by John Greenleaf Whittier  (1807 – 1892)

“As the Spirits of Darkness be stronger in the dark, so Good Spirits which be Angels of Light are augmented not only by the Divine Light of the Sun, but also by our common Wood fire: and as the celestial Fire drives away dark spirits, so also this our Fire of Wood doth the same.”

        COR. AGRIPPA,
           Occult Philosophy, Book I. chap. v.

“Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow; and, driving o’er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight; the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river and the heaven,
And veils the farm-house at the garden’s end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.”

                                       EMERSON

The sun that brief December day
Rose cheerless over hills of gray,
And, darkly circled, gave at noon
A sadder light than waning moon.
Slow tracing down the thickening sky
Its mute and ominous prophecy,
A portent seeming less than threat,
It sank from sight before it set.
A chill no coat, however stout,
Of homespun stuff could quite shut out,
A hard, dull bitterness of cold,
That checked, mid-vein, the circling race
Of life-blood in the sharpened face,
The coming of the snow-storm told.
The wind blew east; we heard the roar
Of Ocean on his wintry shore,
And felt the strong pulse throbbing there
Beat with low rhythm our inland air.

Meanwhile we did our nightly chores, —
Brought in the wood from out of doors,
Littered the stalls, and from the mows
Raked down the herd’s-grass for the cows;
Heard the horse whinnying for his corn;
And, sharply clashing horn on horn,
Impatient down the stanchion rows
The cattle shake their walnut bows;
While, peering from his early perch
Upon the scaffold’s pole of birch,
The **** his crested helmet bent
And down his querulous challenge sent.

Unwarmed by any sunset light
The gray day darkened into night,
A night made hoary with the swarm
And whirl-dance of the blinding storm,
As zigzag, wavering to and fro,
Crossed and recrossed the wingàd snow:
And ere the early bedtime came
The white drift piled the window-frame,
And through the glass the clothes-line posts
Looked in like tall and sheeted ghosts.

So all night long the storm roared on:
The morning broke without a sun;
In tiny spherule traced with lines
Of Nature’s geometric signs,
And, when the second morning shone,
We looked upon a world unknown,
On nothing we could call our own.
Around the glistening wonder bent
The blue walls of the firmament,
No cloud above, no earth below, —
A universe of sky and snow!
The old familiar sights of ours
Took marvellous shapes; strange domes and towers
Rose up where sty or corn-crib stood,
Or garden-wall, or belt of wood;
A smooth white mound the brush-pile showed,
A fenceless drift what once was road;
The bridle-post an old man sat
With loose-flung coat and high cocked hat;
The well-curb had a Chinese roof;
And even the long sweep, high aloof,
In its slant spendor, seemed to tell
Of Pisa’s leaning miracle.

A prompt, decisive man, no breath
Our father wasted: “Boys, a path!”
Well pleased, (for when did farmer boy
Count such a summons less than joy?)
Our buskins on our feet we drew;
With mittened hands, and caps drawn low,
To guard our necks and ears from snow,
We cut the solid whiteness through.
And, where the drift was deepest, made
A tunnel walled and overlaid
With dazzling crystal: we had read
Of rare Aladdin’s wondrous cave,
And to our own his name we gave,
With many a wish the luck were ours
To test his lamp’s supernal powers.
We reached the barn with merry din,
And roused the prisoned brutes within.
The old horse ****** his long head out,
And grave with wonder gazed about;
The **** his ***** greeting said,
And forth his speckled harem led;
The oxen lashed their tails, and hooked,
And mild reproach of hunger looked;
The hornëd patriarch of the sheep,
Like Egypt’s Amun roused from sleep,
Shook his sage head with gesture mute,
And emphasized with stamp of foot.

All day the gusty north-wind bore
The loosening drift its breath before;
Low circling round its southern zone,
The sun through dazzling snow-mist shone.
No church-bell lent its Christian tone
To the savage air, no social smoke
Curled over woods of snow-hung oak.
A solitude made more intense
By dreary-voicëd elements,
The shrieking of the mindless wind,
The moaning tree-boughs swaying blind,
And on the glass the unmeaning beat
Of ghostly finger-tips of sleet.
Beyond the circle of our hearth
No welcome sound of toil or mirth
Unbound the spell, and testified
Of human life and thought outside.
We minded that the sharpest ear
The buried brooklet could not hear,
The music of whose liquid lip
Had been to us companionship,
And, in our lonely life, had grown
To have an almost human tone.

As night drew on, and, from the crest
Of wooded knolls that ridged the west,
The sun, a snow-blown traveller, sank
From sight beneath the smothering bank,
We piled, with care, our nightly stack
Of wood against the chimney-back, —
The oaken log, green, huge, and thick,
And on its top the stout back-stick;
The knotty forestick laid apart,
And filled between with curious art

The ragged brush; then, hovering near,
We watched the first red blaze appear,
Heard the sharp crackle, caught the gleam
On whitewashed wall and sagging beam,
Until the old, rude-furnished room
Burst, flower-like, into rosy bloom;
While radiant with a mimic flame
Outside the sparkling drift became,
And through the bare-boughed lilac-tree
Our own warm hearth seemed blazing free.
The crane and pendent trammels showed,
The Turks’ heads on the andirons glowed;
While childish fancy, prompt to tell
The meaning of the miracle,
Whispered the old rhyme: “Under the tree,
When fire outdoors burns merrily,
There the witches are making tea.”

The moon above the eastern wood
Shone at its full; the hill-range stood
Transfigured in the silver flood,
Its blown snows flashing cold and keen,
Dead white, save where some sharp ravine
Took shadow, or the sombre green
Of hemlocks turned to pitchy black
Against the whiteness at their back.
For such a world and such a night
Most fitting that unwarming light,
Which only seemed where’er it fell
To make the coldness visible.

Shut in from all the world without,
We sat the clean-winged hearth about,
Content to let the north-wind roar
In baffled rage at pane and door,
While the red logs before us beat
The frost-line back with tropic heat;
And ever, when a louder blast
Shook beam and rafter as it passed,
The merrier up its roaring draught
The great throat of the chimney laughed;
The house-dog on his paws outspread
Laid to the fire his drowsy head,
The cat’s dark silhouette on the wall
A couchant tiger’s seemed to fall;
And, for the winter fireside meet,
Between the andirons’ straddling feet,
The mug of cider simmered slow,
The apples sputtered in a row,
And, close at hand, the basket stood
With nuts from brown October’s wood.

What matter how the night behaved?
What matter how the north-wind raved?
Blow high, blow low, not all its snow
Could quench our hearth-fire’s ruddy glow.
O Time and Change! — with hair as gray
As was my sire’s that winter day,
How strange it seems, with so much gone
Of life and love, to still live on!
Ah, brother! only I and thou
Are left of all that circle now, —
The dear home faces whereupon
That fitful firelight paled and shone.
Henceforward, listen as we will,
The voices of that hearth are still;
Look where we may, the wide earth o’er,
Those lighted faces smile no more.

We tread the paths their feet have worn,
We sit beneath their orchard trees,
We hear, like them, the hum of bees
And rustle of the bladed corn;
We turn the pages that they read,
Their written words we linger o’er,
But in the sun they cast no shade,
No voice is heard, no sign is made,
No step is on the conscious floor!
Yet Love will dream, and Faith will trust,
(Since He who knows our need is just,)
That somehow, somewhere, meet we must.
Alas for him who never sees
The stars shine through his cypress-trees!
Who, hopeless, lays his dead away,
Nor looks to see the breaking day
Across the mournful marbles play!
Who hath not learned, in hours of faith,
The truth to flesh and sense unknown,
That Life is ever lord of Death,
And Love can never lose its own!

We sped the time with stories old,
Wrought puzzles out, and riddles told,
Or stammered from our school-book lore
“The Chief of Gambia’s golden shore.”
How often since, when all the land
Was clay in Slavery’s shaping hand,
As if a far-blown trumpet stirred
Dame Mercy Warren’s rousing word:
“Does not the voice of reason cry,
Claim the first right which Nature gave,
From the red scourge of ******* to fly,
Nor deign to live a burdened slave!”
Our father rode again his ride
On Memphremagog’s wooded side;
Sat down again to moose and samp
In trapper’s hut and Indian camp;
Lived o’er the old idyllic ease
Beneath St. François’ hemlock-trees;
Again for him the moonlight shone
On Norman cap and bodiced zone;
Again he heard the violin play
Which led the village dance away.
And mingled in its merry whirl
The grandam and the laughing girl.
Or, nearer home, our steps he led
Where Salisbury’s level marshes spread
Mile-wide as flies the laden bee;
Where merry mowers, hale and strong,
Swept, scythe on scythe, their swaths along
The low green prairies of the sea.
We shared the fishing off Boar’s Head,
And round the rocky Isles of Shoals
The hake-broil on the drift-wood coals;
The chowder on the sand-beach made,
Dipped by the hungry, steaming hot,
With spoons of clam-shell from the ***.
We heard the tales of witchcraft old,
And dream and sign and marvel told
To sleepy listeners as they lay
Stretched idly on the salted hay,
Adrift along the winding shores,
When favoring breezes deigned to blow
The square sail of the gundelow
And idle lay the useless oars.

Our mother, while she turned her wheel
Or run the new-knit stocking-heel,
Told how the Indian hordes came down
At midnight on Concheco town,
And how her own great-uncle bore
His cruel scalp-mark to fourscore.
Recalling, in her fitting phrase,
So rich and picturesque and free
(The common unrhymed poetry
Of simple life and country ways,)
The story of her early days, —
She made us welcome to her home;
Old hearths grew wide to give us room;
We stole with her a frightened look
At the gray wizard’s conjuring-book,
The fame whereof went far and wide
Through all the simple country side;
We heard the hawks at twilight play,
The boat-horn on Piscataqua,
The loon’s weird laughter far away;
We fished her little trout-brook, knew
What flowers in wood and meadow grew,
What sunny hillsides autumn-brown
She climbed to shake the ripe nuts down,
Saw where in sheltered cove and bay,
The ducks’ black squadron anchored lay,
And heard the wild-geese calling loud
Beneath the gray November cloud.
Then, haply, with a look more grave,
And soberer tone, some tale she gave
From painful Sewel’s ancient tome,
Beloved in every Quaker home,
Of faith fire-winged by martyrdom,
Or Chalkley’s Journal, old and quaint, —
Gentlest of skippers, rare sea-saint! —
Who, when the dreary calms prevailed,
And water-**** and bread-cask failed,
And cruel, hungry eyes pursued
His portly presence mad for food,
With dark hints muttered under breath
Of casting lots for life or death,

Offered, if Heaven withheld supplies,
To be himself the sacrifice.
Then, suddenly, as if to save
The good man from his living grave,
A ripple on the water grew,
A school of porpoise flashed in view.
“Take, eat,” he said, “and be content;
These fishes in my stead are sent
By Him who gave the tangled ram
To spare the child of Abraham.”
Our uncle, innocent of books,
Was rich in lore of fields and brooks,
The ancient teachers never dumb
Of Nature’s unhoused lyceum.
In moons and tides and weather wise,
He read the clouds as prophecies,
And foul or fair could well divine,
By many an occult hint and sign,
Holding the cunning-warded keys
To all the woodcraft mysteries;
Himself to Nature’s heart so near
v That all her voices in his ear
Of beast or bird had meanings clear,
Like Apollonius of old,
Who knew the tales the sparrows told,
Or Hermes, who interpreted
What the sage cranes of Nilus said;
A simple, guileless, childlike man,
Content to live where life began;
Strong only on his native grounds,
The little world of sights and sounds
Whose girdle was the parish bounds,
Whereof his fondly partial pride
The common features magnified,
As Surrey hills to mountains grew
In White of Selborne’s loving view, —
He told how teal and loon he shot,
And how the eagle’s eggs he got,
The feats on pond and river done,
The prodigies of rod and gun;
Till, warming with the tales he told,
Forgotten was the outside cold,
The bitter wind unheeded blew,
From ripening corn the pigeons flew,
The partridge drummed i’ the wood, the mink
Went fishing down the river-brink.
In fields with bean or clover gay,
The woodchuck, like a hermit gray,
Peered from the doorway of his cell;
The muskrat plied the mason’s trade,
And tier by tier his mud-walls laid;
And from the shagbark overhead
The grizzled squirrel dropped his shell.

Next, the dear aunt, whose smile of cheer
And voice in dreams I see and hear, —
The sweetest woman ever Fate
Perverse denied a household mate,
Who, lonely, homeless, not the less
Found peace in love’s unselfishness,
And welcome wheresoe’er she went,
A calm and gracious element,
Whose presence seemed the sweet income
And womanly atmosphere of home, —
Called up her girlhood memories,
The huskings and the apple-bees,
The sleigh-rides and the summer sails,
Weaving through all the poor details
And homespun warp of circumstance
A golden woof-thread of romance.
For well she kept her genial mood
And simple faith of maidenhood;
Before her still a cloud-land lay,
The mirage loomed across her way;
The morning dew, that dries so soon
With others, glistened at her noon;
Through years of toil and soil and care,
From glossy tress to thin gray hair,
All unprofaned she held apart
The ****** fancies of the heart.
Be shame to him of woman born
Who hath for such but thought of scorn.
There, too, our elder sister plied
Her evening task the stand beside;
A full, rich nature, free to trust,
Truthful and almost sternly just,
Impulsive, earnest, prompt to act,
And make her generous thought a fact,
Keeping with many a light disguise
The secret of self-sacrifice.

O heart sore-tried! thou hast the best
That Heaven itself could give thee, — rest,
Rest from all bitter thoughts and things!
How many a poor one’s blessing went
With thee beneath the low green tent
Whose curtain never outward swings!

As one who held herself a part
Of all she saw, and let her heart
Against the household ***** lean,
Upon the motley-braided mat
Our youngest and our dearest sat,
Lifting her large, sweet, asking eyes,
Now bathed in the unfading green
And holy peace of Paradise.
Oh, looking from some heavenly hill,
Or from the shade of saintly palms,
Or silver reach of river calms,
Do those large eyes behold me still?
With me one little year ago: —
The chill weight of the winter snow
For months upon her grave has lain;
And now, when summer south-winds blow
And brier and harebell bloom again,
I tread the pleasant paths we trod,
I see the violet-sprinkled sod
Whereon she leaned, too frail and weak
The hillside flowers she loved to seek,
Yet following me where’er I went
With dark eyes full of love’s content.
The birds are glad; the brier-rose fills
The air with sweetness; all the hills
Stretch green to June’s unclouded sky;
But still I wait with ear and eye
For something gone which should be nigh,
A loss in all familiar things,
In flower that blooms, and bird that sings.
And yet, dear heart! remembering thee,
Am I not richer than of old?
Safe in thy immortality,
What change can reach the wealth I hold?
What chance can mar the pearl and gold
Thy love hath left in trust with me?
And while in life’s late afternoon,
Where cool and long the shadows grow,
I walk to meet the night that soon
Shall shape and shadow overflow,
I cannot feel that thou art far,
Since near at need the angels are;
And when the sunset gates unbar,
Shall I not see thee waiting stand,
And, white against the evening star,
The welcome of thy beckoning hand?

Brisk wielder of the birch and rule,
The master of the district school
Held at the fire his favored place,
Its warm glow lit a laughing face
Fresh-hued and fair, where scarce appeared
The uncertain prophecy of beard.
He teased the mitten-blinded cat,
Played cross-pins on my uncle’s hat,
Sang songs, and told us what befalls
In classic Dartmouth’s college halls.
Born the wild Northern hills among,
From whence his yeoman father wrung
By patient toil subsistence scant,
Not competence and yet not want,
He early gained the power to pay
His cheerful, self-reliant way;
Could doff at ease his scholar’s gown
To peddle wares from town to town;
Or through the long vacation’s reach
In lonely lowland districts teach,
Where all the droll experience found
At stranger hearths in boarding round,
The moonlit skater’s keen delight,
The sleigh-drive through the frosty night,
The rustic party, with its rough
Accompaniment of blind-man’s-buff,
And whirling-plate, and forfeits paid,
His winter task a pastime made.
Happy the snow-locked homes wherein
He tuned his merry violin,

Or played the athlete in the barn,
Or held the good dame’s winding-yarn,
Or mirth-provoking versions told
Of classic legends rare and old,
Wherein the scenes of Greece and Rome
Had all the commonplace of home,
And little seemed at best the odds
‘Twixt Yankee pedlers and old gods;
Where Pindus-born Arachthus took
The guise of any grist-mill brook,
And dread Olympus at his will
Became a huckleberry hill.

A careless boy that night he seemed;
But at his desk he had the look
And air of one who wisely schemed,
And hostage from the future took
In trainëd thought and lore of book.
Large-brained, clear-eyed, of such as he
Shall Freedom’s young apostles be,
Who, following in War’s ****** trail,
Shall every lingering wrong assail;
All chains from limb and spirit strike,
Uplift the black and white alike;
Scatter before their swift advance
The darkness and the ignorance,
The pride, the lust, the squalid sloth,
Which nurtured Treason’s monstrous growth,
Made ****** pastime, and the hell
Of prison-torture possible;
The cruel lie of caste refute,
Old forms remould, and substitute
For Slavery’s lash the freeman’s will,
For blind routine, wise-handed skill;
A school-house plant on every hill,
Stretching in radiate nerve-lines thence
The quick wires of intelligence;
Till North and South together brought
Shall own the same electric thought,
In peace a common flag salute,
And, side by side in labor’s free
And unresentful rivalry,
Harvest the fields wherein they fought.

Another guest that winter night
Flashed back from lustrous eyes the light.
Unmarked by time, and yet not young,
The honeyed music of her tongue
And words of meekness scarcely told
A nature passionate and bold,

Strong, self-concentred, spurning guide,
Its milder features dwarfed beside
Her unbent will’s majestic pride.
She sat among us, at the best,
A not unfeared, half-welcome guest,
Rebuking with her cultured phrase
Our homeliness of words and ways.
A certain pard-like, treacherous grace
Swayed the lithe limbs and drooped the lash,
Lent the white teeth their dazzling flash;
And under low brows, black with night,
Rayed out at times a dangerous light;
The sharp heat-lightnings of her face
Presaging ill to him whom Fate
Condemned to share her love or hate.
A woman tropical, intense
In thought and act, in soul and sense,
She blended in a like degree
The ***** and the devotee,
Revealing with each freak or feint
The temper of Petruchio’s Kate,
The raptures of Siena’s saint.
Her tapering hand and rounded wrist
Had facile power to form a fist;
The warm, dark languish of her eyes
Was never safe from wrath’s surprise.
Brows saintly calm and lips devout
Knew every change of scowl and pout;
And the sweet voice had notes more high
And shrill for social battle-cry.

Since then what old cathedral town
Has missed her pilgrim staff and gown,
What convent-gate has held its lock
Against the challenge of her knock!
Through Smyrna’s plague-hushed thoroughfares,
Up sea-set Malta’s rocky stairs,
Gray olive slopes of hills that hem
Thy tombs and shrines, Jerusalem,
Or startling on her desert throne
The crazy Queen of Lebanon
With claims fantastic as her own,
Her tireless feet have held their way;
And still, unrestful, bowed, and gray,
She watches under Eastern skies,
With hope each day renewed and fresh,
The Lord’s quick coming in the flesh,
Whereof she dreams and prophesies!
Where’er her troubled path may be,
The Lord’s sweet pity with her go!
The outward wayward life we see,
The hidden springs we may not know.
Nor is it given us to discern
What threads the fatal sisters spun,
Through what ancestral years has run
The sorrow with the woman born,
What forged her cruel chain of moods,
What set her feet in solitudes,
And held the love within her mute,
What mingled madness in the blood,
A life-long discord and annoy,
Water of tears with oil of joy,
And hid within the folded bud
Perversities of flower and fruit.
It is not ours to separate
The tangled skein of will and fate,
To show what metes and bounds should stand
Upon the soul’s debatable land,
And between choice and Providence
Divide the circle of events;
But He who knows our frame is just,
Merciful and compassionate,
And full of sweet assurances
And hope for all the language is,
That He remembereth we are dust!

At last the great logs, crumbling low,
Sent out a dull and duller glow,
The bull’s-eye watch that hung in view,
Ticking its weary circuit through,
Pointed with mutely warning sign
Its black hand to the hour of nine.
That sign the pleasant circle broke:
My uncle ceased his pipe to smoke,
Knocked from its bowl the refuse gray,
And laid it tenderly away;
Then roused himself to safely cover
The dull red brands with ashes over.
And while, with care, our mother laid
The work aside, her steps she stayed
One moment, seeking to express
Her grateful sense of happiness
For food and shelter, warmth and health,
And love’s contentment more than wealth,
With simple wishes (not the weak,
Vain prayers which no fulfilment seek,
But such as warm the generous heart,
O’er-prompt to do with Heaven its part)
That none might lack, that bitter night,
For bread and clothing, warmth and light.

Within our beds awhile we heard
The wind that round the gables roared,
With now and then a ruder shock,
Which made our very bedsteads rock.
We heard the loosened clapboards tost,
The board-nails snapping in the frost;
And on us, through the unplastered wall,
Felt the light sifted snow-flakes fall.
But sleep stole on, as sleep will do
When hearts are light and life is new;
Faint and more faint the murmurs grew,
Till in the summer-land of dreams
They softened to the sound of streams,
Low stir of leaves, and dip of oars,
And lapsing waves on quiet shores.
Of merry voices high and clear;
And saw the teamsters drawing near
To break the drifted highways out.
Down the long hillside treading slow
We saw the half-buried oxen go,
Shaking the snow from heads uptost,
Their straining nostrils white with frost.
Before our door the straggling train
Drew up, an added team to gain.
The elders threshed their hands a-cold,
Passed, with the cider-mug, their jokes
From lip to lip; the younger folks
Down the loose snow-banks, wrestling, rolled,
Then toiled again the cavalcade
O’er windy hill, through clogged ravine,
And woodland paths that wound between
Low drooping pine-boughs winter-weighed.
From every barn a team afoot,
At every house a new recruit,
Where, drawn by Nature’s subtlest law,
Haply the watchful young men saw
Sweet doorway pictures of the curls
And curious eyes of merry girls,
Lifting their hands in mock defence
Against the snow-ball’s compliments,
And reading in each missive tost
The charm with Eden never lost.
We heard once more the sleigh-bells’ sound;
And, following where the teamsters led,
The wise old Doctor went his round,
Just pausing at our door to say,
In the brief autocratic way
Of one who, prompt at Duty’s call,
Was free to urge her claim on all,
That some poor neighbor sick abed
At night our mother’s aid would need.
For, one in generous thought and deed,
What mattered in the sufferer’s sight
The Quaker matron’s inward light,
The Doctor’s mail of Calvin’s creed?
All hearts confess the saints elect
Who, twain in faith, in love agree,
And melt not in an acid sect
The Christian pearl of charity!

So days went on: a week had passed
Since the great world was heard from last.
The Almanac we studied o’er,
Read and reread our little store
Of books and pamphlets, scarce a score;
One harmless novel, mostly hid
From younger eyes, a book forbid,
And poetry, (or good or bad,
A single book was all we had,)
Where Ellwood’s meek, drab-skirted Muse,
A stranger to the heathen Nine,
Sang, with a somewhat nasal whine,
The wars of David and the Jews.
At last the floundering carrier bore
The village paper to our door.
Lo! broadening outward as we read,
To warmer zones the horizon spread
In panoramic length unrolled
We saw the marvels that it told.
Before us passed the painted Creeks,
A   nd daft McGregor on his raids
In Costa Rica’s everglades.
And up Taygetos winding slow
Rode Ypsilanti’s Mainote Greeks,
A Turk’s head at each saddle-bow!
Welcome to us its week-old news,
Its corner for the rustic Muse,
Its monthly gauge of snow and rain,
Its record, mingling in a breath
The wedding bell and dirge of death:
Jest, anecdote, and love-lorn tale,
The latest culprit sent to jail;
Its hue and cry of stolen and lost,
Its vendue sales and goods at cost,
And traffic calling loud for gain.
We felt the stir of hall and street,
The pulse of life that round us beat;
The chill embargo of the snow
Was melted in the genial glow;
Wide swung again our ice-locked door,
And all the world was ours once more!

Clasp, Angel of the backword look
And folded wings of ashen gray
And voice of echoes far away,
The brazen covers of thy book;
The weird palimpsest old and vast,
Wherein thou hid’st the spectral past;
Where, closely mingling, pale and glow
The characters of joy and woe;
The monographs of outlived years,
Or smile-illumed or dim with tears,
Green hills of life that ***** to death,
And haunts of home, whose vistaed trees
Shade off to mournful cypresses
With the white amaranths underneath.
Even while I look, I can but heed
The restless sands’ incessant fall,
Importunate hours that hours succeed,
Each clamorous with its own sharp need,
And duty keeping pace with all.
Shut down and clasp with heavy lids;
I hear again the voice that bids
The dreamer leave his dream midway
For larger hopes and graver fears:
Life greatens in these later years,
The century’s aloe flowers to-day!

Yet, haply, in some lull of life,
Some Truce of God which breaks its strife,
The worldling’s eyes shall gather dew,
Dreaming in throngful city ways
Of winter joys his boyhood knew;
And dear and early friends — the few
Who yet remain — shall pause to view
These Flemish pictures of old days;
Sit with me by the homestead hearth,
And stretch the hands of memory forth
To warm them at the wood-fire’s blaze!
And thanks untraced to lips unknown
Shall greet me like the odors blown
From unseen meadows newly mown,
Wood-fringed, the wayside gaze beyond;
The traveller owns the grateful sense
Of sweetness near, he knows not whence,
And, pausing, takes with forehead bare
The benediction of the air.

Written in  1865

PASSION PLAY

Ayad Gharbawi




Location: Desert Shore, Bitterly Cold Night, next to strong waves from the ocean.
Characters: Man ((M) and his Lover, a Woman (W).

----------------------------------------


W: “Search as I forever do, in manifold ways unknown, I seek but to love thee, and the meagre goodness from Life, with steely ardour - my armour faithful.”
M: “Alone I may be, and still, yes I love thee; these days heavy are and beset I am by burdensome trivialities, but I remain trusting, though my corner so narrow remain.”
W: “My Love! Your speech I hear aloud and thine lips I live within and yet, my Love, all Solitude I am. Man! I am unaided! In this journey of sinful thorns, my love, in this unforgiving journey, this blurred odyssey, I stand alone”.
M: “This trial you speak of, but I do know of it well; so, listen then: within the strength of trusted togetherness we can plough on, though everlasting harm shall do its spiteful tricks, warm to our united truth shall we remain.”
W: (Surprised) “O! My love! This thought I cannot hear! My life, my destiny, is but mine. And all have their own solitary roads of jagged rocks to embrace, like it we or not. We heartbreaking earthly sad beasts, either fiercely clutch at integrity, or we do let it go to perish away.”
M: (Confused) “My Love! I do hear, I do hear. But when Times decide on burdening us, what then can we achieve? To face Reality within the frail arms of solitude is to ignore, to refuse the severe threats of repulsive grins.”
(Silence)
M: (Passionately) “O! My sweet! Only in us, can we envelope, through joined, clasped warmth can we be as one united! The screams that so truly are meant to slice us off, only we, our Unity, can destroy. For mine eyes can only find sleep in your ears, and it is so - for otherwise nothing and no one can be.”
W: (Angry) “My Passion too is bubbling for thine bewildered ears. Am I not your soul? Do we not suffer as one? Do we not reflect as one? Am I not your lover true? Is not our warmth not weighty to our fickle bones?”
(Silence)
W: (Passionate) “But, Lover, this much ought I to formally declare unto thee: For our eyes, and all eyes, envision unequally at one another. Till eternity, in its casual, indifferent flicker, snatches at us all wretched mortals, the gazes from lords to paupers remain veritably mismatched. O my passion! My woeful heart! These words I thunder forth defines love unfeigned, and what mine eyes do pour out unto thine ears is authenticity true.
(Silence)
W: (Passionately) “What joined mem’ries you choose to caress may possess thee, but your exactness for what love is to you, doth not dwell in mine mind. What tears, what weepings you do, fall stormily upon thine own soul’s wildernesses. You choose to be chained by changing visions and indefinite sentiments of light weight – though so poignant at the moment they veritably are?”
M: (Inquiring) “My love! I cherish thee; where hast thou been in thine mind, for now ye talk of that truth you relate to in your heart. Your pronouncements, what depths I do feel! Can it perchance be that my passion has strayed our winds far from me?”
W: “No, my love! Why is anger, I feel, lush on thine tongue?”
M: (Surprised and Frightened) “Anger! I am too distant from that affliction! But yes, I feel my words make only for unstable murmurs in my breath.”
W: (Quietly) “Then, do tell me, lover, who do your murmurs betray - myself or yourself then?”
M: (Quietly) “Perhaps so, perhaps so. But my anxiety wilfully demands of me to eradicate your vision.”
W: (Firmly) “You answer naught from my undemanding question. Or, are mine meanings too violent for you? What aches thee?”
M: (Passionately) “My sweet! In so many moments, I created mysterious planets for thee! Bizarre worlds of contrasts and opposites and musical words of antiquity and sensual ravines. My love! I, my soul, my life, my inner deepest breath, tempted as I am by Fates’ inscrutable cruelties to ashamedly yield, I have yet always expressed to mine eyes’ heart, though they be in bleak darkness, to faithfully fight without pause all shades of vice and still yet - with loving integrity; I have stood with arms of righteousness and love for thee up and never down! Yes, sincere good and venal ill remain joined in life for all to feel, but you knew it was not for me to disentangle them. And so, I pronounce unto thee, still, and yet ever and ever more, my love for thee, though still beholding a thousand mountains before me, I remain sturdy for thee; I remain undisturbed by burly laws, and by exotic dictums, I stand fierce and unhurt, save in your absence.”
W: (With Sadness) “My beloved, your vivid voice stabs the falsehoods for thee, and I say unto thee, unto thee your excessive and unreasonable chains, and for myself my unreasonable and extreme chains remain.”
M: (Shocked) “But I burden thee with no steely chains, nor verbal fetters! For naught I produce for thee save grace, passion and freedom to love for us both to be in Unity Sacred! Dost thou embrace my visions as ‘shackles’, then ‘tis better we agree to class that which we are as but madness! Hear me, for my tears now must truly change their colours!”
W: (Determined) “Your feverish hands clutch only upon mine erratic wings!”
M: (Anger) “Never! Never! For I clutch only to destroy all malevolence; as for thee, Lady of the purest, untouched, guarded, secluded Ponds, I seek to unshackle for you the scattered, scared shadows that yearn for thine sovereignty. And what is this ‘sovereignty’ but our Sacred Union? What curse deemest you I impose? Do you equal my purest passions with atrocities? Murmur unto mine ears, your clearest love for me.”
W: “Ah! You enquire of me my ‘sincerity’ for thee? What demands!”
(Silence)
M: “I see naught but heaving forests of love betwixt us, and yet, you discover my words being ‘demanding’?”
W: (Drily) “Perchance, your visions are indistinct and ever more blurred, through these years cannot be ignored.”
M: (Begging) “My love! All mine life, though it be lengthy, I fought most venal tyranny, and for this moment, you question my righteousness?”
W: (Indignantly) “I have been plunged into seas hostile and I have plunged in a thousand miles of inert minds troubled beyond conceivable comprehension and I have yet to have my Right for my own greedy, ravenous flesh to be vigorously and forcefully embraced by sensuality and serenity. Yes, I do love thee, and yet in our union, as in all unions, I have been adorned with naught, save snickering, gossiping scenes of festive *****, games, chatter and farewells, themselves festooned within silly and sincerely stupid smiles and frowns, and shallow tears and never ending ludicrous chatter unworthy of monkeys conversing. I have met programmed rows of pats, respect and all other so-called decent intents and gestures, but, where, lover that you are of mine, where does my personal heart, throb and manically vibrate, save in your heavenly imaginations?”
(Silence)
W: (Quietly but Determinedly) “My love! I truly thee love and with passions, I tell you, of proportions of precise exactitudes; in your eyes I have witnessed symphonies of exquisiteness; and, I of thee ask: where dwelleth your own love for myself in thine body?”
(Silence)
W: (Passionate) “Do you recognise the changing structures that form this, that I name ‘My Love’? In my solitude eternal, I do evermore and always do pause, and be pensive, and be thinking of questions, such as ‘where’, ‘why’, ‘when’ ‘how’, and ‘which’ should be my path; I am forever and ever more searching, seeking the heavens of every corner, and the irritable tempests, within my changing self as they themselves do try to seek me, and we forever, through inconceivable murkiness, do try to assemble the everlasting entirety of these disorganized puzzles into some measure of comprehensible cohesion that ‘I’ am. That is how the ‘I’ you love is forever changing and thereby formulating itself, and within all these meandering passions, and endless errors, where am I to feel thee? Where? And where do you seek me? In which land? In which forest? You trivialise my beingness as you focus upon my lands as being that which so effortless to find, and yet, you are much too distant from an understanding of my conflicting, emerging civilisations.”
(Silence)
W: (Passionate) If the utterance ‘Never’ is pathetic for thee, then allow me to introduce you to my latest heart: for it screams out that single, protracted utterance! Never! My love, these winds of raging wraths, both within and outside by flesh, must and can only be annihilated by mine own sincerities – were I not to play against my own self. My uncontrolled desires and, yes, thirsty manic passions can only be tempered and thoroughly satiated to the utter brim, by mine own loving, sources of pleasure, my own uncontrollable ecstasies. As for the rest of ****** pleasures, my own erroneous words, speeches and utterances can only be severed and sliced by my tranquillity.”
M: (Resigned) “I hear thine words. Do not abandon me. Do not destroy our civilisation of justice.”
W: “What we share, the bonds, are enjoyment. Listen though to mine lips: enjoyment is what - when it is to be compared with convulsive ecstatic quivers of satisfaction?”
M: (Puzzled) “And what of all our journeys to attain that unity? For all that, is it to be of mere insignificance? And if that be your truth, for what then did we toil and labour for unity of minds and bodies?”
W: (Laughing) “Did you understand from Life itself, that here it was, grandly to proclaim its furtive faces unto thine own awaiting face?! “
M: (Baffled) “It was so far too plain and vastly clear unto me these sceneries we faced before our loving bodies.”
W: “Yes, and I too, did see them with thee. Our four eyes, did see unity for that flicker of time. How true you speak! But, time clocked on, I saw you as you stood there, moving nowhere, unawares that it was your duty to squash onwards whatever vile breaths faced us.”
M: (Desperate) “And did I not? Did I abandon thee in these crushing paths?”
W: (Accusing) “No, you did not. Never, once did you abandon me. I ask of thee; for what sense do we feel a need for a continuation of these gruelling marches? For unity? For love? Or, is love unity? Was that and is this our reason for us to carry on with these shackles?”
M: “For assuredly, yes, and more yes, I tell thee! Toil and gruelling dawns, and unbearable evenings and the whitest of nights are all for the sacred attainment of that heavenly summit of joy I name as blessed ‘Love’.”
W: (Assured) “And, Sire, what if my nerves, blood and ****** hunger tell thee in truth that we, all of us, need no longer, and need never in truth, to undertake these paths, for we find naught that nourishes us at the blessed summit of your definition of what ‘Love’ is?”
M: (Confused & Sad) “So, I falter here and now upon understanding your speech; do I reason from thee that our loving days in unity are frivolously bygone now?”
W: (Calmly & Gracefully) “Do the wandering birds, and do the blind bats, and do the reckless storms, and do the blindly, raging waves and do the supremely arrogant oceans eternally march on in but one direction only with the savage passage of time within their particular lives? You did pronounce that you built planets for our unity; well then, did you not view how planets endlessly revolve along the same path?”
(Pause)
W: (Calmly & with Dignity) “For, Sire, I am not as a Planet - could you not feel that throughout our journeys? You endlessly query and question ‘who’ it is that ‘I’ am? Well, I speak this much on myself; I am as the birds, and the bats, and the storms and the waves and the oceans.”  
M: (Angry) “Woman! I can only then tell of thee that you are naught but feuding clutter and violent disarray!”
W: (Unconcerned) “Those are your words. Not mine. Speak for what you wish, Sire.”
M: (Angry) “And I stand here, before thee, in anger – nay, more, more! In fury!”
W: (Laughing) “For what? For the deeds that created but sticky, and grimy grains of sand for the undoubted pleasure our eyes?”
M: “And so you label our truths, our love so much! Fair indeed, you speak, Woman of Justice.”
W: (Arrogantly) “Man! Express your delights for your own delights. And, alas, there the circle and reality ends – and it ends only for you. That is one morsel of truth for you to ponder. What we ‘created’ and what we ‘loved’ was never and never, ever be the same for you as it is for me. Are you a sincere believer that your personal vision is the same sight all other seeing creatures envision?”
M: (Angry) “Woman, you enrage me! Your arrogance is drenching thine rags.”
W: (Sarcastic) “Tis the Man with no reason who allows his breath and words to be a veritable cesspool of fuming stenches!”
M: “But I, that I am, no longer can define your contours?”
W: (Pointedly) “Precisely, Man, precisely. Perhaps, now you have come closer to the vulnerable shores of reality!”
M: (Confused) “Do you express that you are ever varying and so for that reason there is not a one unified you?”
W: (Calmly) “For we are all ‘varying’, to borrow your word – if you do so allow me, Sire. There was never ‘unity’ of soul, nor mind, nor self, nor of any one personality. This, I desire, that you may understand.”
M: (Aghast) “Then if that be your truth and then, are we naught but multitudes of ever changing confusions, Lady of the Desert?”
W: (Calmly) “Yes and no! For those who are muscular and full of fertile vigour in their flesh, and in their intellects, and those that are severely and strictly scholastic, then they do need and they can succeed in time, in their never ending struggle to bring together the mutually antagonistic factions of that which constitutes our beingness. And, as for the dense brained soulless beings, then, it is equally veritably true that, a descent into madness can be rapidly produced, since from their erratic constituents, they cannot attract together these antagonistic and mutually-hating emotions in some vision of cohesion, and thus mayhem can be fashioned.”
(Silence)
M: (Calmly) “So, pray do tell me, where does Love and Justice and Truth and Morality stand in your universe?”
W: (Serenely) “That has been mine desire to hear the words being produced from your lips, Man!”
(Pause)
W: “So, now perhaps, your sight may be getting clearer, for your question is certainly apt. Foremost, we pathetic mortals, we the be are forever slimy specks of sand that  crumbles, must necessarily seek to survive and flourish within whatever forest, desert, meadow we find ourselves cast upon.”
M: (Startled) “At what cost, Woman? At the expense of Morality?”
W: (Rapidly) “Yes and no.”
M: (Shocked) “Horrendous! How can you spout out such filth?”
W: (Quietly) “Restrain your stupidities, and give more room to your intelligence, Sire.”
(Silence)
W: (Gracefully) “In times of trouble, what can Man do when he be forced to embrace evil, even though he finds the act of the embrace loathsome, but he does what he does for the truth of his vital existence to continue. Only when he need never embrace vile, and then allows himself to commit the act, then he is for certainty to incur the everlasting wrath of God. Evil is thus never one truth to be utterly rejected, perchance you may now see. ”
M: (Calm but Tired) “I follow your words and their ideas therein.”
W: (Gracefully) “When you talk to me on Man and everlasting, conflicting changes within that self-same creature, I tell you with all the earnestness that I possess, of what God has scattered and endowed upon me; for this beast, we all call in unity Man, this creature has far too many a numberless number of mutually self-contradicting, distrusting, loving, hating, inspiring and a never ending number of feelings and emotions that are in constant flow and change – as in any rapid river descending unto its eventual destination, which in its case, is the sea, while in our case, it is Death itself for sure.”
M: (Despair) “And how can this beast ‘love’ anyone within this welter of confusion?”
W: (Rapidly) “He cannot!”
M: (Rapidly, Begging) “But Man and Woman do love with bristling passions! Do you deny that, Woman?!”
W: (Calmly, eyes downwards looking) “Yes, and no. Since the beast has needs, based on his vastly intricate constituents, to ‘love’ his fellow beast, he imagines and believes

PASSION PLAY

Ayad Gharbawi




Location: Desert Shore, Bitterly Cold Night, next to strong waves from the ocean.
Characters: Man ((M) and his Lover, a Woman (W).

----------------------------------------



W: “Search as I forever do, in manifold ways unknown, I seek but to love thee, and the meagre goodness from Life, with steely ardour - my armour faithful.”
M: “Alone I may be, and still, yes I love thee; these days heavy are and beset I am by burdensome trivialities, but I remain trusting, though my corner so narrow remain.”
W: “My Love! Your speech I hear aloud and thine lips I live within and yet, my Love, all Solitude I am. Man! I am unaided! In this journey of sinful thorns, my love, in this unforgiving journey, this blurred odyssey, I stand alone”.
M: “This trial you speak of, but I do know of it well; so, listen then: within the strength of trusted togetherness we can plough on, though everlasting harm shall do its spiteful tricks, warm to our united truth shall we remain.”
W: (Surprised) “O! My love! This thought I cannot hear! My life, my destiny, is but mine. And all have their own solitary roads of jagged rocks to embrace, like it we or not. We heartbreaking earthly sad beasts, either fiercely clutch at integrity, or we do let it go to perish away.”
M: (Confused) “My Love! I do hear, I do hear. But when Times decide on burdening us, what then can we achieve? To face Reality within the frail arms of solitude is to ignore, to refuse the severe threats of repulsive grins.”
(Silence)
M: (Passionately) “O! My sweet! Only in us, can we envelope, through joined, clasped warmth can we be as one united! The screams that so truly are meant to slice us off, only we, our Unity, can destroy. For mine eyes can only find sleep in your ears, and it is so - for otherwise nothing and no one can be.”
W: (Angry) “My Passion too is bubbling for thine bewildered ears. Am I not your soul? Do we not suffer as one? Do we not reflect as one? Am I not your lover true? Is not our warmth not weighty to our fickle bones?”
(Silence)
W: (Passionate) “But, Lover, this much ought I to formally declare unto thee: For our eyes, and all eyes, envision unequally at one another. Till eternity, in its casual, indifferent flicker, snatches at us all wretched mortals, the gazes from lords to paupers remain veritably mismatched. O my passion! My woeful heart! These words I thunder forth defines love unfeigned, and what mine eyes do pour out unto thine ears is authenticity true.
(Silence)
W: (Passionately) “What joined mem’ries you choose to caress may possess thee, but your exactness for what love is to you, doth not dwell in mine mind. What tears, what weepings you do, fall stormily upon thine own soul’s wildernesses. You choose to be chained by changing visions and indefinite sentiments of light weight – though so poignant at the moment they veritably are?”
M: (Inquiring) “My love! I cherish thee; where hast thou been in thine mind, for now ye talk of that truth you relate to in your heart. Your pronouncements, what depths I do feel! Can it perchance be that my passion has strayed our winds far from me?”
W: “No, my love! Why is anger, I feel, lush on thine tongue?”
M: (Surprised and Frightened) “Anger! I am too distant from that affliction! But yes, I feel my words make only for unstable murmurs in my breath.”
W: (Quietly) “Then, do tell me, lover, who do your murmurs betray - myself or yourself then?”
M: (Quietly) “Perhaps so, perhaps so. But my anxiety wilfully demands of me to eradicate your vision.”
W: (Firmly) “You answer naught from my undemanding question. Or, are mine meanings too violent for you? What aches thee?”
M: (Passionately) “My sweet! In so many moments, I created mysterious planets for thee! Bizarre worlds of contrasts and opposites and musical words of antiquity and sensual ravines. My love! I, my soul, my life, my inner deepest breath, tempted as I am by Fates’ inscrutable cruelties to ashamedly yield, I have yet always expressed to mine eyes’ heart, though they be in bleak darkness, to faithfully fight without pause all shades of vice and still yet - with loving integrity; I have stood with arms of righteousness and love for thee up and never down! Yes, sincere good and venal ill remain joined in life for all to feel, but you knew it was not for me to disentangle them. And so, I pronounce unto thee, still, and yet ever and ever more, my love for thee, though still beholding a thousand mountains before me, I remain sturdy for thee; I remain undisturbed by burly laws, and by exotic dictums, I stand fierce and unhurt, save in your absence.”
W: (With Sadness) “My beloved, your vivid voice stabs the falsehoods for thee, and I say unto thee, unto thee your excessive and unreasonable chains, and for myself my unreasonable and extreme chains remain.”
M: (Shocked) “But I burden thee with no steely chains, nor verbal fetters! For naught I produce for thee save grace, passion and freedom to love for us both to be in Unity Sacred! Dost thou embrace my visions as ‘shackles’, then ‘tis better we agree to class that which we are as but madness! Hear me, for my tears now must truly change their colours!”
W: (Determined) “Your feverish hands clutch only upon mine erratic wings!”
M: (Anger) “Never! Never! For I clutch only to destroy all malevolence; as for thee, Lady of the purest, untouched, guarded, secluded Ponds, I seek to unshackle for you the scattered, scared shadows that yearn for thine sovereignty. And what is this ‘sovereignty’ but our Sacred Union? What curse deemest you I impose? Do you equal my purest passions with atrocities? Murmur unto mine ears, your clearest love for me.”
W: “Ah! You enquire of me my ‘sincerity’ for thee? What demands!”
(Silence)
M: “I see naught but heaving forests of love betwixt us, and yet, you discover my words being ‘demanding’?”
W: (Drily) “Perchance, your visions are indistinct and ever more blurred, through these years cannot be ignored.”
M: (Begging) “My love! All mine life, though it be lengthy, I fought most venal tyranny, and for this moment, you question my righteousness?”
W: (Indignantly) “I have been plunged into seas hostile and I have plunged in a thousand miles of inert minds troubled beyond conceivable comprehension and I have yet to have my Right for my own greedy, ravenous flesh to be vigorously and forcefully embraced by sensuality and serenity. Yes, I do love thee, and yet in our union, as in all unions, I have been adorned with naught, save snickering, gossiping scenes of festive *****, games, chatter and farewells, themselves festooned within silly and sincerely stupid smiles and frowns, and shallow tears and never ending ludicrous chatter unworthy of monkeys conversing. I have met programmed rows of pats, respect and all other so-called decent intents and gestures, but, where, lover that you are of mine, where does my personal heart, throb and manically vibrate, save in your heavenly imaginations?”
(Silence)
W: (Quietly but Determinedly) “My love! I truly thee love and with passions, I tell you, of proportions of precise exactitudes; in your eyes I have witnessed symphonies of exquisiteness; and, I of thee ask: where dwelleth your own love for myself in thine body?”
(Silence)
W: (Passionate) “Do you recognise the changing structures that form this, that I name ‘My Love’? In my solitude eternal, I do evermore and always do pause, and be pensive, and be thinking of questions, such as ‘where’, ‘why’, ‘when’ ‘how’, and ‘which’ should be my path; I am forever and ever more searching, seeking the heavens of every corner, and the irritable tempests, within my changing self as they themselves do try to seek me, and we forever, through inconceivable murkiness, do try to assemble the everlasting entirety of these disorganized puzzles into some measure of comprehensible cohesion that ‘I’ am. That is how the ‘I’ you love is forever changing and thereby formulating itself, and within all these meandering passions, and endless errors, where am I to feel thee? Where? And where do you seek me? In which land? In which forest? You trivialise my beingness as you focus upon my lands as being that which so effortless to find, and yet, you are much too distant from an understanding of my conflicting, emerging civilisations.”
(Silence)
W: (Passionate) If the utterance ‘Never’ is pathetic for thee, then allow me to introduce you to my latest heart: for it screams out that single, protracted utterance! Never! My love, these winds of raging wraths, both within and outside by flesh, must and can only be annihilated by mine own sincerities – were I not to play against my own self. My uncontrolled desires and, yes, thirsty manic passions can only be tempered and thoroughly satiated to the utter brim, by mine own loving, sources of pleasure, my own uncontrollable ecstasies. As for the rest of ****** pleasures, my own erroneous words, speeches and utterances can only be severed and sliced by my tranquillity.”
M: (Resigned) “I hear thine words. Do not abandon me. Do not destroy our civilisation of justice.”
W: “What we share, the bonds, are enjoyment. Listen though to mine lips: enjoyment is what - when it is to be compared with convulsive ecstatic quivers of satisfaction?”
M: (Puzzled) “And what of all our journeys to attain that unity? For all that, is it to be of mere insignificance? And if that be your truth, for what then did we toil and labour for unity of minds and bodies?”
W: (Laughing) “Did you understand from Life itself, that here it was, grandly to proclaim its furtive faces unto thine own awaiting face?! “
M: (Baffled) “It was so far too plain and vastly clear unto me these sceneries we faced before our loving bodies.”
W: “Yes, and I too, did see them with thee. Our four eyes, did see unity for that flicker of time. How true you speak! But, time clocked on, I saw you as you stood there, moving nowhere, unawares that it was your duty to squash onwards whatever vile breaths faced us.”
M: (Desperate) “And did I not? Did I abandon thee in these crushing paths?”
W: (Accusing) “No, you did not. Never, once did you abandon me. I ask of thee; for what sense do we feel a need for a continuation of these gruelling marches? For unity? For love? Or, is love unity? Was that and is this our reason for us to carry on with these shackles?”
M: “For assuredly, yes, and more yes, I tell thee! Toil and gruelling dawns, and unbearable evenings and the whitest of nights are all for the sacred attainment of that heavenly summit of joy I name as blessed ‘Love’.”
W: (Assured) “And, Sire, what if my nerves, blood and ****** hunger tell thee in truth that we, all of us, need no longer, and need never in truth, to undertake these paths, for we find naught that nourishes us at the blessed summit of your definition of what ‘Love’ is?”
M: (Confused & Sad) “So, I falter here and now upon understanding your speech; do I reason from thee that our loving days in unity are frivolously bygone now?”
W: (Calmly & Gracefully) “Do the wandering birds, and do the blind bats, and do the reckless storms, and do the blindly, raging waves and do the supremely arrogant oceans eternally march on in but one direction only with the savage passage of time within their particular lives? You did pronounce that you built planets for our unity; well then, did you not view how planets endlessly revolve along the same path?”
(Pause)
W: (Calmly & with Dignity) “For, Sire, I am not as a Planet - could you not feel that throughout our journeys? You endlessly query and question ‘who’ it is that ‘I’ am? Well, I speak this much on myself; I am as the birds, and the bats, and the storms and the waves and the oceans.”  
M: (Angry) “Woman! I can only then tell of thee that you are naught but feuding clutter and violent disarray!”
W: (Unconcerned) “Those are your words. Not mine. Speak for what you wish, Sire.”
M: (Angry) “And I stand here, before thee, in anger – nay, more, more! In fury!”
W: (Laughing) “For what? For the deeds that created but sticky, and grimy grains of sand for the undoubted pleasure our eyes?”
M: “And so you label our truths, our love so much! Fair indeed, you speak, Woman of Justice.”
W: (Arrogantly) “Man! Express your delights for your own delights. And, alas, there the circle and reality ends – and it ends only for you. That is one morsel of truth for you to ponder. What we ‘created’ and what we ‘loved’ was never and never, ever be the same for you as it is for me. Are you a sincere believer that your personal vision is the same sight all other seeing creatures envision?”
M: (Angry) “Woman, you enrage me! Your arrogance is drenching thine rags.”
W: (Sarcastic) “Tis the Man with no reason who allows his breath and words to be a veritable cesspool of fuming stenches!”
M: “But I, that I am, no longer can define your contours?”
W: (Pointedly) “Precisely, Man, precisely. Perhaps, now you have come closer to the vulnerable shores of reality!”
M: (Confused) “Do you express that you are ever varying and so for that reason there is not a one unified you?”
W: (Calmly) “For we are all ‘varying’, to borrow your word – if you do so allow me, Sire. There was never ‘unity’ of soul, nor mind, nor self, nor of any one personality. This, I desire, that you may understand.”
M: (Aghast) “Then if that be your truth and then, are we naught but multitudes of ever changing confusions, Lady of the Desert?”
W: (Calmly) “Yes and no! For those who are muscular and full of fertile vigour in their flesh, and in their intellects, and those that are severely and strictly scholastic, then they do need and they can succeed in time, in their never ending struggle to bring together the mutually antagonistic factions of that which constitutes our beingness. And, as for the dense brained soulless beings, then, it is equally veritably true that, a descent into madness can be rapidly produced, since from their erratic constituents, they cannot attract together these antagonistic and mutually-hating emotions in some vision of cohesion, and thus mayhem can be fashioned.”
(Silence)
M: (Calmly) “So, pray do tell me, where does Love and Justice and Truth and Morality stand in your universe?”
W: (Serenely) “That has been mine desire to hear the words being produced from your lips, Man!”
(Pause)
W: “So, now perhaps, your sight may be getting clearer, for your question is certainly apt. Foremost, we pathetic mortals, we the be are forever slimy specks of sand that  crumbles, must necessarily seek to survive and flourish within whatever forest, desert, meadow we find ourselves cast upon.”
M: (Startled) “At what cost, Woman? At the expense of Morality?”
W: (Rapidly) “Yes and no.”
M: (Shocked) “Horrendous! How can you spout out such filth?”
W: (Quietly) “Restrain your stupidities, and give more room to your intelligence, Sire.”
(Silence)
W: (Gracefully) “In times of trouble, what can Man do when he be forced to embrace evil, even though he finds the act of the embrace loathsome, but he does what he does for the truth of his vital existence to continue. Only when he need never embrace vile, and then allows himself to commit the act, then he is for certainty to incur the everlasting wrath of God. Evil is thus never one truth to be utterly rejected, perchance you may now see. ”
M: (Calm but Tired) “I follow your words and their ideas therein.”
W: (Gracefully) “When you talk to me on Man and everlasting, conflicting changes within that self-same creature, I tell you with all the earnestness that I possess, of what God has scattered and endowed upon me; for this beast, we all call in unity Man, this creature has far too many a numberless number of mutually self-contradicting, distrusting, loving, hating, inspiring and a never ending number of feelings and emotions that are in constant flow and change – as in any rapid river descending unto its eventual destination, which in its case, is the sea, while in our case, it is Death itself for sure.”
M: (Despair) “And how can this beast ‘love’ anyone within this welter of confusion?”
W: (Rapidly) “He cannot!”
M: (Rapidly, Begging) “But Man and Woman do love with bristling passions! Do you deny that, Woman?!”
W: (Calmly, eyes downwards looking) “Yes, and no. Since the beast has needs, based on his vastly intricate constituents, to ‘love’ his fellow beast, he imagines and believes

There once was a hero who was mute,
A musical hero, to boot!
His fingers did not strum
A guitar or tap a drum;
He saved the kingdom with a flute!

-------------------------------------------------

A soldier clouded by strife,
To have love lost like a life.
Finds beauty in flowers,
Destroys evil powers,
While wielding an oversized knife!

-------------------------------------------------

An army of soldiers well-trained,
Though, in action they seem dead-brained;
Hit with his own bomb,
That one knows your mom,
It’s a battlefield of the deranged.

-SLuR

.how does philosophy and psychology differ? well. psychology was spawned from having to focus on the "need" of a "learning" for writing: speak comes easy, writing, not so much. psychology is so easily spoken, philosophy isn't, philosophy is like a child talking to an adult when psychology / sophistry comes into play /
    refrain... how do i rephrase this statement?
      ah! philosophy is like a child talking to a child...
psychology is like an adult talking to a child...
psychology is a supertition of knowledge...
philosophy? a fear of knowledge.
  knowledge does not make happy people,
or gullible talkative types, either.

... the birth of psychology contra philosophy... the when sophia over-powered the philosophers with too many observation cues... maxims and aphorisms... la rochefoucauld & nietzsche... it began with a dialogue, it maintained itself in a solipsistic monologue... it ended up as advertisement slogans: maxims and aphorisms.... cute observations: seen, "seen" but never tested... i've seen the ugly side of psychology... it's psychiatry... the big pharma carousel and slurred sedative spreschen... try getting a slurred sedative spreschen out of me... i'll sock you... i'm this: )( close to the itch of throwing a punch, i almost forgot what implies: peace... me dancing on old college's (edinburgh) roof while listening to: the shins, new slang... that was peace...
  that was me: rooftop, night, moon,
and the lingo of limbs floating freely off my torso
and at the same attached to it...

       i once cared about a "double" chin...
i grew a beard,
stopped worrying about: when will i learn
the violin... fiddled with my beard
for a while and figured: not now,
not ever...
                much much more gracious
than fiddling with ***** hair...
after all: a beard is very much akin
to ***** hair...

          jordan peterson and the old testament...
right...
       if ever a cain...
  siberia looks like the ideal prison...
after all god said, or "said": let him walk off his sins...
hard to walk off your sins when caged...
siberia? perfect training ground...
all that ******* being sold, cain? a vegetarian...
abel? sacrificed animal flesh...
paradox... so... god... expected us...
to remain hunter gatherers?!
  cain was thinking ahead!
he sacrificed fruits and veg. and...
cain was like: we better start thinking about
morphing into an agricultural society!
god praised abel, the neanderthal hunter gatherer...
cain was like: but look! look! wheat! bread!
we can feed more people!
god said: hunter gatherer! abel! win win!
cain paid homage to god
via fruit & veg...
abel... via kosher blood sacrifices...
now... either i'm just plain stupid...
or god is a really bad fiction....
written up by circumcised men
who never learned to *******:
since: the obvious impediment restriction...

cain was a veggie... abel sacrificed animals...
mea culpa somnum... send this whole
died on the cross
          ergo saved ergo ergo
my fault ******* to sleep... i'm tired of this mantra
like an eskimo is bored of ice...
i'm bored of listening to semitic proverbs...
   i'm bored of their rubrics...
their: "fate-warnings",
their superstitions... a semite will forever remain
a semite for me: kippah-***-tonsure...
or a camel-jockey brigade... lucky them they settled
on a once grand mountain range
of Sahara that was the bed for oil...

oh look! wow! i can think for myself!
wonderful...
               which is what i always thought
would become reality...
i'd watch a video...
not comment,
                 and write a rebuttal...
                  which would fall on deaf ears...
or that sacred minority report...
i'll face it if you face it:
the monotheistic god of the semites...
is as ridiculous
as the poloytheism of the pagans...
      the monotheistic god of the semites
is just too... pristine...
     give too many omni- prefixes
to a being and he becomes, boring...
like superman...
                  and to still preserve intellectual
integrity within the ontological omni-
zoo?
                              hey! feel free!
       i much prefer to believe in a "god"
of a limited circumstance...
                  as the will of creation? sure: omni- etc.,
but as a spectator in the back of the minds
of the "created"? cameo presence...
hence not omni- etc.,
                  after all: free will is free will...
and it requires no divine intervention
in order for it to be proved...
  however bad it happens to be upon
embodiment...
    god was never a source of intervention...
the jews begged prayed lampooned for
that sort of god...
did it fare them well? i don't think so...
god was always a cameo for me...
   something i could rely on...
in terms of finding my grand jurisprudence
libra... when the human sense of justice
would disintegrate...
and i'd be met with the west saxon mantra
of: innocent until proven guilty...
or a jimmy saville...
  i was wronged,
no one will believe me,
fair enough...
                     at least i've found some source
of compensation,
for the time being,
before i believe: not to be reunited
with the dead loved ones...
but before i believe to stand
in the grand court of judgement...
with king Solomon as the prosecutor.


do what the english language does, it uses
hyphens to create compounds...  just do this:
            object-object...
   would i **** it?                depends on the follow-ups
that constrict the two-way "system"
of re-appropriation
            with the german language...
it really is the new: north south east west
"copernican" discussion...
    the **** am i supposed to do
(as a male) with an object
     that's not object=object... because it isn't...
      or object≠object: well? because it
clearly isn't...
                      ****, bro?
                       can i get a hotdog instead?
yeah yeah, extra onions on top...
                            but write it out in
that natural **** schizoi fashion
    as post-german compounds... hyphenated,
but instead include the following variations...
      and put them up for a narcissus inspection
and ask: are they chiral?
               stress-free is a compound word...
           but it's easier with an object-object
compound... 'cos' then you can **** around with
object-object... object=object...
             object≠object...
                                object~object...­
                       object≈object...
                           and   object≡object...
it's close proximity, i gather, so it's hard to
orientate yourself as you might with 1 + 1 = 2...
                      but it's in english, and english is
prone to try and forget the norman conquest
and rekindle itself as: with a germanic origin,
and all that custard that modern german
looks like: i'd be sooner wearing sun-glasses than
actual optic magnifiers if i was found
reading german krupahunddoughchew...
                               or the likes of this fake example.
true transgender? it happens in the ≡ category...
the binary...
       it means: even though you're male
   and can't fulfil the female role of a reproductive
****** capacity... i'd still *******...
    joke's on me...
                 but otherwise? apart from the starting point
in the english language...
      the hyphen and compounding words
as is the "vogue" standard...
               so working from object-object...
and then including the stated variations
                       of a dualistic **** by dichotomy...
         ah man... i'm just talking about
how english is trying to resurrect its saxon
ancestors... what with creating these hyphenated
words... you're going to shove some
      other mathematical symbol in between
the two stated words and think of
                                  some grander schematics...
the death of the university coincided with
the death of the asylum...
                               evidently 2 + 2 does equal 4...
         but it's still a case of working
from object-object...
                            object/subject-subject/object?
north, east, west, south...
                      what the ****?!
                        we have modern neanderthals
roaming this place, and they're faking
  the status **** sapiens... that the hell can
evolve from that?
                    clear and bite-sized truth acknowledgement:
we're **** schizoi... split brained...
                     we've reached a stage where
we're not modelled by a multiplication impetus,
but an obelus impetus (÷)...
                       western society figured...
as **** similis: we have a billion chinese and
a billion blue indians of the raj...
                                why should we be bothered?
                isn't that the case of what's happening?
unearthing the nag hammadi library
                               and the whole transgender movement?
oi! where's the vatican! get those cardinals off their *****!
                                 white, red, purple, black.
pope, cardinal, bishop... priest...
           sure sure... brown....                          monks.
but we're losing a fight against neanderthal islam...
                   come your hungry, your oppressed...
your first cousin ******* retards.
                                         i know i'm taunting,
i'm taunting with a reason: neanderthal islam....
                 so much for history and gloating about it
citing the ottomans; thing is... i have lost the ability
to fear death... i'm actually teasing it, more and more,
day after day, after yet another day...
                          it's a bit like the reverse process of
castration... i'm feeling up pigs' genitals, saying:
      oh look! this porky can sign in #A!
                               quick! to the castrato oink corp!
yep... etymology... the alternative to reading
history.

Palm-brained, more sweet than salty
you do not wilt and you do not expand:
cats always land on their feet,

I worry like your owner. He may fall,
he may stoop on his knees a fateful day!

And the ripples seeming ocean waves,
pale as an eye’s center, brine inside
your skin goes a particular way beneath
curdled fur, covered you so –

you are a still a ****** to my hands,
though I have tongued your fleece case
there is the special salt pulsing below.

We are bigger than sin, we have size on
huffing waters. They are wafers –

lanterns, their latches open and shut
but we say the same: I worry & you haze
not concerned that I will jump,
girls are like cats landing on their feet

girls who fall because they believe
their palm, a parachute is expanding.

Daisy Duke Danica Patrick dialogue

DANICA this is preposterous and an embarrassment to my career image

DAISY oh yeah ya think so

DANICA 1st off you’re simply a fictional character i’m a real live racecar driver 2nd you’re a hillbilly ***** who most likely had *** with both cousins Bo and Luke behind Uncle Jesse’s barn

DAISY who you calling a ***** you venomous ***** i did not have ****** relations with those boys (pause gaze averted)

DANICA bare-foot traipsing around Hazzard County dressed like a rural Dixie belle acting all ingénue

DAISY you ain’t got no manners woman were you raised in the south

DANICA Beloit Wisconsin then Roscoe Illinois for your bird-brained information

DAISY ya know in a vague way you owe me

DANICA owe you what you Appalachian Deliverance banjo ****

DAISY i was laying down rubber pedal to the metal gravel dust road in my ’74 yellow Plymouth Road Runner before you was ever born

DANICA what’s that supposed to mean granny i thought you drove a Jeep CJ-7

DAISY it means my fictional character put a seed in the mind’s eye i planted the thought of a female warrior on the racetrack you understand i trail blazed through Georgia back country all you are is just a graduated knock-off of me

DANICA you tawny scrawny pigeon-toed knock-kneed backwoods ****** wouldn’t know your *** from a hole in the ground behind the steering wheel of a Dallara chassis Honda engine open-wheel racecar and if you think i owe you then you must think i owe Janet Guthrie Lyn St. James Sarah Fisher also ***** you ***** *** rebel *****

DAISY girl you got a mouth on you bet you know how to use it in the dark i bet that’s how you got to where you are i know about those FMH pictures

DANICA what i beg your pardon i earned my stripes on the racetrack

DAISY on your knees with your mouth in the shape of 0

DANICA white trash redneck witch! i hate you

DAISY now Danica calm down remember to breath and remember i’m just a fictional character didn’t mean to ruffle your feathers so bad

DANICA all right ok maybe i was a little too hasty to judge and maybe we did just get off on the wrong foot you know Godaddy is looking for someone vintage yet lovely enduring like you

DAISY you’re sweet Danica but my acting days are done i think you look real pretty in electric lime green good luck at NASCAR but i think you do better at Indy that’s just my opinion

DANICA you just might be right Daisy i’m too independent can’t seem to get the hang of you bootlegging draft-racing good ole boys

DAISY amen

“One of the effects of living with electronic information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload.”                                                      
                                                                                      Marshall McLuhan
So, let’s review:
Man is a thinking animal.
Stanley Kubrick took us to space to get us to think.
Marshall McLuhan:  “There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.”
Hemetucky: what was I thinking?
The Rapture for the 1%:   The Language of the World and The Language of Enthusiasm explains why Sir Richard  Branson’s ****** Galactic will only be taking the richest among us to space.
Ian (Limey Futurologist) Pearson:  “Binary is already the dominant language on Planet Earth with today’s machines having more conversations in 24 hours than the whole of humankind since the birth of Eve.”
Larry Flynt:  “**** is the answer to everything.”
Goofy:  “Yeah, I ****** Minnie. I shagged her rotten, baby!”  
Winston Smith:  “Do it to Julia!”
McNugget Buddies:   “Parts is parts.”                                          
Stunod: “Donuts-a -spella backwards issa stunod.” Think about it.
Tony Soprano.  “You ****** stunod, it's a joke.” (Stunod:  in southern dialect Italian means stupid, or a stupid person) http://(www.urbandictionary.com) define.php?term = stunod  / buy stunod mugs & shirts
Marshall McLuhan:    “Jokes are grievances.”
Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino:  “Antonio Gramsci thought that Stalin and Bolshevism could save him and Italy from Fascism:  stunod.”
The Cloud:  My acceptance of the Cloud into my life and my changeling cyborg self is by no means a capitulation to the surfing life.
Paulo Coehlo:  “The God you seek; that someone who awaits you is you.”
Howard Beale:  “That’s the God *******.”
God:   “Because you’re on television, stunod!”
The Elders of Zion:  Nu?
Meir Kahane:  “Let us not suffer from a national amnesia that causes us to forget who and what we are. No trait is more justified than revenge in the right time and place. I know that American and Israeli elections must be limited only to those who understand that the Arabs are the deadly enemy of the Jewish state, who would bring on us a slow Auschwitz - not with gas, but with knives and hatchets. Vote for Newt!”

**** Jagger:    “Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out” (40th Anniversary Edition, Rolling Stones)
Keith Richards +Fijian palm tree = Stunod.  
Marshall McLuhan:   “The more the data banks record about each of us, the less we exist.”    
Howard Beale: “If there's anybody out there that can look around this demented slaughterhouse of a world we live in and tell me that man is a noble creature, believe me: That man is not only full of *******, that man is  stunod.”
The Nam, Part I:   a demented slaughterhouse within a microcosm and grains of beach sand inside micro-Cosmo Kramer’s shorts. When I was in the Kingdom of The Nam I was always under the influence of some drug, mostly my own pure adrenaline when scared shitless--a frequent condition for me—not only my own piquant adrenal juice but other stuff like ****, hash, Thai stick, *****, amphetamines, H-Horse ******, quaaludes, horse tranquilizers and Russian *****. The drugs were always a welcome and needed friend, a respite from the horrors of war in Southeast Asia. To meditate & levitate, to transmigrate & navigate, to negotiate & regurgitate myself, I needed a head start if I was going to SLIDE through what would be called a wormhole today, making a three-dimensional movement between different parallel universes, a conquest of time and space. Cue our favorite narrator:
Rod Serling:  “You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension--a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You've just crossed over into the Twilight Zone.”
WWII, Part I:  A slider now, I SLIDE to my father’s war—the War in Europe in the years before V.E. Day, May 8, 1945. Suddenly I’m flipped right out of the jungle to Germania, to Deutschland in the winter of 1945. I am a P.O.W. of the Germans, sent out into the economy as slave labor. It’s February in Dresden, Germany, the Baroque capital of the German state of Saxony, the city called lovingly by her (****!) many lovers: “The Florence of the Elbe.” It was a long time ago, during the war and I Survived to Tell the Tale. I am a wet floppy Kilgore Trout; I’ve flopped right out of the Twilight Zone into what appears to be an underground meat locker in Dresden. There are animal carcasses hanging from the ceiling and the building is known as Slaughterhouse Number 5. I am a lucky ******* because even though I don’t know it yet, I’m in the safest place in the entire city. Cue the Bombing of Dresden, a strategic military bombing by the British Royal Air Force (RAF) and the United States Army Air Force (USAAF).  In four raids, 1,300 heavy bombers dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on Dresden. The resulting firestorm destroyed 15 square miles (39 square kilometers) of the city centre and killed many thousands, according to **** figures-- largely discredited by the victors who not only get the spoils but get to spin the history any which way but loose. Casualty figures were 200,000 and death toll estimates went as high as 500,000. Or maybe just 25,000 total, if you believe the ******* Anglo-American valkyries who unleashed the wrath of Khan’s Smoking Joe’s Barbecue Ribs and Hotlinks. Win a war, get a medal and a seat in Congress, maybe the White House; lose a war, get indicted. You’re going to Nuremberg, pilgrim, or the ******* Hague.
Kurt Vonnegut: “World War II was over and I was standing in the middle of Times Square with a Purple Heart on and a purple hard-on.”
Colonel Kurtz:  “We fight for the land that's under our feet, the gold that's in our hands, women that worship the power in our *****.  I summon fire from the sky. Do you know what it is to be a white man who can summon fire from the sky? ...What it means? You can live and die for these things, not silly ideals that are always betrayed  . . . I swallowed a bug. Who are you, captain?”
Willard:   “Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste. I've been around for a long long year, stolen many man's soul and faith. Stuck around St. Petersburg when I saw it was a time for a change. Killed the Tsar and his ministers, Anastasia screamed in vain. I rode a tank, held a gen'rals rank when the blitzkrieg raged and the bodies stank. Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name.”  
WWII, Part II:  The bombing of Dresden had to have been some kind of a violation of some International Code or Geneva Convention. But, of course, the bombers, the Victors, ran the Nuremberg show trials. The bombees didn’t get a chance to say much, didn’t want to make a fuss, seeing how generous the Army of Occupation was with their coal, gasoline, clothing and food handouts. But I was there when it was safe to climb out of the meat locker, and immediately got put to work on the après les bombes clean-up. I was there doing the ***** work, a corpse miner, tasked with collecting the fried grasshopper remains of so many unlucky Krauts who were simply burned alive, like heretics at the Inquisition. So it goes.
William Tecumseh Sherman: “War is Hell, Babaloo!”
Colonel Kilgore: “You can either surf, or you can fight!”
Sam Bottoms: “I dropped a tab of acid at the Do-Long Bridge, so I think I’ll surf for awhile: ‘I see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour.’ Reading Blake: for years it was the only way I could block out the war, that and losing myself in a bunch of undercover assignments. Yeah, it was William Blake, I-Spy and lots more acid; that how I dealt with PTSD.”
The Nam, Part II, LT DAN:  “Good job, trooper; those ******* drugs got you coming and going, sliding so fast you’ve missed latrine duty 3 times this month. Now go get 5 gallons of diesel fuel and gasoline, mix it together and torch that ******* feces, soldier.”
** Chi Minh:  “This ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no fooling around.”
***** Friedman:   “The Democrats and Republicans are the same guy admiring himself in the mirror.”

Muhammad Hosni El Sayed Mubarak:   “Vote for Pedro.”
Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard:    “Fight Fiercely!”
Marshall McLuhan:    “I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.”
The Author:   I am a disaffected angry old man, formerly a disaffected angry young man; a Hopi-Italian Jew with Chinese offspring, namely my left-brained son, a mathematical genius but having a tough time dealing with idiots, the many truly stunod people in the world.  Then there’s my Rose, my sweet King Lear-jet daughter, like her half-brother, not yet finished paying for my sins. My offspring are haunted, visited upon daily by their father’s  ghosts, ghosts created, ghosts hovering over me, from wars hot and cold and peace lukewarm and cloudy, like the uranium ground contamination on the mesa, visited upon mothers and infants  and children who seek only a glass of cool water from the spring not to be glow worms in the dark, leukocytes made insane by something in the water. My sins, a father’s sins; things I did to curry favor, to ingratiate and advance myself with the 1%, things I did to get ahead in life, to get what I thought my father and others in the ancestral slipstream had failed to get, twice to the Rabbi for a get (Hebrew: גט‎, plural gittin גיטין), to get the edge my kids need now, the edge I never had, and life reduced to an exercise in ultimate combat, little more than a cage fight, man against man and God against all. The things I did for money and position shame me now. And shame is a large  source of my anger.  I will remain angry. I will hang on to my anger at God and myself and all who have been disappointed in me, by me, especially the cavalcade of short-term caretakers, women used, abused, left behind and forgotten. Why am I me? Sometimes I think that’s the way I’m programmed. But it’s okay, like Gaga: “I'm beautiful in my way 'Cause God makes no mistakes I'm on the right track, baby I was born this way' Cause God makes no mistakes, I'm on the right track, baby, I was born this way and will I continue to surf the Cloud: even though God is dead and I don’t believe you, or me, or them.
Basic: remember Basic?

10   A IS FOR ANGER NEXT 20
20   START STEP TWO ANGER KUBLER-ROSS INFINITE LOOP
30   GOTO 10
10   A IS FOR ANGER NEXT 20
20   START STEP TWO ANGER KUBLER-ROSS INFINITE LOOP
30  GOTO 10
10   A IS FOR ANGER NEXT 20
20   START STEP TWO ANGER KUBLER-ROSS INFINITE LOOP
30 A IS FOR ANGER NEXT 30
30  GOTO 10 Ad infinitum

low hum, cold rain
i take three extra pills to focus on anything
but you
and how i was so proud to show you off
i put you up on a shelf
made sure you never got *****,
i was so proud to call you mine,
to have something of my own
that i forgot to lock the door to my own home
and let everybody in,
and they took everything
i was so scatter brained with you
trying to make you happy
planning my next move,
i never paid attention to my own pieces
and now they're broken
and i don't even have the energy to put them back together
i was so proud to call you mine
when you barely knew you were half the time

In Italy in 2017
A medical miracle
Will be seen;
A transplanted head.
They'd better get it right.
They didn't say which one.
Above the shoulders?
Below the waist?
Another ****-head
To dinkthink.
A hard-headed
Limp-brained head-banger.
Or did I misunderstand.
Perhaps it's woman's to a man.

(Rock Lake, Canada)

In this country there is neither measure nor balance
To redress the dominance of rocks and woods,
The passage, say, of these man-shaming clouds.

No gesture of yours or mine could catch their attention,
No word make them carry water or fire the kindling
Like local trolls in the spell of a superior being.

Well, one wearies of the Public Gardens:  one wants a vacation
Where trees and clouds and animals pay no notice;
Away from the labeled elms, the tame tea-roses.

It took three days driving north to find a cloud
The polite skies over Boston couldn't possibly accommodate.
Here on the last frontier of the big, brash spirit

The horizons are too far off to be chummy as uncles;
The colors assert themselves with a sort of vengeance.
Each day concludes in a huge splurge of vermilions

And night arrives in one gigantic step.
It is comfortable, for a change, to mean so little.
These rocks offer no purchase to herbage or people:

They are conceiving a dynasty of perfect cold.
In a month we'll wonder what plates and forks are for.
I lean to you, numb as a fossil.  Tell me I'm here.

The Pilgrims and Indians might never have happened.
Planets pulse in the lake like bright amoebas;
The pines blot our voices up in their lightest sighs.

Around our tent the old simplicities sough
Sleepily as Lethe, trying to get in.
We'll wake blank-brained as water in the dawn.

I find myself tongue-tied, and i have been for a very long while.
i'm not quite sure what i can attribute this to...
it's been a quality of mine ever since i've learned to speak.

     (where i've gone and
           the few faces along the way,
                    with eyes like distorted mirrors
                                     showing me my strange self)

i have trouble finding my place, yet i've found many places
i don't  know how to connect, though at times i feel connected

you have  me confused

                   s c    a     t       t e      r            
                               b      r a         i      n    e  d  

back and forth for so long, and finally landed separate,
fixed in each other's shade of the soon-to-be-forgotten past
because-- i don't have a because.
because i have too many becauses.

because i simply cannot

i can't place my finger on why.
i don't feel as real
                                     as i used to.
please understand


life is confusing because there are so many different ways to see it.
so one can never be too sure what is true.
about self,  reality, or other people.
there are a million different experiences of the color green.
i am seen one way, but i feel about myself something invisible.
and sometimes i don't feel anything about anything at all.

she
spoke as if she knew the world down to its heartbeat,
and could see through its bones.
she spoke as if her eyes were the only eyes,
and they saw all truths.
she was not careful with her words
and never stepped outside of her body
to see how imprisoned she was in her thoughts.
she obsessed over what she saw in others,
and what they saw in her.
for that, i think, she always wore the sun.

Never have i felt
So much pain
Explosion after explosion
Of pain
My head feels too heavy
For my weary neck
My stomach churns
And i cant eat
or sleep
I cant think
without my mind hurting
Every light now
even at its dmmest
Is too bright
And it hurts
and noise now
Kills me inside
Theres just too much noise
Im so scatter brained
Nothing makes sense
I cant remember anything
And it scares me
I cant do anything
And i hate it
I cant move
Or ill hurt
But i hurt
If i dont move
Torture pure torture
Thats what this is
God help me please
I just dont know
How i will get through this
If im alone
Laying in the darkness and silence
That has become
My only friend

tired of these late assignments,
although I make good grades.
bored of mundane busy-work,
even if it helps my brain.
I'm interested in the arts,
and running is fun too.
but boy oh boy how great it is,
to sit down, and be with you.

Here's to the...

Calorie counter
Long sleeve wearer
Excessive water drinker
Mirror believer
Professional over-thinker
Clever liar
Hair puller
Tongue biter
Thigh hater
Toilet bowl hugger
Magazine lover
Belly fat ****
At home cryer
Bedroom hider
Internet follower
Social stink bug
One sided therapist
Friend loser
Terrifying truth
Reality dodger
Space-brained
Nicknamed
Love rejector
Anxiety collector
Roller coaster rider
Personal antagonist
Perfection chaser
Hopeless dreamer
Nothing achiever
Unnoticed angel
Silent rainbow
Blood seeker
Soul-searching rebel
Wilting rose

I.

Up the stairs Suzann without an E went.
8" X 10" bright white rectangles dotted
the yellowing and dusty walls,
clean reminders of bad family photos.
Her parents, Bob and Theresa,
had picked out wallpaper. Lilacs
and vines and oranges. Why? She
didn't know.

She tossed her backpack on the floor
at the foot of her bed. Her senior book
was still on the night stand. Charity and
Faith, her sometimes friends, had spent
the last two weeks filling out every page
of theirs, printing hazy images on cheap
photo paper at their homes and sliding them
into the plastic holders or taping them to
the pages without.

They coerced boys they
had liked or still liked or would like if to
fill out pages. When the boys simply signed
their names or names and football numbers,
they guilted them into writing more. Give
me something to remember you by.

Suzann liked to look at only one boy,
Casey Stephen Fuchs, pronounced "Fox,"
though you know that's just what the family
said. She didn't want him to write in her
senior book. She enjoyed the space between
them. She knew what her peers didn't:
she was seventeen.
She knew she didn't know
the right words yet. She knew the heart-bursting
flutters she felt were temporary--enjoy them, she thought,
shut up and enjoy them.

Her parents set her curfew at 10:30. So
this Friday, like most Fridays, she stays
home.

She opens ****** in the City of Mystics,
a novel she's burned through. Fifty pages
or so left. She likes detectives. The methodical
stalking, the idiosyncratic theories and philosophies
that allow them to connect dot after dot.

She shuts her eyes and sends herself walking down
the streets of New York, where hot dog vendors
whistle and say, "Nice legs." She flags down a cab.
She sees Casey across the street. What are you doing
here, stranger? She waves the cab on.
The driver, a brown-skinned man from some vague
country, throws his arms up. "C'mon."

She cuts across the traffic, dodging a white stretch limo,
a black Hummer, a hearse.

Casey's straight hair hangs over his left eye. It's both
melodramatic and troubled. There's a small shift
at the corners of his lips, the corners of lips, this
is a detail she writes of often in her journal--why?

She can almost hear Casey ask her, "What brings you here?"

"Business."

"What kind?"

"None of yours."

He takes this as an entry for a kiss. Not yet, handsome. No no.

"Make whatever you want for dinner," her mom shouts up the stairs.
"There's stuff for nachos if you want nachos. Some luncheon meat too.
Only one piece of bread though."

"Okay."

"Alright. Just whenever. Dad and I are going to go ahead."

"Okay."

"Alright."

Get me out of here. Suzann's whole life is small: small town,
small family, small church, all packed with small brained, short-sighted people. She wants New York or Chicago. She wants a badge--no not a badge. She'll be a vigilante. "You're not a cop," they'll tell her.

"Thank God," she'll say. "If I were a cop then there'd be nobody protecting these streets."

II.

She's read mysteries set in the middle of nowhere, small towns like her own Kiev, Missouri. They always feel phony. Not enough churches.
Not enough bored dads hitting on cheerleaders.
No curses. Every small town has a curse. Kiev's?
Every year someone in the senior class dies.

As far back as anyone she knew could remember
anyways. Drunk driving, falling asleep at the wheel,
texting while driving, all that crap is what was usually
blamed.

This smelly boy named Todd Louden moved out of Kiev
in the fall semester of his senior year a couple years ago.
Suzann was a freshman.

A few months after he was gone, people started saying
he'd killed himself with a shotgun. First United Methodist
added his family to the prayer list. They had a little service out
by this free-standing wall by the library where he used
to play wall ball during lunch. People cried. Suzann didn't know
anyone that hung out with him. Maybe that's why
they cried, unreconcilable guilt--that's what her dad
said.

Then in the spring Todd moved back. The cross planted
by the wall with his name confused him.
He'd just been staying with his grandma. Nothing crazy.
The churches never said anything about that. He was
just the smelly kid again. Well until late-April when
he got ran over by a drunk or texting driver.
They hadn't even pulled up the cross by the wall ball site
yet.

III.

You call it the middle of nowhere, a place where the roads didn't have proper names until a couple years back, roads now marked with green signs and white numbers like 3500 and 1250, numbers the state mandated so the ambulances can find your dying ***--well if the signs haven't been rendered unreadable by .22 rounds.

The roads used to be known only to locals. They'd give them names like the Jogline or Wilzetta or Lake Road, reserved knowledge for the sake of identifying outsiders. But that day is fading.

What makes nowhere somewhere? What grants space a name?

The dangerous element. The drifter that hops a fence, carrying a shotgun in a tote bag. Violence gave us O.K. Corral. Violence gave us Waco. Historians get nostalgic for those last breaths of innocence. The quiet. The storm. The dead quiet.

IV.

It's March and not a single senior has died.
So when she hears the front door open
around 2 a.m., Suzann isn't surprised.
She doesn't think it's ego that's made
her believe it'd be her to die--but it is.

She hears the fridge door open.
Cabinets open.
Cabinets close.
She hears ice drop into
the glass. Liquid poured.

She clicks her tongue in
her dry mouth. She puts
a hand to her chest. Her
heart beats slow.
She rests her head on
the pillow. It's heavy
yet empty, yet full--
not of thoughts.

She can't remember the name
of any shooting victims.
She remembers the shooters.
Jared Lee Loughner, Seung-Hui Cho,
James Eagan Holmes, Adam Lanza.
No victims.

She hears the intruder set the glass on the counter.
He doesn't walk into the living room.
He starts up the stairs. His steps are
soft, deliberate. What does he want?
Her death. She knows this. He is only a vehicle.
Nameless until. Has he done this before?
Fast or slow?

He's just outside her room, and she doesn't
remember a single victim's name. She hears
a bag unzip. She hears a click.

If he shoots her, Suzann Dunken, there's
no way the newspaper will get her name
right. Her name may or may not scroll
across CNN's marquee for a day or two.
If it does, it won't be spelled correctly.
This makes her move. Wrapping
her comforter around her body, she
tip-toes to the wall next to her door.

She hears a doorknob turn.
It's not hers.

He's going into her parents' bedroom.
They're both heavy sleepers.
She opens her own door slowly.
She steps into the hall. She sees the man.
The man does not see her.
She see the man and grabs a family
portrait. The man does not see her,
and he creeps closer to her parents.
She sees the man standing then she
sees the man falling after she strikes him
with the corner of the family portrait.
The man sees her as he scrambles to get
his bearing. She strikes him, again with
the corner. This time she connects with his eye.
A light comes on. "Suzann," her mother says.
He tries to aim the gun. Again she strikes.
He screams. He reaches for his eyes with
his left hand. Now with the broad side she
swings. She connects. She connects again.
The man shoves her off, stumbles to his feet.
By this time, her dad reaches her side.
One strong push and the man crashes into
the wall outside the room, putting a hole
in the drywall.

He recovers and retreats down the stairs
and out the door into blackness.

Her mother phones the police.
She pants more than speaks
into the receiver.

"Suzann," her dad says. "Sweetheart."

Suzann looks at the portrait, taken at JC Penny when
she was in the sixth grade. The glass is cracked.
She removes the back. She pulls out the photo.

"Did you get a good look at him?"

This photo. Her mother let her do anything
she wanted to her hair before they took it.
So she, of course, dyed it purple.

"That's right," her mother says.
"It's about half a mile east of the
3500 and 1250 intersection. Uh-huh."

Her dad sits down next to her.

"How long do you think it'll take them
to find us?"

There's a shift at the corners of her mouth,
and she nods, just nods.

If I were a bird
I could fly up high
In the sky,
A concept of course quite absurd
But a winsome idea had it occurred
For the soaring
Prospect overawing
Terra-bound type outscoring
Gravity-denying thrill of flying
Above all the ant-like crowds,
To say I'd miss this chance would be lying;
Flashing like a scimitar
Through the clouds,
In the manner of the swallow,
Nary aught but jets to follow.

But there is a slight quibble
I don’t think I could even nibble
Or own a beak about to dribble
For that tasty avian treat
At which I squirm
I may be permanently grounded
Leave my feathered friends dumbfounded
Yet I‘m not simply iffy or relatively sniffy,
I wouldn't ,couldn't, eat a ****** worm.

(7th April)

My life is ruined
I thought haiku was my strength
but I can't count

He said boring, safe.

He said 9 to 5, nothing brave.

Well, he’s got it in his head that he’s special, he’s a rebel

‘cause he’s only 17 but the walls are lined with bottles,

‘cause he’s only a kid but he shreds and he’s bled

like the best of the living, breathing, plastic models

under lights like lines and smoke like signs.

Alternative *******, kicks convention like a stone

on a dodgy, moonlit road laced with beaten brick and bone.

But I walked that street with your own two trees--
shivered in the neon glow—

and you’re just a hammock swinging between them, same as me—

I know you know.

We were thrown into the forest, stood together, two by two,

and if you’d dragged me into the shadowy thicket right along with you,
invited me out grasping at poison with your avenging leeches—

maybe I’m not so unfulfilled as you’d like to believe when you’re giving speeches,
strumming and shaking above me, so proud to break away.

Alternative *******, look this way.

I listen to the *** Pistols, jack.

I wear leather.

I text in class.

I sneak trinkets on the side,

under the table, on my mother’s unwitting dime.

Last week I put *** in my pineapple juice because no one else was home.

I write on the walls, I run in the halls

with scissors, with a smirk.

I chase ice cream trucks, I blow off homework.

Don’t you scoff at Metallica, call it an old man’s band.

Cats are badass, son, mine will tear up your hands.
And the garbage on your T-shirt wouldn’t be around to fuel your *******

if Metallica hadn’t taken the stage and taken the hits.

So when you come to town after the laughs fill a decade,

and you want to reunite so the memories don’t fade,

I’ll meet you for drinks sometime after five,

and I’ll go home in time to wake up before nine.

And you better listen close when I tell you how happy I am,

how I work alright 40/7, saying yes sir and no ma’am.

And maybe I drop acid under a bridge between F and M,

splash the city walls and bathroom stalls

with expletives and half-brained philosophy on a whim.

Or maybe I hug a homemade quilt and wait for the clock to tilt

while some ****** sitcom grasps at humor under oath.

And maybe I do both,

and maybe I’m smiling either way.

I’ll tell you this in tumbling words and phrases from our old days,

and then I’ll tap a finger on my soda, safe as houses,

houses like the twin towers that we came from, weighing ounces,

and I’ll ask about you.

And I swear on my 9 to 5 life that I hope you’re smiling too
when you tell me how the band is doing great, playing shows,

how the records fly like spinning pizza pie

in grimy downtown windows.

And when you go home into the stars and you pick up your guitar,

I hope you remember an earlier night, no matter how distant it seems,

that syrupy discourse when I gave you dollars for dreams

and you thanked me with words like boring, safe, because of some one-day preferences.

I hope you realize that I can smile through acid and expletives

just as well and true as I can smile at quilts and clocks,

so don’t put me in a box.


My happiness doesn’t need your special stamp of alternative approval.

Paratroopers free fall,
'chutes coiled and caught in a grease ball afro curl
reaching down perplexed ****** frames.
Diligent chortling mimes trapped in handmade indecision cages, tapping a telling tune of tired games played day after day.
A right brained boy with a head full of clout
miscommunication with a leftist expat from the north
to the south.
Jostled connections send out fizzling sentences
through blown speakers and an overheated circuit -
Bored of the excuses whispers the nameless
without a reason there isn't a purpose.
Shoot an accusing glare past Father Time
overlooking treasonous discouraging crimes
Open those whale blubber caked eyes
to the other side.
It's not what this has done to you
but what this has done to us.
The hitchhiker gave up, traded his thumb for a seat on the bus.
Never was he lost, but given more than one chance.
He, no, she, no we
were thrown away with his walking stick and his waterproof nap sack.
Will we cross this road again?
And pick up from where we began?
Or never turn back?
Always was he lost, but given one too many of a chance
But was it worth it?
Upholding the "right and proper" stance?

i enjoy england

with its little houses
hips brushing, faces smushed
together to revel in quaint rumour
among gentrified lilies and pink
lady apples that blush in the summer

its walkways and alleys
dribbles of soft lamplight guiding
the drunkard, moth-brained and ill
with silk threads to a blind spot
of amber where muck can be spilled

the people on transport
with their airy talk, their mindless
silence, heads lolling idly on
windows, eyes crumpling like napkins
against the leaking crumbs of warm scone sun

pretty little England
where exploitation is vintage
and runs like rosé
down the dusty store windows

here we are free to stumble
down streets with sweat
in our hair and manic karaoke
reverberating off the walls
glee drinking is government protected

I'm quite in love with england,
this field of dew and white roses
fed by gore and sweet tradition
where fresh-faced, sunny children play.

Night was falling, a full bright silver moon was rising, and Seraphine’s hunger had become unbearable. She needed to feed, had to have young fresh female blood, to stay alive and young.

Science had caught up with the reason vampires needed to feed on the youngest, preferably baby’s blood. In 1866 a Frenchman named Paul Bert had conjoined rat’s circulatory systems in a process called parabiosis, and thus the Prize of Experimental Physiology from the French Academy of Science.

In 2012, Cambridge University’s Julia Ruckh found old mice cojoined to young mice physically and mentally rejuvenated, becoming younger, smarter, and more energetic. Subsequent research discovered proteins in the plasma caused the rejuvenation. News outlets had proclaimed, “fountain of youth discovered in ordinary plasma.”

Seraphine needed the youngest, which has the highest concentration of rejuvenation proteins and hormones;  the purest, which is virus-free, and female, which has the highest levels of estrogen and progesterone.

Ideally, a baby girl’s blood would be best, but in today’s modern society, killed babies drew attention. The next best and the pragmatic thing was a 15-year-old runaway girl. L’ Association Assistance et Recherche de Personnes Disparues (ARPD), estimates 1000s of Parisienne girls, ages 10 to 18, runaway each year due to ****** and or physical abuse, ending up on the street, and having survival *** in 48 hours or less for food and or protection. And few if anybody cared. They disappeared, never to be found, presumed dead from a ****** overdose, or stabbed in a fight for food, money, or drugs.

Since runaways had high levels of disease due to survival ***, ****, and ****** addiction, Seraphine focused her attention on young troubled Arab girls living in the Habitation à Loyer Modéré (HLM) or projects of the 93rd, the department number of Seine-Saint-Denis, the poorest, predominantly Maghreb Islamic Arab banlieues of Paris.

Seraphine would undo her ponytail, letting her raven black hair cascade down around her shoulders, so she could fly around and into the projects at night landing on rooftops, listening for arguments, yelling, or shouting of eahira (*****), waqha (****), or haram (forbidden). When she heard those words, she knew a father was forcing old-world customs and religion on his born and raised in France daughter. The daughter, going to secular French public school, knew neither Arabic nor Islam, rebelled, wanting to live a secular, feminist rather than a submissive religious life.

Seraphine had found this month’s mark. She focused her superhuman hearing and sight on a tenth-floor open balcony window of the building across the street.

She could see an older man dressed in the traditional white dishdasha tunic, and taqiyah skull cap worn to evening prayers, yelling and throwing his hands in the air. Further in the flat, Seraphine could see a girl, crying. The man yelled waqha, waqha, then slapped her, and she fell to the floor. An old woman pulled the man back, as the girl got up and ran out the door.

Seraphine knew how this would play out and where the girl was headed. Four blocks away was the Lycée Général et Technologique, which housed a 24-hour crisis center for teens facing physical and or ****** abuse, pregnancy, homosexuality, ****** addiction, or homelessness.

As foreseen, the girl burst out the front doors of the HLM, running, crying down the street. Seraphine leaped from the 13-floor building into the air, silently following the girl like a bird of prey. The girl walked down Rue Bonnevide to Rue Guy Moquet, taking a shortcut through a wooded park.

Seraphine flew down to the ground, landing without a sound, and followed the girl from a distance. She could smell her youth, see her round hips and long shiny hair. When the girl had walked deep into the dark and silent park, Seraphine sprang forward like a puma, tackling the girl to the ground, and slitting her throat before she could scream.

Seraphine savored the ****, drinking the squirting blood from the carotid artery, relishing the warm fresh blood. The girl, in shock, blinked rapidly, trying to process what had just happened to her. She tried to speak but gurgled only blood, tears of fear started streaming down her cheeks. She knew she was dying, was afraid of dying, and wished her father was here to protect her, and make it all go away.

The blood slowed to a trickle. The girl had bled out and her body died. Seraphine continued to drink, ******* harder to get the remaining blood. The girl’s body convulsed then stilled as her brained slowly and finally died.

Seraphine had fed and would be satiated till another full moon.  She got up and licked her lips of residual blood. Her clothes were drenched in sweat and blood. She looked at the girl’s dead body, admiring her clear complexion, and big brown doe eyes, but felt no remorse for the ****.

She picked up the girl’s body in her arms, jumped into the night sky, and flew 65 kilometers northeast of Paris to La Foret De Compiegne in la department d’Oise, a secluded and rural part of northern France. Dead center in the forest lies Saint-Jean-aux-Bois, a small, and forgotten farming village of septuagenarian and octogenarian.

Seraphine flew to a farm a kilometer outside of the village. As she neared the farm, she could smell the putrid stench of pig ****. She started her descent, dropping the girl’s body, which hit the ground with a thud, in the barnyard, as she gently touched down.

The farm was dark, the only light was that of the full moon. She heard a rustling coming from the farmhouse. She saw an old man walking her way, holding a dim flamed oil lamp. He did not look at her, only at the ground, afraid of what would happen if he looked her in the eyes.

Seraphine grabbed the girl’s body by the hair and dragged it to the main pigpen, and threw the body over the fence and into the pit of sleeping pigs. The body hit a pig, startling it out of its sleep, squealing, waking up the other pigs, and realizing they had been fed fresh meat. The pigs sheared the flesh off the bones, then chewed and ground the bones. Within a couple of hours, there would be no trace of the young girl’s body. She was just another disappeared runaway.

Seraphine turned her attention back to the farmer, pulled out a brick of Euros from her coat, and threw it at his feet. He didn’t dare pick it up. He was too afraid of her. He knew what she was. And she knew, he knew what she was.

He’d seen the countless girl’s bodies come through like chicken carcasses at a processing plant over the decades. He knew he would die of old age soon, and only hoped God would forgive him for helping a monster.

Seraphine turned around, jumping into the sky, and disappeared. He was trembling and relieved that she was gone. He won’t see her for another full moon. He painfully bent over and picked up the brick of Euros. His hands were shaking.

******

Seraphine got out of the shower and wrapped her hair in a towel. She looked in the mirror and admired herself, the flawless white skin, the blood red lips, the pear shaped figure, but most of all her firm perky *******. She was brushing her teeth, when the doorbell rang. She rinsed out her mouth and wrapped a towel around her, walked to the door and opened it. It was Damien. She mischievously and alluringly smiled. He grinned back, knowing why she’d called. “I was so glad you were still up when I called,” she said poutingly.

She took his hand and led him to her bedroom. It was softly lit, a low yellowish light, not unlike that of a candle’s. The walls were decorated in red damask wallpaper with gold crown, base, and chair moulding. It was very elegant, very French. The bed was a large four posted red ruffled canopy, covered with a red duvet and pillows.

She got to the foot of the bed, turned around, unwrapped herself, sat on the bed, and shuffled herself to the headboard. She looked at him and spread her legs, showing, offering herself to him. Damien took off his clothes and crawled to her, over her, and leaned down to kiss her. She rose up to meet his kiss, wrapping her arm around his neck, then dragging him down in her.

She kissed him hard, ******* his tongue into her mouth, biting his lower lip. She stopped. He looked at her, a questioning look on his face. Then she pushed him down towards her *****. She had a trimmed and sculpted bush, just enough not to hide her full lips.

He started kissing around her bush, her tummy, and inner thighs. He could feel her squirming, as he circled around, edging closer to her *******. He kissed her lips, sliding his tongue up and down, then penetrating her.

She was wet, and tasted fresh, like sweet spring water. How amazing he thought to himself. I’ve never tasted a woman like this before. He went deeper with his tongue, pulling back the lips with his hands. She pushed his head hard into her. He licked her splayed ******, as she moaned in pleasure and approval. He moved his tongue up till he got to her ****, and lightly rubbed it then stopped, kissing her tummy. She relaxed and sighed.

He kissed his way down to her ****, kissing it softly then circling it with his tongue. She arched her back as he vigorously rubbed her **** with the tipe of his tongue. She moaned, then yelled stop, stop, in breathy gasps, then fell back into the pills. She took his head in her hands, and pulled him up to her mouth, and gave him deep, passionate baiser amoureux.

She took his hard **** in her hand and guided him towards her *****. She slid his **** up and down her *****, lubing up the head of the **** with her wetness. Then she let go, and he penetrated her slowly, as she gasped then moaned. He felt her wetness and heat as he slid deeper into her.

He started to pump rhythmically back and forth, slowlying picking up speed, as she moaned and groaned as he bottomed out his **** into her. He was going to *** and started to moan, when she yelled, “choke me, choke me.”

Taken back, he slowed. She looked up at him quizzically. “Choke me,” she said sternly. “You're a big boy. Choke me,” she repeated with a bit of irritation in her voice. He placed his hands around her neck and lightly pressed and started pumping. He got back into the rhythm and was back on track, getting close to *******. “Harder,” she said, “hard like you mean it.” It turned him on, and he clamped down harder as he pumped harder, animalistically.

He knew she was getting close to orgasming as she moaned and writhed under him. “Oui, oui, oui,” she screamed, and in a blink of an eye, she’d flip him on his back. Her hands on his chest, holding him down, as she rode him hard. She screamed, “ah, ah, ah,” then collapsed on his chest. His ****, still hard, inside her. She slowly rolled over, taking him with her, till he was on top, then rocked her hips, wanting him to continue, to finish.

He started to moan. She hooked her wrist around his neck and pulled him to her mouth, kissing him hard and deep as he came. He convulsed collapsing  on top of her. His **** still inside her, as she wrapped her arms around and rocked him back and forth, kissing the top of his head as if comforting a child.

He rolled over, crashing into the bed with exhausting and fatigue. He looked over at her. She was staring up at the ceiling. He saw the reddish purple strangulation marks he’d left on her neck, and slipped into a deep sleep.

You broke me -
Shattered me to pieces.
Afterwards I was laying on the ground and you still somehow
made me feel sorry for you.
The feet you used to walk on my heart were now bleeding
and I was in even more pieces.

I tried to put myself back together
for you.
Heal the wounds
that are now just scars.
But I keep looking at them
Obsessing over how they got there.

I'm still in ******* pieces
And don't know how to put myself back together
You don't give a ****.
Because
You're better now.
I'm not.
But that doesn't matter
Because you can still see yourself
in the pieces I am now.
I still show you your reflection.

I stuck around for you.
Hoping you would help fix me
Hoping you would help me fix myself.
Instead you just stood there and watched me struggle.
Admiring your handy work.

let me introduce you to my old friend
Jax (Jackson) Hate
ladies and gentlemen
tell 'em about yourself
why don't you, you're the writer
I've known Jax for as long as I can remember
UK to US
kids to teen to?
to a sentimental ***
He's an *******, but he's my *******
He kept me safe
kept me laughing
when I was lost he found me
stop you're making me wet
I love him
really - I do
I'd love me too
The scruffy, scatter brained, *** crazed, sarcastic sociopath is more than blood to me
My imaginary friend who leaped straight from somebody else's nightmare to rescue me
You looked so pathetic, let's be honest, I didn't really have a choice.
He was the one who went straight for the cricket bat in playground scraps
taught me everything I know about manipulating women
You'd still just be loving your right hand every night if we never met
Yeah, but I'd still be in college
Yeah? Rotting away with the other soon to be bovine corpses? Stellar plan my man. ******* A
No, now we rot alone
Smells more like waiting for the legend to take hold. We'll own this world by proxy.
Me, I'm a kid who writes
Jax?
He's a murderer at heart
the hurricane to my calm, rippling koi pond
You forget I'm a misogynist.
I don't know if he's here to stay
I don't know if I ever want him to leave me
no longer mutually parasitic
*the ******* end

you straddled
my mind with
the way you
drew a narrow
line between
what i knew
about you and
what i have
come to find
but you raddled
my body with
addle-brained
designs, never
once drawing
one of a benign
kind.

© Matthew Harlovic

Christine stood
at the ward window
peering out
at the snow

you stood beside her
smelling the perfume
she wore
the one she was going to wear

on her honeymoon
had the ***** shown up
as she told you
a few days before

snow looks like icing
on a Christmas cake
she said
hope to Hell

I’m out of here by then
me too
you said
as long as the quack

don’t fry our brains
with ECTs again
better not have
she said

gives me headaches and ****
look at that tractor
out there in that field
see how those gulls

are following him
through the snow
she followed your finger pointing
like a ship at sea don’t it

she said
you stared up
at the greying sky
cloudless

and end of worldish
could have been
on my honeymoon
some months back

she said suddenly
could have been
well *******
and sun blessed

guess so
you said
instead I get brained fried
by some doc

in a white coat
don’t see how
he could have let you down
like he did

you said
that bridegroom
of yours
gutless worm

she said
leaving me standing there
in that white dress
and headpiece

and those fecking
pinching shoes
you sniffed her perfume
looked at her sideways

her eyes scanning
the fields and trees
her night gown
beltless

(in case we take
to hanging ourselves)
opening
to show legs

and night dress
hanging by the knees
she breathed
on the glass pane

breathed it up
and wrote
with her finger
no more ECTs.