As a woman, and in the service of my Lord the Emperor Wu, my life is governed by his command. At twenty I was summoned to this life at court and have made of it what I can, within the limitations of the courtesan I am supposed to be, and the poet I have now become. Unlike my male counterparts, some of whom have lately found seclusion in the wilderness of rivers and mountains, I have only my personal court of three rooms and its tiny garden and ornamental pond. But I live close to the surrounding walls of the Zu-lin Gardens with its astronomical observatories and bold attempts at recreating illusions of celebrated locations in the Tai mountains. There, walking with my cat Xi-Lu in the afternoons, I imagine a solitary life, a life suffused with the emptiness I crave.
 
In the hot, dry summer days my maid Mei-Lim and I have sought a temporary retreat in the pine forests above Lingzhi. Carried in a litter up the mountain paths we are left in a commodious hut, its open walls making those simple pleasures of drinking, eating and sleeping more acute, intense. For a few precious days I rest and meditate, breathe the mountain air and the resinous scents of the trees. I escape the daily commerce of the court and belong to a world that for the rest of the year I have to imagine, the world of the recluse. To gain the status of the recluse, open to my male counterparts, is forbidden to women of the court. I am woman first, a poet and calligrapher second. My brother, should he so wish, could present a petition to revoke his position as a man of letters, an official commentator on the affairs of state. But he is not so inclined. He has already achieved notoriety and influence through his writing on the social conditions of town and city. He revels in a world of chatter, gossip and intrigue; he appears to fear the wilderness life.  
 
I must be thankful that my own life is maintained on the periphery. I am physically distant from the hub of daily ceremonial. I only participate at my Lord’s express command. I regularly feign illness and fatigue to avoid petty conflict and difficulty. Yet I receive commissions I cannot waver: to honour a departed official; to celebrate a son’s birth to the Second Wife; to fulfil in verse my Lord’s curious need to know about the intimate sorrows of his young concubines, their loneliness and heartache.
 
Occasionally a Rhapsody is requested for an important visitor. The Emperor Wu is proud to present as welcome gifts such poetic creations executed in fine calligraphy, and from a woman of his court. Surely a sign of enlightment and progress he boasts! Yet in these creations my observations are parochial: early morning frost on the cabbage leaves in my garden; the sound of geese on their late afternoon flight to Star Lake; the disposition of the heavens on an Autumn night. I live by the Tao of Lao-Tzu, perceiving the whole world from my doorstep.
 
But I long for the reclusive life, to leave this court for my family’s estate in the valley my peasant mother lived as a child. At fourteen she was chosen to sustain the Emperor’s annual wish for young girls to be groomed for concubinage. Like her daughter she is tall, though not as plain as I; she put her past behind her and conceded her adolescence to the training required by the court. At twenty she was recommended to my father, the court archivist, as second wife. When she first met this quiet, dedicated man on the day before her marriage she closed her eyes in blessing. My father taught her the arts of the library and schooled her well. From her I have received keen eyes of jade green and a prestigious memory, a memory developed she said from my father’s joy of reading to her in their private hours, and before she could read herself. Each morning he would examine her to discover what she had remembered of the text read the night before. When I was a little child she would quote to me the Confucian texts on which she had been ****** schooled, and she then would tell me of her childhood home. She primed my imagination and my poetic world with descriptions of a domestic rural life.
 
Sometimes in the arms of my Lord I have freely rhapsodized in chusi metre these delicate word paintings of my mother’s home. She would say ‘We will walk now to the ruined tower beside the lake. Listen to the carolling birds. As the sparse clouds move across the sky the warm sun strokes the winter grass. Across the deep lake the forests are empty. Now we are climbing the narrow steps to the platform from which you and I will look towards the sun setting in the west. See the shadows are lengthening and the air becomes colder. The blackbird’s solitary song heralds the evening.  Look, an owl glides silently beneath us.’
 
My Lord will then quote from Hsieh Ling-yun,.
 
‘I meet sky, unable to soar among clouds,
face a lake, call those depths beyond me.’
 
And I will match this quotation, as he will expect.
 
‘Too simple-minded to perfect Integrity,
and too feeble to plough fields in seclusion.’
 
He will then gaze into my eyes in wonder that this obscure poem rests in my memory and that I will decode the minimal grammar of these early characters with such poetry. His characters: Sky – Bird – Cloud – Lake – Depth. My characters: Fool – Truth – Child – Winter field – Isolation.
 
Our combined invention seems to take him out of his Emperor-self. He is for a while the poet-scholar-sage he imagines he would like to be, and I his foot-sore companion following his wilderness journey. And then we turn our attention to our bodies, and I surprise him with my admonitions to gentleness, to patience, to arousing my pleasure. After such poetry he is all pleasure, sensitive to the slightest touch, and I have my pleasure in knowing I can control this powerful man with words and the stroke of my fingertips rather than by delicate youthful beauty or the guile and perverse ingenuity of an ****** act. He is still learning to recognise the nature and particularness of my desires. I am not as his other women: who confuse pleasure with pain.
 
Thoughts of my mother. Without my dear father, dead ten years, she is a boat without a rudder sailing on a distant lake. She greets each day as a gift she must honour with good humour despite the pain of her limbs, the difficulty of walking, of sitting, of eating, even talking. Such is the hurt that governs her ageing. She has always understood that my position has forbidden marriage and children, though the latter might be a possibility I have not wished it and made it known to my Lord that it must not be. My mother remains in limbo, neither son or daughter seeking to further her lineage, she has returned to her sister’s home in the distant village of her birth, a thatched house of twenty rooms,
 
‘Elms and willows shading the eaves at the back,
and, in front,  peach and plum spread wide.
 
Villages lost across mist-haze distances,
Kitchen smoke drifting wide-open country,
 
Dogs bark deep among the back roads out here
And cockerels crow from mulberry treetops.
 
My esteemed colleague T’ao Ch’ien made this poetry. After a distinguished career in government service he returned to the life of a recluse-farmer on his family farm. Living alone in a three-roomed hut he lives out his life as a recluse and has endured considerable poverty. One poem I know tells of him begging for food. His world is fields-and-gardens in contrast to Hsieh Ling-yin who is rivers-and-mountains. Ch’ien’s commitment to the recluse life has brought forth words that confront death and the reality of human experience without delusion.
 
‘At home here in what lasts, I wait out life.’
 
Thus my mother waits out her life, frail, crumbling more with each turning year.
 
To live beyond the need to organise daily commitments due to others, to step out into my garden and only consider the dew glistening on the loropetalum. My mind is forever full of what is to be done, what must be completed, what has to be said to this visitor who will today come to my court at the Wu hour. Only at my desk does this incessant chattering in the mind cease, as I move my brush to shape a character, or as the needle enters the cloth, all is stilled, the world retreats; there is the inner silence I crave.
 
I long to see with my own eyes those scenes my mother painted for me with her words. I only know them in my mind’s eye having travelled so little these past fifteen years. I look out from this still dark room onto my small garden to see the morning gathering its light above the rooftops. My camellia bush is in flower though a thin frost covers the garden stones.
 
And so I must imagine how it might be, how I might live the recluse life. How much can I jettison? These fine clothes, this silken nightgown beneath the furs I wrap myself in against the early morning air. My maid is sleeping. Who will make my tea? Minister to me when I take to my bed? What would become of my cat, my books, the choice-haired brushes? Like T’ao Ch’ien could I leave the court wearing a single robe and with one bag over my shoulders? Could I walk for ten days into the mountains? I would disguise myself as a man perhaps. I am tall for a woman, and though my body flows in broad curves there are ways this might be assuaged, enough perhaps to survive unmolested on the road.
 
Such dreams! My Lord would see me returned within hours and send a servant to remain at my gate thereafter. I will compose a rhapsody about a concubine of standing, who has even occupied the purple chamber, but now seeks to relinquish her privileged life, who coverts the uncertainty of nature, who would endure pain and privation in a hut on some distant mountain, who will sleep on a mat on its earth floor. Perhaps this will excite my Lord, light a fire in his imagination. As though in preparation for this task I remove my furs, I loose the knot of my silk gown. Naked, I reach for an old under shift letting it fall around my still-slender body and imagine myself tying the lacings myself in the open air, imagine making my toilet alone as the sun appears from behind a distant mountain on a new day. My mind occupies itself with the tiny detail of living thus: bare feet on cold earth, a walk to nearby stream, the gathering of berries and mountain herbs, the making of fire, the washing of my few clothes, imagining. Imagining. To live alone will see every moment filled with the tasks of keeping alive. I will become in tune with my surroundings. I will take only what I need and rely on no one. Dreaming will end and reality will be the slug on my mat, the bone-chilling incessant mists of winter, the thorn in the foot, the wild winds of autumn. My hands will become stained and rough, my long limbs tanned and scratched, my delicate complexion freckled and wind-pocked, my hair tied roughly back. I will become an animal foraging on a dank hillside. Such thoughts fill me with deep longing and a ****** desire to be tzu-jan  - with what surrounds me, ablaze with ****** self.
 
It is not thought the custom of a woman to hold such desires. We are creatures of order and comfort. We do not live on the edge of things, but crave security and well-being. We learn to endure the privations of being at the behest of others. Husbands, children, lovers, our relatives take our bodies to them as places of comfort, rest and desire. We work at maintaining an ordered flow of existence. Whatever our station, mistress or servant we compliment, we keep things in order, whether that is the common hearth or the accounts of our husband’s court. Now my rhapsody begins:
 
A Rhapsody on a woman wishing to live as a recluse
 
As a lady of my Emperor’s court I am bound in service.
My court is not my own, I have the barest of means.
My rooms are full of gifts I am forced barter for bread.
Though the artefacts of my hands and mind
Are valued and widely renown,
Their commissioning is an expectation of my station,
With no direct reward attached.
To dress appropriately for my Lord’s convocations and assemblies
I am forced to negotiate with chamberlains and treasurers.
A bolt of silk, gold thread, the services of a needlewoman
Require formal entreaties and may lie dormant for weeks
Before acknowledgement and release.
 
I was chosen for my literary skills, my prestigious memory,
Not for my ****** beauty, though I have been called
‘Lady of the most gracious movement’ and
My speaking voice has clarity and is capable of many colours.
I sing, but plainly and without passion
Lest I interfere with the truth of music’s message.
 
Since I was a child in my father’s library
I have sought out the works of those whose words
Paint visions of a world that as a woman
I may never see, the world of the wilderness,
Of rivers and mountains,
Of fields and gardens.
Yet I am denied by my *** and my station
To experience passing amongst these wonders
Except as contrived imitations in the palace gardens.
 
Each day I struggle to tease from the small corner
Of my enclosed eye-space some enrichment
Some elemental thing to colour meaning:
To extend the bounds of my home
Across the walls of this palace
Into the world beyond.
 
I have let it be known that I welcome interviews
With officials from distant courts to hear of their journeying,
To gather word images if only at second-hand.
Only yesterday an emissary recounted
His travels to Stone Lake in the far South-West,
Beyond the gorges of the Yang-tze.
With his eyes I have seen the mountains of Suchan:
With his ears I have heard the oars crackling
Like shattering jade in the freezing water.
Images and sounds from a thousand miles
Of travel are extract from this man’s memory.
 
Such a sharing of experience leaves me
Excited but dismayed: that I shall never
Visit this vast expanse of water and hear
Its wild cranes sing from their floating nests
In the summer moonlight.
 
I seek to disappear into a distant landscape
Where the self and its constructions of the world may
Dissolve away until nothing remains but the no-mind.
My thoughts are full of the practicalities of journeying
Of an imagined location, that lonely place
Where I may be at one with myself.
Where I may delight in the everyday Way,
Myself among mist and vine, rock and cave.
Not this lady of many parts and purposes whose poems must
Speak of lives, sorrow and joy, pleasure and pain
Set amongst personal conflict and intrigue
That in containing these things, bring order to disorder;
Salve the conscience, bathe hurt, soothe sleight.

She sent it to me as a text message, that is an image of a quote in situ, a piece of interpretation in a gallery. Saturday morning and I was driving home from a week in a remote cottage on a mountain. I had stopped to take one last look at the sea, where I usually take one last look, and the phone bleeped. A text message, but no text.  Just a photo of some words. It made me smile, the impossibility of it. Epic poems and tapestry weaving. Of course there are connections, in that for centuries the epic subject has so often been the stuff of the tapestry weaver’s art. I say this glibly, but cannot name a particular tapestry where this might be so. Those vast Arthurian pieces by William Morris to pictures by Burne-Jones have an epic quality both in scale and in subject, but, to my shame, I can’t put a name to one.

These days the tapestry can be epic once more - in size and intention - thanks to the successful, moneyed contemporary artist and those communities of weavers at West Dean and at Edinburgh’s Dovecot. Think of Grayson Perry’s The Walthamstowe Tapestry, a vast 3 x 15 metres executed by Ghentian weavers, a veritable apocalyptic vision where ‘Everyman, spat out at birth in a pool of blood, is doomed and predestined to spend his life navigating a chaotic yet banal landscape of brands and consumerism’.  Gosh! Doesn’t that sound epic!

I was at the Dovecot a little while ago, but the public gallery was closed. The weavers were too busy finishing Victoria Crowe’s Large Tree Group to cope with visitors. You see, I do know a little about this world even though my tapestry weaving is the sum total of three weekends tuition, even though I have a very large loom once owned by Marta Rogoyska. It languishes next door in the room that was going to be where I was to weave, where I was going to become someone other than I am. This is what I feel - just sometimes - when I’m at my floor loom, if only for those brief spells when life languishes sufficiently for me be slow and calm enough to pick up the shuttles and find the right coloured yarns. But I digress. In fact putting together tapestry and epic poetry is a digression from the intention of the quote on the image from that text - (it was from a letter to Janey written in Iceland). Her husband, William Morris, reckoned one could (indeed should) be able to compose an epic poem and weave a tapestry.  

This notion, this idea that such a thing as being actively poetic and throwing a pick or two should go hand in hand, and, in Morris’ words, be a required skill (or ‘he’d better shut up’), seemed (and still does a day later) an absurdity. Would such a man (must be a man I suppose) ‘never do any good at all’ because he can’t weave and compose epic poetry simultaneously?  Clearly so.  But then Morris wove his tapestries very early in the morning - often on a loom in his bedroom. Janey, I imagine, as with ladies of her day - she wasn’t one, being a stableman’s daughter, but she became one reading fluently in French and Italian and playing Beethoven on the piano- she had her own bedroom.

Do you know there are nights when I wish for my own room, even when sleeping with the one I love, as so often I wake in the night, and I lie there afraid (because I love her dearly and care for her precious rest) to disturb her sleep with reading or making notes, both of which I do when I’m alone.
Yet how very seductive is the idea of joining my loved one in her own space, amongst her fallen clothes, her books and treasures, her archives and precious things, those many letters folded into her bedside bookcase, and the little black books full of tender poems and attempts at sketches her admirer has bequeathed her when distant and apart. Equally seductive is the possibility of the knock on the bedroom / workroom door, and there she’ll be there like the woman in Michael Donaghy’s poem, a poem I find every time I search for it in his Collected Works one of the most arousing and ravishing pieces of verse I know: it makes me smile and imagine.  . .  Her personal vanishing point, she said, came when she leant against his study door all warm and wet and whispered 'Paolo’. Only she’ll say something in a barely audible voice like ‘Can I disturb you?’ and with her sparkling smile come in, and bring with her two cats and the hint of a naked breast nestling in the gap of the fold of her yellow Chinese gown she holds close to herself - so when she kneels on my single bed this gown opens and her beauty falls before her, and I am wholly, utterly lost that such loveliness is and can be so . . .

When I see a beautiful house, as I did last Thursday, far in the distance by an estuary-side, sheltering beneath wooded hills, and moor and rock-coloured mountains, with its long veranda, painted white, I imagine. I imagine our imaginary home where, when our many children are not staying in the summer months and work is impossible, we will live our ‘together yet apart’ lives. And there will be the joy of work. I will be like Ben Nicholson in that Italian villa his father-in-law bought, and have my workroom / bedroom facing a stark hillside with nothing but a carpenter’s table to lay out my scores. Whilst she, like Winifred, will work at a tidy table in her bedroom, a vase of spring flowers against the window with the estuary and the mountains beyond. Yes, her bedroom, not his, though their bed, their wonderful wooden 19C Swiss bed of oak, occupies this room and yes, in his room there is just a single affair, but robust, that he would sleep on when lunch had been late and friends had called, or they had been out calling and he wanted to give her the premise of having to go back to work – to be alone - when in fact he was going to sleep and dream, but she? She would work into the warm afternoons with the barest breeze tickling her bare feet, her body moving with the remembrance of his caresses as she woke him that morning from his deep, dark slumber. ‘Your brown eyes’, he would whisper, ‘your dear brown eyes the colour of an autumn leaf damp with dew’. And she would surround him with kisses and touch of her firm, long body and (before she cut her plaits) let her course long hair flow back and forward across his chest. And she did this because she knew he would later need the loneliness of his own space, need to put her aside, whereas she loved the scent of him in the room in which she worked, with his discarded clothes, the neck-tie on the door hanger he only reluctantly wore.

Back to epic poetry and its possibility. Even on its own, as a single, focused activity it seems to me, unadventurous poet that I am, an impossibility. But then, had I lived in the 1860s, it would probably not have seemed so difficult. There was no Radio 4 blathering on, no bleeb of arriving texts on the mobile. There were servants to see to supper, a nanny to keep the children at bay. At Kelmscott there was glorious Gloucestershire silence - only the roll and squeak of the wagon in the road and the rooks roosting. So, in the early mornings Morris could kneel at his vertical loom and, with a Burne-Jones cartoon to follow set behind the warp. With his yarns ready to hand, it would be like a modern child’s painting by numbers, his mind would be free to explore the fairy domain, the Icelandic sagas, the Welsh Mabinogion, the Kalevara from Finland, and write (in his head) an epic poem. These were often elaborations and retellings in his epic verse style of Norse and Icelandic sagas with titles like Sigurd the Volsung. Paul Thompson once said of Morris  ‘his method was to think out a poem in his head while he was busy at some other work.  He would sit at an easel, charcoal or brush in hand, working away at a design while he muttered to himself, 'bumble-beeing' as his family called it; then, when he thought he had got the lines, he would get up from the easel, prowl round the room still muttering, returning occasionally to add a touch to the design; then suddenly he would dash to the table and write out twenty or so lines.  As his pen slowed down, he would be looking around, and in a moment would be at work on another design.  Later, Morris would look at what he had written, and if he did not like it he would put it aside and try again.  But this way of working meant that he never submitted a draft to the painful evaluation which poetry requires’.

Let’s try a little of Sigurd

There was a dwelling of Kings ere the world was waxen old;
Dukes were the door-wards there, and the roofs were thatched with gold;
Earls were the wrights that wrought it, and silver nailed its doors;
Earls' wives were the weaving-women, queens' daughters strewed its floors,

And the masters of its song-craft were the mightiest men that cast
The sails of the storm of battle down the bickering blast.
There dwelt men merry-hearted, and in hope exceeding great
Met the good days and the evil as they went the way of fate:
There the Gods were unforgotten, yea whiles they walked with men,

Though e'en in that world's beginning rose a murmur now and again
Of the midward time and the fading and the last of the latter days,
And the entering in of the terror, and the death of the People's Praise.

Oh dear. And to think he sustained such poetry for another 340 lines, and that’s just book 1 of 4. So what dear reader, dear sender of that text image encouraging me to weave and write, just what would epic poetry be now? Where must one go for inspiration? Somewhere in the realms of sci-fi, something after Star-Wars or Ninja Warriors. It could be post-apocalyptic, a tale of mutants and a world damaged by chemicals or economic melt-down. Maybe a rich adventure of travel on a distant planet (with Sigourney Weaver of course), featuring brave deeds and the selfless heroism of saving companions from deadly encounters with amazing animals, monsters even. Or is ‘epic’ something else, something altogether beyond the Pixar Studios or James Cameron’s imagination? Is the  ‘epic’ now the province of AI boldly generating the computer game in 4D?  

And the epic poem? People once bought and read such published romances as they now buy and engage with on-line games. This is where the epic now belongs. On the tablet, PlayStation3, the X-Box. But, but . . . Poetry is so alive and well as a performance phenomenon, and with that oh so vigorous and relentless beat. Hell, look who won the T.S.Eliot prize this year! Story-telling lives and there are tales to be told, even if they are set in housing estates and not the ice caves of the frozen planet Golp. Just think of children’s literature, so rich and often so wild. This is word invention that revisits unashamedly those myths and sagas Morris loved, but in a different guise, with different names, in worlds that still bring together the incredible geographies of mountains and deserts and wilderness places, with fortresses and walled cities, and the startling, still unknown, yet to be discovered ocean depths.

                                    And so let my tale begin . . . My epic poem.

                                                 THE SEAGASP OF ENNLI.
       A TALE IN VERSE OF EARTHQUAKE, ISLAND FASTNESS, MALEVOLENT SPIRITS,
                                                AND REDEMPTIVE LOVE.

346

Not probable—The barest Chance—
A smile too few—a word too much
And far from Heaven as the Rest—
The Soul so close on Paradise—

What if the Bird from journey far—
Confused by Sweets—as Mortals—are—
Forget the secret of His wing
And perish—but a Bough between—
Oh, Groping feet—
Oh Phantom Queen!

As he walked through the maze of streets from the tube station he wondered just how long it had been since he had last visited this tall red-bricked house. For so many years it had been for him a pied à terre. Those years when the care of infant children dominated his days, when coming up to London for 48 hours seemed such a relief, an escape from the daily round that small people demand. Since his first visits twenty years ago the area bristled with new enterprise. An abandoned Victorian hospital had been turned into expensive apartments; small enterprising businesses had taken over what had been residential property of the pre-war years. Looking up he was conscious of imaginative conversions of roof and loft spaces. What had seemed a wide-ranging community of ages and incomes appeared to have disappeared. Only the Middle Eastern corner shops and restaurants gave back to the area something of its former character: a place where people worked and lived.

It was a tall thin house on four floors. Two rooms at most of each floor, but of a good-size. The ground floor was her London workshop, but as always the blinds were down. In fact, he realised, he’d never been invited into her working space. Over the years she’d come to the door a few times, but like many artists and craftspeople he knew, she fiercely guarded her working space. The door to her studio was never left open as he passed through the hallway to climb the three flights of stairs to her husband’s domain. There was never a chance of the barest peek inside.

Today, she was in New York, and from outside the front door he could hear her husband descend from his fourth floor eyrie. The door was flung open and they greeted each other with the fervour of a long absence of friends. It had been a long time, really too long. Their lives had changed inexplicably. One, living almost permanently in that Italian marvel of waterways and sea-reflected light, the other, still in the drab West Yorkshire city from where their first acquaintance had begun from an email correspondence.

They had far too much to say to one another - on a hundred subjects. Of course the current project dominated, but as coffee (and a bowl of figs and mandarin oranges) was arranged, and they had moved almost immediately he arrived in the attic studio to the minimalist kitchen two floors below, questions were thrown out about partners and children, his activities, and sadly, his recent illness (the stairs had seemed much steeper than he remembered and he was a little breathless when he reached the top). As a guest he answered with a brevity that surprised him. Usually he found such questions needed roundabout answers to feel satisfactory - but he was learning to answer more directly, and being brief, suddenly thought of her and her always-direct questions. She wanted to know something, get something straight, so she asked  - straight - with no ‘going about things’ first. He wanted to get on with the business at hand, the business that preoccupied him, almost to the exclusion of everything else, for the last two days.

When they were settled in what was J’s working space ten years ago now he was immediately conscious that although the custom-made furniture had remained the Yamaha MIDI grand piano and the rack of samplers were elsewhere, along with most of the scores and books. The vast collection of CDs was still there, and so too the pictures and photographs. But there was one painting that was new to this attic room, a Cézanne. He was taken aback for a moment because it looked so like the real thing he’d seen in a museum just weeks before. He thought of the film Notting Hill when William Thacker questions the provenance of the Chagall ‘violin-playing goat’. The size of this Cézanne seemed accurate and it was placed in a similar rather ornate frame to what he knew had framed the museum original. It was placed on right-hand wall as he had entered the room, but some way from the pair of windows that ran almost the length of this studio. The view across the rooftops took in the Tower of London, a mile or so distant. If he turned the office chair in which he was sitting just slightly he could see it easily whilst still paying attention to J. The painting’s play of colours and composition compelled him to stare, as if he had never seen the painting before. But he had, and he remembered that his first sight of it had marked his memory.

He had been alone. He had arrived at the gallery just 15 minutes before it was due to close for the day.  He’d been told about this wonderful must-see octagonal room where around the walls you could view a particularly fine and comprehensive collection of Impressionist paintings. All the great artists were represented. One of Van Gogh’s many Olive Trees, two studies of domestic interiors by Vuillard, some dancing Degas, two magnificent Gaugins, a Seurat field of flowers, a Singer-Sergeant portrait, two Monets - one of a pair of haystacks in a blaze of high-summer light. He had been able to stay in that room just 10 minutes before he was politely asked to leave by an overweight attendant, but afterwards it was as if he knew the contents intimately. But of all these treasures it was Les Grands Arbres by Cézanne that had captured his imagination. He was to find it later and inevitably on the Internet and had it printed and pinned to his notice board. He consulted his own book of Cézanne’s letters and discovered it was a late work and one of several of the same scene. This version, it was said, was unfinished. He disagreed. Those unpainted patches he’d interpreted as pools of dappled light, and no expert was going to convince him otherwise! And here it was again. In an attic studio J. only frequented occasionally when necessity brought him to London.

When the coffee and fruit had been consumed it was time to eat more substantially, for he knew they would work late into the night, despite a whole day tomorrow to be given over to their discussions. J. was full of nervous energy and during the walk to a nearby Iraqi restaurant didn’t waver in his flow of conversation about the project. It was as though he knew he must eat, but no longer had the patience to take the kind of necessary break having a meal offered. His guest, his old friend, his now-being-consulted expert and former associate, was beginning to reel from the overload of ‘difficulties’ that were being put before him. In fact, he was already close to suggesting that it would be in J’s interest if, when they returned to the attic studio, they agreed to draw up an agenda for tomorrow so there could be some semblance of order to their discussions. He found himself wishing for her presence at the meal, her calm lovely smile he knew would charm J. out of his focused self and lighten the rush and tension that infused their current dialogue. But she was elsewhere, at home with her children and her own and many preoccupations, though it was easy to imagine how much, at least for a little while, she might enjoy meeting someone new, someone she’d heard much about, someone really rather exotic and (it must be said) commanding and handsome. He would probably charm her as much as he knew she would charm J.

J. was all and more beyond his guest’s thought-description. He had an intensity and a confidence that came from being in company with intense, confident and, it had to be said, very wealthy individuals. His origins, his beginnings his guest and old friend could only guess at, because they’d never discussed it. The time was probably past for such questions. But his guest had his own ideas, he surmised from a chanced remark that his roots were not amongst the affluent. He had been a free-jazz musician from Poland who’d made waves in the German jazz scene and married the daughter of an arts journalist who happened to be the wife of the CEO of a seriously significant media empire. This happy association enabled him to get off the road and devote himself to educating himself as a composer of avant-garde art music - which he desired and which he had achieved. His guest remembered J’s passion for the music of Luigi Nono (curiously, a former resident of the city in which J. now lived) and Helmut Lachenmann, then hardly known in the UK. J. was already composing, and with an infinite slowness and care that his guest marvelled at. He was painstakingly creating intricate and timbrally experimental string quartets as well as devising music for theatre and experimental film. But over the past fifteen years J. had become increasingly more obsessed with devising software from which his musical ideas might emanate. And it had been to his guest that, all that time ago, J. had turned to find a generous guide into this world of algorithms and complex mathematics, a composer himself who had already been seduced by the promise of new musical fields of possibility that desktop computer technology offered.

In so many ways, when it came to the hard edge of devising solutions to the digital generation of music, J. was now leagues ahead of his former tutor, whose skills in this area were once in the ascendant but had declined in inverse proportion to J’s, as he wished to spend more time composing and less time investigating the means through which he might compose. So the guest was acting now as a kind of Devil’s Advocate, able to ask those awkward disarming questions creative people don’t wish to hear too loudly and too often.

And so it turned out during the next few hours as J. got out some expensive cigars and brandy, which his guest, inhabiting a different body seemingly, now declined in favour of bottled water and dry biscuits. His guest, who had been up since 5.0am, finally suggested that, if he was to be any use on the morrow, bed was necessary. But when he got in amongst the Egyptian cotton sheets and the goose down duvet, sleep was impossible. He tried thinking of her, their last walk together by the sea, breakfast à deux before he left, other things that seemed beautiful and tender by turn . . . But it was no good. He wouldn’t sleep.

The house could have been as silent as the excellent double-glazing allowed. Only the windows of the attic studio next door to his bedroom were open to the night, to clear the room of the smoke of several cigars. He was conscious of that continuous flow of traffic and machine noise that he knew would only subside for a brief hour or so around 4.0am. So he went into the studio and pulled up a chair in front of the painting by Cézanne, in front of this painting of a woodland scene. There were two intertwining arboreal forms, trees of course, but their trunks and branches appeared to suggest the kind of cubist shapes he recognized from Braque. These two forms pulled the viewer towards a single slim and more distant tree backlit by sunlight of a late afternoon. There was a suggestion, in the further distance, of the shapes of the hills and mountains that had so preoccupied the artist. But in the foreground, there on the floor of this woodland glade, were all the colours of autumn set against the still greens of summer. It seemed wholly wrong, yet wholly right. It was as comforting and restful a painting as he could ever remember viewing. Even if he shut his eyes he could wander about the picture in sheer delight. And now he focused on the play of brush strokes of this painting in oils, the way the edge and border of one colour touched against another. Surprisingly, imagined sounds of this woodland scene entered his reverie - a late afternoon in a late summer not yet autumn. He was Olivier Messiaen en vacances with his perpetual notebook recording the magical birdsong in this luminous place. Here, even in this reproduction, lay the joy of entering into a painting. Jeanette Winterson’s plea to look at length at paintings, and then look again passed through his thoughts. How right that seemed. How very difficult to achieve. But that night he sat comfortably in J’s attic and let Cézanne deliver the artist’s promise of a world beyond nature, a world that is not about constant change and tension, but rests in a stillness all its own.

You would think that
Light is always bright,
Shining, Luminescent,
Searing, burning, illuminating,
Perpetual dawn rolling across
Earth's lopsided expanses.
You would think.

Light and Darkness
Were once perfectly melded-
Minded-
Molded together, in the
Time before time,
In the cusp of God's hands
Pressing together and
Held apart in infinite
Pressure and density and love.
They were one yet separate,
Filling the mindless firmament between
The Left and Right Hand of God,
Before He created Earth.

You know the Beginning:
When the Heavens came into
Being
(So that the minds
Of men and women could
Acknowledge their existence)
And then the Earth was
Created

God moved His hands
(And Spoke through Them)
The earth, formless, void:
The Light in God's Hands
Marveled at the Living Light,
The Source of all things
Whom the light had dreamed about,
In its cupola that it thought to be
Infinite, but was somehow, beyond;
God, it seemed, had more,
A Higher Purpose for The Light

And The Darkness, seeing his
Brother distracted and occupied,
And uncomprehending the why
And how of God’s Light and
The Light (his brother?) standing
Close, so close, in perfect
Conversation, and why?
Why was not The Darkness a
Part of His Conversation?

Darkness, in the infinitesimal moments
After Creation had begun,
Turned his back on God and
Saw what was beneath him.
He
Streaked blackly down to the new
Thing God had made simply
By Speaking.

“What is The Darkness doing,
God?”
The Light asked, confused
For the first time.
“I don’t understand.”
God spoke, a gentle,
Soothing whisper.
LOOK FOR YOURSELF,
LIGHT.
And The Light looked,
Shining the barest part of
Himself down, so that
The Darkness could see.

The Darkness saw itself
Hovering over the waters.
The round globe that
God created was covered,
Filled with something
Mysterious and liquid
And like itself, Dark,
Deep, and brooding.

Dark and Void
Were now one.
Away from the Presence
Of God.
The Darkness had never
Flown, or streaked, or
Zipped like lightning before.
And Darkness saw that it was
GOOD.

Now Darkness was doing it.
Darkness was all OVER this
Planet-thing. Darkness had
The WHOLE
THING COVERED.
And Darkness saw that it
Wasn't moving. It had never
Been so big, so
EXPANSIVE before.
It circled the entire planet,
A giant ring of Itself,
For thousands and thousands
Of miles. Looking at the deep
Dark wet stuff,
Darkness saw its face
For the first time.
Not GOOD, Darkness thought
To Himself.
GREAT.
But before The Darkness
Could get a longer
(And much more detailed)
Look, becoming more and more
Connected with the Void…

Four of God's Words
Split the whole of existence
In TWO

'LET THERE BE LIGHT'

The Light of Creation
Exploded outward and
Simultaneously
Imploded inward
Scalding Darkness' eyeballs black
And God took The Darkness
In His Hand and Threw
Him to the other side
Of Earth,
12 hours
And 12,500 miles away.

God favored the "Light"
And called it "Good"
Darkness wanted to hear that
Spoken about himself.
But God further divided
And delineated them
By changing their natures.

The Light, now powered by a nearby
***** Yellow Star
Almost a hundred million
Miles away
(So as to not cook or
Freeze them to death)
God explained cryptically
Who is THEM
(The Light wondered)
There are OTHERS
Besides God?
And us?

But when God was doing His
Business, and it involved you,
YOU PAID ATTENTION

SOL IS EARTH’S STAR
YOU ARE NOW A SOURCE
OF LIFE. YOU WILL RULE
THE FACE OF THE PLANET
HALF OF AN EARTH DAY.
And God's Pure Light
Was now intimately linked with,
Among other things, the creatures
That God was even now filling the
Seas and the Land.
The Light’s new name was
"Day"

The Darkness changed simply
By God Willing It.
The Darkness liked his new name,
Closer to Light's old one
(Night)
And Night thought he might be
Happier, after all, since
God placed so much
MORE of him, far, far out
In the Heavens, in the
Unfathomably
(Though fathomable to him)
Empty spaces between the
Stars that gave birth to
Day every single itself.

But God punished The Darkness
For being Prideful, and marveling
At the beauty of his face
So God banished The Darkness
To reside alongside, and
Even, with, the Void
Who had been cast down
An Eternity before, waiting,
Waiting for just such a planet
To come along, so that Void
Could rule the air
(Like a Prince,
Deposed to his
New kingdom).

The Dark had never before
Felt something so different,
So ‘Off-Natured’ from God
Almighty.
Night was afraid, so Night
Kept his head down and
Out of sight and
Did his job.
The Light shone through
A tiny yellow orb, and
This light bathed the planet
In a veil of brightness.
Night was only one
Aspect of The Darkness, like
A Cousin created to do a
Very specific job, which
Left The Darkness to explore
Earth and the Surrounding
Heavens.

The Light had other aspects,
A nickname, if you will:
“Daylight” and
Daylight, in spite of
All he could see
(But Daylight praised God for this,
And knew God was the Source of All Things)
And all the creatures and
The Man and The Woman
Saw,
Daylight missed his brother,
The Dark.
But the Stars would only shine
Him in the Way God Intended,
And not a little brighter more.
So Daylight did his job, too.

One itself, as Day again
Chased Night away
(Always on Night's heels,
But never EVER catching him!)
Day was shining on a patch
Of water that seemed familiar.
But the water was, well,
Watery, and diffuse, and it
Slowed down Light's usually
Terminal Velocity, and bent and
Diffracted and distracted his
Straight-line nature. Light asked
God to tell Night he was sorry.

YOU’VE A VOICE
YOURSELF, DAY.
TELL NIGHT YOURSELF.

Thank You, Light of Heaven,
Day said, feeling the Star
Sol going into a brief and
Exciting supernova,
A thin yet ultimately powerful
Ray of Sol’s tremendous
Energy shining down
On that little familiar patch
Of water.

Day shouldered its
Way through thick clumps of
Seaweed (now dead) and down,
Ever down,
Deeper than any light had
Ever penetrated the Dark
Ocean.
Down, the light went, down,
To its breaking point,
Where Daylight was barely
Discernible as itself.
It got to the place
Where He ended,
And his brother began.
With its last photon of energy,
Daylight gave itself to
His long-lost Twin.
"I'm sorry, Dark"
A patch of exceptionally black
Darkness wobbled a nod.
(Me too, Light)
It seemed to say.
"I miss you, brother,” sobbed
The Light.
And God have Light his request,
Allowing him to shine just
A little more brightly,
And the Light gave of himself
To his Brother Darkness.
“God, may I please
Keep this little light
Of mine
To remind me of
My Brother Daylight?

Dark was no longer so very
Lonely
As God put a bit of
Himself
In the strange, strange
Creatures who lived with
And in total
Darkness.
And the Dark
Loved those creatures
So much so that when
You
(Or I)
Capture a Dark
Creature,
It cannot,
Will not
Survive the Light
On the Surface
Of the Ocean

This one time,

12. or 13, when me
And a bunch of other kids
From a different neighborhood
Played. Outside. From about sunup
To 9:00 at night. I dimly remember
(This light-bulb memory is the barest bit of energy
In an ancient filament of thought:)

It was a nightmare come to life.
There was this one kid across the River
(Rock Island)
They found him naked and dead,
In a discarded pile of coal.
His life brutally taken from him.
But that was the only time
I'd ever heard of something so horrible. Happening.
It was as commonplace as school shootings.
Which is to say, it didn’t happen in the
World that was ‘As Far As I Knew’.
Outside, everywhere, as far as I knew;
Was just where you went. No matter what.
It’s just what we did. And we did a LOT.

We played. On a job application, I would have
Written that. “Player”. As in: “Hey, I’m a kid.
I mess around. I’m unhygienic and smelly and
My hair is long and arms sunburned and sweaty
And tired and about as happy as any kid
Could be in 1975.

This one time,
I go in this dumpster and grab a
Sandwich the Mgr. of the 7-11 mistakenly threw out
It smelled. Badly. I pretended to take a gigantic
Bite out of it. My buddies weren’t ROTFL.
That stupid phrase was pre-born.
They laughed so hard they fell off their bikes.
Probably painfully so.
I worshiped this praise. Ate it like
Seinfeld eats applause.
They were rolling
On hot Iowa summer pavement, laughing fit to split.
On top of that dumpster, that day, in that single moment,
I was the King of Whatever

The manager heard some kind of ruckus.
The sandwich was in my hand, a cheesy spoiled grenade.
Which I promptly threw at him. ‘Cause he was the Adult
And I obviously wasn't Victor Mature.
He waddled back inside and called the Cops.
Not amazingly,
They were literally right around the corner.
My buddies took off like scalded dogs
I got on my homemade trail bike, laughing so
Hard I pedaled into a sticker-tree.

I didn't know what "irony" was back then.
Back then, I was so inherently goofy, that funny
Hilarious crap was somehow attracted to me.
Ironically, when I tried being funny on purpose...
Fill in the blank. There's a lesson in there somewhere.
I'm pretty sure.

We met at that French word I still can't spell.
Ron Day View.
Cackling like
Loony loons. We laughed out little butts off.

And we rode bikes EVERYWHERE.
Through the trails. There were bike
Trails trailing everywhere, short-cuts from point
Hay to Tree. And oh yeah, I climbed trees.
Constantly. And ate apples and plums from
That mean lady’s yard. She stood in her
Kitchen and glared through cat-eyed glasses,
Daring us. Daring me.
GO AHEAD. PICK JUST ONE SINGLE PLUM.
THEN I'LL CALL YOUR MOTHER!
(Interestingly, we didn't hang out with the
plums which didn't fall too far from Mrs. Tree)

Ate whatever was edible. Wild clover.
Yeah. Grass. And
Crab-apples that held the promise of
Painful bowel movements squirting out of
Your ****. Not ‘***’ because cussing wasn’t
All that big of a deal. You heard it in R movies.
But it hadn’t permeated the marrow of
Our entire culture. Not yet. It wasn’t all over
TV after, say, 8:45.

Nothing about ***. Absolutely Nuttin' Honey.
'Cause I'd be making stuff up in 1975,
When I was 12. Kissing was just...
You know.

We messed around, got into and out of trouble.
We laughed. The future hung over us like
Those mean-sounding thunderclouds,
Miles away, but moving from the North-East,
Because severe weather in Iowa always came
In the same direction.

It’s what we did. It’s just about
All we did as kids. Man, we were crazy, and had
Crazy fun.

We built bikes out of spare parts. They were low-
Slung and cool. Mine was always breaking.
I did a lot of stupid things, and somehow,
Somehow I got away with doing a lot of
Stupid things.

I believe in God. Now.
Way back then, I was Catholic. I don’t
Know if that sufficiently explains it
Or not. We ate fishsticks on Fridays during
Lent. We went to church sometimes
On Wednesday nights, the Guitar Mass,
And on Sundays. The Mass felt like it
Lasted 93 minutes, like our services do
Now. But it seemed to go on forever.
It as about 45 minutes, and we would always
“Leave Early” which meant, we’d take
Our Communion, solemnly, eyes
Downcast and humble, but I would slow,
Then stop, lost in the visage:
I looked up at the Man on the Cross and
Wondered when the Priest would ever
Get around to explaining why He
Died for my sins.
Someone would wake me from my
Reverie, and whisper, “Please move ahead.”
Shamefaced, I would say, truthfully,
“I’m sorry, Ma’am.” Because, in 1975,
When I was 12, I really was.
Sorry.

Then an hour
Later I was dressed in
Salvation Army rags (today)
And I would jump in the creek with my
Jean-shorts and off-color shirt on.
Sometimes, the bikes weren’t in the picture.
So we hiked. Never ‘walked’ but “hiked” which
Was moving with a greater purpose.
Great distances. The distances weren’t the great
Part. I forget what the great part was, because
This was when I was a kid. When I was 12.

The things you did
As a kid
You store them in a secret kid-locker
In your heart
And your heart, it grows, along with the rest of
You, like a quarter pounded into the meat of
A young tree. The tree envelops the quarter,
Taking it in to itself, swallowing time
That you only try to clumsily relive
(Like I’m trying right now)

It used to be cold, icy, and snowy in Iowa.
I know this; I was out in it most of the time.
Does anyone sled anymore? Toboggan?
Round-saucer spinning uncontrollably at
About 12 mph? Metal sleds with runners
And power steering? Down crazy-steep
Barreling down frozen white hills, crashing
Into copses of thin pliable young trees.
You only see this kind of stuff on Youtube
In somebody’s ‘All-time Epic Fail List
The failure is epic, alright. We’ve moved on.
And not necessarily to a bigger, brighter future.

Ice! I skated on long-bladed racer skates.
I could stop on a dollar’s worth of
Dimes.

And this one time
I
Fell right on my knee hard enough to
Grind a hole in my jeans. It looked like a ******
Meteor crater. A pretty girl named Tina
Felt sorry for me and sat right next to me
She wore pink pom-poms and I fell in
Puppy with her for about three hours.
Then she smiled and hugged me and
I was more frozen than the ice outside
And she left, her Mom picking her up
And eying me balefully as I stood
Pink-faced and flushed and utterly
Confused about the randomness of
What had just happened to me.
Girls from my town all knew
More about myself than myself knew
About me. They had me PEGGED, brothers
And sisters. But not this girl. She was from
The next town over.
That was a good day, if I’m remembering
It correctly. If. I’m pretty sure I am.
Or, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t matter.

We played a game called ‘Blackman’
Like a tag game in Gym, where
One kid is “IT” and a mass of skaters
Goes from one end of the ice pond
To the other, and the people you capture
(I couldn’t catch an old man in front-wheel
Drive figure skates and I got so frustrated
I gave up to jeers and yells and found the
Trees were good listeners to kids
Who couldn’t skate as coordinated as
They wanted to.

So ten minutes later
I would go into the Warming House, and
Listen to am radio. All the Hits! KSTT! Davenport,
Iowa. On ******* Blvd., which was really
River Drive, because the Hostess Plant stood
Sentinel on top of the hill, pushing out
Sponge-cake filling and HoHos and Cupcakes
And those awful coconut snowballs, and
This one time, in high school, I shoved one
Inside my mouth and tried to swallow it
And about choked to death.

I walked to Mark Twain Elementary School
And ran home for lunch, and was usually
Late because I was easily distracted
And when the school day ended,
I walked or ran home, hurrying, because
Captain Ernie and Bugs Bunny Cartoons were on,
And then Gilligan’s Island from about 4:00 to
5:30, when the news would come on,
And then Dinner,
And I couldn’t stand to sit still
To save my life. I have ADD. I
Know this now. I didn’t know it
(Nobody knew what it was)
I knew something was wrong with me
Or not-right. It was just the way
The World Turned.

Back then. I had no sense of ‘self’.
I was a changeling. I tried to fit into
Whatever people expected of me, which
Was very often extremely difficult, because
These people I emulated and thought were
So **** cool were just as messed up
As I was, maybe more; But I
Didn’t have the emotional maturity
(Or I couldn’t face the awful responsibility
That went with that awful truth)
To deal with it, so under the rug it went.

I was moody and happy and singing
One moment and crying in the shower
The next.

This one time, I was stuck
In the borderlands of childhood
And the beginning of a man
It was safe, for awhile
This one time.

1) We might have met with a hello, and I might have brushed it off by saying "later", but you were patient and waited for me. That's how I came to know of and learned to love you.
2) You keep telling me I was a carat in your diamond, that when I'm with you, you shine brighter and become stronger. Up to this day, you still make me feel so appreciated, needed and worthy, that I have learned to value what it means to live.
3) You adored me so much, that even with dried lips, you never failed to make my day with you smiling so wide at me, telling me over and over again that I'm the one you love, despite me telling you to stop because it was getting a little too cheesy.
4) And when you raised your hands up in the air, cheering me on, I  felt so much support, energy and positivity to get me through the hell days of life. "Long live us," you said. And I cling on to those special three words for the hope of future.
5) To win a race in life, you pushed me on, endlessly shouting "Ah yeah!" with every accomplishment and dream I fulfilled.
6) Being a risk-taker, you beckoned me to venture out with you to experience new things, moments, feelings and places. I never knew I could jam into myself so much in one day, but I did because you were there to help carry it all.
7) Even from our teens, into and past the twenties, I know we'll be here for each other. We've waited for each other for so long; finally we have a chance to be the mornings and nights we dreamed of.
8) When we grow up all the more, we'll understand each other more, and the both of us will change. But wouldn't it be true love already if our love for our changed selves still stay the same?
9) When you danced and took my hand in yours, I swear that was the time when you entered my heart with admiration bursting out of me, feeding my five senses alive.
10) And you were both a bliss and pain of mine. Whatever bad or good you've been through, I felt it all because we belong to each other.
11) Sometimes you fool around, but I love how you can be such a gentleman. Telling me to cover my knees, wear buttoned shirts all the way to my neck to prevent my collarbones from peeking out. But you don't know sometimes I like to see your collarbones, or neck veins. You're only human and I just stare in awe at your jawline, with my jaws dropping so in an unladylike fashion.
12) Who could forget February 14th? The first day you called me yours. I love how smart it was of you to do that; every Valentine's will be our anniversary. You were far away on that day, but you sent me flowers. Polaroids of you holding flowers, to be exact. I love how you were funny like that.
13) And chocolate. I love chocolate. You sang me songs about chocolate. Sweet, rich and just the right texture-- both your voice and chocolate.
14) The time you've spent staying up all night for me and my happiness; honestly was sometimes making me sad to see you weren't getting enough sleep or rest. You sacrificed so much for me, but all I can do is just love you more and more each day. Tell me, how can I make up for it? Appreciating every talent you have and every single thing and detail you created, was not enough. Even this writing is not enough.
15) There are countless times where you danced for me. Til now, you have never failed to sweep me off of my feet. Literally. But that's okay, if I fall. I know you'll be there to catch me.
16) And here is a new era. In the past, no matter how many times you complimented how good I look, I never really took you seriously or believed such words. Who knew a song about calling me pretty changed my viewpoint? At times, I don't get myself too for changing my thinking so quickly, but you still accept and love me anyways.
17) I may have been here since day one or not, I may have been here since the fourteenth or not, but rest assured, I promise you: I will be here until the end. And as cliche as it sounds, or as overused as it is, I'll always say the most raw and barest line of affection: I love you.

Dull skies have finally broken
Humidity lifts
and there is air under there--
The last of day
the barest blues
the singe of pink
held up by lumps of charcoal cloud
drifting in scent of backyard fires
The moon curses from its crook of smile

Then hides again
behind the city rooftops and blackened trees
among the aerial cheers of a football game

two miles away

My friend Gerard, (who is alive), looks like an Arabian slave-boy, though swarthier and longer of hair than Tony Curtis; an olive –skinned Mowgli, ape boy of Kipling’s  “Jungle Book”, although I have never seen Gerard swinging through any trees, nor eating any insects, nor even kissing a sultan’s foot. But looks can be deceiving, or receiving, with the proper pen, the zen pen of a poet, this proper poet who lives upstairs with his multitude of books piled on the floors, walking on Whitman, sitting on Shakespeare; tripping over Ginsberg, sleeping on Sartre; not a single shelf for this Jung man.
“A place for everything, and for everything it’s place”, he stands and stares out of a window overlooking the jungle of five-foot high weeds that serves as our backyard and wonders aloud “whither Oregon?”; questions our alleged enlightened sense of awareness, his disposition toward liberalness in a world gone madder than usual. Have I convinced him yet, my naïve, trusting neighbor? Yes, he realizes with a sigh that it is so, now that he has finally succumbed and bought a thirteen inch, black & white television of his own, now he can see with his own brown eyes in his own living room, far off wars, instant coffee & instant karma, depersonalized tragedies, faceless fatalities, insidious soap operas and humorless sitcoms, adverse advertisements, Howard Stern; “whither sanity?” we both cry and laugh out loud at this mediocre media, the global sewage, the Marshall McClueless, me and Gerard Rizza, my friend who is alive.

Gerard, (who is healthy), is gay, yet straighter than most men, and has been complaining quite a bit about the ferry service lately; contemplating a move off of Staten Island, and leaving his sporadic substitute teaching gig at a nearby high school, a mere six block walk from our house atop Winter Hill, where he is trying to convince me, a wide-eyed cynic, that a blank, white, unused canvas, surrounded by a wooden picture frame hung upon his wall is indeed a work of art; the job is very convenient, but again the ******* about the ferry, not the boat ride per se, but the incongruities of the ****** schedule, which anybody who has ever just missed a three a.m. boat and had to wait for an hour in the Hierynomous Bosch triptych known as the Whitehall Ferry terminal ,will definitely attest to; and Gerard has this thing about Staten Islanders, like the homophobes at a recent anti-peace rally in New Dorp, supporting the carpet bombing of an oil rich yet still poor third-world country, throwing beer cans at him and his companions while shouting “we know where you live, *******!”. Rizz came home that evening, visibly shaken and pale, (not his usual olive-skinned self), knocked on my door and pleaded “whither ******?”. I went upstairs, sat on his couch and rolled a joint. Gerard puts on the new 10,000 Maniacs tape and tries, once again, to bait me in a conversation about his “work of art”, my work of naught; he speaks of the horrific details of his day. “Isn’t this picture of Doc Gooden on my refrigerator door proof enough of my manhood, my patriotic intent, for those *******? The ******’ Mets, fuh chrissakes!” We sit out on his porch, watching the sun set over our backyard jungle as Natalie sings wireless Verdi cries, and I pass the burning joint to Gerard, my friend who is still healthy.

My friend Gerard, who is *** positive, was quite possibly a cat in a former life, probably a Siamese, thin, dark and aloof; yes, I can see ol’ Rizz now, sprawled out on an old tapestry rug, getting his belly scratched by his owner, perhaps Emily Dickinson or Georgia O’Keefe, Rizz purring like the engine of an old bi-winged barnstormer; abruptly rolls over, gets on all fours, tail waving *****, slinks over to lap water out of a bowl marked “Gerard”. He’d sleep all day on books and original manuscripts, and play all night amongst oil & acrylic, knocking over an occasional blank canvas, which he, in a future incarnation, will try to convince me, in his feline manner, is art. Sitting and staring from his usual spot on the windowsill, his cat eyes blink slowly as he wonders, “whither dinner?”; and begins to clean himself with tongue and paw, this cat who might be Gerard, my friend who is *** positive.

Gerard, who is sick, recently moved to Manhattan, Chelsea, to be precise, in with his best friend; and has stopped ******* about the Staten Island ferry, having far more pressing matters to ***** about, i.e. the ever-rising cost of homeopathic medicine and the lack of coverage for holistic and alternative care; any number of political and social concerns (Gerard was never the silent type); the lateness of his first published book of poems, entitled “Regard for Junction”; his rapidly deteriorating health, etc., etc.; and is now a true city dweller, a zen denizen, a proper poet with high regard for junction. That’s all that remains when it’s all over anyway, this junction, that junction, petticoat junction, petticoat junction – “I always wanted to **** the brunette sister”, I’d once told him; “I prefer uncle Joe!”, he laughingly replied; dejection, rejection, reclamation, defamation, cremation, conjecture, conjunction, all junctions happening at the same time, at now, a single place, a single moment, this forever junction with Gerard, my friend who is dying.

My friend Gerard, who is dead, officially passed from this life on a Saturday morning in early April, a mere two weeks before his junction with publication, although Gerard my friend passed away much earlier, leaving a sick and emaciated body behind to play host to his bedside guests, to help bear the pain of his family and friends; so doped-up on morphine, no longer able to remember any names, he called me “*****” when I entered the hospital room, where this barely physical manifestation of what had once been Gerard Rizza was being kept alive like the barest glimmer of hope, and displayed like some recently fallen leader, lying in state;  “whither Gerard withers” I thought, saying goodbye to this Rizza impersonator, this imposter, this visitor from a shadow world, an abstraction of a friend, whom the nurses told us, his disbelieving visitors, was our friend Gerard, who though technically still alive, was already dead.

My friend Gerard, who is laughing
My friend Gerard, who is singing
My friend Gerard, who is coughing
My friend Gerard, who is sleeping
My friend Gerard, who is holy
My friend Gerard, who is missed.

She was very warm in bed except for her nose, which was more than cold, though not quite frozen. Her bear, who she had folded into her arms but as a prelude to pulling back the covers - no duvees here just scratchy blankets- she placed on her on the pillow. Jellikins was pink and not a proper bear for a nine year old. She'd been her bear since infancy, small and a bit grubby, and pink.
 
It was still quite dark, silent. She could see her dressing gown hanging on the door - just. There was a movement downstairs; her father making tea perhaps. This was his time of day, the early morning. For as long as she could remember he was up and often out when she woke. Even at Christmas, particularly at Christmas when she sought her mother's bed he was 'out', working or walking in the park . But here at the farm he was here, downstairs, and if she went down now he'd wrap her in a blanket or two and read to her until the light changed through the kitchen window on to the yard, a gradual blueness, then, if it was a clear day she'd watch the sun draw itself from the sea in a golden ball.
 
She loved it when he read, because he loved to read, and because he loved to read to her, holding her gently in his arms, she would drift off into her own thoughts. Being out with dogs on the cliff paths, the smell of the Christmas tree at home that her mother would decorate tonight, being on the train for six hours with picnicy food, game after game of Go and those strange  word puzzles her father would invent , then the cycle ride with the big downhill rush to Morfyn and the long long push up Rhiw hill in the twilight . . .
 
Later, after their first breakfast they'd go out into the frozen yard and let the dogs out. Into the old sheds with their simple wooden latches hand-smoothed requiring the barest touch to open; then **** and his mum bounding out, and the little dogs yapping and yapping. Next, to barn and with the knife she'd been trusted with, she waited for the bales to land at her feet, flying out of the darkness up high near the roof. Cutting the baler twine and stuffing it in her coat pocket she opened out the compressed straw ready for Blossom and her friends to munch and scrunch, **** and **** their way through their breakfast.
 
On a farm the opening and closing of gates was like a little ceremony. Always the same careful ordering of movement; you could only open this gate if you'd closed that . . . you always checked the tail of the chain was the whole way through the loop and secure.
 
Meanwhile proper morning had arrived: it had been dark, now it was light, properly morning time. She could move all ten beasts on her own, from the Plas field across the yard to the Stack and back again - four gates each way and never a slip.
 
She had read at school that the beasts spoke to each other on Chrismas Eve, at the moment of the birth, when this baby was born in the stable. Although she doubted this just a little – Who had actually heard them? Was there  a recording perhaps? She wondered what they would say to each other tonight. Surely they spoke to each other all the time. Well, the beasts she knew mooed and grunted constantly. Was it just that we could understand them when suddenly it became Christmas? And how long could they talk for? Just a few minutes, or the rest of the night until the sun rose? She imagined herself opening her bedroom window at midnight to listen to them in the stack yard. She would look up at the sparkly sky, a sky that was so awesome that she and her father would, on a clear night, go up the mountain before bed and stand at the very top to look at the immense upturned bowl of the heavens rising out of the sea on three sides. At home the sky was just a red glow, occasionally the moon rose through the trees in the park, but the stars seemed hardly indistinguishable from passing aeroplanes, only they twinkled and moved. You couldn’t see those fields of stars her father wondered at it here on the mountain, those distant constellations, stars beyond number and time, light years away. Beside which the thought of animals talking to each other for a few minutes at Christmas seemed entirely possible.

She listens to No Doubt singing
"I'm just a girl,"
while shaving her legs.
The hair collects in the bathtub
all scattered across
like blown dandelion puffs
over the water's murky face.
Tiny wishes for
the barest underarms and legs
but she's a women
'they make us bleed'
or so they say.
'Cause I'm just a girl
I'd rather not be,'
while my innocence
circles the drain.
Lucky me...
I'm torn and *****
'living in captivity'
but "I'm just a girl."
"Don't you think I know
Exactly where I stand"

To it, I've never been.
but I've dreamed of a place where everything
is coated in corn and comfort.
Wished the past had taken me,
can't help but feel it was about my skin.
Cactus candy and cowboy boots.
Zydeco and haunted hotels.
The voodoo Frank sang about in the end.
The horns sound the streets.
Close curtains, be discreet.
Encircle the barest neck,
with colorful beads.
His family reunions
made me realize I'm on my own.
Until I met a prettier soul.
I don't kiss frogs for love.
I forget the ease in slime.
and let the grease define
an unhealthy outlook.
Sip another lime or a sour.
A ginger begs the hour.
Lonely never leaves,
but warmth is a soco shower.

I dreamed of going to a ball once, all in red and gold--like Settareh from the old tales.

Only, I had no pari to help me.

My veil was secondhand, my gown plain, and my anklets of paste and plating instead of diamonds and gold.

But there was this boy, you see.

Not a prince, not the captain of a ship or a faerie lord, not a warrior, a healer or a mage...just a boy.

And I had the barest will-o’-the-wisp’s hope that he would dance with me.

This collecting; this laying out of treasures. A piece of watercolour paper cut to fit the sill of a window, then each object placed in a sequence. Stones and shells at first, then slivers of wood, a crab, a starfish. Eventually, small objects from inside the Fishing Station. Strange and so different away from their location. Strange to be displayed as distinctly separate rather than a gregarious jumble of ‘finds’. Their shadows fell with such delicacy across the paper, turning as the light turned, sharp-edged now, smudged later. I would catch her sitting before these collections, observing their properties as the window projected different qualities of light with the passing day. I had them to myself in the early mornings when I crept from our bed into the grey blue light of the dawn. I would sit before them with a china mug of tea feeling my body come to terms with its own self having left its shared part of me in bed. Every day seemed more precious than the previous. As the calendar moved relentlessly forward I realised we had begun to speak in whispers, beyond whispers in fact. I would look at her and speak silently in my head, as I do when I ‘say’ our silent grace, when I close my eyes and pause before the delight of a meal shared. She would nod, or answer with only the barest movement of her petalled lips. The most delicate stroke of my arm was a poem; a hand resting against the neck a chapter of novel. The volumes of words that we had between us come to own tumbled away into the machair. And living slowed right down. Every movement had a graceful turn, bend or flow to it. If we stood close to each other there was rarely the need to venture into an embrace. For once we were not about to part, we became completely, utterly together. We would listen to each other breathe until even that became absorbed into the sea's great breath we could feel from the cottage windows ruffling the waters.

To describe her hair is to scratch markings in sand,
only to watch grains shift and fade like words that I lack.
Raven's too dark, Midnight not true to her soul.
I refuse to settle for simply black.

To put in words the tilt of her chin,
to lay claim to her eyes' swirling blues and greens
is impossible. Better again sand meet my pen
than her face be sullied by the barest degrees.

I'd tell you of diamonds and midnight to compare her beauty,
and then think better of her- less of my words- and take it all back.
I refuse to sully her by barest degrees;
I refuse to settle for simply black.

I have dreamt this dream for several nights now.  It started off in colour; blues, greens, whites and yellows and with only the sound of beautiful piano music and the barest of floors.  Each night the vision grew in detail but faded in colour, until now it is in black, white and gray with the actual colour only implied by my memory of it.

The scene is part of a room, a corner, in a very large and majestic house.  The floor is hardwood with no carpet.  The walls are a very light, warm white with somewhat high ceilings.  I am standing (you cannot see me) looking towards the corner of the room where there are French doors.  The door trim is black.  The doors are open.  It is night and the moonlight is streaming in the doors and in a window, off slightly to the left.  Chiffon curtains frame the doorway and blow in the slight, cool, night breeze.  It is a warm summer’s night and the fresh air is scented with an ocean fragrance.

To my left, just barely in the picture, is a glossy, black baby grand piano.  The ebony of the piano is a sharp contrast to the soft white of the sheer curtains as the breeze wafts them towards the heavenly tones.  The music coming from the piano is the most beautiful sound I have ever heard.  The notes reach into my chest and engulf my heart.  The pianist cannot be seen.  He is just out of the frame of my mind’s eye.  My heart tells me it is he.

I awaken from my dream and lie there, still, with my eyes closed.  Not wanting to lose the tranquility, I re-feel the dream again and again.  In the foggy abyss between dreamland and being fully awake, I imagine him sitting at the piano.  His hair falls in loose curls as he is slightly bent over the keys.  His fingers fly over the ivory as he plays with passion and heart.  His love of the music is evident.

He is wearing a crisp, white tuxedo shirt and black morning suit with the tails falling over the back of the piano bench.  He has not yet adorned the formal tie needed to complete the ensemble.  Or maybe he has already removed it.

This is the artist’s private time for peace and composure.  As he closes the piece of music, he raises his face to the moonlight.  His moist eyes glisten in the silver glow.  His face is relaxed and calm.  As he slowly closes his eyes, a soft, contented smile graces his lips and his body sighs.  He has found the completion he seeks, in his music.

Forty years ago
She wrote me a note
Insubstantial
But ending preciously…

‘only yours’

In fountain ink
On a scrap paper
Written surreptitiously
But passionately
On a break period
Delivered through a common friend
And there wasn’t enough privacy
So it seemed
To read it alone
And not enough strength
To unfold that first call
Till the eyes
In youth’s first thirst
Spread it
In the stolen reflection
Of streetlight
In trembling hands
Barest words
Yet infinitely precious…

‘only yours’

She couldn’t be
For she was
Destined to be someone else’s
And leave me nothing
But her everything
In those two words
Time couldn’t stale…

‘only yours’

She
Possibly now a grandma
With everything
For she left me nothing
But two innocuous words
Barest infinite
Her everything
Mine too…

‘only yours’.

When first we moved on into the house
They said that we wouldn’t last,
The locals told us nobody had
Of the many who’d left in the past.
We asked if the house was haunted, but
They said that it’s not, ‘It’s cool!’
The reason nobody stayed, they said,
Was the serpent that lived in the pool.

The ‘pool’ it seemed was the small lagoon
That was not so far from the house,
‘You’ll notice that there’s never a rat,
You’ll not see a single mouse!’
It seems the serpent came out at night
And fed on the rodents there,
‘You’d better keep all the windows shut,
And jam the doors with a chair.’

We settled in and we laughed at that,
‘They must believe I’m a fool!
I haven’t found anyone out there yet
Who has seen this thing in the pool.
It’s only a superstition, something
Handed down from the past,
They love to shiver and peddle gloom
In the hopes we’ll be aghast.’

We sauntered down and we took it in,
The water was calm and still,
And willows, myrtles and evergreens
Were set in this sweet idyll,
‘I think that I’m going to love it here,
It’s peaceful and quiet,’ said Cass,
I didn’t mention the snaking trail
That I’d noticed, deep in the grass.

She questioned me when I barred the doors,
And shut all the windows tight,
‘You’re not afraid of the serpent, Jack?’
She laughed, and I said ‘Not quite!
There’s gnats about in the midnight air
And I don’t want them in here.’
She laughed again, ‘That’s a good excuse,
I’m sure to believe you, dear!’

Cass would sleep like a log each night,
Would sleep ‘til the break of day,
But I would wake to the slightest scrape,
To a Hoot-Owl, hunting its prey.
I heard a sound on the patio
Like something slithering there,
A tapping sound on the window pane
And the movement of a chair.

It got to the point I couldn’t sleep,
I’d lie there, listening,
Awake to the slightest sound out there,
The barest rustling,
I’d keep a shovel beside the door
Get up, and sit in fright,
Holding my breath, and waiting for
Its visit, every night.

I opened the door one moonless night
And the monster slithered in,
A forked tongue flickering out in front
And cold eyes full of sin,
I slammed the shovel down on its neck
And the head just fell away,
While the rest just coiled through the open door
And the blood came out in a spray.

I must have got it all over me
So I should have washed my hands,
But somehow, some of the serpent’s blood
Got over the pots and pans,
I dumped the body out in the woods
Hid deep in the winter grass,
Then cooked a breakfast fit for a Queen
For the love of my lady, Cass.

I should have known about serpent’s blood
I should have been more than wise,
For Voodoo tells us that serpent’s blood
Will make you grow snakes inside,
So Cass came down with a fever then
And she moaned and cried, ‘Enough!’
She said, ‘There’s something a-move in there,
That’s slithering round my gut.’

I tended her for a week or more
Put a cold compress on her brow,
Trying to get her fever down,
I wouldn’t have done that now;
The seventh morning I checked on her
And she called out, ‘Don’t come in!’
I saw her there on the bedroom floor,
She’d slithered out of her skin.

I stepped aside as she tried to slide
On out through the open door,
She moved like a snake, covered in scales,
I watched her in shock, and awe,
She slithered down to the old lagoon
And disappeared in the reeds,
And that was the last I saw of Cass
I swear, and my heart, it bleeds.

They’ve got me locked in a prison cell
As they think I’ve done her in,
They went to look why she wasn’t there
But they only found her skin,
They think I’m some sort of monster
That I’m mad, or merely a fool,
I keep on saying they’ll find her,
She’s a serpent, down in the pool.

David Lewis Paget

What I want
For Christmas is
Just the barest
Of necessities

All my teeth
Not just two
So when I eat
I can chew

A skip and jump
Back in my step
So each morning
I have some pep

A pair of glasses
Which self defrost
A set of keys
Which don’t get lost

All my hair
Put back in place
So I don’t have
That barren space

A pair of shoes
With self tie laces
So I don’t have to
Reach those places

A set of arteries
That don’t plug
A nice cold beer
Which I can chug

To have someone
My brain equip
With that new fangled
Memory chip

So it can tell me
My intent
When I stood up
And why I went

A bunch of prunes
Which are pre dated
To work just when
I’m constipated

A gizmo that will
So to speak
Turn off my wee wee’s
Little leak

So I don’t have
I’ll just be blunt
Those little dribbles
In the front

A cork that fits
My *** hole, please
So hemorrhoids don’t pop out
Whenever I sneeze

A longer arm
That would pass
Behind my back
To wipe my ***

On this I’ll end
My little list
I don’t want Santa
To get ******
BOEMS BY JA 103

If heaven wasn't so far away
    If I could drive there in just one day
      I'd pack my car and get there fast
         Or fly there with a rocket blast

      Thank my God for hearing this plea
     And for letting your eternal soul go free

              I'd fight a thousand armies
                to a win a raging war
       Or paddle against the currents
                     with just a canoe
                   if I only had one oar
  
             Defending all your beauty
           and the light you gave us here
                 I am not too far,
              my heart is always near

          I'd walk a thousand miles
               just in my barest feet
Or hire a passing, ghostly shipping fleet
   and watch the troops of demons to their  
            grievous quick retreat

    I would walk through the hottest fires
           of a crazy burning hell
    Or surf the oceans fastest, highest
                  waiter, water swell

         I'd slingshot through the stars
             Or float up  on a bardge
           Just  ask the Man in Charge

                  I'm' waiting for the call
                  to bring you home again
                  I'm waiting here for you
                   back here ...
                    back in
                   your earthly Glen.

Cherie Nolan © June 2016

the one positive aspect concerning Tucson’s blistering heat is what women wear on display are details one would never notice or think about if it were not right there in plain view an evident preference based solely on sweltering circumstance is no brassieres yet vogue goes beyond this lovable lapse women being fashion mindful arrange interesting medleys of flimsy diaphanous chemises various lengths of shorts thin-threaded summer dresses peculiar styles of tresses and fairly informal shoes or barefoot in essence everything about women’s wear in Tucson is noticeably informal revealing to the eye the barest facts that said there are those who fall under the dictate of Latin or Goth influences regardless how scorching the sun black is their uniform and finally the no matter what season or time of day hooded sweatshirt set and their hoodlum world

2

nightlife in Tucson is dull for a big city ex-resident several Friday evenings a month he visits plush bar arriving about 6 PM sitting at bar sipping 2 sometimes 3 drinks chatting with whomever then walking home about 7:30 - 8 and that is his rather sedate social life but on this particular Friday night with full moon 2 days away and Venus in his thoughts he thinks to go to sky bar outside monsoon rains are letting up opaque gray sky fragrance of creosote in air he looks at reflection in mirror feels deep depression

3

they are supposed to meet meant to meet destined fated to meet but they will not meet because there is a season for love in a person’s life but that time is gone it is too late for him too many hearts racing then erased lies deceptions disappointments nights alone under-appreciated without love so many years too much bridge under the water concerning her she is emotionally occupied her dog Sweeny on last legs a drawn-out too personal sadness to share besides she is not looking for an older man possibly a younger man who can ease her fears of loss and aging

4

the drainage system in Tucson is not well thought out when it rains it floods she wears Chaco sandals wading through puddles feeling intoxicated by scent of creosote after divorce 20 years ago she became drunken drugging **** until she adopted Sweeny changed her life it is like she is feeling relapse knowing Sweeny will be gone soon she cannot bear the thought decides to start at the Buffet total losers bar then work her way north up 4th Avenue a lot of ground to cover

5

an older man with loud gravelly voice and pink eye introduces himself as Frank says he moved here 25 years ago from New Jersey accent still intact orders ***** martini pulls out 6” KA-BAR military knife throatily grumbles i manage she decides she’s had enough of the Buffet does not finish drink decides to skip the Shanty Maloney’s O’Malley’s glances in the windows of Che”s sees gossipy **** she does not want to run into crosses 4th Avenue looks in the window at Plush sees self-important **** she does not want to run into crosses 4th Avenue again settling for seat at Sky bar

6

he gazes at her and his heart melts she is so lovely in subtle alternative demeanor it would be easy to admire her for rest of his life if he were female he’d want to look just like her but he sees she is not interested in him he looks away remembers the first step when he looks at a woman he searches for qualities that attract him because he wants to desire her yet this tendency creates an imbalance or disadvantage he is rendered weak to a woman’s beauty or whatever traits he idealizes self-realizing this propensity he turns his gaze away

7

she glances around large room notices him smiling at her eyes glance passed him she thinks he looks remotely familiar but the mustache appears ridiculously out of style too much character in his face he appears small maybe 5’8” or 9” probably drives a mini-***** just not her type whatever then she remembers the first step when she looks at a man she searches for qualities she is critical of because she wants to be impervious to his power

Our skins barest bare
in this long awaited retreat
we sit on adirondack chair
waves washing our feet.

We know such times are fragile
like dreams leaving at dawn
are like an imagined mile
before are breaths withdrawn!

We ponder not on what to write
not pour one word from breast
just wait for when seeping night
push the ring of flame to the west!

When one by one they come on the far
two shadows grow on the shore
we string one poem with a silken star
hearts sing in joy encore!

We let our bloods flow to the sea
our souls on sands lay bare
When new tides rise in the morn to be
find two adirondack chair!

Life is but death's glorified twin
a delirious din in the hush
our days a riddle of earthly spin
an illusory maddening rush!

"There's a masquerade in all of us. And to be invited is the greatest invitation of all. There are no masks, and there are no faces, just the barest of raw, gnawed-on bones.”~ Jade Day



[Do decides to take out his cell phone and begins filming the two girls; Unknowingly the girls continue to pleasure each other.]


GIRL #1: Ooh, please don’t stop babe. Ugghh that feels so good!

GIRL #2: Don’t worry darling I will never stop. As long as time continues to exist I will try my best to keep up.


[Do continues filming the girls as they continued eating each other out. Spore, Gum and Sweat sneak up behind Do. Spore slaps Do on his back.]

DO: Ow! What the hell was that for?

SPORE: Come on Do. You know that what you are doing is wrong and completely illegal. Would you want someone to film you while you are having **** time?

DO: I honestly can say that I am no where near eligible enough to provide an answer to that question.

SPORE: Okay, but would you?

DO: I wouldn’t give a ****.

[Gum and Sweat both laugh hard at Do. Sweat gives Do a high five.]

SWEAT: Ha ha. You know Do the coolest thing about you is that you keep it real. You don’t ******* around like some of these other fools around here.

DO: Thank you, Sweat. I try.

SWEAT: No problem bro.

GUM: Spore you really need to get a grip. What’s the danger in a bout of harmless fun?

SPORE: Depends on what level of danger we are talking as well as your definition of harmless.

GUM: I’m stumped. I’ll get back to you later on that one.

DO: Hey Sweat! I am getting some incredible footage over here bro!

[Sweat takes a few steps closer to view Do’s live camera as he is filming. The girls are moaning wildly as they are about to reach their climaxes.]

SWEAT: These girls so make me want to take a few licks ha ha.

GUM: I totally agree with you dude. This session is escalating very quickly.

[The moaning between the two girls became increasingly louder.]

GIRL #1: Oh my god! I think I… I think I’m going to ***!

GIRL #2: Come on darling let’s *** together!

GIRL #1 & #2: Ugh, uugghh, UUUGGGHHH!!!!!!!!!!!


[Do, Gum and Sweat start snickering loudly. Do ends up laughing so hard that he starts gradually swaying around and losing his focus with the camera until finally he hits the ground with a loud thud. The girls both jump in shock as they attempted to cover their upper body features with their hands. Both girls frantically struggled to pull up their jeans and put their shirts back on.]


GIRL #1: YOU GUYS WERE FILMING US? WHAT THE **** DUDE THAT IS SO CREEPY!!!! ******* PERVERTS!!!!!

GIRL #2: WHO THE **** ARE YOU GUYS? WHO IN THE HELL GAVE YOU PERMISSION TO FILM US?

DO: Nobody gave me permission to film you. Me and my friends happened to hear you guys moaning from where we were sitting and decided to find out where it was coming from and then we found you two. It turned us on so we decided to film you. The real question though is who gave you permission to have *** on public property in broad daylight in public?

GIRL #1: Look we were ***** okay? You don’t think that being sexless in an asylum for six months will increase your hormones? You kids have got a lot to learn.

GIRL #2: Yeah, you kids need to experience life on a grander. You need to live a little.

GIRL #1: Hey you in the white jeans! What’s your name?

DO: Who me?

GIRL #1: Yes, you!

DO: Oh, my name is Do. Do Nino. What is yours?

[The girl slowly walks up to Do in a very **** manner until she is within close proximity of Do. She pressed her body against Do with her lips less than an inch from his. She was staring deep into his eyes as in a **** whisper she recited her name]

GIRL #1: Mon nom est Alice. Alice French et la jeune fille derrière moi est mon ami Anna Sharp.

[Anna waved as Do smiled back at her in return. Do felt the warmth of Alice’s breath hit his lips.]

DO: Those are some **** names for women as attractive as yourself.

ALICE: That’s what they tell us.

[Alice had ***** blond shoulder length hair with blond highlights. She had gray eyes with a slender body and sleek hips standing at about five foot nine. Anna had jet black hair with electric red highlights. She had more of an fitness build as beneath her top she had a beautiful six pack as well as some considerably muscular legs. The detail of the muscles showed in her arms. Anna also wore electric red eye shadow complete with lipstick of the same color. Alice leaned in and abruptly began passionately French kissing Do. She then attempted to grab Do’s cell phone out of his hand while doing so. Do caught her trying to steal his phone and pushed her off of him accidentally brushing his hands across her ******* in the process.]

ALICE: Don’t be shy. Go ahead touch them. Feel them. Let them blow your mind.

[Alice whispered sexily in Do’s ear as she proceeded to start trailing her lips down his neck in a series small, light kisses as Alice attempts to grab his phone once more. Do’s breathing rate begins to grow heavier. Do gently grasps Alice on both sides of her upper body.]

DO: What are you trying to do?

ALICE: Oh, nothing. I’m just feeling a little ***** still after my steamy little session with Anna.

ANNA: And may I say she is definitely an acquired taste. Active ***** goers would know what I am talking about.

[Do, Spore, Gum, Sweat, Alice and Anna burst out laughing.]

ANNA: Anyway there is this new club opening up on January 31 called Hyper.***. All of you are invited.

ALICE: Also since you will be with me and Anna you will receive free entrance admission, free vip admission and free drinks all night. We know the club owners.

ANNA: Remember this offer is exclusively for you only and can be revoked at any time. We don’t want you going around blabbing to everybody about it because we will take away your privileges just like that.

[Alice and Anna both snap their fingers as a gesture to justify their statements.]

ALICE: Be there

ANNA: Or be square

[Alice and Anna slowly walk away. Do and his friends take a brief look at his business card.]

GUM: This club sounds very interesting. I can’t wait until opening night. What’s today’s date?

SPORE: January 17

GUM: Ok so two weeks then. I’m so totally pumped for this. How about you guys?

SWEAT: ****, this club sounds like it’s going to be bad ***.

DO: Hell yeah, bro. I’m looking to get laid that night.

SPORE: Boys. You guys are so typical.

SWEAT: To say men are typical is to say nature is questionable.

SPORE: Pretty much.

GUM: You’re so weird Spore.

SPORE: Weird but classic. Controversial yet fantastic.

SWEAT: You can stop now, Spore.

[Spore flips Sweat off. Sweat laughs in response while returning the gesture.]

DO: Hey look guys!

[Do spots another cell phone laying in the same spot that Alice and Anna were having ***. Do walks over to pick up the phone and turns on the back light sliding the screen to unlock it. He finds a video on the screen and decides to press play. The video showed two guys fighting. One had short, wavy, red hair, a white t-shirt and leather jacket with leather boots. The other guy had short, curly, black hair, a white shirt and some white jeans. Spore, Gum and Sweat gather around Do to view the video.]

SPORE: ******* Do! I think that’s you and WiFi.

GUM: Who’s phone is that?

DO: It’s Alice’s…

[Do feels a sudden tap on his right shoulder. He looks over his shoulder and turns around to discover that Dr. Nightmare was standing right behind him.]

DR. NIGHTMARE: Come with me.

Battered by the words
thrown my way I hesitate.
I know what needs to be said.
I know how to defend myself.
I know how to fix that tired
arrogant smile of yours.

You never walked the mile.
Never carried the load.
You never faced down the barrel.
Never lived as a boy without sanctuary,
or as a man without a hometown.
Nine words never changed your life.
Six seconds never changed your world.
Love never found you, and you’ve never
hunted for it, not in earnest.

The sacrifices for friendship are a burden
to you. Do you even know how truly
pathetic that is? Could you ever?
You’ve never fought in the night,
or run throughout the day.
Never let your blood stain
those you trust so that their own
might be spared.
Never so much as lifted a selfless finger
in repent of your nine selfish ones.
Never been so happy someone died
instead of you, only to hate yourself for it.

You are a boy. A man child.
Hold onto that arrogance.
I could blow it away with a
sentence. I could show you a world
where love and trust and hope are
tantamount to survival.
The world is cold and dark and
amazing and you haven’t the barest
idea at all.

I open my mouth.
I close it.
Sleep well, you sad
wonderful
man-child.

Angels watching over you
And I
I am nothing but a blank stare
Amused
Knowing that you are everything
a man could ask for
Knowing that I
will be the one who breaks you


Hardheartedly I applause
At my own misleading specious

Chasing a mirage impassively
In the distance where
no sane man laid eyes
I am looking for a being
Less astonishing than you
looking to feed my ever lasting lust

Insipidness is consuming me
or maybe intense devotion

I feel
away from my nature
the barest animalistic side of me

and you
you are judging me with those humane eyes

my bedroom carries the headiness of stale captivity. the teeth of a years old trap are gathering debris where they’ve gnashed on my leg. my loved ones come to relieve me of my suffering.

the gentle winds bring me dead leaves in layers of red, yellow, brown and the occasional purple. “look at how they’ve changed,” the winds say. “things can change for you, too.” i brush them away. indignant, the winds whip dust and pebbles that become bullets at the right speed, threatening tornadoes that will never come. i wait until their lungs tire.

the cleansing rains rinse the matted blood from my wound and refresh my hot, mangled skin. “doesn’t that feel great?” the rains say. “you can feel like this all the time if you put in a little effort.” i dry myself down. angered, the rains disease the trap with rust and drench me until my bones attempt to float away, threatening tsunamis that will never come. i wait until the water recedes.

the giving earth sprouts a flower in the corner of my bedroom. “life is still growing, waiting for you,” the earth says. “you just have to come to meet it.” it’s a beautiful reprieve for my senses, i almost go to pluck it. as i come to realize my motions, my heart drops to an unknown place away from my chest. i hesitate. furious, the earth wilts the flower until it blends in with the rest of my bedroom. it shakes the ground violently, deepening the pain of the metal in my flesh. it delivered on earthquakes but threatened no aftershocks.

the lively sun dries me of the failures of the wind and rain and earth. the sun says nothing. i make no effort to repay its warmth. it reciprocates that lack of effort.

i have exhausted the affections of the elements, and in their abandonment now rests a deep stillness that urges me to look around.

over time, i have accumulated the barest of pleasures — some unread books, some unplayed records, some small tokens of loves long gone — that mimic a home, but bring you no closer to what that is supposed to feel like.

the odor in here is disgusting. unsophisticated in my aching, i wish for a sweet-scented breeze, or a balmy rain, or a fragrant flower.

or maybe i will just order a scented candle.

Evening falls like an old friend,
And all the dead poets have arrived,
It is a gathering of all their spirits,
For another try at stirring the muses.

We see Keats, and Shelley, and Sandberg,
As they slowly materialize before our eyes,
Then Woodsworth and Dylan Thomas,
Both simultaneously step into the light.

Shakespeare wants to come, too,
But his turn of a phrase won't do,
Because we want Dickerson and Frost,
And the bard must wait until his time has come.

The bonfire is roaring, the starry, starry skies,
A cool evening breeze steps lightly across our faces,
Then Shelley begins to step forward and write in the air,
Such phrases and sketches once again a delight to read.

And, I, a poet want to beam in a trance of worldly proportion,
I can not speak, or utter even the barest of grunts or utterances,
Then Shakespeare, never to be outdone, begins a love-sick sonnet,
While the crowd of hosts take notice and smile out loud.

This gathering of dead poets seems like a dream of dreams,
As they stand proudly upon the dampened ground of forest leaves,
And Walt Whitman wants to recite from "Leaves of Grass" once more,
While I, a student at the beginning of life, take copious notes galore.

The suit in question
Is grey. Pin-striped white.
Double-breasted. Three piece.
Blue tie, grey hatching.
An absolute nightmare to change into.

I drop my jeans
In the monastery stall,
Shed my shoes.
Old friends.
The trousers, slacks,
Rise morning fog
And sleep in the stratus
Of my waist.

I really wonder how
The men of the then
Could have worn them.
So much taller.
So much grander.
So much straighter.

White shirt with
The butterfly tracks,
Make-up stains
From a billion ancestors.
Dead relatives that don’t
Respond to the call.
I take their places
Without a single
Crumb of guilt,
O feel the guilt.
The vest. Easy enough.
Yeast but grey and it
Rises horizontally.
I’ve just noticed pockets
Sewn into maddening teases.
The barest suggestion
Of an opening.
It holds like the bowl of the moon.

The coat. The great monarch.
Organizer with a clipboard
Ensuring the quality
Of a burlesque of silk.
So strange.
So other.
So queer.

In a minute or two, the
Hyperhydrosis.
It really is my only hope
Of describing my true temperature.
I will ignite in a biological
Soliloquy that can
Pronounce all those tricky
Thoughts I’ve given up
For the stage.
Gentle gravity,
Cruel crushing backhand.
Burst my complexion,
Steal my aqueous words.

Again, this suit.
How many Lomans,
Bankers, adjudicators,
Businessmen and Babbits
Have lived out their deaths
In you?
Brave rain cloud,
Where is your lining?
I feel the quip swelling
And project it to the back wall:

Only the costume knows true reincarnation.

Sara L Russell*

Bright colours in a pool of crystal clarity
reflecting all the spectrum of our days
slip down into a quagmire of nonentity
with nothing left to sully or erase.

This cold disease that strips a man of human soul,
is worst of all the ravages of time;
behold those eyes, devoid of everything you stole,
yet blissfully unknowing of your crime.

This bright man, worn away to barest minimum,
this one-time writer and great raconteur,
this poet - will not travel to Byzantium;
his world is fading to a senseless blur.

I LIE IN THE BOTTOMLESS PIT OF BITTERNESS
What have I done to life
That it kills me even though I lie
Down in the bottomless pit of bitterness
I am ****** down to the barest state of anarchy
Too choking and breathless, I can’t talk

Catatonic, I stand in dumb
Severe as I lay in me numb
I can’t wish to have life within me
I only choose to let go of it
If it will let me, leave me!
Leave me! Leave me! Life
For I hate you and everything in you

I am a genius, always eager to go along
You are too jealous of me
And capture me in your wicked web of limbo
That I may suffer and strip away like straw
Waiting to be burnt for the cloud smoke
I barely uphold my breath and strength
As tears and mucus mixed at my chin
All streaming down to my mouth

Am sick and tired of wiping
My weakling hand also tired of wiping
I’ll only let the constituent enter my mouth
Or pass down the earth

What have I done to life
That it kills me even though I lie
Down in the bottomless pit of bitterness
Rolling in painful rub of suffering
Dejection and rejection am screaming!
And sobbing as I struggle to doddle out
Of the brutality of life

Leave me; let me go for am tired
To be thrown, tried even tired of tossed
Who shall set me free, who shall deliver me?
Can you hear my cry?
Help me! for I am drawing
into the boiling ocean of life