When I speak 
The right words 
Always cease to escape
I keep the best ones 
Locked up 
Within barricades
Sometimes they wander 
Like vagabonds on streets 
Yet inevitable I know
One day they'll find their way

And like that
my voice has been stolen away
Anxiety barricades like invisible steel walls
Trapped, I’m left banging with clenched fists
A prisoner within my own head
My brain a chemically imbalanced warden
My mind in solitary confinement

A man, who never believed in Gods,
Refused to acknowledge the supremacy of the imperialist British Lords,
Challenged imperialist world empire with stubbornness,
Wished to build a peaceful superpower country, with farsightedness.

Through his reading, kept himself on evolution,
Sowed in the hearts of Indian youth, the seeds of revolution,
Raising and threatening administrative tones,
Stood fearful and could only break his bones.

From, soviet World misunderstood,
Revolution a product of blood & bullet,
He approached and transformed revolution,
A product of inspiring pen and booklet.

Never limited himself to fight for boundaries of administrative right,
Expanded himself in the jail to throw away human plight,
Fought a death-nearing battle to regain the human right,
To finally set all things for his jail mates completely right.

Pen is mightier than sword,
His life bore testimony to prove that record,
When others attempted for freedom movement to nurture,
He dreamt and worked for building his country a beautiful future.

Born an ordinary Sikh man,
Misinterpreted a lunatic gunman,

Lived a life of comrades,
Hated in every step, caste, religious and gender retrogrades,
Wanted to save his country from blood-******* renegades,
Decided to break all the youth-distorting barricades,
And put his life to a mortgaging death trade.

Lived a life of an unselfish tree,
Decided to give his life to witness the country free,
Evolved his life, a chapter of sacrifice,
Offered overprice to fight the imposed injustice & cowardice.


His physical life remained short-lived and temporary,
Lived for the country to set an example for ideal revolutionary,
Beaten by humanimal imperialists, black and blue,
Opened the youths towards fight for freedom, on a new avenue.

Imperialist empire remained pathetically cruel,
His thoughts & phenomenon inspired a never ending fuel,
For the youths, to sacrifice themselves for liberation of the soil,
Through revolutionary paths, filled with constant sufferings and toil.

The world personified, revolution is,
Red, blood, blood and blood,
He defied and responded, revolution is,
Think, evolve, unite, and change, by the act of read, read, read and read.

He proclaimed a desperate need,
To get ourselves away from disturbing ****,
Sowed the fire of revolutionary seed,
Thus stated to read, read and read.

Imperialist empires killed people like blood-******* vampires,
He fought and responded, with the shot of a demonstrative gunfire,
When ordinary humans aimed to save their family,
Every millisecond, lived a life, personifying whole country his family.

Like a wood that offers light, and burns itself in fire,
Gave freedom a ray of light, submitted himself happily into the death wire,
For revolution, turned the court his Centre of propaganda,
Responded the ruthless imperialist, a warning memoranda.

On the imperialist death rope, he was killed
The batons he passed for the youths of next generations,
His final dream for India, still unfulfilled,
On the presence of present blood-******* politicians,

A baby that never cries on starvation,
A child that never starves for education,
A youth who never roams around to get dignified occupation,
Let’s at least work and fight towards, fulfilling this mission.

PROLOGUE:

“’We must stop this brain working for twenty years.’” So said Mussolini’s Grand Inquisitor, his official Fascist prosecutor addressing the judge in Antonio Gramsci’s 1928 trial; so said the Il Duce’s Torquemada, ending his peroration with this infamous demand.’”  Gramsci, Antonio: Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Introduction, translation from Italian and publishing by Quintin ***** & Geoffrey Nowell Smith, International Publishers, New York, 1971.

BE IT RESOLVED: Whereas, I introduce this book with a nod of deep respect to Antonio Gramsci--an obscure but increasingly pertinent political scientist it would behoove us all to read and study today, I dedicate the book itself to my great grandfather and key family patriarch, Pietro Buonaiuto (1865-1940) of Moschiano, in the province of Avellino, in the region of Campania, southern Italy.

Let it be recognized that Pete Buonaiuto may not have had Tony Gramsci’s brain, but he certainly exhibited an extreme case of what his son--my paternal grandfather, Francesco Buonaiuto--termed: Testaduro. Literally, it means Hardhead, but connotes something far beyond the merely stubborn. We’re talking way out there in the unknown, beyond that inexplicable void where hotheaded hardheads regurgitate their next move, more a function of indigestion than thought. Given any situation, a Testaduro would rather bring acid reflux and bile to the mix than exercise even a skosh of gray muscle matter.  But there’s more. It gets worse.

To truly comprehend the densely-packed granite that is the Testaduro mind, we must now sub-focus our attention on the truly obdurate, extreme examples of what my paternal grandmother—Vicenza di Maria Buonaiuto—they called her Jennie--would describe as reflexive cutta-dey-noze-a-offa-to-spite-a-dey-face-a types. I reference the truly defiant, or T.D.—obviously short for both truly defiant and Testaduro. T.D.’s—a breed apart--smiling and sneering, laughing and, finally, begging their regime-appointed torture apparatchik (a career-choice getting a great deal of attention from the certificate mills--the junior colleges and vocational specialty institutes) mocking their Guantanamo-trained torturer: “Is that what you call punishment?  Is that all you ******* got?”

If, to assist comprehension, you require a literary frame of context, might I suggest you compare the Buonaiuto mind to Paul Lazzaro, Vonnegut’s superbly drawn Italian-American WWII soldier-lunatic with a passion for revenge, who kept a list of people who ****** with him, people he would have killed someday for a thousand dollars.

Go with me, Reader, go back with me to Vonnegut’s Slaughter-House-Five: “Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time . . .”
It is long past the Tralfamadorian abduction and his friendship with Stony Stevenson. Billy is back in Germany, one of three dingbat American G.I.s roaming around beyond enemy lines.  Another of the three is Private Lazzaro, a former car thief and undeniable psychopath from Cicero, Illinois.

Paul Lazzaro:  “Anybody touches me, he better **** me, or I’m gonna have him killed. Revenge is the sweetest thing there is. People **** with me, and Jesus Christ are they ever ******* sorry. I laugh like hell. I don’t care if it’s a guy or a dame. If the President of the United States ****** around with me, I’d fix him good. Revenge is the sweetest thing in life. And nobody ever got it from Lazzaro who didn’t have it coming.  Anybody who ***** with me? I’m gonna have him shot after the war, after he gets home, a big ******* hero with dames climbing all over him. He’ll settle down. A couple of years ‘ll go by, and then one day a knock at the door. He’ll answer the door and there’ll be a stranger out there. The stranger’ll ask him if he’s so and so. When he says he is, the stranger’ll say, ‘Paul Lazzaro sent me.’ And then he’ll pull out a gun and shoot his pecker off. The stranger’ll let him think a couple seconds about who Paul Lazzaro is and what life’s gonna be like without a pecker. Then he’ll shoot him once in the gut and walk away. Nobody ***** with Paul Lazzaro!”

(ENTER AUTHOR. HE SPEAKS: “Hey, Numb-nuts! Yes, you, my Reader. Do you want to get ****** into reading that Vonnegut blurb over and over again for the rest of the afternoon, or can I get you back into my manuscript?  That Paul Lazzaro thing was just my way of trying to give you a frame of reference, not to have you ******* drift off, walking away from me, your hand held tightly in nicotine-stained fingers. So it goes, you Ja-Bone. It was for comparison purposes.  Get it?  But, if you insist, go ahead and compare a Buonaiuto—any Buonaiuto--with the character, Paul Lazzaro. No comparison, but if you want a need a number—you quantitative ****--multiply the seating capacity of the Roman Coliseum by the gross tonnage of sheet pane glass that crystalized into small fixed puddles of glazed smoke, falling with the steel, toppling down into rubble on 9/11/2001. That’s right: multiply the number of Coliseum seats times a big, double mound of rubble, that double-smoking pile of concrete and rebar and human cadavers, formerly known as “The Twin Towers, World Trade Center, Lower Manhattan, NYC.  It’s a big number, Numb-nuts! And it illustrates the adamantine resistance demonstrated by the Buonaiuto strain of the Testaduro virus. Shall we return to my book?)

The truth is Italian-Americans were never overzealous about WWII in the first place. Italians in America, and other places like Argentina, Canada, and Australia were never quite sure whom they were supposed to be rooting for. But that’s another story. It was during that war in 1944, however, that my father--John Felix Buonaiuto, a U.S. Army sergeant and recent Anzio combat vet decided to visit Moschiano, courtesy of a weekend pass from 5th Army Command, Naples.  In a rough-hewn, one-room hut, my father sat before a lukewarm stone fireplace with the white-haired Carmine Buonaiuto, listening to that ancient one, spouting straight **** about his grandfather—Pietro Buonaiuto--my great-grandfather’s past. Ironically, I myself, thirty yeas later, while also serving in the United States Army, found out in the same way, in the same rough-hewn, one-room hut, in front of the same lukewarm fireplace, listening to the same Carmine Buonaiuto, by now the old man and the sea all by himself. That’s how I discovered the family secret in Moschiano. It was 1972 and I was assigned to a NATO Cold War stay-behind operation. The operation, code-named GLADIO—had a really cool shield with a sword, the fasces and other symbols of its legacy and purpose. GLADIO was a clandestine anti-communist agency in Italy in the 1970s, with one specific target:  Il Brigate Rosso, the Red Brigades.  This was in my early 20s. I was back from Vietnam, and after a short stint as an FBI confidential informant targeting campus radicals at the University of Miami, I was back in uniform again. By the way, my FBI gig had a really cool codename also: COINTELPRO, which I thought at the time had something to do with tapping coin operated telephones. Years later, I found out COINTELPRO stood for counter-intelligence program.  I must have had a weakness for insignias, shields and codenames, because there I was, back in uniform, assigned to Army Intelligence, NATO, Italy, “OPERATION GLADIO.“

By the way, Buonaiuto is pronounced:

Bwone-eye-you-toe . . . you ignorant ****!

Oh yes, prepare yourself for insult, Kemosabe! I refuse to soft soap what ensues.  After all, you’re the one on trial here this time, not Gramsci and certainly not me. Capeesh?

Let’s also take a moment, to pay linguistic reverence to the language of Seneca, Ovid & Virgil. I refer, of course, to Latin. Latin is called: THE MOTHER TONGUE. Which is also what we used to call both Mary Delvecchio--kneeling down in the weeds off Atlantic Avenue--& Esther Talayumptewa --another budding, Hopi Corn Maiden like my mother—pulling trains behind the creosote bush up on Black Mesa.  But those are other stories.

LATIN: Attention must be paid!

Take the English word obdurate, for example—used in my opening paragraph, the phrase truly obdurate: {obdurate, ME, fr. L. obduratus, pp. of obdurare to harden, fr. Ob-against + durus hard –More at DURING}.

Getting hard? Of course you are. Our favorite characters are the intransigent: those who refuse to bend. Who, therefore, must be broken: Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke comes to mind. Or Paul Newman again as Fast Eddie, that cocky kid who needed his wings clipped and his thumbs broken. Or Paul Newman once more, playing Eddie Felson again; Fast Eddie now slower, a shark grown old, deliberative now, no longer cute, dimples replaced with an insidious sneer, still fighting and hustling but in shrewder, more subtle ways. (Credit: Scorsese’s brilliant homage The Color of Money.)

The Color of Money (1986) - IMDb www.imdb.com/title/tt0090863 Internet MovieDatabase Rating: 7/10 - ‎47,702 votes. Paul Newman and Helen Shaver; still photo: Tom Cruise in The Color of Money (1986) Still of Paul Newman in The Color of Money (1986). Full Cast & Crew - ‎Awards - ‎Trivia - ‎Plot Summary

Perhaps it was the Roman Catholic Church I rebelled against.  The Catholic Church: certainly a key factor for any Italian-American, a stinger, a real burr under the saddle, biting, setting off insurrection again and again. No. Worse: prompting Revolt! And who could blame us? Catholicism had that spooky Latin & Incense going for it, but who wouldn’t rise up and face that Kraken? The Pope and his College of Cardinals? A Vatican freak show—a red shoe, twinkle-toe, institutional anachronism; the Curia, ferreting out the good, targeting anything that felt even half-way good, classifying, pronouncing verboten, even what by any stretch of the imagination, would be deemed to be merely kind of pleasant, slamming down that peccadillo rubber-stamp. Sin: was there ever a better drug? Sin? Revolution, **** yeah!  Anyone with an ounce of self-respect would have gone to the barricades.

But I digress.

When I speak
The right words
Always cease to escape
I keep the best ones
Locked up
Within barricades
Sometimes they wander
Like vagabonds on streets
Waiting silently in shadows
For their chance at the light

Lucid dreaming is the doorway
        to the unconscious.
So dream.
Do not stay closed
        behind cement barricades
        blocking the moon
        from shining.
Live.
Each second is for you.
The tumbling of life
         does not promise
            anything.
In one breath
you can have
        a time table
        handed to you.
A distinct framework
        of how much
        longer you shall be.
Stay in illusion.
Keep in mind
that very little
is worthy of
being screamed about.
Politics
        and
people games
        are not
         the substance
        of existing.
Picture colourful images
         that flutter
          playfully
            across the
           mental horizon.
A traffic light
      will
       blink
red, yellow, green.
A noise
        will dominate
         the shading sky.
These mean nothing.
Moments of distraction
        soon
         gone away.
Focus on fantasy.
Allow yourself
the freedom to
         celebrate
        the essence
        of harmony.
When you die,
       it will be
         your dreams
         that are
          remembered.
Breathe.
It's just
      a bad day,
      not a bad life.

sordid scripture,
warring woman,
both menace and coquettish innocence
—barricaded.

statues,
fountains,
and restraining orders,
filling the garden:
decorations of
sunlight on a clock,
and a view into tomorrow,

revealing the "texture" of her skin
within the realm of her navel,
as soft as lace,
as smooth as
the surface of a pond.

before diving in
gives an otherworldly radiance,
her shape and smile
compared to everyday realities
are solemn in the extreme,  
the dawn threatens
to break in the east.

her voice,
(a lungfully deep, sensuous purr),
is so distinctive,
come what may,
this could be happiness:

sullen, waylaid and capricious,
her urban sexuality hidden
in the attic of revolution,
suffused with the dreamlike, hazy glow
of colored lights and tinsel.

desire is like Christmas
—it always promises
more than it delivers.

eking out the ultimate gasp in my last breath of impulsion
i collapse without a touch of grace at race's end
how i made it i will never know
dazed and in bewilderment
i reminisce upon my journey

an aggregation of barricades assailed me
with iniquitous decadent delight
seeming to writhe in triumph at my possible demise
capitulating as it devoured and spewed me out the other side
i humbly reassembled fragments of my near annihilation

temporarily rehabilitated
i recommenced the toilsome climb
to the treasured peak atop the mount
when in would come the tempest with its furor
and render me asunder

mere exhaustion is not the word
for death experienced recurrently
ground to mulch and back again
screaming, pleading, surrendering
proved futile as i newly met the same demise

near incapacitation i miraculously emerged
and scraping pulled myself with broken heart and bones
scratching my way through the darkness
toppling at the pinnacle
to victory's end

with exhilaration it dawns on me
the long dark night is over
i passed the test to realize
it is not the finish line
but only the beginning

©2016janetaylor

The root
Of ambition
Is ambivalent

There's no “one cause”
No one causes
A man
To make life decisions
In a day

It takes
Much more
For
A man to be successful
And real
With his inner-self
Accepting
The cards dealt
With the stamina
To play through
Exercising his will
With the feel
Lingering in every pore

Unsure
Of obstacles ahead
Headstrong
Through barricades
Bearing the bruises
Trampling
Over your own
Feet
Defeat
Seen in battle
But the war’s on

And the war zone
Isn’t limited
To a few
Years
Like ages 19-22
Whose to do
Worse
Who has more

Money
CARS
Clothes
And hoes

And whose vision
Is so small
To tack them
with success
All in all

And attack those
Who lack the
Wills
To move forward
And ignorantly
Attach it
With a phenomena
Of
Your unknowing

Root of ambition
Can spread
Like weeds

And weeds
Can **** ambition
Or spread
Like seeds

How many men
Dive
Head first under the influence
Or rise above
High
From the same drug

Barack Obama
Michael Phelps
William Shakespeare
Bill Clinton
Lebron James
Pablo Picasso
The Beatles
Jay-Z
Bob Marley
Conan O’Brien
Dr Francis Crick. (Nobel Prize Winner)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Salvador Dali
Victor Hugo
Kareem Abdul-Jabar
Snoop Dogg
Dr. Dre
Stephen King

Just to name a few
Maybe
Just maybe
It has nothing to do
With success

Or you.

it's understandable, they confused by complex bilingualism as schizophrenia; oh sorry, it's not actually a scary word, before people start to theorise the mono-lingual pre-maturity of a condition that affects older people, they should seriously begin to listen to what a person is saying; there are tales of surgeons leaving surgical equipment in bodies during surgery... well... at least the physicality of such blunders is more pronounced than leaving regression variations of negated ease (disease) in man... (uncouple that compound and you'll find the subtler alternative)... when psychiatrists make mistakes it's not a heart surgeon making a mistake, the mistakes psychiatrists make are far more profound, given the nature of the mistake being seemingly trivial in comparison... yet these mistakes make our mental life worse by disrupting the narrative, psychiatry, being a science, primarily disrupts the (cognitive) narrative; it's hard enough to find yourself in your mind, let alone a worthy narrative that you encompass... it's hard to reemerge with a good enough narrative when you're branded like an ox, a ******* during the height of Christianity, or registering a car for road tax... it's ****** hard.

so they (i've lost the paranoia additive of this pronoun
a long time ago) thought my bilingualism
was worthy the label of schizophrenia...
well... d'uh, isn't bilingualism a split-mind scenario
in itself?
                    bilingualism is more complex than you think,
it reaches to the depths of each language,
it's not a multilingual acquisition, a polymath hooray!
it's bone deep,
                        bone deep, it goes as far into identity
as all conceivable points of psychological architecture;
which is why my bilingualism was so well
established that i became a bit difficult to society:
my upbringing was to match the difficulty -
i was never supposed to utter a single intellectual
disparity, given my stature i was supposed to be
a manual labourer - a position i'd have gladly undertaken
but (see my earlier entries), but...
                                i never really felt a need for
an animosity toward the English -
                                           i loved everything about England
(or at least London) -
                                                 i left my native country
early enough to sponge-up the new culture,
                   but of course when our family was applying
for citizenship we were the obscure minority,
                 after the floodgates opened and the less
creme of the crop entered these shores,
       i was forced into a spiral reinvention, i was no
longer was the British termed "exotic"...
exotica, hmm, funny how i imagine things exotic as
things in sunny places, slaves in the Caribbean,
the platitudes of certain African Savannahs...
something Voltaire might find befitting to write about
like he did in Candide - there's this neurotic passage in there...
                the passage to India... a book i'll
never read: why? can't be bothered, the t.v. series *Indian Summers
does it for me;
                                  plus i do like cooking curry,
so there's the f                        u                            to take-away
curry...           i have an arsenal of spices and i bomb Kashmir
with whiffs of the stuff...
                                    that part of my is what the intended cultural
assimilation was intended for: the rest? n'ah ah.
                               what spurred me to write this poem?
Heidegger's concept of someone moving and integrating
into a different culture: to be honest, the country i was born
in was uniquely pressed to turn its habitants into nomads -
      it was a town primarily based on the steel industry -
now it's a town of pensioners - the steel industry fell to ruin
and people had either the choice of: elsewhere in Poland,
or abroad.
                                    still, things were much nicer
   when the barrier was up... selfishly said? i agree, but then
i had enough air to breathe as a sole artefact of the ethnicity,
and a good enough reputation as a person needing to
persistently learn... had i been a crook? well, now i find
my ethnic background elsewhere, in a near mythical place
in Scandinavia - not that i want to, but i don't actually
have an atypical (a typical) physiognomy of a Slav -
so that's a plus...
                                     but what really spurred me on
was what Heidegger describes as the threshold and indeed
the essence of integration: to learn the language,
to use the language, nothing but language in terms of
being considered a certain noun - in this case, British;
so this is a German perspective from the 20th century...
the British perspective in the 21st century?
                         kinda like **** Germany...
language? forget it... you can speak with a ****** accent
and even ******* grammar... what's at work here
is ethnic cleansing, on a spiritual side of things -
language can rot in hell for the English, what they want
new citizens is to: a. eat fish 'n' chips
                                  b. talk ***** when *******
                         c. lick the **** of Americans
          d. have a sense of moral superiority because of
                    that poncy accent that's becoming a dodo
       e1. forget their mother tongue
         e2. only speak English in private
                            f. respect the Muslim attire but
        to never respect fellow European's concerned
                           about many other things
      g. amongst other things...
so it's not enough to learn the ******* language, that i have to
become a ******* serf? oh wait, i have some spare change
in my pocket (puts hand in a trouser pocket and takes out):
the *******!
                                  or how you find yourself
in an imploded British Empire, go beyond London and you
enter something less resembling a global community
and more a national socialist set of self-evident dicta
wrecking havoc to your senses.
                              and all this from a humble background?
well: freaks and mutations sometimes happen...
                    being born near to the date of Chernobyl doesn't
really help to counter the argument:
           yes, even in Poland, the effects were felt,
my great-grandmother remembers streaks of radiated trees
and un-radiated trees in the park -
        the radiated trees were born... a strange kind of rainbow...
and yes, i do take the **** out of **** Germany
while talking about it and Jewish mysticism -
                                Malachi the arch-heretic (who introduced
a polytheistic concept that does not fit in with monotheism:
reincarnation) -
                            oh look:      something came out of this
conviction that told me to duly apologise to the concept
of the two late monotheistic religions:
                             on your own, can't be bothered -
Christianity was always going to be more image orientated
(after all, the crucifixion is a good enough image)
   and Islam was always going to be more word orientated
(something to shout about, actually, to just shout it) -
the Judaism i found?
                              not being circumcised and what not,
not adhering to the religion as such?
  the lord of the rings and harry potter...
simple... how?
                               please make oaths, swear, use profane
language... maybe that will make your actions less profane
and this isn't 19th century Victorian society event where
people talk polite but play ***** according to the escapades
of Dorian Gray...
                              i'm still adamant that auto-censorship
of a name (the name, i.e. ha-shem) does wonders for your
vocabulary - oath, **** **** ****, words are actually:
                or conjunctions, and this means you can use them
to destroy the barricades of fluidity -
                                 do we really need to say certain names?
Islam says the name all the ****** time,
        Christianity doesn't even know the name of the father:
Jules?                      Jason?                Jeremiah?
                                           can't be Yves...
                   and did 1st century fishermen write?
wasn't that a rebellion against the literate Pharisees etc.?
             so it's pretty much like the harry potter / lord of the rings
rule: Sauron
                       designates the tetragrammaton
   and the necromancer designates ha-shem...
                                                or...
         Voldemort designates (as above)
              and tom-riddle                   blah blah...
oh i have actually washed my hands clean of two most
populous religions in the world -
                            i can't believe that so many people can be
right about something,
                                    would i desire to argue to this
to the grave? not really, i prefer to look at it as a chance fancy,
my real concerns are based upon the question:
   why would bilingualism, ever, be treated as a case
of schizophrenia?
                                           perhaps the language is too
difficult to follow, perhaps i'm reciting a poem by
                           half caste by john agard -
but this **** isn't skin deep, i can't blow the sax in a liberating
transcendence of slavery, or do that other form of
rebellion -
                    &nb

I hate the beach
I'm eighty six and I hate the beach
Hate the sand, not a fan of the surf
Face it, I hate the beach
Last time I went there
I had just turned 18 years old
June sixth, Nineteen Hundred Forty Four
God, I hate the beach
I was in the 5th Regiment
Régiment de Maisonneuve
and I've never been to a beach since
I'm from Verdun, Quebec, Canada
Not many beaches around there
Thank the lord for that I say
We'd been training for six months
Operation Overlord it was called
We were coming in on troop carriers
It was to be a beach head landing
I'd never seen a beach before
At least not for real
Never want to see another
We arrived early June 6, 1944
I think I said that already
You must forgive me,
I'm 86 years old and I hate the beach
fourteen thousand Canadian Troops
Bursting out of armoured troop ships
Like, the young, virile, brahma bulls we were
Coming in, all I could hear was the waves
I was in front, well...close to the front
I remember, there were no birds
who ever heard of that?
A beach with no birds
At least not at this beach
I could smell the salt in the air
And I knew I could hear the surf
And my heart, I could **** well hear that
But, no birds, I couldn't hear the birds
Gunfire, nope...cannons and mortars
But birds and guns, not a sound
Weird huh?
I remember running forward
Always forward, past blocks
Wood barricades and barbed wire
And bodies, lots of bodies
I knew that I knew some of them
I just didn't have time to stop
And say goodbye,
I just ran
Emptied my weapon at least once
I only know this, because it was empty
when I hit the beach
God, I hate the beach
You know in the movies
or in those flowery books
where they talk about someone being shot
and how "there was a bloom or
they're chest flowered red where they were hit"
I never saw that, never looked back
Just ran forward, saw the "bloom" in their backs
Don't like red, or flowers or the beach
I don't remember much after that
Could still hear my heart
That's a good thing, I guess
I got tore up good with the wire
but I never got shot
Never, "bloomed" for anyone
A few of my buddies were lost
I toast them every year
Never at the beach though
I hate the beach
Wife and kids used to go
I never did, never will
I remember the 50th anniversary though
Wife and kids went back
Not me,
Went into Montreal to see a ball game
Montreal Expos 10, Houston Astros 5
I remember Will Cordero hitting a homer
It was the sixth inning, I toasted the hit
I thought about that day 50 years before
And went back to watching the game
I hate the beach
My name is Gilles Roquefort
I'm eight six years old
And I can still feel the sand and taste the salt
On a bad day.

I wake up
Each morning,
Head to my closet,
And arm myself
With clothes
Thick as brick walls.
I rummage
Through various
Pairs of greeve-like
Pants
Looking for
The right foundation
On which I
Will build
The day's
Exoskeleton.
Fix my hair
Like the rest
Of mankind.
Hair that
Acts as the cloak
That ascribes me
To anonimity.
Before I leave
I put on the
Weight of
My outer person,
The one which
I have carefully
Built out of
Various yous
And none of me.
The skin
That I Have worn
To see my soul
Forlorn.
I go, parade myself
Like a sentinel
Emblazoned
With all the
Merits;
Look and behold
A hero that
Beckons to all who pass
A hero who
Hides all the dross
Of the Inside.
The inside
of whatever is left
Of my
Dying kingdom.
I go as a bastion
With jutted spears  
And sharpened pikes
Wounding those
Who advance
Whether in peace
Or in strife.
No, I will not
Let anyone
Through the gates
Of my starving
King.

All my life
I was being
Built as a
Stronghold.
Father, as a mason,
Taught me
That strength
Is measured
Through how
Much pressure
My structure
Can endure.
Mother, as an artisan,
Raised me
As a dam
That will not break.
Taught me
That my worth
Is measured in the
Volumes that I can keep.
Suffering be now
The mortar
That binds all my griefs
Together.
Pain, *****
Barricades
Around my thirsting
Prince.
Comrade,
Stay as a facade;
Hide the muck
That have accumulated
Throughout
The years.

Lover,
break me down.
Strip me of all
My armor,
Break down the walls.
Turn my spears
Into soft dandelion *****.
Wade through the tar
And see
Through the veil.
Unseam
All my scars;
Bleed me dry
Until you reach my core.
See me for
Who I am.
Witness the king
That I have
deprived.
Caress the face
Of the prince
That I have denied.
Satiate my famished spirit,
Oh, you, lover of my soul.

I found an empty book, it's labelled biology- grade nine,
fake lines ran across the book, never any real content,
to feel content with what I read was an impossible matter,
scattered diagrams of human anatomy too far from realism
because realistic diagrams would include labels to hearts
with coloured charts stating that 'this may fall apart-
not by fat barricades, but to paraphrase a different place,
Neruda chases the stars and from afar as the cages of ribs
would rip and sometimes, just enough to have felt loved,
to feel enough with being held for just a night, a short time,
but life is built beyond a biology book.

It is so strange that I have learnt so much more about life
than ninth grade biology because being biologically correct
doesn't ***** the hairs on my back as an assortment of words
like an assortment of birds aren't really meant to be described
as assortments and a biology book isn't really meant to describe life.

‘Twas but a rare, snowy day in Paris,
a January day, as all the lights of the city
rested, as dancers of the Moulin Rouge
fixed their make up during the intermission

And in the graveyard of Père Lachaise
there stood a solitary figure of an old man,
his hands gathered together politely,
in front, clenching on to a tattered flat cap

The man stood in front of a grey wall,
“a tomb without a cross or chapel,
or golden lilies, or sky-blue church windows,”
but with an equally lonesome little plaque
that read, ‘Aux mort de la commune,
21 28 Mai 1871’

He lit a cigarette, from which he took just one puff,
stuck it upside-down on a patch of dirt,
then notwithstanding the thunderstorm
of camera flashes from Japanese tourists,
he started to sing, with a hoarse yet firm voice,
“Debout, les damnés de la terre,
Debout, les forçats de la faim…”

As the wrinkle on his forehead began to stretch,
the dusty particles of ice piled higher and higher
on neighboring graves commemorating
French members of the International Brigades
and Spanish maquis of the French Resistance
-apparently the 3,400 meters height of Pyrenees
was merely a backyard *****
for ideas and fates to tread over barefooted-

His song was a ballad of unrequited passion;
when he got to the chorus about some final struggle
and the unity of human race in a silly hymn,
a song that was never played on a radio,
for which no cool kid would ever
spend $0.99 on iTunes store,
his voice started cracking in amorous choke

The old man was a lifetime lover
in the truest spirit of a Frenchman,
spent all his life trying to charm a girl named Emma Ries,
and whenever he dreamed of holding
the eloquently bruised hands of that sixteen years old seamstress,
his eyes swelled of nostalgic heart,

And he used to cry joyfully,
dropping tears of bullets back in the days,
whether by the guillotine in Place de la Concorde,
behind the barricades of Belleville amidst the cannonballs,
******* in front of the Gestapo firing squads,
or under the truncheons of gendarme in Quartier Latin

As the expired old ******* moaned wet dreams,
hallucinogic delusions of his bygone youth, however,
the chilly, soggy winter of 20th arrodissement piled on,
the ashen slums of Ménilmontant depressingly ugly as always
with brownish-grey molten snow spattered all over
the streets trotted by drug dealers and wife beaters,
and neither the fiery oratory of Maurice Thorez
nor the sanguine grenade of Colonel Fabien
was around to arson the frost into the proletarian spring

In the same winter that the old man sang
the first, only, and last lovesong of his life,
it had been more than two decades already
since the Berlin Wall had tumbled down
and the ruling parties in Greece and Spain,
both socialists,
had just driven 500,000 workers out of their jobs

-J.P. Proudhon, Marx and Engels, Jean Jaures, V.I. Lenin,
Leon Trotsky, Antonio Gramsci, Leon Blum, Abbie Hoffman-
by the time the old man muttered an old pop-song nobody cared for,
all of those names were as relevant as some Medieval knights,
characters from an obscure chronicle centuries ago,
who died by charging horseback into windmills,
mistaking them for giants that held whom they thought as
a princess of an ugly peasant woman,

Eventually, right before his voice cracked
into an embarrassing fuddle of choked-up tears,
impressive for a seventy something years old,
the man finished the song from his memory,
all the way up to the sixth stanza;
yet the curvaceously splintered palm of a seamstress,
it was still so far away from his hands that’s been pleading
since 1871 for that glorious *******
which once stood so proudly in the face of a Czernowitz magistrate

When the cigarette he stuck upside down on the dirt
burned all the way down, he reached into his coat,
took out a rose, laid it softly, like his own infant child,
in front of the plaque which golden inscriptions
turned grey from unwashed grimes of ages
and as the old fool walked away,
his back turned away from the solemn wall,
there was but one little patch of dirt in the whole of Paris
uncovered by snow, still hoping for the spring to come.

It's cold outside,
rain falling down the sky,
foggy view, blurry sight,
I tremble with every step taken.

Not dream nor reality,
my consciousness fades,
words dance around their letters,
my beliefs collapsed.

Shapeshifting,
a brighter world sprouts,
limitless possibilities,
junctions merging their paths.

Efforts rewarded
with the sand of time,
barricades undone
time rewinds.

Splashs of water running down my face,
worlds drifting apart,
existence reentered,
my walk proceeds.

i built barricades to block my desire for your lips
because i thought it would be easier
to not be around you
than to be around you and face the truth that you are not
and never will be
with me
but the nights are cold
and your arms are warm
and i am not sure how much longer i can go
without seeing your smile

She owns a castle
Feeble as glass
crumbling walls to repel the past.
As the roots creeps higher onto the castle walls
Years passed and no one danced the waltz
Medieval old music keeps playing
She was abandoned, lost and dying.
she was an unsaved princess left alone
all her sadness never known
a dainty flower
meant to wither
She stared afar
Eyes locked on a nearby tower
yet she seemed distant
Vowed never to speak of love again
she was silent all these years...
she was empty, alone, forgotten
Just like her castle
She sits atop the velvet chair
Stood up at the veranda on the cliff
Pain was all hers to keep
what could've happen
if she'd just leap
She owns a magnificent ocean
of glistening tears
You'll hear her screams
blend with the roaring waves
On sleepless nights she wanders
The great garden
The ambiance of melachonly
The field of haze seems to widen
A ruler to all the shadows casted
A subject to her desires neglected

The doors are shut
Countless barricades will bombard you
Before you could walk up to the bridge
So brace yourself and your white horse
She wont let you get to her
Silly..silly..kinglet
She waited,
Oh how many years has it been.
Kneel infront
Of the *lonely queen.

Bunkered--
that's how they are now...
my soft places once shared with you
sequestered, behind barricades of knowing.

When you sold me out, did you think I would not find out?
My spirit wails at what is lost, the wall between us...
Fire, revenge? Nay, a knife will not assail you--
I refuse to be like you.

Should
never have to
face the
thickened
sticky
white and
creamy
cheesy
cliched
wrath and
terror
of her
mother's smile.

Should
never have to
flinch
inside
behind walls
made of
bricks
behind
barricades
of
stone
wrapped
in
bubble-wrap
at her
mother's
glance.

Eyes
should
never
hold
so
much
power
within
the
flash
of
discontent.

She should not
live
on a boat
always
biding time
waiting for
storms to pass
for
waves to
curl
and crack down
upon her
head
down into
the sand
that
holds her
down into
the dark
that
kisses her
goodnight
down into
the brutal
flick
the tap on the
glass
clench
of
the fingers
twitch of
the jaw

should never
have to
wait
for the
mother's roar
to
echo
through the
chamber
of her heart
until
silence
envelopes
her soul
and she
can sleep
without

fear.

Should
never
fear
her
mother's
evening breath
the
gentle and
stilling
exhale
a sigh
a brittle
and
glassed sound
that shatters
against her
tightly
pursed
lips
locked
mouth.

Should never
tell the heart
to
quiet down
and let
her run
like a
good
child
ignoring
the warning
bells
which
everyone else
seems to ignore
the words
that leave
her
stubborn
lips
in the
joke she
tells
the story
she
preaches
the hesitated
eye
widening
limerick

the expected
story
to tell
her
friends

her
mother's
wrath
tastes like
fire in
her belly
sulphur in
her throat
and
metallic
lingerings
of
biting
her tongue
to
suppress
the
screams

'what can you expect'

'my mother gets like that'

'she attacked me'

'but its okay'

'I was stubborn'

It is almost sunset but it is still too hot. She sits next to me and passes over a mason jar of crushed ice and lemonade and I take it gratefully into my hands. Instead of drinking it, I rest it against my forehead and allow the condensation from the glass to drip down the sides of my face with closed eyes. I take more of it with my fingers to drench the back of my neck, but my palms burn more for it. When I sigh because this small jar does not alleviate my apparent and immediate threat of heat stroke, she laughs at me.

She is my best friend. There was a never conscious moment that I made that decision, it just happened. Before she'd joined me on her concrete stoop I'd been turning over the idea of whether or not there was an exact moment that I'd perceived her differently, but could not pinpoint it. I’d been eyeing the patches of dirt and dead grass scattered within her yard, listening to her hum If I Ain't Got You out of tune, mumbling some of the more repetitive words here and there, picking out the sounds of her fetching things as she sets them on the counters of her run down kitchen. I try to guess what she is doing as I am hearing it, but feel unwilling to join her. It is even hotter inside her house since her air-conditioner is broken. We are devastated.

After a moment of silence she narrows her eyes against the sun tells me that she misses him. I nod, but say nothing. Three of us sat here last year and suddenly the heaviness of his absence rests between us. She quickly changes the subject and tells me she wants to start jogging because when school comes back around she’ll be thin, for sure. “I’m going to be so ****, I’m not even joking.” I smile at her determination. She talks about a girl in our year that everyone calls pretty, but I shrug. She asks if I think she is pretty. I can only nod my head. I can’t compliment her properly because I haven’t found the right words to tell her that it’s not about being thin. That is not what makes her perfect. Not to me.

I never liked her lemonade, but I begin to drink it anyway, thankful that some of the ice has melted fast enough to be a bit watered down. I don’t mind. It made it less sugary. The first time she’d given me lemonade, her father had laughed and said, “If you eat the ice, it’s like a dessert,” not knowing that dessert was literally the last thing I ever wanted. I have never been fond of sweets.

She laughs a little and crunches away on her ice and I cringe. She knows I think it’s an awful sound, but I’d grown so accustomed to it after the years of hearing it. For her, it was a typical summer treat. It wasn’t even real lemonade. In her freezer were small cylinders of an odd, condensed yellow mush that they’d dump into a plastic pitcher and then add water to. Remembering this, I no longer feel like drinking it. I hand it to her.

“Don’t want it?” she asks. I shake my head, watching neighbor girls sit under a tree with a small dollhouse as I wait for her to finish both jars. I don’t like the way it leaves the back of my throat feeling dry anyway and I never feel less thirsty after drinking it. She sets the empty jars between us and we talk about where we’ll go this summer, what movies we’ll see —lamenting that there really haven’t been any good ones recently and that maybe it’d be way more fun to see if we could convince her parents to let her join my family at the lake house. She doesn’t want to swim at all but seems excited to lay on the dock and get a bit of color.

She wants to take pictures. She rises from the stoop to return the jars to her kitchen sink and grab her camera and we walk through her neighborhood. I trail behind her consciously as she raises it to her eye, letting my fingers run along her neighbor’s chain-link fences, dreading the moment she finds a way to somehow sneak me into the frames of her photographs. She’s seemed more eager to try and capture me now that I am taller. I have grown so much in just a few months that I’m not sure how to handle my limbs just yet. They are too long and too thin and I am strangely aware of them —but even more aware of where she points her lens.

We find out that there is construction behind her neighborhood and sneak past the half constructed fences, large barricades, and signs (Keep Out, Construction Ahead). It is an odd place for nicer houses, we decide —right next to the ghetto. She laughs at the brick wall and shakes her head. “That’s not going to keep them out.” But it looks intimidating anyway. Maybe that’s the point.

In the middle of the area rests newly planted trees shading a small, wooden gazebo. They overlook a manmade pond, just large enough to swim in. She knows me too well. My first instinct is to jump in so she dares me to. Practicing self-restraint I tell her all I want is the shade and I lean against the railing of the gazebo instead. I watch her snap more photos —of leaves, of ripples, of her feet, the construction. She asks again if I want to join her and shrugs at my reluctance. She dips short legs in the water and casts a teasing glance in my direction. Her pink hair looks silly against her warm face and I smile. She tells me she knows I want to, that I’m a *****. I shake my head. She draws it out mockingly and threatens to take a picture. (I cover my face with my hand.) “Paaaaansssyyyyy.” She laughs and tells me to just get in. “You gunna just take that?” I was a lot less eager to break rules, but no. I wasn’t going to just ‘take that.’

So I jump in, glad to be cool. The momentary weightlessness frees me for just a small space of time. I feel it cling to my skin when I surface, but my clothes make me feel twice as heavy. I want all of my thoughts to feel the way your body does underwater. Light. Careless. Far away.

Suddenly, behind us, someone is shouting at us in an indistinguishable accent. We trade horrified glances, swearing we catch the word cops, and we bolt, leaving a frantic trail of water and wet foot prints to evaporate behind us. We don’t stop running until we get back to her porch, the sun fully set, and we collapse against her concrete stoop out of breath, laughing much harder than we should. “Oh my god,” she repeats over and over again with exasperated giggles and small gasps for air. My heart cannot be tamed, like it's run ahead of me. I’m sure I won’t be able to find it for a while.

“Oh my god...” She tells me she doesn’t want to run anymore and I cast her a confused glance and tell her we’re definitely in the clear, but she shakes her head. “No, I mean all summer. Forget being thin,” she says. Suddenly I feel her in that missing section of my chest. “Who wants to run in this heat?”

The air is
thick with water beads.
***** little water beads
that fill my lungs
making it hard to breathe.

The yeast
in my belly
is causing me sickness
that nothing can remedy

My head is full
of deadends and barricades.
The yellow and black
bumblebee signs
warning me
to keep my feet on the ground.

Just then as
a hot air balloon
spills its peoples
onto jagged rocks.
Breaking their bones
and giving them ****** noses.

© 2011

All Rights Reserved

With every resistance,
remember –
how everything was choked
back into your mouth
when you were a baby bird
and the barricades
were not yet burned.

When you,
with aching gaze
watch the Joan of Arc torches
purge their way
up the winding acres
of stolen wood;
call yourself to Dunsinane
and wait there.

***** up your own feathers
and try to fly –
strip yourself of ash;
pretend that your fragility
is a stepping stone
to becoming a phoenix.

Inhale smoke
and watch the revolution
burn beneath your broken body,
your flightless bones
crushed to mothers’ milk,
countless choking coughs
coming up; down again.

Sing;
drown out the inevitable,
and choke;
with beautiful sounds
of death drawing acid
up your cartilage;
revolutionaries flee
the barricades, the fire,
whilst you beg
for what you have lost
to be choked back into you again.

Wallowing
in a stagnant,
skeptical world,
you must live.
Run river, run
you are no forest,

you do not stand still,
and you can never go back.
Logic need not follow,
but it always will,
and that is all it can do,
it is all
I can do.

Pleasure seeker,
still mindful of the gods;
Dionysus, Apollo,
Hanuman, Saraswati
in your heart,
never at odds.

Show no humility,
only invincibility,
make yourself cry
twice weekly.

Leave your mouth watering,
leave your mothers wanting more.

What if the cacophony broke the barricades?
Noise, noise, noise, noise, poison!
Gasp as the venom creeps to your brain,
grasp at the hilt of the dagger, dilettante, for all we can see
is that friends are always followed by pain.

I tread in diverse masks

Sheathed by barricades of fear

You shan’t gain answers shall you ask

I tread in diverse masks

Sip of pessimism from a flask

‘Tis the only sound I hear

I tread in diverse masks

Sheathed by barricades of fear

There's a place between society and the wild
Where aimless bodies are piled
We call it the Wastelands
All creatures die of old age
Or hunger inside this cage
The deer are never hit by cars
For they never travel that far
The Wastelands use fear
That's what keeps them here

The Wastelands are a scary place
It's horrifying how nothing happens
It becomes too much to face
So we hide under satin
To provide comfortable resting
And avoid Wastelands testing

The Wastelands are a barren environment
Solitary coyotes learn from the cacti
Who soak up meager moisture
And become prickly to protect it
Never knowing if nourishment was near
They grew prickly because of their fear

We inhabit the Wastelands
We're trapped here
Where the walls of the city
Seem to mirror
The walls of the wilderness
So it's here we build our nest
But surviving is a constant test
Because we have useless hands
Here in the Wastelands

Wastelands
Interaction
Is reaction
Create a faction
And never leave
Even if love cleaves
It lies behind ramparts of containment
And the fear of society's arraignment
Even if peace calls
It stays behind walls
Of trees hiding predators
That keep us embedded here
So we ***** barriers to protect us
From the barriers surrounding us
We find our connections through hatred
And build teams around it
We made foolish deals with Satan
This is what we're amounted

Scavengers from both worlds encroach the Wastelands
Journalists and artists mine our souls
Vultures mine our flesh like gold
Taking what they need and going home
Our rabid mouths begin to show foam
From the frustration of loss
But inactivity is our cross
While we watch carrion feeders
Carry on eating
Our friends
Until we turn and look away
Knowing that'll be us one day
Because in the Wastelands
Friends are just creatures who are near
There are no animals to hold dear
We're afraid to lend an ear
When Wastelands use fear

The Wastelands are hell
Dry river beds tell of a time
When the rain fell
But now we're plagued by drought
You can tell by looking at the trout
They flop on the ground
Wondering where to wander for water
The cacti remain still
It's the Wastelands will

In the Wastelands we wait to die
Although we really want to fly
We're just afraid of heights
Which impedes our sight
Where we can't view over our own barricades
It's fear that prohibits our ability to elevate
And we see that the order is too tall
Back into the Wastelands we fall

delicately, our dragonfly conversations
dance in Japanese gardens,
where jewelled concrete pagoda’s
stand stilted, like
timeless geometries, in greening water

then wind rustles timidly through
creek beds and pebbled leaves;
bells ring like wine glasses at a dinner table
and we feel our arm hairs stand on tiptoes,
pricked up to weary voices

(chanting monks, those that sit in circles
monkishly chant, in unison
“there are three meanings of loneliness”)
here, chanting also, we
find ourselves again not alone
enchanted in the fragmented daylight.

but then again, I turn, apathetically, and declare
“let us rest
in the immense imagery of our imagination

for it is easier to sleep,
as rain creeps closer to our doorstep,
than to ***** barricades, levies
and trenches around our house”

Oh, but the way the light reflects upon the Japanese trees
is so splendidly delicate,
and our delicate conversations
feel all so perfect…

so now please, time, lose me
in your whisper.