He lived too many floors from street level for his advanced years but Ambrose grew up in a time when one did not complain over loudly in case one’s right to complain be taken away.
The last Social Worker to visit had sported an Aldermaston CND badge on his lapel and an air of indifference that Ambrose took to be a sign that now was not the time to raise the topic of his hip vis-a-vis the six flights of rickety stairs. So he would soldier on and thank heaven that there was always Sunday and Johnny.

Ambrose considered his “friendship” with Johnny the ******, and with a sigh, concluded that their relationship was akin to those between tiny birds who peck morsels from large carnivores.

Johnny was a teenage runaway who, not yet passed puberty and well short of 5ft tall, weighed in at 82lbs .The transaction was simple. On Sunday, he would cook a dinner for them both in exchange Johnny would help Ambrose into the bath and bathe him.

There had been a time when the indignity was real but now he would lay awake listening to the late night sound of Soho drift up to his rooms where red and blue neon light danced on his ceiling and imagine he could feel those young hands run over his cold loose skin. When he closed his eyes he could see the young ******, stripped to the waist, soap and sponge in his hands, at the foot of his bed …he ached for the boy’s sensitive touch. Those magical fingertips, those taut sinews, and hairless torso seemed so wonderfully innocent and pure to Ambrose but he hated the purple and yellow bruises that waxed and waned on the boy’s arms  with each successive visit.

Once he’d watched as Johnny banged at his vein demanding it rise for his spike…but as the first deep red cloud bloodied the fix Ambrose shut his eyes tight and felt the cold air of Northern France on his face…his ears flooded with screams and explosions as his brothers lay around him, their blood seeping into the brown ankle deep mud in long river-like branches.

Johnny didn’t understand why Ambrose cried but thought it must be memories or stuff that old people think about?

Some times, as the rush cascaded through his soul, he found himself crying too but didn’t know why…only that it felt warm and when it stopped he had a feeling for the old geezer that he couldn’t quite put his finger on, which would lead to him hugging the old fool and would only then break down and rage about things long locked away…then Ambrose would stroke the boy’s hair “teens are a bad time for men” he’d say while wishing he too was blessed with failing memory.

Forty-five years later someone said a simple word that flicked a light switch in a tiny garret room in Soho and Johnny got a tiny sliver of his memory back, picked up his pen lest he should ever lose his old friend again.

Ambrose
Ah-kin-
MOO-sir-ee
Lifts a trumpet to his mouth.
Deep breaths blow notes
at right angles
into space.
The sound is worn denim.
The sound is Lauren Bacall.
The beat is urgent and syncopated
just like his last name.

Ambrose
Ah-kin-
MOO-sir-ee
Rests a trumpet by his side.
Reverb:
Ambrose interprets the persistence of sound;
reflections build up and decay
until the sound is absorbed
by the surfaces of this space.
Inhale.
Ambrose,
pulls the trumpet
To his mouth
once again.

dust cloud heavy
in an apricot sky
cottonwood mucker
under ambrose pale
whippet and shepherd
mill at the earth patch
yellow birch hangs
over red bench park

combine shavings
in crack rust brown
scissors chips fall
at the back stop
whiskey jack looters
sing patented chords
siblings (and 2 wheel enthusiasts!)
give thanks

joyous retrievers
master the criss cross
bare maples stand
at settlers way
barred owl and blue jay
whistle in the fore-wind
ghosts
and goblins
pull on the seeds

wind gusts belt
over the west gulch
a blood rush churns
in the chilling fall morn
hallowed grounds still
at the midday
quiet reflections
of the afghan
and hound

jumpers unite
at the oxbow
route runners bend
(on a sultry foray!)
meadows exposed
in the framework
ball parks empty
with pennants past

barrel dirt favors
the brew house
crimson and copper
find bracken ridge gate
harvest hands savor
the honey and hops
blankets of color
for a winter's hatch

brush fire kept
under steady peruse
bark bites fly
and embers glow
pine cones drop
from the timber tops
3 wick candles
grace the dinner place

shiver and ******
at the piper's call
cob web dew
on the shadowy gates
a chilled mist mellows
the season's return ~
poets and artists
and dreamers awake

Zigzag Universe says: "I am the space of Devananda" Way of God "and meditation. We know how a great inherited noun “de meditatio” has reflected on the ideas that are reconciled. My numen comes from the Greek Peltast mercenaries, creating survival in the contemplation of standing on those who are not in the fords of the breath of blood. We focus the mind so that the sheep that graze in the meadows fall upon us when we reconcile ourselves to somehow standing, waiting for them lectured here in Archangelos and in placebos of the bread-making gifts of the grasses. Obviously, stability allows us to get colossally on our feet and meditate where we have to sow hopes of meditation and work them with the pleasure of experience, which transports us on spirituality on the lips that are pronounced by the horses that graze, filling their bellies with the idiomatic hopes that transport us to the intellect and the conclusive horse. On the other hand, in contemplation there is more spiritual than intellectual character since it carries an experience and not a conclusion. Philo of Alexandria; Philo Judaeus, being a Hellenized Jew, is our mentor and philosopher star, born in the year 20 BC. He is contemporary to the era of our Mashiach, maker of everything and the neo-universe of Vernarth "Duoverso". The new universe of Vernarth being apologetic, Jewish and also Hellenistic therefore makes of our creator and all the theological creative thinking of all his creation. Divine providence and grace are and will be your superiors to have universal kinship with the Zig Zag Universe that migrated to Duoverso Zig Zag, for the providence of divine powers, who are in this range mercifully allowing and forbidding the splendid power of the royalty of Christian meditation manifested. Those of us who bear his goodness transformed into passion, we are the ones who create his theocratic rise, doing sovereign service, courage, joy and caution of human ethical satisfaction. We surround ourselves with our philosopher Philo for the diaspora, for the benefit and virtuosity of laws that emanate from the One-dimensional Beams of Kafersuseh in Ein Karem. The stoicism of democracies weakens the ungovernable powers of self-wisdom, they decay before those who ignore who they are and will be, under the symbolization of the supposed Jewish leadership of offering their children to the sacrificial altar ambivalently. The warmth of the afternoons in Tsambika increases the macro radius of our zigzag, binding the biblical pages with Platonic Greek philosophy and anti-material stoicism, with goods re-delegated to the natural good where it comes from. Our writings are the inspiration of the demiurge of the embodiment of a bakery recipe in the idea of the lowing of Zeus's stomach, with the solid dissatisfied discourse of not creating more bakery hectares for Stoics and demiurges. Although the thought of Philo permeated the fathers of the ecclesiastical epic, as in its origins in Alexandria, they will be Ambrose of Milan and Augustine of Hippo, with weak influence on the Jewish tradition, particularly in the rabbinic tradition that was born in one or two centuries after his death. Part of this is due to his use of the Septuagint (the Bible translated into Greek) instead of the Hebrew Bible and his allegorical interpretation of the Torah. His work also gives references to religious movements that have disappeared today, such as the Alexandrian therapists. Zig Zag was and will be moved away between time and space, in a world adjusted to the senses that are propelled within the contextual totality, the world and the biosphere framed in the phenomena of the Zigzag Universe, being born on a stellar night when it touched our life the earth, being able to see how the cordial matters of the cosmos caressed its cosmology, making of it its magistracy and descendants of the Hellenic cosmos, in constant caresses of the universe already predisposed to the bing bang, emerging from the other side of the car, observing us and seeing ourselves in the Horcondising face anti-material. We are science that models the energy and matter system in causes of the ancestors, with whom their life and ours sneakily crashed. Gravity made us great paternity in Vernarth, being in the Dodecanese, being a cosmos in the curvature that makes us screen with the moon in its romantic astrophysical swings and with the exaggerated geometry of a zigzag. We are the versatile and multi-dynamic mass that expands simultaneously in the head that pauses in the oaks of the Horcondising of Vernarth and also the time-space that has not been troubled by the origin or the inflammation of the stars that move irregularly in zigzag , for the fractality of its component, which is clearly Aramaic blue light, in circuits of cumulus movements skimming the air, attracting the attention of the entire order of the sleeping universe and making the duplication of the universe itself appear before them; in Duoverso  that is the universe awakened and young of thanks "

Duoverso says: “My distribution of nearby galaxies are keys to the paleo universe already arranged in macrowaves, which are the percentage of the spaces of the Trisolate energy fields, which interact with the Mashiach phylogeny in Gethsemane, now lying in a stagnant decomposed future, in a specific frozen present. My final station is to place the Zigzag Universe on the re-expanding medieval chrestomathy, in qualities of Sub Mythology, already settling here in Archangelos. The implosion of my gravity has created worlds of visibility of great astronomical yearnings, in some fractions of time zigzagged by millions of fractured light-years, like an irregularity that resembles the measurements of everything quantifiable, being science or not, acquiring from the hexagonality, the primogeniture of the passage that from Jerusalem goes to Bethlehem, where the Davidian prism, in whose Original is attributed a fractal of the two-dimensional shape of a line of the Mediterranean fractal coast, resembling the gems of the crown of King David to that of the Messiah, seeming to be similes, but of irregular geometric formats. To build gems in landscape spines, basically subdividing themselves into equal conical funnels and then being randomly displaced towards their central point shared with King David's crown, recursively repeating it in each square until the desired level of detail is reached, in the curve that joins the landscape to Bethlehem and then to the Church of the shepherds in its fractured hexagonal base, simulating to be snow falling on the top of the roofs, wherein the Kafersuseh manger, the Mashiach was born and died in the abstraction of the Beams One-dimensional in foreign eyes, eroding those who are mortals and do not see you with divine eyes in self-likeness of our hysteria of the failed plan to increase the size in the unknown geometry of this new dimension in the implosive movement of the Verthian Duoverse. The nature of the snowflakes in Bethlehem are natural fractals, detailed in their nature and in natural infinity. Here the new privileged world for self-similarity in the mental and cosmogonic functions of Vertnarth was envisioned, at intervals in each space of gloomy clouds, bringing accelerated bombs of messaging from Gethsemane among mutated olive trees towards other humans. My correlation is an infinite fractal with the reversible observable time and with the pattern belonging to mobile echoes of a space, which is occupied by Vernarth as multi-study and integers between fractional integers”

Hyperdisis: “Finite is the curvature, between the time that walks between the jungle of the Duo Universe as an alternative of energy Zigzag and Duoverse, which triggers our observable world what a great eye is, which ignores and knows extreme distant and focal parts of the One-dimensional Beams of Kafersuseh in Ein Karem, since the Duoverse is the trial Universe that the Mashiach had before coming to the Holy Land, provided by my form of Hyperdisis escorting him. I go in arduous colors in gradient for its limits of positions of verbality, and solutions of physical fields, interwoven by an external gravitational means. The macrowaves are exposed matter not contained in the abrupt changes of the optical selection of the Mashiach with the One-dimensional Beams, attracting selection crystals to atomize them, in the fears of reaction and recreation of multiform plasma saviors of Christian cosmic. Examining the double of the macrowaves and the equation of them on the axial of the universe turned into Duoverse, already in millions of light-years will continue in the Duoverse, for ectoplasmic reconversion with great margins of assertiveness. The cartography of hyperdiction, is the correction of the error of the current universe, losing itself, in the second thousandths of figures that separate us from the Universe, but all being more than time ... !, we are left at the expense of the wick of all electro-matter "

The sub-mythology having already been constituted, Hestia appears, having taken a great nap. When she appeared before Vernarth in Tsambika, she was seen changing in size, when she was six meters away she looked dwarf and when she was two meters from him she looked monumentally giant, but with a versatile countenance, therefore she was already appreciated in the last steps, with the domestic figure of a Goddess who emanated light-years from the chimneys of her habitable galaxies. The critical immanence that would happen would be the perfectible plan for the Zig Zag Universe and the Hyperdisis, bringing torn words for those who were approaching the main altar of Vas Auric, which was in a great proscenium ratio in the vicinity of Tsambika, between the Mind / Meditation for a constant mechanism of Wisdom / Meditant, according to the cosmological constant, leading perhaps to the beginning of a decade and third universe called Triverse. The oscillations of all these fantasies, Vernarth observed, but he knew that he would have to collide with these worlds finally already precipitated and of temperature that acted on the average of the normal range, therefore it was imminent to mutate it to the provisional Christian Duoverse, which goes backward advancing between the rapid lights of creation. Immediately afterward, the Universe has torn apart and lost among those around it, establishing itself in units millions of years of lightly compressed in the piccolo Aulos, which Hestia carried in one of its golden hands, in its Prytaneion, igniting with the flames of the heart of fire and of the passion of consanguineous love, "Prytaneum", paved by the light of the clarity of faith of the owners of the hamlets that were founded when they arrived in Tsambika, in search of Vas Auric, cheering with the omphalos stone, which marks the navel of the world with the challenge of wandering towards the island of Delos in the daily warmth of a spring afternoon in Rhodes. She is a woman with veils on her face, always walking to and from her virginal abode, in the house of foolish or vestal virgins, there is no Hestia, only perhaps there are some similar ones staying in the cold fire of her menopause, losing fertility afterward. to be swallowed by her father, and then expelled from himself, regurgitated in candle flames, of love in a blessed house full of immunity, giving the Duoverse another geometric category with angles never contained, sliding vibratory between distances that deduct minutes from Hestian space, for the purpose of approaching its finiteness, and inaugurating the sub- finite, which will never be a source of termination in a puzzling end of equationally physical unfinished time. This consolidates the Duoverse in Duouniverse, expressed in figures that moderate the length of a physical state before it is finished and restarted in a process that does not end (sub-finite)

Saint John the Apostle says: "Not even death recognizes the dimension of the universe when it detaches itself from the capsule of the body ..., less from the Duouniverse ..., making at night what is day and what is a day at night"

Vernarth says: “I am being reborn, the variety of times between myself and myself, are you. In my new creation and Duo-universality, with rules that angle my thoughts where my muscles did not reach. Today we are plagued by invasive objects of new creation, and in particular, I feel them bustling with the wrinkling of the strings of the balalaikas that I had in Moscow, with flat thoughts and now with flat atonements that I do not know, but my courage climbs where they fear me. be poor of feared value. Rather greater fear on a larger scale and related limits where infinite dramatic areas fade away almost make me an atheist in atheism. The ribs of time, gropingly, are oversized, in the ribs of the five-fold dimension of the Duoverse that imagines my curved, over-curved world, not knowing how to reach the line that allows me to know it head-on and full, on the coast of light that If now I see the Mashiach in Gethsemane, in the Olives Bern, walking straight ahead towards me, with another starting point going back, but I being in the creation that for God the light of himself towards the stars that are reconverted into stars, in all addresses calling each other. "

The Top Ten Epigrams of All Time

In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.—Albert Camus

It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.—Eleanor Roosevelt

If you can't be a good example, you'll just have to be a horrible warning.—Catherine the Great

If life were fair, Elvis would be alive and his impersonators would be dead.—Johnny Carson

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.—Oscar Wilde

To err is human, but it feels divine.—Mae West

An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.—Mohandas Gandhi

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.—Virginia Woolf

I'm not offended by dumb blonde jokes because I'm not dumb, and also I'm not blonde.—Dolly Parton

He does not believe, who does not live according to his belief.—Sigmund Freud



In April 2014 A Poet’s Glossary by Academy Chancellor Edward Hirsch was published. As Hirsch writes in the preface, “this book—one person’s work, a poet’s glossary—has grown, as if naturally, out of my lifelong interest in poetry, my curiosity about its vocabulary, its forms and genres, its histories and traditions, its classical, romantic, and modern movements, its various outlying groups, its small devices and large mysteries—how it works.” Each week we will feature a term and its definition from Hirsch’s new book.

epigram: From the Greek epigramma, “to write upon.” An epigram is a short, witty poem or pointed saying. Ambrose Bierce defined it in The Devil’s Diction­ary (1881–1911) as “a short, sharp saying in prose and verse.” In Hellenistic Greece (third century B.C.E.), the epigram developed from an inscription carved in a stone monument or onto an object, such as a vase, into a literary genre in its own right. It may have developed out of the proverb. The Greek Anthology (tenth century, fourteenth century) is filled with more than fifteen hundred epigrams of all sorts, including pungent lyrics on the pleasures of wine, women, boys, and song.

Ernst Robert Curtius writes in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1953): “No poetic form is so favorable to playing with pointed and sur­prising ideas as epigram—for which reason seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Germany called it ‘Sinngedicht.’ This development of the epigram necessarily resulted after the genre ceased to be bound by its original defi­nition (an inscription for the dead, for sacrificial offerings, etc.).” Curtius relates the interest in epigrams to the development of the “conceit” as an aesthetic concept.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge defined the epigram in epigrammatic form (1802):

What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole;
Its body brevity and wit its soul.

The pithiness, wit, irony, and sometimes harsh tone of the English epigram derive from the Roman poets, especially Martial, known for his caustic short poems, as in 1.32 (85–86 B.C.E.): “Sabinus, I don’t like you. You know why? / Sabinus, I don’t like you. That is why.”

The epigram is brief and pointed. It has no particular form, though it often employs a rhymed couplet or quatrain, which can stand alone or serve as part of a longer work. Here is Alexander Pope’s “Epigram from the French” (1732):

Sir, I admit your general rule,
That every poet is a fool:
But you yourself may serve to show it,
That every fool is not a poet.

Geoffrey Hartman points out that there are two diverging traditions of the epigram. These were classified by J. C. Scaliger as mel and fel (Poetics Libri Septem, 1561), which have been interpreted as sweet and sour, sugar and salt, naïve and pointed. Thus Robert Hayman, echoing Horace’s idea that poetry should be both “dulce et utile,” sweet and useful, writes in Quodlibets (1628):

Short epigrams relish both sweet and sour,
Like fritters of sour apples and sweet flour.

The “vinegar” of the epigram was often contrasted with the “honey” of the sonnet, especially the Petrarchan sonnet, though the Shakespearean sonnet, with its pointed final couplet, also combined the sweet with the sour. “By a natural development,” Hartman writes, “since epigram and sonnet were not all that distinct, the pointed style often became the honeyed style raised to a higher power, to preciousness. A new opposition is frequently found, not between sugared and salty, but between pointed (precious, over­written) and plain.”

The sometimes sweet, sometimes sour, and sometimes sweet-and-sour epigram has been employed by contemporary American formalists, such as Howard Nemerov, X. J. Kennedy, and especially J. V. Cunningham. Here is a two-line poem that Cunningham translated in 1950 from the Welsh epi­grammatist John Owen (1.32, 1606):

Life flows to death as rivers to the sea,
And life is fresh and death is salt to me.

Excerpted from A Poet’s Glossary by Edward Hirsch. Copyright © 2014 by Edward Hirsch. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.



collected in
collection
A Poet’s Glossary
Each week we feature a new term from Academy Chancellor Edward Hirsch’...

Traveling around Queensland



You see in October in 2002, Brian Allan went on a trip to Queensland with pipeline, where
The bus came right to Brian's door and there was heaps of picnic food, and there was this lady
Named Janet, who was a bit of a larrikin, and Kelly, who was a very nice lady, and then there was Richard, who tried to steal my book, but, in theory, I never kept it due to my mental breakdown, but that was a fun trip, you see we travelled up to Hervey Bay where we went to a museum aquarium, yeah that was cool, and I took some great pictures of the group I went with
And I really participated in the objects of that museum, and then we went whale watching, and that was really really cool, I also remember, doing a bit of Dolphin watching, and also, I took a photo of myself in the captain's seat, and we had a banquet meal aboard that boat, boy it's like the boat at bateman's bay,, but more exotic, and, I moved all around the boat trying to get pictures of the whales and other things, and yes, this was cool, and, one of the older people on the tour I went on had a crush on me, and I thought, she is way to old for me, but, I wanted to be nice, ok, and then as the boat went over each whale, it went rumpita rumpita rumpita
And all the people on the boat, including myself were walking from deck to deck taking photos, as this was the only time we would see whales on this Queensland coast, and then, yes, the boat trip was finished, and we all went off and went home and then Richard was tired and wanted me to get the milk for breakfast, and I didn't and he stole my writing book, because I was ******* him off, but I wrote a Poem called I don't want to be a stalker, and despite me and Richard wanting the same thing, why can't he ask, why me, and then we all had tea, and went to bed, and the next day, we went to feed the seal, and matey oh this was great and I enjoyed as you hold the piece of fish out and the seal jumps up and grabs the fish, oh this was ever so much fun, and I had 3 Goes, I think, but it could've been more, maybe less, but it was fun, and
I can tell you, the seal was having a great time as well, and I took a few photos of the seal as well as we made a movie about it, but through years and years of my mental breakdown I might have wrecked that, but it was a video anyway, and I haven't got a VCR anymore, anyway, but
I don't think I threw out the photographs on the trip, which is great, and after we left Hervey Bay, we went to the Gold Coast, and all the dreams I had about the Gold Coast, first of all we went to Warner brothers movie world, and mate, I felt like I was in the USA and as I watched the police academy cars,yeah cool, and there were a lot of rides we went on, yeah, I just walked around the theme park, buying things in the movie playground, and buying souvenirs, and talking to some of the tourists, and I spoke to a lot of the people from our trip, as I walked around with Kelly and Steve ambrose, and then at the end of this day at the theme park, a bad
Thing happened in Bali, which was the Bali bombings and Tom and Steve who were my room mates were watching the whole boring news event the whole day, as this was a relax and chill day, me and Steve went for a walk, while Steve wanted to live down here, and said, hey, mate
Have ya got any jobs, going, in a real Australian way, and then the trip leader Joel took us on a walk down to surfers paradise, and I ****** in the water, because fish do it, why can't we, well
This was a real relaxing day, and then they bought our meals in, and if I can remember, it was
Fish and chips, with prawns and so on , well this was ever so tasty, I loved it, and then we went to bed, for the next day was interesting, you see, the next day, we will go to currimbin animal
Sanctuary, where we held snakes, and we looked as bold as the big bold eagle, and there were a lot of wildlife, there and I took a lot of photos there, it was radically awesome, and Queensland is the cleanest state in Australia, the seas are cleaner and green, while no, really disgusting seaweed ever existed and, mate, yeah really clean, after that we headed back to our motel, and we watched the football, Australia won, and Tom was showing is patriotism by standing up with his hand on his chest, to the national anthem, and me and Steve and Kelly
Went for a dip in the pool, and Richard who because I spoke up to him, he really liked the way I was ever so cool, and then we went back to our rooms and waited for our next meal, which was
Home made spaghetti  bolognaise and this was made ya know ever so tasty, and Jason  and Joel cooked it, one *** of it to every room, about 3 in total, and I don't know about other rooms, but my room really loved it, yeah, the best spag boll in the country cooked by Jason and Joel, and
Then after about 2 hours, we went to bed, and the next day, we went home and we stopped over at Coffs Harbour and at night, we bought pizzas, for each of us, and James and Kelly joel and myself were driven home by Joel, and we fell asleep after watching our last nights TV
And we went for a Sydney bypass which meant, in about 6 hours we were all home and that was the end of a great trip, and I went to my play rehearsal for urban dreaming that night, and
Despite my parents saying I will be too tired for that, it was just a watching the other theatre performance that was on, which was cool, man, and I really loved the holiday, for it brought me some happy memories, the end


Sent from my iPad

The swell
of cedarwood, deep in the burrow
Ambrose waits, and he is risen

where winter rests
in a bed of water, soft smiles
pale faces

blue babies in golden reeds.

swollen still
in the stillness of tomorrow,

of yesterday's grief, to be
reborn every morning
in the pineal quest of
nirvana, the navel's bud,

to grow yellow, languid
from the icy bloom
of self defeat

and smile, smile.

Come in, come in
I hate how you're always late
It makes me remember all the forgetting I had to do
To get not quite over you

Vapid, empty-- pregnant with my projections
        The woman dissembled
        her shaking legs;
led to the ground where
        cherry blossoms
        blow through the field
        and heaved.
        We ran
        disguising their war
        with tiney sandals
        and heavy, ambrose mist
        clawing for that--
        they even noticed
        your scar.
My true one.

Uncle Vanya and Lady Godiva

Uncle Vanya came strolling down the road
Wishing he had made something of his life
His young friend Anne loquaciously agreed
And with remarkable vehemence urged him

     to endeavour to remediate his perceived inadequacies in the    
     many precedent matters that burdened him…

Don Quixote suggested that worries were giants
Cassandra said, “There is only one page left”
Nick Adams whispered, “Shh! You’ll scare the fish!”
Ambrose Silk asked the way to the world’s end

And young Lady Godiva, sans chemise
Outsourced her image on souvenir tees

Went for a ride
and out
down to St. Ambrose Church
For free community dinner
Barbecue
and make your own sundaes
Little girls
with pigtails eating watermelon
Magic
was the after-dinner entertainment
Made some extra *****
appear in your hands
read from the Flaming book
Have the Steel Police
check rings
magically
Made me laugh
from my belly
Nobody had eyes on us

Just good times
I don't think I've ever seen
a child laugh so hard or look so amazed
Thank you
Was a delicious evening
with friends
on a ride
through South Lincoln
Little Woods
Where the critters are
Moose, bear, squirrels and otters
swim and
eating berries
with Woodland Fairies
holding flowers I've never seen
except in dreams
Or movie pictures
Lichen glowing on the trees
and the Mist over the mountains
smiling down windy roads
Where Ex CIA
Artificial intelligence resides
and Randy Quaid and conspiracy theories
hide

Back through Bristol Gap
back home again
to do it all over tomorrow

Cherie Nolan © 2016

Ubi Petrus

                                          For Inky and Jason


                                      “Ubi Petrus, ibi Ecclesia”

                                        - St. Ambrose of Milan


Where Peter was, there also was the Tomb --
Blood-sodden dreams cold-rotting in old sin,
The Chalice left unwashed, the Upper Room
A three-days’ grave for hope-forsaken men.

Where Peter is, there also should we be,
Poor pilgrims, his, a-kneel before the Throne
Of Eosian Christendom, and none but he
Is called to lead the Church to eternal Dawn.

Where Peter then will be, there is the Faith,
Transubstantiation, whipped blood, ripped flesh
A solid reality, not a wraith
Of shop-soiled heresies labeled as fresh.

Where Peter is, O Lord, there let us pray,
Poor battered wanderers along Your way.

When I knew you,
You could do anything
I sat at your feet like a small child in awe
Looking up at  you with eyes opened widely
You were magical.

I lost you along the way
And I just heard your voice on the phone for the first time in a while,
I don't hear the magic anymore.

The passion is gone
Perhaps it is hidden behind clouds of smoke,
Under the *** bottles your cousin brings.
Behind your brother's hospital bed
Masked by the beep of the monitors
Or the screech of the halting 2 train.

I wish that you would promise that you won't waste away,
That you won't waste the powers bestowed upon you by the gods
But you would never.

You were my immortal,
My Ambrose.

Uncle Vanya and Lady Godiva

Uncle Vanya came strolling down the road
Wishing he had made something of his life
His young friend Anne loquaciously agreed
And with remarkable vehemence urged

him to endeavour to remediate his perceived inadequacies in the many precedent matters that burdened him…

Don Quixote suggested that worries were giants
Cassandra sighed, “There is only one page left”
Nick Adams whispered, “Shh! You’ll scare the  fish!”
Ambrose Silk asked the way to the world’s end

And young Lady Godiva, sans chemise
Outsourced her image on souvenir tees

/because you could really get a square, or any coherent mundane geometric narrative of re- re- re-... out of a *******... or tell someone with a size 11 shoe, that a size 9 will be, just as comfortable... and while the English language goes to ****, thank **** it has no mother and has no son in the guise of me... with the current lexi- of non-cis non-binary yadda yadda abracadabra... a return to stern, dog breeding terminology... pedigree, mongrel... hybrid... can't really as the semite for an authentic opinion, came from a people that sat on their ***** for long watching chickens walk down a village dirt road... anything to redefine, those half-***** screaming into a tin-can tied to a string... after all, Greenwich... outside of the English speaking world, we like to call the natives: Greenwich bellybuttons, or rather,  bellybuttons of the world: pępki świata... as a person of acquired tastes, it's turning into a heartache, seeing english so deformed... perhaps by both technology and youth... a Frankenstein to behold... and when in Paris, did I speak any french? not really, but I had the audacity to cling to an Italian girl who could, and a Russo-Canadian girl, who also could... but you still managed to meet people who understood that english,  not french, was and is the lingua franca of tourism... obviously not so much when it comes to commerce... and banking, is not exactly a commerce... neither is the media... e.g.? re.: Münster... on the first day 3 people (not including the attacker) were killed and 30 injured... on the second day 2 people were killed (including the killer) and 20 injured... who the hell still thinks that the media juggernaut is a trebuchet to fling a Meursault into the limelight? it's naive to think that such people are seeking fame... a ******* butter knife and a glass of beer will always be more "famous"... and the man who discovered beer, well... good luck reading Plato... comes the staring into the abyss, and the abyss not staring back, whispering a words: ad absurdum counter ad nauseam...


too much love poetry, too much love
poetry that isn't risqué,
plain mundane out of fear...
a fear of being found dead 2 weeks
later...
not mundane to say the leat,
just: a zoological observation
of a lion, rather than stark naked
on th savannah...
or thereabouts...
                but to have to exhaust
poetry for love? this sort of love?
i prefer the memory of candyfloss
sitting on a stump of wood...
        maybe that's why i find the current
movies exhausting,
           bankrupt writing,
or rather,  current movies an modern
art, minimalism, minimalism,
large open spaces replaced by
   strobe c.g.i.
point being, when did the fallacy
of subjectivity come into
contact with dialectics?
   just asking,  because i somehow
cannot conceive an objectivity of one,
in that,  not having to cite
a bibliography, third part sources...
can't a subjective opinion
be just as true as an objective
herd nod?
    mesmerising that
     subjectivity should be deemed
as sub-dialectics,
           bellow engagement...
somehow contaminated...
are pronouns in that respect
subjective? silly question...
chess pro noun: or solving crosswords...
pro nouns, meaning:
in favour of remembering
  names of objects...
            and further into the exposed
muddle of atomised grammar...
objectivity is when you stress
   pre nouns...
   otherwise, someone is to be found
vehemently stressing a pivot
word, and that gives him or her away?
all of a sudden objectivity is
regarded with more respect,
      objectively, perhaps talking
about things with a blank canvas,
orientating oneself where
you're not allowed to use nouns...
the closest you can get to asking
a co-worker for a hammer on
a construction site is to hum a hmm...
is that objectivity?
        hence the classically mundane
narrative...
   because i just wanted to say
that a richness of one's own memory
creates a cinematic void...
i can't estimate how many hours
I've sat drinking, more entertained
by my memories, than any recent film...
just like today, having refreshed
a pale nectarine kitchen with
lemon peel... i already started thinking
about the corridor...
                  but before that, during
the day...
    why is spring in England,
why is summer in England...
  so... ******?! i wish there was
a better word for it...
     god i've missed continental spring...
i haven't experienced, continental
spring for... 22 years...
                  deep continental spring,
past Germany,  above the Balkans
below the Baltic...
      22 years of 22 springs,
spent on that bog of a sinking ship
known as England...
rain... rain... more rain...
     dampness and 21 Beehive Ln.
Gants Hill just across the synagogue
above the estate agent...
    dampness and those *******
   woodlice...
          22 years having spent each mid
April to late May under
earl Grey the ******* ponce...
                     no one I sleep better
in this part of the world,
the body has synchronised itself
with the fauna and a heritage past
and the mind seems revived...
to the scents of waking trees,
   to the sight on national news
of bears waking from their wintry
hibernation in the Tatra mountains...
ecologists testing mosquito repellents,
anti-rabies snacks dropped into forests
for foxes to eat...
         and only the one direction
traffic of English... comes a headache
having to listen to it, comes easier writing
about it...
              hence the old woman decided
to take my case of the presidium...
tomorrow i'll have my photo taken,
take my British passport,
declare myself as myself before
a bureaucratic piece of paper
with a signature, wait less than two weeks
and get my Polish citizen identification card...
plan B...
       just in case...
          just in case it becomes normal
for spring and seeing so many
children playing outside the 2nd level
balcony overlooking a graveyard...
boys as old as 6 / 7 playing with
wooden swords...
     teenagers sitting on benches
in the cool night till 10:30 pm...
                               and everything else
worth living for, lived in a small town...
far away from the London rats...
     far away from a country that understands
bilingualism as schizophrenia...
              maybe i am mad,
but the ones who think I am, are no more
sane...
                than me...
                                first thing's first...
with a snap of the fingers,
i can retain my dual-nationality,
and perhaps, after a while,
after I stop finding the study of psychiatry
by studying psychiatric blunders
a bit boring...
            and say auf wiedersehen to
ol' ***** 'n' Charlie Ambrose...
                                                 honestly,
england's worth of its very misery...
    its hardball when attached to the mainland,
a nation of thespians,
     hard this, soft that,
                   nuns instead of frisky youth...
or at least: for the joy of life
at first, prior to the sentiments of
adulthood, and shackles,
as was once done in a spring field
or on top of a hay stack;
              which... makes it doubly
uncomprehensive...
     ad to why someone's father might
force himself to forget his mother tongue. ..
with his son not being able to speak it,
suddenly reaching for
         a bomb making kit, a knife,
a car or an assault rifle...
            that sort of grievance?
as the old testament ends with a hope...
not till the heart of the son
turns to the father, and likewise
reciprocated...
                       shame for the collateral
damage... truly, shameful...
but you'd think that a son could
realise his beef,  is with his immigrant father
and not the host nation...
            because a return to the past
or, the body to the land,
the land to the mind, and mind to
the tongue, and the tongue to the breath,
and the breath to the soul,
   and the soul to the forefathers...
          kinda amrican, wouldn't you say so,
Herr Jefferson?

Ms. Ambrose
wrote
excellent prose.

Ms. Baily
played the Banjo
daily.

Ms. Carter
drove farther
then anyone else at work.

Mr. Dennison
loved to eat
venison.

Ms. Falco
once ate
yellow snow.

Mr. *****
drank too much
*****.

Mr. Hall
got lost
at the local
mall.

Ms. Kincaid
loved lemonade.

Mr. Lesko
hates the
winter cold
and the way
this poem was wrote.