One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound
except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember
whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve
nights when I was six.

All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky
that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in
the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays
resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen.

It was on the afternoon of the Christmas Eve, and I was in Mrs. Prothero's garden, waiting for cats, with her
son Jim. It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland,
though there were no reindeers. But there were cats. Patient, cold and callous, our hands wrapped in socks, we
waited to snowball the cats. Sleek and long as jaguars and horrible-whiskered, spitting and snarling, they
would slink and sidle over the white back-garden walls, and the lynx-eyed hunters, Jim and I, fur-capped and
moccasined trappers from Hudson Bay, off Mumbles Road, would hurl our deadly snowballs at the green of their
eyes. The wise cats never appeared.

We were so still, Eskimo-footed arctic marksmen in the muffling silence of the eternal snows - eternal, ever
since Wednesday - that we never heard Mrs. Prothero's first cry from her igloo at the bottom of the garden. Or,
if we heard it at all, it was, to us, like the far-off challenge of our enemy and prey, the neighbor's polar
cat. But soon the voice grew louder.
"Fire!" cried Mrs. Prothero, and she beat the dinner-gong.

And we ran down the garden, with the snowballs in our arms, toward the house; and smoke, indeed, was pouring
out of the dining-room, and the gong was bombilating, and Mrs. Prothero was announcing ruin like a town crier
in Pompeii. This was better than all the cats in Wales standing on the wall in a row. We bounded into the
house, laden with snowballs, and stopped at the open door of the smoke-filled room.

Something was burning all right; perhaps it was Mr. Prothero, who always slept there after midday dinner with a
newspaper over his face. But he was standing in the middle of the room, saying, "A fine Christmas!" and
smacking at the smoke with a slipper.

"Call the fire brigade," cried Mrs. Prothero as she beat the gong.
"There won't be there," said Mr. Prothero, "it's Christmas."
There was no fire to be seen, only clouds of smoke and Mr. Prothero standing in the middle of them, waving his
slipper as though he were conducting.
"Do something," he said. And we threw all our snowballs into the smoke - I think we missed Mr. Prothero - and
ran out of the house to the telephone box.
"Let's call the police as well," Jim said. "And the ambulance." "And Ernie Jenkins, he likes fires."

But we only called the fire brigade, and soon the fire engine came and three tall men in helmets brought a hose
into the house and Mr. Prothero got out just in time before they turned it on. Nobody could have had a noisier
Christmas Eve. And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim's Aunt,
Miss. Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would
say to them. She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets,
standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said, "Would you like anything to read?"

Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel
petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt
like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the
English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the
daft and happy hills *******, it snowed and it snowed. But here a small boy says: "It snowed last year, too. I
made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea."

"But that was not the same snow," I say. "Our snow was not only shaken from white wash buckets down the sky, it
came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow
grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely -ivied the walls and
settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunder-storm of white, torn Christmas cards."

"Were there postmen then, too?"
"With sprinkling eyes and wind-cherried noses, on spread, frozen feet they crunched up to the doors and
mittened on them manfully. But all that the children could hear was a ringing of bells."
"You mean that the postman went rat-a-tat-tat and the doors rang?"
"I mean that the bells the children could hear were inside them."
"I only hear thunder sometimes, never bells."
"There were church bells, too."
"Inside them?"
"No, no, no, in the bat-black, snow-white belfries, tugged by bishops and storks. And they rang their tidings
over the bandaged town, over the frozen foam of the powder and ice-cream hills, over the crackling sea. It
seemed that all the churches boomed for joy under my window; and the weathercocks crew for Christmas, on our
fence."

"Get back to the postmen"
"They were just ordinary postmen, found of walking and dogs and Christmas and the snow. They knocked on the
doors with blue knuckles ...."
"Ours has got a black knocker...."
"And then they stood on the white Welcome mat in the little, drifted porches and huffed and puffed, making
ghosts with their breath, and jogged from foot to foot like small boys wanting to go out."
"And then the presents?"
"And then the Presents, after the Christmas box. And the cold postman, with a rose on his button-nose, tingled
down the tea-tray-slithered run of the chilly glinting hill. He went in his ice-bound boots like a man on
fishmonger's slabs.
"He wagged his bag like a frozen camel's ****, dizzily turned the corner on one foot, and, by God, he was
gone."

"Get back to the Presents."
"There were the Useful Presents: engulfing mufflers of the old coach days, and mittens made for giant sloths;
zebra scarfs of a substance like silky gum that could be tug-o'-warred down to the galoshes; blinding tam-o'-
shanters like patchwork tea cozies and bunny-suited busbies and balaclavas for victims of head-shrinking
tribes; from aunts who always wore wool next to the skin there were mustached and rasping vests that made you
wonder why the aunts had any skin left at all; and once I had a little crocheted nose bag from an aunt now,
alas, no longer whinnying with us. And pictureless books in which small boys, though warned with quotations not
to, would skate on Farmer Giles' pond and did and drowned; and books that told me everything about the wasp,
except why."

"Go on the Useless Presents."
"Bags of moist and many-colored jelly babies and a folded flag and a false nose and a tram-conductor's cap and
a machine that punched tickets and rang a bell; never a catapult; once, by mistake that no one could explain, a
little hatchet; and a celluloid duck that made, when you pressed it, a most unducklike sound, a mewing moo that
an ambitious cat might make who wished to be a cow; and a painting book in which I could make the grass, the
trees, the sea and the animals any colour I pleased, and still the dazzling sky-blue sheep are grazing in the
red field under the rainbow-billed and pea-green birds. Hardboileds, toffee, fudge and allsorts, crunches,
cracknels, humbugs, glaciers, marzipan, and butterwelsh for the Welsh. And troops of bright tin soldiers who,
if they could not fight, could always run. And Snakes-and-Families and Happy Ladders. And Easy Hobbi-Games for
Little Engineers, complete with instructions. Oh, easy for Leonardo! And a whistle to make the dogs bark to
wake up the old man next door to make him beat on the wall with his stick to shake our picture off the wall.
And a packet of cigarettes: you put one in your mouth and you stood at the corner of the street and you waited
for hours, in vain, for an old lady to scold you for smoking a cigarette, and then with a smirk you ate it. And
then it was breakfast under the balloons."

"Were there Uncles like in our house?"
"There are always Uncles at Christmas. The same Uncles. And on Christmas morning, with dog-disturbing whistle
and sugar ****, I would scour the swatched town for the news of the little world, and find always a dead bird
by the Post Office or by the white deserted swings; perhaps a robin, all but one of his fires out. Men and
women wading or scooping back from chapel, with taproom noses and wind-bussed cheeks, all albinos, huddles
their stiff black jarring feathers against the irreligious snow. Mistletoe hung from the gas brackets in all
the front parlors; there was sherry and walnuts and bottled beer and crackers by the dessertspoons; and cats in
their fur-abouts watched the fires; and the high-heaped fire spat, all ready for the chestnuts and the mulling
pokers. Some few large men sat in the front parlors, without their collars, Uncles almost certainly, trying
their new cigars, holding them out judiciously at arms' length, returning them to their mouths, coughing, then
holding them out again as though waiting for the explosion; and some few small aunts, not wanted in the
kitchen, nor anywhere else for that matter, sat on the very edge of their chairs, poised and brittle, afraid to
break, like faded cups and saucers."

Not many those mornings trod the piling streets: an old man always, fawn-bowlered, yellow-gloved and, at this
time of year, with spats of snow, would take his constitutional to the white bowling green and back, as he
would take it wet or fire on Christmas Day or Doomsday; sometimes two hale young men, with big pipes blazing,
no overcoats and wind blown scarfs, would trudge, unspeaking, down to the forlorn sea, to work up an appetite,
to blow away the fumes, who knows, to walk into the waves until nothing of them was left but the two furling
smoke clouds of their inextinguishable briars. Then I would be slap-dashing home, the gravy smell of the
dinners of others, the bird smell, the brandy, the pudding and mince, coiling up to my nostrils, when out of a
snow-clogged side lane would come a boy the spit of myself, with a pink-tipped cigarette and the violet past of
a black eye, cocky as a bullfinch, leering all to himself.

I hated him on sight and sound, and would be about to put my dog whistle to my lips and blow him off the face
of Christmas when suddenly he, with a violet wink, put his whistle to his lips and blew so stridently, so high,
so exquisitely loud, that gobbling faces, their cheeks bulged with goose, would press against their tinsled
windows, the whole length of the white echoing street. For dinner we had turkey and blazing pudding, and after
dinner the Uncles sat in front of the fire, loosened all buttons, put their large moist hands over their watch
chains, groaned a little and slept. Mothers, aunts and sisters scuttled to and fro, bearing tureens. Auntie
Bessie, who had already been frightened, twice, by a clock-work mouse, whimpered at the sideboard and had some
elderberry wine. The dog was sick. Auntie Dosie had to have three aspirins, but Auntie Hannah, who liked port,
stood in the middle of the snowbound back yard, singing like a big-bosomed thrush. I would blow up balloons to
see how big they would blow up to; and, when they burst, which they all did, the Uncles jumped and rumbled. In
the rich and heavy afternoon, the Uncles breathing like dolphins and the snow descending, I would sit among
festoons and Chinese lanterns and nibble dates and try to make a model man-o'-war, following the Instructions
for Little Engineers, and produce what might be mistaken for a sea-going tramcar.

Or I would go out, my bright new boots squeaking, into the white world, on to the seaward hill, to call on Jim
and Dan and Jack and to pad through the still streets, leaving huge footprints on the hidden pavements.
"I bet people will think there's been hippos."
"What would you do if you saw a hippo coming down our street?"
"I'd go like this, bang! I'd throw him over the railings and roll him down the hill and then I'd tickle him
under the ear and he'd wag his tail."
"What would you do if you saw two hippos?"

Iron-flanked and bellowing he-hippos clanked and battered through the scudding snow toward us as we passed Mr.
Daniel's house.
"Let's post Mr. Daniel a snow-ball through his letter box."
"Let's write things in the snow."
"Let's write, 'Mr. Daniel looks like a spaniel' all over his lawn."
Or we walked on the white shore. "Can the fishes see it's snowing?"

The silent one-clouded heavens drifted on to the sea. Now we were snow-blind travelers lost on the north hills,
and vast dewlapped dogs, with flasks round their necks, ambled and shambled up to us, baying "Excelsior." We
returned home through the poor streets where only a few children fumbled with bare red fingers in the wheel-
rutted snow and cat-called after us, their voices fading away, as we trudged uphill, into the cries of the dock
birds and the hooting of ships out in the whirling bay. And then, at tea the recovered Uncles would be jolly;
and the ice cake loomed in the center of the table like a marble grave. Auntie Hannah laced her tea with ***,
because it was only once a year.

Bring out the tall tales now that we told by the fire as the gaslight bubbled like a diver. Ghosts whooed like
owls in the long nights when I dared not look over my shoulder; animals lurked in the cubbyhole under the
stairs and the gas meter ticked. And I remember that we went singing carols once, when there wasn't the shaving
of a moon to light the flying streets. At the end of a long road was a drive that led to a large house, and we
stumbled up the darkness of the drive that night, each one of us afraid, each one holding a stone in his hand
in case, and all of us too brave to say a word. The wind through the trees made noises as of old and unpleasant
and maybe webfooted men wheezing in caves. We reached the black bulk of the house. "What shall we give them?
Hark the Herald?"
"No," Jack said, "Good King Wencelas. I'll count three." One, two three, and we began to sing, our voices high
and seemingly distant in the snow-felted darkness round the house that was occupied by nobody we knew. We stood
close together, near the dark door. Good King Wencelas looked out On the Feast of Stephen ... And then a small,
dry voice, like the voice of someone who has not spoken for a long time, joined our singing: a small, dry,
eggshell voice from the other side of the door: a small dry voice through the keyhole. And when we stopped
running we were outside our house; the front room was lovely; balloons floated under the hot-water-bottle-
gulping gas; everything was good again and shone over the town.
"Perhaps it was a ghost," Jim said.
"Perhaps it was trolls," Dan said, who was always reading.
"Let's go in and see if there's any jelly left," Jack said. And we did that.

Always on Christmas night there was music. An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin sang "Cherry Ripe," and another
uncle sang "Drake's Drum." It was very warm in the little house. Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the parsnip
wine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death, and then another in which she said her heart was like a
Bird's Nest; and then everybody laughed again; and then I went to bed. Looking through my bedroom window, out
into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other
houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas
down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.

Pellets of rain pestered the cotton swagged
sky, cloudy purses grew black with scowls
coldly spelling their injustice. A chapter of
sunrays shot shamesless shards, irony perched

between chaperones; a truce maybe, rains restless
pathways of rays bleating their appeal, rooming in,
black balaclavas, rooting for blue beams,
itching bony beads of cloudy sweat, out of reach

In turn, limbs colour coated grassy spaces
tides of sun worshippers laughed out loud
their inner duets, hand in hand the sweltering
dance floor bathed them, sidling cotton clouds

Swiftly passing the sunscreen, laying back, beckoning
the sun from beneath neatly positioned cloud baubles.
Within an inch of our lives the splodges began, light
heavy, heavier, to the swell of April in full tune

Instantly the greedy green spaces groaned, ejected
sweet harmony, rolled out goodbyes, tongued stiff
breeze longing for its thirst to be quenched, and so
torrents rushed in where fools once lay

A lonely sunscreen bottle, remnant of warm
minds soaking heat, long days teasing into belief.
Yet April fooled us once more with beguiling banter,
chorused a chanting cheating lullaby of lamentation

A firetruck races past the isolate Blue Fox and infinity. Dulcimer clatters fading brickwork on the cross markets and churches where blind men are the imagining heaven. Luminescent Volcanic leaves heated from sunfire beautiful in the Spring choke lanes which are battered by abstract cavern homes. What happened to the Orient Harpsichord Serenity? Where does the Blue Fox go? Incense Markets Sauna with Smoke are busy in Denpasar while I'm here at a North American shopping mall where Ivory Columns cradled in violet fauna do wait sturdy and enchanted in rows.
Here I'm waiting by the leather clay shade bench in silent meditation breathing community whispers and listening clear to water pour from the lionhead fountain. Parrots caw atop a wide gated ceiling facing Empyreus.

There is a fire in America. The Blue Fox is hidden beneath firs and palms bathing in humidity. The Blue Fox is writing prophecies of economic collapse and rampant pointless murders making the newspapers. Ash storms blazing while banana painted trucks row on row attend to Victorian wood panels cooling to onyx powder in too short a time. There is no room for learning when The End Times go too quickly.
I'm listening to Bob Dylan scream instrumental prayer on harmonica rough against my ears. The Blue Fox treads February Beaches a few hundred miles from Australia and whistling the words of flowers in his head. He chews on wheatgrass jangling change in his fur pockets like those cartoons. He is the vision of Bohemia, he is an active star dazzled in this beguiled galaxy, yet in his spine he carries the turmoil doppleganger kept by all and known by none.
The firetrucks are doing all they can to quell the lung-poison vase boiling an apartment dancing inside but it continues to grow in its enraged fury.

There's a fire in America boys and girls, come around and see.
Canoes of memorial gold row through oppression and genocide, the Inuits and First Peoples of ancient years are wondering too where the blue fox went when agony cries the air. Stories of wisdom replaced with stories of war. Balaclavas labyrinthine through  exotic Bazaars thick with music and plants hanging off fishhooks and brass coat hangers while I write and dream of such Valhallas in my shopping mall on a quiet afternoon.
Bill is playing the banjo with faded paint and a single broken string, there he is on Yates! Cowboy hat made of charcoal velvet holding a meager collection of change.  
Stephen Schizophrenia is lying on his back watching aluminum kingdoms hover on by expanding nimbus clouds. He has eleven dollars to his name along with a damaged half torn belt with his initials engraved on the buckle  He taps his feet to Edith Piaf howling "La Vie En Rose" while an Airplane collides with his sacred personal aluminum palace, suddenly he can't block out the repressed memories he's fought decades to hide deep and dark in his bleak jazz enthralled brains.

Maybe we're all supposed to fall apart. Maybe we're designed to hurt and cause hurt. Where is that ****** Blue Fox? He's ebullient, thoughts fragmented in sharp bliss glass cutting him through while he rolls around the sands catching Buddha particles in his paws digging holes on Kuta Beach to his Idyllic land where happiness is forever and therefore false.

The Blue Fox falls in love overwhelming with everybody and every soul. So many souls by the billions every place! Even the tyrants. Even the demons. Even the necrophiliac scoring an OD'd brunette at twenty six from Anaheim who collapsed flatlined by prescriptions on a 3rd floor Complex.
He adores the narcissist who loves everybody as fully as The Blue Fox as long as they are herself. She is the harmonic untainted flytrap unaware of its own venomous nature but jealous of Summer and jealous of those whose names are heralded through generation to generation.
He adores The addict who is hollow of everything but the ****** sizzling under his patchy skin while he sinks from divinity swelling through his heart. He smiles while the remaining light dies inside him, left with only the regret remedies of suicide.
He adores The artist who fled to the big City and became nothing but watered down pigment after the Capitalists tossed him off the nearest skyscraper shouting pretentious metaphors.

The Blue Fox loves them all! He has no concept of the corrupt, or the lazy, or the greedy and needy and crazy and forgotten. They are all equal to him! The Blue Fox is knelt on paisley carpet smooth and spectacular! His regular India ashram, uplifting his body and his mind. The blue fox knows no doubt. Or anxiety, frailty or tears. He has no impulse or desire. The Blue Fox is joy in form and breathing spectrums of color mixing to combinations we cannot perceive.

There is a fire in america. It rages on unstoppable. It engulfs countries thousands of miles and histories away. It swallows the morning, noon and night. It protrudes disease in its wake. It heats up the ozone layer allowing radiation to make us more than cancer the zodiac. It causes our terror. It blots out our ardor. It havocs our heroes. Nothing is clean anymore. There is a fire in America.

And America is the world!  I'm watching out the front doors of this shopping mall where an elderly man trips at the food court escalator and becomes more renowned with every lethal collision down the tiles of freedom. Paramedics arrive shortly after and attend to another scalded by that same fire.
Up and up it goes!

A letter from unknown.
British Expeditionary Force, Friday December 25th 1914.      

   
"My Dear Mater, This will be the most memorable Christmas I've ever spent or likely to spend: since about tea time yesterday I don't think theres been a shot fired on either side up to now."

"Last night turned a very clear frost moonlight night, so soon after dusk we had some decent fires going and had a few carols and songs. The Germans commenced by placing lights all along the edge of their trenches and coming over to us - wishing us a Happy Christmas.
Some of our chaps went over to their lines."

"There must be something in the spirit of Christmas as to day we are all on top of our trenches running about ..."

"After breakfast we had a game of football at the back of our trenches! We've had a few Germans over to see us this morning. They also sent a party over to bury a ****** we shot in the week ... About 10.30 we had a short church parade the morning service etc. held in the trench ..." 

"Just before dinner I had the pleasure of shaking hands with several Germans ... I exchanged one of my balaclavas for a hat. I've also got a button off one of their tunics. We also exchanged smokes etc. and had a decent chat."
"They say they won't fire tomorrow if we don't so I suppose we shall get a bit of a holiday - perhaps ... We can hardly believe that we've been firing at them ... it all seems so strange.
With much love from Boy."

the following additions will seems like plastic
surgery,
               and in turn will put the encompassed
poem under much strain,
  but as i will say: a 48h marathon can do
that to your narrative "skills"... well... techniques...
   esp. given it's winter in the northern
hemisphere, and two nights and two days
actually feels like three nights and two days,
given we're into our second day, and i've already
experienced a night-time this morning looking
at the clock.

  italics will be pleasantly omitted...

        instead... a maxim style akin to la Rochefoucauld
will be adopted... to merely insert
             toothache when otherwise the ***
is sitting on a leather sofa and thinking what would
be a better chance to juice up the brain with a
psychoactive sedative-effect, i.e. with what liquid?
    coffee on the brain is a sahara, as is famously
known: arabs love their coffee... and their
  baklava dressed in balaclavas - or as we say in
Europe: there's enough water, so we drink alcohol.
    turns out diabetic rates only go down in arabia
if enough sports cars are imported... must be
the g-force diet.

         but hey! look at the title! the title was always
going to to resemble the final version of
the preliminary work, the sketch, of what went on
last night...
                   beginning with the scariest film i have ever
seen: a horror movie without anything to do with
night or its aura (i was about to say aurora, never mind),
a movie from 2002... which ended being more scary
even it almost bagged the lead role an oscar...
        and then what i can only claim to be better than
gaming these days... taking graphic novels onto screen...

which brings me to a question, and if i ask the question
with a mature enough wording,
i might actually get a serious debate going...
     namely? x-men, first class...
         and i share something with this theme,
did you know that people remember far away from
Chernobyl parks being pigmented, where
   there were segregational duo-incisions in the trees
from the radiation? it happened nearing when i
was born, spring, and the women were told to drink
iodine... that 2002 film shows iodine treatment
   on "mental" patients, you pour enough iodine down
the nostrils you get a better understanding of
epilepsy... ah... the magical things people could ever
think of doing on another human being, let alone
   a courgette, or a steak...
                well, yes, in parks, half the trees were
the colour of spring, all green and asparagus juicy...
the other half were brown, and decaying,
    almost potato skinned, if not simply: potato skinned.
      as i said, i was a foetus at the time,
and apparently some Scandinavian got a microcosmic
whiff of it and panicked... let alone those exposed
too close to Chernobyl, a radiation-pH spectrum
emerged, of who and how they were exposed it...
    cancer, for example, is prevalent in Poland of
those who don't get to experience a midlife mental
disorder of buying a yacht... lucky them...
   which fits nicely into the seriousness of graphic
novels, as that film unbreakable clearly demonstrates...
  all realism of graphic novels actually stems
from batman... my favourite... no super-powers,
plus i had a simulation of being orphaned and raised
by my grandparents for 2 - 4 years while my early
psyche developed, and then redeveloped utilising
a different language, then went back to settle old dues,
and then went back again: charged with having read
    antoine de saint-exupéry on a year long
hiatus that allowed me to watch the 1998 world cup
              in a dark-lit room with my great-grandmother
and see France win... with such jubilation as if
Napoleon just came back from Elbe for seconds.
this is not the point, i said i would word it maturely
and not look half as an ***:
    why does francis xavier sympathise with
max eisenhardt, but belittles james "logan" howlett?

   all things start so small, i just remembered listening
to this song that allows you to lay down words like
bricks in a wall (prometheus' 9th - the man who swam
through a speaker)...

  why does he, is francis xavier just ******* that
one of logan's mutation counter-pluses is his ability
   to regenerate health and vitality, while at the same time
creating a amnesic hinderance to apply his psychopathy?
i guess it is... max on the other hand as unchanging:
fixed memory coordinates, because physically:
he's unscratched... up to a point of how this debate
runs its course... i just don't see how francis has to
belittle logan... just like henry "hank" mccoy is first
belittled as simply bigfoot... the problem with
amnesia is that even you have the capacity to
engage in telepathy (rooting out distant pathologies
rooted deep inside your psyche that never allow
you to reach a full potential - or what's Freud's
case of postulating receding pathologies and subsequently
creating a forward looking theory to work with
in creating uninhibiting constructs -
       francis xavier? nothing more than a psychiatrist...
in the modern sense, without iodine treatment,
or electric-shock-therapy... rather the guy that
says everyone is special via talk-therapy...
  and all psychiatrists have this child in them:
they all want to be telepathic... just like all
manual labourers want to be telekinetic) -
           the oldest chestnut, if there ever was a hazelnut
to boot.

       original, as except of what is to come...
  i mean, what i started off is now bound to italics,
  just to make a point that after watching 48 hours
of things, and having finally looked at symbols,
    i could only write so much coherently,
before donning what looked like some poet's clothes,
and stepping into a foggy highnoon for
  a bottle of beer, a bottle of whiskey, and
     a prescription of insomnia pills...
   well (they're called anti-depressants for old people,
who prefer to treat their "depression" - if not
merely old age, while they're asleep)...

no one would ask for this type
of hiatus...
       some would call it:
being an american spy,
      getting caught in soviet
russia and enduring interrogation
techniques -
    yes, a "hiatus" of nearing
48 hours: of being constantly awake.
       or what certain former
east europeans going back
   to see family members might
ask about, when Lithuania, Estonia
and Latvia are under a national
sway of general jittering paranoia
as reported by English newspapers
   and later established by
            an American president's
tour of the region -
                         or how Crimea
is the 37th or 38th or whatever no. it's
now - or whether it's
           Tartar autonom oblast -
but indeed, nearing a 48 hour long
insomniac "hiatus".

            and i can sympathise with francis xavier
experiences when max eisenhardt is first encountered,
this sharpness of a psyche, rather than its automation
or literal non-existence... this is why i could
            stay up for longer than 48 hours if i wanted to,
but i can see so much in being awake for so long
that natural consequence is that:
a. i have lost the capacity to dream,
  b. i have translated the capability to dream into code
(namely the letters you see before you)
   and
c. i have found a "safe-space" to recuperate from
the pain i feel...
  meaning
      d. i know with what ease people acquire a substance
known as a soul... and with what ease they can
think in this substance, like a fish in water...
    what i'm talking is a lobster a boiling basin,
where your exoskeleton can mean a lot upon
jumping off a cliff, but when your inner flesh,
starts to be almost eaten by the mutation of protein
from tapeworm larvae into edible meat?
      i know this substance, i have experienced it...
and i know that i dare not put a soul into a foetus
that doesn't have a workable tongue, bladder and ****.
  i think it's time to end this preliminary "work".

So many of us
beaten, heart-wrung care
we share
our hopelessness
our impotent despair
our seismic horror
mounting terror
as nations pile mistake
on fatal error
How do we act
as casualties mount
how do we hold our blighted leaders
to account

We trawl through history
and weakly portion blame
make claim on pointless claim
to show that we began this game
That this was us, and that was them
but all this does
is set the process off again
And little comfort,
stating that we cared
in lieu of just confessing
we are scared

Scared that in the loneliness of night
a sneaking voice
might say this choice was right
that self-defense
is justified
that editors and leaders
can't have lied
that evil really stalks us,
really walks our streets
plots our defeat, prepares
to hoist black flags
into the air.

It does, and always has.
The name may change
but nothing of this crisis
is so strange.
Cry anarchy, revolt
pledge blood to the republic
**** the vote
don masks and balaclavas,
meet in shade
believe this is the place
where deals are made
And soon, to fan eternal conflagration
someone will bring a god
to the equation,
proclaim a nation,
proclaim the right of judgement,
who should live
and who should die
And in the dancing flames,
raise eyes
to thank the empty,
mindless sky.

But what is worst,
among the frantic, wretched cries
is that our comfort
lets us view it with surprise
our safety, compromised
exposes this malignant myeloma -
we feel that we
should never die.
We should not suffer,
should exist
in numb, eternal safety,
empty bliss
no cold, no hunger,
conflict frowned upon
All struggle gone -
we should go on
and on
and on.

But breathe.
Feel echoes, ripples, tremors -
close frightened eyes
and just remember -
this is the road that we are always on
We found it on arrival,
leave it when we're gone
but our survival
is unhindered.
While fools break splinters
from its rugged bones,
we still lay bigger, stronger stones.

This is the world.
Love fiercely, dare
to shout in anger,
weep in care, do all you can
to help your fellow woman,
fellow man
to shatter walls, to build
together, better, wiser things
Prepare
to sacrifice, to will a world as one
and know that evil done
can be undone

Do not succumb
to cold, immobile fear
but shout, in righteous fury,
"We are here!"

i'd really like to punch Roger Boyes in the face... that kind of therapy talk akin to Fight Club... i'd really love to punch Roger Boyes' smile off...  can't stress how much i'd like to punch his face, simply to add the mascara of plum with that grin of his... i'll say it one more time for the therapeutic reasons, akin to 1916 and northern irish zombies; god, i'd love to punch that man into a Picasso.

why... the pristine supposed involvement of
Colonel Kentucky in Syria...
leave them to it! your opinions are just invests in war,
look at you, cooked-up in a semi-detached
in Warwickshire... i'm sure the select journalists
ageing have moved from the column to
the opinion section, because they are *proper
bulldog bred to choke a Belgian waffle
and *****-up a moth for a tartan pattern;
******* in the Caribbean - pilot features added
to the wingspan about what i wouldn't integrate into
even if Dickens or Shakespeare was an ice cream moment
of melting into a society... honey pooh...
you want the community experience?
abolish the strategy for urban areas and Greek-likened
free-city states... you want a community?
move to a village... no immigration will change
that demographic, village life means village life,
and villagers... and your neighbour's breakfast
on your table given the gossip at the hairdressers...
get a prim and the low-down;
that English, functioning atheism:
left hand (a-, the indefinite article) - and right hand
(the-, the definite article) - Kula Shaker'***** -
but i'd really love to punch Roger rather than Gandhi...
for Aleppo... i guess it's fun and morally pristine
to serve a comment along with oysters away
from the tabloid section of Loners of the newspaper,
a poet best dissects a newspaper -
did Cromwell ask for aid? Charles got the Chaplin
chop - Russia assured everyone, the support
of the Armstrong - because Colonel Kentucky and
every other entrepreneur of capitalism was not
part of bookmarking the last few pages of the Syrian
civil war... is that because no English civilians
knew the reality of war that Syrians concerned themselves
with? hence the punch for the journalist...
how about infiltrating a far-right perspective to counter
the spread of Jihad in Europe? being an island will
hardly help, as pseudo-****** said: now the channel
tunnel... let the tanks roll in.
England is under this fake impression that America
cares two-shots of whiskey three shakes of the dice
about its opinion... it doesn't...
America is pro-Israel.. England is quasi-pro but by
majority not wishing the Palestinians to experience
a 2000 year old Exodus... so here come the balaclavas
with black & white or red & white Houndstooth patterns.
still... i'd love to punch that Roger into a tombstone-flat-face.
leave them to it! it's a civil war! none of us
were ever Syrian civilians... we were civilians elsewhere...
in the green mint-fresh rolling hill countryside...
this isn't your son's Special Ops first-person shooter
on a computer screen... **** me... let the gym meat-heads
pump the iron... you a covert disciple of the diminishing
English high-street franchise... you know
that when a franchise begins to become turned FLAWED
it invests in adverts - capitalism's exposure comes
with advertisement, when a company is on the fault
line of bankruptcy or making profit, if decides on
an advertisement project, a crusade - to rekindle
public trust, i.e. naive handshakes all round.

On a brighter note
a Thames lighter boat,
where the rivermen between the banks give thanks to
tidal waves and wave across between the shores,between the puritans and ******,
Southwark never bores the citizens,pitting them against the age where Shakespeare plays upon the stage and Chaucer sits in Tabard Square,
awaits the pilgrims who are milling corn atop the bridge.

Cromwell sells the tickets for his latest gig,to dig the graves and inter the raving lunatics who switch from bedlam down to palaces in the minster where the spinster out of place knits balaclavas for the faces that she sees dropping from a guillotine,
these things I've seen a thousand times, written in ten thousand lines and acted out below the chimes of clocks that stand before the sway of one more 'down south london way'  or anyway what do I care if it's share and share alike or not.
I've got allotted but a short spell here,time for dinner,one more glass of beer and then my dear I'm on my way,
to stroll through more of yesterday.

Belgrano

Can you hear the curses? I hear them still
dead in the air rolling on the grey high seas,
fluttering, stuttering, up in the cold stony clouds,
frozen like kites in the middle of nowhere.
I hear the silence too, of the boys, the young young boy's
pressed against the bulwarks and the dead eyed iron,
sense their gun metal faces hidden inside the masks
of home spun green wool - skittering eyes peeping
through knitted balaclavas worn as cold comforters
dripping in Atlantic spume.

I can hear the whispers, the trembling pampas whispers
of near men, close men, light shaven, cropped near-to skull men,
some with dark, bull herding eyes , hearts full of Spanish guitar
and pampas whistles and beside them the rich city blond men,
quiet and bookish, alone with their poets and pebble black rosaries
running like the southern tides  through their cold chapped fingers.
All hugger-mugger equaled by forced conscription, circling in silence
within their sea shrouded fears - crammed like live fish quivering in their ancient tin of old victories.

Yes I hear them still, calling out for a distant mother's arms, ripping  
loose their little boy screams that are clear as over head seagulls
yet eight thousand miles away. I can hear their raw primitive panic,
ancient as the whelps of beaten camp fire dogs echoing back
from the steely grey clouds; I see them tearing at the
sea born mist, slicing the strings of their pampas kite curses
with broken bones and shattered skulls, loosing curses that rise to run
above the waves to our shores carrying the lost, little boy simpers
of clamour and death that found  roost in our forgetful hearts.

Yes I still hear the screams, the sea drowned, salt soaked screams,
a cold southern ocean full of drowning young Argentine boy dreams
(pronounced men before their time), those fire soaked screams and I remember how we the civilized danced on their sad lonely deaths in our distant dry victory soaked streets of triumphant,disregard and screamed ;
"Gotcha".

I wake up but its all a dream
Cashin cheques on reality
You can't avoid if you cannot see
And you can't cash in without a salary

I'd imagine by now that the world would be flat
As lies to the weak is like *** for tat
Like this and that and Yin to Yang
Inseparable if its lodged in your brain

Like an icepick fits a lobotomy
Or the key to the locked monstrosity
The lack of hygiene to disease
I see strange **** while i sleep

Like balaclavas and white vans rollin
Free candy, kids stolen
Schools shut down by big bad guns
Trigger happy to be struck down dumb

Police enforcing, breach and clear
To clear the haze that fogs the mirror
What you see reflected is what lies inside
But brought out stronger, you can see it in the eyes

Cold and malicious, a job is a job
A cop or a gangster, ready to rob
At the end of the day, a life taken is crime
Evil changes host, it never truly dies

If i have no trust I'm sorry
But y'all lied when you said dont worry
Because i placed my faith and now its wasted
On a bunch of *******, evil motivated

The essence of the soul is a *** of gold
That can be exploited by greed unknown
A certain host, attracts moths to a lamp post
They find the fit and fill that hole

That void becomes your battery
A lifetime of crime without sanity
So here I lay, cashin in my salary
The reality that fuelled my vanity

I spent me evening on the receiving end of a crap rap song
with a strap in me face an me back door gone
both the entrance and the exit if youre following on
coz five balaclavas and a glock got the block wrong

The guillotine drops,
she knits
balaclavas
for the dead.