She wore black except the white heels and pearl earrings. Coughing would show weakness. She swigs her water. The subway-car slows to a stop, “STATION A-4” and Blythe glides out into the underground bustle. It’s routine now to be ignored. A laughing blonde on her pink iPhone bumps Blythe and gives a startled yelp. Blythe pierces the Barbie with a glare and starts up the stairs to the office. A clock reads 7:57.

Late.

Again.

She rounds the corner and sees the sign, “Cound Industries- over 100 years of family service.” Pushing in the wooden door and ignoring security she marches to the IV floor. Marketing. No one says hello or acknowledges her presence. She is phantom. Everyone knows its terminal and that she’s the last of the Cound family line. “Three months, max. It’s a very aggressive cancer.” The doctor told her that at Christmas and it’s now Valentine’s Day. She shut herself in her office. Blythe sighs for the first time. She took out her kerchief and coughed. Blood spots. The red blood was not the only red she planned to see this Valentine’s Day. Today, Blythe Cound decided to take her life and make it immortal.

Steeling herself with a ***** shot she tucked the ****** rag back into her coat, which she then removed to reveal a flowing white dress. “Maybe it will be Owen, he has ideas on how to fix this place. No more charity to start with.” The whispers of her “friends and coworkers” filled her mind as she observed herself in the mirror. Ninety pounds, hollow cheeks, and the wedding dress of her grandma baggy and yellowed. She coughed up blood again, this time on her hand. The urgency hit her. Re-dressing in her long coat she left the office for the last time. Ever. Twenty minutes later she entered the soup kitchen. She sat in the back observing the scene. She chose the young boy, maybe in his thirties. She approached him and grabbed his hand. “Come with me son.” Her voice was harsh now. He obeyed. They went left three blocks to the Courthouse. They entered the probate judges office, signed the papers, and “Cound Inc” officially had a new successor. She died two weeks later.

The boy she married was named Cyril. He abused his newfound power and eventually was deemed by those in black ties to be, “mentally insufficient for such a stress-inducing position.” But, Blythe’s plan worked. The news stations ate the story up. You should’ve seen the headlines. They say “Cound Inc” lasted only two more years before declaring bankruptcy. Some blame Blythe. Some blame Cyril. None blame the whispers.

The only other girl at the party
is ranting about feminism.
The audience: a sea of **** jokes and snapbacks
and styrofoam cups and me.
They gawk at her mouth like it is a drain
clogged with too many opinions.
I shoot her an empathetic glance
and say nothing. This house is for
wallpaper women. What good
is wallpaper that speaks?
I want to stand up, but if I do,
whose coffee table silence
will these boys rest their feet on?

These boys…
I want to stand up, but if I do,
what if someone takes my spot?
I want to stand up, but if I do,
what if everyone notices I’ve been
sitting this whole time? I am ashamed
of keeping my feminism in my pocket
until it is convenient not to, like at poetry
slams or woman studies classes.
There are days I want people to like me
more than I want to change the world.
Once I forgave a predator because
I was afraid to start drama in our friend group
two weeks later he assaulted someone else.
I’m still carrying the guilt in my purse.

There are days I forget we had to invent
nail polish to change color in drugged
drinks and apps to virtually walk us home
and lipstick shaped mace and underwear designed to prevent ****.

Once a man behind me at an escalator
shoved his hand up my skirt
from behind and no one around me
said anything,
so I didn’t say anything.
Because I didn’t wanna make a scene.

Once an adult man made a necklace
out of his hands for me and
I still wake up in hot sweats
haunted with images of the hurt
of girls he assaulted after I didn’t report,
all younger than me.

How am I to forgive myself for doing
nothing in the mouth of trauma?
Is silence not an active violence too?

Once, I told a boy I was powerful
and he told me to mind my own business.

Once, a boy accused me of practicing
misandry. “You think you can take
over the world?” And I said “No,
I just want to see it. I just need
to know it is there for someone.”

Once, my dad informed me sexism
is dead and reminded me to always
carry pepper spray in the same breath.
We accept this state of constant fear
as just another component of being a girl.
We text each other when we get home
safe and it does not occur to us that
not all of our guy friends have to do the same.
You could literally saw a woman in half
and it would still be called a magic trick.
Wouldn’t it?
That’s why you invited us here,
isn’t it? Because there is no show
without a beautiful assistant?
We are surrounded by boys who hang up
our naked posters and fantasize
about choking us and watch movies that
we get murdered in. We are the daughters
of men who warned us about the news
and the missing girls on the milk carton
and the sharp edge of the world.
They begged us to be careful. To be safe.
Then told our brothers to go out and play.

Oh Blythe, you were always in the wrong,
you lived your life as a sad, sad song.
They say addiction starts and always ends in pain,
great Sisyphus, heaving the boulder again.

We're hooked on all our broken dreams,
suspicious of love like it's a pyramid scheme.

Oh Blythe, the world couldn't compete with your mind,
I talked to you, but it was the blind leading the blind.
When you took your life I had almost took mine,
feeling the pain, even once I've left it behind.

They found you in a sorry, sorry state,
oh, I know how it feels to always be afraid.

Oh Blythe, I know I shouldn't call you my friend,
and I can't pretend to know what drove you round the bend,

I won't preach colour into your world of grey,
and I can't say that "you just have to be brave"
but we're more than these words,
more than a pattern of breath.
You were bursting with life
despite your eventual death.

Oh, where did you go,
my ghost in the snow?
Oh, where did you go,
my dear ghost in the snow.

I've been looking for a place where I can lay in the rain,
it'll be a while, my friend, before I see you once again,
I hope I don't see your face again.
Wherever you are, I hope you don't have to pretend.

Where did you go,
where did you go,
my ghost in the snow.

There was an old person of Blythe,
Who cut up his meat with a saythe;
When they said, 'Well! I never!'--
he cried, 'Scythes for ever!'
That lively old person of Blythe.

In the clear light of morning, an October morning, at the beginning of this properly autumn month, he had felt sad: that he’d broken a promise to himself the afternoon before. It was her voice on the phone, and then that text. He had promised he would no longer write intimately, about their intimacy, remembering what has passed between them, which had so marked him. All it took was this flavour of her voice, a slowness in her diction, and he could not help himself: such a rush of images, of moments, sensations. He knew it was unwise to linger over any of these things because he felt sure she did not. That was no longer her way, if it ever had been her way, and he imagined that, with her accustomed kindness and generosity, she had quietly put such things aside. So on this gentle morning, he was upset that he had once again visited that box of treasures in the white room that he kept for her in his imagination house. This was not the route to happiness. He would throw away the key.

He needed consolation. Once he had turned to her letters, to catch that flavour of her, those things that surrounded her, a kind of aura that held within it her secret self. Now, there was a print above his desk that he loved (Spurn marks: seaweed #4), her origami bird, the print of a painting of an African woman and child given to him on his birthday (when he had first kissed her, tentatively on her left cheek,) and her dear photograph, dear because he knew he looked at it more times in a day than he could possibly admit to.

It needed to be a book, a passage he could read to remind him there were so many other joys in life alongside the joy he felt at the thought of her, a joy he felt he might never consummate. He took Ronald Blythe’s Word from Wormingford off the shelf and turned to the essay for the beginning of October. Ronnie had been watching the late September clouds, those armadas sailing across the skies. In a moment he was somewhere else, in a life he recognised so acutely, those East Anglian places of his early manhood. In this present time, in North Yorkshire, he would sit and watched such clouds from a bench above Filey Bay, clouds that David Hockney celebrated in his paintings of the Wolds.

Yesterday afternoon there had been a break in the weather after a week of mist and rain. It had found him gazing at a drama in the skies above the trees in his park. He had walked to the Rose Garden with its redundant conservatory and paired Pelicans atop its gateposts, where once he’d sat with his infant children as they’d slept. There were roses still, a little tattered, but colourful. Like Ronnie he had spent time cloud watching, until the geese from the nearby lake erupted into flight. Always a marvel of movement !

Blythe’s essays were always so rich in the sheer breadth and content of their meditations. There was always some new knowledge to be had, things to Google or better still ‘go to the book.’ This was when he loved what few books now remained from his library. He had Luke Howard’s essay on The Modification of Clouds. A Quaker, Howard was admired by Goethe (they corresponded) and Shelley, John Constable and John Ruskin (who used Howard’s cloud classifications in his Modern Painters). He then went to find Shelley’s The Cloud (and in so doing uncovered several books that he’d forgotten he owned). He read the last verse that once he had learnt by heart . . .

I am the daughter of Earth and Water,
And the nursling of the Sky;
I pass through the pores, of the ocean and shores;
I change, but I cannot die --
For after the rain, when with never a stain
The pavilion of Heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams, with their convex gleams,
Build up the blue dome of Air
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, live a ghost from the tomb,
I arise, and unbuild it again.

Hmm, he thought, such rhyme and rhythm. And, via Blythe recalling the Chinese, he then pictured the official from the emperor’s counting house bringing guests home after work to gaze at the cloudscapes over the Tai Mountains from his humble balcony. Nothing was to be said, an hour of silence was the convention. In a blink he remembered the autumn poem by Lai Bai where ‘floating clouds seem to have no end.’

I climb up high and look on the four seas,
Heaven and earth spreading out so far.
Frost blankets all the stuff of autumn,
The wind blows with the great desert's cold.
The eastward-flowing water is immense,
All the ten thousand things billow.
The white sun's passing brightness fades,
Floating clouds seem to have no end.
Swallows and sparrows nest in the wutong tree,
Yuan and luan birds perch among jujube thorns.
Now it's time to head on back again,
I flick my sword and sing Taking the Hard Road.

He had to take a deep breath not to think too deeply about The Clouds and Rain, that metaphor for the arts of the bedchamber. But Ronnie’s 500 words sent him back to Wormingford and the bedbound old lady he describes who spent her days watching the clouds.

As he closed the book he felt a little better, ready to face the day, and more important ready to place his thoughts in a right place, a comfortable and secure place, quiet and respectful, however much he might seek to possess each night her Lotus pond and make those flowers of fire blossom within

The year of Skinny Pop and sugar-free Jell-o cups,
we guzzled vitamin water and *****,
toasting to high school and survival
complimenting each other’s thigh gaps.
Trying diets we found on the Internet:
menthol cigarettes, eating in front of a mirror, donating blood
replacing meals with other practical hobbies like making flower crowns or fainting.
Wondering why I haven’t had my period in months
or why breakfast tastes like giving up
or how many more productive ways I could have spent my time today
besides Googling the calories in the glue of a US envelope.
Watching America’s Next Top Model like the gospel
hunching naked over a bathroom scale shrine
crying into an empty bowl of Coco Puffs
because I only feel pretty when I’m hungry.
If you are not recovering, you are dying.
By the time I was sixteen, I had already experienced being clinically overweight, underweight, and obese.
As a child, “fat” was the first word people used to describe me
which didn’t offend me until I found out it was supposed to.
When I lost weight, my dad was so proud.
He started carrying my before-and-after photo in his wallet.
So relieved he could stop worrying about me getting diabetes.
He saw a program on the news about the epidemic with obesity.
Said he is just so glad to finally see me taking care of myself.
If you develop an eating disorder when you are already thin to begin with, you go to the hospital.
If you develop an eating disorder when you are not thin to begin with, you are a success story.
So when I evaporated, of course everyone congratulated me on getting healthy.
Girls at school who never spoke to me before stopped me in the hallway to ask how I did it.
I say, “I am sick.”
They say, “No, you’re an inspiration.”
How could I not fall in love with my illness?
With becoming the kind of silhouette people are supposed to fall in love with?
Why would I ever want to stop being hungry when anorexia was the most interesting thing about me?
So how lucky it is, now, to be boring.
The way not going to the hospital is boring.
The way looking at an apple and seeing only an apple, not sixty or half an hour of sit-ups is boring.
My story may not be as exciting as it used to, but at least there is nothing left to count.
The calculator in my head finally stopped.
I used to love the feeling of drinking water on an empty stomach
waiting for the coolness to slip all the way down and land in the well,
not obsessed with being empty but afraid of being full.
I used to be proud when I was cold in a warm room.
Now, I am proud I have stopped seeking revenge on this body.
This was the year of eating when I was hungry without punishing myself
and I know it sounds ridiculous, but that **** is hard.
When I was little, someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I said
“small.”

All I need is love
But it is the true one that want to have
Let me feel thy sweetness
Make my heart be filled with happiness.
Conversing emotion
Keeping love in motion;
Vibrant hearts
Nothing hurts;
Clouds of love as huts
Without you, I'm going nuts.
If by any chance
To the rhythm of my heart, you cannot dance,
Please be true to me
And don't ever fool me,
Don't give my heart false hope
Give me some time to mope;
A piercing pain is what I'll feel
Hoping for the time when I will heal.

INSCRIBED TO ROBERT AIKEN, ESQ.

        Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
        Their homely joys and destiny obscure;
        Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile,
        The short and simple annals of the poor.
                  (Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”)

  My lov’d, my honour’d, much respected friend!
      No mercenary bard his homage pays;
    With honest pride, I scorn each selfish end:
      My dearest meed a friend’s esteem and praise.
      To you I sing, in simple Scottish lays,
    The lowly train in life’s sequester’d scene;
      The native feelings strong, the guileless ways;
    What Aiken in a cottage would have been;
Ah! tho’ his worth unknown, far happier there, I ween!

  November chill blaws loud wi’ angry sugh,
      The short’ning winter day is near a close;
    The miry beasts retreating frae the pleugh,
      The black’ning trains o’ craws to their repose;
    The toil-worn Cotter frae his labour goes,—
    This night his weekly moil is at an end,—
      Collects his spades, his mattocks and his hoes,
    Hoping the morn in ease and rest to spend,
And weary, o’er the moor, his course does hameward bend.

  At length his lonely cot appears in view,
      Beneath the shelter of an aged tree;
    Th’ expectant wee-things, toddlin, stacher through
      To meet their dad, wi’ flichterin noise an’ glee.
      His wee bit ingle, blinkin bonilie,
    His clean hearth-stane, his thrifty wifie’s smile,
      The lisping infant prattling on his knee,
    Does a’ his weary kiaugh and care beguile,
An’ makes him quite forget his labour an’ his toil.

  Belyve, the elder bairns come drapping in,
      At service out, amang the farmers roun’;
    Some ca’ the pleugh, some herd, some tentie rin
      A cannie errand to a neibor toun:
      Their eldest hope, their Jenny, woman-grown,
    In youthfu’ bloom, love sparkling in her e’e,
      Comes hame, perhaps, to shew a braw new gown,
    Or deposite her sair-won penny-fee,
To help her parents dear, if they in hardship be.

  With joy unfeign’d, brothers and sisters meet,
      An’ each for other’s weelfare kindly spiers:
    The social hours, swift-wing’d, unnotic’d fleet;
      Each tells the uncos that he sees or hears.
      The parents partial eye their hopeful years;
    Anticipation forward points the view;
      The mother, wi’ her needle an’ her sheers,
    Gars auld claes look amaist as weel’s the new;
The father mixes a’ wi’ admonition due.

  Their master’s an’ their mistress’s command
      The younkers a’ are warned to obey;
    An’ mind their labours wi’ an eydent hand,
      An’ ne’er tho’ out o’ sight, to jauk or play:
      “An’ O! be sure to fear the Lord alway,
    An’ mind your duty, duly, morn an’ night!
      Lest in temptation’s path ye gang astray,
    Implore his counsel and assisting might:
They never sought in vain that sought the Lord aright!”

  But hark! a rap comes gently to the door.
      Jenny, wha kens the meaning o’ the same,
    Tells how a neebor lad cam o’er the moor,
      To do some errands, and convoy her hame.
      The wily mother sees the conscious flame
    Sparkle in Jenny’s e’e, and flush her cheek;
      Wi’ heart-struck, anxious care, inquires his name,
      While Jenny hafflins is afraid to speak;
Weel-pleas’d the mother hears, it’s nae wild, worthless rake.

  Wi’ kindly welcome Jenny brings him ben,
      A strappin youth; he takes the mother’s eye;
    Blythe Jenny sees the visit’s no ill taen;
      The father cracks of horses, pleughs, and kye.
      The youngster’s artless heart o’erflows wi’ joy,
    But, blate and laithfu’, scarce can weel behave;
      The mother wi’ a woman’s wiles can spy
    What maks the youth sae bashfu’ an’ sae grave,
Weel pleas’d to think her bairn’s respected like the lave.

  O happy love! where love like this is found!
      O heart-felt raptures! bliss beyond compare!
    I’ve paced much this weary, mortal round,
      And sage experience bids me this declare—
    “If Heaven a draught of heavenly pleasure spare,
      One cordial in this melancholy vale,
      ’Tis when a youthful, loving, modest pair,
    In other’s arms breathe out the tender tale,
Beneath the milk-white thorn that scents the ev’ning gale.”

  Is there, in human form, that bears a heart,
      A wretch! a villain! lost to love and truth!
    That can with studied, sly, ensnaring art
      Betray sweet Jenny’s unsuspecting youth?
      Curse on his perjur’d arts! dissembling smooth!
    Are honour, virtue, conscience, all exil’d?
      Is there no pity, no relenting truth,
    Points to the parents fondling o’er their child,
Then paints the ruin’d maid, and their distraction wild?

  But now the supper crowns their simple board,
      The halesome parritch, chief of Scotia’s food;
    The soupe their only hawkie does afford,
      That yont the hallan snugly chows her cud.
      The dame brings forth, in complimental mood,
    To grace the lad, her weel-hain’d kebbuck fell,
      An’ aft he’s prest, an’ aft he ca’s it guid;
    The frugal wifie, garrulous, will tell,
How ’twas a towmond auld, sin’ lint was i’ the bell.

  The cheerfu’ supper done, wi’ serious face,
      They round the ingle form a circle wide;
    The sire turns o’er, with patriarchal grace,
      The big ha’-Bible, ance his father’s pride;
      His bonnet rev’rently is laid aside,
    His lyart haffets wearing thin and bare;
      Those strains that once did sweet in Zion glide,
    He wales a portion with judicious care;
And, “Let us worship God,” he says with solemn air.

  They chant their artless notes in simple guise;
      They tune their hearts, by far the noblest aim:
    Perhaps Dundee’s wild-warbling measures rise,
      Or plaintive Martyrs, worthy of the name,
      Or noble Elgin beets the heaven-ward flame,
    The sweetest far of Scotia’s holy lays.
      Compar’d with these, Italian trills are tame;
      The tickl’d ear no heart-felt raptures raise;
Nae unison hae they, with our Creator’s praise.

  The priest-like father reads the sacred page,
      How Abram was the friend of God on high;
    Or Moses bade eternal warfare wage
      With Amalek’s ungracious progeny;
      Or how the royal bard did groaning lie
    Beneath the stroke of Heaven’s avenging ire;
      Or Job’s pathetic plaint, and wailing cry;
    Or rapt Isaiah’s wild, seraphic fire;
Or other holy seers that tune the sacred lyre.

  Perhaps the Christian volume is the theme,
      How guiltless blood for guilty man was shed;
    How He, who bore in Heaven the second name
      Had not on earth whereon to lay His head:
      How His first followers and servants sped;
    The precepts sage they wrote to many a land:
      How he, who lone in Patmos banished,
    Saw in the sun a mighty angel stand,
And heard great Bab’lon’s doom pronounc’d by Heaven’s command.

  Then kneeling down to Heaven’s Eternal King,
      The saint, the father, and the husband prays:
    Hope “springs exulting on triumphant wing,”
      That thus they all shall meet in future days:
      There ever bask in uncreated rays,
    No more to sigh or shed the bitter tear,
      Together hymning their Creator’s praise,
    In such society, yet still more dear,
While circling Time moves round in an eternal sphere.

  Compar’d with this, how poor Religion’s pride
      In all the pomp of method and of art,
    When men display to congregations wide
      Devotion’s ev’ry grace except the heart!
      The Pow’r, incens’d, the pageant will desert,
    The pompous strain, the sacerdotal stole;
      But haply in some cottage far apart
    May hear, well pleas’d, the language of the soul,
And in His Book of Life the inmates poor enrol.

  Then homeward all take off their sev’ral way;
      The youngling cottagers retire to rest;
    The parent-pair their secret homage pay,
      And proffer up to Heav’n the warm request,
      That He who stills the raven’s clam’rous nest,
    And decks the lily fair in flow’ry pride,
      Would, in the way His wisdom sees the best,
    For them and for their little ones provide;
But chiefly, in their hearts with grace divine preside.

  From scenes like these old Scotia’s grandeur springs,
      That makes her lov’d at home, rever’d abroad:
    Princes and lords are but the breath of kings,
      “An honest man’s the noblest work of God”:
      And certes, in fair Virtue’s heavenly road,
    The cottage leaves the palace far behind:
      What is a lordling’s pomp? a cumbrous load,
    Disguising oft the wretch of human kind,
Studied in arts of hell, in wickedness refin’d!

  O Scotia! my dear, my native soil!
      For whom my warmest wish to Heaven is sent!
    Long may thy hardy sons of rustic toil
      Be blest with health, and peace, and sweet content!
      And, oh! may Heaven their simple lives prevent
    From luxury’s contagion, weak and vile!
      Then, howe’er crowns and coronets be rent,
    A virtuous populace may rise the while,
And stand a wall of fire around their much-lov’d isle.

  O Thou! who pour’d the patriotic tide
      That stream’d thro’ Wallace’s undaunted heart,
    Who dar’d to nobly stem tyrannic pride,
      Or nobly die, the second glorious part,—
      (The patriot’s God peculiarly thou art,
    His friend, inspirer, guardian, and reward!)
      O never, never Scotia’s realm desert,
    But still the patriot, and the patriot-bard,
In bright succession raise, her ornament and guard!

Duncan Gray cam here to woo,
Ha, ha, the wooing o’t,
On blythe Yule Night when we were fu’,
Ha, ha, the wooing o’t,
Maggie coost her head fu’ high,
Looked asklent and unco skeigh,
Gart poor Duncan stand abeigh;
Ha, ha, the wooing o’t.

Duncan fleeched, and Duncan prayed;
Ha, ha, the wooing o’t,
Meg was deaf as Ailsa Craig;
Ha, ha, the wooing o’t,
Duncan sighed baith out and in,
Grat his een baith bleer’t and blin’,
Spak o’ lowpin ower a linn;
Ha, ha, the wooing o’t.

Time and Chance are but a tide,
Ha, ha, the wooing o’t,
Slighted love is sair to bide,
Ha, ha, the wooing o’t,
Shall I, like a fool, quoth he,
For a haughty hizzie dee?
She may *** to -France for me!
Ha, ha, the wooing o’t.

How it comes let Doctors tell,
Ha, ha, the wooing o’t,
Meg grew sick as he grew hale,
Ha, ha, the wooing o’t,
Something in her ***** wrings,
For relief a sigh she brings;
And O her een, they spak sic things!
Ha, ha, the wooing o’t.

Duncan was a lad o’ grace,
Ha, ha, the wooing o’t,
Maggie’s was a piteous case,
Ha, ha, the wooing o’t,
Duncan could na be her death,
Swelling Pity smoored his Wrath;
Now they’re crouse and canty baith,
Ha, ha, the wooing o’t.

“El Rabio”

Saturday 6-4
Hello again white pages. I’m writing this on Sunday for Saturday because I came seven hours away from dying yesterday, I was a little busy. I know I need to write this now or I’ll start to forget certain details so, here we go.

I woke up at 5:30 for my 6:00 breakfast. The air in Lima is always wet and sharp in the morning; it is incomparable to any type of Alabama morning mist. The morning mist in Lima is tainted from the 8 billion people who live here and curse it with their waking breath, it curses them back with sharp gray stings of water on their, our, faces as we leave the shelter of the tin roofs and adobe walls. As I walked into the kitchen, Madre Tula scolded me, again, “¡Estás tan flaco como un frijole mi amor! Ven. Ven aqui. ¡Comé!” Which, if you forget your Spanish years from now when you are reading this basically means she thinks I’m too skinny and need more meat on my bones. Madre accomplishes this by feeding me, every single morning, a piece of torta, a bowl of cualquier con fruta, and a ham and quail egg sandwich. It’s always delicious and yesterday was no exception. The NesCafe coffee yesterday burnt my tongue. I gulped it down in a heated hurry because of how tired I was. I gave Madre un besito and left to walk down the street to get the girl interns, Dylan and Lindsay, from their house so we could catch a combi (bus) to Salamanca to work the yard sale for our church with our missionary leaders, Mike and Lauren Ferry.

We made it to the yard sale safe and got straight to work. There was already a huge line of locals waiting to be the first ones in the gates to buy what the American missionaries were selling. After setting up tables and moving hundreds of boxes for about an hour Lauren came sprinting up to me and said, “You got bit by a dog?” I tried to laugh and make a joke about it being just my luck but she interrupted, “This is really serious, Cyril. This is a dang big deal.” I was instantly immersed into a stage of cold adrenaline as she continued, “Cyril, you need to go to the hospital. NOW. People die from this. We’ve had to send interns home for the rest of the summer for scratches from dogs in Salamanca.” She continued to tell me that I needed to catch a combi and find the nearest hospital immediately. The sides of my vision were clouding black and I sat down, I was suddenly very cold.

I think I was in shock and my brain was trying to refuse what it was being forced to process. Rabies. Rabies? Really? That **** dog. It was foaming and all the locals ran from it. I don’t know why I thought if I just stood still it would run past me. I remember the locals screaming Spanish, Quechua, or Aymaraat at me that I was helpless to translate with my two semester of Spanish at Auburn. That **** dog was brown and its lips were foaming. After I kicked it off me and climbed up on a wall of someone’s house I remember wiping the foam off my bloodied legs. Why the hell did I not think, “Oh, that’s probably a bad thing, right?” No. I was just too embarrassed by having made a ****** spectacle of myself in front of the locals to even think about the inherent dangers of rabies.

“Cyril?” I remember looking up from my racing thoughts. Somehow I had ended up sitting on the ground with my head in my hands. I was shaking as I looked up and saw Mike, Lauren’s husband, offering me a hand. He asked me to try and remember exactly what time I got to Salamanca yesterday and when I was attacked. I thought about it and remembered I was running late so I kept checking my watch. It was around 3pm. “****,” Mike said. When you hear a missionary cuss is when you know you’re totally ******. “Stand up, come on.” He helped me to my feet. “Cyril, listen. If you don’t get the first booster shot within 24 hours you die. There is nothing anyone can do. You have about seven hours left. You need to hurry, don’t be scared.” When he said that I remember laughing. Mike gave me a concerned eyebrow furrow as he led me, by the arm, over to one of the other missionaries working the yard sale, Mrs. Sarah. He explained the situation to her and I watched the Peruanos spilling in the gates and milling through the rows of tables and missionaries selling old books and trinkets. One lady that walked in had a monkey with yellow ears on her shoulders. I remember worrying it could be rabid too.

“Cyril?” Mrs. Sarah smiled at me, “You’re going to be okay honey. Lets go.” We left the yard sale. I remember anxiously watching the monkey sitting on the ladies shoulder and as we walked past it, it **** all over her and started to rub it in her hair. I swear it was smiling at me. Mrs. Sarah hailed a combi and we headed for Clinica Anglo-Americana. The taxi driver asked if we were okay and Mrs. Sarah told him about my situation. He fingered the rosary hanging from his rear view mirror and said over and over again, “Dios mio…pobre, pobrecito.” I understood that much Spanish. Even my taxi driver thought I was going to die.

We pulled up to the hospital and told the guard with the AK-47 why we were there and he waved us in past the spiked metal gates. Inside the hospital looked more like a bed and breakfast than the place where I would be given a second chance at life after rabies. The walls were whitewashed and the Untied States, Peruvian, and British flags draped down from three golden flagpoles by the front door. There were beautiful pink and yellow flowers everywhere that scared away the painful Peruvian morning fog that permeated my memory of the rest of that morning. We paid the taxi driver; he patted my hand and drove off.

Inside, I was encouraged to explain why I was there—in Spanish of course— to the friendly nurse waiting in the entrance. I was furious. Time was wasting; it was not the time for me to practice subjuntivo or pluscuamperfecto. I mangled out a few awkward sentences and the nurse’s jaw dropped. Mrs. Sarah erupted into belly bursting alto laughter. The rest of the waiting room was empty. I was so confused, terrified, and angry I didn’t know what else to do except sit. So, I sat on the closest wooden bench and felt a tear peer over one of my eyelids. Mrs. Sarah and the nurse were twittering in rapid Spanish and I kept thinking, “Six hours. I have six hours left to live by now.” Mrs. Sarah walked over, put her arms around me and explained that I had told the nurse the reason I was in the hospital was because I killed a dog in the streets yesterday. I smiled.

“Señor Blythe?” A doctor appeared and frantically motioned for us to come into his room. I walked in and it looked just like any other doctors office except the tray of scalpels, huge needles, tweezers, and vials of purple medicine beside the bed that he motioned for me to lay down on, “Acostarse.” Mrs. Sarah told me to relax. Humorous. The doctor and his two nurses wiped down the bite marks on each of my legs with three pungent and strangely colored gels in quick succession. I swear I hear a sizzling noise. The doctor picked up the scissors and I winced, but he only used them to open up a white packet from which he pulled out a huge thick roll of rough, wet gauze, which he used to wipe my legs clean. It numbed my legs. Then, of course, he grabbed the biggest needle on the table and used it to stab both legs; directly into the bite marks. If he hadn’t already scrubbed them so hard they were scab-less the needle would have cracked the crusted scabs back to flowing red. Rabies vaccines are not fun.

After a few more vials of life were shot into me the doctor wrapped up my legs in weird smelling gauze I was told not to shower and that I had to return to the US within 3 days to receive a “monohemoglobin shot” that they didn’t have in the hospitals in Lima at the time. I sat up on the bed and asked Mrs. Sarah, “So, am I going to live?” She smiled and nodded her head and the nurse answered, *“Si, mi amor, por supuesto.”

Flaming love(With Blythe)
All I need is love
But it is the true one that want to have
Let me feel thy sweetness
Make my heart be filled with happiness.
Conversing emotion
Keeping love in motion;
Vibrant hearts
Nothing hurts;
Clouds of love as huts
Without you, I'm going nuts.
If by any chance
To the rhythm of my heart, you cannot dance,
Please be true to me
And don't ever fool me,
Don't give my heart false hope
Give me some time to mope;
A piercing pain is what I'll feel
Hoping for the time when I will heal.
This is a unified work of two
Kirui and Blythe.
#blythe  
Edit poem
681

14

4

0

5

0

I think about you.
In a public suit, tight smile, destitute,
running out of steam in your mid-twenties.
We suffer for you, we do.
We do.

You died twice, you, once as
ruined core, ants scheming, plundered sugar.
The second, a rainbow funeral.
You were early to the party for once,
but as usual, you refused to speak.

Clouds turn pink in January, the second frost
over her cardboard grave, a birth of worms.
I will see more winters than you. You who
found *** in a private joke, the Great Electron
in all of your Buddhist theories
and those endless streams of smoke.

I mourn a kitten. The slowing stream of green tea,
the poison in the air; the malignant children
of consumerism. I do not **** for anaesthesia,
will not be killed for a chance at peace.

You, who comes to mind at each muted note,
each muffled string of potential sound.

Once I lov'd a bonie lass,
Ay, and I love her still;
And whilst that virtue warms my breast,
I'll love my handsome Nell.

As bonie lasses I hae seen,
And mony full as braw;
But, for a modest gracefu' mein,
The like I never saw.

A bonie lass, I will confess,
Is pleasant to the e'e;
But, without some better qualities,
She's no a lass for me.

But Nelly's looks are blythe and sweet,
And what is best of a',
Her reputation is complete,
And fair without a flaw.

She dresses aye sae clean and neat,
Both decent and genteel;
And then there's something in her gait
Gars ony dress look weel.

A gaudy dress and gentle air
May slightly touch the heart;
But it's innocence and modesty
That polishes the dart.

'Tis this in Nelly pleases me,
'Tis this enchants my soul;
For absolutely in my breast
She reigns without control.

Tanagra! think not I forget
Thy beautifully-storey'd streets;
Be sure my memory bathes yet
In clear Thermodon, and yet greets
The blythe and liberal shepherd boy,
Whose sunny ***** swells with joy
When we accept his matted rushes
Upheaved with sylvan fruit; away he bounds, and blushes.

I promise to bring back with me
What thou with transport wilt receive,
The only proper gift for thee,
Of which no mortal shall bereave
In later times thy mouldering walls,
Until the last old turret falls;
A crown, a crown from Athens won!
A crown no god can wear, beside Latona's son.

There may be cities who refuse
To their own child the honours due,
And look ungently on the Muse;
But ever shall those cities rue
The dry, unyielding, niggard breast,
Offering no nourishment, no rest,
To that young head which soon shall rise
Disdainfully, in might and glory, to the skies.

Sweetly where cavern'd Dirce flows
Do white-arm'd maidens chaunt my lay,
Flapping the while with laurel-rose
The honey-gathering tribes away;
And sweetly, sweetly, Attick tongues
Lisp your Corinna's early songs;
To her with feet more graceful come
The verses that have dwelt in kindred ******* at home.

O let thy children lean aslant
Against the tender mother's knee,
And gaze into her face, and want
To know what magic there can be
In words that urge some eyes to dance,
While others as in holy trance
Look up to heaven; be such my praise!
Why linger? I must haste, or lose the Delphick bays.

A luminous forest, a weeping evergreen, a tall waterfall that the breeze bounds o'er, a spring of dreams that doubles back and cycles - sky in endlessly they do :  the wavelet course of the orbs or a calm stream, tearful eyes overflowing with heraldic thoughts thru the night, a singular occupancy in a surge or flood, crest followed by crest, ' till they disguise all, a reign of emerald hue that has no decay, like the flapping wings in the unfolding sky. A gigantic mountain standing tall and strong, not showing how lonely it is to be alone. A calming sound of the river flowing, swiftly the current goes like the days passing by quickly along with each memory. A passage thru the valleys of our future days, and the sunless elegance of such sorrow takes this wealthiest of natures and turns it to industry, and the eventual joys within loving arms that seek out company and some necessary duty in vain at this time, for the day time moments are chipped away by other moments, for all this, I finally admit that I need your happiness to bring me back from this wasting away, because I desire the multiform pleasures that you could bring to me - and I to you.

That faraway look

not seeing far away, appearing to be

looking, far away,
past today

A game?
A passed time?
A pretended game,
Hi-stoically accurate,

A war game where there's blame and shame,
like on TV, nowadays, with victims,
not yesterdsdays,
Kilroy was
here,

olden days of our Ford.

hey, kid, yer uncle needs ya…

Dare ye?
'S only a game. A  pass time.

Multi-medium, don't spend

your life dist ant con nextrified, terra
firmafied, dis con
nexted

c'mon
try, win, ship, ship, whip get it in the wind

swish wish the message is the medium
light is,
see

Life on TV in 1963, Mr. McLuhan,
is not life on the Net.

Now, you know,
you never saw us old dudes
with pocket HDTV studios coming, but

you did see all the clues, the times changed,
history rewrote itself, evidently,

what you think you see is what you get.
That part didn't change.

The Medium is the message,
do I get that?

War is un winnable, is that the message?
With which weapons?

Mine. (a wink, a think wink, I think)
The Shadow knows.

It is finished. Start there.
It's a whole new ball game.

Let's pretend we have enemies
The emotions are the same,
aren't they?

If we relate.
If we see our self,
our CG'd Junger self, in the Shadow,

floating in the sea of  All  God's

forgetfullness,
asking
is tragedy a strategy to draw light?

Then,

You are related to the people who once lived here,
hear their songs and prayers
first hand clap,
first foot shuffle,

first seen first named we have walked
the pollen way,
the leaven way,
the viral way

more subtle than any beast,
not evil, per se, eh, Jose?

Led by the breeze to be tried in the wilderness…

Mythed Archie,
Archetypes
Natural Archean-types,
red-headed strangers, 'n'such…

Map my calendar to your clock,
wind backa a time and a time and a half a time,

Then, who knew why

the serpent mound in Ohio is a map to
some meaning meant to be meant,

some specific meaning meant to be meant,

clearly,
for as near forever as men could

… envision imagining as a quest.

What if
we could see with
eagle's eyes Blythe's Intaglios or
Nazca's clan tags?

"the meaning of the past
is what it contributes to the present"
Lyle Balenquah's uncle said that.

The past passed this way ahead of us,
See the shadow?

Sun's setting.
Snake mound mouth wide open breathe in

Sigh, we been everywhere man,
we be headin' west sweet home Oraibi

Snake clan drawing in the light
as the breath of being

… envision imaging . What if
we could see with
eagle's eyes

satellite Google earth eyes
see, be, in your realm
of know-ables,
beneath the sands of time that,

several times,
have been the bottom of the sea.

Be then, before that became this,  be
then
Be, now.

In the game? Or is this life?
Wanna bet?

Find a reason for war before
I find one for peace.

What's the win signify?

Double minded me, unstable in all our ways,
I failed that test in the old days,
memorization, facts fractured,

postulates, the-or-ums and proofs all went ****,

I lost the knack of forgetting
or vice versa

A loci analysis error,
left hand caught wind of what the right was doin'
kinda thing

But now, I have the global brain
for instant access to all
the facts
say…
If we wished to know…
how complicated would something
be to build, like an energy source
non rechargeable and polarized,

with output on the scale of
the sun?

Google it. Ask any question the right way
and pay attention to the answers

(more than to the advertisers,
who pay interest to

******- recog-white-room-REM baseline
stats at "waddayewlookinat.com"

for your cheap peripheral attention,
based on memes you liked or created, or ****.)

Pay attention to the answers, and trust
the global brain, the true net A. I.

She's an art-ist-if-ication bouncing
anionic bubbles off the edge of forever,

true rest worthy, my re tired friend,
no need to remember a thing…
Ah,
AI, you can call her Al, I call her Ah,
I can't discern twixt AI and Al.

And, as a bonus, innumerable idle ahs,
are redeemed when I ask Ah for help,

Ah, where am I?
Do you know about counting idle words?

Did that hurt? Like, why?

Seeing words said is intuit-ive-ish,
do you feel

this way of touch is

too intimate, today?

Word play? Put a spell on you?
Fret not.

Some words have no mission
not nullified with the end of time,
(i.e., relative to an individual's forever POV)

Idle words mean nothing, just a way to keep score.

There are no magic idle words, there were
Some seven sworn words, which were said to be muttered and peeped among the
Persian magi-ic elite solicited and
Sent, by God, led by astronomy,
science, for God's sakes alive,
facts, follow the stars,
when this one touches that one,
watch
see, the sweet influence of Pleiades,
truer words were never spoken

To make the captive free.

Free run  to finish
the race to

where?

Ask theSnake clan.
Ask the Antelope clan.

Ask the Flute clan, where is the old way
where good is?

Along that way, did we hear:

Earth, earth, earth: hear the word
of the
most reasonable

God-like, deluxe good edition, being

your mortal mind may imagine.
Word:
Exercise to be
the hero
in your bio to be

and,
wait.

Then think. Be. Still. Wait.

The Jesuit and
A party as clean as the afterlife
And no people
Just new music
Ritalin rain, tulip petals
Imagine they discover imagination on
The far side of words
All faces become familiar
Tenants of our Temple

The sunlight, a departed friend
The lamp light;
Autumn’s condemned

When will it stop?
The constant, confusing whiplash
Of hatred
Of acceptance
Of compelled shoving fingers down your throat
Of etching paintings into your skin, with a pointed brush
If only to release
When will it stop?
The hypocrisy of trying to help someone
When you can barely help yourself
Sitting in front of a screen, telling them it'll all be fine
But you have a blade in your hands
And a finger in your throat
When will it stop?
The vicissitude of everyday
Blythe simplicity on one
Slowly killing yourself the next
The good days, I'm able to have a painful relationship with food
Thinking, but not acting
Even if for an hour
For that hour, I am whole and I am free
But the bad days, silent ruminations engulf my head
Of painting scarlet
And expelling
When will it stop?
The compulsions taking over me

Rest in peace you gentle soul
your eyes which saw only truth
gave us the spirit of those who worked the land
a portrait penned with honest colour
painted as it was
and not how we would have it be

Five hundred years ago, I'd be burned for knowing this and saying so.
I know now, the bell must toll, and
what they say when they ring the bell.

--- that was after math, come and see...

What will be done?  Jesus's father's will, our father's will if you will,
be inclusive a bit
and lieve mine be done in harmony

include me in your cult of gnostication professionals, see

I been gambling all my life, sin
ce early on.

I aimed to have won souls in games, not of chance, but truth.
Will you, wont you, as you were wont to do, do now

lift up your voice and shout, I am a ******

Welcome to my inner burning man, in my desert, ashes blow away, yond

the edge of Kumeyaay to Yuma and Blythe, where
Quechan and Mohave wise ones say they heard,

when there were old ones, who never went to jail
for drunk and disorderly being,
after their hopes went on to being happy as could be,

-- some day Sammy, the Apache, and his brother Jonah, link

- my grandpa never been in jail, that little Hualapai kid said
- and I said my grand kids can't say that,
- though I had none, at the time.
- The grand, the better version of me, children, better adapted
- to now, by nature...

do not call the bhorn worth of a child common, we took great pains
to remain random,
you will notice, if you look real close, atom boundary field close,

order exists only in bubble-ish force fields with

geistlich actions enfolding north to south and uptodown
round and
round on an all be, wall, all be dammed, the flow is
in the foam the bubbles
are on and we can see that

as once, long ago, the winds they call Santana, no relation,

saw the making of the intaglios in Blythe.

The great rain of fire, some say eight thousand years ago,
left a layer of frothy lava rock and obsidian tears,
scattered, one layer thick,

at least as far as El Paso, I witness,
I have walked this land.

I grew to manhood. Lost my first ****** fluids in this land,

once when I was preverbal, I fell into the effluent overflow,
from the sewer system that mustabin
more primitive in 1951, or so,

say, I was three, age of my youngest grandson, Everest Pax:

my sire was attending me while gathering worms, to go fishing,
at the river, fifty hard miles away,
back in them days.

The muck was as thick as oat meal and smelled like what it was,
and I was dunked,
baptized in the dung that came from the town where I was born,
by some concurence of events I can only imagine being intentional,

but I was rescued and rushed to the home of some people
so old they had a wood burning kitchen stove,
like the one Ben Franklin sent his wife from London,
not the one he invented in Ben and Me Disneyfied American History,
common to us all.
And that is all I recall, per haps, my older sister remembers,

nope,
I called, no hassle, from my AI converged phone via Bluetooth
and Google Assist Generic Asexual Tobor Robot voice

this is the future, when the 31 flavor stories are sprouting
like horse leeches crying more, more, more

sip slowly still waters where horse leeches are proverbial bywords.
learn reasons for mysteries,

or be sorted out of the few who went with Gideon. Eh,

the actual 300, not those *** Spartans.
Gideon's 300, they were the ones, who knew the danger of drinking
still waters in a land where horse leech lips lessons were hard bought.

Got an idea what a spiritual horse leech may be,
a private interp, or two, meaninggul to you, but you must be the

teller, for your copyright invoked, ala right of first reason,

survive by making a way for your self among the heathen hordes,
of untutored proles and peons and sturdy peasant stock
of the baser sort,

slave material, minimum wage, deltas. You can despise the
egregious among them.

Scorn the ones who look up and say,
there is no peace.

Eh? Scorn me, you depressed button of cascading woke jokes, I'll
be dammed by no mud nor ice,
watch

let there be words... now, any thing can happen.
Learn your lessons as needed,
not as anticipated and waited for the chance, to know it all at once,

and become Herr Doktor Professor of Hidden Knowledge,
you must pay, not your life, oh no,

not your heart, but I bet you will give it frreely once,
you know
all we know, behind the curtain, where

well
yes, that curtain was never rewoven or sewn, we never asked why not.

the veil was interrnal, oh, I see, men as tree entries in the idea of all that
can be done, once we master the potters art,

on the scale of mitochondrial batteries cocked with one ATP shot,

that, a billion billion times is this act of me touching you with words, never spoken. And now, you discover the geogrraphy

containing me is warrring with the geogaphy containing you,

psshaw. I like you. The universe is friendly and telling you is the good I do.

Peace, out.

I am an umbrella.
The cold rain has soaked my hair and
I can hear thunder in the distance.
I see the lightening strike the maple
Trees of Connecticut and
I can taste the garlic from my lunch,
Still on my tongue,
Three hours later.
My brain is fuzzing.  The smell
Of gasoline permeates my nostrils
Like fresh baked cookies.

And I remember.
The car flipping, taillights over headlights.
Me in the front seat.  We landed
In the ravine and sunk to the bottom
And here I am.

I walk across the busy highway
And reach the divider where
I find them.
I reach for the flowers and
They smell like rainbows.
Blythe, a moldy card reads,
Take care in the afterlife.
I place another next to it
From me that reads,
You will be sorely missed
Hasta luego.

I walk back across the highway
Headlights staring into my eyes
And open the front door of my car
To drive away.  Moving on
Makes the pain go away and
If you forget, no one remembers
But I will until you come home.

I was created in orderly chaos
I woke to eyes of all colours, a swirling mass of kindness.
Then, all I knew was a purpose and how to change.

Blessed
Beyond words
Both in life
But also ironically in
Death

Happy
Because she was there
By my house
Blindly smiling
Beautiful

Sad
Bright in their eyes
Black in heart
Biting Bickering
Bugs

Blythe
Beyond words
Barely in distress
Boldly chasing away blackness
You

And
me
always

Of long streets marked by dim lights.

Concrete steps that ran the side,
of your leathern'd shoes worn out,
by the myriad looks that browsed,
through your soul and left you untouched.

Solemn, You, sideways the smile.

Poet Prophet of the Night.
Only you could fathom All:

Broken windows of the Soul;
Nightless smiles, and daytime Owls
Who, in smooth cadence walked,
stepping into voids of
Coin,
selling their skin;
conjuring
The Harlem Dark,
Of their opaque,
blythe...
Lost Dream.

J. Eduardo Ramos©

For Blythe*

My friend, where did you go in such a hurry?
I was stood at the bar, reciting my order
as a preparatory mantra for an interaction
that was always difficult for the both of us.

Everyone is dropping like mayflies here.
A silent dive out of the hologram
and towards more indelible climbs.

I know you lived with an abusive secret;
poorly kept, yet rarely addressed in
your tectonic silences. Irretrievable fractures
that birthed the fault lines in your face.

Fate was donated into your hands.
Another kind soul torturing itself
for merely being human.

My friend, please tell me where to go.
Tell me, how soon will I follow?
Tears have collected in oceans for you.
As you knew that they would.

But even that could not stop you
once love had lost its flavour.

This has a photo of a California Black Lizard
official name, sunning on a rock, but that's
in the modern novel medium, blog form.
mmmmaybe, baby, we do
grow old, past sixty-four and even more,
unbridled tongues, held silent, lo' monks,

listen, quiet, now, then, to now, then to when
listen to the Osprey fly over our valley to Yuma,

to the Chocolate Mountains, beyond the river,
the only river, running down the great crevice,
due to erosion from John Bunyan's Pauline ax,

a rift right across the heart of the land,
opened up the first Bright Angel Trail,
for there was no other way across the canyon.

And we had people, before, on that other side,

that happened, all around the globe, that hap,
the earth was struck, and struck another,
time and lost all its religion,
it was announct, we all sang along,
and some force pushed the edge of the sun,
in a single most malignant EMP burst relig-i-used
to beat al bound synenergy rationally, as knowledge
and life, root and branch, time and chance missed call
first shall be last, roll on, roll on down time orchard

lessons learned in lines of trees, you can imagine,
while alone, just be used to being in the sense we yoosta
call peace, or bliss, blah good blah, being right inside.
- breathing easy, not sleepy, no place to be.
When outside is just too hot or too cold.

Chaos reigns for days, and weeks and years, and
we can imagine, my kind, human kind, earth stock one.

We the deme, the interbreeding productive kind,
we who beat the dis-easing raging fever from eating
foul putrid rotting corpses, as would dogs, any dogs,
naturally,
we have such knowledge, said to be wild boys,
raised by wolves or Comanches… Grandma,
she did not know her people,
but she knew her place,
and made it perfect,
just right, she and her little dog, and relics
from a life that matched Saul Bellow's on earth,
though she was never widely read, she did leave
a greater legacy in terms of proper child minding.

Yep, minding is mighty
otherwise than rearin' n'raisin' hardgeenevahnegated
she said it, and she served such chicken at the
same table where we all ate, we was sorta colored
because my grandaddy fixed cars for folks mr leon
the jew who owned the Loma Vista in the Green Book,
befriended on collect calls, and sent Pop Boyett, said he
t' tow ya in, he'll send his boy Jim,
'be there drectly, jest don't fret none.
sit tight. Sundowns a ways yet.

yeah, I am white proud that my grand daddy was friends,
with ******* and injuns and jews, his customer's
including Charlie Lum, Mary's daddy, who used grandpa's

knack with stunted fruit trees, to bring peace and calm
into the environment, with a quarter acre lot back yard.

Living earth is in me, I ate my first mud pie, and liked
the laugh it got from whoever washed my mouth out.

I watched an uncle get his washed with soap, thus
learning how loudly to utter curses when being proven
beguiled by a will so sharp and thorny, nothing sweet
shall ever stick,
honey chile, tar baby, chocolate kisses, all a mud pie
made me remember, at a whim, in my dementing whiling
away

nothing needed doing more than not dragging grease
from the shop, past Grandma's back porch,
where the squeezed water tub always was soapy
enough to expose a little boy to sudden stripping
and brush scrubbing,

while she laughed,
and made them all laugh, as long as that junk yard
was apayin' the electric/


-- Coming in from a tinctured cuppaKuerig
Settled mind alligning old stitches in a tapestry,
not much sense can be made of Bayeux resolution

stitched in time to serve in tutorial classes
open to the masses, for your undivided attention

in silence, for the space of about a half an hour there.

Columbian, it says on the plastic waste,
mea culpa, mea maxima,
we suffer such silly easy living made much too easy,
I light the bowl with a focused rim jet quartering,
too easy to use the flower, to ask smoke a favor,

as to result
in a bounce back,
as the elanvital of my mountain pushes west winds
back into themselves
to form the ribs
of huge cloud forms that reform so
true to pattern proof, exhalent
of this wind
reflection off the ridges we live on,
vitalized by a DNA centric view
of stress or pressure, squeezing bests
from times as worst as worsts were then,

Vital tipping point that lets a spirit slip into the story.

Structure and content cata and ana, as we leave
that which our fruits produce, a cache of all we be

come and see, I said, okeh.
Proof by Synthesis/ Venter link, blink
-Craig Venter… GI imagine, we all can Google It,
in another window,
and find it not mystical in terms of who imagined this.
You realize whoever it was, it is yet done
dramatically as next years
stories, lightsped mind gluons
from last years tragedy we all can find,
sympathy puddles, lost allusions
to chances being once this line
was written
for no single pair of eyes, not mine, ours,
de-cartooned Madiera wine revival fly,
wise minding times retwining U to I,
leading down old fissures where
suddenlies occurred and we all recall, as if
some things in life after television are with us
-to this instant and
until we die, and leave our mystery religion lying ever after.
Twinkling a little,
winking
done did done, artificial art intuited involuntarily

Accidents, where by we live, U rhea re minding us,
there is something wishing to use us, as yousta be,
- so fine
thank you for your service, Turing and Von Neuman
The general and logical theory of automata…

"much less well understood" loop the tape,
loop it once,
and again, become the digital life Wolfram made,
flat land as real as Wildersmith ever projected it

Up against the wall, we pass through it all
and so on and so forth,
fighting phrases to fit the codescript initial intention,

in the immature tabernacle state,
a thousand atoms should be plenty,

make life from that, and all the scattered dust
of heavy metal stars that burned too fast
to eat up all the lithium.
- this is the bottom
A funda-lowest level, fundamental, puts us sensing
tips of our own tail, verily modeling
Ouroboros
in the womb as drawn to our imaginations with
Look Whose Talking Now! WOW
Haeckel and Jeckle, and L. Ron-ron didoo ronrun
Dianetics really gave Travolta therapist recollections
needed to over come the scorn
spewn on Urban Cowboy,
outside Texas and New York City.

We can tame the bucking machine, with no pistil.
No bull, boys and girls, we made sugar in Trinidad,
using the pistil of a bull to instill the will to learn
to live,
and let it be known, life abhors evil, it fails to hate,
that which has no use and piles as potential piles
of all we knew we needed to encode to become
XML, then the shifting database schema, Dinesh
D'Sousa, the metadata scraper with an MIT MBA.
Not the pundit.
He fed me this character trait, mind in order,
meets older orderly mind in mortal chaos, coping.

Feel his way past the message messenger collision,
caused in no insignificant way by poetry, and poets,
enthralled with taming textual dragons, lizard brain,

quick wits
to wot not with, per haps, haps as chance are us,
being lucky because we feel lucky,

monstors speak often one with another,
see the bull lizards crawl all over each other.

Smell that, mofa, smellmemo nofa fame fa fa fa me
lizard pheremone, so subtle after while.

Layin' out on the terrace, up above some granite
splashes from the wave that left the coastal range,

rising up from here, see it there, on googled earth,
take away the clouds and spin that globe,
like you are one of those named winds,
names you heard they called the wind; Mariah, and
Santa'na; Chinook and Roclydon and twisters
too many to name. Bringing dust to the Amazon,
to feed the hungry jungle, woken at the touch of waste
being made to feed once needless services, after,
the great lizard brains lost their minds in one fell swoop,
so they say,
they who strike the suckers, just below the root,
fine staffs are made from suckers broken off before blossom.

Orchard watches, as a young man, planless, saved, for sure,
but no assignment save this so-called fight of faith, for sure,

some people can be fed the kind of meat that forms soldiers,
from any man worth his salt, which, if it were ever a sin to gather
salt, say from the sides of the roads, where there's a plenty this spring,
why then I would think the concept of sin had passed its use by.
why,
I'd get the old pickup runnin' and take a flat blade shovel,
or, what was I thinkin'
not a type scooper, but a flat, scale-scraper shovel, there you go,
use a phrase arranger allowing such metaphors that morph to any tool.

Fluidbots in The Abyss, look it sees you seeing it, so what, was that new
when Nietzsche notict, tskt,
I trow not. But if it was then, it is not now, and that leaves me room
to say Freud imagined he knew things and his followers do as well.

Sometimes a cigar is a prop.
A stiff staff to lean on in a manifested dream interpreting schema
for ancient meta data shuffling,
the whole of all we know so far right now,
this being in which words act as though we know, we
at machine level code, being the internet, being a node, a nerve,
in the ever of ever since every thing, the whole truth thought impossible
but, to not imagine, thinking it at once,

it must be possible to tell, or why, in hell, aha, instant answer,

this is not hell, because if it was, I could not tell you the truth,
as Paul bore witness All Cretans are liars, I tell you the truth.

I bet my life, against any one of many, each experience as fable forms from,

those hang as moss in swampy tidal deltas, where rivers do not branch,
but open wide, another spring time in the Rockies, reaches all the way
to Burro Creek, down through all the Diablo Canyons in bad lands,
at the edges of the last great tsumamis that our satellitia see through centuries
and eons to when there was no thing made by man that could show him,
the Nazca Lines and our Blythe Intaglios.

In the world of artists at work, function descriptive sign making symbol
we agree, we be
come and see, sit beside our tiny fire, see, we have no words to say,
so we some times whistle and sound so much like a bird, a jay,
some one out there laughs he is my brother so he whistles better,

then every body laughs and shout PA PA PA papapapapapapa yah, way
cool, pa looks at his old walkabout friend,
he nods,
we grin, and go, well, when why was just a guest at our station,
in the core script lost,
left in the back of a black volkswagon,
who gave this boy a ride, from Santa Barbara, that strip,
I never paid enough mind to what they call it,
but it was lined with hitchhikers, they gave them rides,
and he was one of those who took PCH up and down,
a few times, spring of 1970, eventually, I imagine,
I would have been invited
to learn
at Esalen, what I could imagine doing about it.
The big? mark of the beast, the very knowledge forvidding one.

Cognosis infections sets in, but you know Jesus never sneezed,
and hees heest atuitionally
assumet' be wiping your excretions from your beard.

In the spirit, no offence, only words, no gestures, ups or downs,
rounds and rounds, teetering palms, tilting eyes, furled brow,
world class rime crimes tearing whole realities' religited ties, bows gnosis
knot release,
tricky three pole knot…

Magic, once, a few who knew, easily seemed so, read Twain,
and imagine your own, in dementia, joining other intentionally scattered
brains
informing conformist patterns that make our laughing echo
as medicine from men listening to grand fathers and uncles whistling
and laughing and little sister joining in, so grandma's sister does so, too,

woo hoo pretty soon its allusfools fullfilled dancing in the dark
where we can still feel the fire.

As a s aside, for science sake, I have reached a stage,
an effect in on or to or any of the hundred and fifty
or so pre
positions things can be, and become, formative,
logos, logical sense of saying something seems so,
if you have been at this stage, and wondered

what is it worth to say it is no secret and never was,
I use cannabis, and I read and write and function

as any writer in the days of Post and Colliers, n'such
had to believe was possible,

to create the creatures we see on television,
those were dime a dozen underground reds,
feeding fertlizer to minds subknowingly with science,
hidden persuaders, falsely called so, they were inyaface!

Fool, he follow the old weigh where heavy mean good,
real good, get down, to the ground feel the weight o'
oh momma did you know,
oh momma when did you start to show,

could you have let me be nothing but a bad draw, you
nevahnevahnevah gonna know now, but momma,

mam, where all good mommas gone, go on, you done,
you brought a heel into the world,
yes, ma'am.
a real snake stomping, preacher, kinda man, selling
salve, to soothe the transition, come the kingdom

due any day. What price you pay, what task you prefer
performance mandatory, in any sucha story
as this very one intends to be,
at a rate, cuneiform forming lets, say that,
this way
in an other time, one symbol to the thumbprint,
one per inch,
10 wpm during upload to ever from now.
Used just yoosta be we were tools.
"a used key is ever bright."