(Glade, World, Master, Boy, Hero)

                                                 GLADE

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

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

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

                                               WORLD

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                              MA­STER

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

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

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

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

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

                                                  BOY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                                HERO

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

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

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

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







Copyright 2020 by Ron Sanders.

Contact:  ronsandersartofprose(at)yahoo(dot)com

a badgers life was happy now its life is dull
farmers got together and decided on a cull
now they are in danger no longer can they roam
they will all be shot and the cemetry there home

they have roamed for years in our countryside
now the cull is on going nationwide
it is really sad it has to be this way
why cant they stop the killing let the badgers stay

they are a part of nature and are meant to be
not something that you ****  on a killing spree
we must save the badger anyway we can
what would the people say if badgers killed a man

the badgers life was peaceful but now his life is dull
farmers got together badgers they will cull
shoot them all at will no remorse at all
soon the badgers will be gone as there numbers fall.

after all the years of roaming wild and free
soon will disappear no badgers will there be
this lovely little creature hunter of the night
soon he will be gone no badgers left in sight.

it is such a sin to **** this natures child
that once had his freedom roaming in the wild.

I love my little garden, even though it takes me hours
to mow the lawn and prune the trees and **** around the flowers.
I love the bees and butterflies, and I wouldn't mind the snails
if they'd leave my runner beans alone and not go off the rails.

I like to watch the badgers as they amble 'cross the lawn
very early in the morning, in the hour before the dawn,
and if Mister Fox comes passing through, it's really quite exciting
- though I find the smell he leaves behind is somewhat less inviting.

I like the worms - they're useful and they don't do any harm,
but the badgers think my garden's their own private worm farm.
So I rather like the idea of a wild-life community,
Except the badgers messing up the lawn with such impunity.

Yes, I like to keep my garden like a small nature reserve,
but creatures sometimes do things that I really don't deserve,
like badgers digging worms up!  Though I really wouldn't mind it
if they'd just re-fill the holes, and leave my garden as they find it!

It was the twilight of the iguana.
From the rainbow-arch of the battlements,
his long tongue like a lance
sank down in the green leaves,
and a swarm of ants, monks with feet chanting,
crawled off into the jungle,
the guanaco, thin as oxygen
in the wide peaks of cloud,
went along, wearing his shoes of gold,
while the llama opened his honest eyes
on the breakable neatness
of a world full of dew.
The monkeys braided a ******
thread that went on and on
along the shores of dawn,
demolishing walls of pollen
and startling the butterflies of Muzo
into flying violets.
It was the night of the alligators,
the pure night, crawling
with snouts emrging from ooze,
and out the sleepy marshes
the confused noise of scaly plates
returned to the ground where they began.
The jaguar brushed the leaves
with a luminous absence,
the puma runs through the branches
like a forest fire,
while the jungle's drunken eyes
burn from inside him.
The badgers scratch the river's
feet, scenting the nest
whost throbbing delicacy
they attack with red teeth.

And deep in the huge waters
the enormous anaconda lies
like the circle around the earth,
covered with ceremonies of mud,
devouring, religious.

.how  dignified it is, to simply take a walk at night...

)            that's all i wanted to disclose...
what comes now,
is all the unnecessary details
that would constitute a prose piece...
albeit in cascade - for the ease
of the eyes bunddled up in a
claustrophobia of a paragraph:

i know: the mere word 'dignified'
seems rather obnoxious...
but... how dignified it is,
to take a walk at night...
esp. when one is recycling leftover
bottles of whiskey, whiskey,
beer... whiskey...

after reading Knausgård vol. 1 -
with his father strapped to the house
with his mother drinking himself
to death...
perhaps i'm also akin...

but... there's "****" to do in between...
good god! mein gott!
greta thunberg! run! i said run idiot!
run to the recycling center with
those glass bottles!
success though: cutting the ingestion
by over a half...

current bank balance?
nearing 2 thousand pounds...
and there's the garbage to sort between
the recyclable and the non-recyclable...
there's the tending to keeping
the house clean...

there's a remnant spark about giving
a toss about some sporting event...
there's cooking a dinner...
but... it seems i miss the man who would
find about an hour and a half
to walk the streets at night...

somehow i missed it -
but... i imagine the sight of a week's worth
of empty bottles in the wardrobe...
i've had enough and...
i call the dog that's the dignity to take
a walk at night...
to never overthink anything except
thinking - that i can leave in the basket
of nothing...

sometimes the ego-automaton jumps
in and makes my walking meditation
fuzzy... that's where i find this mythological
ego of psychology -
ego the anti-narrator...

which implies: not myself... reflexive...
not my, self... the reflective circumstance...

and there's no familiar presence
of an mp3 player (broken, ****** lasted
for 3 years, good enough lifespan)
and no headphones...

perhaps i was anti-radio some time ago...
i've amassed a decent personal library
of audio... but now i rarely use it
having made a discovery of the gramaphone
and vinyls...
and being the late 20th century colt...
i should still be ripping c.d.s onto
mp3... but...
i just wanted to check out what i was
missing...
perhaps... the crazed sound of passing
cars, will indeed, never replace
the cobblestones and hooves...
but... there's a right to heave a sigh...
for no apparent reason other than:
i've met myself this very first time
having aged...

this is not a time for west coast
1990s pop punk or punk rock or whatever
they called it... when you would
either run in gallop jumping
in a jonathan edwards style...
or looking down and walking into
a lamp-post... this is no time to be
refreshing the cinema of youth...
with the offspring's ignition...

not when you're walking: and trying not to think...

also of today: my jewish newly converted
to islam neighbour came round
asking about my mother's slight bout
of depression concerning...
her recent hip-replacement...
and what's still in the post...
the aesthetic surgery...
after all: what surgery, proper...
is also a plastic surgery - an aesthetic...
obviously the muscles and the bones
are intact... but there is always a chance
that waste tissue will be removed...
fat... etc. and it hasn't even been 2 weeks
since the surgery...
and she said: your mum should look
at my surgery scars...
i lifted up my t-shirt and turned
to show her my back... namely my
right shoulder-blade...

and i said to her: you know why i didn't
get aesthetic surgery on this mark
of cain? that's the same reason why i don't
have tattoos...
nothing against tattoos...
i have the only tattoo i need:
a mark of cain and some historical tattoos...
dates... that i keep close to me
from my time in the pedagogy meat-mincer
effort... how it began with the romans: per se...
later began with hastings 1066...
but it would never begin with:
the first battle of Tannenberg (1410)...
so you don't know how i think my mother
is exaggerating?
it's a good thing she's my mother...
she can have her ******* pass...
i'd give her the same ******* pass if...
we were married for 35 years and...
she was a woman i could grow with...
otherwise? the ******* pass i reserve for
children...

i subsequently signed her will...
yes... she came round looking for a second
witness for her will being made official...
or ****** bureucratic paper...
but nonetheless official...
i didn't mention the fact that...
the two witnesses that have signed the paper:
need to be present simultaneously...
i asked her... what's my occupation?
oh... right... i'm a scribbler...
a chicken-scratcher... writer of no
guild... a writ pusher...  

but all i wanted to write was...
i'm not a fan of the haiku...
esp. the western haiku... or a maxim:
i abhor maxims...
but if you put Kant into the juicer
and you spit out the congested
categorical imperative...
and it doesn't sound like the original, should:

act only according to that maxim whereby you can,
at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.

id est:

act only according to that haiku whereby you can...
at some distant point of time,
convene for it be a shared experience
in the ratio of a 1:2 point of seperation...
2:4 4:8 8:16...
but that's not really a categorical imperative
to begin with... what sort of "idiot" would strive
for a maxim to become a universal law...
universal laws are maxim spin-offs...
or i'm just blah-blahing too much...
waiting dear god: for the razor's edge (and drowning)...
or a punchline on stage in front of a dumb / mute
audience...

o.k. 5-7-5...
syllables... given the japanese don't use
letter but have syllables instead...
again: i'm not a fan...
if it took my long enough...
i'd find my 5 syllables and my 7 and again
my 5 syllables...
but i am a westerner...
i deal with letters... i don't deal with syllables...
unless they are prefixes akin to trans-...
meta-... anti-... post-...
the western adoption of the haiku implies
the boredom achieved from too many
sonnets... is the haiku the new sonnet?

i'll try... but i'll need to open a dictionary
for this effort...

water knee deep truce (5)
to the drowning man imploring (8)
signature the soul with this last breath (9)

or however many... it's just a passing thought:
i don't know how it would be worthwhile
to think inside a box... standing outside it
to begin with...
a haiku and no punctuation:
if you're going to be puritanical about it...
no punctuation?!
no diacritical markers?!

the Kant reference is just to ease up on:
who the hell would live by a maxim,
a stand-alone maxim at that...
one maxim to make it into the realm
of gravity...

there's the plethora of aphorisms that
are observations that... well...
let's just say it's no an imitation game... (

since how the hell does:
how dignified it is, to simply take a walk at night...
all of the above?
darwinism in images:

stopped climbing trees...
stopped being furry...
stopped dreaming about snakes...
stopped fearing snakes...
stopped wrestling with tigers...
stopped king kong versus tiger gorgon...
jumped into a whale...
came out sonar Jonah with hell'io Job
to boot...
stopped climbing trees...
took toward the complexity
of climbing rocks...
esp. boulders... later desired
the great big button of a cookie i.e.;
desired the moon...
brewed some moonshine...
build the mirror corridor
at Versailles...
dug up lazy dinosaur bones of
that thick glutton splodge and...
retired the horse... drove a car...
etc. etc.: came across
the happy birthday of death by
gregory corso and said:
that be one of the best recitations
of poetry i have ever heard...
in youth and Paris and Paris was
the signature...

all of this but there's still...
how dignified it is, to simply take a walk at night...
more to the point...
how dignified it is, to walk at one's own
leisure...
a bottle of england's finest ale...
theakston's the old peculier in one hand...
a marlboro cigarette in the other...
how dignified it is...
to walk: but to also walk... at one's leisure...
not running a marathon...
not... running the concrete or the tarmac
dry with new year's even resolutions
to loße mass... (yes... since weight involves
gravity blah blah)...

this auto-correct science factoid rubric
around each corner...
i can only admit that walking...
is a sport for gentlemen...
cognitive ping pong ensues...
a solo game... perhaps...
it's not a matter of sport...
or attempting gentlemanly stature...
which could be the case...
say... if i were 75... years old...
but...

that's all fine and dandy... the psychology
behind darwinism 2.0
not even copernicus made it that far
with his "revolutionary discovery"...
or not that Ptolemy was still...
index... bibliography and historical
constipation when attempting to be
democratic and historical...
in a single poo'em... with no rhyme...
and certainly no overt-technique biases
to: "identify with"...

it's still an image burning in my head...
the gorilla that would / could wrestle
a lion to sleep with a ripped-off jaw...
the thumb-king of the jungle
and the savannah...
and of course the donning of the conquered's
mane...

but beside all the discoveries in the past
and the present...
i will find myself smirking...
laughing to myself...
that someone will find this too...
i can't stress it enough:

when i see people driving their cars...
some fast, some slow...
walking onto a bus is not a leisure activity...
it's not even a dignity...
it's a time-warp... a short-cut...
besides the point...

even this brain sometimes allow for
the dignity of walking to be eclipsed...
what its sometimes-odd bursts of egomania /
megalomania or all those other:
traits of the rational man...

perhaps this is the first day i've truly
appreciated the sensibility of walking -
much more in that: it became a dignity...
like the time i found the antithesis of narcissus
in my shadow...
once upon a nightly promenade
in the english outer-suburban labyrinth...
20 minutes walk from the fields,
grazing horses... foxes, badgers and...
no wordsworthian naturalism... i.e. the idyll...

superior intelligence, the fork,
the knife, the screwdriver the *****...
the hammer and the nail...
the scythe, the sickle and the lollipop...
the telephone the radio the television
the soap opera addicts...
the bedsheets the bed the cushion
the shampoo and soap...
all of it... but none of it at the same time...
with what comes a priori and with
what comes a posteriori...
the dignity of walking...
perhaps the only state of grace...

perhaps less "abilism" and more - upon reflection...
a mother strapped to a bed
after a hip-replacement surgery?
i.e. in a personal, very personal,
non-Teheran specific vicinity?!

perhaps the most basic meditation is required...
nothing grandiose...
nothing temporal or non-temporal...
something basic...
i.e. spatial... a meditation on cross the street
like a mindful hedgehog that you are...
and not panic driven like a mother goose
with her nursery...

walk long enough and you can even
experience bouts of spontaneous amnesia...
which is not related to actual memories
and their totality...
more in the immediacy: amnesia ex cogitans...
amnesia out of thinking...
10 minutes apart and you can almost
forget what you were thinking of...
10 minutes more pass... the labyrinth spits
you out and you recover from that temp.
bout of crucible amnesia: to forget what you
were thinking about...
which is a variant to that other escapism
of day-dreaming...
since you're walking... and no day-dreamer
is synonym of the thinker who also walks...

this variant of escapism comes of its own
accord... perhaps it's an ontological built-in-mechanism
that when you couple walking with thinking...
you'll most certainly experience these
bouts of "amnesia"... which of course doesn't
include walking in circles... but in a labyrinth
of your unconscious motives...
that the body is dissociated from a conscious will...

since... what sort of thinking exists
on a treadmill... or during running... to begin with?

how  dignified it is, to simply take a walk at night...
dignified in that: one is not so much able
to come across one's best ideas there...
but that one can simply come across... cogitans per se -

yes... i.e.: to be free from cogito ergo sum...
to come across the res cogitans medium...
only while walking...
and not like Descartes imagining oneself
sitting at a desk of doubt...

i find no better alternative: walking opens up...
thinking-in-itself... sometimes that's merely translated
as: being... it does not specify / reveal itself
as a: necessity of narration...
thinking is not narration is not thinking...
if you have experienced the ugly spontaneity of
the ego... in that vein of psychology's
three-tier meta-brain dissection of the mind:
subsequently the soul... blah blah...

now i see... this has become a sit-down meditation...
it has to end...
now that the arms have been employed for
a period longer, than the legs were employed
for, prior.

there was little badger football mad was he
and in a world cup match he just long to be
he went to brazil to see his favorite  team
and to play for them would be his only dream
he bought a football kit hoping he could play
playing for brazil would really make his day
when someone was injured they made a substitute
badger he  was called and put on his football suit
now it was his chance to see what he could do
playing for brazil his dream it had come true
badge scored a goal just before the end
and into the lead the badgers goal did send
they ended up the winners the crowd began to roar
brazil had won the cup and were champs once more
badger he was happy and enjoyed his day
and thanked his favourite team for allowing him to play

Let me tell you about something I saw the other day,
when I was out walking through a field of hay.
The night was quite pretty, the air crisp and clear,
when I suddenly encountered a cat who was drinking a beer!
I walked a little farther and encountered some mice,
sitting around a card table, all playing dice.
The mice looked quite serious, they all dressed like thugs,
I was dumbfounded, and simply stared down from above.
Then I saw something that completely blew my mind,
it was a variety of animals, dancing in a conga line.
For hours and hours and hours they danced,
more animals joined in, even deer came to prance.
This party was larger than any I’d seen,
a couple of badgers were even smoking something green.
“Innocent” deer were snorting lines off of snakes,
and a couple drunk farm dogs were fighting with rakes.
A cat and a mouse were sitting in a barn,
entirely too drunk, they took turn telling yarns.
From across the field, you could hear an owl retch,
while a gaggle of geese slurred “Benny and the Jets.”
Sheep laughed, “Bahaha!” while dancing on tables,
the horses were getting it on in the stables.
This party was crazier than any I’d attended,
a pig even ended up losing an appendage.
As the sun came up, things started winding down,
all the cows went home, and the "Keg King" took off his crown.
I took this as my cue, it was time to depart,
so a couple mice and I hitched a ride on a farmer’s cart.
"Sayonara!" I yelled, "It's been lots of fun!
Everybody get home safe, try not to hurt anyone!"
But enough about me, let's talk about you.
That was my weekend, what did you do?

Accountants hover over the earth like helicopters,
Dropping bits of paper engraved with Hegel's name.
Badgers carry the papers on their fur
To their den, where the entire family dies in the night.

A chorus girl stands for hours behind her curtains
Looking out at the street.
In a window of a trucking service
There is a branch painted white.
A stuffed baby alligator grips that branch tightly
To keep away from the dry leaves on the floor.

The honeycomb at night has strange dreams:
Small black trains going round and round--
Old warships drowning in the raindrop.

there was a little badger he was adventure bound
he built himself a boat from a log upon the ground
he packed a little case with things that he might need
and took along some food so he could have a feed
setting out to sea he set himself afloat
out in the deep blue sea in his little boat
underneath the sun on summers day
badger he was happy as he sailed away
he came across an island with a big palm tree
then got a little nearer so that he could see
he walked along the sand of the island shore
a place that he had found and never been before
suddenly he saw a dolphin near by
he looked very sad and began to cry
badger asked the dolphin was there something wrong
i have been washed up  he said the tide was far to strong
badger he was clever and got his little boat
then he towed the dolphin and set him back afloat
dolphin he was happy he was back at sea
he could swim again now that he was free
dolphin thanked the badger and both sailed away
now they are still friends to this very day

‘Twas the start of March Madness,
And all through the land,
People sat by the TV
With pencils in hand.

The committee had chosen the teams with great care
And everyone hoped their Alma Mater was there.
The teams were selected and placed into regions
With top seeds rewarded for having good seasons.

Badger fans from Wisconsin were
All dressed in Red
With Final Four visions
Dancing  ‘round in their heads.

Kentucky fans claimed
(As they most always do)
The Championship would go
To their Wildcats in blue.

The Blue Devils from Durham
Were also quite hot
And the Duke fans were certain
They would win the top spot.

‘Nova fans were excited; their hopes are alive!
Remember the upset?  1985
An 8-seed back then, this year they're a One!
Villanova Wildcat fans are sure to have fun! xxxxxxx already done.

Now the ‘play-ins’ are over.
But I’m not sure who won
Doesn't matter, the winner
Will be trounced by a One.

I, with cold beer and my bracket,
Settle down in a chair
I’ve picked all the games
Now I’ll see how they fare.

Now Badgers, Now Boilers,
Now Hawkeyes and Bucks,
On Hoosiers, On Hoyas,
On Shockers, and Ducks
Go Flyers, Go Sooners, Come On Musketeers!
Go Cardinals, Go Cowboys….   Gonna need some more beers.

Then all of a sudden arose such a clatter
On the tube Sir Charles was starting to chatter.
“I’m the Round Mound of Rebound, - there’s no one like me!”
“Watch all my commercials, NCAA on TV!”

From Thursday through Sunday
On to Sweet Sixteen,
Elite Eight, Final Four and
All the games in between.
The nation is watching from East Coast to West
Which of the 60+ teams will be best.
With OTs and upsets and a blowout or two,
I am glued to the TV and
I’ll bet so are you.

I closed my eyes for a second, and then fell asleep

But was quickly awakened by my doorbell's loud beep,

And what, to my wondering eyes should appear?

But Sir Charles himself;
 And he asks for a beer!

"I'm not a role model, I just like to dunk.

I took a look at your bracket, and
Most all your picks stunk!"
I turned to ask him to fix it,
But he'd disappeared.
Yes, Sir Charles was gone,

And so was my beer!

Now my bracket is busted,
I’m all out of beer
Merry Madness to all,
I will see you next year!

"A Visit from St. Nicholas", also known as "The Night Before Christmas" and " ' Twas the Night Before Christmas" from its first line, is a poem first published anonymously in 1823, and later attributed to Clement Clarke Moore, who acknowledged authorship in 1837.   from Wikipedia.

Unfortunately, Mr. Moore never had the chance to experience March Madness.  :-)

TB or not TB!
Is it in the badgers?
That is the question.
Whether 'tis noticed
elsewhere - slurry perchance.
As they shuffle off the coils
of barbed wire or dodge  the
slings and arrows of culler’s  slaughter
for outrageous fortune,
who for them will take up arms
with a see  of dissidents
and by opposing
end the heart-ache, the
thousand natural shocks
their setts are heir to?
'Tis a consummation
devoutly to be wish'd.

William  Spearshake

i like to watch the badgers strolling through the night

such a lovely creature with stripes of black and white

underneath the moon looking for a treat

something nice and tasty that he loves to eat.



roaming through the fields the hunter of the night

such a lovely creature such a lovely site

i just love to watch them it brings joy to me

just to see the badger with there life so free.

On a great mountainside, a beautiful river ran, reaching all creatures across the great expanse. Glowing crystal and clear as the fresh alpine air, the water ran, as yet undiscovered and unmarred by civilization. It knew not of the impurities that other waters knew, free from the grasp of humanity and completely pure in it's design. Each spring as the snow melted, the river would charge through the forges and ravines, reshaping the ground in it's wake, changing the surface of the mountain in it's path. Stones would tumble and trees would crack under the raw power of it's force, as it gained in size and speed over the spring months. This spring however, it met upon a larger rock, seemingly a boulder. "Ha," thought the river, as it began growing rapidly, the melting snow empowering it as it crashed into the boulder, slightly changing course and returning to it's usual path. "I will be back soon." The river promised. As summer grew nearer and the sun seemed to burst from it's cloudy shield of winter, it began to show more steadily and with a greater heat than it had in springtime past. The blazing sun caused avalanches as it bore into the icy crust of the mountain top. The river suddenly felt something new, something changing, it was surely larger and more powerful than it had been in previous months, and as it charged down the mountain, it was sure of it's victory upon the great boulder. "Surely now this rock will not remain unmoved!" exclaimed the river as it flooded down the ravine, in search of the unchanging obstruction of mineral. The sun's rays had created an avalanche, dumping hundreds of tons of ice into the rushing river, melting the snow and creating a great roar as the river grew abruptly to 3 and 4 times it's previous size. As the river grew it felt a giant to all the objects on the mountain, proud and sure of it's eminent victory over the great boulder in it's way. As the water gained momentum and seeming to contain all of it's new fury in the roaring flood just for the great rock. A sleeping rock awoke suddenly to a roar and a crack as it heard many smaller boulders tumbling into the trees nearby, and the rumbling river rushing straight for him. "Aww, thought the old stone, yawning. "This will surely be interesting." As the rushing water advanced upon the rock, it had no idea what was to become of it's proud and boastful ways. Rushing water carrying all types and sizes of large rock and debris smashed into the great stone with all of it's might. The rock was unmoved. Little did the river know, this stone was rooted deep, a branch of mineral deposit coming from the very core of the mountain itself. The river had no chance. At the impact the water and debris scattered, and the river, suddenly defeated, splashed against the side of the rock and continued its usual path of the many years before. As it continued on, it felt something moving, carrying itself somewhere else, like someone or thing was pulling part of it away from itself, and it roared in agony, sending more boulders to crack into the trees nearby. Alive and kicking, and carrying it's own cry came a beautiful new stream caressing the side of a great stone in it's beginning, almost as if to thank it for it's place in giving birth to the new life. "You are welcome." Spoke the stone, supporting the stream in it's new path, as the water began to run fresh and new across the bare ground. The stream seemed to caress everything it came across, the roots of the plants and trees feeling thankful for a new source of water. Although the smallest seedlings would be lost in the stream, it was a good sacrifice to make for a source of that precious water so generously given to the side of the mountain with the large river. As the stream carried on, moving pine cones and pine needles aside, it brought new nourishment to all the life of the dry side of the mountain. As a small child just learning to walk, running to meet new people and see all the new things, experience the new life, the river ran. It glanced upon the tall oaks and the thinner pines and the smaller saplings. It rushed to meet the squirrel, carrying with it acorns fallen on the ground higher on the hill. It ran to bring uprooted fresh seedlings to the young deer. It brought with it fallen nuts and berries and left them near the bear's den. It brought freshly dropped dry twigs and branches to the wary ******, hunting for a new home. It brought with it pine needles and dropped them next to the trees with sparrows and blue birds hopping about for new materials to strengthen their nests. The stream ran free, bringing gifts to all it met with and inviting all to join it in it's path. The young of the forest gathered together, foxes and rabbits and badgers alike, to join the small stream in its journey down the mountain. Never carrying too much water as to uproot or change the surface of it's new found paradise, the stream was grateful to be a part of the dry side of the mountain, and that side of the mountain was never so dry. That side of the mountain never knew the fear of falling rocks or boulders. It never knew the fear of the flood of spring. It flourished with new life and greenery as it became privy to the little stream's side of the mountain to live happily without fear of flood or the dangers it brought. Each new day more bushes and saplings followed the little stream . The animals began to move from the great river's side of the mountain to the little stream's side. The river became lonely in it's wrathful wake, having only the rocks and logs it carried along as it's companion. Even the trees were scared to grow near it's threatening wrath. Loved by all and continually becoming the renown of the mountain, the little stream never knew such hardships. Such is why a little stream can be more changing than a great roaring river. To be feared by all or to be loved by all, is in the makings of every gaining current. The little stream never grew much larger than a dear's jump or a squirrel's leap. Except in the hearts of the lives around it. May we all be as little streams, not hungering to change the surface of our world, or to be feared. May we all live as the one who embraces all the forms we meet, being grateful for our own place among them. Then may we know what it is to live among many and loved by all. Then may we never know fear, or lose ourselves to a great boulder. May we change with the small movements of the ground beneath our feet, and carry with us gifts to all those we meet. May we be mightier in the heart than in the mind, leaving our hunger behind. May the little stream meet us too, and may we hear it's message clearly.

there going to cull the badgers the creatures of the night
reducing all there numbers take them out of sight.

they say  they spread diseases to cattle in the field
now the badgers fate is well and truly sealed.

it seems such a shame to **** them all that way
why cant they find another place and let the badgers stay

i love to watch the badgers roaming round at night
with there furry coats of colours black and white
walking through the fields neath a moon so bright
this lovely  thing of nature brings me such delight
i sit and watch for hours till the break of day
and watch them disappear as they  slowly walk away

"There are animals in the road"
the traffic reporter said
"We're not told what they are
find another route instead"

And so I got to wondering
though I wasn't going that way
what the mystery beasties were
that were on the road that day

Were they a herd of wildebeeste
who took a wrong turn on the veldt
or perhaps a wayward mule train
delivering some sacks of spelt

Maybe a team of trainee reindeer
diverted from the North Pole
or a bunch of llamas from Peru
that fell through a wormhole

Or bears, or wolves, or lions
could be zebras or kangaroos
surely not beached aquatic mammals
or elephants trumpeting the blues

Exotic beasts seemed unlikely though
it was more likely cattle or sheep
though it could have been migrating badgers
moving goalposts somewhere safe to keep

Cynthia Pauline Jones, 27/10/13

there going to cull the badgers the creatures of the night
reducing all there numbers take them out of sight
they say  they spread diseases to cattle in the field
now the badgers fate is well and truly sealed
it seems such a shame **** them all that way
why cant they find another place and let the badgers stay

there was a little badger  adventure bound was he
he built himself a boat from a fallen tree
he packed a little case with things that he might need
and took along some food so he could have a feed.

setting out to sea he set himself afloat
out in the deep blue sea in his little boat
underneath the sun on summers day
badger he was happy as he sailed away.

he came across an island with a big palm tree
then got a little nearer so that he could see
he walked along the sand of the island shore
a place that he had found and never been before.

suddenly he saw a dolphin near by
he looked very sad and began to cry
badger asked the dolphin was there something wrong
i have been washed up  he said the tide was far to strong.

badger he was clever and got his little boat
then he towed the dolphin and set him back afloat
dolphin he was happy he was back at sea
he could swim again now that he was free.
,
dolphin thanked the badger and both sailed away
now they are still friends to this very day

.i do expect you to become lost in this labyrinth - at least that's what i'd rather say - sleep-deprivation is for "some" reason to escape the mediocre of having catched the "8 hour wink"... or whatever the Minotaur wouldn't call it... because i wouldn't call it a "problem" of "gender-neutral pronouns" either... i would call it a "problem" of noun-acquisition-status of letters; notably in greek and hebrew.

friends of "the" family have been looking
for on fb,
****... the caron S (š) will not do!
i need to use two alphabets that...
did not nurture yiddish into existence!
cyrillic didn't accept hebrew...
it'll have to do...
it wouldn't be enough to simply write
my name in cyrillic...
and no... in hebrew no less!
since the vowels are hidden...
and inserting the proper hebrew vowel...
it still wouldn't matter that...
my surname is missing... the galician germanic
e(ch)lert or the e(sch)lert...
no... but how is one to insert
the right kind of vowel: all in hebrew niqab
harem of diacritical markers subscript...
when... you don't have...
enough letters as nouns as scientific
constants as the greeks... do...
i guess only η (eta) stands out as a sore thumb /
black sheep... but i am bound to be wrong,
in the meantime:
well it's hardly a letter-with-a-noun
inclined akin to alpha (α) -
otherwise all is well...
we use the prefix prime (the grammaton per se)...
and discard the suffix when constructing words...
ergo? a-lpha...
and so an so forth...
till be arrive at...
blasting your ears nearing deafness because:
beethoven's mrs. H is:
music so you have to shout over it!
loud! what?! loud music!
loud music what?! loud music
to shun the "pain"...
oh... see you in one of those classes
when you can write sign-language for the dead
when you've been allowed to write braille!
see you sputnik ****!
yeah, see you deaf in one year divine John!
but you get the promise that's:
not your everyday latin castrato sing-along...
those greeks sure have all the best
science... stabilizers... not a lot of songs
to sing along to... because their letters
are also noun-status: also have noun-status...
otherwise the ol' prefix use...
and the suffix recycling centre...
a word like: matter...
well...
   ματτερ - no... i will not use the greek word...
i'll state... mmm... hm!
mu implies m- and cutting off the -u...
alpha implies a- and cutting off the -lpha
tau implies t- and cutting off the -au...
epsilon implies e- and cutting off the -psilon
rho implies r- and cutting off the -**...
and so... we have the word matter...
and the recycled materials for...
some other words...

hebrews? hebrews do have... noun-status letters...
(א) aleph - what's vogue?
inserting the iota into the omicron that's
the marriage: φ (phi)...
or whether it's the turning of the iota in
the omicron to provide the opening of the door
θ (theta) to see: that light at the end of the tunnel
delta (Δ)... again... it's only aleph we're "investigating"...

the other letter in hebrew with a noun-status?
(ג) g'imel...
another is (ד) d'alet...
(ז) z'ayin...
(ל) l'amed...
(ס) s'amekh... most certainly (ע) a'yin...
(צ) t'sadi...

interlude: what is the distance
between (א) a'leph and (ע) a'yin?
a kametz...

now we can "debate" - noun-status letters...
the greeks are in the same sort of pickle
as the hebrews...
there can be a debate whether...
the greeks have more than:
alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, iota,
lambda, omicron, sigma, upsilon, omega
as noun-status letters...

why? because it becomes silly...
(ק) qof and (κ) kappa...
(ר) resh and rho (ρ)...
(שׁ) and... well... to be honest...
that's heading into cyrillic territory...
and the caron S (ш)...
given (ס) samekh and sigma (σ)...

this always happens to me when i come
across a hebrew...
even if he's old and riddled with dementia...
i see him with his polish bride
and i see a "romanian gypsy"...
the feeling is... strange...
this hebrew is like an old cousin of mine...
but it's always a touch of magic...

i am not good at solving crosswords...
(כ) 'xaf' and chi (χ) -
perhaps i have exagerrated the letter-as-noun
status on some of this greek and hebrew...
tightly-knit bed-fellows...
as the boasting resounds in the labyrinth
of the rise and fall of the roman empire...
and the barbarian attempts to have
settled the lands near the seven hills...
and revived the eagle...
spec-ta-cu-lar failures!

the germans should console themselves
with having a crow on their marching banners...
and polacks should...
satisfy themselves with the unicorn myth
of an all-white bald eagle... albino eagle...
and so the harry potter: minus ***** 'arry
can have their unicorns, swans,
honey-badgers, welsh dragon,
st. andrew's gryffindors... etc. -

name, a name... i need to... change it...
obviously...
no hebrew vowels will be used...
since... their use... is devoid of what's already
concrete usage of diacritical markers
in established letters...
if cyrillic and hebrew is to be used...
and not greek and hebrew:
because... well thank you for the new testament
riddle... let's move... away...
to "greater" / other... things....

i can't use a kametz alpha
a tzere epsilon
a chirek iota
a cholem omicron
or a shurek upsilon (omega)...
so all the vowels will have to by cyrillic...

my... latin, name?
mateusz konrad... let's drop the surname...
let's call it a game of:
ibn... or ben... matthew son of konrad...
and since i don't have a... confirmation name...
what name? i would have chosen: Isidore...
after the saint of seville...
or... Ignatius (of Loyola) -
the only fun part of going to a catholic school
was... learning about the counter-reformation
and writing an essay about it...
and their library was decently stacked...
so... plus plus...

this is but a simple exercise...
first the name in cyrillic...
there will not be a full name in hebrew...
which i'll probably lace with greek...
and it will still make all the more perfect
sense... should it be transliterated back
into anglo-ßaß...
yeah: why i don't have a girlfriend...
with these sort of interests?
i guess an hour with a *******
once a year is enough for me...
and for womankind in the hospice of omni...

just following the laziness
of the russian visa authorities are the embassy...
they didn't translate mateusz into matvei
or konrad into: Дракон...
мат-вей...

these are the sort of idiotic tier-1 level
кaцaпс... working in the russian embassy in Loon'don...

because i was never going to be the матвей
who'd **** an илoнa like the 300 deadly mongrel
saracren mameluks or the spartans... no...
i counter the 7 headed beast on her
with every ****** in that one night
i was making my final goodbyes...
but keeping the mikhail bulgakov novel...
through a repose in Warsaw and...
i finished what, "apparently" i wasn't supposed
to finish...

and she is one of those troubled girls...
every ****** partner that meant anything to her...
she will have a tattoo of that lover
on her body... i know my place on her body...
it's on the right shoulder-blade...
the tattoo is of a dragon...
i know because i've met girls like her...
elsewhere...

even as i was being driven home after taking
my mother for her rheumatoid arthritis check-up,
blood test, x-ray... and the pakistani cab-driver
was talking about all the precautions he needs
these days: video ahead of the bonet for insurance
policy... a camera looking in...
and audio recording on his smartwatch...
because what he said... didn't surprise me...
i once picked up a spanish girl - Tamara in a club...
and she decided to take me home
for a one night stand...
as we were approaching the house she was
sharing with three homosexuals
she decided to jump out of the cab...
and make a runner... i calmed the cabbie:
i'll pay for it...
we tried to later **** the hetreosexual way
with her calling me angel because
of my "erectile dysfunction" under the bed sheets
in that putrid smoke of cocoon ***...
like the birth of a rancid moth embryo and
choking from the heat of dust and alcohol
and... what i am alluding to is that some girls
do jump out of cabs to avoid paying the fair...
i knew what the pakistani cabbie was saying...
she owed him 40 quid...
he filed the whole thing to the police...
she accused him of ****** assault...
the story would have fit...
she run from the cab when he tried to sexually
assault her... but... he did have
that audio recording from his smartwatch...
in the end the girl was fined 700 quid...
which is nothing... compared to...
what's that called in h'america? a false accusation?
slander?
i know that girls jump out of cabs...
to avoid paying the fare...
i drove with one... who did just that...
i guess she was so used to this act that she
forgot i was sitting next to her...

- all the *****... but then all the chem-soup
post-psychiatric *******?
the ***** i can stand...
the pills are just tasmanian devilish when
it comes to catching the perfect
battery insomnia recharge...
and always meeting and respecting
the elder of the group darwinistic:
prat pact... a hebrew...
there always needs to be a yew
a *** in the equation...
no... not some english society
uncle tom worth of a high society rabbi...
i mean a jew that will support
west ham... because...
it's an irrational team...
it can fathom beating chelsea (A)...
but then... "forget" to win against...
for god's sake! Norwich (H)!

i know! i know! joseph conrad took his place!
here's my part anagram!
Mатвей Дракон...

the near non-existent diacritical presence
in the english language...
well... no "surprise surprise" if...
you're starting with
и (i) or rather (ı)...
and what's being the flock of salmon
up the river, being caught?
the j but not (ȷ)... imagine my... "surprise"
that the russians arrived at...
и and ı - in tow... ȷ and the й...
the breve...
parabolla or... my eyes only see
the microscopic details when someone
will simply slurr?

- borrowing from yesterday and...
in the early night of winter standing
in the garden with four potatoes
and something else...
looking up at the sky...
i am used to seeing unusual "things"
in the sky -
i'm not unusual when it comes
to having seen a u.f.o. - fluorescent
and squid like in colour -
but i'm also the sort of person that
would carry a few beers for such
spontaneous encounters -
rather running around like a raving
lunatic armed with a camera
filming the whole thing...
i have no proof: i hope my words are enough...
and if they're not?
well... if it can be seen with a naked eye -
i don't need to blink via a technological
feed and argue about: quality of the picture...

but even i wasn't ready for...
what i saw today...
those are roaming stars? aren't they?
and i really did forget to count how
many moved in the same direction
askew - one by one with equal distance
between them - before the distance between
extended - there must have been more than
10 - i'd say there were around 20!

is this always how things are -
when one contemplates the tetragrammaton?

part anagram? well because the russian
do have a version of the hebrew matisyahu...
but they do not have the german conrad
in their language...
probably as to why the germans do not
really have... a yuri or nikita in their language...
nikita after all sounds more feminine than
masculine - anyone could with hindsight
speak of mr. rocketman's lover of
the same same... as not some russian beau
example of the fairer ***...
but a comrade khrushchev...

- and why wouldn't i call those russians
that work in the russian embassy in Loon'don
кaцaпы? for one... they just type letter for letter:
a mateusz / a matthew is a мaтэусз...
for all "legal" purposes...
they already have the сз = ш...
bureucratic purposes...
and no wonder some are like:
how do you say that?
too many consonants some add...
and i really did think that all of us were
allowed to be fully literate...
that's not the case... blowing my own horn...

having a wet ***** over: because i like my given
names... perhaps that's why i didn't want
the confirmation option of being allowed
to change any of my given names: legally...
to one of my own chosing...
when i was 15 / 14 i didn't even known
or think about a name like Isidore...

when the german name became coupled
with a hebrew loan...
otherwise the russian with the first
being an anagram... drakon -
Mатвей Дракон - it's just a name -
it's my name - what's in a name is what's
precisely not in anonymous names
.666 handles and avatars on the internet...
i can own my face - and i can own my name...
because - i kind of like it...

again: on in russian can the west slavic
C be distinguished from the K... Ц -
and back into the cyst of the western lands...
Ç or what came with sigma's tail...
it's so... boring... to have less the different
sounding letters - given no diacritical markers -
and only the "exotica" of spelling -
all the metaphysics in the world combined
and concentrated in greenwich...
but no real orthography...
i could begin the day by bemoaning this poverty
of the english language...
oddly enough as both the outsider coming in...
the immigrant who became a citizen...
and as the insider coming out and coming in
again on that expatriate spectrum of
working from the thesaurus: IMMIGRANT...
for all the beauty of Macbeth...
i can have to ruse myself to bemoan
conventional english... the formal english...
the antithesis poetica...

but i do somewhat "know" why it's called
a tetragrammaton...
i wouldn't classify any of the letters that make it up
as noun-worthy letters...
the kametz (a) and the tzere (e) are nouns...
and letters... but you don't see them when
the hebrew doesn't exfoliate and is left
crude with "missing vowels" for the gentiles
to read...
saying that... calling ה (he) a noun is pushing it...
as is calling ו (vav) a noun...
or י (yod) - although...
the yod could be allowed a noun-status
as... an apostrophe... or a version of the caron -
but the remaining letters of the tetragrammaton...
are "syllables" in that they are consonants...
and when the tetragrammaton comes face
to face with noun-status letters of its own
universe: g (ג) gimel, d (ד) dalet, z (ז) zayin -
l (ל) lamed, s (ס) samekh, ц (צ) tsadi -
resh? shin? the gates are open to allow the question
in... but when...
there's also siamese Adams aleph (א) and Ayin (ע)
being and nothingness respectively...

what could Islam possibly offer me...
intellectually?
when i once asked a muslim what...

alif, lam, meem                                      meant...
he replied... only god knows...
so i thought... only god?
i must have been talking to one of those muslims
who have arabic overlords...
before they can catch a whiff of the almighty
blah'llah...
ا, لَـ, مَـ
again... greek only touches upon...
the initial - the medial and the final
version of sigma...
isolated you would see the capital sigma...
Σ - which could also be treated as the initial
letter - given that the σ looks more like a medial
form - although it's also initial -
whereby ς is the final form -
almost like the english: 's... apostrophe s -
which could be claimed to be an article of possession...
or the plural article when the apostrophe
disappears - or when the ς altogether disappears
when: the possession is plural:
a teachers' strike... e.g.

no not with a fatha - we have our own diacritical
markers... thank you...
but good question...
so... why is the meem written in an isolated
form in the word - yawm (day)...
but not in a final form?
but i do not write in a squiggly line in this digital
arena... perhaps my language looks simply
written... oh yes, the aesthetic of the arabic script
is always stressed...
but even the hebrews think like the greeks
and the latins... in a way...
nothing has to flow in one river-wry format...
there's no isolated letter... of a letter -
as there's no initial no median and no final
form of it... but there is a "question"
of the hiding of vowels...
for gentiles and muhammadians alike...

- perhaps some will call it the trans-community...
there was once a dead poets' society...
evidently with the rise of de-transitioning...
there's now a nag hammadi library society...
circa 1945 when this library was left unchecked
in the hands of: the children
with too many toys and too many sandpits...
probably that one neu-mecca of san francissco...
at least the dead sea scrolls:
that were unearthed at about the same time...
treated the hebrew far better than
the nag hammadi library treated its children...
and why the former power, the vatican,
didn't step in... to control these text...
as they flew out on a *****-nilly without
herr zensor... herr inquisitor...
i will never know...
the scouts of medicine left... black holes
of having advanced in the field of anaesthetics...
too many toys for the the children
with too many sandpits...

- because i would rather the fascination
with a language... than its immediate...
polyglot acquisition and use...
if i put my head to it... perhaps i could
speak the 7 languages my great-grandfather spoke
before jumping into the Niagara Falls
leaving a postcard sent...
but when i peer into the details...
i quiet like these two trenches of mine...
this english this canvas and my eye toward
the east and the south and semites...
just because english is a language without
diacritical markers...
a language filled with metaphysical dialectics:
but missing any mention of orthography...

a hebrew might hide a vowel...
and write only consonants on street signs
for a gentile to read...
but then the gentiles' languages morphed...
and a vowel became distinct...
there is A that begins the word: ah-men...
but there's also an A that is invoked with a tail
to point and identify a tree, an oak:
dąb...
so much for kametz being hidden...
if there's no 2nd tier "complexity" of kametz...
but there is one for the visible...
A - vowel - a vowel with a tail...
but without a name -
as all letters are - whether vowel or consonant...
in the litany and choir of the castratos
of ancient Rome...

pause with me...
what music are you listening to?
i'm listening to... years of denial - burning sun
(veyl channel) - 1,319 views...
i like to... find the better alleys of my entertainment...
as i can't hate kevin spacey...
not because of kevin spacey...
but because of lester burnham...
or more to the point...
why thomas newman reminds me of a...
reincarnation of Satie...
not a Chopin or a Liszt virtuoso of the piano...
not a when a hammer strikes
a line of 88 nails...
but when a butterfly chances the here and there,
on a shy-loot of a beauty of scarce sounds...
just the same of nostalgia for this era of
movies borrows me from out any new
suspence... as that sort of nostalgia creeping
into people born in the 1960s who truly
admire h'american movies from the 1950s...
even i am to blame when i feed
a nostalgia - more to the point for the technicolour
acryllic glow akin to...
richard quine's 1958 bell book and candle...
but of course scandinavian existential cinema
of a Bergman would be in black and white...
black and white photographs...
but if we're talking movies?
Undogmatic & Kernfeld - thought experiments...
Amanti d'oltretomba (1965)...

i will have to refine the greek to hebrew to greek
similarities...
an Ezra Pound can hide behind counting
matchsticks and reading into chinese ideograms...
when lo and behold! some japanese *******
comes up with a minimalism of the on'yomi...
or perhaps japanese is a language
that fuses elements of braille?
no point question the matter since
the mongols famously didn't come over to Japan
to add to the already Mandarin caste of
the kun'yomi...

but no... these greek letters are nouns...
even though π is equivalent to understanding
the wheel a posteriori: as a circle -
prior to there was only a wheel but no
knowledge of the dynamic of the radius,
or the diameter...
but it's still a prefix weak hardly a noun...
alpha and beta are nouns because they
denote something - prefix category shared -
but... the alpha and the beta male...
even gamma rays...
what's that? π-networks of coming back
to point (0, 0) in terms of:
no more than three powers of seperation between
you and some random from hugh yawn'khh?
my bad...
but η, μ, ν, ξ, π, ρ (ρ requires delta epsilon
and sigma to imply island of Rhodes)...
τ - but this is not China and tau is not Tao...
to tow is... to tow...
φ, χ, ψ... these could be names...
but ψ is like a crucifix for psychologists...
so these are... but at the same time:
are not names...
working from Latin, "borrowed"...
A (or aye)... B (queen bee)... C (i çee)...
D (dye or dry or d.i.y.)... E (eh? vowel catcher
arm no. 1 of the tetragrammaton)...
surd if the other arm... most notably in gujarati...
or not...
but this leftoever ancient Latin:
                                sing along! sing along!
a, be, cee, dee, e, ef, gee, h "hatch" / hay,
i, jay, kay, em, en, o, ***, que queue cue,
Ar, Tee, U, Vee, ekhs (x), why (y), zee or general Zod /
Zed... etc.
do i remember the "correct", french pedagogic
sequences of: letters of the alphabet?
i thought the whole "game" was about
the lexicon? and the lexicon within the lexicon
of the correct spelling?
are there 26 letters in the english alphabet?
there are! mein gott!
do i have to monkey-play-me-harmonica -
monkey-play-me-the-acordeon and tap to play
the drums... really? now?!
there were never going to be any alphabetical
sequence of events...
if i can remember that there are 26 letters:
the order of the pedagogues doesn't matter...
the lexicon matters... one's own vo(gue)-ca-bu-Larry...
short of Lawrence...
and shouldn't i give up my Lawrence Vogue...
i will certainly to remember to give
the "correct" order of what begins
with abc- and ends with -xyz...
this is the inbetween...
please see fit to spot a sparrow or a typo...

becuase if the british are to be proud of their past...
proud in the sense that it is...
fermenting and all this decline of the west "thing"...
of the people that has to "somehow" welcome
a revival... кaцaпы (plural of кaцaп)
is a racial slurr - designated for russians...
by those who had a pseudo-isarel interlude...
of what was known as the polish-lithuanian
commonwealth - of the last european pagans -
who didn't become the prussians
and made the bavarian spirit rigid
and militaristic...

i find this part of history... rather... infantile...
i have been taught a version of history
through the lense of infantalism...
perhaps science-fiction was the serious medium
of literature after all -
all of the past - if it is to be called a past -
is prescribed by zeitgeist -
my contemporaries' suggestion to be an infatile dream!
it must be a version of infantilism!
at least: that's my response in relation to:
the past having any aspect of being worth
celebrated...
me struck dumb being coerced by a...
genetic archieology of a past...
what some of the current people invest in...
mirror mirror: on no wall beside
mirror mirror: my face...
speculum speculum: well! there's always history
as etymology!
i don't like the word faciem...
where does visage come from?
oh... right...

quest to perfect the algorithms to escape
the everyday speculum was prime suspicion:
to speculate...
i guess any search engines requires:
etymological root...

mirror mirror: my void eating face...
my pulpit of vanity -
my valley of aeons...
my detail of the smirk the demonic glee...
of your most greyish glee...
of no concern for celebrated beauty...
or at best: no beauty to be exemplified
and stealing memory having invested
in the memory of cinema...
mirare mirare: comesse vacare visage meum...

now that's rather different...
isn't it? a history lesson with...
a stress for a post-scriptum in-and-out
"epilogues" (misnomer) and a return
from the trivia interlude back into the narrative...
only with an understudy of etymology...

who do i look like? some ******* ***
who would use such a ***** word as epistemology?
"epilogue" is a misnomer in the context when...
there was never a justifiable metaphor...
a misnomer is a metaphor:
for the **** by the ocean of the shore
in the vicinity to claim town status - Dover -
albino cliffs: more or less...
epistemology is a word most frequently used
by people... who read to people...
encyclopedic entries... cyclopes reading...
all that matters is the cwowd: which is the Velsh
variation of: that already numb-R lost trill
of tarantula bit anglo-ßaß...
which didn't require zeppelins or h'american
spaghetti accent westerns of draw and drule
and drawl...

such a minor racial slur when it comes
to the russians... soviets or red barons...
you must have never visited Moscow or St. Petersburg...
**** the right sort of ******-up russian girl...
and... if you're lucky!
she's take you to... the russian versailles!
Peterhof -
the racial slur stills remains...
a thank you matka rosiya...
satellite son over 'ere: the bellowing from Berlin
is like a sudden plague of hyenas attempting...
no... the foxes are imitating the hyenas...
which is which or rather: which is why?
a mutual agreement: reciprocated...
a great a great much decent ****...
for both of us...
the memory still feeds me...
oh no, it doesn't haunt me:
it feeds me... i could only find replicas
in brothels... i would never dare usurp
this catherine this tsarina of my memory...
i would never dare invest my personality in someone
else... she can be married her... 3rd time...
and this might be her 10th repentence...
of an 11th lover...
on this sinking ship: Potemkin i go as one -
reincarnation or no...
i still don't believe: this hindu myth of:
only a fixed number of people were every to be
born... and the rest are the harsh realities
of the base focuses of animals...
as we somehow drag these n.p.c. mysterions with
us... whether strangers or fathers or mothers...
are you not attached to your grandson:
dearest "catherine"?

such is the tyrany of the hindu polygamy
trans-temporal polytheism...
a diadem with a mouth for an eye...
and an eye for a mouth: or what better way
to salvage this grief of being only being 20 and 21
when having met and having to vow to
allow ourselves our each his and her seperate
lives...
at least some people call it:
the house of lords... and the house of commons...
on a much grander scale...
oh i'm pretty sure tsar (ras)Putin is much amused...

as i am now speaking with a borrowed tongue:
someone lent me a tongue -
i desired to speak with it -
imagine this complete lack of horror with regards
to being lent -
when reicarnation comes to the fore...
i agree: with "him": a most disagreeable
metaphor for... whatever it is the hindus truly believe
to be: the most humane form of
being allowed a human: self-consciousness
and a relationship to all those teenage
*****-dear-diary entries of... precursors
to the menapause and... the blue blood gremlins
of the big pharma pills-down...
the big pharma *******...

unless asked... always in uniform before your "majesty"...
as with any decent *******...
god forbid one of them thinks i'm jesus christ...
come back...
but never with these... grey-area maidens...
this "tool" will not be aroused
on the simple signature end contract promise
of: he made it to the finish line of a one-night stand!
where's the finish line of a one-night stand?
the next day? the *******, the *******...
her ******? at least the new generation
have the... cipher password for sexting...
or whatever has become of a good old fashioned
**** your brains out?
via you **** a plum sore tattoo into my pelvis
with your coccyx like a well balanced
african body of ivory beauty?!
you know the type... it looks like butter
in moonlight... like... what's the point of a niqab
in africa?! it's already... a warewolf has come
among the wolves...
and how i miss you, i esp. miss you when
i sit on my windowsill and listen to foxes
mating...
how those ******* squeal yank and bite nothing
but bone having omitted both the flesh
and the fur!
i miss you the most when i sit at night -
and listen to foxes mating;
after all... this is essex... this is england...
foxes at around 1am are my cognac...
beside ms. amber: and you know you'll also
be ******* her when i've had my fill...
but oooh... look at me: oooh...
gravy...
but i've watched! crows don't attempt fucky-fucky
tow-dollar sucky-sucky bangkokh style
during the die... all that is black that's worth
the crow is done in the night...
perverted pigeons during the day!
****-*******-me-into-a-voyeurism of their
greedy insect esque antics of coo coo...
then jump onto the rucksack of a female...
and all those beta-male pigeons... and that: huh?!
moment of bewilderement when he "thinks"
he has cooed like an alpha...
only the memory of you...
and all the prostitutes after you...
which always made imagining ******* you again
all that more simple; there was no кaкaшкa
with them to begin with.

Mining we do
for survival and art..
repeating processes
both ancient and modern..
beginnings are quiet
seeded by necessity..
badgers dig holes
earthen tunnels and paths
powerful digging discoveries
sustaining of life..
coal miners diggings
dark labor below
planting cities above..
data mining
a technology
new in our time
computer's patterns emerging
never before seen..
startling creation
of many new
wholes...

When midnight comes a host of dogs and men
Go out and track the badger to his den,
And put a sack within the hole, and lie
Till the old grunting badger passes by.
He comes an hears—they let the strongest loose.
The old fox gears the noise and drops the goose.
The poacher shoots and hurries from the cry,
And the old hare half wounded buzzes by.
They get a forked stick to bear him down
And clap the dogs and take him to the town,
And bait him all the day with many dogs,
And laugh and shout and fright the scampering hogs.
He runs along and bites at all he meets:
They shout and hollo down the noisy streets.

He turns about to face the loud uproar
And drives the rebels to their very door.
The frequent stone is hurled where’er they go;
When badgers fight, then everyone’s a foe.
The dogs are clapped and urged to join the fray’
The badger turns and drives them all away.
Though scarcely half as big, demure and small,
He fights with dogs for hours and beats them all.
The heavy mastiff, savage in the fray,
Lies down and licks his feet and turns away.
The bulldog knows his match and waxes cold,
The badger grins and never leaves his hold.
He drives the crowd and follows at their heels
And bites them through—the drunkard swears and reels

The frighted women take the boys away,
The blackguard laughs and hurries on the fray.
He tries to reach the woods, and awkward race,
But sticks and cudgels quickly stop the chase.
He turns again and drives the noisy crowd
And beats the many dogs in noises loud.
He drives away and beats them every one,
And then they loose them all and set them on.
He falls as dead and kicked by boys and men,
Then starts and grins and drives the crowd again;
Till kicked and torn and beaten out he lies
And leaves his hold and crackles, groans, and dies.

there was a little badger he was rather bored
so he booked a trip a holiday abroad
he packed up his case and surf board too
surfing on the waves he just loved to do.

he boarded on a plane looking for some fun
headed for hawaii go surfing in the sun
he reached his destination  to begin his holiday
headed for the beach to surf along the bay.

carrying his surf board he headed for the sea
feeling very happy as happy as can be
he began to surf on the waves so high
people stood and watched as they were passing by
doing lots of tricks a clever chap was he
somersaults and turns for everyone to see

people were amazed at the badgers skill
to watch him surf the waves gave them such as thrill
badger he was happy and enjoyed his fun
surfing on the waves in this land of sea and sun.

Do you remember the night Abraham first saw
The stars? He cried to Saturn: "You are my Lord!"
How happy he was! When he saw the Dawn Star,

He cried, ""You are my Lord!" How destroyed he was
When he watched them set. Friends, he is like us:
We take as our Lord the stars that go down.

We are faithful companions to the unfaithful stars.
We are diggers, like badgers; we love to feel
The dirt flying out from behind our back claws.

And no one can convince us that mud is not
Beautiful. It is our badger soul that thinks so.
We are ready to spend the rest of our life

Walking with muddy shoes in the wet fields.
We resemble exiles in the kingdom of the serpent.
We stand in the onion fields looking up at the night.

My heart is a calm potato by day, and a weeping
Abandoned woman by night. Friend, tell me what to do,
Since I am a man in love with the setting stars.

Adrift on her very first voyage
With the sea coursing in through her bow
Lay the cruise ship, the S.S. Lumbago
There was scarcely a chance for her now
But Ahoy! On the western horizon
In a flurry of yellow and green
That ender of blight and a damsel’s delight
And he’s always on cue for his scene

It’s Sir Patrick Stewart!
And his Luxury Budgerigar!
It’s got seating for seventy people
And the service is well above par
There’s an adequate medical unit
And a modest but elegant bar
What more could a man ever dream of
In a Luxury Budgerigar?
Well…

The forests of England were burning
So the foxes escaped to the city
The badgers had taken to looting
And the squirrels had formed a committee
But who should arise from a manhole
With a confident gleam in his eye?
That destroyer of woes with a spring in his toes
And he’s quick with a witty reply…

Sir Patrick Stewart!
And his Luxury Budgerigar!
With adjustable hose pipe attachment
It’s got wheels like a feathery car
The forests were dowsed and the fauna re-housed
With a three day retreat at a spa
It’s a thing to admire and surely acquire
The Luxury Budgerigar!
But…

Susan was stricken with sorrow
Twas her darkest, most fearful hour
A spider had wrestled her out of her bath
And set up his home in the shower
But who should jump out of the wardrobe
With an innocent look on his face?
That singer of shanties, remover of *******
And first in an obstacle race

Sir Patrick Stewart!
And his Luxury Budgerigar
With a sucker for spiders and beetles
That deposits them into a jar
There’s a tiny wee restaurant to feed them
It was given a Michelin star
A remarkable thing with retractable wings
Is a Luxury Budgerigar

So if you should be in a pet shop
And you see just the critter for you
Please heed this advice: make a note of the price
Then proceed to the back of the queue
When you ask for your preference of creature
Should it whistle, slither or waddle
Do as Sir Patrick Stewart did
And opt for the Luxury model

there was a little badger he took a driving test
now from all the walking he could have a rest
he headed for centre where the test would be
hoping he would pass. and be walking free
he started up his car to take his driving route
along with his instructor who wore a fancy suit
badger he set off and he drove at his best
used his mirrors all the time so he could pass his test
instructor he was happy and told him that he passed
badger he was pleased no more walking now at last

there was a little badger a lovely chap was he
he longed to be a sailor sailing on the sea
he built himself a boat to make his dream come true
then he sailed away on the ocean blue.

he was really happy having lots of fun
sailing on the sea underneath the sun
suddenly the weather started acting strange
brewing up a storm as it began to change.

winds got really bad wrecked poor badgers boat
washed him overboard now badger was afloat
then he saw an island badger swam ashore
he was very sad his boat it was no more.

then he heard a voice coming from a tree
there he saw a parrot as friendly as can be
parrot asked the badger why he was so sad
i have lost my boat he said the only one i had.

dont worry said the parrot i know what to do
i will call my friends and build a boat for you
parrot called his friends there were quite a few
a monkey and turtle and a totoise too.

they gathered up some logs lying on the shore
built a boat for badger to sail again once more
badger thanked his friends for all that they had done
then sailed away once more underneath the sun

badger made it home as happy as can be
his dream it had come true a sailor now was he.

worlds in devastation floods and hurricanes
rainfall far to much filling up the drains
people going fracking digging up the sea
why cant they just go home and let  nature be

culling all the badgers wildlfe in distress
worlds in devastation causing such a mess
global warming changing polluting all the air
no body seems to know whats going on out there.

nature it is changing getting worse each day
the world  has changed so much and gone the otherway.

there was a little badger adventure bound was he

he built himself a boat and headed out to sea

riding on the waves as happy as can be

the world it was his oyster badger he felt free



he sailed across the ocean and found an island shore

badger he decided that he would explore

maybe find some treasure that was left behind

in great big chest of the wooden kind



badger searched around to see what he could see

then heard a noise from behind a tree

badger took a look to see what it could be

it was a little turtle a friendly chap was he



badger told the turtle all about his quest

and about is search for a treasure chest

i will help you search the little turtle said

off they went togther and searched the sand ahead



suddenly they saw a little sandy mound

badger was excited his heart began to pound

badger started digging to take away the sand

turtle he was there to lend a helping hand



there beneath the mound much to there suprise

there was a treasure chest.  there before there eyes.

they opened up the chest   full of lots of things.

lots of golden goblets and lots of golden rings



they had found the treaure they were looking for

buried in the sand in this far off shore

badger he was rich and decided he would stay

with his friend the turtle in this land so far away

alarm
dogmatical snakebird dictator
**** rooster of electro maniacal damnation

wake
goober eyed ithyphallic mortal yahoo yawns
glacier shuffle to Midas’ bowl

brush
minty hairy pasty headed *******
seafoam ***** on white vanity beaches

shave
deceitful murderous metal cartel scraping
dead shrubs from yesterday’s winter

breakfast
egg flour chalk smack
guzzling bean kerosene

work
batshit bureaucratic badgers bludgeon
muktuk hamsters lubricating wheels of fortune

lunch
butcher’s dead friend between greasy toasted cement
harlot’s heavenly tomato mating cabbage cousin

work
taradiddle of martyrs at jargon’s temple blather
babble, bumble - copulation without *******

dinner
unicorn steaks, butterfly sauté, and
leprechaun fingers, a side of manslaughter dolphin

sleep
a felon’s holiday

repeat

there was a little badger he took a driving test
now from all the walking he could have a rest.

he headed for centre where the test would be
hoping he would pass. and be walking free.

he started up his car to take his driving route
along with his instructor who wore a fancy suit.

badger he set off.  he drove at his best
used his mirrors all the time so he could pass his test.

instructor he was happy and told him he had passed
badger he was pleased no more walking now at last

there was a little badger adventure bound was he

he built himself a boat and headed out to sea

riding on the waves as happy as can be

the world it was his oyster badger he felt free



he sailed across the ocean and found an island shore

badger he decided that he would explore

maybe find some treasure that was left behind

in great big chest of the wooden kind



badger searched around to see what he could see

then heard a noise from behind a tree

badger took a look to see what it could be

it was a little turtle a friendly chap was he



badger told the turtle all about his quest

and about is search for a treasure chest

i will help you search the little turtle said

off they went togther and searched the sand ahead



suddenly they saw a little sandy mound

badger was excited his heart began to pound

badger started digging to take away the sand

turtle he was there to lend a helping hand



there beneath the mound much to there suprise

there was a treasure chest.  there before there eyes.

they opened up the chest   full of lots of things.

lots of golden goblets and lots of golden rings



they had found the treaure they were looking for

buried in the sand in this far off shore

badger he was rich and decided he would stay

with his friend the turtle in this land so far away

Since lockdown, there is
virtually no road ****, no
dead foxes, badgers, or
rabbits on the wayside.

Since lockdown there is
virtually no refuse, no
Kentucky or McDonald
wrappers on the wayside.

Since lockdown, there is
virtually no pollution, no
no noise or exhaust fumes
or oil drips on the wayside.

Since lockdown there is
virtually no people, no
idle gossip or slandering
in groups on the wayside.

Since lockdown there is
virtually no spraying, no
herbicides pesticides or
fungicides on the wayside.

Since lockdown, there is
virtually no reason why
anyone would wish for a
re-opening. Of the wayside.


Ps.

I love Lockdown.

T'was the gleaming dawn that those fairies poked from the veils of flowers and caught on hair were the pedals of the healthy sun. When the age was young and time knew not of itself, the hills were not corrupt.
   The wings of faeryflies and butterflies were tarnished not, but were glode upon by the winds of aimless grace; Thus they were always at Heaven's feet. Racing upon the glorified mountains were the badgers and bears lined in unison, smiling and perfect. The sun bound its rays to the shoulders of grass hills like eyes of Gods upon their children. Stood ***** were housing trees of the nested kind, fertile and lush.
   Lazy and idle slumped man happy and lethargic, hypnotized by that herbal glory that was his natural home. That of a kind that had been stolen in past tales but was revived in that timeless moment that could be lived and lived again alone in the forest to the east. Winged reptiles fluffed with fur dove from penetrating limbs and sung to the distance in inspiration. Perked were the ears of the majestic and gorgeous felines, born of the deserts that were the companions of kings. Not caring to hunt, lapped the wolves and dogs laying with the enemies of ages gone. Now only peace was reigning.
   Books and poems spoke of nothing new for the moment had found itself in heaven. The poets had no magic to convey and the authors nothing to tell, the scientists nothing to document. Thus the dreams of Children and Gods poured like water of the loveliest kind, sparkling with diamonds quenching the soul of the population. Food grew lush and free like fruits of divine knowledge upon that giving tree!
   Ritual and rite spoke of many diverse Deities and contact was non-denominational. Praise rose to the highest and rang of the clouds which were glided upon like notes of bards to which realms beyond one could go no further to speak! This was the realm from which language was born and art was bare in its true identity. This was where the onyx was carven by the Lord's anvil, given by the spirit of blacksmiths, and craftsmen of the like. Within those onyxes was night's essence and dwelling within the diamonds of day was a rainbow of fantasy hills free from decay!
   Giants gave free rides to the ones below with lifted songs of magic, levitating them free from natural bounds! The trees grew miraculously at speeds unknown to time lines perceived but was of time construed as God Speed. Bushes bared fruits of rainbow colors and iridescent visual illusion! Beautiful and bold were the tastes that quenched the deepest of yearnings. Salt liquid would drip from the children as they skipped from haven to haven with baskets woven on crafty mothers said to know of love. Those mothers would lullaby their babies to worlds of sorts known in mythologies of ageless civilizations! Lifted and beaming the children were transformed to angelic entities with harps of berceuses. Emanating were visual paradises transcendent of worldly nature but only known to the angels and the ears that were graced by glory!
   Proud were the further generations of what had been laid out by their tall, masculine birth fathers. Unholy language was unknown but only the ecstasy of heaven poured from lips like nectarous liquor.
   The forests were lined with prairies of diverse flowers sprinkled and gazed upon by moons and suns of worlds magical and beyond! Stumbling, the mossy giants wore clothes of Pan and draped were their leaves over their limbs reaching for love and what may lay beyond those wreathes.
   The soaked floor of druid woods were vibrant and lively. Untrodden paths bore magical potions and herbs that once ingested sung through the guest's frame till ecstasy was found and language no longer made distinct the inevitable unison that those vibrations of time had strung through countless, and meaningless ages. Entered would be a realm beyond form, void and the concept of either. But only would love and the moment of now float like stars of unfathomable material buoyant in the womb of worlds. And sprung from what would be perceived as void came all the heavens and what lay beneath those shaman's and kahuna's ingrown feet.
   Embedded were the children of time, one with nature and naked in themselves and free to breathe what ever purified and holy air that cuddled their outlines like a mother does her child.
   Spoke from ten thousand horns were the tales of Lords and Gods and kingdoms that laid harmonious upon mother earth. No matter how the bard of the local bar was spoken, crazy he would be deemed by men who now hid this knowledge from those who knew not of the possibility. In all languages that soul would speak to all ears ignorant to difference but had love for only the song. And now still the gift of imagination and the boundless feats that it could manifest were passed along like feathers and leaves upon the passing river. Sought and caught were the treasures of language to those who knew of translation. And lullabied were those Gods and Angels who heard of the transmissions.
   But now only the drunken bard lay sloppy and tired beneath that tree that somehow taught him of nature and the wisdom that it held. And off into the distance sprang the vibration of his passing mumblings like songs of nonsense upon that aimless wind.

THEY walk / Just one / Alone on the cracked pavement / Toes dragging, head sagging / tripping over lines that aren’t there.
High tops / the likes of God himself /sanctified, glorified, / pearly white as the gates of heaven / Consumerism, cleverly disguised / as divine ascension, the righteous liberty of choice / the steering of your own destiny- / and yet / ... / those footprints in the dirt /  seem only to last as long  / as anyone cares to look.

THEY / THEIR / THEM / Words rarely respected / most often neglected / every conversation, a silent battle / for the right to exist as THEY see themselves / THEY are a complete deviance from / the suffocation of two / neither pink, nor blue. / THEIR body, our bodies / once beautiful in our youth and vigor / now condemned as destitute wastelands. / Reaped of any / dichotomized consumeristic value, / that the world instilled during our years of innocent persuasion. / We are dust now, society tells us / just ghosts of what the earth once bore;  / our place is nonexistent in this world. / Little choice but the next,  / a test with limited boxes to check. / Maybe they’ll listen when our cold, nighttime howls / are too loud to ignore. / Maybe one day, we’ll fill the ears with our voice / never to be quelled again. / But until then / existence becomes more a question than fact.


A red rover world; / it croons to us lovingly,  / as does the sun coax the flowers to bloom / come out! the world says / come out! / our wayward sons / come out! / our wandering daughters / come out, oh battered children of the world / let us cradle your broken hearts! / let us see your tears!  feel your anguish! / and maybe we will know you better for your suffering. / And so we came, and continue to come. / not all, but enough for the satisfaction of the status morale / Be different! the world challenges / And so THEY dare to live differently, / and by extension, dangerously. / We ascend, just like the logos told us we would- / only to be brutally thrown aside / because we’re all the wrong shoe size. / our punishment is most often internalized / we knew all along, our woes an offbeat cry / to the rest of the planets unwavering bass line.


Scrutiny badgers us, in the guise of necessity / when in reality, it is the / furtherment of our marginalization. / What’s in your pants? / What bathroom do you use? / How do you ****? / Liquidated words flow free like water, / but stay behind, slow and thick like hot tar; / it hurts just the same. / Has it occurred to you / that THEY might want to share with you / more than the anatomy of THEIR mortal shells? / THEIR minds, THEIR souls transcend ignorant thought. / Ask THEM something beautiful, because that is what THEY are. / Do THEY come together like a star, in a glorious explosion of light and motion? / Or is it more like a flower blossoming, fragile pulses beating under translucent skin?


The labels of today / the toxic expectations building up from within / like residual filth trapped under your fingernails / never gone, bound to return, nearly inescapable / and never directly addressed / for the sake of not / corroding. / The stars are within kaleidoscope eyes. / yes, dexterous hands have crafted this being / see the light, the mystique and wonder of / this stardust child, set to change the spin of things. / and THEIR heavenly shape is beautifully flawed / maybe marred by the solar winds of the sun / or glimmering with interstellar dust- / a lingering kiss of radiation  / from THEIR time among the asteroids. / This person of universal intent / THEY must be big, and THEY must be brave / for whilst joined under flag and name, THEY are still just one  / a lonely phantom wandering cracked, forgotten sidewalks / Where the lights flicker and the air is stagnant and thin. / THEY cast THEIR eyes skyward, searching for something / a twinkling like THEIR own, in the map of the vast unknown / A reflection of what THEY must become / to simply be.


In a way only the universe can, / it whispers back on the celestial winds / with an unnoticed correspondence. / One of those skidded toe marks / Has smudged the lines of / blue and pink / Hopscotch lines, much like unspoken, unbroken lines / that is where THEY reside. / the fray, the cusp, the precipice / THEY see THEIR world in the skidmarks / a grand spray of color, like the nebulas that THEY once knew / Not the line, but the divergence of what is known / into something new... / and a hopscotch hymnal, / a broken prayer on clumsy lips / not to the God with the high tops, / pearly and clean as heaven’s gate, / but to a vast and anonymous universe / is answered.

When the sun hides
the doubts arrive
playing hide and seek
talking behind my ear

Voices clang at pipes
crushing a plumber's work
I try to hide

Playing their game
the doubts find me
simply like a dachshund
searching for badgers

Brutality is enforced
my body beaten raw
like a bowl of dough

My head slaps the floor
as I fall, I see it
blue heels deep in mud
once a savior, now a doubt

the badger huntings back there out cull once more
yet another killing spree like the one before
killing natures creatures that once wandered free
all around the country for everyone to see.

now they have to suffer as they face the gun
shooting without guilt as they begin to run
we should try to save them protest with all our might
this lovely child of nature the hunter of the night.

it such a shame to see them die this way
we should do our best and let the badger stay.

and yes, very much a niche concern, my laptop broke down
   and i'm forced into the box room, albeit not ramped
out with Nabokov's Switzerland lodging:
at a hotel in the Alps catching butterflies and Lolitas -
i've finally matured in my likings -
but let me tell you, it has been painful
adjusting to the upright sitting:
lost the slouch and the quickie
crow-on-a-windowsill with a whiskey
sharpshooter and then a tornado cascade
into the lesser concept of a blank page and that famous
nothing of philosophers... i love the lesser critique
of Heidegger, my grandfather bought me
a 25 volume worths of interest,
and Heidegger stood out foremost,
primarily because of a peculiar surname,
i later learned that he was the German
that would eventually make Wordsworth
pointless in picking up the lyre,
with so many books i had to realise that
i needed a partner akin to walking through
Dante's epic,
              i could have chosen Ovid, but esp.
Horace, but i didn't choose Virgil or Homer,
a blood German peasant... but also
a pheasant, which means auburn peacock...
oh sure, you get familial ties with people
of the world, people who made either their
forenames or surnames akin to the nouns
as familiar as stars chairs and smoked ham rumps...
perfectly akin to everyday familiarity of use...
i wasn't worn in Warsaw or Krakow -
if i were, i probably wouldn't have left the natives,
but living on the outskirts of that great capital
doesn't necessarily impress:
in all honest edict contraction: i feel debased
travelling into London (central), ***** and ******
out my mind...
       i guess this means two more years rereading
Heidegger's being and time
                               after purchasing his ponderings ii - vi
from the years 1931 - 1938;
yes, my family was directly affected by **** Germany,
not in concentration camps, on the frontline,
so why would i be sopping over a **** familiar
in the realm of philosophy?
       a. public intellectuals don't exist in England,
    English doesn't like philosophy,
         proof
                  ?    b. Shakespeare - peer in on shaking
a pear and
                      the dancing of a retired circus bear dancing.
     c. that's Pythagoras, we leave him in the Pascal gambit.
i just think it's a shame that i have this massive
democracy in my room, and i'll end up with something
akin to a Quran -
                              again, why Heidegger?
i don't know, it could have been that Czech Kundera -
     or Kafka, it could have been Seneca,
              but all these writers are city dwellers,
Heidegger was a quasi-villager pseudo-city-dweller,
i find foxes and deer and dead badgers in my little
promenade escapades, also Satanist black masses
with the framework of in excelsior satanis! -
and lightning that strikes but no thunder is heard...
less for the sons of thunder: the 12 hot-air balloons,
it's very much Germanic in Japan with
feng shui or otherwise known in the peninsula as qi
     kee.
                      then there's the **** of the haiku
by the west and me answering: let's make ensō -
smoothed out narratives, ecstatic variation from
     thinking and away from moral decisiveness
in that activity of perpetuated choice-making -
                how clearly thinking extends into narration
rather than the Cartesian
                 precipitation of thought into being -
nope: from thinking into narration
          juiced-up enclosure of "zoological" tightening
with ensō: beefy haikus.
          but what i really find problematic?
the interpretation of Heidegger's concept of dasein
as coupled with ecstasis.... our ex-stasis...
                  with da meaning there
               you can pretend to be "happy" about protests
across the world, and wars and other turbulent
activity...
                   what i am proposing is what Nietzsche
prompted with sum ergo cogito,
         in that the real ecstasis is concerned with being
allocated to a here, and therefore a hesein -
the interpretation posits the ecstasis there
when Heidegger originally posits concern there,
     or as he encodes: "concern"
                       meaning the dittoing puts him in a safety
of the here, it's the ecstasis of not being there,
but here in the present as the ecstasis, and there
     of some abstract venture as being beyond his command
of attributed dynamism of being involved,
for he's not involved. give me an hour and i'll be
in the countryside: we have that weighty countryside mentality,
farmers talking ******* when stacking hay
and laughing with the grammar Nazis when
    people go to the gym but teach their brains
the flab that the brains actually are: primarily spongy fat -
     apart from typos, it's the case
                                           (it is the case that)
   i don't (do not)
                               much concern myself from English
slang of piano (Joanna)
           and the outright **** (Pakistani),
               cos there was no sine                  when people
overacted toward the tan of me swallowing vowels and
replacing them with shortcuts to prop'ah Cockney,
oi oi, ******, bruv! brush up! this bus to school is
mingy with the throng!
                          who ordered the sardines?
        Stendhal is still the love of my life... i can write
enough complexities with Heidegger, but my love
resides with Stendhal... who would have thought
that a film adaptation would make me eager to read the book
(the scarlet & the noir)? Peter Jackson knew, as did J. R. R.
but it comes from the musings,
          once i do the Kantian critique a one over
the missing yawn and what's actually the most underestimated
arithmetics of wording rather than number circus
         or replicas of taxman rubrics:
after enough chemistry, favouring the organic and
later becoming endowed with a palette for Indian cuisine
well: philosophy books are the worded versions
of mathematics in terms of jumping the burning wheels
of 1 + 11 = 12        and          i contemplate
                                            but what's the = and the 12?
it's so ****** open, i could have invited a hundred thieves
to porose a car-boot sale at my house.
but all this, which might seem like self-love,
    it's not about that...the French intellectualise
and have them public because they talk beautifully -
                  the English?
they sing...
                               the Germans are morose and silent...
        the Spanish are simply the onomatopoeias of *******
and the Italians are seen and heard licking their fingers
after enough basil is added to tomatoes...
   i'm still banging on about the apathetic interpretation
of dasein, rather than the ecstatic version popularised
by the scholars...
                                 the version that reads:
if a tree falls in a forest and there's no one to hear it fall,
does it make a sound? that's my interpretation of
dasein / being there / being "there"....
                          a.                          b.
                       concretely            in abstract,
we already know that the abstract of being is nonbeing
or that things are abstracts of nothings with identifiers
of being used, without actually being touched:
i can say that i see a chair without actually having
to sit on it.
                    i was thinking simpler though -
olly murs' heart skips a beat and someone of the major
tracks by one direction...
             when i reference myself to these tracks
i'm being ecstatic, in the dimension of hesein,
                  like da, shortened purposively from the
authentic hier / here in german....
              why am i ecstatic in the here?
   because i don't have to be concerned in the realm of da /
there, where my opinion "might" matter...
                   but really doesn't...
                             which is why i don't understand
this interpretation of dasein meaning ecstasis -
                           or ex status quo....
                                               as already suggested -
our moral obligation toward language is to provoke
a Minotaur to become an architect of our venture in
using language, away from the market place...
into forests, into depths that have no justification
for being imagined, or as such diagnosed as ever being
there and established to planning permission and norms
of established caricatures and cleanly undertaken
shallowing and hollowing out from them being furthered.
i should be sad having trodden such a path
for myself, but i feel a kinship with this German,
come on, what consolidated the Kantian
dichotomy of a priori and a posteriori as in
   or must not philosophy a fortiori poeticize beings?
should not be conversed with from a wholly
anti-intellectual dynamism suggesting a personal
historic aversion of what's otherwise ethnically ******
without suspicion in terms of cultural tact?
again: nothing - which is higher and deeper than nonbeing(s)
(i ensure the ambiguity of the plural, if only
due to the fact that nothing is
    kindred of a definite article - the -
                          and ensures a translation as nonbeing,
while nothing in a quality as in nothingness
            kindred of an indefinite article - a -
         and ensures a translation as nonbeings, the plural,
ambiguity and throng -
   perfect offshoot that's already known as a-
           and -the         with a missing -ism).
yes, language ought to resemble something less
instructional, certainly less capital / monetary,
and more of a preservation of ambiguity and subsequently
myth... or what otherwise concern themselves with
in the hustle and bustle of a public life: integrity,
                                ulterior of the personal sphere of interests:
the person per se;
       and the apéritif (a'per-teeth)?
                 for lack of diacritical insurance, the English
are constantly in need of a tongue-map for waggling it
prop'ah:
                    the Chelsea y'ah
or the Cockney wa'er                - t t t.
                mind you, that's related to the trilling of the R
(originally intended as a trill) and subsequently lost
in the Germanic ethnic cauldron: hark the French and
cipher the English curling the tongue making the R curled
rather than trill - my idiosyncratic fascination aged 8.
  i thought i ought to end this with a thought about
what's a universal maxim in psychiatry
  in England in terms of a standard prognosis:
patient A has lost touch with reality...
      that's the prognosis, the diagnosis: dialectics of Gnostic
teachings? anyway, that's the standard,
that a person has lost touch with reality... what a great swindle!
     y

there was little badger football mad was he
and in a world cup match he just long to be
he went to brazil to see his favorite  team
and to play for them would be his only dream.

he bought a football kit hoping he could play
playing for brazil would really make his day
when someone was injured they made a substitute
badger he  was called and put on his football suit.

now it was his chance to see what he could do
playing for brazil his dream it had come true
badger scored a goal just before the end
and into the lead the badgers goal did send.

they ended up the winners the crowd began to roar
brazil had won the cup and were champs once more
badger he was happy and enjoyed his day
and thanked his favourite team for allowing him to play.