I remember reading
Martin Luther King, Jr's
Letter from Birmingham Jail
Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom
Mark Twain's Huck Finn
DuBois' Souls of Black Folk
For the first time

The words of Chief Joseph
Sitting Bull
Tecumseh
James Welch
and Alexie Sherman
And others of indigenous kind
Linger like arrows in my mind.

Of course, there's
Gilgamesh's forlorn quest for Enkidu;
Osiris, Amun, Ra, and Seth,
Homer's Illiad and Odyssey,
And Virgil's Roman treatment -
(For whom the gods destroy
We all must learn bereavement).

I remember reading
Milton's Paradises (lost and found)
And Dante's Infernal quest for Heaven
Through the bowels of Hell with Virgil's spritely guide
And up the Devil's staircase with Beatrice by his side.
John's Revelation of Times' End;
And LaHaye's money-making Left Behind
Apocalypses here to chill my mind.

I have surveyed Dead Presidents
Washington,
Jefferson,
Lincoln
Both Roosevelts, Ted and Frank,
And Reagan
And smatterings of others...
Then hopped the bookish pond to read
Sir Winston and some others,
Not the least of whom is Gandhi G,
Taught by the Queen to free his brothers.

I have studied
Moses
Job
David
Ruth
Esther
Isaiah
Jeremiah
The Disciples
Paul
and James
(Ironically,
Though Jesus is the "Word"
He never penned one).

British poets's thoughts,
Tale tellers long-dead
Have found their way
Into my head:
Beowulf and Chaucer
Old moral plays
Shelley and Keats
Cavalier Poets
Scott and Brownings
Burns and (not) Allen
Spenser and Shakespeare
Dylan and Tolkien
Lewis and Auden
And so many more
That I leave on the floor

Western Americana I have loved
Hemingway and Steinbeck, all worth the time,
Mari Sandoz' Old Jules, and
Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth,
Keroac went on the road, while
Joseph Kinsey Howard showed us the West
Lewis & Clark in journals scribed
Their journey west and back again

I can't forget psychology
And so I will digress
Or Sigmund's accusation stays
That I have but suppressed:
Ellis, Freud, and Eric Berne,
Pavlov, Skinner, Thorndike, Watson,
Wundt, and Wm James, Piaget and Chomsky
Then Vygotsky and Bandura put a social spin
on cognitive psychology, and Everybody's in.
Diverging and Converging, psychic students, all
Could never make transaction
'Til Rogers tried to make some peace
But Ellis wouldn't have 'im.

And then, of course,
The lighter stuff,
The popcorn of the mind:
Clancy, Rankin, Carole Keene
L'Amour and Will James
Stephen King and Poe,
Cruz Smith and Leon Uris,
Grisham, Deaver, Cornwall,
Asimov, Bradbury and Herbert,
Carroll and Baum...

I remember reading
Martin Luther King, Jr's
Letter from Birmingham Jail
Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom
Mark Twain's Huck Finn
DuBois' Souls of Black Folk,
Adichie's The Thing Around Your Neck,
Sherman Alexie's Part-time Indian tale....
For the first time

The words of Chief Joseph
Sitting Bull
Tecumseh
James Welch
and Alexie Sherman
And others of indigenous kind
Linger like arrows in my mind.

Of course, there's
Gilgamesh's forlorn quest for Enkidu;
Osiris, Amun, Ra, and Seth,
Homer's  Illiad and  Odyssey,
And Virgil's Roman treatment -
(For whom the gods destroy
We all must learn bereavement).

I remember reading
Milton's Paradises (lost and found)
And Dante's Infernal quest for Heaven
Through the bowels of Hell with Virgil's spritely guide
And up the Devil's staircase with Beatrice by his side.
John's Revelation of Times' End;
And LaHaye's money-making Left Behind,
Collin's Hunger Games and Dashner's Maze Running
Apocalypses enough to chill my mind.

I have surveyed Dead Presidents
Washington,
Jefferson,
Lincoln
Both Roosevelts, Ted and Frank,
And Reagan
And smatterings of others...
Then hopped the bookish pond to read
Sir Winston and some others,
Not the least of whom is Gandhi G,
Taught by the Queen to free his brothers.

I have studied
Moses
Job
David
Ruth
Esther
Isaiah
Jeremiah
The Disciples
Paul
and James
(Ironically,
Since Jesus is the "Word,"
Through men He penned).

British poets's thoughts,
Tale tellers long-dead
Have found their way
Into my head:
Beowulf and Chaucer
Old moral plays
Shelley and Keats
Cavalier Poets
Scott and Brownings
Burns and (not) Allen
Spenser and Shakespeare
Dylan and Tolkien
Lewis and Auden
And so many more
That I leave on the floor

Western Americana I have loved
Hemingway and Steinbeck, all worth the time,
Mari Sandoz' Old Jules, and
Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth,
Keroac went on the road, while
Joseph Kinsey Howard showed us the West
Lewis & Clark in journals scribed
Their journey west and back again

I can't forget psychology
And so I will digress
Or Sigmund's accusation stays
That I have but suppressed:
Ellis, Freud, and Eric Berne,
Pavlov, Skinner, Thorndike, Watson,
Wundt, and Wm James, Piaget and Chomsky
Then Vygotsky and Bandura put a social spin
on cognitive psychology, and Everybody's in.
Diverging and Converging, psychic students, all
Could never make transaction
'Til Rogers tried to make some peace
But Ellis wouldn't have 'im.

And then, of course,
The lighter stuff,
The popcorn of the mind:
Clancy, Rankin, Carole Keene
L'Amour  and Will James
Stephen King and Poe,
Cruz Smith and Leon Uris,
Grisham, Deaver, Cornwall,
Asimov, Bradbury and Herbert,
Carroll and Baum...

The list goes on and on, and will, I'm sure, expand beyond capacity.

DESTINY IS A S0N OF A ***** 01-22-11

Destiny most certainly means death
But down here, ***** murders are allowed.
A Low profile is seen as weak, soon
slaughtered by their predators.

Truth: Oakland gangsters are serous.

They bang it for the colors,
colors of their territory
collateral damage lay dead
in the street; the rotting innocent.

This conflict, this senseless war
between three colors, blue, red and black
is why violent Oakland is now called
..... "Baby Iraq", yep you heard me: BABY IRAQ

a ****** occurs every three days
....over red, blue and black.
They say they fight over turf and colors.
I think they're the same damm thing.
Thier colors mark the poles like dogs.
The scent of the enemy is evident.

Intel from the neighborhood walls
reveals the constant dissonance
and the unwillingness to lose.

A grenade of spray paint,
criss-crossing, the others' lines
until it's time to get some respect,
Ya feel me?!?

I hear this phrase so many times
it hardly phases me anymore.
Yeah, I feel ya, dude,
now whatcha gonna do?

This one boy's eyes had me mesmerized.
As he talked softly into the distance.
He began to rock in a sad back and forth,
as his homies began to surround him

He was the wise one, the shot caller
even with  his weak form peeing in a bag
hanging from his wheel chair.

Javier was wearing black, the color from his hood
He was just a gang affiliate until color blue
( or was it red?)pulled up and shot him...
he's no longer walking, in a wheel chair instead.

He was beautiful I fell most in love
with his angelic face with an elf's chin
coffee with lot's of cream color skin
He was smooth as porcelain

He had a youthful moustache
and a memory of a war veteran
He is a gang member now,
in the middle of a warzone.

"Be Bait", "Play Chicken",
take chances, on the enemy's
turf, become victor or victim

Names of games, dangerous,
and fun provoking the violence
passed down through each generation
Some sort of genetic adrenaline.

The series of small deadly battles
leaves a smell of fresh gun powder
asphalt and blood spilled iron
three colors pouring out,
turn into the color of wine.

Hopelessness is proven out
by the swollen death count,
mounting up, the line of corpses
waiting to be thrown off gurneys
entering the morgue, then
tossed into the freezer
with the rest of them.

Baby Iraq has become
a force of its own on the street.
If they ever figured that out,
They'd be running the nation.

They are too caught up
in their fathers' hatred
History repeats, written line by line
Raw power in the clutch of stupid minds,
begins and ends with small apocalypses.

In dire situations, they eat their young,
like ******
The gobbling up of offspring is
nothing new or unsacred.

It's what they do to
postpone their own fate.

Any beneficial gain is not felt yet
but will be, in the events that
did NOT happen

They don't get it
there is no benefit.
They all just die.

From birth children are told that love is bowing before an almighty god.
Bowing before their parents, priests, and teachers. Instilled with fear
of going to a fiery hell unless they believe what is laid out before them.

Is it a wonder how our world has turned out?

Tell me a truth I cannot challenge. Can you do it?
Well, with me, no. I will question and challenge everything.
It is with my curiosity that I take in the beauty of life, it is with this
curiosity that my perception changes from a fearful child to
an empowered, hopeful, and critical thinking adult.

I have not turned to science, but is more solace found there?

Scientists are not looked upon with fear the way gods are.
Scientists tell us of the enormity of the universe, how we connect
to it and are already a part of it. Instead of handing us impending
apocalypses, it hands us a galaxy that can support life for 30 billion more years.

So why not turn to science?
Because, once science told us the earth was flat.

Challenge your world.
Never stop asking questions.
Take not religion as your decider.
Take not science as your crutch.
Sit in silence and use what you find
within yourself to judge and perceive
this life. Here you will find freedom.
Here you will find personal truth.

Six times life has trembled,
At the passing of apocalypse.

Each time,
Three causes were possible:

Heaven,

Hell,

And Earth.

From heaven, asteroids could fall,
And throw up curtains on the world,
Or passing waves of cosmic fire
Would strip away the clouds.

From hell, the waters of Styx
Might slip through terrestrial cracks,
Then rise as gas,
To heat the world as sheets of floating glass.

Between the two:
Animals themselves
Could mediate the flow
Of Earthly poisons.

Of the three apocalypses
Born on Earth,
Their horsemen are:
The progenitors of atmosphere:
Primordial Cyanophyta,
Then Archeopteris, first of the trees,
And inventor of the root,
And last:
Humanity ourselves,
The apes who play with fire.

Apocalypse number one was caused
When Cyanophyta -
Named for the blue-green colour
Possessed by these bacterial worms -
Learned to inhale the Sun.

They breathed in photons,
Filtered through a heavy atmosphere,
And exhaled an ocean of oxygen,
That filled the skies with ******.

Then the world was a canvas painted
With a single simple transformation:
The land – which then was only iron –
Was touched, naked
By the breath of blue snakes
And so the wide metallic continent of Ur,
Was racked from coast to coast
With rust.

The world’s iron skin absorbed oxygen like cream;
So that, when the global epithelium
Could take no more,
The new air rose,
And thinned the heights,
And all the gathered warmth of centuries
Escaped into the stars.

Then – an interlude of flame –
Comets fell on reddened ice,
And the planet’s molten core restored
The stratospheric glass,
And the world was hot once more.

Next, Archeopteris:
First of the trees,
As plant life rose to giants,
The primal soil of Gondwana
Was infiltrated
By the evolution of the root.

As vascular limbs drilled down to earth,
They plundered minerals,
From which these new goliaths
Grew fronds,
And then, upon the giants’ deaths,
Their carcasses were ill received
By little lives
Who could not hold their salt.

Then came the chaos of holy war:
Heaven rained and hell spilled up,
And so passed end times three and four,
Up to the kaleidoscope of teeth and claws
That was the age of dinosaurs.

Now the fifth apocalypse
Was Chicxulub:
A worldstorm in a meteor,
So named for baby birds
And the sound of Armageddon:
Xulub!
A knight in igneous armour,
Who killed the dragons of Pangaea.

Now, to the sixth.
As yet far less fatal than the rest,
But the first apocalypse
With eyes and ears,
Who sees the fire its engines breath,
And to its own destructiveness attests.

We began in the trees,
And once the planes were cleared of predators
By mighty Chicxulub,
We moved out onto the grass,
Stood up and freed our hands,
And learned to play with fire.

With it we loosed the energy
In roasted meat,
And poured the new-found resource
Into intellect,
Then wielding sapience,
We humans spread:
The first global superpredator,
We preyed on adults of apex species,
Tamed the world,
Then dreamt of gods
Who placed us at its helm.

We noticed then,
The manifold atomic dots
On the cosmic dice that cast us;
And stuttered in shock.

Our dreams of stewardship
Were dashed on revelations,
That we are the chaos
In the inherent synchrony of dust.

Refusing all potentials
That mirror the errors of our youth,
We let the title ‘sentinel’
Drift from loosened fingertips,
Any now by morbid self-assertion,
We mark ourselves:
The selfish sixth apocalypse.

This is me, I am who I am..
Every day I give all I can..
I'm not a gangster, but I'm a fighter
both with my fists and as a writer
I am the dark poet.. quietly killing on the lyrical scale,  
Edgar Allan Poe-etic is my poison, injected and inhaled
willingly taken, slowly destroying me from the inside out
making my veins blaze within me so that my blood cells shout
my heart beat slows as the affliction eats away almost as if to say
to drop rhymes upon the beat, slowly symphonic, deathly harmonic
Or rather perhaps, along the lines of pure demonic.
Lyrically woven into my blood, I cannot help but bleed.
Music has shaped me into the man I am, seeing in depth what you could not believe
I've seen wondrous nightmares and beautiful wastelands, you couldn't possibly conceive
The wilderness heart beating in my chest has made me a beast of a writer
For even in the darkest of my days my writings are always lighter.
Doomsdays upon apocalypses, Dragons among faeries, each of these I've dreamed
I cannot begin to explain the sheer epicness of these things I have seen.
Lyrically woven into my blood, I cannot help but bleed.

If everybody runs around screaming and freaking out, it will be devastating.
May none of us be forced to endure that.
Mankind should practice
Do drills.
How to behave for a pleasant apocalyptic experience
Embrace and sing
A joyful song of comfort
Practice the song
To soothe all the plants and animals
As our world
Becomes the floating smashed world museum

When people ask what I do for a living,
I respond

“Listening to my heart ******
as my mind garden blossoms
incandescent indigo constellations
humming the songs of nature’s entirety.

I sensually embrace the entirety’s
divine lips kissing my spirit
with sacred words
merging into me—
a blissful osmosis of neurotransmitters
waltzing with my consciousness
flowing liquid electricity
and molten rhythms of oxygen
in kinetic unison through moments
of subjective apocalypses
slowly returning to yugen.”

When asked where I see myself in ten years,
I respond

“Copacetic contentment—
having surrendered my life
to more than just the digital currency
of likes and retweets
and the constantly dissolving paper coins
because I chose to see people
as breathing pieces of naked art,
in progress,
stripped down to their thoughts
jettisoned through this spherical time
of infinite space and possibility
slowly accepting there is more out there
beyond traditional political religical flimflam,
beyond abnormal logicality,
beyond nirvana.”

The radio is wracked with fervent calls
(Minutiae of obscure variety)
But silence comes from one room down the halls
As one man fights his own impiety.
Whatever ideologies he held
Before his current call have kept quite mum
For no two words their meanings yield to meld
(His god of information now is dumb).
A slight gives way to crack the dam of calm
As one man's altar all at once forsakes,
And pray-ers praying prayers receive no balm
When mortal ignorance its sanction makes.
     Men in apocalypses are left fire-less.
     (Though no one listens to the wireless.)

flight
flowing
elderberries
and the
syrup of rebellion

see
sails
snail-pace
along the highway
man's
view
finder

and pointing

shouting

the breath of the ever present
nature
fumed
scent

age appropriate
apocalypses
redemptions
conclusions

painted vividly stroked

it's late!

too late!

foe fry
fun


and i sailed

in the view finder
in the fumed
scent
in the anxious awaiting
calls
not sure whether to find you

hello.
i wish.
i wonder.

are you really that surprised?

In a random experiment,
I ask all to each bury a journal
about worshiping pandas,
thinking that in 200-or-so years,
when apocalypses come and go,
it will be taken from the time capsule.
And as they read the verses
I will hope for laughter
but fear them to believe it true.

I inhale apocalypses inside
my soul, embracing the
raging vibrations, disintegrating
mazes, distorted truths beneath
shadowed walls, perplexed
kingdoms, gasping galaxies,
a drifting analogy sinking
in chaos.

These are the end times.

Judgment is coming
For our iniquities and apathy
For the ****** of the unborn
For worshiping money
For voting Democrat
For buying non-biodegradable products.

Or so they say.

I don't enjoy discussing
Or even hearing
About eschatology
When and how and why the world will end
Which is what seems to pervade the air at home
Every time the conversation suffers an unfortunate lull.

Some cathartic culmination
Of a Deity's wrath
No doubt for all the
***, drugs, and rock & roll
Humanity indulges in
On a daily basis.

Hearing about the end --
Demons born to women
Automatons wearing human skins
Talking animals
Seems so redundant.
The signs had been here all along.
We've been living with them for ages now.

What if
Instead of a violent, sudden cataclysm,
The end comes
As an implosion
Drawn out over billions of years?
What if the second law of thermodynamics
Is the prophesy
Doomsday prophets overlooked?

There are no aliens coming
To **** and subjugate this planet:
We're already here.

This is the end
We've been simmering in it
Fighting and spitting and cursing
In puddles of our filth and hate

The end has been unfolding
For the past few millennia
As humanity continues to multiply
Like rats beneath New York.

And here we are
Making plans
Getting married
Hoarding money
Getting **** drunk
Too busy preventing
The little apocalypses
Of our petty lives.

We're planting gardens
In the shadow of a warhead.

We all saw it coming
We were just too busy to care.

My world's already ending
In bits and pieces anyway
At random intervals

Every time I let someone in
And she inevitably leaves
Taking a piece of me with her
My sun dies in agonizing degrees

Even a quiet infatuation
Eats away at me
Crumb by crumb.

All those theories about the end
Forget them.
I'm living my own apocalypse
And surrounded by human-sized
People-shaped versions
Of the Four Horsemen
So shut up already.

The struggle is futility
Patient people play the part
Of impartiality

The wiser are restraint
Castigated for their intelligence
Castrated by their class

A classless struggle we abide
Poor children barely manage
To survive and seldom thrive
Not given access to the tools
Of excellence

But we wield the sword of obsolescence
Antiquated ideas put on the same level as
Modern machines and moral philosophies

Broad language discarded for
The disinfected nature of stupidity

Our language is censored
And free thought is crippled

Thus to succeed we must
Write to their level of understanding
So they can understand it

Which means we do not expect grandness
From the masses
That we underrate what they are capable of

The papacy’s power is palatable but detrimental
The Popes presence sends his parishioners
In to servitude as they submit to the
Sublimation of their identity

Unable to identify the truth from the lie
Unable to separate the flock from the I
I become the villain
For stating these things

So I drop names like Darwin and Thomas Paine
I wear the scarlet letter of poet and philosopher
Of Supplicant to science, Of literate romantic

I the son of Percy Bysshe Shelley
The son of Twain and Poe
The Son of Shakespeare and Baudelaire  
The son of logic and poetry
The lost ******* of peace, love, and understanding

I leave the eve of man’s ill behavior
To see the seething corps of corpses
Rise in ignorance strive for pestilence
With hopeful hate in their eye
To perpetuate the self-fulfilling prophecies
Of all types of apocalypses

But in the end it will be I that am despised
Thus if I must be hated then at least
Favor me with this tiny justice

Like Galileo, Giordano Bruno, and Copernicus
I will wear chains well earned
There is so much knowledge to be had
So learn, live, love and then learn some more

I miss all those days we spent together
i miss the way we spent all night watching old movies i never heard of
i miss the next mornings when i had to poke you awake
i miss the way you snored completely ignoring me
i miss the days we spent drinking beers at our new york
i miss ignoring your incessant ramblings about everything
i miss the way you always annoyed me till i blew up
i miss the way i childishly cussed at you while you laughed on
i miss the way you gently wiped my tears and listen to my problems
i miss our plans for surviving possible zombie apocalypses
i miss your chivalrous gentleman self glaring at pervs on the street
i miss the terribly offensive jokes you cracked that never were that funny
i miss the way those same jokes somehow crept in and made me smile
i miss the way you turned me from an old monk to a beer lover
i miss the plots we created to destroy our tormentors
i miss how you always knew more than i did but never considered me stupid
i miss how you always try to take in my criticism but refused to accept it
i miss how you believed in my artwork and never let me forget it
i miss how you talked like an absolute child about your latest femme escapades
i miss how you always pretended that you don't care but remembered every small detail i mentioned
i miss the way you accepted all of me without a spot of hesitation
i miss looking into those intense eyes of yours in wonder at the boy you were
i miss creeping you out by getting extremely close and laughing at your expressions
i miss sleeping uncomfortably beside you as you roll around in rem sleep
i miss you tucking me in when the pressures of the world were too much for me to dream
i miss dreaming about our futures making wild plans about brands we wish to own
i miss getting completely hammered with you and being so publicly weird
i miss your complete honesty no matter how much it hurt
i miss softly kissing your forehead as i put you to bed after our drunken adventure
i miss everything you used to be
but most of all
i miss the way you hugged me
holding on tighter when i tried to pull back
subtly sealing your promise to always be around
i miss you boy
more than you can ever know.

time flows slowest
around galactic centers and our worst moments
black holes and dying parents
foul, putrid and humid in
acts of betrayal and cowardice
pooling around loss like van gogh’s whorly stars snickering
voyeuristic time crept in at my point of least courage
subatomic tabloid photographers flashbulbs cracking
when I broke your heart one january afternoon
and there was enough time gathered for me
to store all the details of the scene
the way your shoulders slumped and the
straps of your tank top slid a little to the sides
how you looked up and to the left hoping the oak tree out the window
would grow a mouth and explain my sudden departure
if only you could see it through tears coalescing
like soap bubbles summoned between thumb and forefinger in childhood baths
“I promised myself I wouldn’t cry,” you said
and it took me years of vanity to understand you’d known;
my accumulated guilt and sadness had not been subtle

i named my sin at an awkward dinner out
millennia after a stellar collapse in a one bedroom apartment
where I lied and told you it was me
not you but it was you
still burn inside me cold
when I’m alone
warm on days I know I saved our children
from the sad gravity of loveless parents
silently begging of them greatness
to validate a vacuum-empty marriage born of
supposed-to and should in the absence
of desire or at least the resignation
of married friends or Jovian planets unignited

maybe time cups our worst memories before us
in greedy luminescent starflesh hands woven of personal apocalypses
laughing outright when the memory burns away
in solar flare fingers
warps in the distorted fabric of how
we edit and redact those moments to survive sane
and we panic realizing
after breaking or being broken
we have remade ourselves entirely of
shame and misery and misfit parts
devoid of structure beyond weeping
brittle bones of future selves
stolen or relinquished  

or maybe time holds these memories for us immature
baby skull soft
too delicate to be picked through with angry desperate hands
while distance and growth or
maybe just forced perspective
lets the memory or
us harden into something we can pluck
from its hands lifetimes later and lazily
browse like any other casual catastrophe

At the beginning of 2020, Australia was on fire.
The threat of WWIII was all too real.
Baby dictators playing with "disposable" human lives.

Disposable lives
Disposable masks
Disposable gloves
Disposable plastic bags
. . . and here were are again with disposable lives.

My family and I survived the Oregon trail and not one of us died from dysentery. A small victory!

George Floyd, "I can't breath."
Black Lives Matter.  
LGBTQ+ Lives Matter.

Marching in the streets and shouting until I can't speak. Organizing and criticizing institutions that WE built. People WE put into office. And my more political topics that WE are responsible for.

Black Lives Still Matter.
LQBTQ+ Lives Still Matter.
Anti-maskers, "I can't breath."

A shame and a reflection in the United States education system.

Me walking my dogs, "I can't breath. . . without a mask"
Ashes falling from our apocalypses skys.
My skin burns from the air.
I my dog sneezing because they don't have masks.
My mask discolored from this short walk.

Exposed
Double Down
Tested
Isolate
Negative
Relief
Virtual Life

A light at the end of this long tunnel?
Good-bye Oregon!
2021, let's try Utah?

My grandfather was not a boxer
but he loved to fight, throwing
punches at the faces of hard men,
left and right hooks, uppercuts
in barroom brawls and alleyways,
with hands the size of iron trivets,
forearms cut with ropes of muscle.

Eventually, after decades of stitches
and bruised knuckles, after his hair
turned white and his eyes clouded,
he would shadowbox in the garden
behind the dilapidated potting shed,
swinging slower, less light on his feet,
but safe in that manicured square
ringed by boxwoods and evergreens,
the bees in spring buzzing applause.

My grandmother would watch
him from the kitchen window,
in a sweater she always wore
regardless of the weather,
and wonder what he was fighting
against, or, perhaps, fighting for.

And that’s how my grandfather died:
throwing a final right cross in the air
before dropping to his knees at last,
knocked out on a mat of green grass,
washed by an unexpected downpour,
water collecting in opened red tulips,
loving cups in full bloom, the first
ten drops of rain counting him out.

Standing in that garden decades later,
I know I am no fighter.
Approaching old age, hands in pockets,
I watch for signs of unexpected weather,
worry about things beyond my control:
car crashes, cancer, electromagnetic pulses,
the minutiae of a thousand apocalypses.

Is the future drawing back
a left hook I will never see
coming? Will a haymaker
hit me like a hammer,
unmaking my family
before the final bell?

And suddenly I realize:
maybe I should have
learned to throw
a ******* punch.

Does any of this actually mean anything?

These jokes,
   My blushing cheeks,
The time we spent together.

  This feeling is completely foreign, it feels like a flesh eating disease my stomach.

Every time I see you I can feel the oncoming zombie apocalypse that lives with in me, begin to stir.

Staring into your eyes makes my chest beat so hard they can feel it in Alaska.

Which is where I want to honeymoon with you, because I figure by the time we are married we will need an isolated bunker, far enough away from civilization so we won't become zombies too.

But if we do, and if you have to be the one to **** me ,spare my eyes,
   So I can always remember exactly what it was that ended the world.

For you, my darling, I would start 10,000 apocalypses.
   To keep you, my darling, I would end of the world.

My nightmares?
They aren't just nightmares.
They're more like...
night apocalypses.
Why?
My entire world
shakes hands with death
in every single
twilight terror...


You.

Life that once so desperately
clung to your lips,
has bestowed it's final kiss.  
Golden flesh is now fresh powdered mountains.
Emerald and fiery yellow hues have
departed the only eyes
I will ever drown in.

Please wake up.

Ancient forests
started on October 9th, 2020
revised on November 30th, 2020

Translation of a Chinese poem by **** Wei:
"I know no good way
to live and I can't
stop getting lost in my
thoughts, my ancient forests."

I think getting lost
in ancient forests
sounds lovely.

I get lost in my head
in old familiar battlefields
and imagined future apocalypses.

But an ancient forest
with cool, shaded layers of trees
doesn't sound so bad

I guess it is the lost part
that is the problem.
Maybe the ancient forests
wouldn't be so bad
if the poet knew where he was.

Feet touching the earth
anchoring this self
to this exact spot
the soul a beacon
to the world's gps system.

I am here.

I am not lost.

I am.

In a moment and an eternity,
Trapped in the crossroads of apocalypses,
I saw peace.
And knew the solace that can be found
In the breadth of a moment
And the terror and awe
Held in the myopia of eternity.

It is an old cliché, to ‘live in the moment’ but a strong truth that is understood by few. Eternity represents the  multitude of moments that ever were or ever will be, the conceptualization of eternity in and of itself generates limitations these moments never knew. Eternity as a concept that represents our attempt to harness multitudes of moments, the very attempt of which epitomizes the limit of our perspective. Our ability to understand these moments fails as soon as we attempt to organize them into a single concept. In these instances our need for rationality seems to outweigh our desire to accurately understand the world around us.

I beg you to leave your rationality behind and refrain from limiting your ability to perceive a moment by giving in to the paradigm of eternity. Time and how we understand it are the backbones of how we organize society, relate to each other and find meaning in the world. So unless you find yourself enlightened and living in a just world you may want to reconsider how you understand time… you may want to withdrawn your investment in the paradigm of eternity and consider the moment for what it truly is

Circus to close after 149 years*

Speaking of apocalypses,
this current model is a yawn.

A large, loud golden retriever
barks out random orders
and fear collapses the world
like a wet tent or used ******.

People scream in the streets,
but facts remain few and unlikely.

A big chunk of reality is missing.

Even the elephants are confused.

You’ll never make a show out of that.

The struggle is futility
Patient people play the part
Of impartiality
The wiser are restraint
Castigated for their intelligence
Castrated by their class
A classless struggle we abide
Poor children barely manage
To survive and seldom thrive
Not given access to the tools
Of excellence
But we wield the sword of obsolescence
Antiquated ideas put on the same level as
Modern machines and moral philosophies
Broad language discarded for
The disinfected nature of stupidity
Our language is censored
And free thought is crippled
Thus to succeed we must
Write to their level of understanding
So they can understand it
Which means we do not expect grandness
From the masses
That we underrate what they are capable of
The papacy’s power is palatable but detrimental
The Popes presence sends his parishioners
In to servitude as they submit to the
Sublimation of their identity
Unable to identify the truth from the lie
Unable to separate the flock from the I
I become the villain
For stating these things
So I drop names like Darwin and Thomas Paine
I wear the scarlet letter of poet and philosopher
Of Supplicant to science, Of literate romantic
I the son of Percy Bysshe Shelley
The son of Twain and Poe
The Son of Shakespeare and Baudelaire  
The son of logic and poetry
The lost ******* of peace, love, and understanding
I leave the eve of man’s ill behavior
To see the seething corps of corpses
Rise in ignorance strive for pestilence
With hopeful hate in their eye
To perpetuate the self-fulfilling prophecies
Of all types of apocalypses
But in the end it will be I that am despised
Thus if I must be hated then at least
Favor me with this tiny justice
Like Galileo, Giordano Bruno, and Copernicus
I will wear chains well earned
There is so much knowledge to be had
So learn, live, love and then learn some more

If I left notes in Sphinx drawers
Crimson leaves whirl to earth.

People shisha-puff barrels of oil
in the air
Skies tumble nimbostratusclouds.

Apocalypses apocalypse while
Broadway & Wall Street chuck
**** ******* flags
Slide them in Alabaster wardrobe
crevices.

Kaleidoscope paper.

my mother dreams of apocalypses.
every night she watches
as the world falls to ruins at her feet;
and every time, she tells me,
there’s a strange sense of peace
as her shoulders bear the weight of the sky.

in my nightmares there’s no peace,
no heroics; i dream of pain and
of heels hitting the cold earth;
at night i'm pursued and hurt —
a scrappy child, all teeth and wide-eyed fear
power stripped away from small,
helpless hands.

does that make her paranoid?
or does it make me selfish? no matter.
lately you’re in all my dreams;
you never hurt me in those.
it’s nice. and i know being needed
would be the most beautiful thing
but i’m not the child. i’m not dreaming.
time will ruin us in the end.

i’ll see your eyes in the dregs of my coffee;
my hands will itch to remind me
how to dial your phone number and God,
i know, i know that in my deathbed
my fingers will tap the Moonlight Sonata;
they’ll trace your birthdate in cursive
on the white sheets below my slowing heart.

i’ll remember when you called me pet
then i’ll take off my sweater. yes,  
that time when you pulled my hair?
my body went limp —
a rag doll, a disgrace of a child —
laid out bare on the slab of stone.
i’ll think of you ’til i’m stupid and numb:
sand in my mouth and you put it there.

no, i will keep my terrible secret
as if it is not enclosed in glass.
because she looks nothing like me,
and what i feel can’t quite be
described as relief. but no matter.
whether you’re unaware or uncaring
deceit is so easy
except when it comes to you,
except when it comes to you.

The paralysis,
the agony of unresponsive muscles,
the coward voice that barely moves the air,
the hesitation that confuses
what we are and what we are not.

This fear that makes me avoid
discomfort, pain, the unknown,
this fear guardian-torturer,
does not fit me no more.

The fear of the unreal,
the fear of the impossible,
the fear of breaking myself,
the fear of the fear,
the fear of the uncontrollable wills,
this petty fear that serves only itself,
that hits palaces, and houses and slums,
the fear of a dingy past,
or of an obscure future,
of the prophetic images of possible apocalypses,
professed by notorious atheist scientists,
or the fear of the science propagated by unbelieving priests,
or the fear of the starvation I never had (that made me obese),
or the fear of the accident I never experienced (that locks me home),
or the fear of the policeman and the thief (that armors my car),
or the fear of rejection I never suffered (that fuels my social life with happy pictures),
and the sum of all these fears, the ultimate fear,
the fear of never come to be what I dreamed to be.

Today, none of my muscles will obey them.

Unless you're prepared for hurricanes
Tsunamis and any apocalypses
Because darling
I'll make those look like
Child's play

met a stoner on the highway
who was crying like an angel
of grace, leavened
like the abacus of misery’s
loom, a fellow sun-washed
tarnished
goodness graced
ill-believer who
saw no distance in the stars
and burned his soul with needles,
coming down on a young child
eclipsing serial apocalypses
in calypso’s grace,
a *****,
or a *****, poisoned
on a long winter’s algebra
entering into a space of
infinite solitude within the held notion of all beings,
O Shadow,
oh strange manifest of worldly sin,
where is my friend, oh master of destinies,
what shape is he in? does the dream
of a lost dogs sorrow hypnotize
like the eyes of a sparrow,
shooting like an arrow from a
deep dark hello,
how does one to think?
know?

through the forest: instead of running
simply walking
muddied feet
muddled tongue
  
                       if i could get away
from "getting away" i would call myself
by my name
in third person
and then wonder: what's with this
pronoun gymnastics that
is dumb-    -ing people
who think they are walking on eggshells
but instead: are:
walking on broken glass...

the mirror of the sky
and the mirror of the seas
how entwined without adjectives
sometimes
sometimes things are devoid
of adjectives

a mountain is a mountain is
Moses and Muhammad and they too
are: non-responsive in
definition...

lazily stomaching an afternoon
within a day:

i sNIGGER... snigger -
yet the added S- is somehow not so much
concerning the rest of the word
"somehow": "offensive"?

i'm still astounded by what visualization
was generated from Frank Herbert's
Dune... beside the rather unique
punctuation there is not much to swallow...

willows willows and some drool...
**** and pike and birches for all lost *******
like dissociation with dogs
having *** like we try to think "we" in
the royal sense: devising plans
to outstrip *** from function
like *** is devoid of function
of magnetism like
there is no synonym and no antonym

through the forest: perfect exercise for
both mind and body
not running: oh hell no... no running involved
just hunched for moments at a time
then upright...

sitting on a stump of what was formerly
a prided oak
on a throne of stump
i sat and pondered whether:
is Matthew a good person?

3 years this long distance "relationship"
lasted...
i gave up so much travesty of
the lived, personal, experience
that i found blind-spots concerning
fellow man
and felt more indulgent than
associating Goethe with the title: patriarch...

of whom? artists? like Shakespeare
isn't already the patriarch of actors... isn't he?!
not out of vanity or wounded self-esteem
but paper and ink are readily available
in that: they're no longer necessary...

and all these people attached to miniature
Apocalypses in their pockets
these soft-machine hullabaloos
feats of anti-engineering
it would almost, almost therefore: seemingly
be: best associated with...

seems almost idiotic to pressure the id
to overcome the ego
in the grand scheme of
psy: schematic: associating man with man
within himself:
under what metaphysical scalpel
were these 20th century intrusions:
ventures: in understanding man
how well man became understood
find foundations of such progress
in Auschwitz...

elsewhere life under the Quran was as if
a nightmare to which i woke into
seeing life undisturbed:
with the exception of the unavoidable
outliers akin
to the Pakistani **** gangs of Rotherham

voiceless dental fricative [θ]
or its voiced counterpart [ð]

i think that's the dire consequence
of not keeping check the evolutionary
strategy of language as
its own entity: self... minus my self:
my self: the reflective component
"v" / "vs" the reflexive myself strictness...

forget the aesthetics of spelling
and how it looks on paper...
through the forest
i walked with only one ear...
well... two ears...
but one ear was focused on the parody
of listening to music
while the other ear was honing in
on the furor of the birds
bothered by a pendite...

i literally unearthed this word, right now,
on the spot...
spot of ENSOO... in one sitting:
omicron omega omicron omega:
U turn up to Silon...
up to Silon... my version of Zion...

second-person plural present
             active imperative of pendō

and people come to me with these
iron maiden chambers of grammar solely
on the vestiges of stressing... *******...
pronouns?! seriously?!

what the **** does pendoo mean?
ha ha! well well... just my luck for resurrecitng
old tongues
while i baptized myself in the nettles!
oh the nettles!
i took my shirt off
i was going to take all my clothes off
and run into the nettles
i thought it might suckerpunch me good
to feel the itch crawl into my skin
if i also itched with my testicles
but then again: indecent exposure...
sufficed with rubbing nettles
on my shins
my forearms
my hands
plucked a stem
and rubbed it on my face
plucked a stem
and rubbed it on my chest and my back

like Husayn -
i became a martyr of self-doubt...
no... it was certain:
there was no affair
no cheating involved
but it would have been cruel
to give hope
when the realist in me knew:
perhaps i do not like my work
but i love the company i keep
at work...

i was thinking about the properties
of doing such a thing
hinging upon a story i once read
about Roman centurions throwing themselves
****-naked into nettles...
duck quack medicine...
chemo... no...
cherry chemistry CH CH CH
choo choo...
  "too many consonants" my scratched ***
and tilting halo: for ****'s sake...

DRAKA: DRADZA: DRA-     -JA
equivalent to DZ...

          quack... duck... medicine... ah!
lost a word for a moment:
HOMEOPATHY!
or hum-pathology: **-meo-pathy...
etymological: where?
    ** in Greek: meo mea yes yes
-pathy yes like -ology...

                   this tongue outside of my
mouth in my head
not exactly a rhetorical gift
but for the duty to interest:
i.e. being invested in being interested:
undying! preserved! mummified!

what comes now is a flood of memories:
one or two hiccups
but compared to what Edie was used
to with her experience of men...
over a stretch of 3 years
we only met twice
and we had Oppenheimer sort of ***

that's what happens when
a cryptic meander:
a recluse... yes yes: once or twice
in the brothel
but what i also learned
when *** is bought / exchanged
that rigid LIMP ******* ****
i'm trying to get my rocks off
want to lick her out
finger her and then she blurbs out:
that will be extra...
she also forgot to peel the banana
sorry
but she forgot what the ******* is
for and isn't for
and that was a waste of time
i ended up paying £130 for massaging her...

and that's what: in the heralded
wisdom of a 55 year old to a 38 year
some ******* clue:
oh yeah, yeah... the younger girls
are *****...
hornier: puppet: you have my strings?
seriously?
am i to believe that women
in the luxury of the menopause
are... wait wait...

  wait wait... menopausal women
are hornier: freer...
than their younger counterparts... period!
the end!
i've heard too much ******* to suffer
the fate of the gullible patrons of:
*** for pleasure...

   and she might have thought me an invalid
for not having secured a progeny
in child of my own
(a)

           but now i just see timidity breeding
fluorescence
if that's even possible whenever
i see women in that brackets of (18 - 45)
that's a good bracket to have...
invigorating: indispensable...
like this was my ONE NOTCH
and a belt of all those times
i wondered whether or not i had erectile
dysfunction: clearly not...

******* the brains out of an older woman:
trick came with the thrice tickle...
tasteless?
current affairs and political lies
are tasteless:
suffice to say that a sound reading
of Marquis de Sade coupled with some
sobering Kant and Bukowski's efforts
yes yes... all a matter of fact: stress...
a poem a day keeps the psychiatrist away

a poem a day keeps the psychiatrist away
so much for apples...
tangerines oranges snakes and ladders...

the realist spoke:
i was never going to leave London
for her
that dynamic of mother daughter
grandmother was strict and Christian-obligatory
i can't do Christian-obligatory
when you have suspicions of
the one and only heresy that is: hypocrisy...

i couldn't leave London for Kauai
i would hate waking up
driving past the golf courses of Princeville
and i would hate to live among
Americans
even if they were Polynesian half-winks
of what the genesis story is
of that vastness: i.e. Taiwan...
too much sun not even *****: ooh! azure!

i'm an urban rat
i need urban slang to surprise me
especially if it's coming from the youths
of Hackney and they're Somalis
or Nigerians ...
i feel sick whenever i travel back to Poland
and am stuck with an ethnic homogeneity

too much white on white
i once stated already that: the future is mixed race...
for all the ills and ailments
we need a genetic vibrancy
and one way is to breed:
no sorry... that **** is on AUTOPILOT right
now... as natural as gravity...
but at least black women will stop
wearing wigs
and their half-kin will have a full crop
of hair and there will be no more
*****-slapping concerning alopecia...
perhaps no teeth-whitening envy too:
orange skin tan peel: blinding ivory: ugh!

                        only in Essex...

plus! i don't want to come across as some
invalid
but i really really don't need a car in London
sure i'm heading to Poland
to get a driving license in September
but that's just a formality blah blah blah
but over there: bicycle: bad bearings...
knock-knock buckling...

             England is an island but Kauai
is a whirlpool of existential constipation
that's equivalent to: ha ha... claustrophobia...
oddly enough it was just that...
plus summer is coming
and with that Wimbledon
and the concert season
and the Euro finals and being a tourist
of bad-mouthed Ahmed Ahmeds
flying in from Sow-Di Land of
the free peoples of Putinphilia... well: you know...
blah blah...

           yes: i am the bad man...
because i'm the realist and i wanted the memory
bank to implode then explode into
stretching time:
that non-linear point of having
a concern for time...
a stretching and juxtaposition of time
and that's also QUANTUM TIME...
as much as i might enjoy the quantum space
of my bedroom and me kneeling
before the bed and typing this out...

memory = quantum time

                       i can play with it as much as i can:
with the additional fervor of having
memory intact outside
of the realm of pedagogic infringement
and acidity once upon a time
constricted by learning irrelevant facts:
it's like: why do they teach us biology
when they know none of us will
be doctors or at least most
why don't they teach us nutrition in school
help us focus on the entire body
rather than bulldozer our experience of
youth with talk of *******
thrombocytes and chlorophyll?

          pedagogy is outdated - clearly:
if it weren't for a self-assured want to grasp
etymology / other languages...
beside from the basics of arithmetic and some
grasp of letters: although nuance
that sound to the letters presented
and what dyslexia is there to be spoken of?

ah ha ha... blah blah...
for all my afternoons to revolve around such
joy: to write.