Wondering the evening stillness
We left the bluebell beds
And the sculptured wooden rose
To trample the wearing pathway
Down to the campus amphitheater.

A patch of daylight brought the party
To look upwards where transparent rope
Made a crossing of wavering sun beams
A celebration of Art Installations with an
unexpected rhyme.

Downwards the plateau, a semicircle of grass
Melts into July’s empty classroom of books
As wasted writing and hours of hot fluttering
In a breeze with discarded wineglasses and cups
Await the sound of trumpets and a golden crown.

Love Mary ***

“Big change, huh? Bet you could take some awesome shots here, Max.”

Max nodded, only hearing the last part of Warren’s sentence. Truth was, she was distracted by how beautiful this place was. If Max stood at the end of the street, she could get a killer depth-of-field perceptive image by aiming towards the long and skinny winding roads being enveloped by the building’s shadows. San Diego seemed to flourish with art and photography culture, and great opportune shots to shoot photographs.

“Earth to Max.” That seemed to knock her out of her thoughts. *****, focus. “Are you going to go swimming with me and Brooke?”

From the look on Brooke’s face, she was hoping to God that Max said no. Brooke is the relationship equivalent of a boa constrictor, and she wasn’t sure how this hasn’t dawned on Warren yet. “I’m not sure. Maybe. Let me unpack first.”

After Kate dropped out of going to San Diego Comic Con last second, Max was nearly going to join her when Warren practically begged her to come. Coming back to the present - equipped with her suitcase and messenger bag - Max lingered behind the couple by several feet. This was her way of trying to avoid the reminder that she was third-wheeling with a boy who used to have a very awkward crush on her and his salty girlfriend.

“I’m going to go down to the pool.” Warren said, sliding his key card into room #228, turning his head to face Max before opening the door. “Maximillian, are you sure you don’t want to join us?”

“Like I said, I’ll think about it.”

The moment the three of them walked in, Brooke and Warren beelined for the restroom with their bathing suits in hand. Once they came out, Warren had a blue and black plaid board short swimsuit on whereas Brooke came out with a highlighter-colored graffiti two piece.  “Alright, Mad Max. We’re out of this joint. Catch us at the pool if you need something or want to swim. If not, we’ll be back in an hour.”

Max waved them off, digging through her bag for that bathing suit. The crimson colored ruched one-piece vintage bathing suit sat abandoned at the bottom of her matching vermillion suitcase. Down below at the pool area, she could hear screaming and laughing and splashing of the pool water. Max got up from her suitcase, and opened the curtain enough to look out at the hotel pool. Several other people were down there, pushing the time limit very close to closing in an hour from now. Come on, Max, you’re really going to let your whole adventure be ruined by the usual high-strung Brooke?

**** it.

Max nabbed the swimsuit from the hidden corners of her suitcase, stripping herself down to pull the swimsuit onto her body. Once the swimsuit was on, she turned her waist feeling the soft fabric conform to her small but still vaguely prominent curves. Max can remember Mom always saying that she looked good in red, so she recommended a red one-piece since Max doesn't have the confidence to show her stomach to anyone.

Well, except her best friend Chloe. They used to take bubble baths together as toddlers so it used to be the most natural thing in the world to get dressed in the same room together. It must have been a better time, where there were no insecurities. Now Max has trouble calling her up without her finger freezing up as she attempts to type the very last digit of Chloe’s phone number into her phone.

As Max turned around in the mirror, she noticed how her lack of a rear end was a lot more distinguishable in red. Wowser, Max thought, this looks really good on me.

“Wowser.” Max said aloud to her reflection, and threw on a bathrobe.

It must have been ten minutes into Warren and Brooke swimming when Max opened up the pool gate, entering the vast perimeter of the pool area. There were significantly less people around the pool, where most of the people still inside the pool area were kids our age. “Max, you’re here!”  

This made two teenagers stop in their tracks as they were opening up the pool gate at the other end of the pool to leave. One of them whipped around so fast that it was a blur of blue hair.  “Wait…”

“Is that…Max Caulfield? It looks a lot like her.” Rachel asked to Chloe, who hung her jaw open in disbelief. No ******* way.

Furrowing her eyebrows, she watched Max drop the robe on a nearby chair. Like an awkward penguin, Chloe watched her best friend waddle up to the pool edge & cannonball into the waters below oblivious to the two girls standing at the gate watching her. “You’re going to wake up the neighbors and the owner of this hotel's parents forty miles away, Warren!”

“Do you want to go say hi to her?” Rachel asked Chloe.

As Chloe decided on actually going to surprise her, Max's friend said something that made Chloe change her mind in a split second.

“How would you know? Besides, you’ll eventually forgive me for that once you meet the entire cast of Star Trek tomorrow, Max.” Warren yelled at Max, and Chloe did a small grin as she turned away from her best friend, closing the gate on both of the girls.

“No. Guess the oblivious nerd is going to Comic Con too.“ Chloe took one last look at Max before going back inside the hotel with Rachel Amber at her tail. "Do you think she'll recognize me in cosplay?"

"Probably not. Unless I drop the bomb on you guys."

“Shhh. I don’t need you ruining my surprise party, *******.”

Max, Brooke, and Warren weren’t in the pool for long, since Warren bumped his head into the side of the pool while doing laps with Brooke. They had to get out, and put an ice pack on Warren’s sore bump on his head. “Now how am I going to cosplay the 11th Doctor? I need to gel my hair back, but I have this gargantuan bump on my head.”

“We’ll figure it out, sweetie.” Brooke said, and Max nearly gagged.

Max went back to the hotel room first, since being around Brooke made her want to strangle her.  This whole third-wheeling thing was annoying, and Max was regretting coming alone without Kate as her faithful chauffeur. Nonetheless, she wasn’t going to let that ruin her trip. She was here to have fun. And to take a bunch of photographs, of course.

The next morning around 4:00 am, Max was rudely awoken by Brooke who shoved her in her shoulder. “Get up, Max. We’re leaving in thirty minutes from now.”

Was that necessary? Max thought, crawling out of bed. From the bathroom, she could hear Warren fretting over the mammoth-sized bump on his head as both of them got dressed in their cosplay outfits. “Okay. That hurt a lot. Ow, ow, ow.”

“Oh, is there anything I can do to help?”

“Shut up, guys.”

Feeling slightly irritable from the loud ruckus Brooke and Warren were making in the other room Max rolled out of bed. She rustled through her suitcase for a pair of skinny jeans and a white t-shirt with the print of a doe on the front. Once she had her clothes, she stood up to walk into the restroom to change when she noticed the ending result of both of her companions.

Brooke’s multicolored dark hair was pulled down in waves framing the scarlet dress with a black belt fastened around her waist. As for Warren, his usually shaggy brown hair was gelled back for his cosplay. She had to admit, he looked handsome in his mahogany jacket, red bow-tie and matching suspenders, and the cotton collared button-up he wore underneath. For a cosplay of The Eleventh Doctor and Clara Oswald, it was quite impressive how close they looked like the actual characters of the TV show Doctor Who.

“Take a picture of us, Max!” Warren said in a chirpy voice.

“On it.”

Max pulled out her camera, and pointed it at the couple who held up peace signs together. Once the picture rolled out, the couple split apart to put on the finishing touches of their cosplay.  As for Max, all she had to do was throw on her clothes. There wasn’t a lot of work in dressing up like normal people. Besides, she’s never really been a fan of cosplay.

If you want to count dressing up as pirates with her best friend Chloe on Halloween five years ago cosplay, then yeah, Max has cosplayed several times before.

“Max, hurry your *** up. It looks like the amphitheater is getting crowded from here.” Warren yelled from outside the bathroom door towards Max, who sloppily tied her shoes.

As they exited out of the large double doors of the four star hotel, Warren and Brooke took the crosswalk, pointing out people cosplaying as characters from TV shows or video games. They were smiling and laughing, leaving Max to third-wheel again. Instead of lingering on it, Max put in her headphones and turned on Crosses by José González tuning them out.

“Where is the line?” Max asked Warren as they approached the crowded complex filled with restaurants on one side and the amphitheater on the other side. Tents were set up here, even.

“This is what I call natural selection. If you come prepared with prior knowledge on how this works, you can conquer this haphazard looking line.” Warren spread his arms out, motioning towards the crowd that was rapidly growing in size.

“Let’s go, Warren.”

“Wait!”

Like an octopus, Brooke latched onto Warren dragging him into the depths of the growing sea of people. After three painful hours of waiting, Max felt the crowd start to lighten up around her as excited but deafening chatter filled the air of the surrounding herd of people. Everyone was clamoring loudly, quickly rushing into the open doors with their San Diego Comic Con day pass thrown around their neck.

As soon as Max received hers, she eagerly threw her day pass around her neck. After buying a small breakfast sandwich from a booth, Max decided to start people watching. Some of the cosplays made her laugh like the Darth Vader cosplayer leading a conga line of faithful storm troopers, taking long confident strides.

Max took several photographs of several different cosplayers, ranging from Doctor Who, Scott Pilgrim vs The World, The X-Files, Breaking Bad, Undertale, Magic: The Gathering, and Family Guy. When it started getting crowded, she got up from her chair and entered the large archway into the convention center filled with colorful tents and cosplay galore.

Wielding her camera bag close to her waist, Max carefully maneuvered her way through the sea of people as she took a look at the booths. Suddenly, the throng of people became too much for Max. An elbow into Max's side pushed her into the left side of her waist, throwing her into a booth.

“Hey, are you alright?”

Max’s eyes glanced up towards a blue-haired girl cosplaying as Pris from Blade Runner, who had grabbed her waist. Something about her was actually kind of familiar, however, Max couldn’t tell. “You hit that table pretty hard.”

Max felt the warmth from her waist leave slowly. “This crowd is suffocating. I need a place to breathe around here. It’s too claustrophobic for my liking.”

“Are you alone or something? Because I could always use company in my tent. It gets hella boring inside this tent sometimes.”

“Do you say that to all of your customers?” Max asked, chuckling nervously at the blue-haired cosplayer’s comment.

“No.” She mumbled something under her breath that Max didn’t quite catch. “I mean – unless you’re uncomfortable with it. I’ve seen people faint multiple times from claustrophobia here.”

Since her head was bent down over a sketch she was doing in a journal, the only way Max could tell that the girl was blushing was by how red her ears had gotten. The realization that the girl became a nervous wreck all of a sudden after that comment had made Max’s day already.

“Maybe you’re right. I should just sit down. There’s no places to sit around here, though.”

The blue-haired girl patted the armrest of the empty fold-out chair behind the table. “This is Rachel’s chair, but Rachel is helping out with the convention rave for later. She’s on the committee or some ****.”

“Coworker?”

“And an annoyance at times.” Max went around the table, taking a seat in the chair the girl patted. It was itching at her brain that there is something about this girl that is so nostalgic.

Suddenly, a long brunette-haired girl billowed through the back curtains of the booth, where Max saw a tattoo chair in the back along with an extended table with clutter everywhere. “Chloe, do you have my phone? I really need it right now.”

Wait a second. “Chloe?”

“Great. Thanks a lot, Rachel. You ruined the element of surprise.”

"No ******* way!"

After Chloe handed the phone to Rachel, Max followed with her first impulse, throwing her arms around Chloe. Immediately, Chloe laughed as Max nuzzled her head into Chloe's shoulder blade. Max could feel the initial excitement pounding in her chest as Chloe tightened her grip on her as well. “Get a room, Chloe.”

“I will shove this combat boot so far up your *** –”

“Okay, I’m leaving. I need to call Frank and see when he was going to get here.” Rachel stated matter-of-factly, then added as she was leaving, “Hope you have a fun reunion.”

Once Chloe let go of Max, she held onto her arms staring into her face. “Wowser. This is crazy. You’re dressed as Pris from Blade Runner. That is definitely my ****.”

“I hope so. Someone asked me if I’m cosplaying Ramona Flowers from Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. Now I will accept that misunderstanding because Ramona Flowers is my woman crush.” Chloe glanced over at Max, changing the mood merely by narrowing her eyes at the brunette. “Alright, are you going to explain why you didn’t call or text me for five years?”

It was so sudden that Max suddenly felt inferior to Chloe. "I'm sorry. My parent's decision to suddenly move to Seattle wasn't my choice."

"That's not a good enough reason." Chloe attempted to change the tone of the mood lighter, since this wasn't exactly the place to discuss that. "So what's up with you? Living it up here in San Diego or something?"

"I - uh - moved back to Arcadia Bay. Two months ago."

"Without a phone call, telling me that you moved back." Chloe pressed her lips together, annoyed. "Nice one, Caulfield. That's just ******* peachy."

Max started to get a little irritated herself. "Look, I'm sorry. Can we just drop it?"

"I’m sorry, Max. I don’t want to be the ******* to ruin your day. In fact, this was the complete opposite impression I was going for. If you want to punch me for being such an annoying rat, go right on ahead.” Chloe pointed at the bicep of her left arm.

I shook my head – chuckling as Chloe kicked back her chair – propping her feet onto the table cluttered with various types of artwork. There was a dozen pieces of art here, but I noticed Chloe was really into abstract watercolor paintings. Mostly Chloe did sketches of characters from TV shows and video games and painted it in watercolor. One of the paintings in particular caught my eye.

Of course – like all of Chloe’s paintings – it was strikingly beautiful: In front of an obsidian background was a butterfly with eye-popping azure wings. One of the wings seemed to be slightly blurred to give more definition to the closest wing. “Wow, you’re a real artist.”

“I’m also a tattoo artist. If you want to get a tattoo, just hit your girl up. It’s on the house for you.” Chloe said, holding out her arm to show me. “Rachel helped me with both designs.”

Chloe had a beautiful sleeve on her arm and a tattoo on the top of her hand of a red chrysanthemum. Max traced the red ribbon detail on her arm tattoo with one finger, making Chloe shiver. “Dude, you can look, but you can’t touch the tats.”

“Sorry, it’s beautiful.”

“Hopefully it will still look beautiful when I look like the human equivalent of a raisin when I’m 80.” Chloe joked, holding out her arm in front of her face. “How about it, Max? Wanna get tatted up by your best friend Chloe? It might be a great experience for you, hippie. No gang related tattoos, though.”

“Yeah, because I’m totally a part of a gang.”

The smile that lit up Chloe’s face sent Max into a comatose state of delirium. Her eyes focused in on Chloe like a lens, taking shots in her head so she didn’t forget this moment with her best friend. For once, Max was having fun. “You’re still a ******* geek. That’s good news.”

“Always.”

Chloe shook her head before getting up. “Alright, so do you want a tattoo or not? This is your final offer, Max. Don’t let it go to waste.”

“I don’t know. You know I’m scared of needles.”

“Still?” Chloe grabbed Max’s shoulders. “Come o

The beginning of this story is pretty hazy, I’m not really sure I remember how the whole thing started but when it was happening it all seemed to make so much sense.
The first thing I remember, everything seemed normal enough, I was probably just going about doing the same things I do most days, nothing special. Then all of a sudden this terribly great thing happened. Everyone was talking about you.  Something important going on and you where right at the center of it. As I later found out you had gone missing or run away or just vanished, nobody knew. I defended you when they said they had seen it coming, that they had seen it in your eyes. I knew better than that. This was a place of loners and lovers, no families allowed, all the families had to go somewhere else, or at least they did.
I remember someone important, the Mayor maybe. He was like a cartoon villain, suave in a gray paper-perfect gray suit and silver hair slicked back just enough. He had a big smile and teeth like snow on a sunny day. He was a game show host villain.
He was the one making the biggest fuss about the whole thing. Always talking about how we shouldn’t feel ashamed of you for running away or that we should pray that you be safe wherever it was you had gone. But he just had those big phony teeth.
There was something going on with friends, at school I guess, like they wanted to keep talking about it but I didn’t. I knew you were coming back, how couldn’t you. I tried to explain to everyone that there was no way in hell I would be that cruel to myself, but they had no idea what I was talking about, they thought I was losing my mind.
You remember that time we tried that one drug and things were not as great as you expected. That night we thought we were both going to lose our minds. This time I wasn’t losing my mind. I had all the confidence in the world.
There was a lull midway through, I had no idea when you were coming back and I was starting to get annoyed with all the people around me. I couldn’t believe they were still making such a racket about the whole thing. They weren’t even like real people, they all had these defining characteristic which became their entire personality. They were caricatures of real people but I didn’t have the heart to tell them. I didn’t care enough to bother with figments, how could I?
Then suddenly the whole thing was different, there was some new great event going on. Everyone had gathered to some great big open amphitheater. All the seating was facing a big fancy stage with lots of lights on it. Behind the stage were hills. Everyone was talking about them, those where the hills they said you ran out into. As it turned out that was the reason for our being here. It had been like a hundred years or something since you had run away and everyone had come for a ceremony in your honor.
The whole thing was absolutely awful. It felt like we were there for a whole day, and the mayor was speaking for over half of that. Everyone was so captivated by his teeth and his suit that they barely heard what he was even talking about. They all acted as though what he was saying was breaking their hearts though, some even seemed genuinely inspired.                                       
The ceremony was going on and I was pretty done with the whole thing, I could feel the end coming. There was some pause in the speeches and all the seat sitters went to go freshen up. I took my chance and just ran out into those hills.
This was the best bit. All of a sudden I was in these hills, there was nothing but mountains in the distance and the stars were like light fixtures. They shone with color almost but the moon was so big and brilliant that everything was that perfect dim blue-silver color. By that light I could see the wind dancing in the knee-high grass, not like waves but more like snakes. I felt like a dumb rock when all I wanted was to be smoke, dancing with the wind.
Then you came down from the sky, you showed me all the dazzling swirls and swoops you could do and left all these crazy colors in your wake. When you finally settled down I saw you skin was like orange flame, soft like a marker drawing, moving around you like a flaming teardrop. Your core was all blackness and depth but I knew it was you. Who else would it be?
We hold hands and you fly us back to that big stage. We wait behind the curtain and we hear the mayor come on one more time. He’s telling the audience about one final display to tip off the ceremony, a dazzling light show preformed by a secret guest. I look at you in surprise but before I know it we’re making a run for it, speeding up those long aisle steps, up towards the exit doors at the top. Everyone is speaking about it at the top of their lungs but I can barely hear them over the sight of you. Your colors are all falling off and I can see your features being revealed as flakes of light peel away. We burst out the double doors and down some hallway. Out into the bright sunlight and I still can’t get over how beautiful you are.
And that’s how it ends.

At the mailbox, again:
“Who loves me, baby?”
Well, let’s see: there’s a flyer from Mercury Insurance,
Reminding me that most middle-income customers
Save an average of $4 million smackaroons when they switch too.
The Penny Saver USA.com is here,
Thank God, almighty!
So now I know that Thomas Roofing & Paving
Is having a special on 20-year leak-free flat roofs;
"All work guaranteed & insured.
No job too big or small.
Free estimates/Emergency services/License # I8U-69."
And thank you, Jesus,
For another $4.99 Farmer Boys 3-Egg Breakfast
Combo with Coffee coupon, and that
Little Caesars Hot-N-Ready, $5.00 cheese or pepperoni,
Mae-West-“why-don’t-you-come up and see me sometime?”—mailer. And, of course, another technology Siren’s song:
Verizon FiOS delivers entertainment this big,
Dish me up some dish NETWORK, $19.99 a month . . .
Are you ******* me?
For 12 ******* months?
AT&T;: whack me off on 120 channels.
DIRECTV.com - DIRECTV® Official Site‎
Worry-free 99.9%  . . . cue Joe E. Brown,
"Some Like It Hot“ Osgood:
"Well, nobody’s perfect!"
Time Warner/Sprint/T-Mobile;
And ******* Leather, Polk Street, San Francisco.
******* leather?
Must be for my neighbor: that ***** ****!
And here’s the weekly 8-page color fold-out from Stater Bros:
Lowering prices every day, large cantaloupes
(Jessica Lange, are you back?)
10 for $10.00, 32 oz. Gatorade
Or 24 oz Propel in 30 assorted varieties @ 79 cents
+ CRV: California Redemption Value?
Nice euphemistic cover-up for a TAX.
Nice, nice, very nice, CA elected state officials;
Nicely done, Sacramento.
Everywhere else in the country you get real money—
A fixed number of pennies, nickels, or dimes—
For your plastic bottles and aluminum cans.
But in California, the licensed recyclers
Get to pull the market price out of their *** each morning.
California Redemption Value?
What ******* genius government kleptocrat thought that one up? Conspiracy Alert: who gets all that CRV money?
And what are they doing with it?
Feeling plain, Jane?
Marinello Schools of Beauty, want you,
Offer you hands-on training in cosmetology,
Skin care esthetics, manicuring and vaginal deodorizing—
Just kidding, Babaloo.
Food tip for the Third World:
Never try to write poetry on an empty stomach.
Sizzler 6 oz juicy & succulent.
RENEGADE DEAL:
El Pollo Loco guacamole chicken sandwich,
Coupon free, small drink and small chips,
When you purchase a guacamole or jalapeno sandwich,
includes pepper jack cheese and a southwest sauce.
Gardenas sandia con semilla, 7 lbs 99 cents.
GARDENAS: “en precios, servicio y calidad, nadie nos iguaia.”
Bud Gordon’s Quality NISSAN:
One at this price after a $1500 factory rebate.
TERMINIX: get them before they get you!
The Kingdom Animalia, Phylum Arthropoda, Class Insecta
Bug up my *** again.
And a form letter from the VA
Asking me to please update my whereabouts.
And a form letter from the VA asking me
To please update my whereabouts.
And miles to go before I sleep.
Bite me, Mr. Frost!

An outing, at last.
I am going for a walk around the inside of my gates.
I live in one of those gated over-55 lunatic asylums.
There are gates. It is gated. Get it?
GATED! We feel safe here.
Probably a good thing at our age:
Self-imposed institutionalization,
Putting oneself in an asylum to ferment and die.
The fact that so many of us
Need it so bad at only 55
Says something itself about the current state of
Baby Boomer metal-fatigue.
I am now standing at the far end of the golf course.
I wait at the far end of the 18th Hole.
A ball bounces past my head and
Rolls off past the green into the far rough.
The 18th Hole is perched atop a small plateau,
Out of sight, far above the horizon for anyone teeing off.
I am Puck, invisible and impish.
I pluck the ball up.
I scamper to the green.
I pop the ball into the hole.
Which is better than popping a hole in the ball,
Surely, kind of a drag,
As we were once fond of saying.
Deflated Ball.
Deflator Maus.
OPERA can be ****.
Bodice-ripping corsets, whorehouses and naked ******!
Hardly what you might expect from
A night with the Welsh National Opera,
But they found their way into this production of "Die Fledermaus."
Ripe language, contemporary jokes and
Toilet humor thrown in, adding immensely
To the pleasures of Strauss’s operetta.
"Die Fledermaus," or The Bat’s Revenge,
Is all about drunkenness and adultery.
Despite being written in the 1870s,
It remains equally pertinent to today’s pub culture of excess.
Daring; Colorful; ****: PGA golf.
I steal a golf ball on the far end of the 18th Hole.
I pick up the Titleist and stick it in the hole
(Steady Jessica, not yours.
I hide behind your bush.
(Cue up PSA, First Lady Bird Johnson’s 1960s
Nationwide Beautification Campaign:
“I want everyone in America to plant a tree,
A sherrrr-rub, or a booosh.”)
The golfer now searching frantically:
Why is the cup always the last place they look?
Then, wham, bam, he looks:
A legend is born.
A hole in one,
His name forever immortalized
On a plaque over the bar, the proverbial 19th Hole.

As you know, I speak for all mediocrities,
Safe in my 55+ gated-community.
I go next to the Club House,
"The Lodge" as it’s called.
Each afternoon, the usual suspects
Claiming first come/first serve tiered mini-theater seats
Where Netflix matinee gems are screened.
It is two minutes to DVD show time.
I walk to the front of the room.
I stare at my audience.
I count the house slowly,
Making meaningful eye contact with each wrinkled face.
I cup my hands behind my back and speak:
“I assume you are all here for my lecture on Kierkegaard.”
No one reacts.
I turn to leave but do a double-take and smile.
One old woman in the top right corner of the amphitheater laughs, Perhaps the one other human being within the gates
Who has also smoked a joint today.
For an instant, I am overwhelmed with paranoia,
Perhaps I’ve gone too far over the line:
No longer “oh-he’s-a-character;”
I am now “that creep is ******* nuts.”
Is it time for someone to approach my family,
My next of kin, my “who-to-contact-in-event-of-emergency” number? Who will make the call on behalf of the HOA—
The Homeowner’s Association—
The Tsars, the Duma, the Supreme Soviet in these parts?
They are the power inside the gates;
Those who determine the state’s enemies,
Who govern its community norms.
Power within the gates.
Law within the asylum.
Little Hitlers one and all.
Hopefully they reach my sister first.
She’s been briefed.
KEY POINT IN THE NARRATIVE:
The new narrative is non-linear.
We can no longer sustain a narrative understanding of ourselves;
We are each an individual stream of consciousness,
All of us random, non-linear and disconnected.
We grow more and more disconnected from others.
We may be neighbors in space and time,
But we remain deprived of any significant human contact;
Any spiritually significant human contact.
Our social circle narrows to what can fit in The Telescreen;
We become more intimate with a legion . . .
Did someone say a legion? SPQR:
Am I having some sort of genetic-linguistic seizure here?
Am I channeling Benito Mussolini again?
Il Duce speaks to me from the grave,
Still blowing smoke up my Hopi-Jew-*** ***,
Filling in my insecurities,
Plugging the holes in my character
With delusions of classical Roman grandeur, glory and empire. Hmmmm? Quite an appetizing pitch for the average *****,
A message so completely, so ethnocentrically slick,
Olive oily, and so seductive.
A non-Italian would have thought
American Legion or Legionnaire’s disease,
Or The Foreign Legion, The French Foreign Legion.
The French: a virulent, promiscuous people.
Do you want fries with that, Simone?
No, I don’t get out much.
Only an occasional brisk walk around the asylum,
In and around the golf course, around but inside the gates. (LINKS) Bill Gates. Daryl Gates. Billy Bathgate’s Gates? Ghiberti’s Gates? The Hot Gates? Thermopylae? 300 Spartans/700 Thespians:
“The noun causing idiots to think of
Two girls sloppily eating each other’s mighty vaginas,
When they hear mention of someone being an actor.” http://www.urbandictionary.com
Not even close.
No, I rarely venture out.
This is Hemetucky.
There are methamphetamine-stoked
Teenage zombies at the gate.
Note to costume control:
Perhaps camouflage clothing is the safe choice?
No loud red Hawaiian.
No garish Indonesian batik.
Fleet of feet are these Hemet tweakers,
These cranked up Riverside County teenage barbarians,
These Huns & Visigoths,
These amped up, ravenous jackals.
And why stop there?
These Vandals & Vandellas.
A Motown flashback:
“Nowhere to run, baby, nowhere to hide.”
With or without Martha—
They remain dangerously lethal.
Yes, let it be camo clothes for me.
Those **** heads may be young.
They may be fast.
They may be able to run me down
On a dry grass dog-legged fairway savannah,
Tearing the meat from my carcass.
But the sons-a-******* have to see me first.
Besides, we know who are real friends are.
Hooray for our media peeps!
We become more intimate with a legion
Of television personalities on 125 different channels.
Most of these we know by name and context.
We know their families, their friends,
Their histories, their tragedies,
Their favored hyperbole and manner of speech.
Sometimes we establish intimacy with celebrities
Strictly on the basis of universal body language.
At times–in the absence of any other
Empathetic facility of identification–
We connect on instinct alone.
Instinct: perhaps animal at its core,
An animal kingdom affinity group,
Connecting on a bio-linguistic level,
Particularly when the Korean, or Spanish,
Mandarin, or Arabic,
Japanese, or even Hebrew language version is broadcast.
All languages cryptically alien,
A dense boundary, a barrio border wall,
Undecipherable, impenetrable concrete.
But we’ve never spoken to our neighbors,
Nor do we know their names.
Celebrities are the neighbors we know best;
Although the intimacy is an illusion,
Permission to invade their privacy presumed,
Tacit in the relationship between celebrities and their fans.
I am an independent contractor now,
An outside consultant to the NSA.
Try as I might I cannot crack the enigma,
Kim Kardashian remains far beyond my code-breaking prowess.
I repeat myself:
We can no longer sustain a narrative understanding of ourselves;
We are each an individual stream of consciousness,
All of us random, non-linear and disconnected.
We are more and more disconnected from others.
We may be neighbors in space and time,
But we remain deprived of any significant human contact;
Any spiritually significant human contact.
Our social circle narrows to what can fit in The Telescreen; we become more intimate with a legion . . .
Back to you, David Ulin:
“Sometime late last year—I don’t remember when, exactly—I noticed I was having trouble sitting down to read. That’s a problem if you do what I do, but it’s an even bigger problem if you’re the kind of person I am. Since I discovered reading, I have always been surrounded by stacks of books. I read my way through camp, school, nights, and weekends; when my girlfriend and I backpacked through Europe after college graduation, I had to buy a suitcase to accommodate the books I picked up along the way.”
Thank you, David L. Ulin.
I cannot help myself.
I grow more eccentric each day.
My eyeballs glued to that flat screen!

Cosmo Kramer: "The bus is outta control.
So I grab him by the collar, I take him out of the seat,
I get behind the wheel, and now I’m driving the bus."
Jerry: "Wow!"
George Costanza: "You’re Batman."
Cosmo Kramer: "Yeah, yeah, I am Batman.
Then the mugger, he comes to and he starts choking me.
So I’m fighting him off with one hand,
And I kept driving the bus with the other, ya know.
Then I managed to open up the door,
And I kicked him out the door, ya know,
With my foot, ya know, at the next stop."
Jerry: "You kept making all the stops?"
Cosmo Kramer: "Well, people kept ringing the bell!"
(Share this moment with a stranger.)

I speak for all mediocrities.
I am their champion, their patron saint.
Boom Chaka Laka. Boom Chaka Laka.
Boom Chaka Laka. BOOM!
Isn’t it time Salieri tempted Constanze–
Frau Mozart–with a plateful of Capezzoli di Venere:
“******* of Venus.”
You had me at hello, Kidman.
I know you too well, Nicole.
I knew you from before,
Way before Tom’s Oprah couch freak show.
Listen to me, Nicole:
We are face to face
With the most profound question in American literature:
"What is the grass?
The flag of my surrender?
The flag of my disposition?"
I resort to Socratic maxims: Know yourself;
The un-****** life is not worth living.
Is it stress? Is it lack of conviction?
Everything Jeff Lebowski neither wants nor needs in his life?
I watched you *** in "Eyes Wide Shut," Nicole.
Now I know you with my eyes and your legs wide open.
Thank you, Sidney Pollack.
Sidney knew.
Sidney dealt us cards
From his Hollywood Tarot deck.
We are intimate, Nicole.
I watched you squat.

I thought I would be raising a glass to freedom.
But my counterparts didn't know that history had its eyes on us.
The choices seemed apparent,
Yet, we have been left bewildered and scrambling -
Wondering whether we did all we can.

My glass is raised to freedom -
The end of freedom.
History has repeated itself.
The beginning of the end.
And thunderous applause filled the amphitheater.

Those that have felt wronged have decided the fates of those that have had no wrong doing.
Two exes.
One overwhelming Y...
It's ineffable.

We may weep and mourn today.
We may weep and mourn tomorrow.
We may be frozen in the moment -
But our legacy isn't etched in stone.
It can be changed by us all if we choose..

These sleepless nights will wear us down.
The disrupted R.E.M. may disrupt our rest.
But we must only rest until we are capable to go on.
And when we move, we will move as a force of love.

Love will oust the darkness that has descended upon us.
Love will out.
Truth will out.
We will endure the worst and rise.

And then we will raise a glass to freedom.
We will raise a glass to all.
We will raise a glass and drink to the revolution-
The revolution that will be a beacon of light for those that need it most.  

In a sea of red we will be the silver lining
In a sea of red we will be the light.
We will call those home.
We will call to those that need us most.
We will be united against the fear.

We will rise and rise and rise.
We will rise until lambs become lions.
We will overcome.
We will show them that we cannot be killed or swept aside.
We will rise up.

The dance of Amphitrite
I used to see
When I lived by the sea
Which in turn saw me
With her ever azure eyes
Below clouds, camphor-white

Her tides used to rise
With the coming of the night
And descend slowly
With the advent of light

I was welcomed everyday
By her king's white horses
Who galloped by her bay
I used to watch with wonder
The seagulls by her quay

Zephyrus, the west wind
Caressed her wavy locks,
Composing mellifluous harmonies
(The songs of the sea).
He brought with himself,
Ships, salts, sand
And faraway lands'
Numerous stories

The swash and backwash
Were like the ballet of nature
Performed by the sea
Which I used to see
As the sea saw me
With her ever azure eyes
As her tides used to rise
Sometimes low, sometimes high

In the Amphitheater of Amphitrite

pale clouds at the summit
water color sky
cattle guard at wood bridge
creek bed running dry

split log fence downtrodden
razor back in wire
sinkhole on the wild plain
grouse fields under fire

pine bug and a lone wolf
clear cut on the trail
stump lake on the open range
kettle valley rail

raven on the hatheume
slash and burn and scar
blasted church in a tired sun
wild rose under char

thistle in the hollow
quails nest sitting high
carriage house at lone rock
curtains of july

smoke jaw in the canyon
percolator dream
silver sage in chapel
schneider's requiem

stockmen on the wrangle
big horn antler chase
table top at sunset
deacon creek in grace

quarry in a furry
lines of tinted red
spurs and blades and columns
patchwork of the dead

past the bow hill junction
cattle ropes are black
indian amphitheater
saddle on the rack

sun is at a high bake
sedimentary stone
three days on the morphine
skeleton and bone

cold water road is lonely
corrals are cut and paste
gone but not forgotten
the dust filled aftertaste

Mom should’ve been here by now. I sat on my frilly blue and purple polka-dotted bed waiting for the knock on the door telling me mom found my dress. Finally, it raps on my door. “Mom! Did you find it?” My eyes widen as the silky blue sways in her arms, it’s beauty sings as a caged bird let free. I gasp in admiration. “I-It’s wonderful!” I pick it up and it glides down into a perfect fit.  “I’m glad you love it. Come down after you finish getting ready.” The door thuds after her. Looking across the room I note my honey brown hair that curls into pigtails. Restraining the squeal that is caught in my throat, I travel the length of my room to the mirror.

     The mirror sits on an antique dresser that my mom found at a garage sale. At first I didn’t care much for the ancient wooden junk that is at least half a century old. Now the gold-tinted metal gleams with pride once again. Rusty gems were in carved into an arc surrounding the mystic glass. “Lydia! Can you go upstairs and get that box down for me?” Mom’s request interfered with my thoughts. … Go in that dusty attic? “Sure mom!”

       Out the door and into the hallway stood a door like any other in our house. It squeaked open as eerily as what you’d expect in a haunted house. ‘A box, a box’ than out of the side of my vision I thought I saw motion. I shook it off as just being a spider or mouse. Soon my footsteps lead me to come across a dresser and mirror identical to the one in my room. It was cluttered with cobwebs and spiders. “Not very well taken care of, are you?” I muttered the joke. I looked into the mirror expecting to see a light blue dress covered in dust and sparkly silk material, but there was no reflection at all. I looked even closer at the mirror, before realizing, there was no mirror at all.

     I looked around until I found it behind the dresser, sitting on the ground. I touched one of the gems that surprisingly glowed despite the rust. Something shone until I was blinded. A tingle ran through the hand that brushed the mirror’s gem and flew through my arm until it encompassed me, racing into my every feeling until I couldn’t feel anything. My eyes shut and refused to open themselves.


     A gentle breeze grasped my hair, as music descended from the air. I could smell what seemed to be a banquet of some kind, mixed with perfume. Slowly my eyes lifted their veil to lock with waves pounding against a brick wall. I was looking down from a balcony into the erupting sea. The white brick-made balcony was large and lonely even with the brush of people walking by. I hid behind the rose-red curtains to look around. People danced and talked. Some ate. The music paved the trail for their feet to follow, all very gracefully. The men wore suits that tails drip to their knees. Their white shirts buried under sashes of gold, red, or blue. Sometimes holding medallions, some only dressed in ties. The woman wore Victorian dresses of every color and shade. Frilled hats with flowers were arranged on their heads.

     Wait, I’m not supposed to be here. I was in the attic, going to the café with mom. What was I doing? My head ached from the effort to recall my actions. Why can’t I remember? I stumble backward only to reach the balcony’s edge. Where is this anyway?

      I dive back into the curtain to search for my answer. The softness of the curtain was a rose pushed to my nose. I peeked through the small gap to find a page carting some clothes past my hiding spot. I sneaked next to the cart being wheeled into a doorway, planning to find a way out. I lost the page and walked around until I went through an archway door. The cool air spiraled against my silk-trapped skin. The scent of flowers bloomed around me. I found the garden labyrinth.

     Walking through the maze’s hedges I arrive at a beautiful fountain displaying crystal clear pouring waters. Everywhere I gazed, flowers embraced the greenery. My breath deprived my lungs of air as I took in the sight. It was so magnificent under the light of the full moon. A few lamps lighted a sidewalk path maneuvering along the hedges. I circled the fountain, taking in the surroundings. My silk dress was shining in the dim glow. The sceneries beauty entranced me.






     I didn’t see a shadow before me, and almost fell to the ground. In a graceful swoop an arm latched around my waist to pull me to my feet. “Be careful to look where you’re going, please my lady.” He bowed his head while his slim rimmed glasses started to fall off of his face, suddenly he looked up at me; sliding them back on with a slight wave of a finger. “That garb isn’t from around here.” He noted my sky blue dress with interest. I’m not even sure where I am. “I seem a bit lost. Will you help me?” he stares at me closer, a deeper curiosity shines in his green eyes, daintily brushed by his dark hair. “My dear, if it brings you comfort to know, we are in London at the Buckingham palace.”

      I gasped; London was so far away from New York. It’s across seas. I gulped at my next question as sweat pricked the nape of my neck, “What’s todays date?” His eyes sparkled at the question. “Why, it is June 28, of 1838. The entire castle is bustling at these very words. It’s a day to remember. Now my dear, I must take my leave and see to the ballroom. Farewell.” He bowed, than turned to leave. His slow stride seemed like a dance all on it’s own. My gaze was caught on his figure following the foot trail until he had disappeared. I sighed at my first encounter with someone in this grand place. The Buckingham Palace, in 1838. …1838!! That can’t be right, it’s 2014. Then the shock hit me as if bricks fell from the castle onto my forehead; the clothes, the language, the pages, and royalty. This couldn’t be London in present Great Britain.

    I circle the garden once more before I decide to go back inside. The young noble had realized my clothes didn’t belong here, probably anyone who sees me would recognize this too. I start off towards the footpath. The melodic rhythm still swirled in the breeze. Than for a second I thought I heard a footstep. My head twists back only to see a shadow move. The cool air now seems icy. Multiple possible things to say to the night air gallop through my mind. “ Such a lovely night,” is the one I decide on. From behind me a few feet back I imagine a sigh. No, not imagined, but actually there. It’s too real. I turn on my heels just to catch a glimpse of a black cape caught in the wind, as it’s master floats into the open. “My, It is lovely. However, I didn’t realize such a strangely dressed commoner as you could enter this palace.” His smirk shows sarcasm as easily as his eyes. “I never intended to visit a palace, even less in London.” My honest answer only has him conceal his laugh.




     “I’m sure you didn’t. Yet, your dressed for a fine occasion.” His hand reaches for mine. I pull away from the willowy figured glove. “Why not allow me this dance in the garden?” I back away, aware that his voice is too prescient and I should be careful. “Are you going to be wary of me?” his gaze turned pained, his blue eyes that were once full of playfulness now melted into hurt. I unintentionally reach out for his gloved hand. His laugh echoes past the foliage. “Such a naïve girl.” Dread decided that this nobleman should be avoided at all costs. I ran towards the palace. “And so the chase begins.” He snickers and rushes after me.


     I pass through the archways, glancing back now and again to find the caped captor flying along my tracks. If only there was some way to lose him. I ducked into the nearest doorway. At the far end of the hall I could see a door with a sign saying, “Dressing room”. I flung myself under a table and tablecloth to hide myself as my pursuer rounded the corner into the hall. I tucked my head between my knees and waited for his footsteps to fade. The warm place that held me trapped was close and too easily discoverable. I held my breath and tried to sink into the darkness. I’m not here. No one can find me.

     After enough time flew by to ensure my safety, I crawled out from under the table. The cloth draped over my head. I looked back and forth, half expecting to see a smirking smile, and haughty eyes. A girl stares down at me. She’s at least ten years old. “Shhh.” I press my finger to my lips and gently smile at her as if we’re keeping a secret between us. She giggles, copies the motion to her own mouth, than delightfully skips away. I let out a sigh and stand up. I follow the hall to the dressing room. The door creaks open and I look around once more, startled by the sudden noise.

     I sneak inside hoping find that the room is abandoned. In the darkly lit room, only my footsteps sound. As far as I can tell, no one has entered lately. I walk over to the carts of clothes and run my hand over the first one on the stack. It’s a ruby-red dress with fine material and some gems similar to those in the mirror. … The mirror. Not in my room, but the attic. My head hurts again, but I know I touched its gem before winding up here. How? I look through the dresses until I find a light blue and white one. The bowed sleeves come down to my elbow with frills encasing the bottom. The neckline forms a squared area of similar white frills. A small white sash acts as a belt that drops into the skirt of the dress. Two similar white ones come down each side. I pick up the light material and set it near my feet.
      My old silk dress easily slips overhead, making way for the new clothing. After tugging tight sleeves and bodices into place the light dress swoops over my feet. I spin through the dark room only to stop at catching someone’s eye. I immediately turn towards the frozen face. It is my own reflection in a mirror. I face myself as my sight settles on the dress I wear. My honey brown hair curled over the dress from my pigtails. My eyes sparkled it’s matching blue to the dress. In the corner of the room, next to the mirror, sat a large wooden box. I looked through it to find that it was full of jewelry and accessories. I prodded its contents until I found sky blue bows to wrap in my pigtails.

     I walked into the open hallway, now littered with people going to and fro. Anyone from passerby’s, young nobility, servants, and pages. Once the hall emptied I fled the room, hurrying through the corridors until I met with the room that created the harmonious trance. At the ends of the great ballroom sat crowds eating and laughing. Clusters of on-goers danced and chatted. In the middle of the farthest side of the room sat a throne that was embroidered with metal marks from centuries of legends. On the throne sat a woman at least eighteen of age. Her regal crown shone despite other attractions surrounding the dance room. A page strode over to her as she flourished her hand for his service. He stood and listened intently to her whispers. Finally, he stood and roared for the room’s attention. From his mouth spilled cheer and wistfulness, as he demanded the crowd’s ear. “Our young Queen Victoria’s coronation has completed. Now starts a new era! Let the celebration proceed.” The room reverberated with hope, love, and admiration for their new ruler.

     ‘Queen Victoria has been crowned’ having no clue how to find a way home, I disconsolately decide to join in the festivities. The crowd moves into a larger room. I stagger after them; the mass pushing everyone forward. We pass the kitchens. The aroma of cakes and deserts of every kind rises into the cool night air. The only smell more perceptible than delicate delights is the perfume penetrating the entire castle. We enter a by far more spacious ballroom. Empty amphitheater seats loom overhead, tied into the walls for onlookers to watch the ball unravel. Once again I glance at these to notice black material hangs over the edge. A head moves as people fill the seats. A nobleman with a black cape and familiar blue eyes takes their seat next to men and woman of high status. I walk into the mop to hide myself, while watching him. He laughs and chats with them as if he’s known them all his life.


      Unable to watch where I’m going, I trip. The harsh, solid ground hits my knee as if I’ve met a tornado. I wince at the pain as I strain myself to stand. A firm, but careful hand grabs mine. I look up into green eyes shaded by recognizable glasses. “My dear, you are very clumsy.” He smiles at me as I pat my dress back into place. “I see we’ve met again.” My response comes weakly as the sore from my knee makes me flinch. “I don’t think you’ve told me your name.” I inquire. “You have not requested my name, so I haven’t told it. However, if you do me the honor of a dance, my secret may be leaked.”  He bowed and offered me his arm, as I timidly accept it.

     A new song disrupts the last, as new pairs take the stage. He walks me onto the floor, and diligently starts to dance. I watch my feet, not wanting to mistake my pace. “Lift your chin, my dear. You don’t seem to but much of a church-bell.” I looked up at him puzzled. “Church-bell?” As he tried to conceal a grin, his glasses couldn’t suppress the laughter in his eyes. “Your rather quiet. And most likely not from around London, are you?” I looked to the ground once more. Should I tell him or not? Will it start problems, or will I be okay? “It’s fine, I shall not expect you to answer a question you wish not to.” I looked up at him, solemnly. “I promised to introduce myself, correct?” I nodded, as the music that echoed around us faded into the next song.

      His movements were so fluid; he was a wave at the end of the day, flowing into the sunset. “Miss, I am known by most as William Anderson. It’s a pleasure to meet you.” He procured my sweaty palm into his, tenderly swiping his mouth to my fingers. I let my hand be brought back into the dance as I searched for words to speak. Once the dance ended a few moments later, I curtsey and murmur, “It’s nice to meet you. I am Lydia Olsen.” At my gesture he bows, and requests once more, “Am I trustworthy enough to understand why you are in a mysterious place you don’t understand?” My answer had been decided and started to splatter from my mouth. “Y…”









     The next sound bounces along the room, it’s symphony starting. My words mix into the noise. In my vision of the seats above, snowy dots shoot arrows in my direction. Blue eyes gaze down at me, their iciness piercing me as icicles prickle my skin. I exchange a glance with William, nod and answer, “You are. I’ll explain.” My discomfort is surely recognizable. I often peek over my shoulder above as we dance. The shadow with a glare starts his voyage through the seats to reach the stairs that pillar into the wall. He descends from the tower, only adding to my panic. My hand seizes Williams, as I give him an apologetic smile. We hurry from the room, stumbling over each other’s feet. His graceful prance, now a faltering wreak.

     Once we are outside the ballroom, I turn towards him. “I trust you, so please understand, I live In the USA in 2014. Not London, not Even in the 1800’s.” His expression is masked, but I’m sure that I’ve confused him. “I went back into time, from the future.” The simple words struck a chord with him, his glasses tilted off his nose as he listens intently. “The future? How?” even I don’t know how to answer such questions. “I’m not sure. I was in the attic with a mirror, than … ****! I’m here.” Confusion once again wonders onto his face. “I went into a storage room with old things, and found a mirror, touched a gem, now I was here.”

     “I see, but why did we run away from the celebration? I was looking forward to another dance with you.” His casual smile does nothing to conceal unasked questions. I’m not sure how to answer them ei

“If you or someone you know
Has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s . . . ”
You can tell a great deal about UNLV,
My Vegas morning, easy listening
Radio station of choice,
When I first sit down,
Sit down to work in the morning,
One can surmise from the
Target demographics of so dire,
Such sober pronunciamentos, by
DJ Mueller, 91.5 The Source»
Live from UNLV/KUNV
Las Vegas kunv.org/KUNV
The Jazz Lounge with
Frank Mueller, Thursday, 7:00 am-11:00 am.
So don’t say I never
****** your ****--metaphorically speaking—
Herr Mueller, my good friend.
And while we’re on
The subject: WORK.
They never tell you that
Writing is such ******* hard work,
Which explains my need to **** up &
Lubricate the mechanism,
Before I start.
But I digress.

Just in case you haven’t noticed,
In case you had not been taking heed, CNN:
There’s an exciting new, radical ******,
Left-wing personage & presence
Making a play for the main room,
Center stage, center ring
Global Palace & Amphitheater.
I refer, of course to
Pope Francis:
Media-savvy, media mensch,
Crafting his own image,
Playing to the masses,
Choosing the namesake--
Francesco—right outta the gate,
Zip outta some Franco Zeffirelli
“Brother Sun, Sister Moon,”
Saint Francis di Assisi,
Talent show.
Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio,
In Buenos Aires, Argentina,
He worked briefly as a
Chemical technician
(Read: “bomb maker”)
& Nightclub bouncer
(Read: “sadist”)
Before resuming
Seminary studies, 1969.
(Tribute PSA: October 29, 1969: Happy 40th Birthday to a Radical Idea! Bill Duvall, SRI computer room. Late 1960s, the evening of October 29, 1969 the first data travelled between two nodes of the ARPANET, a key ancestor of the Internet.)
Pope Francis is a master at technology,
As any aspiring Global Wizard must be.
He has a special web site:
“Papal Bulls & Other *******.” Palabras del Papa Francisco - News.va www.news.va/es/source/vatican-va Translate this page PAPA FRANCISCO. AUDIENCIA GENERAL Miércoles 13 de mayo de 2015. [Multimedia]. Queridos . . .

Francis: Pope in Rome,
Signing international treaties again.
The Holy See himself—that
Wacky Argentinian--
One of many Lefty Cardinals,
Pulls off upset ordination in
Vatican City, God’s little 110 acres,
Our world’s smallest city & sovereign state,
Patrolled by a wacky-striped
Swiss Wackenhut Swat Team,
The Vatican: former playground for Nero,
**** Command Central for Caligula,
Construct of Mussolini’s $92 million
(More than $1 billion in today’s
Ever more worthless,
Ever more inflation soaring money!)
Lateran hush money,
Vatican monopoly money,
Seed money for colonial expansion,
Il Duce signing on behalf of
King Victor Emmanuel III,
Remembered today
Mainly for his short stature, &
Exile to Alexandria, Egypt,
Where he died and was buried.
“Vic the Man,” as he was known
Here in the Principality of Monaco,
“Vic the Man in Monte Carlo.”
But I digress.

Just the other day, Pope Francis
Signed another international treaty,
Recognizing Palestinian statehood,
Generating praise from Palestinians, &
Criticism from Israelis, who said:
“The move does not advance peace efforts.”
“Even this Philo-Semitic pope,
This pope who cares about the Jews,
Even he doesn’t get it,” said
David Horovitz, Editor,
The Times of Israel,
Which is what one would expect from
The guy who wrote the book:
A Little Too Close to God,
Still Life with Bombers:
Israel in the Age of Terrorism . . .

It is tempting to ignore the
Sheer ego, the colossal megalomania
That is Jorge Mario Bergoglio,
Truly a personage of great moral suasion,
Whether he’s cleaning the feet of the homeless,
Dialing up strangers for late-night chats or
Convincing the self-described atheist,
Raúl Castro to give Catholicism a second look . . .
This pope who took the name of a
Nature-loving pauper,
This Pope in Rome,
Francis:  Transformative,
Revolutionary gust.
Pontiff, from Latin: “a bridge,”
Spanning the God-Man divide.
We are talking about a brotherhood,
That survived both Borgia & Medici,
And other assorted kink-fests for centuries.
Just what bizarre peccadillo
Required the resignation of
Benedict XVI, in itself, a
2,000-year first?
Francis:  the first Jesuit Pope.
Francis: the first Pope from America.
Francis: “The circumstances surrounding
Benedict's decision to step down
Will titillate scholars and the journalists alike,
For many years to come,
Given his resignation came so soon
After the “VATI-LEAKS” revelations:
Vatican bank corruption,
Pederast-priest cover-ups, &
Other ignominious fiascos
Requiring significant damage control.

One would think that an institution
With their own royal observatory,
The Papal See’s inter-galactic,
Night-vision telescope, Mount Graham,
Southeast of Tucson, Arizona,
Could steer clear of faulty stars.

I won’t lose you like I did with the countless others,
The truth moves in a way much akin to lies,
Before, in the days when lightning and thunder went to war,
And after light had left and the mountains all ran and fled to the shore

Losing teeth and carrying them with everything else inside,
Breaking legs are buckling under encumbrance long denied,
Sifting through the mist of an anarchic mind,
Reaching the sea, dive into the depths and see what I can find

The curtain falls around the amphitheater again,
The crowd boo and scream for more,
They don’t want it to end

Paintings flash and crash into my eyes,
I can’t help but to imprint my own strokes and to analyse,
Trapped in my own maze of rain soaked walls,
I think I’ve found the end and then the curtain calls

The curtain falls around the amphitheater again,
The crowd boo and scream for more,
The curtain falls around the amphitheater again,
They don’t want it to end
The curtain calls and so we start again

Chop down the city lights of Paranoia.
Cathartic beads of sweat roll
off the horrors of your back
under the saggy breast lamps

in the pitched dreams where the nightmare kids
come to watch you sleep.
           Somersaulting walls made of human tissue,
the love of your life overseas, and everything you say
comes out as water torture on hollow centers of hope.

                        poetry is dead.
                                                  Liars smoke ten packs a day,
social criminals stroll in marathons of perdition
across the rot of post-modern vices,
their feet stomp closer to watching faces under the bed.
                                      'This is a story. A dream!'
Everyone sees the fire under the bed.
Watch-fires earthbound by every word
before it is said,
gagged in envy--brought to glow by spineless atoms.

        Every sexless sun has a beard, a saved flirtation that singes
          the vacuum of today's soul,
                             a dead dream because you didn't pull it from the brink.
No one has a name in poetry. A task. A point. An exit.
                                                  One bed-room apartments locked with pearls
                                                     visible only to soloist dogs.
No sorry for vagueness or shut-mouth or bleeding upwards. The meter is running....
to the pharmacy
because it could be pregnant with all the possibilities.
And the whole amphitheater wants to hear one line, the life changer you brought
--here it is: Forget your name.

It harassed free fall, it was affected by the friction force in the absence of the tefillah, the walls became more taxed and accelerated with gravity that exceeded the acceleration of time, gravity triggered the rest that was in the outside walls and made different kilometers apart, with the free fall at more than 9.8 km per second. Beneath the ground the dimension was made lower than the intake embankment, creating placements in revealing swaps in the solar position, for anyone trying to level the force of fall and its acceleration versus gravity around bodies that were moving accelerated and scattered. The earth constantly hurried its mass to preponderate and go where something or someone could rescue it, the air was inked with an offer in the cases of the imprisoned airs, which from the graves adjoining the valley of Kedron kidnapped its areas of lavender physiognomies to link it to the mantles of the Tallit, which in some cases arose with thousands of souls from their graves, to receive the cushioned rubble between which they were electro-magnetized with the blankets, and the wiring they generated, conceiving that they would gather them in the naive and demiurgical plates, for the holistic retransmission of the tract to Patmos, starting from the Cyclades all the way to the Dodecanese.

The sensitive ex-karst plates of Patmos trembled through the passageways of the Cyclades, which permeated in a ratio of the first reflection in the distance vision that approached between both physical episodes, but the second axis of reflection was made aware in an unknown perspective close to the underwater elevation of the Profitis Ilias, close to the entrance sinkhole, between the variables of the inter plates that were assigned to the reflective tapes of the Beit Hamikdash that mutated to the Megaron Áullos Kósmos. Here the omega will resume a minimum of constant forces, emphasizing the friction that bellowed by the hands of the pro-zealots who had left those sarcophagi in the Kidron Valley, in the average anchor values of the great leaks of the friction with the falling water by millions from the inexorable wind that aided the indivisible objects in the Kidron valley ratio, as a reflection of free fall hitting the friction between the Bern Olives, with torrential rains that were made periodic for an esplanade near Mount Scopus. This seat suffered from the force of friction in the fall of the wall, appreciating the burials that were and will be the reactionary phases of the Hellenistic degree. Objects faded to the state of rest and gravity that cavorted through the valleys, replicating distances more than periods of Elijah in the Judah desert itself and in the Dead Sea. From the depth of the valley, aqueous elements emerged with the proportional speed of the falls of the material and immaterial bodies, outlining the second Newtonian law, as the holy water submerged into the flow of the super-atomized savory, which was reconverted into the same Beit Hamikdash, to materialize in the submerged and hidden effects of the pagan force, hinting at the analogy of the equinoctial of the Dyticá that pushed the wave of the Kaitelka whale, in the constant of speed, tensing the force of the rocks that never stopped moving until his body igneous was quintupled in the fifth dimension beyond the consciousness of those who do not understand immaterial physical abstraction, in fractional microseconds.

The density of the rain filter that had been volumized from the submerged interstices, created the gravity of the horizontal movement that subdued the equation in kinetics that gave the differential in the unresolved expectation of the cessation of movement. Where the amount of reaction is more than what would go to Patmos, disproportionate to the macro pulleys that oscillated in the meridians, speed, and acceleration. Prior to the decoupling of the forces of fall in the already submerged bodies that were counterbalanced to give rise to the volume cords that detached from the largest chamber of the wall, to record the final sequence of wear generated by the reconversion and balance points of their masses, then the starting pedestal accumulates and is reconnected with this phenomenon of the Invisible Eclectic Portal of Patmos, being aware that they would have to enter the cavern, after having ceased their work for this mass retransmission of the reinverted wall to propel the Megaron uprising. Within three months after the Hellenistic Full Moon, the colors of the Tefilah will become mathematical, fascinating the spiritual intensity that inspired Saint John to build the temple near his cave of the Apocalypse on the reef of Patmos. The sanctity will count the astragali in front of the cyclamen for the delicate advances, wearing the blue-green of the quadrinomial that represented geodesy in its points of order and of its evangelist faction. Confusions were overwhelmed not to stop the movements of splendor in the effusions of the storms in sacred prayers in the room, which takes refuge from Kímolos bringing the souls of Helenikká, for the offices that made the trend of Katapausis after the subsequent full moon. Discounting the three months that never elapsed since Vernarth arrived on the Eurydice.


Kaitelka and the judgment of her abode would determine the corpus and the psyche of the irascible necromances of Borker and Leiak, subordinated to Zefian so that the torrential rains on Patmos are perceived by the colder of condensed water of Cassandra that Beit Hamikdash had been bringing with two anthropomorphic shadows that had been supporting him, that of a Cohen, Levita and a Samaritan, they were the guardians that came from Jerusalem to Patmos to assimilate the enthronement spectrum of free fall converted into free ascent were the fourth arrow that spectrum for the first column to be erected. The breath of all of them became more entropic each time that would be concentrated in a certain haze that was released by its titanic whale snout; Rather, I say of her presence that she was raised by some larvae, which came from certain Zeus dresses that he had expelled to free the larvae that were from her immortal garb, looking like bait for those who stalked him with necromancy. . But this time he would be very contemplative for the construction of the Megaron de Vernarth, because amphitheater was a cause of low politics for his Olympic spectrum. The energy or Evegeia, was primed for objects that took forms of papyri covered with invisible enzymes tried from Qumram, but the cause of Mortis revived the larvae making the oblivion of the era that continued after the Mortis of all legions multiplied by the phrases that were sinister from the true matter of physical remanence.

Nature welcomes you with an embrace
The wind playfully caresses you
And the crescent moon still visible
And the sun playing hide-n-seek
About to rise, coloring the flaming sky
In the amphitheater of celestial sphere
There is the drama unfolding of a new day
All the spectators, waking to the spectacular
Applauding, as a tribute to the grand illustration
Of abstract paintings, with a rich hue
Dawning on us whith a new plot to enact
The sunrise guiding us with a new ray of hope
Birds leading the way, helping us dream
To reach higher and cross new horizons
I am also a spectator in the crowd
Thronging to face life, as new day has dawned*















© Amitav (Radiance)

Paul of Tarsus resented his visit, among so many issues of paganism and Christianity that somehow tried to establish it in Jewish orthodoxy, for goods in non-Romanesque centuries of centuries, dissimilar to a Roman statute in the past to decree it today as ****-Clerical.

Saint John the Apostle says: “Christian doctrines were limited when they settled in Jerusalem, nor did they submit to worldly Judaism. He preached it while breaking the loaves in the fasmatémporos or sacralized breadbaskets of salvation, and of the company of those who were circumcised, by those who received the kingdom while they were born into Roman *******. Everything was Estebanian obfuscation as the first martyr of the ecclesiastical order, where the universe points between races, society, and sensual possessions; between Greeks as junk between barbarians and uneducated, and Israelites between Jews and pagans, to make capital laws but hidden among the subjugated codes of dictatorialism, like all the slaves, gathered in Corinth. And of female inferiority to male supremacy, without inheriting the flesh in the reconciliation of shared worlds. His policy moves the bellows of the free winds, for an enclave that begins to be a direct belonging of another man with the Alpha, and finally, this ends up being his landowner in Omega, as a fugitive baptismal sprinkling of those who become attached to the lord, that they do not recognize and if they do it under their clothes and thoughts, that they even carry sores or wounds even on their chromosomes. The genotype is the third month of gestation with embryos that can even be heard with their heartbeats beyond all the galaxies back and forth, colliding with the head of the woman who puts order to the established opinion of the extreme polarity of the genome. The coronation sculptures were made diverse with Gothic forms that differed with duplications of the stars that were built, not specified in any quantity of accumulated energy after thousands of years to be released in the channeling of the corbel, where the Cherubs rested. dedicated today to the lordship of the ancestry of the invocation, and the exaltation of the stained glass that descended from the sky with sectioned iridescence, marking the canonical hours of the first century, the beginning of the fifth decade, where Paul was already pointing to the letter to the Romans, "Where you give free grazing to the sheep, the rams overwhelm the density of certainty with their betrayals, the sublimity of the atrial rebound movement, makes their disparate ears warn of the justification of pointing out where the danger grows". In this way, Pablo de Tarso decided to name himself in the middle of Mataki, as Pablo de Patmos, because his soul still depended on the Marial outlet for his canonical lapses, in fact becoming the main and actant incarnation of faith, with the cardinal points.

Goddess Nike appears again to consummate the victory, then from the exhausted stadiums of the Pergamon amphitheater, Wonthelimar will bring Victory with the other "V" of the goddess Nike, also borne by Athenea Nikephoros. From this duplicity, both are transposed into Vernarth's "V" as an initiatory pseudonym; which will depict the reinforced twin of the Hellenic genesis of Wonthelimar, articulating from this Prótypo with the genesis of the cardinal Mandragoron, which will be Vernarthian architectural and divinized hierarchy.

Mandragoron Geodesy

- North: Vóreios (Zefian Boreal)
- South: Nótos (Austral de Borker)
- West: Dyticá (Sunset of Leiak)
- East: Aftó (Equinoctial of Kaitelka)

Faced with this geodesic repositioning, Pablo de Patmos makes the context of narrowing the analogy of the cross and the intersection point of them through, the Zohar Light that emerged from the iconographic program that was spreading out of the Ave Maria that was heard in echo intervals, The main one being the one heard by the oil press that Vernarth was holding, to lavish the first virginal thread of olive oil, which joined with the sleet drizzle falling between the intersecting points of Vóreios from north to south Notós, and from Oeste Dyticá with the Necromancy of Leiak to the Kaitelka Peninsula.

All seated began to pray, then the nascent of the Empyrean that came with the sleet emerged, and the ****** olive grove of the first degree, all went into a trance, the soul was overwhelmed only with light that each one could see in their features through the irradiation of the eyes of Vernarth and Saint John, and in the breathing of each being difficult and discordant. In the distance you could see the sparkles of Peter and James, together with the Mashiach, they came to enter the peace of each one of those who were here in the Katapausis, the night was warned by the Notós de Borker who prayed with the disciples of the Mashiach accompanied by the three winds from the south, which transfigured the colt of Bethany that admitted them to take them to the Seventh Heaven, here at the first stone of the Megaron with the Mataki, the seven bread baskets and candelabra, taken by the agony of the chalice that everyone carried in their bodies where they sprang from their interior, along with the thread of oil mixed with blood that had fled from Zion to Gethsemane, thus lifeless with the interdict stained the lights of the Menorah, which was propelled over the gray and agonizing shadows of the bread that asked why hand would be divided? They all say drink with their hands, but the hands of the Mashiach opened the sky first to illuminate the exacerbation of Leiak's Dyticá, saying that the sweat of agony will fill our chalices intensely adorning what is revealed by our disturbing sleet. The Equinoctial became magenta and Eritrean, where glory made it pertinent to leave and ask for an oblation in the natural reaction of the recipient, before offering himself! The shudders only spoke of the rictus, when Vernarth huddled every so often to blow the embers of the incense that spread from Aorion, spliced in the Fourth Arrow of Zefian, to leave the ergonomics bronze point, pointing out the Cherubs that came from Heaven falling, to those who went up with their sacrilegious bodies to purge their errors, adoring them with purely beatific simplicity, to bring them back to Patmos to purge there, what the error will make of virtue the light over the darkness in lives that stumble over the moaning death, whose sufferings ravage beyond life, where they suffer undaunted pains of danger, not knowing how to resist them.

Frontality becomes ordinal from unity to three, and from duality to four; that is to say, from Vóreios to Notós and from Aftó to Dyticá, making the Escurialense cross with the crossed lines filled with the celestial blue that filled them with the Seventh Heaven. The darkness macerated the embryos on the error of confronted anguish before an impartial body fallen from the discouragement of overcoming it and moving away from the eschatological. The Mashiach moves his hands through the Codices of Raedus pro generating Jubilee, for the branches that climb the thread of the olive tree that was scalding with passion, to hang on the wood of the Kashmar. The Kardiá resembled lost in the minutes of Kairós, failing to rejoice them, to then overwhelm them in some Escurialense demonym, forming the golden cross, whose four arms were already covered by blue and blue enamel, and in parapsychological fractality, making temporality move in the super imagination of Áullos Kósmos de Vernarth.

He is the Colosseum,
With high walls built up that have withstood centuries of harsh winds and violent storms.
He is looked upon with such admiration, this looming citadel of aestheticism, and is unmatched in any respect.
All who pass pay reverence to this fortress of great strength.

At first, navigating the Colosseum is a daunting task,
But as I started to wander down his narrow hallways and stroll past his looming arches,
I began to learn my way around and figure out just what it was that made him so magnificent.

And then, Thank the Deities,
I wandered upon the brilliant stadium of his heart.

But sadly I came to realize that behind his stable facade was a decaying sight, for his walls were crumbling on the inside.
The stones that were built to protect his fragile insides served a different purpose, to mock him of the storms that have hurt him in the past.
He was hidden behind this fortification and writhed in the cold darkness, alone and scared.
He was afraid to go out and fight, convinced that the violent storms outside that have battered him so, will surely come again.

I pity his soul, for having to take the time to put up each monstrous pillar, put down every concrete block, and fill every crack with cement.
He felt that this was necessary in order to be sure that no evil forces could hurt him ever again;
He was filled with hatred for the world because of what it had done to him.

But as a dedicated warrior, I musn't let him be scared any longer.
He has been gracious enough to let me into his life, into his amphitheater of a soul.
He is my Apollo, and I want to show him how beautiful the cosmos can be.
So I will be his gladiator, and fight for his name.

I had a premonition in 1972.
I had this awful feeling
that sometime in the future
there would be only one
national park, instead of the 64
we have now, left in America:
10 square miles in the remote
northwest corner of Montana.
I just finished watching on PBS
a video of John Denver, in 1974,
performing in the Red Rock
Amphitheater located in the
Rocky Mountains. That was 49
years ago, but to me, John Denver
embodied, even if unwittingly, the
emergence of concern of the bur-
geoning existential, catastrophic
threat of climate-change Earth now
faces. Few have taken bold, proactive
measures to save all living creations
on our only home. Al Gore and
Greta Thunberg come to mind readily,
but, in reality, the multinational
corporations that still rule Earth
deem profits over prudence, let alone
curative, worldwide action. John
Denver died in a plane crash in 1997,
49 years ago. Jesus, John! Why did
you have to die so early in your life?
I, and the rest of the world, hope
my premonition is never realized.

TOD HOWARD HAWKS

It’s 1:21am on a Thursday night and there’s no rain
where there should be.
There’s no weeping over the seven-colored earths
and the erosion of the skin is building up.
I have a mouth full of stumbling words,
nervous and absurd,
like wax flowers and plastic china cups;
bottles of placebos.
I have masks on the walls
and body parts on the floor.
Dim light from violet lampshades painting worlds
with minimal effort, but with profound meanings
that pretentious collegiates speak over bearded elders
while stuck in fishbowl towns, separated from the oceans of
metropolitan beliefs.

    Pulling nail fibers from fingertips with crooked teeth,
    a habitual ritual christened from a darker half.
    Waves of feral multitude plunging the streets
    As riots of people made of fire chant the names of fallen angels
    And personified martyrs.

Episode after episode of plot-thickening exposition,
the weight of which is but a feather to the pull of the moon.
To **** my privates to a saddened resolution that’s
sweeter than a mutual **** for the sake of love.

    Penetrating me with needles as thick as bones,
    Brittle as sculpted phalluses made of teeth.
    Drilled out from the cavities and clamped iron
    that make me grind and ******
    In my sleep
    out of nightmarish extremity.
    Or persistent calamity.

She’s dead, wrapped in plastic
And fountains are pouring mercury
Profuse silver-stained drooling
Ostracized from sane certainty

     The thunder of guttural bellowing
     In the chasm of bed sheets,
     where leather bound demons
     split ***** hands under ice knifes
     Muffled voices
     And embryo faces
     Tearing out primal smiles
     Tied with black laces
     In a public amphitheater.

She’s dead, wrapped in plastic
And fountains are pouring mercury
Second time I’m seeing it drool
With a last moment of certainty.

It’s 1:41 on a Friday morning and there’s rain.
*Finally.

I board a public bus
A graying bus driver is a woman and then morphs into a man
A normal experience within a dream

My eyes glaze over as I assume a state of aloofness
As I tend to do when surrounded by unfamiliar people
As some sort of defense mechanism
As if the otherworldly look in my eyes
Will thwart the formation of an ill intention forming in the mind of a stranger that occupies the bus with me
Just in case

Two older men are on the bus
I don't validate their existence
When I am aloof
It feels like I am the only person truly alive
Everything gradually grows dimmer
As my inner world roars as loudly as an amphitheater.

The bus drives for hours
I've never been on this bus before and I've never been to the town I am traveling to
I'm going there to check out a church
Even though I'm not a Christian
Hours pass...
I start falling asleep in my dream
The bus has no stops

Finally, the bus reaches the end of its route
I am dropped off in front of a CVS along with the other two male passengers
One scruffy old man leers at me and smiles at me
But I act as if I didn't see him
I have no idea how to get to the church
It's getting dark
All that is around is the CVS, the bus stop, and a road with an onslaught of cars driving in either direction
Why did I make this hours long trip if I didn't even know exactly where I was going?
If only I could cross the wide street to get to the other side where the bus stop for the bus back home is
But I can't
The cars were driving at fast speeds and their was a constant flow of them
So I stood in that nakedness of uncertainty and abounding possibility
Stuck and calculating
As the sun set over this foreign place I ended up in
All because I was seeking some purpose
And yet, it brought me so far away from home,
the comforts and luxuries and certainties of home
Yet, when I awoke, something deep and vital within me knew
That I will never find my purpose within the comfort of my home.

Having arrived at Patmos, on the southeastern ***** of Skalá, Wonthelimar observed that the Seleucid ships were there. Already knowing of the myth of Seleucus and of his Divinity, since her mother Laodice, according to Vernarth's parapsychology parallel account, and aligned with Wonthelimar, that she had presumed that her son Seleucus had been conceived by carnal union with Apollo. These oracular dreams separated them from Vernarth, for a certain Antigone of the imperial Seleucid with the anchor of the ring that Apollo had captivated from the gematological extract, now wading in the quantum of Chauvet, which had been identified from Gaul.

Wonthelimar says: “from such a thigh such as a Vas Auric you will be anchored at your anchor, in a proud fallacy if you have been engendered by Apollo if it is that your mother temporizes in a hallway idyll or Antigone, and not of someone wearing a ring that smells like broken neo-Hellenic dreams in one that anyone believed, born of one being or another like me from a mythological Iberian, but being carried from a very young age on the haunches of a Bucephalus. Here I believe where Laodice would be or would be caught by knowing that creatures like me, spawned in the darkness of a cave, should wear that ring, but in the seventh ring of the horns of my paternal Ibez with its antlers constantly growing, and in my forehead having one of them in the antlers of the female that fed me in the reign of darkness and in the heights of the mountains. Upon leaving Chauvet I embraced her suspended antlers, and when I separated from the sixth ring, my female nurse with her pale neck offered me the seventh so that I would do it with brown illusions to be like her in the maternal ***** of the Rhone that in altitudes Thousands leveled out over seven hundred meters, with each ring being the power of a reign of darkness filled with light and undeserved talent. In the autumn, my female mother would get involved when I timidly approached from my cavern full of aldehyde, eliminating it through my mouth and eyes, creating from them the brave fear of misunderstood symbols..., if you saw it, your Seleucus...? You would abandon your divinity with a single breeze of the elements when you would recover your anchor rings on the roads. On the other hand, I wake up in his ring because of the meager light that intimidates the converted mountain beings, who interpose me in their combats, if an antler was or is torn from one of my attempts of frustration, after not seeing what it is not noticed even in thousands of distant blushes, and not even in the emission of the eyes of a hypothetical Apollo "

Behind the philastic zoomorphic of the exalting from Seleuco's mouth, the bilocated Epidaurus on Patmos was lowered by the steps of an amphitheater, bossed around in the conclusive closing of his story behind bars or horns that splintered his revoked mention of aspiring to a ring, which is not and will be nothing more than a synonym of despair, more than an immortal that is now abbreviated from the stigma of co-founding itself in meaning as a temporary truth of Hellenism, deducing to qualify its origin as a plus part and ascendant servant, but not descendant in shirts that have to transvestite him on the Epidaurus proscenium. Seleucus began to doubt his converted eagerness to lash out the mythological divine lineage for a sanction, in which the lightning bolts of the stunning sky themselves demystified their annoying gales of submission, by dynasties of the proverbial Kleos for the purposes of fame, and politics that open the loaded winds with cots of gold to marry with diligent nebulosity in transliterated and linked tripods in cumulus universes, where the first two abuse the fulcrum of the obverse that falls by gravity on no man's land..., here is the myth of anchoring and not of to aspire to a ring or earring that will drag us to heights where the icy cold wind crowns you on legs of bronze and not of gold "

These coins were carefully observed by those who observed them from a gorge, capturing the humility and infallibility of a being that came from the entrails of Chauvet, interpreting courses that awaited Seleucus. The appendages were detached from the koilones and tiers that jumped over it, to press and narrow the diazomas or corridors that were already deployed like a laser in the cubations of the consciousness of Megarón and the Vas Auric of the Hexagonal Primogeniture, which already was made ubiquitous. It was released from an Alexandrian Greek fire on the jaws of the hecatomb of the ex-generals of Alexander the Great. Here in funeral periphrasis, few prostitutes rusted behind his inheritance, each with their bronze panoplies and banners in favor of Leonatus in the hands of the Satrap Antigonus, Ptolemy, and the most outstanding applicant of his divine inheritance, Seleucus. They all meet outside the Eurydice ship in Skalá to settle decisions and franchises of ancestry, for the purpose of divinizing the destinies of their tasks and interests, to sink them into the first stone under a base of faith, and of those who will come from the return of the Anastásis like Greek resurrection of bread and wine, Psomí kai krasí…; "The Mashiach for being of whoever and whatever"

Seleuco says: "Psomí kai krasí, Bread and Wine for all." We have revived our leader, who in good time should resurrect us all for his mentions of the new future of fallen leaders and heroes. We are not oblivious to your expiration and perhaps your negligence in Babylon, but the steps of a king require other Seleucid measures and their oriental legitimating, being oligarchies that should morally do what is known. Antigonus, Ptolemy, and I appear here with me, preserving periods that leave us of mediumistic notions of the grim, who does not allow us to close our eyes. We confer the denounced ambiguity of previous riches that do not fit in any silo that can contain it, nor what happens to the secondary after diving early in the morning mounted on your Bucephalus, full of its manes swollen with the posterity of a Roman emperor besieging it, without advancing by requirements or where he rides now in steel wastelands, and not through upholstered steppes of the cautious ensign on your guard and in the solemn light of life that the **** leaves behind in your symbolic sarcophagus! We want you to join us, and to be able to banish our distinctions from where Apollo has given his eternal sleeper in the sense of an ephemeral truth, which makes light of flesh colors in the fiery figure of your coat of arms.
We have stolen the traced areas of Judea and from there Maccabees have donated us inscriptions back to my threat to you and Antigonus,... to my enemy debtor, but even so, I come to repair unevenness and want to repair idylls more remote from the Euphrates to settle in the ranks of Ptolemy. We have all sinned to look for you in our slogans, gaining fleeting territory, but we have lost your lux, already well said in my sanctuary in Didyma, but in seconds that continue from the first, already raising flags and heralds that increase your vox, more than a David that defeats a colossus; that from his own death resurrects...! "

All perceptibly dismayed looked at Alexander the Great who was behind a canopy listening to everything with his ear attached to the canvas that separates him from a presumed truth. He draws the curtain and pounces before everyone with stealth and courtesy, incontinenti he speaks to them after inhuman efforts to move away from the stagnant sub-understanding of his former commander.

Alexander the Great says: “The aureoles of sanctity have dislocated my Beelzebub, and the brambles brush against the Scabious flowers like widows that sing in the cenotic lines of my hands from a purgative cathartic in its graceful subfamily that makes my eyes heterochromatic de facto, between the thistles that are spiced between the aromatherapy of the Scabiosa cretica. In their oblong shape with pincushion flowers, they make the basting their nailed pins waiting to be used so that my desolations are not lost even after being just reborn. After the annual Attic calendar in Elaphebolion where they walked on me to resist the deer of Artemis, in attempts to get up and ***** me in the sessile voices of Scabiosa dispelled by Vernarth that have raised me in the involved species, like a chalice of unstitched shreds in seven holes, leaning back to the Aquenio in his fruit tree that is stained with lavender-blue, and the Lepidoptera bringing Vernarth from Gethsemane and the anti-Sarnic clothing that makes him exalted. Now from here, I harangue you, like immaterial troops that do not move their courage, with enemies that are left open to the fear of my walk on them, on rams of the imminent danger of warbling victory with steely Falangists. What a nationalist Faskéloma attribute as obscene fuss and Pashkien that reorders the armies that invade its headless stadiums, in raised nightingales that chirped the sadness of seeing myself fallen on the nose of the common soldiers and full of scabies in Arbela. I have to fly with you my lost flocks ready of Apollo surrendering twilight fire, and of moon-sun between the legs of a colossus forged by greater fires, speaking to me of Macedonian triumph, under the yoke of the crackle of a people that lies taciturn with the satraps in Hercules's cunning conquering in the cheers only after three laps they made debits from my left, while I saw the light of Uriel coming towards me in the Lepidoptera with his sheathing, and entirely of a horse placed Beelzebub, to transmigrate him with me from Cinnabar chains and honor what serves the world also that dies with me in Thrace or Alexandria Bucephalus, after the south of Corinth, regardless of me, who already sensed that he was anti-diadoco..., being at that time a leader of the Sacred League of Delphic Amphibian, after feeling so much pain immediately from dying..., I still had life left in the Scabiosa flask and in bronze vessels that I removed from the swirling wind of the s Thermopylae, leaving me stranded with nothing but chimeras of winning the world, but losing a Life that had just begun "

Meanwhile, at the dawn of Vas Auric was projected at relative height, Syrmus's light and resounding fall were shown when he attacked the back of Macedonia -... here Alexander makes a gesture of modest resilient power... -, after he glimpsed to Saint John the Apostle how he moved with his staff the tricolor clouds transmitted by the troops of the Tribalios and that was crushed by the carnal battery of Macedonian cavalry that immolated them before their knowledge, and then after their three thousand victims..., which according to some outstanding Hypaspists also rushed them far beyond the Danube where they were engulfed in the confinement of the Getas in thousands, and in greater proportion but with leather rafts, the Hellenic troops crossed this same river and with a few thousand they conquered them filling their saddlebags..., not gold... !, but brandy that burned all the pastures where no Bucephalus crossed by fire.

Her friends made an accord
To bring her cariad
They met
They embraced
with blissful laughter
The day carried on
They went to the portal's entrance
Outside
He was preoccupied
By the device he held
Outside
She met another compatriots
Who played their mischiefs
With slippery liquids
They caused chaos
And an accident happened
With a child
Who fell
The girl came to rescue
And held the kid until
The pain was gone
And
She looked at her cariad
Waiting for something
Something or someone
She looked at her
Parents
And they urged her
To enter the amphitheater
With her platonic frater
So she went
And waited outside
She faced the fragile glass
Facing her own reflection
Tucked her hair
Behind her ear
And called her cariad to go with her
In a place she felt home
And then
Through the looking glass
Waiting for him
She saw
The way he waved
Frantically
Implicating
An urgent
Goodbye
So she went outside
And saw
Her cariad
With a fair woman
She knew
She was the Eros
While she, the frater
Platonic, should be Platonic
But what's with that look?
A look of regret
A look of pity
A look of apology
On her cariad's face
As she approached and saw them
Her heart heavy
Falling in the pitch blackness
Of Oblivion
Where self deprecating
Self loathing
Self pitying
Dwell
So she closed the distance
Greeted the fair woman
Who bothered only with a side glance
At her
And so they went
And she
With them
In a brief walk
Before they went away
Until
They parted ways
Again
With her
Cariad

On this cold November night
Salman Rushdie shook my hand.
An irate Ayatollah had
pronounced a fatwa on the
man

He seemed at peace, this hirsute fellow.
in his bespoke suit from Savile Row.
He signed some copies of his book
then his security man said he must go..

The lecture hall had been half full.
Perhaps some had been scared away.
I had come to hear him speak.
Freedom of speech must rule the day.

Outside  Colden in the dark
an amphitheater is tucked away
A stage sunk in a bowl of grass
where Greek tragedies  might be played.

Which tradition shall prevail?
I wondered to myself that day.
Will acolytes of a murderous cult
Sweep Euripides away?

A Moslem horde  poured through the gates
when Rome fell  for the second time.
The Divine Wisdom was defiled
and Constantine Palaeologus died.

I turn my collar against the damp
illumined by sodium vapor light
I think on Arnold's loss of faith
and ignorant armies that struggle in the
night

You came to me in a dream,
O Specter of Sensibility,
to help discern the distant
drowning dirges of dying doubt

We walked—our party’s steps
quite quicker than our own.
As the gap grew greater,
they disappeared into the night.

All alone along an amphitheater’s path,
my ghostly guardian gave life
to the story I had wished to hear.
Clarity obtained—each player was one of us.

Eyes straight ahead, she didn’t break stride.
The waves of her voice took charge,
powering the reels that play,
saying, “So, you slept to know?

“I’m here for you and you alone
so you could see me in reality.”
A proper lady she was,
so small talk preceded needs.

She went on to tell of how,
“patience at present is prudent.”
“And purposefully perplexing,” I thought,
listening in reverie.

“Just as I return oft in your dreams,
so too will what I embody come back.”
She was cold so my arms became alms.
We sat in acceptance until the crowd caved in around.

Mercurial Ambrosia / Profitis Ilías and Cinnabar

From the rudiments of the votive offerings that were outlined from the Megaron, a grammar was looming that sought terminologies in the lexicons of those who would intervene in the ruling party of the same patron twin; in such a symbiosis by naming him Mandragoron.  Vernarth came already ready after the fringed platform of the Acrotera modules, and in his affirmation of how he will appear before the plinth of Athenea and Zeus, who were awakening from a reminiscence of the Nemeton Druid, to go in the responsibility of the active life of austerity, and in the greyish roots of Zeus's oak that was rummaging, attend to the lively brushstrokes of three-dimensionality of the "V", which could be seen concentrically in the Pergamon frieze. The "V" emerges from the sculptor's cardiac center of escape and perspective, in the polys-perspective of gigantomachy where Athenea apprehends the suffering Alcyoneus by the hair in a deadly belligerent perspective and in convulsions of Satanic enthronement; Alluding to the apocalyptic epistle of Saint John the Apostle, on the vertical optics of the great Maker of pnemo-images or aerial nuances in the semi-open eyes of the giant suffering in Alcyoneus, with lost encumbrances from the maternal power of his matron Gea, for a polytheistic empire and adverse towards the border of the Christ anointed in unison, and of the better-known reliefs of the Athenea panel. Her contracted forehead and her belly convulsively are constricted, which only leaves us suffering and mortal fear. In the arranged thing the giant loses contact with the mother of him Gea of him; Disappearing land leaving you vulnerable. The sacred serpent of Athenea will **** Alcioneo by biting him on the chest (ibidem Vernarth's suffering pectoral from Bumodos, Tel Gomel.)

Nike will consummate the victory, and then from the exhausted stadiums of the Pergamon amphitheater, Wonthelimar will bring the Victory with the other "V" of the goddess Nike, also borne by Athenea Nikephoros. From this duplicity both are transposed into Vernarth's "V" as an initiatory pseudonym; that will graph the reinforced twin of the Hellenic genesis of Wonthelimar, articulating from this Prótypo with the genesis of the cardinal Mandragoron that will be architectural and deified Vernarthian hierarchy:

Cardinal Mandragoron

- North : Vóreios  (Zefian Boreal)
- South  : Nótos    (Austral of Borker)
- West.  :  Dyticá   (Sunset of Leiak)
- East    :  Aftó       (Equinoctial of Kaitelka)

The Cinnabar Tsambiko, had bushy inclinations with the Mercurial Ambrosia, for the good of large metropolises of Mercurial Pollen, for those of a single deity coming from polytheistic Pergamum, in a flaw that is centrally concentrated in the monotheism of the Mandragoron, which will rise from the rocky of Mount Profitis Ilias from the height of the rhizomatic basalts, to condemn those who betray them, if they are stripped of the Lepidoptera. In the same way akin to a bucolic immortal, in dietetic miraculous, for basal ingenuities of nomenclatures, from the focal point of indigestion that dies with the digestion of sacred food, led by healing perceptions and sensations of the well-known world of ferment. It could be a Backoi, Kykeon, or Nepenthe, preferring to be swallowed by the Titans, to later filter honey that evaporates and volatilizes towards the Sulphurous Cinnabar, containing the bi-compound and sacred Mercurial Ambrosia, to later be disposed of with a vile gargle to the disposition of mortals who were to be immortal like Heracles. From this mythological infundity, the potion for Vernarth is abstracted from smearing it on his nose and on his pectoral, so that his wound that did not heal does not rot...; perhaps his Hellenic heart in rubble anticipated the destruction of future archaeological works. Or perhaps to imbue it in the chest of Achilles, like Vernarth, but it would be so as not to resist fasting. Liquids with entomology and Lepidoptera from Gethsemane in flocks come to clean the scabs of the heroes, who are only able to resist such effusion and subtle prophylaxis, stinging Prometheus a single sip in this new Mercurial Ambrosia.

Emptying memory:
        The sun does not block out
The stars,
        The soul did not absorb them
The water vanishes the fire,
       Petrified light,
Executed dust of old flesh
      In a tomb of earthly thoughts;
The Sol centrally corners the eye,
     Blinded by the word
In a litany of days,
     Crushed hopes fall on nocturnal
Flesh,
     Old as Cain and Abel
As smooth as assassin pagans,
        Kissing the eclipses
In a fit of rage on a wounded bird,
     Theatre of peoples
In a cosmic garden
     Impaling moons
And guillotining the planets,
      Eating fire on burning lips,
A thirst for living water
     And a wisp of gentle air,
A swarm of deities with
Overgrown origins in a circus
        Of faithful,
    The sanctum was exploded
With idealistic dogs licking
     Their own *****,
The amphitheater of man
     Stained with repetitive slow thoughts,
Drunk with light
Hidden in shadows.

Jack Squat, Tom, ****, Harry, Average Joe, John Doe and Mr. Smith
Decided to switch gears and do something neato
Instead of the usual nada and zilch

They went to go figure out exactly who's who in the zoo
And sure enough that's exactly what they did

They penetrated the mantel
Separated the crust
And stimulated the core

The Missionary positioned herself on her knees
And prepared to pray

They became metamorphic
They took the high ground
Ingenious
Sentiment

Fraternal twins
Both lived in eternal fret
One practiced fretwork
The other joined a fraternity
They both found each other years later at the amphitheater
They let their recessive genes surface
And clean the surface of their distressed jeans

Insane
In pain
Invain
My vanity
Is insanity
I'm panicking

The Golden age took place during My darkest days
Undisclosed illness
Indisposed
I left a bread crumb trail back to the poster board of my heroes and heroines

Masterfully
Mastery
Call me a maverick ,aster
Ask for me
Can't keep track of me
Can't keep up with me
Up keep
Big Mac attack
Crunch wrap supreme
It's not mystery
I'm a machine
Keep it clean
Make it shine and sheen

When it counted
I was unprepared and dumbfounded

But you'll never take them alive
They're already dead on the inside

I throw my voice
A slip of the lip
Plate tectonics take place  
Volcanoes erupt and coat the viceroy in ash

Cherish it

Night Thrill

Opened eyes see unseen things,
different worlds revealed all at once,
can’t you hear them?
Coming to life with ease,
breathing and living just as anything else.

The trees begin their dance,
flailing their arms,
leaves falling to the ground,
patterns making stars, snowflakes, simple beauty.

Walking through the hollowed buildings,
silent and empty in the lull of the night,
only soft cries and yells can be heard
as the beasts run wild.

In an amphitheater, vast and desolate
darkness captures the hardwood floors
and renders all life from the place,
moments from collapsing.

Footsteps across the dusty stage,
squeaks and creaks heard as the curtain rises,
a rusted chair decays on the surface,
the once living prop, struck from its glory.

A strong gust begins swirling,
rushing over the cracked floorboards,
bringing the stage to life
under the feet of a Shakespearian player.

The scene is set and not a moment too late,
a motley audience of demons and ghouls,
witness the defining moment,
a humble servant of the stage
relinquishes mortal form and ascends.

She sells to me
Bittersweet
The symphony of seas of
Concrete
Life
Off shoreline
Timeshares near volcanoes
Sally old Betty
Once sold seashells
Drowned years before
What sold me had me
@ hello poetry:
The other shore
A flight
Amphitheater life
   &
       Home
Seashells on the
Seashore...

The river flows
and giggles.

Sails wide unfurl,
the man in the bow
allows the horizon
to be born in his eyes.

In the man's hands
there is a land,
a shore,
for him to name.

The river flows  
and giggles.

A willow in a sand bank
is no geography,
only a choreography
in the amphitheater.

The river giggles
and flees, in its flow.

I believe in the spirit
I have more faith than reason
I question my own country
Heaven and hell in all seasons

I can't conceive that
God's mystery
Can be pinned down by one book
But every now and then
When I lose another friend
I decide to take a look

And the ants crawl to the amphitheater
There's crumbs and love for everyone
Like smoke through a spider's web
There's nothing to be done
We just spin on and on

Listening to the ***** din of Sin

City streets

inside the concrete weight of dark rooms

the window ajar

to let the outside air in

while chain smoking to the Metro sirens'

soundtrack

of harpies' in heels

clucking and squealing

(laughter as sharp as their stilettos)

this & midnight overshadowing

black rubber tires burning on black boulevards

vehicular collisions'

sounds stalagmite, metallic

crunch

against the hum of sleeping traffic

signals

hollow city like a wide amphitheater

with the occasional Harley motorcycle's

thunder

waking car alarms

               a choir of infants' high pitch wailing...


The desert night's sirocco hiss

outside my 2nd floor apt. window

in a dark room

where my silence is a deep listener

and my mind a curious wanderer,

where the walls

not only keep out

but carry every conversation.

in such a cryptic void

a spark is gleaned,

a firefly wisp of an epiphany :

we are not separate

you and I

        city and fly

        burrow and groundhog

        dam and ******


we are unread books in dark rooms

waiting for the absolute truth

we find

in one another

to be known

to be seen


as we recite the past horrors

of loud pains

from a city that strips us numb

our pages open like Window panes

ajar...


no matter how ugly the chapters

we will have known

joy being

held within your hands

the story with you

is also mine /

we are

north & southern

swamp & willow

breath

sultry kiss  

Arriving,

humidity on skin

Sweat the nights awake

Until we're dusk

And it drains the sinew

of screaming city

Steaming shadows

shattering length wise

On bright carpets made of morning

Green grass and still

our day yet written

new

Our flight is departing now...



once a firefly in a dark room

a simple story

                a night sky full of stories.


each light

our eyes touch



fireflies

in dark rooms...