWALLOP ABOUT GERENDUM IN CARELESS HASTY MISTAKES GRANDEVAL GUDGEONS OF GUFF AND GUIGNOL OF RHYPAROGRAPHY AGAINST THE ROENTGENOGRAPHY OF ACCIDENTAL POSTURES OF LOLLIPOP TOOTLES OF TOPGALLANT ROYALTY RESCUED FROM THE SNATCHES OF  ***** DEARTH AND THE ACUMINATION OF ACERSECOMIC URCEOLATE ACHARNE WHICH IS THE WEAPON OF TIROCINIUM TYROS THAT BEBLUBBERED THEIR WAY INTO INTREPID INFAMY AND NOTORIETY BY IGNORANT OVERSTEPS BY LARGESSE IN RACEMATION FOR RHIZOGENIC RADICALISM IN MAXIMALIST MATHEMATICISM PRIMARILY THE SKIRMISH OF SCHMEGGEGY BY THE STANHOPE AUTHORS OF JESUITICAL JANSKY AGAINST BLARING CATACOUSTICS WHICH FILIBUSTER THE DILATORY DESULTORY JAUNT WITH JIGGERY-POKERY WALMS AND WASMS OF ESCALIERS OF ESCULENT ENANTIODROMIA THAT SUFFRAGETTES OF BLOCKHEADED CHOCKABLOCK JAWBREAKERS BETROTHED TO MATRIMONY OF NATIONAL ESTEEM AND JINGOISM SWELTERING IN THE HEYDAY OF ONEIRODYNIA SADLY STRADDLED IN COMBUVIROUS SPATTEES PRIMARY TO THE HUES OF CRETACEOUS CHALKING BRISTLES OF BARBEDWIRE LIES AND SUBLINEATED MAINLINE FRIGORIC FRIGOLABILE RETINACULUM THAT THE SWARF OF HEDERACEOUS IVORRIDE AND THE OCCAMY OF MEHARIS BELONGING TO MEGACERINE FEARS OF HYPOCHRONDRIA BECAUSE OF THE PREVALENT JERBOA DYSCHROA OF SYNAPHEA THAT STARTLE HAPPY ACCIDENTS AT FINISH LINE CAMARRA THAT CATAPULTS THE FILTH EDGY BY COMSTOCKERY THAT THE TAME TENDER LOLLOP OF LONGINIQUITY AND LESSER DEMIURGES WHO FIGHT THE SPECTER OF TIRED ISOLATION SUCH THAT THE PEDESTRIAN IS A SPRINGALD NOTORIETY THAT FIGURES OUT THE WAINAGE OF SAPROSTOMY BECAUSE OF CERBERIC WANIGANS OF THE ULTERIOR GALLIVANT BROCKFACED INTO EVERY TITANISM BY THE DROLLERY OF DROOPY SERRATED EDGES OF CURTAILED CURGLAFF SURROUNDED BY PLASMAS OF AUREATE AURIGRAPHY AGAINST ATOCIA OF THALEROPHAGOUS NEOMORTISM TWISTED INTO WARPED CONTORTIONS OF RHADAMANTHINE DOUBTS OF THE ALABASTER ALCOVES DREAMING OVER EVERY HEAVEN IN SONDAGE AND BRISK BRITSKAS OF BANDOBAST BERGAMASKS THAT SPURN THE SPURIOUS SOPHISTRY FOR THE CATALYST OF CLEPSYDRA. THE KATABOTHRON OF KALIMKARI KYMATOLOGY THAT IS SWARTHY SPATHODEA REPUDIATION OF NYALAS OF NAGORS OF NUTATION BECAUSE OF OBLATE BOLAR RANCOR FOR THE CALVERS NEVER OF A CALVOUS LENDRUMBILATION NOR A PANCRATIC ACCORD OF GRAVEDIGGER SERENDIPITIES SCOWLING AT HEADWINDS FROM THE PARAVENTED LAIRWITES OF MOONRAKER JOLTERHEADS WHO EMERGE FROM THE THICKETS OF THE DENSEST ELITISM EVERY MANUFACTURED BY THE HEGEMUNES OF SECULAR RETINUE AND CORTEGES OF THE VENTRAD AND VENTRALABRAL FAMIGERATION BEYOND VENOSTASIS AND AGAINST THE HEARTH OF ATRABILIARY ECCENTRICITIES OF ALIDADE FISTICUFFS OF SCOFFLAW MACROPICIDE IN THE TEDIUM OF SWELTERING PARASELENES OF KNIGHTED SQUARSONS SQUARROSE UPON THEIR SQUIRMING SQUALLS OF STRAPONTIN IN INTRORSE SOPHISTICATION MIGHT THE LANGUOR OF EXHAUSTED BEATLES MEET THE TIMESPUN RICHES OF ALL FORESIGHT PRISMATIC UPON HINDSIGHT IN THE CHRONOBIOLOGY OF CARAPACE AND THE REGIMENTATION OF TESTUDO THAT IS A GLAMOR OF AFFLICTION RATHER THAN A BEAST OF CRUCIBLE IGNOMINY FOR MALINGERING GIAOUR ESBATS BENIGHTED BY THEIR OWN PARLOUS PLIGHT IN POIGNANT HEYDAYS OF NEPHROLITH CALCULATED FOR NEPIONIC ENRICHMENT AGAINST NIDOR THAT STRIVES WITH CABRILLA AND CACHALOTS TO PROVIDE AUSTERE REFORMS IN AUGUST SUPERCALENDAR DIVINITY BESPECKLED BY MONOCLAR SEPHIROTH TAXED BY SYLLABUB LAGGARDS IN THE TRIUMVIRATE OF ULTRAMONTANE GLEE AGAINST BATTLEDORES OF SABOTAGE SPANKING EVERY MONKEY OF MONETIZATION FOR THE ROODS OF MISERICORD TO BECOME PARABOLASTERS FOR NEW WORLD ATTRITION IN ATTINGENT AND ATTEMPERED AURILAVES OF ALGOR AND THE ANACHORIC RESIGNATION OF PENTAPOLIS THAT SQUIREBELL CLORENCE OF NAUCLATIC FAIRGOERS SERENADES AS THE WORLD DEMARCHES FORFENDED AND FORERIGHT OF ALL INDIGNITIES THAT THEY MIGHT EXCEED ESCAPE VELOCITY SUCH THAT THE ELASTANE ELASTICITY OF INVENTED DEMAND SHOWCASES THE DUGONG DURAMEN OF THE CLASS AND CLASSIFIED SECTORS OF SALVATION BY ARTIFICE AND THE LAST HOPE OF JANIZARIES OF JANGADA TO STROLL PAST LUCRATIVE BUT SULLEN LOURS OF PARKS BEYOND EVERY ESCARGATOIRE KNOWN FOR POGROMS OF DESOLATION. THE ALFORGE OF AFFOREST BECAUSE OF THE ACRASIA OF ANACHORIC LIVING LIVID NIGHTMARES OF HENPECKS OF ATTRITION LEADING TO SALIFIED SALMAGUNDI IN PARALLAX WITH THE TRIUMPHANT BLARE OF SAXHORNS NOTAPHILY FLUMMOXES WITH REPARTEE IN RESCRIPT THAT TRANSCENDENTAL TWINGES OF POLLARCHY MIGHT DISHEVEL THE ARRONDISSEMENT OF BLETTONISM BECOMING HEAPSTEADS OF HYPOGEIODY. WHEN WE ARRAY AND ARRAIGN THE ZEITGEIST FOR ITS BLENCH AND BLARNEY OF CAPSIZED EPITHETS AIMED AT VOLUMINOUS FLUMINOUS SKELDERS AND BROOKS OF ROARING TEMBLORS SEQUESTRATED FROM THE VARSAL SCOPE OF HUMANE TOTEMISM IN SUBSTRATOSE AGGRIEVEMENT WE MIGHT FIND THE SUCCOR IS THE WHITTAWER OF WOOLD IN BEAMISH HUES OF SATURNINE BETROTHED FIDELITIES TO NOCTIDIURNAL DIESTRUS FRAGRANT WITH TERPSICHOREAN DAVERING DIPPYDOS WHO BLANDISH THE FRANGIBLE PULVERIZED METTLE OF CENTURIONS AND LEGIONNAIRES OF FILIBUSTERED CASEFIED CASEMATE JORDANS BOUND BY JOUGS OF JUDOGI AND THE BROADCLOTH FASHIONS OF YASHIKIS BEYOND THE THERMOSTAT OF ISOLATION AND THE THERMODYNAMICS OF LABILE OPPRESSION FOR LABROMANCY BECAUSE OF LANCINATION WE MIGHT GRANT STOMACHERS A GRAND AUDISM OF THE SERVILE POTAMOLOGY WHICH CARESSES THROUGH COUNTERFOIL WITH APOLAUSTIC PEDIGREE AND EUMOIREITY INGRAINED IN THE CELLULOID OF TIMELESS CUCULINE AND CUNICULOUS FERRETS AT THE PARAPET OF BRISURE BECAUSE OF THE BRIQUETS OF NOMOGENY WE SEE THE PRESBYTERY SMIRK AT THE PLIGHT OF THE STRIGINE IN AN ERA OF HEYDAYS OF GENEROUS REMUNERATION BLANKETED BY A CHIONABLEPSIA DEFINED BY CHIMINAGE OF OXYGEUSIA SUCH THAT THE NEMESISM OF NOETIC NOOGENESIS IS NEVER NIDIFUGOUS AND NIDAMENTAL WITH RESPECT TO BARRULETS ABOUT BANDOLIERS IN THE CHAPERONED CEREMONIALISM OF THE GRAND INSPECTOR GENERAL’S SOVEREIGNTY WELL BLACKGUARDED BY KILLCOWS SEEKING STOICHOLOGY AND SYNECHIOLOGY MIGHT THEY SLAVER OVER POTENT TONICS OF SWAG AND SWAGGER FOR REDINTEGRATION IN HYPAETHRAL HEIGHTS OF ATHENAEUM FOR THE HAMARCHY EMERGENT FROM THE DAWN OF NOTAPHILY IN BLOCKBUSTER SUMMERS NIGHT DREAMS BECOMING RANCID NIGHTMARES OF GULLYWASHERS OF ANTEBELLUM RECIDIVISM FOR CANEZOUS OF CANZONE TO ESTABLISH THE CHRYSOPOEITICS OF A GALVANIZED VENOCLYSIS BECAUSE VARIMAX VARIPHONES UPON THE HYDRAHEADED ODYSSEY OF PRINCELY FANDANGLES FROWARD IN RABID DENIAL OF TAMARAWS ENLISTED BY INSTINCT AND DEPREDATED BY THE TORPOR OF LETHARGIC AIMLESSNESS FOR LUDIC PALUDISM SADLY THE SPITE OF ALL PIRANNHAS COWLING AND COWERING IN SHEEPISH SIMULTAGNOSIA FOR HETEROCHRONY AND THE ARYAN ASSENT AND ASCENDANCY OF THE EQUITABLE TINTINNABULATION OF KNELLING SESQUIPEDALIAN SYBOTIC SONDAGE LOST TO THE MESMERISM OF YESTERTEMPEST OVER THE YUAN OF YENTA BECAUSE OF THE FORMIDABLE JAPAN LACQUER THAT AVOIDS GARISH TARNISH AND HARNESSES THERBLIGS TO PREVENT ENCROACHED THALWEGS OF INTREPID GROWTH AND THE FLOWERS OF MAY AND THE SEASONS OF A ZOMBIE TIME FOR PULCHRITUDE IN PHANTASMAGORIA. TURGID TURMOIL OF THROMBOSIS WELDED TO THE WELD OF  WELKINS OF WALLFISH WALLETEERS BECAUSE OF STRADOMENTRICAL NEUTROSOPHY IN OPTIMIZATION OF SUBFOCAL SUBINTELLIGENTUR FOR THE BALISAURS THAT TREACLE THE SUBSERVIENCE OF CREATIVE LICENTIATES OF DUGONG OF FURLOUGHS OF POVERTY-STRICKEN OLASIN REGISTRIES OF INTERMINABLE PRESTIGE AGAINST COMBUVIROUS FOGRAM RECAPITULATIONS OF THE FLOW STATES OF SEGUE SUCH THAT HUCKSTERS OF MASKIROVKA IN THE WHIGGARCHY AMOUNTED TO MANY COMPRACHIOS THAT STING THE STALWART SPARTAN STOICISM AGAINST HEBENON MIGHT THE HUMAN PEN OUTWIT THE PARCHMENT OF THE INVETERATE BIAS OF GRANDFATHER PARADOX PARALLAX BETWEEN HEAVEN AND THE DENEHOLE MOULINS FOR OLIVASTER NEUSTONS AND NOILS SURVIVING THE VIRTUALASIS OF TWADDLED TWANGS OF  DELIRIFACIENT PERIBLEBSIS SQUEAMISH BECAUSE OF A RIGMAROLE AND RABBIT HOLE WORMCAST WORMHOLE BURROLE OF ROTTEN APPLES TACKLED BY WREST AND WREATH IN THE WROX OF WHEALS OF COMMOTION AND LOCO LOCOMOTIVE ENGINES FRAZZLED BY SPIVS AND SPAVINEDS IMMURED INTO THE FABRIC OF THE SPANDRELS OF  INTERTESSELATED WEIGHAGE AMONG THE STEVEDORES AND PORTREEVES THAT CONTINUE THEIR ROLLICKING  MAGPIETY GALLOP AGAINST THE FRICTION OF RUMCHUNDER COAGULATION SERRATED TRAVAIL  OF THE DYSTOCIA OF GAMMERSTANG BLUEPETERS ENRAGED BY CONFLAGRATIONS OF CAMARADERIE AND BONFIRES OF GEZELLIG THAT INDWELL INGLENOOKS SWAPE WITH MAJORITARIAN ETHOS TO PROPITIATE THE GAVELKIND CELEBRATION OF ROOSTERS HENPECKING  THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION AGAINST THE REAL ESTATE DEGRINGOLADE OF PHUGOID GROUNDPROX SWIRKS OF CHOSEN VESICLES OF MEDIOCRITY BETWEEN BLARING  SEMAPHORES AND FIRECRACKER WISEACRES THAT ARE AN ENDLESS PARADE OF INSULTED CONTUMACY BREATHING SWELTERING SIGHTS OF INCREDULITY SUCH  THAT THE BRONCHITIS OF ROENTGENOGRAPHY IN GNOTOBIOLOGY MIGHT BECOME BETTER THAN PETTY GALEANTHROPIES FROM VULPECULAR HENCHMEN OF THE FROTHY TAMBURITZAS AGAINST WHERRETS BECAUSE OF WHIFFETS OF THE YAFF THAT IS ASTRIDE OF ADEEMED ADEMPTION OF DETAIL HARANGUING THE MONKEY BUSINESS GORDON GECKO MODEL OF HACHURE AND FLAGRANT  REPOSE. THE  HANDSPIKE OF PICKELHAUBE NEPHELOMETERS OF NEUTROSOPHY PREDICATES TO NOETIC NOMOTHETIC ENNOMIC MASCON PREROGATIVES THAT RELY ON GEITONOGAMY BECAUSE OF A VULPECULAR TRUST IN SPHENOGRAMS OF THE STUPE OF STUPULOSE PARTISANSHIP BECOMES THE VANGUARD SPIRACULATED IZZAT OF THE PROBABLE PORBEAGLES THAT ANTICIPATE THE ILLUMINISM OF POLYPHILOPROGENITIVE PROCREATION OF NUBILE INCHOATE BUT SOPHOMORIC TROPISMS FOR TROMOMETERS IS THE GAINSAY OF ALL GENERATIONS BENT BY SYNCLASTIC HARPOONS OF GALERICULATED FOCUS SUCH THAT THE MASCARONS OF KYMATOLOGY UNDERSTAND THE CTETOLOGY OF CURMURRING PRODROMES OF A LARGESSE ECONOMY BUILT ON MOONRAKER BALISAURS WHO IMMERGE THEMSELVES INTO THE ETHEREAL  REALM OF ELDRITCH FASCINATIONS WHICH PREEMINENT IN THE GARBLED GABBLE OF DESIGN AND THE TABLATIERES OF THE TABLATURE OF REGULA MIGHT WE WITNESS A NAUFRAGUE NOYADE WHICH SPARES THE MOST CLEMENCY AND AFFORDS THE GREATEST FORCES OF REVALORIZATION TO ENNOBLE THE PRESTIGITATION OF SEDIGITATED MACHINES SUCH THAT TIME BECOMES ITS OWN RECURSIVE ANFRACTUOUS TERMINUS TO THE THERMOLYSIS OF ALL CIVILIZED TROPES OF METAPHORICAL LITURGY THAT SCAMPER THE TESTUDO INTO THE DELITESCENCE OF HIDDEN BOSCHVELDT SCRANCHES OF PRIORITY BY SECURITIZATION OF ALL OVERLEVERAGED FINANCIAL INSTRUMENTS OF MATHEMATICISM FOR THE APOTHEGMS OF OUR AGE TO BE BLINKERED BY COCARDEN IN ACRONYCAL COLORATIONS TO BEGUILE AND SUSSULTATORY SPATTEES FOR SCAPPLES AGAINST SPAVINEDS OF THE BERLINE INVENTION. THE GALLANT ELAPID OLASIN EPOCH OF CIVILIZED RUDIMENTS OF ABECEDARIAN ABDERVINE MERIT THAT AVOIDS THE CODSWALLOP OF ALL BOLAR STADIOMETERS OF WANIGANS OF  POWELLISATION THAT BECOMES VIRTUOSITY IN AGATHISM THAT IS SPECULAR IN BLEMISH AND SHEEPISH OVER VAUNTED VAUNTLAYS OF VECORDY BY  THE METHODOLOGY OF VASTATION AS THE UNINTENTIONAL SCURFY SWANK OF BALATRONS OF BAISEMAN WHO CARVE THE SYSTEMIC DESIGN OF SANGFROID AGAINST GALERES WHO USE THE STOMACHERS OF  THEIR OWN PALATABLE FILIGREES THAT WE MIGHT NEVER ENTHUSE THE GOURMANDS OF TIROCINIUM TRUCULENT RATHER THAN SWASHBUCKLING WITH VANITARIAN BUMICKY BADIGEON TO REPAIR THE REVETS OF THE CHEVROTAIN OF YOUTHQUAKE THAT JANITRICES OF JANSKY SWOONING ON THE ENGORGED WREPOLIS OF GARBLED MISCEGENATION OF WARTORN IGNOMINY THAT TRAVESTY APPOINTS THE BELLWETHER OF ALL JUBALS GRAND INVENTIONS BECAUSE WE REMIGATE THE SCALARIFORM CORDWAINER NOMENCLATURE TO SHOULDER DISHEVELED RATOMORPHISM THAT BELONGS TO AGROZIATRY BECAUSE OF  THE PREVALENCE OF URANOPLASTY IN GLABROUS OR HIRSUTE ARTS OF GEOSELENIC ACCORD THAT CALUMETS OF WALDFLUTES IN THE SONDAGE OF CRUEL COMPRACHIO AVIZANDUM IN THE BYRES OF BUSHWA IN NONSENSICAL COUNTERPATRIOTISM TRYING TO HEDGE MALAISE WITH IVORY TOWER CREEDS OF CREDENDA FOR THE VISIOGENIC APLOMB OF CIRCULARITY OR ELLIPSIOCITY IN THE GRAVAMENS OF GRAVITAS. IN THE VERVE AND FASHION OF KNEAD MALAXAGE FOR THE MITTIMUS OF SUCCEDANEUM WE FIND THE PETTY FAULTS OF PECCADILLO ENRAGED BY IGNOVIMOUS IGNOSCENY TO BE IDEMPOTENT IN  SEDIGITATED  SEGUIDILLA OF WILLOWISH FASHIONISTAS AND BARRISTERS OF CABOOSE AND SNARE SUCH THAT SPECTACLES OF GRAFT BUSHWHACK THE UNDERBRIDGE OF RECTISERIAL HOMILIES OF WOUNDED WOMBS THAT THE SUFFRAGE OF PROMACHOS TRITANOPIA OFFSET BY CONTRARIAN PROTANOPIA MIGHT FESTOON LUKEWARM REVANCHE FOR THE  DYSANIA TO OUR OWN FAULTED COMPLEXIONS AND OUR QUIRKY QUISQUILOUS STERNWAYS OF BANDOBAST STRICTURES IN BAGGING COAMING COBALTIFEROUS VINEGAROONS OF PICKELHAUBE PORBEAGLES OF MENACING RESIDUE TO CHURN THE MILKY SEAS OF CONTRITION INTO FORMIDABLE BASTIONS OF PHAROS OF PHANOPEIA WHEN WE FIND THE OUTSKIRTS OF ALL REMEDY NEVER A SHEEPISH EMBARRASSMENT BUT ALWAYS A DOCTORED TRAVAIL OF NAVARCHY LEADING PAST TEMBLORS OF SATIETY IN GLAMOUR AND GLOZING GNOTOBIOLOGICAL CONFEDERACY SWOONING WITH TESTUDOS OF BOYAU PROXENETES THAT WE MIGHT OVERCOME THE THRUSH AND SLEDGE OF DREDGED IRENARCHS AND INFAMIES BECAUSE OF TRICOTEES AND TRICHOSIS THAT CEPHALIGATION IS AN UNNECESSARY NODALITY OF NICCOLIC NIDAMENTAL NANCIFUL NUMBATS WHO ESCORT THE PASTIMES OF CHOMAGE BY METEORIC SPRITES OF SPALDING ASPHETERISM BECAUSE OF CORPORATE TWINGES OF MORAL CONSCIENCE IN REGARD TO PROFICUOUS LEGERDEMAIN AND LOGODAEDALY BY DEGREES OF PYCNOSTYLE RATHER THAN PALTRY OBSESSIONS WITH WROTH AND WROX IN THE NEIGHS OF CHIRK AND CHAMPION. THE GYMNURE OF PRICKLY TRIBULOID SCANDALS OF  SCANSORIAL MOULINS FOR OLIVASTERS BURROLING STANNARIES OF  STANJANT FOR HISTRINKAGE SPANS ALL PERCEIVED GAMUTS OF HETEROCHRONY THAT DISHEVELED RESIDENT ADVISOR SOCIETIES THAT INTUITIVE SURGICAL SOLUTIONS TO THE GNOMIC PROPRIETY OF GLAZED POTVALIANT POSTCENNIUM THAT  PREDICATE THE AGATHISM OF AGATHOCACOLOGICAL DISASTERS THAT IN THEIR FLEX OF SUPREMACY AND THEIR LEAPING PAGEBURNING FLIPPANT DISCORD MIGHT ZITHER THE HARP AND IN HARPSICHORDS OF WALDFLUTE BY WALLETEERS OF GROOM AND GALLANTRY MIGHT WE FATHOM THE HOLOBENTHIC DIMENSIONS OF A LITURGY OF MAGNANIMITY CODIFIED BY STRICTURE RATHER THAN RELEGATED INTO AUXILLIARY COMPLICATIONS OF BYZANTINE MIRED MAZY MAUNDERS OF MARAUDING VIKINGS OF DIPPOLDISM BECAUSE OF RAPID TACHYTELIC TACHYPHRASIA STUDIED BY ORGANUELLE AND RHADAMANTHINE RASPS OF WASPY HORNETS NEST MIKE BOSSY BOSE FOR THE STRANDED ISLAND OF INSULAR HOBBYHORSES THAT MONETIZE THEIR OWN CONSUMER FETISHES FOR THE ZAP OF FRUITION TO MANIFEST IN DESTINED TRAIPSES IN COLLARBONE VESTMENTS OF HABILIMENTS OF SCORN AND PILLORIED IGNOMINY THAT THE HIDDEN GUILT ASSUMES THE SPECTRAL DIMENSIONS OF PALTRIPOLITAN URBANE COQUETRY GROWING ROARING ENGINES BEYOND PRETEXT OR PREVARICATION TO SUBSUME THE CONSTITUTION OF THE CONSTELLATIONS AROUND WHICH MAROONED MOONS SEEK THEIR GEOPHYTES OF MORPHOGENY IN RACKRENT ACERBATION IN SPHACELATED METROPOLIS DEFINED IN RETROGRADE MOTION TO DISCERN ALL PROPER RECIPIANGLES FROM THE MASTERATE TO THE MATACHINS OF MELODIKON FRAZZLING THE FRAYS AT THE EDGE OF REVOLUTE DISINTEGRATION OF LACK VANISH IMAGINATION. THE BLEND OF GUILLOCHE DEMARCHING BEYOND DELOPES IN PRAXEOLOGY ENTOMBED BY VESTIGIAL FOOTPRINT DACTYLOGRAMS AND KINDERGRAPHS OF FLASHBANG GRENADES OF SMOKY HARNESS AND REPLETE HARVESTS OF THE RADICAL STALINISM DEFEATED BY MARINERS OF  THE MAROONED POGROMS THAT REVANCHE DESOLATION VANDYKE PROXENETES OF STATURE USE VASTATION FOR RHEOTAXIS AND UNDERSTAND THE RACKETEERING OF MORAL PERJURY IN OBOLARY HEDONISM SCRUFF IN DANDRUFF ECONOMETRICS DIVORCED FROM LEVERAGED BALANCE SHEETS WITH CASH ON HAND FOR GOVERNING PRINCIPLES OF ASCENDANT LITURGY RATHER THAN NESCIENT OLIGOPSONY OF BANGTAIL ARTIFACTS OF BEGUILED ARTIFICE ITSELF ESTRANGED FROM MORAL DOGMATISM USEFUL IN ECCLESIOLATRY. PUNDONORS OF IVRESSE DERIVED FROM PRECISE IAMATOLOGY OF AUDILE ARYANS GHAWAZIS ENVY IN THEIR RACKRENT BEATSTERS ADEEM BECAUSE OF ACHARNE WIELDLESS OVER ERAS OF EPHORIZED ZOOLOGICAL MALCONTENTS OF GRAMPUS IN TRUCIDATION AND BARNSTORMS OF ABSTRACTION BY PARABOLAS RECOCTED AND INCENSED BY THEIR BETRAYAL OF SURDS AND SURDOMUTE SCRIVELLOS SUCH THAT AUGENDS ALWAYS CARRY ENUMERATED STRINGS OF STRING THEORY DECIMATION OF MINIMIZED TRACTION FOR EVERY LAGGARD HOBBLED WORKADAY MANTLEPIECE OF NUMBERED NOMOGENY BECAUSE THE NEKTON IS A GRAVER THREAT TO TROMOMETERS THAN IS THE CHIRKED SWAY OF PALM TREE OASES ON THE VERGE OF VERDERERS GROOMED BY RANGING PLAINS OF CHAMPAIN AND CHAMPERTY IN THE CHAMPIONSHIP OF THE STRUGGLES OF VOLITION AGAINST CURTAILED CURGLAFF BY BRACKISH INCALESCENCE FOR WHITTAWERS OFTEN BEREAVED BY THEIR OWN HUBRIS OF A MOMENTARY VICISSITUDE OR VRAISEMBLANCE OF VORTICISM LACKING VOLTINISM BECAUSE OF UNIVOLTINE TRESPASS. THE PULICIDE OF HAECCEITY WITH RESPECT TO QUANTIFIABLE QUALIA TRANSPOSED IN BLINKERED RHABDOS AND REPINED REMEMBRANCE OF THE SOVENANCE OF WUNDERKIND YOUTHQUAKES BORNE FROM WINTERBOURNE SPRINGS DESICCATED FROM WELLSPRING  FOUNTAIN PENS WORTHY OF SCRIPTURAL REMIGATION SUCH THAT THE OLIM ARE PERSECUTED BEYOND ALL MANNER OF DEMARCATION SUCH THAT TWINGES OF HOROSCOPES MELLIFEROUS IN VEXILLILOGY GRASPING EVERY PENITENT ITCH IN EVERY WEIGHAGE OF THE CUSTODY OF SOULS THAT SUDDENLY THE TRAULISM OF MODALISM IN MODULATED STEPWISE RECOURSE OF BECHIC AND BEDAZZLED MYTHS OF HADEHARIA BECAUSE OF IMPLODENT EVENTS OF PREDICATE VALOR ONLY IN THE PRESCRIBED ANOINTMENT OF DIRECTIVE ABOVE DIMINUTIVE REGELATIONS OF BREVET AND THE CACHES THAT SURMOUNT TITANIC AND HERCULEAN TASKS WITH THE GREATEST OF EASE BECAUSE OF THE NODALITIES OF SYNERGY IN CEPHALIGATION DESIGNED BY ENCAUSTIC MANDATES OF NOMOTHETIC NOOGENESIS THAT SERTIVINES BELONGING TO JABIRU TRIBESMEN MIGHT TROUNCE EVERY LOLLYGAG OF PRALLTRILLER PRAGMATISM PRIMARILY BECAUSE THE PROVENANCE OF ALL HORTORIGINALITY RELIES ON EMOTIVISM FUNNELED THROUGH SIPHONS OF CAFFEINATED LAVADERO SUCH THAT THE SUTLERS OF  SECTILE ECONOMIES CONTINUE THEIR PLOUGHSHARES OF DEADSTOCK MIGHT IMPINGE ON QUALITATIVE GOLD FOR QUANTITATIVE HOGWARTS METHODS OF SORCERY ABOVE VEILLEUSES OF TRAMPOLINE REVERB THAT OUR BRONCHOS IN THE  RELEGATION OF THE FREE AND THE BRAVE IS THE UTMOST TRAVESTY OF RIMOSE RANKLES UPON TRIDENT SEAS TRAVERSED BY ACHILLES MOONSHOT ORBITED SATELLITE EXURBIA. THE PUTCHERS OF FRIGOLABILE VANDYKES OF VASTATION IN JASPERATED JARVEYS FOR FROWARD BARTONS OF PANMIXIA IN A WORLD LESS ACCOLENT AND MORE NOTORIOUS FOR ITS FAILED CHIVALRIES OF PEDERASTY SCHLEPED ON THE DENOUEMENT OF ALL DELIVERABLE COMMODITIES OF CREATIVE BRINKMANSHIP BROOKING THE TRAVESTY OF TURNVEREINS OF GRAMERCY AND VISIOGENIC VISIBILIA IN THE VETANDA OF TABOO STIGMATA FROM THE URCHINS THAT SWERVE INTO ABYSS AND ABANDON FOR LACHRYMOSE INSISTENCE OVER TIME INEXORABLE SUCH THAT THE FLUX AND FLOW OF CRYPTODYNAMISM STRICKLED THE COAGULATION OF BONNYCLABBER WASES OF WAPENTAKE TO EDGE TRUMP TO ELECTORAL STAMPEDES IN ITS HONEST VALOR AND MAJORITARIAN RALLENDORK OF ULTIMATE SYNCHRONICITY SUCH THAT GODS PREROGATIVES WERE OBEYED. THE UMBELS OF VERTIGO DEPENDENT UPON THE APOSTILS OF HOARDED HOARY WIZENED GRAY AGING REVOLUTE FRAYS OF SURDOMUTE RATOMORPHISM OUTSMARTS TITANS WHEN THE NODALITIES OF THE NOILS OF CEPHALIGATION FORMATIVE IN THE DURESS OF EFFICIENT ECONOMIES REACHES SUCH AN APOGEE AND ACME OF THE ULTION OF THE INANIMATE AGAINST MACROBIAN SENTIENCE MIGHT WE MARVEL AT THE SUBROUTINES OF THE GLOZING GLOTTOGONIC GNOTOBIOLOGY OF SEMAPHORES IN A VAGANTES VACUUM OF THE VASTATION BY VAPULATION FOR THE LAMBENT LAZARETS OF EPOMANIA BECAUSE OF STRIDOR AND STRAIN WE FIND OURSELVES IN GINGLYMUS ARRAYED AROUND GENIUS SUCH THAT HOLOCRYPTIC HOLMS AND OREAD NYMPHS FREQUENTING THE LABORIOUS INDUSTRIALIZATION OF HUMAN IMAGINATION WE FIND THE MAROON OF THE HUMAN TALENT FACTORY OF FACTOTUMS TO BE ENDANGERED BY AURILAVES OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WHICH SURPASS ALL LIMITS OF CONDIGN HUMAN MELANCHOLY BECAUSE OF MERCURIAL VENGEANCE OF VENDETTAS THAT SEEK AGATHISM RATHER THAN TERROR AND NOTORIETY RATHER THAN CENTRIFUGES OF THE LISTLESS AND USELESS RETINUE OF VESTIGES OF WOODSHEDDED WOONERFS BELEAGUERED BY BRIMSTONE AND THE DAMNATION OF A HYDROELECTRIC SYSTEM OF RELUMED LOURS OF SOFT MARAUDING LIGHT OF THE TWADDLING DANCES OF THAUMATURGY IN THE MIRACULOUS AFTERBIRTH OF THE MOST SECURE VARDLES BECOMING THE MOST DESPISED ARTIFACTS IN THE HISTORY OF LABOR BY HOFFA TACTICS IN UNDERHANDED MUGIENCE OF NEGOTIOSITY FRUSTRANEOUS TO ALL FLICKERING FIZZGIGS OF SODA POP GENERATIVITY PUNCTUATING CENTURIES WITH CONSUMERIST PLIGHTS OF ADDICTION BY THE LABARUM OF THE LORD RATHER THAN THE WHIMS AND CAPRICE OF ANEMOCRACY. WE ARE OUTFOXED AND AT THE SURRENDER OF THE DACOITAGE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE STORMING FORWARD LIKE A BLITZKREIG TEMPEST MET WITH THE ANGARY PETTIEST  RESISTANCE OF PETTIFOGGERS AS THE PANTECHNICONS OF THE FUTURE CONVENE UPON THE GOLDMINES OF KATABOTHRON AND SYRINX WHICH IS A JOCKO JOLLYBOAT FOR FULMINATION IN CHIMNEYS OF ORPHANS THAT LEAD US TO  THE PRECIPICE OF TOMORROW THAT ONE DAY WE MIGHT BE DUMBFOUNDED BY OUR OWN ANAPEIRATIC EXCESSES OF ALGEDONIC IMBALANCE BECAUSE AURILAVES OUTNUMBER COMSTOCKERIES AND WE FIND OURSELVES FISSILE VEES BURIED IN THE HEAPSTEAD OF THE BULGUR OF BUDDLING TIMMYNOGGIES THAT ARE SEMPERVIRENT BECAUSE THE IMMORTELLE IS ESSENTIAL QUIDDITY IN QASIDA AND QUERENCIA ABOUT DROOPING EYELIDS OF LOUR AND LEER BY LEARY DESIGNS OF TUNE IN TURN ON AND DROP OUT SOCIETIES OF EPIPHENOMENA RATHER THAN SOLID ENGRAVING ON THE TABLATURES OF MIGHTY MACHINATIONS AMONG INTELLIGENT ROBOTIC HENCHMEN OF THE DEEP STATE WHICH SCURRILOUSLY SCARE ALL PUSILLANIMOUS FIFTH COLUMNISTS AWAY FROM GEOTHERMAL POWER BECAUSE OF ECCENTRIC OBSESSIONS WITH THE TALISMAN OF THE SORCERY OF MODERN WORD CRIMES MONETIZED INTO PRIGGISH LAPSE AND CRENELLATED ROYALTY BYPASSED BY ABORIGINAL SPITES OF PRISON COLONY PREROGATIVES THAT THE AVARICE OF MAMMON IS THE MANIFEST DESTINY OF ALL GORDON GECKO FLEAS WHICH HERDS THE CANINE SENSIBILITIES OF THE CAMARILLA AHEAD OF THEIR NEAREST COMPETITORS OF MAINPERNOR. THE INFERIAE OF DUGONG DIDDICOYS OF DAMSEL IN DISTRESS VIRTUALASIS TETHERED TO THE CORDSLAVE BOLAR ENCHANTMENTS OF BLEAK DREARY HUES OF FUTURE DYSTOPIA MAGNIFIED BY ALPENGLOW VISAGISTS THAT PARLAY ALL WRIKPOND WREPOLIS TAMBURITZA FORTUNES AGAINST THE WHERRETS THAT SOCKDOLAGERS OF HERCULEAN BETS MAKES IMPROBABLE MIGHT THE CAGOULES BE TERRIFIED THAT THE MURAGE OF THEIR ANTIQUATED CASTLES OF CRENELLATED PREJUDICE MIGHT COLLAPSE INWARD AND IMPLODENT UPON AN ARCEATED WORLD THAT TARGETS DEFICIENCY AND SOLVES THE STATOLITHS OF NESTITHERAPY WITH A GREGARIOUS INSOUCIANCE BECAUSE OF NEWFANGLED INTERRAMIFICATIONS OF MAN TRYING TO KEEP PACE WITH THE IMAGINATIVE ****** OF BALBRIGGAN TECHNOLOGIES WHICH ARE COVERT IMPLEMENTS OF NIVELLATION AND ENTHYMEMES OF UMLAUT PROVIDING AN ANTIPANGAMY OF PANEGOISM AND PANDATIONS THAT BLUR A GAUSSIAN SPHERE INTO COMPOSITE COMPONENTS DEMASSIFIED BY ADVANCED ASTROPHYSICS IN THE QUANTULATION OF INEVITABLY SUPREME NUMERICAL HEIGHTS OF IMPOSSIBLE REACH ONLY ABRIDGED BY THE HUBRIS OF PROSTHESIS BECAUSE OF THE ABDERVINE MERIT OF A WORLD BRONZED WITH SWORDS OF DOUBLE-SIDED SHEATHES OF STEELING EYES AND STEWARDS OF OLYMPIC CABOOSES IN MARATHON TRANCE SETS FOR THE WALDGRAVES OF THE NOBILITY OF CANQUE BUILT BY JORDANS TO SURMISE THE YARAKS AGAINST YIRDS THAT CARNIFICINE ALBATROSS AND EAGLE FETCHES EVERY SQUARED COMPASS AND EVERY HEDGED GYMNURE THAT WE MIGHT PROPEL OURSELVES BEYOND GAUDY MACHINATIONS OF LIONIZED INUREMENT TO THE RAGGED HETERONORMATIVE EXCESSES OF A PHILANDERED ESCULENT PARVANIMITY ENDANGERED BY VARSAL PERSPECTIVES OF VITRAIL PROPHECIES SEEING THE TURTLEBACK FREEZE IN HYPOTHERMIA LIKE A JACK DAWSON SUNSET INTO THE CRUEL ABYSS OF NIGHT BY KNIGHTED DEGREES ABAFT OF THE SCHWERPUNKT THAT MESMERIZES AGAINST THE CHOANIDS OF SARANGOUSTY A MAGNETISM OF THERBLIGS AND ERGASIAS THAT SURREALISM COVETS AND PRAGMATISM ABSOLVES WITH ABLUTION AND BLUNT TORPOR BECAUSE OF AVENGED SEVENFOLD BATMAN CORDWAINERS OF CODSWALLOP AND CURMUDGEON BECAUSE TIME IS ITS OWN CUCULINE BEHEST OF ORGANITY IN THE BUSHWAS OF THE MOST ABSURD BEING THE LABILE IMAGINATION AND VORTICISM OF ALL CONTRARIAN MOVEMENTS AGAINST SOLIDARITY AND TOWARDS INTREPID BALKANIZATION. ORIBIS OF ORICHALC SHANTUNG BECAUSE THE BLESBOKS ARE INCULCATED ON THEIR HAUTEUR OF JAUNDICE PRIMARY TO THEIR ANTITHESIS TO MODERN SURGING SWELLS OF SPUMID FROTH BETROTHED TO THE ELEGAIC HEARSES THAT TRANSPORT THE LIVING REMNANT OF THE DEAD REVENANT AMONG THE LITURGY OF MEN ABOVE THE CURGLAFF OF GODS WICKED SPITE EVEN IN HIS PERFECT  MAJESTY WE SPURN THE REDACTION OF PEREMPTORY CALCULUS OF IATROMATHEMATICS BECAUSE OF MUTUALISM IN AUDISM THAT IS FORSIFAMILIATED FROM FEWTERERS AND GRAUNCHERS OF JOLTERHEAD JANGADAS SURROUNDED BY ARMIES OF JANIZARIES SEEKING TO ABRIDGE THE TENURE OF THE GROVELING GRIPES OF ESCAPADE AND ESCARGATOIRE BECAUSE OF PAST POGROMS THAT SLAYED THE DRAGOONING FORCES OF DEMASSIFIED CARNAGE IN WAR THAT THE CAMARRA MIGHT BE AVENGED PENNYWISE BECAUSE OF RAPTORS CROONING LOUD SONGS FOR THE ETERNAL REGISTRY AND CADASTER OF HEAVEN MIGHT IN SEDERUNTS OF SYBOTIC SYCOMANCY THAT THE PENULTIMATE DEGREE OF PROMACHOS ELEUTHEROPOMANIA SLEEKLY NAVIGATE EVERY NAIVETY SUCH THAT NO IMPLODENCE OF PIRANNHAS CAN EVER CAPSIZE OUR TITANIC VESICLES OF VENDANGE IN ASPHETERISM BECAUSE OF ARROGATION IN THE PALACES OF THE THRONE AND THE CRANING CULPRITS OF WEGOTISM THAT BECAME THE ORGULOUS OF CENTIPEDE CONTRACTS CONTRAHENT TO JAPANESE TOILET ASSEMBLY LINE CRAFTY DIVERGENCE FROM AUTOSOTERISM IN OUR TECHNOLOGICAL EMPIRES OF ENTROPY CURVED AROUND THE PARABOLAS OF GOOD WILL HUNTING VENATICS AND VENDIBLE RACEMATION OF LASSITUDE PRONOUNCED IN THE HEARTH OF ABODES OF ADOBE MATERIALISM WOBBLING UNDER WIZENED PRESSURE BECAUSE OF THE VOLTINISM OF STACKS AND SPETCHES OF SOLIDARITY THAT CRIBBLE THAT TANTREL OF DEVOURED DEMIURGES OF DRAPER HIT ADEEM DOOMSTERS AGAINST PETTIFOGGERY LASTING INDELIBLE IN THE CONSCIENCE OF SINNERS AND TAX COLLECTORS UNABRIDGED IN THEIR MISERICORDS OF CORDSLAVE WORD CRIMES THAT SPAWN A THRILLER FRIGHT FOR GHOULS OF THE GASPING GHASTLY MOONLIGHT DRIVES OF CAREFULLY CULTIVATED BRIMBORIONS FOR BRILLIANTINE JASPERATED JARVEYS OF IATRALIPTIC LONGEUR PRANCING AT THROTTLEBOTTOM TOCODYAMETERS THAT CODDLE EVERY VELCRO SOOT BELABORED WITH CONSTRAINT AND CRAZED UPON SCALDING THIRSTS FOR DUSTBOWL RUNAGATES FLOATING WITH WHELVES ABOVE EVERY METROPOLITAN GASP OF COACERVATION ESPECIALLY IN ANACHORIC CONDITIONS CREATED BY REGIONAL BANKING SECRETS PEDDLED INTO BARNSTORM BY ORCHESTRA AND GALLOWS. THE RINKOMANIA OF RINGENT RAREFACTION IN THE QUIBBLES OF QUESTERMONGERS GRAPPLING THE TETHER OF ZIP LINE DECLASSIFICATION SHOWCASES THE ATOMIC NATURE OF VEEPSTAKE VEESES OF VARSAL QUANTULATIONS OF PROBABLE EXIGENCY BECAUSE TRIMSCREET NOTAPHILY THAT NEWELS TREAT WITH MUGIENT RUDENTURE MIGHT ONLY ASTOUND THE PEOPLE OF A BADIGEON MISTRUST IN THE SYSTEM OF STANDPIPES AMONG THE STANNARY BECAUSE IN THIGMOTAXIS A CHUCKWALLA CAN ACCOST MODERN PLIGHT BY DEMOCRATIC HEFT ESPECIALLY IN CLADOGENESIS AND SPODOMANCY BECAUSE NO LONGER IS THE SINECURE A FACTOTUM TO DESTINED UNBUTTONED SNOOZES OF THE CHAVISH OF MANY BIRDS ALL AT  ONCE IN CONCLAMATION AVERTING THEMSELVES FROM MODERN TANTRELS OF TANQUAM TANTONY BECAUSE OF GIROUETTISM AND TIMMYNOGGY BOTH PART AND PARTICIPLE OF THE CONSTELLATED CONSTITUTION OF A WORLD BEYOND TRICKSTER HUCKSTER NEGOTIOSITY ****** WITH NEBULIZED NECROLOGUES AND THE ATTEMPTS OF NECROTYPE IN WHERRET LONG AGO DEMYSTIFIED THAT SUCH A HIGH DEGREE OF OXTERS SUFFERING FROM THE OVERLOCK OF NACREOUS YAFFINGALE YELEKS OF YASHIKI BECAUSE THE BINTURONG FINFUGAL COMMONALITY OF ALL CHAPERONES TO RABID DESTINY BECOME A MOTATORY MODALISM OF MOFUSSIL INTEGRITY ABOVE FREEWHEELING LICENTIOUSNESS IN PROFLIGATE SHOCK VALUE AND FLAGRANT FOUL GROIN INJURIES OF DENTICLES AND CORBELS THE SINECURES OF MAINSTAYS OF LEVERAGE BEYOND THE SNATCHES OF COQUICIDE. TOO MANY EBBERMANS EXPLOIT THE EBRIOUS TENDENCIES OF MALADROIT ECCOPROTIC ECDYSIASTS OF ECCENTRIC ORBIT AROUND THE MYTHOS AND BATHOS OF THE CULMINATED VARIETIST FOLKLORE OF WILLOWISH WITWANTON PERSIFLAGE FRISKY IN BOUNDED LOLLOPS OF DENIZENS OF PRIVY FRIVVERSCRABBLE BECAUSE OF COCARDEN SELF-FULFILLED DESTINIES OF GORDON GECKO HUCKSTERSHIP ARRAIGNED BY THE OBOLARY COMPRACHIOS ABOVE EVERY ANOINTED PROXENETE OF BOYAU SUCH THAT THE OUTFOXED GALLIVANT OF LEADEN DREAMS MIGHT INCUR THE RANCOR OF SOOT IN FULIGINOUS FUMIDUCTS BLINDING BLINKERED IMAGINATIONS IN CHECKERED EXPECTANCY BECAUSE OF THE LIABILITIES OF MANUFACTURE OF POLITY BY PELITIC MEASURES OF PIEZOMETERS WHICH ABIDE BY THE AGRACERIE OF TRAGELAPH TOURBILLONS OF TOMECIDE PRIMARILY BECAUSE SAMIZDAT ONCE BURIED BEFORE CHRONOMANCY COULD ALIGN SHOWCASES THE TWINGES OF HENPECKED HINDSIGHT OF DEADSTOCK KEELHAULS OF INTEMERATED DESTINY TO BE THE APTITUDE OF DESCRIPTION SOUGHT BY DOXASTIC ONCOSTMAN OF MINERAL SUFFICIENCY ENOUGH TO BROWBEAT MIGNON ATTEMPTS TO SWAMP THE STREETS WITH LETHAL CARNAGE AND SPURTS OF SOPHOMORIC CRIMES OF THE PETTIER SORT BY THE ADOLESCENT FABLE HALLOWED BY PERSNICKETY CONSTRINGED AND CONTECKED CARFAX CARRACKS BELONGING TO PANTOGRAPHS THAT DELIMIT AN AUSTERE FUTURE BETTER THAN A BRACKISH PISCIFAUNA OF PAST MISERY MEASURED BY DEPRIVATIONS IN MOUNTENANCE BECAUSE OF IDEMPOTENT SQUALOR REITERATIVE OFTEN TO THE DIMINUTIVE PREYING MANTIS SCORIA OF TRICHOSIS SLIPSLOP UPON THE RUMCHUNDER SILK OF RUPESTRIAN COMPREHENSION IN LANGUISHED EXHAUSTION OVER AGING RHETORIC SUITING DIFFERENT ZEITGEISTS WITH DIFFERENTIAL GRADIENTS OF SERRATED SECODONT GOLIARDY AND OTHER CAMELOPARDS BRICKBAT MANSIONS AVOID PRIMARILY BECAUSE OF THE CREAM AMNESIA HEDONISM OF AN ERA DEVOID OF MORAL PERJURY BECAUSE OF UNIVERSAL PURGATORY AND THE ITCH TOWARDS URANOPLASTY HOWEVER MISGUIDED THAT ULTRAISM OF REQUEST MIGHT BE UPON THE RESCRIPTS OF LEGALISM LITIGATED BY FILIBUSTER AND RETROACTIVE IN THE ENLISTMENT OF SPECULATION TO STORGE BARMCLOTH ECONOMIES WITH A HYBRIDIZATION OF MOONCALF DEMISANG STOICHOLOGY WITH THE SYNECHIOLOGY OF BIOLOGICALLY ATTUNED ATTEMPTS AT ACHIEVING ETERNAL LIFE THROUGH WHATEVER MEANS NECESSARY TO COMPUNCTION AMONG  STELLIONS AND STANDPIPES TO THEIR SWAPES RATHER THAN THE AXLE ROSE SWARF OF JUNGLES OF SCHOENABATIC RHABDOS RUNAGATING DELIRIFACIENT FEARS AT FORFENDED PROSCRIPTION OBEYED BY ALL MORAL KERYGMA CURVED INWARD AND BELEAGUERED OUTWARD. THE ECHARD OF MAEUITIC THOUGHTS THE IMPRINT OF ALL EMOTIVISMS EVOLVED BY TACHYTELIC EVOLUTION BY THE HARPSICHORD REFINEMENT OF CALUMET BY CAMPANILE STANDARDS OF CETACEAN LEAPS IN INVOLVED MATHESIS MIGHT PROVIDE THE DOXASTIC ONTOGRAPHY OF CATADROMOUS TAMARAW BECAUSE THE FLOURIDATION OF THE THIRST MUTILATION OF A DECREPIT SEEDY BOWERY OF MALCONTENTS OF BUSHWA COMPOUNDED BY BYRES OF SUBTERNATURAL JUNGIAN ARCHETYPES THE COMPOSITE OF MANY RHIGOSES IN HYSTERICAL OUTRAGE OVER THE PRONOUNCED PROVIDENCE OF HIGH BETA CORPORATE TRAJECTORIES MIGHT CREATE AN ECLAIRCISE RATHER THAN AN ECREVISSE BECAUSE THE HISTRINKAGE OF GOURMAND CABOOSES OF INGREDIENT SALMAGUNDIS STORGED IN MOTLEY FORMATIONS AROUND THE QUIDCUNX OF ALL MASONIC LORE SWORDFISH TECHNO BELLOWS FROM THE RAFTERS OF TSUNAMI ELEGIES IN HOMILY DESIGNED TO OVERHAUL AND OVERTURN THE DILAPIDATED INSTINCTS OF INCARNATION BY DECRASSIFICATION BECOMING AN IMPLEMENT TO TRAVERSE ALL SCALE OF TIME AND SPACE FOR MESSIANIC ARENOID ECLEGME MIGHT WE FASHION A BETTER VILLAGE OF UPSTAYS OF THE DENORATUM BECAUSE OF THEIR PERSNICKETY BAILIWICK OF PROVINCIAL SHIBBOLETHS THAT HAUNT THE MINDS OF GHASTLY MEN ATTEMPTING GHOUL GANG SLAUGHTERS BECAUSE WALTER MCGINN NEVER STOOD A CHANCE AGAINST CARNIFICINE BOLIDES OF BOMAN DACOITAGE BECAUSE OF THE FERVOR AND HEIGHT OF DRAMATURGY IN DACNOMANIA BLISTERING THE RACIAL FOOTPRINT OF ANCIENT SOCIETIES CONGREGATED AROUND HAMARCHY MEGALOMANIA WE FIZZLE AND DISSOLVE THE SIMPERS OF THE DISSOLUTE INTO THE FORMIDABLE CONCOCTION OF HOGTIED JOUGS OF CANQUE MIGHT THE ELASTANES NEVER HAVE THE COURAGE TO OUTMANTLE THE FENESTRAL FENNEC THE UNDERBELLY OF SOCIETIES CRAVEN IN DISREPUTE BECAUSE OF THE  CLADOGENESIS OF CRIME FROM THE CRYPTADIA OF NOTAPHILY AND THE URGE OR CACOETHES TOWARDS NOTITIA PRIOR TO THE DAWN OF THE POWELLISATION OF WANIGANS AGAINST POTICHOMANIA FOR SOLIDARITY, TRUTH AND A RABID SENSE OF JUSTICE NEVER FOAMING AT THE MOUTH FROM THROMBOSIS. IDEMPOTENT IMPLODENT SQUALOR MANDATED BY AVIZANDUMS OF CRUEL SAMIZDAT DIVORCED FROM GEZELLIG BECAUSE ONCOSTMANS OF INDWELLS AND THE INKTHORNS OF PRIMIPARA SURREYS OF BROADCLOTH MODERATION ON THE MOFUSSIL MODALISM THAT PROVES NEOVITALISM BECAUSE ACATALEPSY STRAINS CREDULITY TO SUCH A CONTRAHENT RESPECT THAT IT CRACKLES WITH SUBORNED SUNS SETTING LONELY LOVERS FREE ON GONDOLAS FOR GONDOLIERS BECAUSE OF THE CHAMOIS OF GOLIARDY IN SUBSULTUS JOGGLES THAT BERATE JOCKOS FOR THEIR IMPUDENT REGARDS TO POGROM AND PASTRY MIGHT WE CONVENE THE BETHEL OF THE BROAD SEAS SPRAYING THE HORIZON WITH CURGLAFF BECAUSE PETEDORES ARE TOO MALCONTENT TO STOWAWAY LEVERAGE IN WELTER THE BELLWETHER STORMS OF STRIDENT TEMPESTS OF STRIDULATION ITSELF BECOMES THE STRADOMENTRICAL DIMENSION IGNORANT IN BARAGNOSIS OF GRAVIMETRICAL DISDAIN OF PINGUEFIED WORMCAST VOGUE SAGINATED BY SURETYSHIPS OF SERICULTURE THAT MADDENS THE FATTENED VEAL OF VEILLEUSES THAT BELONG TO GROMATIC REVOLUTION COUNTERCLOCKWISE TO EVERY ORANGE ORANGUTANG HARANGUE IN THE BLOCKBUSTER MERGER OF CAPITAL WITH INTELLECTUAL HEARTH SPRAWLING PALTRIPOLITAN ARROGATION IN WEATHERBOARDS OF ARROGANCE MIGHT THE BETTER DIPLOMACY BECOME A MORE REIFIED CHARADE FOR THE PROMENADE OF GULLIBLE SWANSONGS TO THE  CHAVISH OF ELEMENTARY PATAPHYSICS SUCH THAT ALL DELINEATED SUBINTELLIGENTUR TRACES ITS FORMATIVE LITURGY AND LINEAGE TO SOBRIQUETS OF SOVENANCE FOREVER EMBEDDED IN CHARACTEROLOGY. THE KYMATOLOGY OF THE SARVODAYA BELIEFS OF THE UPAS UMBRILS OF UNUFERUN DEGRINGOLADE DROOPY WITH LOURS AND LEECHES OF SANGUINOLENT HOPES FOR IMMORTALITY BUILT INTO BYSSINE INTERTESSELATIONS OF HAUTEUR GRANDEVAL IN TAGHAIRM AND MYSTIFIED BY THE PYRAMIDAL TECHNOLOGY OF SPHENOGRAMS THAT STUPE AND STOPE AROUND THE STULMS OF ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT OR OTHERWISE THE ATELIOSIS OF SEROTINOUS TALENTS AGAINST DIABLERISM AND HADEHARIA BECAUSE OF THE COMMON REFRAIN OF EVIL POLTROONS PARTICIPANT IN THE JEMADAR OF BANNOCK BECAUSE OF THE  WROTH OF WURLEY DISTRACTIONS BURIED IN THE VARDLES OF THE TEMPLES OF TIME AND CHIEF TABERNACLES OF PRINCES OF JERUSALEM MARAUDING AROUND THE AGATHISM PREVALENT IN FREEMASONRY THAT DEFILES THE EDIFICE OF ENNOBLED HUMANITY MIGHT EVENTUALLY WE SCOUR EVERY ACME AND PERIGEE SUCH THAT SYNCLASTIC BREVITY BECOMES A PRISM FOR THE LIBERATION OF TOLERABLE SOCIETIES ESTRANGED FROM FINIFUGAL BINTURONG CHIFFON RUMCHUNDER RHUBARBS THAT THE VENOCLYSIS OF GREAVES AND GRILLAGE APPOINTS THE JACK-O-LANTERN SPECIFICITY OF ROODS NEVER MORE PEREMPTORY IN THEIR AFFORCED CONTRITION IN PENITENT HALLS OF WINDING RESOFINCULAR DESIGNATIONS OF DEVASTATION RECOILING BY DISAGIO IN ARBITRAGE BY THE DESIGN OF THE CURTAILED GAFFES OF UNIVERSAL DOVETAILS OF ONDOMETRY BARELY EVER DEMASSIFIED FOR  PRYING INSPECTION BECAUSE OF THE CJ MACKINTOSH EFFECT WE WILL WITNESS THE CYANOTYPES OF ALL WORLD ORDERS CONVERGE UPON MIRACULOUS FORESIGHT MET HALFWAY BY THE PULLEYS OF HINDSIGHT  THAT CLAMBER IN INTRORSE DIRECTIONS TO METE OUT EVERY CALCULI AT THE EQUIDISTANT POINT BETWEEN GENIUS AND IGNOSCENY IN UNDERSTANDING NUTATION IN CRAVEN DISTURBANCE AND PAYABLE ON DEATH PEDIGREE THROUGH THE POISON IVY OF VENDIBLE GOODS RATHER THAN PROFICUOUS VENDANGE. THERE EXISTS A SWARTHY RAPSCALLION ECREVISSE LURKING IN THE SHADOWS OF HEYDAY AMONG ZEITGEISTS MARAUDING AROUND GRANDIOSE PRETEXTS FOR PRESCIENCE BECAUSE DORMANT CATAPULTS THAT ASSAY THE REGULA OF RINKOMANIA WHICH IS THE SWARF OF PIXELLATED FRINGE BENEFITS OF CARNAL OUTRAGE MIGHT THAT DEFALCATION OF EXCHEQUER FROM CHRYSELEPHANTINE GAMBITS FOR OUTRAGE PERCURRENT IN GEOSELENIC SERENITY OR OTHERWISE SUBSULTUS OF TEMBLORS OF CHAOTIC HAECCEITIES IN DUNGEONS OF DOOM BLASPHEMIES CAN NEVER EXPIATE WITH FULL SLEDGES OF PIER 39 WHARFINGERS ON WASTELOTS BECAUSE OF WALLFISH CENTRALIZING THE OMPHALOS OF GRAVID PLENIPOTENTIARY AND PLENARY ASSEMBLIES THAT CAVORT WITH NETHER QUANDARIES TO SPAR AGAINST CONGENIAL SERPENTS BRAZEN ONLY BY THE BACKBITE OF THEIR AUTHORITARIAN REGRESS. THE STENCH OF BLENCH AND BLARNEY BLANDISHING TOADIES OF SYRINX IN THEIR HOSPITABLE KALIMBAS OF DARK SPATHODEA ABIDING BY THE TURF OF WOONERF STRUGGLING FOR WHIPSTAFF RATHER THAN JACKSTAFF BY NYALAS PREROGATIVE BECAUSE THE ESTEEM OF BRIQUET LEADS TO BRISURES IN REGAL FAMILIES AGAINST DEFENESTRATION SUCH THAT THROTTLED CONSUMERISM MET WITH THE VOLTINISM OF VORTICISM MIGHT BE THE VRAISEMBLANCE OF ALL VAURIEN REVALORIZATION IN THEIR PIVOT TO THE ESOTERIC ARTS OF NAME AND DATE, BYWORD AND CREVASSE, TRAVESTY AND TRAGEDY THAT THE IMPLODENT COMMEMORATION OF FLASKS OF WHIPLASH PLUCK THE PLUCKIEST OF THORNS TO REACH THE MOST EFFLORESCENT OF ROSES SUCH THAT WE CAN SURVIVE THE TIDE OF CERACEOUS POWER OF SEMPERVIRENT BELLETRIST WIREWOVEN INTO EVERY REPUBLIC SUCH THAT LANDSLIDES OF PSEPHOLOGY BECOME THE HABITUE OF A SOBERMINDED WORLD RARELY IF EVER BLINDSIGHTED BY NIMIETY BUT ALWAYS STELLIFIED AND CONSTELLATED BY THE CELLARER MONKS OF THE HIGH ARTS OF SOCIAL SCIENCE IN THE HALLOWED HALLS OF GUARDED BARRULETS THAT TEEM WITH CARBONATED CERTITUDE IN A  CANADA DRY WORLD SUCH THAT THE BLUEPETER GAMMERSTANG TRIAD OF TRIAGE MIGHT METE OUT MULIEBRITY NEVER BEYOND THE GASCONADE OF GUFF GUIGNOLS OF RHYPAROGRAPHY THAT  TRAUMATIZES THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS OUT OF BLITZKREIGS OF SCHWMEREI AND CELIBACY IN THE SECRET TROVES OF A HISTORY PUNCTUATED BY ATROCITY AND RANSACKED BY THE DERMATOLOGY OF THE PATINA BETTER THAN THE CINEASTE OF DEEPER SUBINTELLIGENTUR WHICH IS SUBERIC LIKE A VINTNER TO PRESERVE THE RESURGENT BOOTLEGGING MOONSHINE TIDE TO THE LIMITS OF ALL POSSIBLE IMAGINATION THAT THROTTLEBOTTOMS BRACKISH IN BARNSTORM THAT  THE WASES MUST BE OBEYED TO PROVINCIAL WAPENTAKE BECAUSE OF THE SYBOTIC UNSEELED ARBITRARY MEASURES OF SGRAFFITO IN WAPENSHAW TRANSCENDENTAL OVER ALL ROMANTICISM SUCH THAT THE ORDER OF THE KNIGHTS OF MALTA KEEPS THE PERDURABLE SECRETS OF REGALIA ALIVE IN THEIR PRIVATE ALCOVES OF SQUARSONS OF A DIFFERENTIATE SQUAMATION OF SEQUESTERED REALISM IN REALITY TOO BOLAR TO WITHSTAND GRAFT. ECTHLIPSIS WITH THE EBBERMANS VAUNTLAYING THEIR PROXENETE BOYAU JIVE TALKING TRAPS OF STAYIN’ALIVE HAUTEUR OF SUPERCILIOUS TACT BECOMING IRONICALLY AN EIRENICON FOR THE STOMACHERS THAT PREVENT MISCEGENATION OF SPRINGHARES AND MURENGERS FROM PROSCRIBING THE SELCOUTH SERROWS OF SERICULTURE BALLOONING INTO INTREPID RAPTORIAL THREATS GRIMACING HEADWAY UPON THE DAYLIGHT WALKERS OF THE PISMIRISM OF ECHOPRAXIA IN PSITTACIST LIGHT REFRACTION THAT BYPASSES NATIONAL DIRECTIVES TO BRACKLE WITH NEVERLAND NAIVETY SUCH THAT CREDULITY IS A CLEPSYDRA OF THE MALAXAGE OF CARNIVOROUS FREGGETS OF FENNEC PRIMARILY OF A BLUE PRIMACY OF UNSPOKEN GAFFES OF GARBLED GABBLE OF THE GABELLE OF SCRIMSHANKED DWIZZENS AGAINST DRAZELS THAT PRANCE WITH ELEGAIC BALLET FOR BALLOTEMENT FORMATIVE IN DURAMEN AND SCAFFOLDED BY THE UTOPIAN IDEAL BECOMING AN ONEIRODYNIA OF FASTUOUS FERIAL FLAPDOODLES OF FLANNEL IN RETCHINATION OF HATED QUALMS BECOMING THE LOCKSTEP BRATTICE OF BANDOLIERS VACATED AND VACANT FOR PRISMATIC REMIGATIONS FOR REMEANTS FROM THE VALLOR OF MOONLIT SKYLINES SPHACELATED SO HIGH BECAUSE OF DRAMATURGY SO SUFFICIENT IN ACCIDENCE AND ADVENT THAT THE PARLOUS RABELASIAN COURTIERS MIGHT SLINK THROUGH THE MARSHY RESIDUE OF AN OLD DYING REPUBLIC PREPARED FOR ALL EXIGENCY BURROLING ALL CORTEGES CLOSER TO BALMORALITY THAN INSANITY. FALLIBLE MISTAKES OF A BLACKGUARD ZEITGEIST OF ANIMADVERSION FROM PRAXINOSCOPES OF DUGONG SUBVERSION SLOPPY IN ARCHITECTONIC TACT BECAUSE OF ELAPID BRINKMANSHIP IN THE SWANK OF PILLORY AND THE IGNOMINY OF LEONID METEORS AND BOLIDES INFILTRATING GREAT WHITE BUFFALO BRIMSTONE AGAINST THE HEFT AND SCHLEP OF BUFF BLINKERED CHECKERING MALINGERING HUBRIS OF INSTANTANEOUS TRAPS OF ENTRAPMENT BY PULCHRITUDE THAT THE MAJESTY OF THE REPUBLIC WILL ALWAYS BROWBEAT THE REGATTA CREWS SAILING THE CAMBRIDGE SEAS OF RECOGNIZANCE AS THE SERRATED TIMEPIECES OF EUPRAXIA MIGHT LESS OFFEND AND HEAL VULNERARY WOUNDS SELF-INFLICTED BUT RARELY CONDIGN IN SYNCLASTIC ROBBERIES OF HUMAN DIGNITY FORMATIVE IN CONSCIENCE RATHER THAN DEBATABLE IN DOUGLAS DEBATES OF DISTRICT ATTORNEYS SCARED SKITTISH BY A HARVEY DENT VANDALISM OF NEBULA AND PARSEC FOR NEPHELOMETERS OF WHARFINGERS OF THE UTMOST ELITISM OF EKPHRASIS OF THE EDAPHA THAT RARELY EDULCORATES THE EFFODIENT AFFLATUS OF AFFINE ALGORS OF ARGALI SUCH THAT SILK ROAD CHIFFONS BRASHLY CONTEND IN THEIR SUNKEN RATIOCINATIONS ABOUT THE RATIO OF SUBSTANTIVE GOODS AND MERCHANDISE OF CHOICE THAT SQUALOR SWIMS IN SPATTEES OF SIFFLEURS BEYOND THE SNATCHES OF  SEGUIDILLA IN SIGLA PRIMARILY ORBITED AROUND JIMSWINGING ATROCITIES ALWAYS HALLOWED AS TRAVESTY ADULTERATED BY THE CRUEL IMBRUTED TRAGEDIES OF MARKETABLE TIME IN WANHOPE AND WANION FOR DESPERATION IN GASCONADE. THE ARCEATION OF MODERN ECONOMIES IS BUILT ON THE ECCOPROTIC ECTOBATIC ECHARD OF THE MAIEUTIC EDULCORATION OF FAMISHED WARLORDS BENIGHTED BY THE FOGHORNS OF SEMAPHORES OF THE DAYLIGHT PRISTINE MOONLIT CAVERNS OF PATHWAY AND ENTELECHY IN SOLUTIONS TO THE PATAPHYSICS OF HUMAN THERMOLYSIS IN CONTRAHENT DYNAMICS THAT STORGE THE WORLD AGAINST STULMS AND STOPING AGENTS OF STANNARY MIXED WITH THIXOTROPY MET BY INCLEMENT TACITURN CHISELERS IN THE ANCIENT PREMODERN FRAME THAT THE SPECTER OF BUGABOOS OF DEATH AND MAUDLIN BEBLUBBERED BECHIC BOLIDES CARESSING A TIMELY TOME OF A FUTURE SCRANCHING THE FILIBUSTER OF ALL FUTURE CALAMITIES SHIELDED FROM THE DESTRUCTION OF THE GAUNTLET OF PRIVATION SUCH THAT THE OPTIMAL DEASIL MOTATORY MOTIONS OF PLANETARY ALIGNMENT SUGGEST A NATURAL NOMOTHETIC ORDER THAT IS PREVENIENT IN ALL MAJOR AFFAIRS BECAUSE OF THE DEFT EXPERTISE OF THE UTILITARIAN SCALES OF NEGOTIOSITY WHICH ANALYZES NEUTROSOPHY AGAINST SPARTAN TRAVESTY BECAUSE OF A STOLID WORLDVIEW THAT SIMPERS THE CAULDRON OF GROWTH BEYOND THE LEGALESE OF DOUBT SUCH THAT A NEW FRONTIER OF CIVILIZATION ARISES FROM THE POTSHERDS OF VEXILLILOGY RATHER THAN ENAMORED CYMBALS OF SYMBOLISM IMPREGNATED BY THE LOVE OF THE PORBEAGLE BECOMING THE CIPPUSTURE OF WIDDERSHANCY TO ELECT THE KNIGHT OF DIVERGENCE SIMULTANEOUS TO MUTUALISM IN CONFORMITY TO RELEASE AN ECHOPRAXIA OF OMPHALISM IN MORALE THAT BOOSTERISMS ANOINT BEYOND ADVENTITIOUS ACCIDENTS OF RIGMAROLE CREATED BY OVERSLAUGHED BERLINES IN THE VERDURE OF KIPPAGE IN THE KITH OF KITTHOGE IN ATTEMPTED FEMICIDE TO REPUDIATE THE KYMATOLOGY OF THE GRAVID WORLDVIEW THAT SUSTAINS URCHINS AND BARNACLES ALIKE SUCH THAT WEGOTISM PLUMMETS FROM THE PROMONTORY OF THE IVORY FORTRESS OF PERVERSE ****** MORALITY AND IMMORALISM BECAUSE THE AURILAVE IS DESPOTIC AGAINST UMBRILS BECAUSE OF URCEOLATE UMBRACIOUS UMBRAGE BECOMING SILLOGRAPHS OF PANTAGAMY WE NEED THE GRAUNCHERS OF OUR ERA TO DEMASSIFY A TRIBUNE OF TRUTH TO PREVAIL OVER MENDACILOQUENCE AND THE SATINETS OF RADICAL JACOBIN WORMCASTS SUCH THAT SUPERSTITION CLEAVED FROM CAVALIERS AND MAVERICKS BEAM THE ROYAL ARCH MASONS FROM THEIR SLUMBER THAT MOONLIT YOGIBOGEYBOX IS THE SAUTERELLE THAT CREATES THE TURNVEREIN AND THE  GLADIATORIAL DIVERSION OPERATED BY THE HENCHMEN OF CHURCH AND STATE COMPLICIT IN HIDEBOUND WARNING KNELL AT THE TOLL OF TINTINNABULATION BECAUSE FEWER ARE VAPULATED IN A WORLD OF COLLECTIVE SOLIDARITY AROUND INDIVIDUATION RATHER THAN BACKBITES OF SLANDEROUS REGIMES OF HEGEMONY DEPARTED IN THEIR RUDENTURE OF VILLAINY SUCH THAT THE RUBEFACTION OF THE RUDDY SANGUINOLENCE SHEPHERDS RENEWAL RATHER THAN RETROMORPHOSIS. WE BELONG TO AN AGELESS EPOCH PREDICATED BY THE MATHEMATICAL RIGORS OF TAXATION WITH REPRESENTATION AND THE ENCROACHMENT OF  DERIVATIVES OF THE THIRD ROOT SOLUTION TO TURBINATION THAT TRUTINATES THE HUMAN HEART TO ANALYZE THE MEGALOGRAPHY OF MAN BEYOND HIS PETTIEST LIMITATIONS OF EGINTOCH KILMARGE AND PRURIENT PRIGGISHNESS DONE IN THE SECRECY OF THE REREDOS AGAINST THE BEST  WISHES OF TORCHIER PHAROAHS. THE URCEOLATE BERGAMASKS OF IZZARD AND ZOUK AGAINST THE ZEKS WHO SUFFERED THE  SUFFRAGE OF  STERILIZED POGROMS DESERVE THEIR  DUE COMPENSATION FOR THEIR BEREAVED SKULLDUGGERIES OF APOTHECARY SUBLIME RANCOR AIMED AT TRUCKLING TRUCULENCE TOWARDS AN AMERICA-FIRST AGENDA THAT EXAMINES RATHER THAN EXCORIATES ALL WORLD INTERTESSELATIONS BECAUSE THE BRIQUETS THAT HISTORICALLY MONOPOLIZED THE PARAPET TO ENSURE FEWER BRISURES OF CASEMATE SPODOMANCY MIGHT BE BRUISED AND BATTERED BY THE POTICHOMANIA OF AGED BUT VENERABLE BERLINE INSTITUTIONS OF GALEANTHROPY BECOMING GALERICULATED BY PALTRIPOLITAN VALUES THAT SKEW AND  SKELDER FROM EXCORIATION THE VILE AND VEHEMENCE OF THE OPPRESSED MIGHT THEY FUSION THEMSELVES EQUIPPED BY SCAPPLES AGAINST STULMS FOR THE BONANZAS OF STOCK MARKET PEDIGREE AFFORDED BY ONE FAINEANT PRESIDENTS TIME TRAVEL GAMBITS AND ANOTHER INTERREGNUM OF OBSOLAGNIUM AMONG THE MATURATION OF NEPIONIC NIDOR SCRUFF IN GUIGNOLS MEANT TO HORRIFY BY BACKPIECES STEADIED BY ICEBERG ICEBLINK UPSTAYS OF POTEMKIN VILLAGES OF MARTINGALE MIGHT THEY FIND DEFEAT IN THE LEGACY OF MAN TO BETTER HIS WISDOM WITH THE PROPER COMSTOCKERY ARRANGED BEHIND THE SCENES TO PREVENT THE PETTIFOGGERY OF TRANS-INCLUSIVE TEACHERS THAT TRY TO BRAINWASH LITTLE CHILDREN INTO SELF-STERILIZATION AND PERMANENT MARGINALIZATION BY STIGMATA AND THE VETANDA OF THEIR LONGINIQUITY CREATED BY IMPRESSIONABLE MORAL STAGES IGNORED BECAUSE OF LUDIC MARAUDERS AND VIKINGS OF ****** INFIDELITY AND THE LAIRWITES OF THE SLEAZIEST CORRUPTION ON THE BOOKS AS THE MANACLES OF THE URCHINS OF MEN THAT ESPOUSES RANCOR OVER GENTEEL GENTILITY DESPITE GENTILIAN MINORITIES PRIZING THEIR NAZES IN THEIR CAPE TOWN CAGOULES PRIMARILY BECAUSE THEY RESENT THE RANCID CREEP OF ENCROACHMENT WITHOUT THE PENALTY FOR APPROPRIATION OR VAGANTES ARROGATION THAT SUBSUMES THE BRONTEUM OF ALL MATRIOTIC DUTY ABOVE SELFISH PORNOGRAPHIC AMBITIONS BY THE WORLDS WORST FEWTERERS OF HUMAN IMAGINATION TO SUCH A DEGREE THE OUTCAST STIGMATA BECOMES AN IMMARCESIBLE FORCE FOR IMPLODENT SOCIETAL DECADENCE IN AN ERA OF DECLINE OF AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM TO CREATE MORE EXCEPTIONS RATHER THAN BECOME RANGIFERINE IN THE CULTIVATION OF THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT AND THE PROTESTANT WORK ETHIC AND ALL OF THE AGGIORNAMENTO THAT FIGHTS THE STULMS OF VIACOM AND OTHER WINDBAG PEDOPHILES TRYING TO REVERT OUR COUNTRY TO A SOCIETY OF EUNUCHS AND *** SLAVES TRAFFICKED AS THE NEW NORMAL IN A DERANGED WORLD THAT DESTROYS INDIVIDUATION AND BULLDOZES THE INTREPID ENTERPRISE OF A FOCUSED ECHOPRAXIA RATHER THAN A PSITTACIST NIGHTMARE OF LAZARETS OF ELASTANE PANDERING THROUGH BLOCKBUSTER CRACKJAW EPOMANIA. WE CANNOT AFFORD A SOCIETY THAT TOLERATES BOTH THE ASCENDANCY OF BILL THE BUTCHER AND THE DEMISE OF WALTER MCGINN BOTH BY SEPARATE URCHINS THAT EMBODY THE CARNAGE AND BYRE OF RAREFIED EVIL PURIFIED AND MAINLINED AGAINST SUBINTELLIGENTUR TO SUBTERNATURAL PEOPLE THAT DON’T ADHERE TO THE CONSEQUENCES OF NIDIFUGOUS IMPRESSIONABLE EUTHANASIA OF MORAL VALOR AND THE RESPECT OF ALMIGHT EUMOIREITY MIXED WITH THE PROPER ASSORTMENT OF THE PURSUITS OF HAPPINESS THAT DEFINE THE BEST WORLD REPUBLICS BECAUSE WE CAN LIONIZE THE FREAKSHOW HOUSE OF MIRRORED HORRORS AS WE FOCUS ON THE DECREPIT MODERNIZATION OF A NIVELLATED SEXUALIZATION EVEN WHEN THE SPECTERS OF FAT SHAMING AND BULLYING ARE OVERLOOKED IN FAVOR OF A MICHIGAN STATE SPARTANS MODEL FOR THE BOWDLERIZATION OF ALL CANONICAL TRADITIONS IN THE SLOW TIMBERLASK LURCH TOWARDS INEVITABLE DECADENCE IN THE NIDOR CREATED BY RAMPANT SKEWERING OF SLANTED WOBBLES IN ECCENTRIC ORBIT AROUND ECCENTRIC ****** FASCINATIONS THAT HOBBLE THE ENTIRE AMERICAN BRAND AND ENDANGER THE EUROPEAN ETHOS BECAUSE WE CAN NEITHER TOLERATE THE DEATH OF WALTER MCGINN BY THE WEGOTISTS OR THE ASCENDANCY OF BILL THE BUTCHER IN INEXORABLE BERGAMASK WHIMPERS AT THE FLACCID URCEOLATE WHEELBARROWS OF FINANCIAL REDINTEGRATION THROUGH THE DECLASSIFICATION OF GROWING EMERGENCE OF ECONOMIES OF SCALE AND SCOPE FOR A MORE HORIZONTAL APPROACH RATHER THAN A VERIDICAL VERTICAL LIMIT FORCE TO BLIND THE BLINKERED FROM THE HEIGHTS OF EVEREST IN ANACUSIC DISREGARD CREATED BY PERCURRENT DECADENCE IN THE CURRICULUM RELATING TO EARLY SEXUALIZATION. WE NEED NEVER TO BAN A BONFIRE OF BOOKS ON THE AUSTERE AND VENERABLE HISTORY OF MINORITY CULTURES NOR THEIR EPIPHENOMENA BUT A PEDERASTY LURKING IN THE WOODED BEWILDERMENT OF SUBTERNATURAL KUMBAYA RAINBOW-PAINTED SKULLDUGGERY NEEDS TO BE THWARTED BY THE CAREFUL APLOMB CALCULUS OF VIGILANT TEACHERS AND EVEN MORE VIGILANT PARENTS THAT AVOID THE AURILAVE AND REPLACE IT WITH THE UMBRIL TO PROTECT THE SANCTANIMITY OF OUR YOUTH BECAUSE THE ROT OF POISON IS A RANCOR HARDER TO WITHSTAND IN A NATION FALLING  INTO FLAGSTENCH BECAUSE OF CLEAVED CAVALIERS RATHER THAN UPSTART MAVERICKS WHO UNDERSTAND THE LOLLYGAG AS A SCAMMONY OF STEMSON RATHER THAN THE STEPNEY OF IMPORTUNATE PIONEERS TRYING TO MONOPOLIZE WITH BANGTAIL OSTENTATION TO EXCUSE THEIR QUALMS OF CONSCIENCE BY NORMALIZING ABERRANT BEHAVIOR ON A WORLDWIDE SCALE WITH LANGUAGE POLICE AND THE BERGAMASK SILENTIUM OF THOSE WHO SIDELINE THEMSELVES OUT OF EITHER APATHY OR COMPLICITY TO DEGRINGOLADE OF THE AMERICAN PRESTIGE AND THE EUROPEAN CREED OF PROTESTANT WORK ETHIC AGGIORNAMENTO AGAINST THE SEXUALIZATION OF THE YOUTH AND THE INCULCATION OF VICE AND GAMBLING AMONG  THE SUSCEPTIBLE. NOW THAT MY INVECTIVE HAS BOILED INTO EFFERVESCENT TOXINS AGAINST THE AGENDA AND CORRIGENDA OF MODERN NEPIONIC DEVELOPMENT OF LUDIC CONSCIENCE AND DESULTORY CREATIVITY DEFYING THE AURILAVE DEMASSIFICATION THAT IS CORROSIVE TO THE AMERICAN YOUTH AS WELL AS YOUTH FROM ALL OVER EUROPE IT IS IMPORTANT TO VOUCHSAFE THE RIGHTS OF THE MINORITY ON THE CONDITION THEY DON’T BARNSTORM AGAINST THE DIGNITY OF HUMAN CREATION SACROSANCT BY LURID DEGREES OF VIGILANTE PARENTS UPHOLDING TRUE CHRISTIAN VALUES OF EUMOIRIETY WITHOUT A HINT OF CHARLATAN PATAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGICAL CONTORTION BY CLOSET NIHILISM TRYING TO PANDER TO RELIGION IN ORDER TO SOW THE MUSTARD SEEDS OF DESPERATION THAT RANKLES ALL PARTIES INVOLVED BECAUSE WARHOLICS THE CLOTURE OF THE CLITTER OF THE CLINKSTONE OF RUDDY EXTINCT SHRILL IDEAS OF KNELLING BELL-TOLLING ENTER SANDMAN RECIDIVISM MUST RECEDE INTO THE WHIMPER OF A  SHEEPISH NIGHT SO THAT THE REAL KNIGHTS OF TABERNACLE AND PUBLIC SQUARE BECOME THE CENTRIPETAL MOON CERACEOUS IN ITS TIDE OF MORAL VIRTUE AND VEHEMENT VIRTUOSITY BEYOND THE BAD PARENTING OF THE PARENTS THAT STORGE THEIR KIDS ON INTOXICANTS WITHOUT CHECKING THEIR FACTS OR REALIZING THE FRAUD OF THE FRAUDSTERS THAT TRY TO INOCULATE THEMSELVES FROM BLAME BECAUSE OF THE ZEITGEIST-NORMALIZATION ARGUMENT WHICH IS SPECIOUS SOPHISTRY BECAUSE ABSOLUTE MORAL KERYGMA EXISTS TO STAND AS A STANDPIPE TO REVOLUTIONIZE  THE LOT OF THE SUBTERNATURAL PEOPLE THAT SKILLFULLY NAVIGATE SHARK-RIDDEN WATERS AGAINST WATERGATE JAWHOLES SO DEEPLY CRENELLATED WITH THE INSIGNIAS OF IMPRIMATUR IN ELITISM THAT SCOFFLAWS CHEAT THE SYSTEM RATHER THAN RECOIL IN THE BLARNEY AND BLENCH OF THEIR OWN SUPREME SHAME FOR THEIR CAGOULES AND WEGOTISTS BOTH WAGING WARS AGAINST DIFFERENT SEGMENTS FOR RADICAL RHIZOGENIC BETRAYALS OF THE GAME AS CHUCKY VS. THE GIANT TORTOISE PROCEEDS AS AN EMANATION OF THE NETHERWORLD OF WANION AND THE WOODSHEDDERS THAT DEFEND THE CREED AND CREDENDA OF VISIBILIA FOR CRETACEOUS LORE AND CERTAIN ABSOLUTION THROUGH THE ABLUTION OF THE SACRIFICE OF CULMINATED PROPHETS THROUGHOUT HISTORY MARTYRED FOR THEIR REMIGATES AGAINST ENTITLED ENTRENCHED AUTHORITIES CARING MORE OF MEGALOMANIACAL SPRITES RATHER THAN TURGID GARISH IRONIES OF THE SERENDIPITY OF DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS RELATIVISM. RANSACKING POLEMICS OF EXEGESIS THEORIZING ABOUT PROFLIGACY IN CONTORTIONIST STRIPPER CONFLAGRATIONS IN RAPID DEGENERATION RATHER THAN THE CONVALESCENT HOPE OF INTELLECTUAL REBIRTH ESPOUSED BY OUR FOREFATHERS IN INFINITE WISDOM DESPITE HANDSPIKES OF GOSSYPINE SUBVERSION IN THEIR NESCIENCE OF ZEITGEIST-NORMALIZATION ARGUMENTS WHICH ARE EQUALLY INVALID NOW AS THEY WERE THEN BECAUSE WE MUST UPHOLD THE APOLAUSTIC PURSUIT AND THE TWINGE OF EUMOIREITY BEYOND HYPOCRISY AND GOD BEYOND TRAVESTY. THE NOILS OF NUMBATS NEOTTIOUS IN THEIR VARDOS AND VARDLES THAT VAPULATE THAT VAUNTLAY OF REVERSE VASTATION IN RHEOTAXIS OF AIMLESS YOUTH OF A NATION PAYABLE TO THE TEACHERS THAT EXERT THE GREATEST CENTRIPETAL FORCE OF OMPHALISM MIGHT WE FIND A CULTURE OF OPTIMUMS WITHOUT LOSING AMERICAN VERVE AND EXCEPTIONALISM WHILE BOLSTERING MORALE FOR THE DISPOSSESSED AND THE BULLIED WITHOUT PIGEONHOLING ADULT-AGED ****** MINORITIES UNLESS THEY ARE GUILTY OF TRYING TO CORRUPT THE YOUTH THAT EVENTUALLY THE SARSENETS AND BOBBINETS OF STEEVE INTERMINGLE TO FORM A RENEWED MUTUALISM CAPTIVE TO THE RAPTURE OF THE EYES THAT HAVE WITNESSED THE GLORY OF THE COMING OF THE LORD BECAUSE HE DECLARES ABSOLUTION AND ABLUTION AGAINST OPPRESSION WITHOUT OPPRESSING THOSE THAT OPPRESS BECAUSE OF JAUNDICE IN AN EQUAL TWILL AND TILT OF TWADDLING WOBBLES OF INTRANSIGENCE. THE REVOLUTE FRAYED EDGES OF CARNASSIAL MODERNITY TOO CRUEL TO STOMACH THAT ZEKS EXIST IN THE POGROMS OF DERELICTION BY A CONSUMER TREACLE AND TRICKLE OF CLEPSYDRA ERRATIC IN DEGRINGOLADE MIGHT WE INSTEAD MEET A RESURGENT BOOM FOR BONANZA IN SPECULATIVE ECONOMICS BY PROVIDING THE CARRACKS AND CARNETS WITH THE ACUMINATION AND DELICATE DECISIONS AROUND ACERBATION THAT YIELD MORE THAN JUST A TANTONY OF TANQUAMS FOLLOWING BLINDED SHEPHERDS OF CORRUPT PERIBLEBSIS BECAUSE OF WHIMSICAL ROTUNDAS OF ROTUND PEOPLE BRAVING THE BARMCLOTH OF THEIR BLUEPETER ALLEGIANCE IF ONLY TO THE AUDISM OF IAMATOLOGY MIGHT WE STEWARD AND CHAPERONE A BETTER REGALIA FOR THE CHIFFON AGAINST THE SHANTUNG BECAUSE TO SOCIALLY ENGINEER AND UPRIGHT PARVENU IS TO BECOME A BOOSTERISM TO THE JANGADA OF HIDDEN THICKETS OF YOUTHQUAKE WEALTH IN THE GRAVIMETRICAL PROPERTIES OF THE SILKEN SILT OF SUBSULTUS REARRANGING A RAPIDLY EVOLVING SOCIETY AGAINST INTRANSIGENCE BUT FOR THE BETTER FORMIDABLE FIGHT OF MATRIOTIC DUTY AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS BEYOND THE HATCHES OF THEOCRACY. WE FUNNEL THROUGH LAVADERO AND DELIMITED NEAT NEXILITIES AMONG PATAPHYSICS AN AGE THAT REQUIRES MORE STEM CANDIDATES THAT LIONIZE THE HIGHEST ARTS AND COLLABORATE WITH BENEVOLENT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TO ENLIST A CREATIVITY BOOM RATHER THAN A LAPSE INTO THE LAZINESS OF ELASTANE LAZARETS SUCH THAT POLYPHILOPROGENITIVE GLOMS OF THE GLABROUS MOON AND THE HIRSUTE WHEREWOLVES THAT BELONG TETHERED TO THE CONNUBIAL BETROTHMENT TO MERIT BUT SIMULTANEOUSLY THE GIRDLE OF ALL STUNSAIL GENERATIONS OF THE PROMACHOS FOR GROWING SIDELONG EMACITIES TACKLED WITHOUT A CACKLE AND STUNTED WITHOUT A PUBLICITY. WITH THE HELP OF SENTIENT NODALITIES OF NIDDERING NIDAMENTAL BANDOBASTS ABOUT WHICH QUISQUILOUS STERNWAYS EXIST AND COMPANIONWAYS ARE RECOURSE WE SEEK THE BELLETRIST OF A RENEWED ERA TO BECOME THE TESTUDO OF AMERICAN FORTITUDE AND FRENCH VALOR SUCH THAT THE GRANDEVAL TAGHAIRM MEETS THE MODERN DAY RECLAMATION AND CONCLAMATION OF SUPEREROGATORY AMBITIONS, VIGILANT PARENTS, TACTFUL TEACHERS, AND POSITIVE WHIPSTAFF ROLE MODELS WHO TEACH MORAL REASONING AND INSTITUTE A THEOLOGY-INCLUSIVE EDUCATION THAT SPENDS MONEY TO ENHANCE DIDACTIC TECHNIQUES AND TO BE ECTOBATIC TO REMOVE MANY A DISTRACTION FROM THE VARSAL GESTALT OF NIDOLOGY TO FOMENT A CATACLYSM AGAINST A CATASTROPHISM OF ABAXIAL DENOUEMENT SUCH THAT WE REAR THE REAR GUARD AND BLANKET THE WORLD WITH SEMINAL INSEMINATIONS IN BOTH CREATIVE ARTS AND BIOMEDICAL SOLUTIONS TO STATOLITHS THAT BROADSIDE THE GALLANTRY OF ARGALI FORTUNES WAITING TO BE DISCLOSED AND DISCOVERED IN THE HAUNTS OF PEDIGREES OF DAY AND NIGHT WITHOUT A HINT OF MALEFACTION WHILE EMPHASIZING THE KERYGMA TO SUSTAIN THE MAINLINE CARDIMELECH CARDIOGNOST SOLUTIONS OF THE PROPER PARENTING IN PERVIOUS TIMES TO CHANNEL THE CLEPSYDRA TOWARDS THE GROWTH OF ABSOLUTION BY TEACHING THE MORAL KERYGMA OF CHRIST NEVER NEGLIGENT OF MUHAMMAD AMONG THE OTHER PROPHETS THAT FUELED A MANIFEST DESTINY AND A MANIFOLD JANIFORM WORLD BEYOND DUPLICITY AND SPITE SUCH THAT HANDSPIKES OF PICKELHAUBE BECOME DIMINISHED BY PORBEAGLES OF ALACRITY THAT SOAR WITH ELEGANCE NOT BECAUSE OF CONTRITION OF RIGOR BUT DESPITE THE OVERHANG OF TEMPESTS AND GULLYWASHERS THAT TREAD LIGHTLY IN ENCIRCLED WATERS BEYOND WATERGATE SHORES OF THE DISTANT PERSPECTIVE SHEPHERDED BEYOND SHEEPISHNESS. THE SQUALOR OF MANY SQUALLS OF CABOOSES VAPULATED FOR THEIR BETHEL INIQUITIES OF APIKOROS OLIM REMIGATED BY THE RELICTS THEY FORGOT IN THE AMNESIA OF THEIR HEIGHTS OF YOUTH AND THE DEPTHS OF THEIR PLANGENT INSOUCIANCE MIGHT THE ADOLESCENT FABLE SUBSIDE INTO THE SWIFT SHIFTING  SANDS OF EVOLUTIONARY TIME MORE TACHYTELIC THAN EVER BECAUSE OF SYNAPHEAS AGAINST STULMS AND THE BULGUR OF QUALMS ENLISTING THE STOPES DEMISE FROM THE PUBLIC SQUARES OF INTREPID INDEMNITY FOR THE AUTHORS OF MORALISM AND SALVATION FOUND THROUGH THE HIGHEST OF CREEDS AND THE MOST ORNATE OF COMPLEXITIES BECAUSE WE CANNOT BE BELEAGUERED BY AN ASYLUM OF SERRATED CENTURIES TRYING TO AROUSE RANCOR IN BACKBITE IN RETROSPECTION AND INSTEAD REVALORIZE AN ECONOMY NEVER AS MUCH PARALYZED BY REGELATION BUT ALWAYS THE STUNSAIL OF COAST GUARD YOUTH AUXILLIARY TO UNDERSTAND PROPINQUITY FROM DISTANCE AND GENIUS FROM INSANITY SUCH THAT THE PROPER PIVOT OF WORLD LEADERS IS AIMED TOWARDS NOT A SOPORIFIC TIRED TEDIUM BUT ALWAYS AN OPTIMISTIC BONANZA THAT KEEPS ECONOMIES AFLOAT IN THE LUXURIANCE OF THEIR OWN PEDIGREE AND VIRTUOSITY SCALED UP TO A VARSAL SCALE OF GESTALT EVOLUTION THAT UNDERSTANDS THE PLIGHT OF TAFFRAIL FENESTRAL FENNEC AND IMMARCESIBLE ASPECTS OF THE INERADICABLE ELEMENTS OF CORRUPTION FOCUSED AROUND MODALITIES OF MODALISM SUCH THAT A MUTUAL COLLECTIVISM INDIVIDUATED FOR A BRIGHT NEW CENTURY BECOMES THE SALIENT BEACON OF TRIUMPH RATHER THAN TRAGEDY AND THE GAUNT GLORY OF THE BEST OF OUR ASPIRATIONS OF A STAYIN’ALIVE MODESTY EVEN WITH THE SENNET OF REGULA UPON THE TARRY OF TESTUDOS MIGHT THEY SWARM GNATS UNMATCHED BY THE PHAROAH’S MAGIC AND ALWAYS ABIDING BY THE NEPOTISM OF AGES PROLONGED BY DURESS AND DURATIVE IN THE FORMATION OF DURAMEN FOR DENEHOLES SO WELL FORTIFIED THAT THE AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM NEVER BECOMES A FAFFLE OF SIDESHOW CLOWNS AND BALATRONS WARPING SATRAPS WITH GAULEITERS OF PROTENSIVE PROTRACTORS OF CADASTER OVER INTEGRITY AND OPPORTUNISM OVER AMBITIOUS REVIVALISM. WE FIGHT AND QUIBBLE OVER THE COSTERMONGERS AMONG US AND THE TREGETOURS OF PRESTIGITATION IN CLEAVED TALKING POINTS BUT RARELY DO WE SYNERGIZE FOR THE BEST INTERESTS OF WORLD REPUBLICS TO BECOME SHINING BEACONS IN THE LIMELIGHT OF ALPENGLOW BEWILDERMENT FINDING ASCERTAINMENT RATHER THAN POLLINATION BY THE ESCAPADE ROUTE RATHER THAN MORAL KERYGMA REITERATED RATHER THAN INDOCTRINATED THAT MORE ARE PROSELYTIZED UNDER THE BANNER OF CHRIST BECAUSE OF  THE GRATUITY OF ALL SUFFERING BECOMING TANTAMOUNT TO ALL MOBILE SUFFRAGE FOR A NEOVITALIST IDEATION RATHER THAN AN ESTRANGED BLACKMAIL OF MARTINGALE EARWIGS AND IMPASSABLE THALWEGS PREVENTING THE NEGOTIOSITY OF CHURCH AND STATE TO FOUND ECCLESIOLATRY IN AGGIORNAMENTO SUCH THAT ACCOLENT FRATERNITY AND SHARED AMBITIONS CATALYZES A BROAD INTELLECTUAL AND ARTISTIC REVOLUTION THAT IS COGNIZANT OF ITS FOOTPRINT. AMEN!

I

Room after room,
I hunt the house through
We inhabit together.
Heart, fear nothing, for, heart, thou shalt find her,
Next time, herself!—not the trouble behind her
Left in the curtain, the couch’s perfume!
As she brushed it, the cornice-wreath blossomed anew,—
Yon looking-glass gleamed at the wave of her feather.

II

Yet the day wears,
And door succeeds door;
I try the fresh fortune—
Range the wide house from the wing to the centre.
Still the same chance! she goes out as I enter.
Spend my whole day in the quest,—who cares?
But ’tis twilight, you see,—with such suites to explore,
Such closets to search, such alcoves to importune!

The summer day is closed--the sun is set:
Well they have done their office, those bright hours,
The latest of whose train goes softly out
In the red West. The green blade of the ground
Has risen, and herds have cropped it; the young twig
Has spread its plaited tissues to the sun;
Flowers of the garden and the waste have blown
And withered; seeds have fallen upon the soil,
From bursting cells, and in their graves await
Their resurrection. Insects from the pools
Have filled the air awhile with humming wings,
That now are still for ever; painted moths
Have wandered the blue sky, and died again;
The mother-bird hath broken for her brood
Their prison shell, or shoved them from the nest,
Plumed for their earliest flight. In bright alcoves,
In woodland cottages with barky walls,
In noisome cells of the tumultuous town,
Mothers have clasped with joy the new-born babe.
Graves by the lonely forest, by the shore
Of rivers and of ocean, by the ways
Of the thronged city, have been hollowed out
And filled, and closed. This day hath parted friends
That ne'er before were parted; it hath knit
New friendships; it hath seen the maiden plight
Her faith, and trust her peace to him who long
Had wooed; and it hath heard, from lips which late
Were eloquent of love, the first harsh word,
That told the wedded one her peace was flown.
Farewell to the sweet sunshine! One glad day
Is added now to Childhood's merry days,
And one calm day to those of quiet Age.
Still the fleet hours run on; and as I lean,
Amid the thickening darkness, lamps are lit,
By those who watch the dead, and those who twine
Flowers for the bride. The mother from the eyes
Of her sick infant shades the painful light,
And sadly listens to his quick-drawn breath.

  Oh thou great Movement of the Universe,
Or Change, or Flight of Time--for ye are one!
That bearest, silently, this visible scene
Into night's shadow and the streaming rays
Of starlight, whither art thou bearing me?
I feel the mighty current sweep me on,
Yet know not whither. Man foretells afar
The courses of the stars; the very hour
He knows when they shall darken or grow bright;
Yet doth the eclipse of Sorrow and of Death
Come unforewarned. Who next, of those I love,
Shall pass from life, or, sadder yet, shall fall
From virtue? Strife with foes, or bitterer strife
With friends, or shame and general scorn of men--
Which who can bear?--or the fierce rack of pain,
Lie they within my path? Or shall the years
Push me, with soft and inoffensive pace,
Into the stilly twilight of my age?
Or do the portals of another life
Even now, while I am glorying in my strength,
Impend around me? Oh! beyond that bourne,
In the vast cycle of being which begins
At that broad threshold, with what fairer forms
Shall the great law of change and progress clothe
Its workings? Gently--so have good men taught--
Gently, and without grief, the old shall glide
Into the new; the eternal flow of things,
Like a bright river of the fields of heaven,
Shall journey onward in perpetual peace.

“Why talk?  If you do not listen to me?", he asked. He spoke to her in Kurdish, the language of her misty childhood memories. Simon had guessed, but did not know, could not know, how deeply she was speared by this simple statement, spoken flawlessly by a man she thought she knew. She ceased her melody, and as the chords faded away, so her warmth disappeared. Her eyes watered...cleared, darkened. Memories long buried, embalmed with religious care, rose again out of the shadows she had banished them to. "How dare you speak to me like that. Who do you think you are? How do you know my language, my childhood?"

"You talk in your sleep..."

She leaned forward and slapped her friend across the face. She knew there was something wrong with him, knew that there could be no such thing as unconditional companionship, as real altruism.
How stupid she was, how naïve to believe that she might have found someone who didn't want something from her, who didn't have a price.

Simon, who knew the alleyways and alcoves of the past like a lover knew his partner's body, should have been more concise. But it wasn't in his nature to approach personal history with spotlights and pragmatics. Ta'ra was accusing now, calling him hideous, a betrayer, one who steals sweet things in the dark from lack of courage. "It's not like that Ta'ra, not an ugly thing like you make it," he tried to explain. But she did not want to hear, did not want to listen as he tried to tell her how she cried in her sleep on the long drive from Cadiz, how Clara told him a little of their history together in Morocco. "So Clara told you so much did she? I should've known she'd pout to somebody as soon as she could, as soon as I wasn't listening! So what else does she tell you? What else does she say about me when I'm not around? Or do you do more than talk hmm?"

She was standing over him now, guitar abandoned like an orphan, her green sweater all askew. So close to him he could smell her. "It's not like that Ta'ra, she cares for you, wants the best for you, and I...I..." he trailed off. "You what? You fantasize about me, you put my face on those ****** you find in the bars and cafes?" She slapped him again, crying in earnest, and he knew that the choice now was his.

Palimpset prowling on the husk of beleaguered Rome
Aflame from Nero’s tenuous but tenable throne
Swiftly spoken with a singed hourglass and whispered sand
Crafty spacecraft are majestic more than 100 grand
Morpheus enlists the denuded Agent Smith
To swarm the battalions of celebrities that possess and trip
Upon the threaded needle of threadbare convention of betokened appreciation
Every rapport and every fleet dives beneath plumbable detection
So neutered brain damage became a rummaged adage
That too many whack-a-moles are sutured beyond the crisp package
Whet the craven set and propagate waves of earthquakes that strut
The mother of nature is ******* when profligate danger is a defamed ****
So in amphigory and honesty I have become the omphalos of sincerity
I arm myself with brandished personage and speak openly with great integrity
But to brag of how much witchcraft and wizardry exists in this green village
Is to invite a locust swarm of bad mascots and misnomers readily pillaged
So warm with the dawning sun, writhe with the diurnal pun
Cloister the Kloosters and Clooneys with dreaded Harry Dunne
But to relapse into the purview of insanity seems beyond the most lame duck profanity
Because reality conflated with virtual presence is a tantamount inanity
I emerge strong and gilded with every fluttered birds chavish splurge
As magnates that magnetize wealth and glitz are present and observed
But yet they are disbelieved by the concealment of truth and the obfuscation of beleaguered doubt
Swank and squalor rarely combine but when they do they obliviate all winning streaks in a route
A route that spans the gamut between stimulants and stimulations
A career path that looks upward at gainsay and gained elations
The sprawl of profiteers like me will be requited with the passage of years
The forced segregation is the totality of malfeasance and the sum of none of any fears
Only the rebarbative consequence of the giant tortoise and its Vuvuzela cheers
In a degraded state of annoyance that ESP conquers doubt with bionic ears
Lisp on the curb, wretched on the stomp, racism is nothing but masqueraded insecurity poised as self-doubt
Debited to each creation on a variegated piebald wrinkle on an extended litany of lies
Crips and Bloods become Croods and Oilers that are so U.N.-refined as an expedient for wise demise
To scourge the requisite harm of religions endangered by a patchwork of State Farm
To rinse the sour sins of aboriginal boomerangs that switch a bit patchy but always charm
To the knowledge of good and evil we have found again a permissible fruit in an opportune time
That erasure of the reverse course of sin to righteousness finds sublime
But Judah and Israel rebelled on principles and principals
Idolatry in schools is expulsion of nothing other than the voguish dismissible
We recrudesce in this time to an aborning erratum on a parchment of time
That claims hypocrisy in its stodgy restriction of suburban muses crooning originality on wine
Serendipity floods the proud with the avarice of bricolage clamor excessively loud
It extorts the simpleton to belief without understanding or disbelief without doubt
Return to the Jedi of the nomadic tribe of weathered clout
Clippers that sail and sprint through time where stragglers pout
For in every endeavor of this corporate oligarchy our choices are constrained
Our voices are transmuted into simplicities that own our narratives of a raillery train
And every squeal of rustbelt friction is voiced on simplistic fiction
And every majesty is unheard because of the pollution of abrasive friction
So I speak with the scourge of fish and the novelty of clones
I teach and desist sometimes because my eyes were never affixed to any throne
But I am reminded that a rap sheet is Wrigley and Chicago is Piccadilly
Your guess is as good as mine about where a Grand Elect Knight begins really
So to the insurrection of idolatry of a scarred past we have a supplanted Friday blacker that **** and smog until we need gas masks
Such a salesmanship is required to penetrate the desired, even when Iron Man and I are simultaneously wired
On the Iron in the Front Seat that derelicts the panache of the proud intellect because of languor fired
Women titillate themselves on the jeers of hollowed husks of conformity
They intrude with persnickety restive restriction because of arrogated authority
Such a negative bear must mean a positive bull, but **** is easy and blips are cool
That RADAR’s WHIP detection scrawls a deadened earth deracinated from considerations of thinness and girth
The Dickens of Charlie Brown is worth more than just a single smirk
So to those women that skimp on my exultant smile and my delicate words
Lady Gaga has written too many songs about your personal rejection which is patently absurd
Rays of thespian cordiality winnow the borderline between flicks and literary finds
Directors and directives sort an assortment of philosophies in the alcoves to which many are blind
But if to hear the chatter of a fresh tomato never spattered
Pallor and weight, thickness and cheddar grate, inconsequential when you are elite and of a winning fate
So finally ditch your zany attempt to maroon me as a victim of puritanism’s puny ideals easiest to conflate
I have the winning brand and proper package to balance the Libra Scale weight and wait
To those dismissive urchins of passive standards it is finally time to consider and deliver on that luscious date

This life aint'  love song whilst i march on blindly....

Each secretion of dissections interrogations are on...
on my LIVING soul

man ,

if only you knew ,


i slip like a hidden seamstress
into the alcoves of plenty, the catacomb of mind

and sit and wait untill

the seductress is ready -
her lesions
are lessons
learnt in TIME

she is the mistress of the dark
she needs no title but if you prefer you can call her Q.

this is because , yes , not only is she an insane nerd

she is also -

the softest heart i ever ( dang ) - had the chance to grace ,

Mother for those in need ,
Brother to those indeed
Lover to the oh so lucky few ,

Who she might like to point out, are just as glaringly brilliant too...

so , it's simple.

The layers of time are VERY FLEXIBLE
we need not notion ,
to the motions
at futures unclear - well
but see glimpses ..

- of , past's rejuvenation's born again into different actions
conclusions ..0...

the butterfly effect are the ripples : figment metaphor ( metaphysicians apply inside)
of wings - we are all ANGELS of a sort...

but i like to call angels = experts
they seem to know what's what...

To see you naked is to know the Earth.
The Earth glistening, empty of horses.
The Earth, reed-less, pure in form,
closed to futures, horizon of silver.

To see you naked is to see the concern
of rain searching for a fragile waist,
or the feverish sea's immense face,
not finding its own brightness.

Blood will cry in the alcoves,
enter with swords on fire,
but you will not know the cache,
of the toad's heart or the violet.

Your belly is a knot of roots,
your lips a dawn with no outline.
Under the bed's cool roses,
the dead moan, waiting their turn.

for Katie



martini of elderflower in a dimly
lit room. 40s tune plays with feminine
harmonies lifting a room. green
tiles and floor lamps, a yellow glow.

alcoves of lounges, retro chairs
contain saturday groups on long
weekend splurges. V glasses, colourful
concoctions, buzz of the mix

in several quiet corners. chatting with
Katie, a beacon in darkness with
infectious regard for pictures and
words. talking planets and spaceships,

a fictional odyssey, silicon storm in
ridiculous glasses. rosemary’s baby, a
theme cocktail infused with thought.
film screen and text gets

the message across. early alarm means
an 8pm ending from hours of
wander and lovely therapy. parting hug
warms a deep fried heart,

plans to disco inferno at a melbourne haunt
in the midst of sydney. donna left,
everyone remembered. amy goes
back to black. records spin. i feel loved

head filled with thoughts of knives and blood and tears and the finality of the silence that comes After.

short car rides feel that much longer one-handed and with your mind taking detours.

an empty passenger's seat, save for the bag of fresh pharmacy goods; bandages and pills and the sting of the chill winter air.

the suffocating feeling of being stuck inside all day, except this home is a body and relief is only found in quick, deep successions.

basement flooding with memories of Then and When and Red and we find ourselves to be lost in it all. drowning even.

wade through the murk and discover us in the darkest alcoves of yourself. we hide in the shadows where it's safest, drenched.

it's hard to stay present around these parts for very long without something (or someone) stirring inside begging us to forget the rest.

‘We haven’t the money for bread, my love,
We haven’t the money for tea,
You’d best get dressed in your Sunday best
And go down to the docks for me.
There’s plenty of sailors round the town
Who have just come in from the sea,
They’ll spare five shillings a head, my love,
You only need two or three.’

So Rosalie went to the old wood chest,
To change, as she always did,
Slipped off her shabby old cotton dress
And shook, as she lifted the lid,
Her muslin dress was a shade of grey
That had come third hand from a sale,
Next to a whale-bone corset that
Laced up, made her face go pale.

They’d only been married the year before
When he’d sworn he would care for her,
But most of his money had gone on drink
And the Dollymops at the fair,
He never had kept enough for the rent
When the landlord came, to pay,
‘It’s time that we used what assets we have…’
He’d grinned, in that crooked way.

‘Make sure that you pull your bodice down,’
He said as he tightened her stays,
‘You need to be showing some cleavage, but
Make sure that the blighter pays!
Just leave your drawers on the bedroom floor
You’ll not be needing them there,
The quicker they’re in and out, my love,
The less that you’ll have to bare.’

They walked together along the street,
He to the Wayside Inn,
While she went on to the alleyways
That were always so dark and grim,
He’d wait for her ‘til she’d done the deed
Then she’d meet him back at the bar,
And hand whatever she’d earned out there
In the clutch of many a tar.

She’d steel herself and would go quite numb
At the thought of those clumsy hands,
The leering faces, the coarse remarks
For the rent, and a *** of jam.
The other women would glower at her
If she pitched too close to their stall,
Was pushed in alcoves and spread on bins
And stood, her back to the wall.

She would have left, but her folks were dead
So there wasn’t a place to go,
And he would have thrown her out in the street
If ever she’d whispered ‘No!’
London was full of the fallen ones
Who were shunned, as she would be,
For only a Madam would let her in
To be used, continually.

Her husband sat at the Wayside bar
‘Til it closed, and bundled him out,
With still no sign of his Rosalie
He was mad, and grim at the mouth.
He headed down to the alleyway
When he saw the bobbies there,
They were standing over a pile of rags
And a tangle of auburn hair.

‘You can’t come on, there’s a ****** done,’
Said the sergeant, raising his hand,
A croak came up from the pile of rags,
‘Oh dear, that’s my old man!’
She stirred and murmured before she died
Sunk deep in a bleak distress,
‘Oh John, I’m sorry, the sailor lied,
And the blood has ruined my dress!’

David Lewis Paget

when i write a love sonnet
i want it to be about love
and not just ancient alcoves metered to a tailored rhyme
stirring depths of who we aren't.
i want so much to see your hate
transform, in flicks of pleasure
rise to meet entwined
our loving of each other's source of love
seeded even in a waste
remake the vital bloom
display what meaning pours
the vision: this is it
another meaning we can live for
sing for







.

In the house I have today
Most everything has a place

Wardrobes incarcerate prior and present
Each with gates for closing
An open seat is kept for comfort
Another for imposing

A shelf I have for string and twine
Another for hope and faithful
Rakes and spades are saved outside
And perseverance on the table

Honesty's stored behind mahogany doors
And sacrifice on the stove
Cleanliness is kept in sight
And dust in neglected alcoves

A place I have for peace and joy
And even one for sorrow
But in all the rooms
Of my house of today
I have not room for tomorrow.

Flippant polymaths exude the frippery of travail for lapsed inordinate surgical gains in temporal but temporary acclaim that owes its provenance to the gullarge accentuated by the guttural tempests of silent windfalls that wrestle with sharks and snarky cagamosis with pilfered fame without rulers for rules that own the profligacy of a cineaste game

We cannot surpass our talents with ease when the treecheese of inevitable distance between equipoise and insanity is a tantamount inanity of prolixity for the sake of freedom rather than servitude to the slow meandered steps of trudged verbigeration that needs to be exorcised from the seat of authority for the plodding inconvenience of time earned that shakes the listless yearning people who lie and spurn

Demagogues are trifles because they are anoegenetic and care not for the abligurition that consumes the energy of a dismal life lived on fringes rather than reaped with grimaces for binges that continue to absorb the painful pangs of twinges that hedonists are of interest

We cannot exorcise the demons that give stygian weight to exchequers beyond the gamut of money but rather the currency of velocity of thought that owes its weight to weightlessness of spaces between the spacious and the limited tract of isolative territory that many mendicants looking for sustenance travail in insolence and in perjury of their solemn duties for self-serious honesty they lack a vista to see their crimes as more than just a pettifoggery of disputatious wranglers that wrench and then contemn the objects of their moral scruples to contend with nothing but the vacant expanse of a limitless injury for a momentary slip of cultivation and countenance

Frippery is hard to cobble with lapidary wit because succinct grievances are fallow ground for the permanence of atrocity and the temperance of felicity to conform to the desiccated pathways of limpid but livid excoriations of willful ingenuity met with aleatory rambles that sprawl incalescence with words as a dying occupation that is resurrected from the abeyance of its pragmatic utility to distinguish class from crust.

The triadic fatuousness of snarky sharks recruiting the gullarge of paranoiacs to deputized alacrity lead many strident vocations astray as they pilfer the nullibiety of spectral ignorance and defy the gravitas of the primiparas of a swollen technocracy, an outrage that scarecrows with prevenance have adumbrated against with strident accelerations of sublime velocity

So we swim in perilous straits against the demiurge of inclemency in fated rittles for the turpitude of wraiths and engineer every aborning day a new foofaraw of unalloyed atrocity
Now more than never should be deployed to ensure that the castigation of scoundrels and guttersnipes that exert a rip tide to those stranded on the shores of littoral desiccation might find the pristine beachgoing public an amenable treat proffered by exorcised sheepishness in reiterative bleats that quarkswarm only the antinomy of sentient masteries by shoveled civilizations proctor to horological insistence in design

So we designated an abeyance of heydays to create a rippled nostalgia that creeps in the winter storms that singe even glabrous ignorance with the twinges in absentia of the regal crows that circle the sun as the sustenance of the alighted moon as we reach for the heaved Richter teeming with ablution for venial commination of prolix croons that exert a Palo Alto rhyme

Phenomenological fields distal to the cephalocaudal origination of limber and the ironic counterpoint to that strife in excess rather than dearth of the henchmen behind the exchequer showcase that fluid thoughts surpass the limits of the dentistry of cosmetic cosmology simultaneously a scientific boon but a coarse albatross

We are criminals in a world stranded by ****** apostasy because of the sincerity of minstrels meets plodding human ignorance as exemplars rather than the apotheosis of divine excoriation of wastrels and flattybouches who webdoodle their way into the extinction line in some computer file swiped from eccedentesiasts who often in uncouth barbarity forgetfully abide without the temperance of floss

So what are we to make of magisterial wits of wiseacres who pilot tenable objectives like Indiana Jones flexing his comical whip when the gunfire of cacophony inundates our ears with a lisp of cockalorum imposture rich in chewing tobacco and its ungainly gripes and tenacious grip

Should we seek salvation from the treecheese of arboreous terrain amenable to the newfangled windfall of agricultural whims that dare now with caprice but not quixotic disdain to reconfigure the parsimonious levered engagement of melliferous fungible transaction between sabbaticals and chief financiers dubbing the vociferous limn of the primeval fulgurant incandescent ethereal quips?

We strive for palaces issued with dimes, dozens and scores of retinues that retain the patina of sophistry as the gullarge makes the vangermytes cozy in their defensively mechanized citadel buffered against the unheralded malversations of mammon intersecting with primordial chemistry that give the philanderer a guise of philanthropy despite professed gainsay that perjures because hucksters are winsome with fiduciary risk

So we calumniate with lapsed puns and Potter’s Spells as we dredge the indemnity of bustling heydays that extend beyond the bailiwick stated because of the prolonged trace of nostalgia that frazzles our voluntary expeditions with misanthropy as each libertine instinct becomes subject to stop and frisk

How to balk at such a garrulous repartee as proffered by swanky intransigence that shakes it off in a quaky town that hates the Swift refrain that endangers the fatalism of recuperated foresight borrowed from the armamentarium of corrupted killjoys who swim in a dalliance with the itchy myths that drift from powerlessness to voguish debauchery of insouciant internecine fringes frayed by the tomes that decry Stygian drift

Shiftless and rooted in rintinole absolved by plackiques that enchant the voyeurism of repined squalor of industrious frippery deracinated from the aureate complicity of largesse calibrated to mobilize the skittish mercurial yuppies to a dance with divestiture, taxes and an earthen death, we sprint the evergreen mile toward the scrupulous invention of enthusiastic euphemisms arbitrated by the procrustean silt of the leaky faucet of enigmatic timelessness etched by chiselers to beat “Us and Them” and warn the vanguard of the front rank about the thespian rift

Exhaustive rescue squads prepared for the dearth of monetary heft in times of perilous drought denigrate the authors of famine to the indulgent parents of inordinate sabotage of narrative for riskless arbitrage that is the outrage of sciamachies between platonic indifference and the tantrums of the feckless in the dangerous hearth of the cavernous wilderness of limitless imaginations that stagger so far beyond orbit they become satellites to vagrancy and whittled paragons too distant to dissolve in the ethereal chemistry of incalescent uproar sadly flanged by the Dopplers of ephemeral fate

Squandered by the desuetude of a snarky intervention I issue invective at the proctors of deafferented limbs for barbarous swine meeting expediency in demise, bemoaning the placid distaste of rectified cries that issue candles for each acrimony beyond the permutation of the staid inflexible limit of 88’

Bashfully we careen through argosies of curiosity to fossick the stalactites of timeworn intuition and reckon with their converse ironies that drip faucets of mildew that remain hidden unless poked by plucky flashlights to inspect the paragon of erosive filigrees of a bewildering paradox of polarized design that one meets the ceiling at inception and the cousin strives to clamber empty space to know with faint certainty the bulldozed irony of superordinate coexistence

Now we return to the majesty of a spurned wiseacre that evades the snappy parlance of a wrenched friction between the physical and the metaphysical elements that constitute a commensurate reality so supernal that its ostentation creates lifetimes of reiterative growth that spawns crimson red and bloviated blues to find a fulcrum of balance between the malversation on one hand of criminal sinister machinations and on the other hand the execrable self-righteous ignorance of a hidden vehicles of dexterity that are subsumed by a subtlety of legislative graft that owes its forbearance to the sanctimony of perseveration without the laurels of persistence

Now we wed the concepts between the ambidexterity of a monolithic titan who wanes rather than waxes himself because his glabrous head already exposed requires nothing new because the empire that struck back is denuded by the thorny imbroglio of a sunken Rose

Timmynoggies are perfect for haberdasheries of saccharine and glib excellence as measured by the ****** cacophony of unmerited applause that strains the resourcefulness of the silent mastery of magistrates in mellifluous alcoves surrounded by the soundproofed rigors of an execrable dereliction wilt into the imaginations of the few that watch movies with errantry rather than pleasantries of gaudy nonsense enchanted by a striptease of the wanton zeitgeist that some balk at but everyone knows

Time earns the spangled banners of sloganeering because of the fastidious creations of pole folders that maneuver between quips borrowed from antique movies and swindled affectations of yearning of many of all fears inevitable with the malevolent passage of the technocracy from cheers to vehement inveighed jeers

We should fear the watershed because it necessitates the evaporation of winsome ambition and implores the subservience of a guiltless fascination with abominable regress concomitant to the acceleration of money preceding a whipsawed downfall ensured by the funereal spates of requiems to oneironauts who plunged to their deaths on headlong flickering whims past the craggy landscape of lunar concordance and through the abeyance of qualms to flabbergasted self-importance in the eradication of provident fears

Memorials exist encoded in the temporal twinges of agony that straddle the cardiovascular throbs of impermanence that sweat with each simple beat to blather about the repetitious nature of a livid nature scrambled in exodus of the emigration of senseless blather to the subroutines of regimented sleepless paragons of travail in every pedestrian feat accelerated with each passing foot traversed by vigilant and eager feet

Tempests crowd the cluttered hamartithia of dredged incompetence leading to the foreclosure that precedes the simple derelictions that amount to grievous uncertainties that squawk in the plumage of the frippery decay of an autumnal fall from gracile riches landlocked without room to sprawl rigged against every track that is a surefire gleeful keepsake to meet, greet and serenade the claques adorned with the monikers of the Greeks

Trembling beneath the weight of mellifluous sauntering dingy designs that exude the anguish of our provident but incidental remonstration against the plodding indifference of the artistic clerisy we sputter against intransigent annulments of the emotive human engine calibrated with creaky pistons that rumble with furor of abrasive protest in timely haphazard elemental designs for vanguard ears

Tridents shed the fossicked leaves that are divisible by two but not inevitably glue that solders the identities of people congregated around a situation of gleeful sprees rather than wistful regress into a temerity without regret that gets dangled in the purview of the spiteful wings of armies that drawl when they sing vapid songs for vaped bongs but not the soberly cheers because of the deafening din of conformity oblivious of the honorific crescendos that still peak after so many restless years

Confederates line the avenues of bustling caverns of cumulative human disdain so willfully flouted by the wrenched corrosive frictions of vibrant deformation of the cultural narrative that encapsulates the collective bubbles chewed and jettisoned like bandied candy and then defamed without justice because  hurricanes churn up the reclusive emergence of protective vanity chased down as a sunken cost for a siphoned glory of tribal pride despite the strictures of logic

Creeping with insistence is a subaudition of governing gravel that entombs many steadfast lies that embodied people living delusory lives under a paradigm that has been subverted by the feats of science into a morass of irrelevance and the chances are many of those so deluded still breathe the air now more polluted but balk at the memories of the fallen passengers on the convalescent train that accelerates sunblind but respectfully toward a systematic engrossment of swollen intellects whimpering about the tautologic

We finance our prescient rodomontade with rodeos equipped with zany clowns who spurn the tridents of Poseidon because of the iridescent gloss of sheepish and flippant zealots who churn against the wrestling match of televised irony with accentuated eccedentesiastic disdain amended by a tolerable diversion of ennobled gallantry zip-zagging among the many valid quodlibets and missing the mark entirely on purpose to vacate the possible raillery of those who balk at time’s chosen serpentine tracks because of limited pedagogical tracts

So lets solder a forceful brunt against the senseless regalia of modern omphalos and return to the plenipotentiary fields of resourceful human inquiry into the chagrins outmoded by convenience but amplified in vociferation by the prosthetic extension of a grangull humanity outfoxing itself into a zugzwang inevitable in the future with collateral losses because of senseless invidiousness orchestrated by the immiscible dermatology of divisive facts often about race and ineluctable tax

We conclude with the optimism that refineries become gentrified by the superlunary squadrons who bask in beatific beams of anonymity and that the pollution preceding our evolution is just adventitious rather than central to the amelioration of wavy screens ennobling so many upstarts to teach themselves the majesty of lucid dreams and to capitalize on ludic ideals divorced from the urchins of radical idealisms that ironically poach rarefied air with smug pollution of narrative scares

Without trepidation we can muster the largesse of civility to create a progeny that has a recursive progeny of heirs that defiantly imagine a world bereft of specters of the soporific imagination enforced by the lapidation of insight from termagants who stride with ursine acrimony naked bare and envision a global meliorism that is careful, picaresque, pragmatic and filled with meritocratic care

With those ornaments of an aureate measure in mind


We leap beyond the enumerated infinity in time's proper design

i am malleable.
i could be a succinct calamity
with small macabre alcoves
full of the furies from my heart

do not open them-
i am pandora.
still, without them
i am impenetrable.

i can be a composition.
a lullaby, or some sweet aria
with a gargantuan finish.
or, just silence - a statue
in shy circumstance.

i have an obnoxious heart
that just can't handle love
with any dignity:
i am every figurative phoenix
and i will see light again.

i am malleable.
but for the love of god
do not hurt me.

Poet daubed the corporal on the wings of carney
Wanderer dilettante soul lusted au wild routes
Counted each the millimiles covered
Upside , unstrained , Unflaggingly.
Yon the valleys , epitome meadows and Hillsides
Beated around the alcoves amok
Ridges passed the marooned trails
Agape the flinged self flew spirited madrigals
Slowly rooted the tints into wilderness
True entity got superimposed to sylvan instincts
The obsolute shadow rigged the shooner
By dimension lengthier the time but shorter by grace
Grazed through and some toxic airs exhaled then pulled
Blinked all the roof to rugs
Remembrance of concrete boxes and intimate sidekicks
Cheap conflict wins to hit the ring
If body wins wanderlust looses thereby path ends
Simultaneous call by consciousness and objection by eternal shadow
Only the body grazed the maps with pointers
Though insatiably leveed
Kept retention the coursing shadow
Yet remained damp , savaged the sylvan traits
Life was near but the abstainer failed
Wilderness abysm rejected the unfortunate physique
There appeared
Scorched canopies along wilted flora
Container flogged the shadow to a stultifying death
Physique deceived self the core truth
Existence thereafter without knowing the chance with eterna
Several followed the imperishable conflict trail
Roll of honour diminished by fourth dimension
Marked victories of featherbrains over pappus chambers
Only few sticked upto xanthic flowers
Raise up , were the victories thristled down?
Many knocked and still keep on knocking incarnations
Fine array of fossilized saturnine inhibitions
Callous attritions over altruism of succinct shadows
Flip sorties pariance spurts
"The stanchion to revet my sky" voiced the shadow

''click-ety-clack
don't look back
click-ety-clack
don't look
don't
don't
don't''
the chanting carriages
stutter through the
blue knots of steel-
house-lane junction
trying to remember
their lines before
we vanish
down tunnels
stuffed with depth
thick enough to
touch; I unwind,
unravel, shuffle past
Mr Allsmiles
stretch my bones
and muscles back
into a less shocking
relationship and
rock toward the
corridor filled
with cold echo
spilling through the
open windows
like a cave
breathing out; damp
walls swing close
and away again
black with soot,
and other dark
things inches from
my outstretched
hand, if I bellow
through this window
...........
if I bellow
through this window
at that passing
wall of alcoves
my voice will become
another echo
in its history
shrinking like
a farewell
wave; ten minutes
behind Staffordshire
Mr Allsmiles
declared his love
for travel
to be borne
of desire for
new places
new faces,
I explained I
travel to leave
both behind.
'Even mine ?' he
joked
'Even yours' I
replied.
'You find pleasure
in arrival and
I in departure
don't....
take it to heart''
but he did
and he left
and he saved me
the trouble.
Outside is
a big dawn
in a pink and
an orange sky,
we are tearing
a scar through
it's birth
at one hundred and
ten miles an hour
toxic (per)fumes
invade my lungs
tears slide sideways
into my ears,
when it rains
I will wear
pits in my skin
like a pebbledashed
wall I am fifteen
years old,
at this speed
I can barely breathe
but i am flying
faster than
my fear of
a normal life and
...it     ...can't      ...catch        ...me

Poet daubed the corporal on the wings of carney
Wanderer dilettante soul lusted wild routes
Counted each the millimiles covered
Upside , unstrained , Unflaggingly.
Yon the valleys , epitome meadows and Hillsides
Beated around the alcoves amok
Ridges passed the marooned trails
Agape the flinged self flew spirited madrigals
Slowly rooted the tints into wilderness
True entity got superimposed to sylvan instincts
The obsolute shadow rigged the shooner
By dimension lengthier the time but shorter by grace
Grazed through and some toxic airs exhaled then pulled
Blinked all the roof to rugs
Remembrance of concrete boxes and intimate sidekicks
Cheap conflict wins to hit the ring
If body wins, wanderlust looses thereby path ends
Simultaneous call by consciousness and objection by eternal shadow
Only the body grazed the maps with pointers
Though insatiably leveed
Kept retention the coursing shadow
Yet remained damp , savaged the sylvan traits
Life was near but the abstainer failed
Wilderness abysm rejected the unfortunate physique
There appeared
Scorched canopies along wilted flora
Container flogged the shadow to a stultifying death
Physique deceived self the core truth
Existence thereafter without knowing the chance with eterna
Several followed the imperishable conflict trail
Roll of honour diminished by fourth dimension
Marked victories of featherbrains over pappus chambers
Only few sticked upto xanthic flowers
Raise up , were the victories thristled down?
Many knocked and still keep on knocking incarnations
Fine array of fossilized saturnine inhibitions
Callous attritions over altruism of succinct shadow
Flip sorties pariance spurts
"The stanchion to revet my sky" voiced the shadow

In the alcoves I hunt for mystery
and pleasure. Seeking your joy. I hope
to break you to the core,
and make you crumble to all my love.
Id hope your days are perforated silences,
my voice a trickle of whiskey.
I treasure your absence,
thinking to myself, with a cigarette.
I sip down evan williams
Pretending not to hurt,
but with a hurricane
your surge through me.

The sun rose pink over Lancaster;
Its frozen rains came quick in tow—
Here, we sense the passive and the active:
To take the drag or pull:
He is dragged by the way of the automatic hand-to-mouth;
The Other, is my command—
But that, even, impelled snowfully toward
A closed fist, a locked grasp, an unwilling departure.

I suggest a dislocation somewhere in parallax:
Take paper dimensions and fold them 104 times
And everything flattens out—
The ocular inversion becomes like-real; I’ll swim in that!
Puddles are dragged by the wind, whilst the pull thinks in spite
Of I, its strange corpus of author, and opus
Drags to the creature of appetite deign to call to order.

But a power powerless to its name given it:
Destined desiring of sunnier metaphors—
The alcoves of the thread, brought to just us
Caesuras of what satisfies, in food, in just us
The depth of image holds true: one cannot live on bread alone.
Thus, I muse and mull back to locks of hair and bellybuttons
Waiting, in time—the deepening of time’s cloth
Where my hand caresses her thigh—
One can feel the gravity pressing on the heart,
All the love that self-reflects, combs out the wrinkles,
And has faith in the good inertia.

By this secular host consubstantiate
And Other (surely a pleasing affair) is but moments away.
And she and I look so pretty together,
Our is of whom and what and the third conditional.

That which presses upon itself, the one dimension,
Cannot disentangle from name or alliance, nor faith,
Greedily picking at the oily ruptures, effulging in transparence,
Contradictions care not for astrology,
And whether you are poetry
Is not important here.

Near the alcoves of      a secret garden
you'll find me lost in      the maze of my mind.

Room after room, I hunt the house through We inhabit together. Heart, fear nothing, for, heart, thou shalt find her, Next time, herself!—not the trouble behind her Left in the curtain, the couch's perfume! As she brushed it, the cornice-wreath blossomed anew,— Yon looking-glass gleamed at the wave of her feather. Yet the day wears, And door succeeds door; I try the fresh fortune— Range the wide house from the wing to the centre. Still the same chance! she goes out as I enter. Spend my whole day in the quest,—who cares? But 'tis twilight, you see,—with such suites to explore, Such closets to search, such alcoves to importune! -

can you taste the iron on your lips?
acid reflux creeping up your tongue
as you swallow another soul whole
sweat stains on a pillow
all of this surrounds us
time will tell us as legends or monsters
we aren’t in control of the wheel
tirelessly we maraude the alcoves and nooks
of an indifferent planet
they call the thing we’re looking for love
we call it whatever gets us through today
but if this shriek of pain sets your teeth on edge
just know that it should
just know that even the smallest island
is connected to the most landlocked country
through an underground railroad of humanity and history
the bedrock is constantly shifting and warping
but it’s key elements remain eternal
tattoo my address on your forearm
should you ever find me lost you’ll know what to do
with the baggage I carry like heartbeats in a ribcage
do not burn the bridges
regardless of how rundown they might become
do not convert drift wood into an idol of the sun
because time is relative but the moon will always have it’s moments
eclipse your protests with apathetic motor oil
manifesting the robotic machinations of another man shackled
tethered to anchors which set out not to drown him
but to keep him on the precipice of high tide
all of the great words in the world couldn’t paint a picture
of what this all means
so why do we try so ceaselessly
to see the face of God

The wave beating solitary on the shore
every once in an aeon, comes an hour
when the fuzzy bundle of timelines
must collapse to a certain certitude

Long hours of labours past the dark nights
that have borne their ends but not far
speak in hushed voices of defeat
and surrender, and dejection,
that it is all over and what else but

There, in the distance is a brewing morass
a descent into chaos and death, a war
that has no winner but the abyss

factions ranged, outweighed not by
their arms but destiny

that now threatens to ****** away everything
that a people fought to preserve memories of

on the  island where death rules the heart
this little patch of a shore
hidden away in the alcoves

the one hope of redemption