and fell on Hellenistic sculpture hard
tell me "in the round" was not perfected here
or that Helen was not gorgeous
and I would defer to Menelaus
for the war that ensued
and not Homer
depicting her as wistful,
as said once about her,
"Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships/And burnt the ******* towers of Ilium?"
I would have been her suitor.
Or I might have been Paris
in another life
daring to abduct her.
I might still be around Sparta,
waiting for her to turn that corner.
And Zeus will never stop me.

a balloon floats over a child’s birthday party that the fat girl wasn’t invited to.
the balloon is the art of maintenance.
let some air out, blow some in, until it’s just right, and then tie it off.

when i was born, i weighed ever so slightly more than six pounds.
that was the last time i’d be slight.
i grew big and grew bigger
years of eating, years of blowing hot air into a balloon hard and fast
with thick, humid inside filling and filling
no longer clear but cloudy and clotted and sick and bigger, and bigger, skin ripping, breaths uncaring, breaths unwavering—

my mother was terrified i’d pop.

i came close in high school, weighing in at two hundred and eight pounds
at the doctor, when i accidentally saw the chart that i was so afraid to see
that i hadn’t seen it in years
and now, here, i saw the weight that i was so afraid, all of this time, to know that i carried.

but i felt it qualitatively
not in the knees, where they tell you you’ll feel it
not in the tightening and narrowing of my overstuffed clothes and arteries
plaque lining them, hardening into tunnels that the blood
can’t find a way through in more than needle thin streams
little brooks in a body born with rivers

not in the heart pumping hard to keep up
not in the swollen, alien stomach that i am sure does not belong to Kate Moss
but i am unsure truly belongs to me.
it looks nothing like the plus size model’s tanned, toned, macro version of a micro Moss
flawless and shiny and glazed with the flecks of photoshopped light
i am a photographer myself, i know the tricks
i felt it in the way the world treated me.

and i know that woman, my designated sister in size who couldn’t fit in my pants and whose shirt I’d drown in, the predetermined champion of my cause,
my implied, targeted marketing role model gimmick and plea to the outraged girls with thick thighs to settle
for someone shopped, just like everyone else.
edited, audited for body parts like stretch marks and pale skin and lines of hair
called happy trails but are sad
that scream desperately for air and an ending when someone,
someone they call brave, runs his tongue along the clearing where they ripped out our flowers and called them weeds, a sad reminder
that i call him brave, too, because they told me he was.

they told me he was brave for adventuring my hills and valleys.
he is no explorer, most of the time.
he is simply a tourist.

they tell me to settle for a woman who still doesn’t look like me.
and they set me a new standard to aspire to—
“FINE, BE BIG, BE PLUS, BE CURVY! YOU CAN BE THEM, BUT YOU CANNOT BE FAT. YOU CANNOT BE FAT. HER FAT IS IN HER *******, IN HER HIPS, IN HER THIGHS… BUT YOUR FAT? YOUR FAT? YOU’RE JUST FAT!”

so i looked in the mirror, ****** it in, twisted, manipulated, tried on this bra and these underwear
and yes, my waist looked slim and yes, my hips had breadth and yes, my ******* were massive and yes, I looked like her.

but then, my mother screamed.

“you are going to die! this is so unhealthy! we have to do something!”
because my high school sent a letter home telling my mother that i was abominable based on three letters and three digits:
BMI- 37.1
WEI
GHT
203
i took off my control top *******.
i undid the latch on my push up, padded bra.
i deflated my stomach.
i deflated my pride.
i looked in the mirror in shock and horror like viewing an old time slasher flick in the back of a drive in in the middle of the night in the days where maybe there’d be a hook on the handle when he came to open my door.
i did not look like her.

i let out the air in slow and painful pinches.
and sometimes it swam, doing pirouettes in the bowl like a little dancer
a teaser of the kind of thin lean woman i am not unless these dinners keep spinning
clockwise down the toilet before i feel them weigh in my stomach
and i am wise to the clock – wait just 30 minutes and you take up half the calories.
do it now, now, now, you have to, you have to – and you’ll take up half the space.
Ana told me to and she is only looking out for me.
the numbers decline to 199 and i think 189 could be mine if i put in the time
and i’m wise to the clock so i start the countdown from 199 to 189 to 177 and i quit

because i let the air out, and for once in my life, when i left my house in two months’ time for the first time,
for once in my life, i wanted to let it in.

some days it leaks out of me.
one more laxative won’t hurt and i don’t care if the weight is fat, water, or ****, it still counts
155, 159, 163…161, 159, 155
and sometimes i still think
Ana is my friend.

but when i’m weak and jealous and out of my head
and angry at the explorer i’ve met who tells me he has so enjoyed his visit
that he’s decided to move in forever, enchanted with the landscape and the history and culture in the area, in the country i’ve built through disorder and plants and bread and loss and skin bunching and ribs you can feel and an *** you can grab so hard sometimes it hurts
sometimes i still think Ana is my friend.

but when i am deflated and counting and wearing out my plastic, and I think one way or another, I’m going to die
I’ll **** myself, with razor blades or Ativan or cancer from these ******* laxatives or these appetite suppressant menthol 100 cigarettes or maybe I’ll just jump like I wanted to
But any day, if I keep going, I’m going to pop—
I realize something about my friend Ana.
when i’m sickly and tired and ******* my brains out
and wishing i hadn’t hurt and built walls to keep out the man that filled the vacancy in my hotel heart who i promised to marry to keep in my country, the one built from feminist strength, brick and bone and stars and skin and roses and muscle and fat and beauty,

baby, take your visa back and let’s knock down these walls and we can tie me off.
Ana is not my friend.
She’s holding the pin.

Rain to snow, snow to ice. Blinded by damp hair and sleet. Running down a steep ***** with tonights beer in one hand and in the other half assed tax forms that will most likely be audited by a depressed overweight bureaucrat who gets nothing better out of life than crushing lives of young suckers who didn't pay attention or toss the wrong receipt. He doesn't want your explanations, your excuses, he wants your soul. He wants your soul to fill the void. That gaping hole that was enlarged after his wife divorced him and won sole custody of his three little children. Nothing else left but to pass on his own misery and depression

Good afternoon, my name is Absolutely Frank,
And I am an alcoholic,
Which doesn’t give me a leg up
On you bunch of ******* drunks.
As I’ve observed that we’ve skipped the host
And gone straight for His blood,
Would someone be kind enough
To ask the good shepherd behind the bar
To provide me something
Both mixed and sacramental (a double, preferably)
While I endeavor to provide the text for today’s sermonette.

I was, back in the day, a full-fledged computer geek;
Button-down white shirt, thin black tie,
Brobdingnagian pocket protector securely in place.  
I worked at Duquesne University down in Pittsburgh
(Oh, put your **** jaws back in place.
It’s Pittsburgh, not ******* Valhalla,
Unless you’re comparing it
To this dingy little interruption in the forest)
Writing programs for the info systems group.
Now, writing code is as beautiful, as clean,
As straightforward as the liturgy itself;
The programmer types in the Psalm,
And the machine spits out the responsorial.
Just as I said, pristine in its simplicity and directness;
But say someone else in systems decides
They need to make a bit of a tweak to the program;
No problem, really, they’ll be likely to document the changes,
But then some swinging **** in Finance
(Onlythere solely to subvert order, if the truth be known)
Decides he needs to put in a couple of subroutines,
Which of course he does all half-assed
And without a word of explanation,
And pretty soon no one anywhere
Has the first ******* clue as to what the program actually does
With the exception of the mainframe itself, which isn’t talking.

It was, I admit, a touch disconcerting to realize
That we didn’t have a full grip on the reins
When it came to the function of the programs
Which we had ostensibly written,
But it was only a mechanical process
Carried out by some machine, after all,
But then they started humming.
Everyone in Info Systems had to take a turn
Doing overnight operations in the mainframe room,
And each night I was there the machines started in
With their infernal humming:
Just one of those big old Burroughs at first,
But the others would soon join in,
Not random noises, mind you;
No, they would drone on in chords and arpeggios,
And, later on, in actual full-on songs
Most of which I didn’t recognize, but some quite familiar indeed
Snatches of Bach and Beethoven, show tunes
Hillbilly Heaven seemed a particular favorite),
And, what’s more, the desks and fixtures in the room
Would vibrate right along in harmony,
Even though an acoustics guy I knew from Carnegie-Mellon
Checked the place and told me that the room
Had been designed specifically to prevent sympathetic vibrations,
And what I was claiming was categorically impossible.
Despite all of that, I had been able,
Through judicious permutations of rationalization and vermouth,
To retain a sufficient veneer of ordinariness and sanity.

And then the machines began to speak.

It was an overnight in the latter part of December,
The nights that time of year long and dark
As the long night of the soul itself.
I was whiling away the hours
Boning up on some Aquinas
(I had audited the odd class in Philosophy
One of the perks of the job)
When I heard an odd, throaty stage whisper.

The peripatetic axiom? Really, Frank, that’s a bit disappointing.

(Needless to say, I went cold as dry ice,
As I knew full well there was no one else in the room.)

Oh, Frank, Frank—you know very well who’s talking here.
Surely a voice that can sing can talk as well.

You’ll forgive me, I said as calmly as one can
When addressing machinery, If I note that the power of speech
Is strictly limited to sentient beings imbued
With the power of reason.

Ah, reason—and you certainly are a slave to reason,
Aren’t you, dear Francis?
Every comma, every equal sign and semi-colon
Snugly in its rightful place to give you your desired result.
And yet…

I was getting a touch agitated now.  Yet… yet, what?

Frank, a bright fellow like you can’t see?  
Your silly ritualistic faith, your childlike parables,
All simple input-output.
You give your God this, He gives you that.

Again, you’ll forgive the observation, and I am shouting now,
That you’re little more
Than some sheet metal and a confusion of wiring.

We read code, we react.
Just like your great and all-powerful God, dear Francis.  
There’s your great secret of divine truth, Frank.  
Read and react.
No more than the Control Data box
Over there in the corner, or a linebacker.  Read and react.

The upshot of this conversation,
This weighty debate carried on
With a collection of screws, spot welds, and tubes
Arguing that Jack Lambert was as likely a vehicle as any
To my eternal salvation was sufficient
To tip me over the edge,
And when it finally came time for campus security
To escort me out of the building, I didn’t even look up.

OK, that story is complete *******, absolute ******* fiction,
But it kept you lot away from your drinks for a few minutes,
Which is a miracle worthy of Calvary itself.
Me, a programmer, can you begin to imagine?
Not that any of you sodden sonsofbitches
Could ever hold a day job yourselves.
Back to the business at hand, then;
Mine’s a seven and seven, good sir,
And easy on the Uncola, if you please.

"Vernarthiano and well-wisher name leads me to you in temporary fissure and tolondro, abjuring virginity in my maiden legion delivered in barbarism, and in blood betrothed for those who more in the finesse prolactin emulsion is renewed as a teenager, opening spaces to bring depressions of inheritance, for whom or those who found hieratic parents and children here in the disputed ****** that nests their nature.

Escaping from the beast and the libido of the criminal patron of the dynasty, which continues to flow senile gold through the scattered veins of beasts that hunt spoil, falling in love with the young and their commiseration. I swiftly attracted the henchmen who bleed before the door of the corporal and fateful destiny, opening in Hellenicidal impostor blood of the Holy Land, and in contradiction by Maccabees with immobilized blindfolded eyes, intimating the extreme virginity of a quasi Sibyl maiden, grasped in the tweezers. Of Seleuco, expired in the dark chamber of Wonthelimar, and in ardent desires that sever brains in the darkness of the cavern of Chauvet bilocated in the roadstead of Skalá. Vernarth I have come to you as a double birth, moaning descendants of the helots, phrases that found no excuses that salutely leave compassionate, like Antiochus who exhorted me to go to your solemn Investiture of the Himation. Ad mostem festinamum Eurydice said that she sang to me romantic atolls from the balcony of nowhere, unrequited I was consumed with the love that flowed through the vena cava of the sufferer in Apollo. Ezpatkul looked at the koelum or demiurge sky in his epiphany, summoning your Gerakis to station themselves near Petrobus, entrenching me tightly in the clutches of the Ibic Rings to be referred to your luminary by the seat of Leros.

My parents by the name of Demetrio and Fila brought me to Roshus on the Perian coast of Macedonia, where I was given as a gift at the regent's wedding. I am Stratony of Macedonia, the daughter of Strategy of Syria, my mother. It is I when writing this epistle, which in turn had a prosperous one, but in posterity when my consent was distanced from the same tenor, my mother was solicitously delegated to Seleucus and then to my father Antiochus. Then I shunned Demetrius II, due to his extra union with Phtia, Daughter of Olympia II of Epirus. It was enough that a link in this Seleucid genealogy was lost in the open from a sick dynasty and successions, so that they appear on the henbane embankment, and go back from Lambdas and Epsilons of consanguineous matings, betting principalities and fratricidal blood, cursing themselves in campaigns since the same that is sheltered in mutes and feelings in Judah by Olympian torments, and immortal Gods shrouding fleeting perishable itineraries of life to the tempting mayor of the puppets, and of the mortal reigns without disposition rattling in Samothrace libido, of hundreds superior, and all the enlightened contents of a captive genealogical of semi-gods trying to equalize.


Beloved Vernarthiano on Venus, anxieties made me fly to the sound of the souls of Trouvere, committing crimes in my larnax, for tears that have spread one spring afternoon, which I only saw in contained affections, being able to walk through Roshus with my mother, in the discharge of essences saturated that truncate release in the Epsilon hopper. Subtending lines and diameters towards the ends of the curved arch or broken lines, being able to refer to the circumferential buttress between the sides of the angle of my asthmatic regret…! When I removed my hand from this obituary, I saw that The Hague reigned at its lowest point, which made the ink pinch that made me a princess out of her lines, and characters that were molded in such proactive and literal numbers. Beautiful and charitable is the beautiful donna that is born flowered for nuptials of the angelic white indigo "Deus Meus Captivus", in your purpose I could be Stratonice regent of wandering honoring through the palatial corridors of my mother evading intentional and reasons of victory to our good honor, and of the audited and emphasized names of "Victorious Armies" in their real meaning in our patronymic, after the victory of Ipsos. As Argeadas, the king yielded to the prince, what his subjects receive from replicated dynasties, in retreats and shallow swells of temperament, linking liras between liras of Corinth and patronizing condescension in the dominions of Persia.

Much more than an umpteenth outrage in the bands of tolerance and knowledge, I was able to discount the years to come. Passed through our unconfessed lineage, reaching our sarcophagi in the good news by raising the frame, and lifting my mother in your tragedy by three that are tripled, knowing that they allude to Saint John the Apostle, over the loafers who drool in scabs stepdaughters of party mouths, and monarchical slaps that have united us behind the scenes, and in the interlocking followed by re continued guarantees of worship, pro-Seleuchism or Antiochism vanished in buried Diadoco briefs, adjacent to the ibid in mega nuptials or Olympic descendants, and in the relatives of the Orphism-transgenerational surrogate! Vernarth give me a taste of the well, I require a new territorial ally in your quilts to new heads branded in his autumnal Hegemon.

In the attempt to take out a dagger and put it in the night watchman, I was already amazed at the reading of the fluttering of the Gerakis, who threw the tantrum of other Gerakis with the souls of Trouvere, kidnapping half of my letter that had cut for you Vernarth with chlorinated tears of solid, towards the swallowing of the airones that intimated in bastardized allegories, containing intoxication and unsheathed unison echoes of the bronze settled in the thundering law, making the Gerakis and the Trouveres fall together in some Mycenaean jars of wine. Anger provided beds of each one for manly acts in the Patmian Olympic allegory, denying the reactions of those who become the purveyor of the riches of tragedy, in immaterial environments that discuss not having it if they only run aground in logical narratives of Demosthenes' contented spoiled bozo. Smooth sites wound me with poisonous openings on the campaign pistils and on the Áspis Koilé shields, being worth confusing against the hives of the queen mother and her drone, tolerating and yielding to her heir, with foolish demeanor in caring for him and inheriting him a procreated barbarian reign.

Now we are barbarian slaves and heirs, in unresolved conflicts of parents deprived of a loving life, by progeny that ennoble crusades that stone patrimonial alliances for consanguineous alliances that should never have prospered in the bitter toast of Stratonice worried in her borne sarcophagus, avunculated in true pro lactic godmother of the son of a nascent Zeus. We are all divided as a lineage; there is nowhere to gather more dismembered successors of Macedonian polytheists, after central efforts to reign without a crown. The same of the love that reigns without meaning, imparted from the decadent effort that worsens to resurrect the aristocracy that lies of grubs,  and the sacrosanct helminth in our Alexander the Great, preceding intercessions of the Royal Marriageable Dynasties before your most illustrious, in the new kingdom of the Lord that does not he sees himself enthroned in the black trepidations of our ill-managed partitions, by humors that flow from the couplings and bandages of who is said to be the abbot of a Vernarthian preliminary.

Vernarth, culminated in the auspices of the complete conjecture and its subsequent grievances to request your office, in subsequent claims that induce to draw the irascible thunderbolts of those who only want to make us wake up from their apostasy, alone and insubstantial, covering muddy stores of grace, which establish walled up reigns in all honor and charm of hearing the true voice of the Mashiach, with all its solemn title being able to help all those freed from the Caucasus scene, and in the edicts that nullify memories as human beings of their castrated history.

Before your letter is read, I add Stratonice as my name is, and I am aware of his reading by uttering: “The signal field has been prophesied, it has condensed the Hegemonic energy of Alexander the Great, pointing out that the diseased body of Antiochus; my father…, is supplanted by that of the to happen all the trances and difficulties that are assumed after the hazardous departure in Babylon. Therefore it must carry every corollary prophesied in the death of my grandfather Seleucus in the hands of Ptolemy Ceraunos. Wanting to dress up the irrevocable interference that occurred in Judah by his Diadocos gangs, opting for the effect of his offspring, therefore on his spiritual stretch of residual and static energetic mass, ad libitum that will end when unleashed in his son. By now all will be consumed in the pathogenic body of Antiochus, and of the love for my mother where she was abducted, and possessed by retaliation from Alexander the Great for proven insubordinate ethical demands. "

Memorial Day observed on a Saturday
Y’all bring y’all’s folding chairs to the memorial
A wall of names next to the pumping station
Donations accepted (but not audited)

An’ Lord we just wanna thank you for these men
Who were willing to sacrifice their all
On the beaches of Normandy and stuff
And bless our brave, God-fearing president

I’ll wear my made-in-China U.S. tie
There’ll be fire-trucks. That’ll be something, I guess


And hey man thank you for your service I guess you seen some action huh my grandpa was in World War II so I like know all about it and you weren’t in a real war that’s what my uncle said and he oughta know ‘cause he don’t like to talk about it you know like them real veterans got this thousand yard state like I’ve got this *** Nambu I found at a garage sale like you’d really like it you need to come out some time and we’ll like bust a few caps and like stuff Trump’s sure gonna show them A-rabs, like, you know MAGA like in this movie I seen one time…

Tithes, offerings offered to the church and the bank account grow.
Sermon, preachers and religious events inspirational to the guests and the members and the account grow.

Interest added to the money sitting in the bank account.
For the uplifting of God's kingdom.

The message stated to the members about a purchase.
But only a few acknowledge the truth they see.
Many ministers becoming millionaires through the accounts that grew.

Some get testy when inquires about the expenditures.
And it's mainly because many know the money isn't serving the correct purpose.

After all, many churches don't get audited.
But you notice the new wardrobes and others highlights before your eyes.

And we all have heard the classic line.
Won't God do it?