what a life it is
to live in love
with an ideal self.
to be in love with one
who doesn't exist,
not even in fiction,
only in the realm of your mind.
what a life it is
to look in the mirror
and feel your soul shatter
but when you look away,
you can pretend you are
the version of you that you see in your head.
I'm not the only one. I know it.
Biographers say that Sylvia Plath was in love with her dream self, encompassed in a strange egotistical fantasy.
I live in that same fantasy.
How do I make fantasy me
the real me?

by
Alexander  K  Opicho
Eldoret,Kenya
(aopicho@yahoo.com)

Ladbrokes, the online betting firm has once again nominated Ngugi wa Thiong'o as a candidate for Nobel prize in literature 2014.The firm arrives at the probable nominee through a highly polished probabilist mechanism.It also nominated Ngugi as the probable candidate for literature Nobel prize, but the final was Alice Munro the Canadian short story writress.The eventuality of Ngugi winning the literature Nobel prize is a long a waited event in Africa , especially among Kenyans.
However, Ngugi is not the only nominee , he is among others and even to make it worse he is not the top scoring nominee. He has tied with four  others at the score of 50/1 points.These  are; Umberto Eco who wrote the famous book In the Name of the Rose, Nuruddin Farah a Kenya *** Somalian veteran poet and prose writer   and   then Darcia Maraini.
There are eleven writers of global stature who are currently scoring above Ngugi wa Thiong'o.They are operating at the level of 50/1 scores. These include ;Margaret Atwoo d, Salman Rushdie, Cees Nooteboom, Don DeLillo, Amos Oz, Javier Marias, Cormac McCarthy , Bob Dylan, Peter Handke, William Trevor and Les Murray . The missing writer in this category of global writers is Yan Martel the author of Life of Mr. Pi , whose also on the list of the favourite writers of president Barrack Obama.His book Life of Mr. Pi once shared  a prize and equivalent acclaim with Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Legs. So, why Martel was not nominated remains the usual intrigues of Nobel nomination process.
Haruki Murakami ,Assia Djebar,Svetlana Aleksijevitj , Peter Nadas, Joyce Carol Oates , Adonis ,Milan Kundera , Philip Roth , Mircea Cartarescu, Ko Un , Jon Fosse  and Thomas Pynchon  are currently scoring below Ngugi.They are operating between 10/1 and 26/1 scores.However among them Haruki Murakami, Joyce Carol Oates and Phillip Roth were very story contenders and hence competeters for the same prize with Ngugi during last year.But Joyce Carol Oates is a weaker contender this year given than he recently wrote an offensive and tortuous poem against the eminent American  poet Robert Frost .  Oates drew from the book Lovely, Dark and  Deep  which   paints the  Frost  as an arrogant, sexist pig who gave up on his mentally ill children. The story has outraged Frost’s fans, biographers, and  his survivors.
Inspite of all these there is no literary value that can make Ngugi wa Thiong'o to deserve a Nobel prize reward for  Literature. Apart from his first  two books weep not child and the river between that had concrete literary position, his later works are pamphlets of communism , that keep of regurgitating communism as initially written by Karl Marx and France Fanon.His second last book Globalectics is written as annual lectures in respect of Rene Wellek, the books is a practical duplication of Paulo Freire , and Spivak Gavatri.His contemporaries at the University of Nairobi accusing him of tribalism when it came to supervising post graduate students. he was soft on his fellow Kiguyu's and discriminative agains Luo and Luhyia students.He lifestyle as communist ideologue is also self defeating as teaches in america at Irvine University , very busy amassing wealths just like any other capitalist.He campaign for vernacular writing is egually not water tight on the bench of praxis, as he himself teaches special English in America but not kiguyu language.
Another stunning revelation from the Swedish academy is nomiantion of Vladimir Putin the Russian president for Nobel peace prize alongside fifty something  organizations as competitors.the nominations is based on his role he played in the Nuclear disarmament of Syria.The Ukraine question has not been yet raised.But logic of these goes like historical imbroglio that puzzled the world in relation to the role of ****** in relation communism against the then gathering storm for the second world war.

These are poems about Ann Rutledge and her romantic relationship with Abraham Lincoln.

Winter Thoughts of Ann Rutledge
by Michael R. Burch

Winter was not easy,
nor would the spring return.
I knew you by your absence,
as men are wont to burn
with strange indwelling fire —
such longings you inspire!

But winter was not easy,
nor would the sun relent
from sculpting ****** images
and how could I repent?
I left quaint offerings in the snow,
more maiden than I care to know.



Ann Rutledge’s Irregular Quilt
by Michael R. Burch

based on “Lincoln the Unknown” by Dale Carnegie

I.
Her fingers “plied the needle” with “unusual swiftness and art”
till Abe knelt down beside her: then her demoralized heart
set Eros’s dart a-quiver; thus a crazy quilt emerged:
strange stitches all a-kilter, all patterns lost. (Her host
kept her vicarious laughter barely submerged.)

II.
Years later she’d show off the quilt with its uncertain stitches
as evidence love undermines men’s plans and women’s strictures
(and a plethora of scriptures.)

III.
But O the sacred tenderness Ann’s reckless stitch contains
and all the world’s felicities: rich cloth, for love’s fine gains,
for sweethearts’ tremulous fingers and their bright, uncertain vows
and all love’s blithe, erratic hopes (like now’s).

IV.
Years later on a pilgrimage, by tenderness obsessed,
Dale Carnegie, drawn to her grave, found weeds in her place of rest
and mowed them back, revealing the spot of the Railsplitter’s joy and grief
(and his hope and his disbelief).

V.
For such is the tenderness of love, and such are its disappointments.
Love is a book of rhapsodic poems. Love is an grab bag of ointments.
Love is the finger poised, the smile, the Question — perhaps the Answer?
Love is the pain of betrayal, the two left feet of the dancer.

VI.
There were ladies of ill repute in his past. Or so he thought. Was it true?
And yet he loved them, Ann (sweet Ann!), as tenderly as he loved you.

Ann Rutledge was Abraham Lincoln’s first love interest. Unfortunately, she was engaged to another man when they met, then died with typhoid fever at age 22. According to a friend, Isaac Cogdal, when asked if he had loved her, Lincoln replied: “It is true—true indeed I did. I loved the woman dearly and soundly: She was a handsome girl—would have made a good, loving wife… I did honestly and truly love the girl and think often, often of her now.”

Ann Rutledge’s grave marker in Petersburg, Illinois, contains a poem written by Edgar Lee Masters in which she is “Beloved of Abraham Lincoln, / Wedded to him, not through union, / But through separation.”

Ann Rutledge’s original grave at Old Concord, once neglected, has a fairly new marker provided by her family. One side of the maker, along with her name and dates, reads: “Where Lincoln Wept.” An account popularized by William Herndon in his biography is that Lincoln was so distraught by Ann’s death that he knelt and wept at her grave. On the reverse side of the marker is carved “I cannot bear to think of her out there alone in the storm. A. Lincoln.”

Herndon was Lincoln’s law partner and a friend. He also attended poetry readings with Lincoln, who wrote poems himself. Lincoln called Herndon "my man always above all other men on the globe."

Following Lincoln's assassination, Herndon began collecting accounts of Lincoln's life from people who knew him. Herndon wanted to write a faithful portrait of his friend, based on the hundreds of letters and interviews he had compiled, plus his own recollections. He was determined to present Lincoln as the man he actually was, not as a romanticized national hero and saint, and this meant revealing things other biographers would omit or elide, due to the puritanical conventions of that day. Such details included Lincoln’s suicidal depression and his contentious relationship with his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln. And Herndon maintained that Ann Rutledge was Lincoln’s only true love.

Keywords/Tags: Ann Rutledge, Abraham Lincoln, poem, poems, poetry, love, lover, mistress, paramour, romance, romantic, quilt, grave, Dale Carnegie, William Herndon

could it possibly begin with the well-known question,
as to whether a "histoical" jesus existed?

well... to answer that question, you'd have to ask
an actual historian imbued in the *zeitgest of the times,
and if this zeitgeist was that of: the spreading of a revised
monotheism that was judaism, and judaism alone,
you really have to look up someone who lived
in the stated dates of temperal constraints;
and as such, there is only one reliable source -
         josephus ben matthias -
         born in ~37a.d., at the time whem emperor nero
ruled the roman empire,
                   at first one of the leaders of the jewish
revolt, who later "converted",
    caputed in galilee by the romans, his life was spared,
and he gained roman citizenship, befriended titus
   and vespansian...
                            more importantly, his surviving work,
the book       the jewish war.
                      now comes the appropriate cascade of
apocalyptic insinuations...
                  when the greeks wrote the new testament?
they weren't in decline... but in a way were,
       in that they held no reasonable conceptualisation
of time, or the passing of time, for that matter decay...
i guess they wrote the new testament in desperation,
  in relation to the past, and the present, leading toward what
future they hoped to envision, as byzantines they
would eventually become...
          just like the defeated trojans became romans,
in what's recorded in rome's gensis that's virgil's
                                             aeneid.
apologies for the moving backward and forward with the facts...
but it's crucial for some sort of clarity...
    a poem can describe a day, i.e. singled out events:
    like homer, and the trojan war.
journalism?     that goes way beyond a day,
       it can be a week, but it can also be a decade...
  for example the war in syria, might boil down to last a decade,
but journalism can cope with a decade.
         history on the other hand? it can't last a day,
  it can't last a decade either, as such...
             by historical standards, a decade isn't worth
investigating... unless it is by historicirty enthusiasts -
who will, for example, give you detailed accounts
   of the punk decade, or a grunge time-period -
           they stress historicity, because they are biographers,
or even autobiographers... but that doesn't make them
historians are as such.
     why? because history deals with centuries,
and centuries as such, that need to have some sort of connectivity...
  what comes after the historical timescale?
     as the above stated question suggestes.. did a "historical"
jesus exist?     now we have moved beyond a historical
conceptualisation of time... and into a realm of λoγoς:
   which echoes down the ages with the help of φoνoς -
mythology, that is the upper tier of history,
it's the modus operandi for people who want to remember as much,
tell as many stories, as it takes to encode at least
one millennium - hence the need to apply the cocept
of myths, and the logic to that is: you can only hoard so much
in libraries.
     so why should mythology be so confused with other modes
of recording time? homer's epic is not misunderstood
as myth, because it takes days into concern, so far removed
by mythology, that they can be taken as reasonable observations
of the times he lived in.
        anyway... what needs to be done now is to explain
the greek confusion with time in the period of history that made
them the conquered, rather than the conquering...
           thus on this basis, a citation from the historian of the times
josephus ben matthias...
      the jewish war, chapter 7, judea under roman rule (page 147),
1981 edition...

  'a greater blow than this was inflicted on the jews by the egyptian
  false prophet. arriving in the country this man, a fraud
who posed as a seer, collected about 30,000  dupes, led them round
from the desert to the mount of olives, and from there was ready
to force an entry into jerusalem, overwhelm the roman garrison,
and seize supreme power with his fellow-raiders as bodyguard.
  but felix anticipated his attempt by meeting him with
the roman heavy infantry, the whole population rallying to
the defence...       the egyptian fled with a handful of men and
most of his followers were killed or captured...'

     riding on a donkey into jerusalem (30,000 dupes), rings a bell,
the flight of joseph and mary to egypt? rings a bell...
  now the timescale problem of the new testament, the precise
hyperbolic aspect of it...
       crucially? the unearthing of the nag hammadi library
in the egyptian desert.
              hmm... so far so good... i don't buy, for one bit
that jesus was a hippy from the word go!
   the whole resurrection story doesn't fit the bill...
                       he was a war lord... or a false prophet...
seen by jews as an egyptian...     the question is... where did
the actual crucifixion take place? on golgotha, or somewhere
in egypt? well... given the historical account... it must have been
in egypt... and after that: he went back to judea as
the hippy described in the new testament...
         what puts the pieces together is the above historical account
and where the library was found... but on top of that!
    the book of revelation... and the code enclosed in it:
ΧΞΣ    - grafitti, against the emepror nero...
        you don't get any reference to augustus -
you get anthony and cleopatra... so given when the historical
account was written, and the zeitgeist embedded in
the book of revelations?       hmm...                ch'e      ks'e     si.
did the historical jesus exist then?
    if the jews didn't see him as an egyptian,
             and if they later didn't move the accounts from egypt
and self-lacerated themselves with tales from golgotha?
   who knows... maybe the holocaust wouldn't have happened;
on my behalf, that's just wishful thinking;
but the greeks were just as bad... what came last for them
came first... and what actually happened, to them didn't happen...
        is that irony that the jews were somehow
grateful for roman occupation? i mean... did any other
babylonian king enslave them, and tell them to oput a garden
on a ******* ceiling, like nebuchadnezzar ii did?

This was the problem with the great bard William Shakespeare
Of venereal diseases he did not care or fear
The biographers do lament
His creative powers were unwisely spent
In 16th century brothels of London--on dear, oh dear!

Tex Lester and his sidekick Lumpy Bascom
wiggled down the arroyo on their bellies
to better observe a latifundista trouble spot
too hot to touch so they tap danced instead
Lumpy grabbed the walkie talkie and said
hey my turn to change the channels
Tex said OK Lumpy said here goes
your eyelids are turning transparent
every lock has a key but some are kinda rusty
it was an irreducible problem
on a sliding scale as usual
nothing so precious as a mind
overcoming its own psychosis
nothing so dangerous so revealing
what makes potential seem immediate
who can have infinite protection
working yourself to exhaustion can help
if you are an original sin Catholic
it has been 7 seconds since my last confession
contusions from the infant cradle
held to the sky in blessing
but the fields always droop and wither
and we always have the rest of our lives
the latifundista was under attack
by an army of particulars
bringing the guilty to the book
if  they go apoplectic it usually means
there's a **** in the butter dish
at this point grab life by the ***
a balm for the paranoid shakes
or life's analog of the ****** Mary
offering her writhing body to lepers
entering heaven in her bent Bentley
while the rebels arouse themselves
as her personal representative
no keener mortal praise exists
except by her blind biographers
and their company of war chariots
our task is to mend civilization
without getting our ***** shot off
but at my age it's an empty threat
funny you don't see many
geriatric suicide bombers
a relic from grandma's day
where tradition was not the joke
it certainly is today unless it is a
tradition of mockery

From "Pageant of Naked Mischief" available on Amazon

Yet biographers have always felt compelled to draw lessons from his life. Perhaps for us the habitual waging of such a hard, inner warfare is lesson enough for our season. For it may be that only those who patiently struggle without victory in such lifelong conflicts within themselves are worthy to be called saints.  

Thomas More
By Richard Marius
Pg. 520