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Test Ting Won To Tree
By
Charles Fleischer







Rifleman decal water is to Tiny basket liners as Strained yo-yo string is to?
Dark wool glowing is to Oldest lost oddity as First genetic engine is to?
Black quail taint is to Nut curdled paint as Hemp biscuit dominoes are to?
Steam traced paper is to Lemon ash vapor as Digital ****** wig is to?
Eccentric brine mimes are to Electric silk slacks as Spark formed lava is to?
Sunchoked black hornets are to as Rescued orphan doves as Retold cat jokes are to?
Hand traced videos are to Braided rubber spines as Opal rain dancers are to?
Halogen anchor gong is to Annoying bread portraits as Soft bracelet lockers are to?
Old troll bios are to Select cherub echoes as Broken matchstick parasols are to?
Dome nine chariots are to Frayed lunar remnants as Fuming honey flasks are to?
Bluing assault operas is to Beading fluted flowers as Magnetic lawn tweezers are to?
Converted flea sponges are to Floating dog murals as Frozen Archie comics are to?
Molded road pads are to Crusty gumdrop thread as Straw ribbed pelicans are to?
Inflatable diamond vowel is to Single gender raffle as Groovy desert coffee is to?
Temporary solution radiation is to Idiotic witness mumble as Motorized marshmallow kit is to?
Panoramic utopian paranoia is to Aggravated **** silhouettes as Unhinged gun sellers are to?
Homesick ghost pajamas is to Virtuous fly fungus as Royal sandpaper gloves are to?
Gangster hayride tickets are to Deer milk Oreos as Turnip fairy maps are to?
Glue gun **** is to Nocturnal cabin mice as Cab fare corn is to?
Speckled fish nickels are to Under water bric-a-brac as Epic snakeskin paisley is to?
******* bungalow pranks are to Drowsy vapid oafs as Quantized cavern fish are to?
Raunchy snail kimono is to Coiled time dice as Smeared equator malt is to?
Metallic centaur franchise is to Transparent cheese chess as Spotted glacial remnants is to?
Sky fused pong is to Rustic mothers brattle as Granulated canister ointment is to?
Overgrown maze mule is to Mated smugglers hugging as Floating thesaurus exam is to?
Sliding coed sprinkler is to Soapy whitefish rebate as Precious lamb diaper is to?
Mushy acorn luster is to Lilac protein rings as Slapstick wrestler dialect is to?
Freaky plankton bells is to Rolling horse divorce as Morphing morphine lips are to?
Sticky razor sparkle is to Emerald muscle spasm as Glaring cat cipher is to?
Peppy unisex mustache is to Pelican fighter syndrome as Clumping night grumble is to?
Scanning paired pearls are to Ruby rubbed roaches as Satanic sailor flotsam  are to?
Glowing asteroid solder is to Ideal shark data as Failed frail doilies are to?
Numb nuts boredom is to Fantastic icy phantoms as Sporadic silk creations is to?
Crooks crow chow is to Loading spackled bonder as Gargled snowdrop blasters are to?
Outdid myself today is to Outside myself again as Outlived myself controls is to?
Venting shuttlecock upset is to Texting badminton kitten as Settler tested motels are to?
Prepare paired vents is to Prefer paid events as Pretender predicts fiction is to
Crunchy mental fender is to Catching mentor menace as Poorly seasoned lettuce is to?
Outside sidewalk inside is to Seaside outcast input as Sideways landslide victory is to?  
Compile fake password is to Compost world poo as Compose village anthem is to?
Crooked crotch blunder is to Loud crowd thunder as Divine vine finder is to?
Chucks’ wooden truck is to Bucks good luck as Sticky ducks tucked is to?  
Overhaul underway overseas is to Overturned downsized pickup as Underground onramp overloaded is to?
I’ll bite there is to Aisle byte their as Isle bight there is to?
Gnat gnawed wrist is to ***** show beans as See through putty is to?
Flapping floppy guppies are to Buzzing zipped dozers as Muddy ****** strippers are to?
Dark diagonal dialogue is to Diabolical dihedral die as Interesting circadian exposition is to?
Experimental flossing expectations are to Waxed dental traps as Permanent impermanence resolution is to?  
Outran ringside intrigue is to Sidetracked onboard boatload as Loaded firearm topside is to?
Phony ****** phone is to Chewy ego honey as Yogi Mama’s dada is to?
Nimble teardrop squiggle is to Humble cage curtains as Loyal truckstop morals are to?
Torching curled elastic is to Sonic neighbor clamor as Golden droplet integers are to?
Duplex pupil scanners are to Nacreous cloud clocks as Shrouded flute shops are to?
Lawn rocket tendrils are to Finding surreal borders as Sheep monarchs children is to?
Gloating ungloved squires are to Busting double doubters as Pushing woeful doctors are to?
Tricking snowbelt firedogs is to Panmixing blackened haywires as Unclothed shameful leaders are to?
Malicious ranch ritual is to Internal puppet bubble as Ornate underworld masquerade is to?
Rustic debonair Eskimos are to Mindless sassy elves as Gorgeous somber acrobats are to?
Learned earthy pimps are to Fearless sneaky Queens as Somber gentle vagrants are to?
Shocking horse wear is to Glossy sled fluid as Damaged chipmunk tongue is to?
Traditional agony chart is to Damp voodoo motel as Backwoods museum quote is to?
Magical cat cabin is to Dapper porpoise humor as Malicious graveyard foam is to?
Therapeutic gazelle cushion is to Stored alibi equipment as Stunning tempo light is to?
Fantastic rascal art is to Wasted prune dust as Jupiter’s ****** law is to?
Little nut razor is to Gigantic hyena shield as Hourglass pillow fever is to?
Coiled rain clouds are to Dizzy tycoon clowns as Lime eating cowards are to?
Possessive epicurean demonstrators are to Faded eavesdropping giants as Determined swanky drunks are to?
Aquatic preview pocket is to Soggy judicial topiary as Finicky hamster fabric is to?
Enlarged fruit cuff is to Obedient mumbling orchestra as Dark tenant tariff is to?
Recycled flash thermometer is to Botched temptation probe as Pet glider grid is to?
Seriously shy idols are to Costly driving perfumes as Ferryboat chapel wine is to?
Winged jalopy details are to Faithful spectral fathers as Sprinkled mint rainbows are to?
Spelling unneeded words is to Sprouting donut ***** as Blaming mellow mallrats are to?
Eroding loom keepsake is to Magnificent accordion canoe as ***** bongo fumes are to?
Souring violet ink is to Juvenile insult park as Periodic ferret envy is to?
Obedient boyfriend aroma is to Sanitized fat lozenges as Dramatic jailer garb is to?
Mysterious patrol group is to Dynamic maiden discharge as Captured hurricane ratio is to?
Lackadaisical bigot bingo is to Oblong care merchant as Expensive swamp shampoo is to?
Petite orifice worship is to Atomic barge pet as Plucked hair exhibit is to?
Elite officer wallop is to Automatic yard rake as Healing ****** glitter is to?
Needless swan costume is to Giant jungle goat as Organic picnic napkin is to?
Leaky jet steam is to Innovative fascist whistle as Enchanting idol evidence is to?
Plastic mascara seduction is to Greasy thermal ointment as Attractive muskrat crease is to?
Lucky camel pills are to White coral Torah as Eternal stage clutter is to?
Roasted oat **** is to Sloppy *** glue as Nylon table debt is to?
Steep nook catastrophe is to Empty dome damage as Pulsing breeze powder is to?
Empty sack power is to Hitched buck stroke as Red claw warning is to?
Ultra brief slogan is to Yummy lab mutant as Pathetic ball armor is to?
Nauseating fish splatter is to Obstinate ****** twitch as Strained ***** coffee is to?
Mezzanine intermission fossil is to Proven **** apathy as Golden duck shroud is to?
Civil tutors torment is to Thor’s posted theory as Yellow melon rain is to?
Immense olive raft is to Exploding kangaroo buffet as Ethereal witness index is to?  
Marching dark speeders are to Searing scribble fighters as **** tripping sinners are to?
Seeping viral angst is to Aged hermit tea as Murky bowl nibble is to?
Condensed blister guzzle is to Pink dorsal pie as Lavish speckled runt is to?
Needy insult poet is to Sedated acorn trader as Dry honey zoo is to?
Veiled trust flicker is to Deranged poser fashion as Flat sizzle tangent is to?
Purified diet spray is to Nebulous wishing target as Thrilling screen dope is to?
Majestic ribbon astronomy is to Bizarre formation sector as Rebel bell gimmick is to?
Sealed dart whisper is to Green silk draft as Cold vacuum varnish is to?
Clumsy raven power is to Insect island circus as Minted mink drapes are to?
Curved map ruler is to Tiny lethal radio as Blue fused metal is to?
Inverted laser invasion is to Damp sheep dump as Puffy gown smoke is to?
Saucy Channel blazer is to Leather goat filament as Starched locomotive hat is to?
Broken jumper leads are to Disgraced mini exorcists as Designer shamrock caulk is to?
Tweaked poachers smokes are to Assorted sulfur pathways as Collected bedlamp trickle is to?
******* bungalow pranks are to Drowsy vapid oafs as Quantized cavern fish are to?
Crawling battle worms are to Vibrating metal pedals as Mentholated matrix wax is to?
Missing meshed rafts are to Liquid rock pipes as Crinkled bean bikinis are to?
Tithing **** joggers are to Perforated buck fronds as Leather zither picks are to?
Fearing truthful cowards is to Rambling preachers mumble as Gazebo ambulance gasoline is to?
Shelving elder’s whiskers is to Poaching goalies pesto as Radical tricycle angst is to?
Mucky gunboat polymer is to Primeval maypole flameout as Cathedral greenhouse intercom is to?
Diaphanous safety prize is to Unleashed saucer lion as Dorky blonde ropewalker is to?
Tapered spring meter is to Silver silo mythology as Misguided judges medallions are to?
Alligator x-ray money is to Cherry unicorn water as Coyote cactus toy is to?
Cowardly dorm scrooge is to Atomized pewter script as Flattened spore smoothies are to?
Trash can yodel is to Flashing wired spam as Exploding chocolate pudding is to?
Sonar blasted bushings are to Threading ruined wheels as Forty shifting boxes are to?
Tiny balloon rebellion is to Softened square cleanser as Iconic soul sucker is to?
Harmony night light is to Spanish nitrogen desire as Squirrel cavern iodine is to?

Lazy winter secret is to Slow airport widget as Silly mustard binder is to?
Elephants raising raisins are to Microscopic lamb planet as Purple hay puppets are to?
Caribou venom vaccine is to Electronic lemonade choir as Demonic princess massage is to?
Beet coated bridge is to Fattened needle point as Mylar monkey spine is to?
Ashy ink dust is to Youngest rabbi planet as Orange cartoon geometry is to?
Cold green chalk is to Cobalt ladder farce as ***** river filters are to?
Sublime sheep master is to Sleeping past rapture as Subliminal bliss jelly is to?
Ocean crust slippers are to Twigged germ radar as Popping sharpie scope is to?
Zen wrapped beep is to Oak foamed code as Wicked flashing sizzle is to?
Dew eyed sleigh is to Say I do as Act as me is to?
Humpback on hammock is to Ham hocking hummer as Hunchback with knapsack is to?
Corned flag jelly is to Draped wing chewers as Tripping swan acid is to?
Futuristic Rembrandt chant is to Almond likened meadows as Asian timber blue is to?
Nap in sack is to Flap on Jack as Ducks dig crack is to?
Flowing flavored lava is to Gleaming optic layers as Enhanced goose gibberish is to?      
Flag tied pajamas are to Saline checker choir as Speed reading quotas is to?
Whipped spam spasms are to Misted shaman scripture as Testing pitched bells is to?
Cave aged eggs are to Crowded tiger cages as ****** wagon pegs are to?
Pigeon towed car is to a Man toad art as Wolf whisker wish is to?
Second hand clothes are to Minute hand gestures as Final hour prayer is to?
Slick wicked shavers are to Tricky watch boxes as Sprouting pine tattoos are to?
Waxed stick ravens are to Match stick foxes as Narrowed thermal towers are to?
Ice cave rice is to Laced face lice as Gourmet pet **** is to?
Diamond lane anniversary is to Space age appropriate as Time travel agency is to?
Lime bark violin is to Lemon twig guitar as Lunar sky waffles are to?
Fake rat **** is to Smart cake batter as Rugged fur tax is to?
Tarred raft fluff is to Flaked rafter dust as Lined liquor flask is to?
Flakes will fall is to Take Bills call as Broken maze compass is to?
First faked voter is to Entombed cartoon honey as Smallest aching smurf is to?
Fancy bared ******* are to Flaky fairy treats as Kings amp filter is to?
Bone window folio is to Whittled fake pillow as Little fitted jackets are to?
Nine nuts brittle is to Ate pear pie as Six packed poppers are to?
Incandescent playground pencil is to Elastic hand worm as Perfumed piano ink is to?
Opal shifting anode is to a Windup lion decoy as Pale paisley trolley is to?
Stacked black boxes are to Old packed tracks as a Throwing micron hammers is to?
Apricot bark furnace is to Merry Orchid Choir as an Ivory rinsing funnel is to?  
Narcotic honey nuts are to Slick flag toffees as Silk fig sugar is to?
Orange coin raisins are to Low note candies as Smelling balled roses is to?
Pocket packed monotints are to Tragic ladder hayracks as Ravishing speed traders are to?
Crayon spider resin is to Coral squirrel forceps as Wolf tumbled loaf is to?  
Silver wheat flies are to Width shifting wheels as Golden blister blankets are to?
Really tiny hippopotamus is to Masked fat podiatrist as a Sad sack psychiatrist is to?
Miniature Mesopotamian monuments are to Apple minted elephants as Raising wise ravens is to?
Lathered nymph nacre is to Sonic ion constellations as Concealed iron craft is to?  
Epic gene toy is to Ladies bubble sled as Jagged data bowl is to?
Bugged dagger bag is to Pop sliced meld as Atom bending moonlight to?  
Rural madam’s deed is to Dyed dew dipper as Eight sprayed dukes are to?
Jiffy grand puffer is to Floating altar myth as Vintage dark mirth is to?
Undercover overnight underwear is to Overpaid undertaker overdosing as Overheard understudy freebasing is to?

Black grape crackle is to Red cactus ruffle as Installing padded pets are to?
Snide snobs sniffing are to Sneaky snails snoring as Snared snipes sneezing are to?
Exploring explosive exits is to Explaining expansive exports as Expecting expert exchange is to?
Shrewd logic ledger is to Puppets dropping cupcakes as Placated topaz octopi are to?
Door roof tools are to Cool wool boots as Wood cooked root is to?
Bright fight light is to Night flight fright as Mites bite site is to?
Floor flood fluid is to Wooden door Druid as Nasty **** broom is to?
Accurate police photography is to Intelligent microbe geography as Condensed aerosol biography is to?
Cowardly cowboy grime is to Corpulent corporate crime as Bosnian dwarf necromancer is to?
Jell-O clearing shaker is to Brillo cleaning shiner as Cheerios bowling shields are to?
Mumbled mindless hokey is to Fumbled found money as Humming kinder bunny is to?
Daisy’s clock setter is to Lilly’s boxer toxin as Poodles rose paddle is to?
Watch Bozo Copernicus is to Hire Clarabelle Newton as Find ***-wee Einstein is to?
Amethyst thistle whistles is to Lapis pistol whip as Diamond bomb scar is to?
Dandelion seahorse rescue is to Crabapple dogwood farm as Faux foxglove lover is to?    
Optical poppy stopper is to Polar halo lens as Day-Glo rainbow sticker is to?
Savanna leopard spotted is to Eskimo lassos kisses as Alligator lemonade standard is to?
Bill of Rights is to Will of left as Thrill of night is to?
Baptize floozies quickly is to Useless outsized nozzles as Puzzled wizard wanders is to?        
Chaps wearing chaps are to Chaps contesting contests as Consoling concealed consoles is to?
Quiet squirming squirrels are to Aeon beauty queens as Queasy greasy luaus is to?
Knew new gnu is to Sense scents cents as We’ll wheal wheel is to?
Blazing zingers ringing are to Wheezing singers flinging as Freezing finger number are to?
Lamb tomb jogger is to Dumb numb **** as Thumbed crumb bug is to?

Blue accordion casket is to Jaded scholar ***** as German mushroom circus is to?
President George Flintstone is to Funny Fred Washington as Abraham Jetson’s dog is to?
Google Desmond Tutu is to Kalamazoo Zoo Park as Zodiac actors Guru is to?
Swamp cradled whisperer is to Cherished drawbridge cello as Bludgeoned prankster outlaws are to?
Dukes pink mittens are to Smeared nest carava
Meena Menon Sep 2021
Flicker Shimmer Glow

The brightest star can shine even with thick black velvet draped over it.  
Quartz, lime and salt crystals formed a glass ball.
The dark womb held me, warm and soft.  
My mom called my cries when I was born the most sorrowful sound she had ever heard.  
She said she’d never heard a baby make a sound like that.    
I’d open my eyes in low light until the world’s light healed rather than hurt.  
The summer before eighth grade, July 1992,
I watched a shooting star burn by at 100,000 miles per hour as I stood on the balcony  
while my family celebrated my birthday inside.  
It made it into the earth’s atmosphere
but it didn’t look like it was coming down;
I know it didn’t hit the ground but it burned something in the time it was here.  
The glass ball of my life cracked inside.  
Light reflected off the salt crystal cracks.  
I saw the beauty of the light within.  
Nacre from my shell kept those cracks from getting worse,
a wild pearl as defense mechanism.  
In 2001, I quit my job after they melted and poured tar all over my life.  
All summer literature class bathtubs filled with rose hip oil cleaned the tar.  
That fall logic and epistemology classes spewed black ink all over my philosophy
written over ten years then.  
Tar turned to asphalt when I met someone from my old job for a drink in November
and it paved a road for my life that went to the hospital I was in that December
where it sealed the roof on my life
when I was almost murdered there
and in February after meeting her for another drink.  
They lit a fire at the top of the glacier and pushed the burning pile of black coal off the edge,
burnt red, looking like flames falling into the valley.  
While that blazed the side of the cliff something lit an incandescent light.  
The electricity from the metal lightbulb ***** went through wires and heated the filament between until it glowed.  
I began putting more work into emotional balance from things I learned at AA meetings.  
In Spring 2003, the damage that the doctors at the hospital in 2001 had done
made it harder for light to reflect from the cracks in the glass ball.
I’d been eating healthy and trying to get regular exercises since 1994
but in Spring 2003 I began swimming for an hour every morning .  
The water washed the pollution from the burning coals off
And then I escaped in July.  
I moved to London to study English Language and Linguistics.  
I would’ve studied English Language and Literature.  
I did well until Spring 2004 when I thought I was being stalked.  
I thought I was manic.  
I thought I was being stalked.  
I went home and didn’t go back for my exams after spring holiday.  
Because I felt traumatized and couldn’t write poetry anymore,
I used black ink to write my notes for my book on trauma and the Russian Revolution.
I started teaching myself German.  
I stayed healthy.  
In 2005, my parents went to visit my mom’s family in Malaysia for two weeks.
I thought I was being stalked.  
I knew I wasn’t manic.  
I thought I was being stalked.  
I told my parents when they came home.  
They thought I was manic.  
I showed them the shoe prints in the snow of different sizes from the woods to the windows.  
They thought I was manic.  
I was outside of my comfort zone.  
I moved to California. I found light.  
I made light,
the light reflected off the salt crystals I used to heal the violence inflicted on me from then on.  
The light turned the traffic lights to not just green from red
but amber and blue.  
The light turned the car signals left and right.  
The light reflected off of salt crystals, light emitting diodes,
electrical energy turned directly to light,
electroluminescence.  
The electrical currents flowed through,
illuminating.  
Alone in the world, I moved to California in July 2005
but in August  I called the person I escaped in 2003,
the sulfur and nitrogen that I hated.  
He didn’t think I was manic but I never said anything.
I never told him why I asked him to move out to California.  
When his coal seemed like only pollution,
I asked him to leave.  
He threatened me.  
I called the authorities.  
They left me there.
He laughed.  
Then the violence came.  
****:  stabbed and punched, my ****** bruised, purple and swollen.  
The light barely reflected from the glass ball wIth cracks through all the acid rain, smoke and haze.
It would take me half an hour to get my body to do what my mind told it to after.  
My dad told me my mom had her cancer removed.
The next day, the coal said if I wanted him to leave he’d leave.  
I booked his ticket.
I drove him to the airport.  
Black clouds gushed the night before for the first time in months,
the sky clear after the rain.  
He was gone and I was free,
melted glass, heated up and poured—
looked like fire,
looked like the Snow Moon in February
with Mercury in the morning sky.  
I worked through ****.  
I worked to overcome trauma.  
Electricity between touch and love caused acid rain, smoke, haze, and mercury
to light the discharge lamps, streetlights and parking lot lights.
Then I changed the direction of the light waves.  
Like lead glass breaks up the light,
lead from the coal, cleaned and replaced by potassium,
glass cut clearly, refracting the light,
electrolytes,
electrical signals lit through my body,
thick black velvet drapes gone.  





















Lava

I think that someone wrote into some palm leaf a manuscript, a gift, a contract.  
After my parents wedding, while they were still in India,
they found out that my dad’s father and my mom’s grandfather worked for kings administering temples and collecting money for their king from the farmers that worked the rice paddies each king owned.  They both left their homes before they left for college.  
My dad, a son of a brahmin’s son,
grew up in his grandmother’s house.  
His mother was not a Brahmin.  
My mother grew up in Malaysia where she saw the children from the rubber plantation
when she walked to school.  
She doesn’t say what caste she is.  
He went to his father’s house, then college.  
He worked, then went to England, then Canada.  
She went to India then Canada.  
They moved to the United States around Christmas 1978
with my brother while she was pregnant with me.  
My father signed a contract with my mother.  
My parents took ashes and formed rock,
the residue left in brass pots in India,
the rocks, so hot, they turned back to lava miles away before turning back to ash again,
then back to rock,
the lava from a super volcano,
the ash purple and red.  


















Circles on a Moss Covered Volcano

The eruption beatifies the magma.  
It becomes obsidian,
only breaks with a fracture,
smooth circles where it breaks.  

My mom was born on the grass
on a lawn
in a moss covered canyon at the top of a volcanic island.  
My grandfather lived in Malaysia before the Japanese occupied.  
When the volcano erupted,
the lava dried at the ocean into black sand.  
The British allied with the Communist Party of Malaysia—
after they organized.  
After the Americans defeated the Japanese at Pearl Harbor,
the British took over Malaysia again.  
They kept different groups apart claiming they were helping them.  
The black sand had smooth pebbles and sharp rocks.  
Ethnic Malay farmers lived in Kampongs, villages.  
Indians lived on plantations.  
The Chinese lived in towns and urban areas.  
Ethnic Malays wanted independence.
In 1946, after strikes, demonstrations, and boycotts
the British agreed to work with them.  
The predominantly Chinese Communist Party of Malaysia went underground,
guerrilla warfare against the British,
claiming their fight was for independence.  
For the British, that emergency required vast powers
of arrest, detention without trial and deportation to defeat terrorism.  
The Emergency became less unpopular as the terrorism became worse.  
The British were the iron that brought oxygen through my mom’s body.  
She loved riding on her father’s motorcycle with him
by the plantations,
through the Kampongs
and to the city, half an hour away.  
The British left Malaysia independent in 1957
with Malaysian nationalists holding most state and federal government offices.  
As the black sand stretches towards the ocean,
it becomes big stones of dried lava, flat and smooth.  

My mom thought her father and her uncle were subservient to the British.  
She thought all things, all people were equal.  
When her father died when she was 16, 1965,
they moved to India,
my mother,
a foreigner in India, though she’s Indian.  
She loved rock and roll and mini skirts
and didn’t speak the local language.  
On the dried black lava,
it can be hard to know the molten lava flickers underneath there.  
Before the Korean War,
though Britain and the United States wanted
an aggressive resolution
condemning North Korea,
they were happy
that India supported a draft resolution
condemning North Korea
for breach of the peace.  
During the Korean War,
India, supported by Third World and other Commonwealth nations,
opposed United States’ proposals.
They were able to change the U.S. resolution
to include the proposals they wanted
and helped end the war.  
China wanted the respect of Third World nations
and saw the United States as imperialist.  
China thought India was a threat to the Third World
by taking aid from the United States and the Soviets.  
Pakistan could help with that and a seat at the United Nations.  
China wanted Taiwan’s seat at the UN.
My mother went to live with her uncle,
a communist negotiator for a corporation,
in India.  
A poet,
he threw parties and invited other artists, musicians and writers.  
I have the same brown hyperpigmentation at my joints that he had.  
During the day, only the steam from the hot lava can be seen.  
In 1965, Pakistani forces went into Jammu and Kashmir with China’s support.  
China threatened India after India sent its troops in.  
Then they threatened again before sending their troops to the Indian border.  
The United States stopped aid to Pakistan and India.
Pakistan agreed to the UN ceasefire agreement.  
Pakistan helped China get a seat at the UN
and tried to keep the west from escalating in Vietnam.  
The smoldering sound of the lava sizzles underneath the dried lava.  
When West Pakistan refused to allow East Pakistan independence,
violence between Bengalis and Biharis developed into upheaval.  
Bengalis moved to India
and India went into East Pakistan.  
Pakistan surrendered in December 1971.  
East Pakistan became independent Bangladesh

The warm light of the melted lava radiates underneath but burns.  
In 1974, India tested the Smiling Buddha,
a nuclear bomb.  
After Indira Gandhi’s conviction for election fraud in 1973,
Marxist Professor Narayan called for total revolution
and students protested all over India.  
With food shortages, inflation and regional disputes
like Sikh separatists training in Pakistan for an independent Punjab,
peasants and laborers joined the protests.  
Railway strikes stopped the economy.  
In 1975, Indira Gandhi, the Iron Lady,
declared an Emergency,
imprisoning political opponents, restricting freedoms and restricting the press,
claiming threats to national security
because the war with Pakistan had just ended.  
The federal government took over Kerala’s communist dominated government and others.  

My mom could’ve been a dandelion, but she’s more like thistle.  
She has the center that dries and flutters in the wind,
beautiful and silky,
spiny and prickly,
but still fluffy, downy,
A daisy.
They say thistle saved Scotland from the Norse.  
Magma from the volcano explodes
and the streams of magma fly into the air.  
In the late 60s,
the civil rights movement rose
against the state in Northern Ireland
for depriving Catholics
of influence and opportunity.
The Northern Irish police,
Protestant and unionist, anti-catholic,
responded violently to the protests and it got worse.  
In 1969, the British placed Arthur Young,
who had worked at the Federation of Malaya
at the time of their Emergency
at the head of the British military in Northern Ireland.
The British military took control over the police,
a counter insurgency rather than a police force,
crowd control, house searches, interrogation, and street patrols,
use of force against suspects and uncooperative citizens.  
Political crimes were tolerated by Protestants but not Catholics.  
The lava burns the rock off the edge of the volcano.  

On January 30, 1972, ****** Sunday,  
British Army policing killed 13 unarmed protesters
fighting for their rights over their neighborhood,
protesting the internment of suspected nationalists.
That led to protests across Ireland.  
When banana leaves are warmed,
oil from the banana leaves flavors the food.  
My dad flew from Canada to India in February 1972.  
On February 4, my dad met my mom.  
On February 11, 1972,
my dad married my mom.  
They went to Canada,
a quartz singing bowl and a wooden mallet wrapped in suede.  
The rock goes down with the lava, breaking through the rocks as it goes down.  
In March 1972, the British government took over
because they considered the Royal Ulster Police and the Ulster Special Constabulary
to be causing most of the violence.  
The lava blocks and reroutes streams,
melts snow and ice,
flooding.  
Days later, there’s still smoke, red.  
My mom could wear the clothes she liked
without being judged
with my dad in Canada.  
She didn’t like asking my dad for money.
My dad, the copper helping my mother use that iron,
wanted her to go to college and finish her bachelors degree.
She got a job.  
In 1976, the police took over again in Northern Ireland
but they were a paramilitary force—
armored SUVs, bullet proof jackets, combat ready
with the largest computerized surveillance system in the UK,
high powered weapons,
trained in counter insurgency.  
Many people were murdered by the police
and few were held accountable.  
Most of the murdered people were not involved in violence or crime.  
People were arrested under special emergency powers
for interrogation and intelligence gathering.  
People tried were tried in non-jury courts.  
My mom learned Malayalam in India
but didn’t speak well until living with my dad.  
She also learned to cook after getting married.  
Her mother sent her recipes; my dad cooked for her—
turmeric, cumin, coriander, cayenne and green chiles.  
Having lived in different countries,
my mom’s food was exposed to many cultures,
Chinese and French.
Ground rock, minerals and glass
covered the ground
from the ash plume.  
She liked working.  

A volcano erupted for 192 years,
an ice age,
disordered ices, deformed under pressure
and ordered ice crystals, brittle in the ice core records.  
My mother liked working.  
Though Khomeini was in exile by the 1970s in Iran,
more people, working and poor,
turned to him and the ****-i-Ulama for help.
My mom didn’t want kids though my dad did.
She agreed and in 1978 my brother was born.
Iran modernized but agriculture and industry changed so quickly.  
In January 1978, students protested—
censorship, surveillance, harassment, illegal detention and torture.  
Young people and the unemployed joined.  
My parents moved to the United States in December 1978.  
The regime used a lot of violence against the protesters,
and in September 1978 declared martial law in Iran.  
Troops were shooting demonstrators.
In January 1979, the Shah and his family fled.  
On February 11, 1979, my parents’ anniversary,
the Iranian army declared neutrality.  
I was born in July 1979.
The chromium in emeralds and rubies colors them.
My brother was born in May and I was born in July.

Obsidian—
iron, copper and chromium—
isn’t a gas
but it isn’t a crystal;
it’s between the two,
the ordered crystal and the disordered gas.  
They made swords out of obsidian.  





Warm Light Shatters

The eruption beatifies the magma.  
It becomes obsidian,
only breaks with a fracture,
smooth circles where it breaks.  

My dad was born on a large flat rock on the edge of the top
of a hill,
Molasses, sweet and dark, the potent flavor dominates,
His father, the son of a Brahmin,
His mother from a lower caste.
His father’s family wouldn’t touch him,
He grew up in his mother’s mother’s house on a farm.  
I have the same brown hyperpigmentation spot on my right hand that he has.

In 1901, D’Arcy bought a 60 year concession for oil exploration In Iran.
The Iranian government extended it for another 32 years in 1933.
At that time oil was Iran’s “main source of income.”
In 1917’s Balfour Declaration, the British government proclaimed that they favored a national home for the Jews in Palestine and their “best endeavors to facilitate the achievement” of that.

The British police were in charge of policing in the mandate of Palestine.  A lot of the policemen they hired were people who had served in the British army before, during the Irish War for Independence.  
The army tried to stop how violent the police were, police used torture and brutality, some that had been used during the Irish War for Independence, like having prisoners tied to armored cars and locomotives and razing the homes of people in prison or people they thought were related to people thought to be rebels.
The police hired Arab police and Jewish police for lower level policing,
Making local people part of the management.
“Let Arab police beat up Arabs and Jewish police beat up Jews.”

The lava blocks and reroutes streams, melts snow and ice, flooding.
In 1922, there were 83,000 Jews, 71,000 Christians, and 589,000 Muslims.
The League If Nations endorsed the British Mandate.
During an emergency, in the 1930s, British regulations allowed collective punishment, punishing villages for incidents.
Local officers in riots often deserted and also shared intelligence with their own people.
The police often stole, destroyed property, tortured and killed people.  
Arab revolts sapped the police power over Palestinians by 1939.

My father’s mother was from a matrilineal family.
My dad remembers tall men lining up on pay day to respectfully wait for her, 5 feet tall.  
She married again after her husband died.
A manager from a tile factory,
He spoke English so he supervised finances and correspondence.
My dad, a sunflower, loved her: she scared all the workers but exuded warmth to the people she loved.

Obsidian shields people from negative energy.
David Cargill founded the Burmah Oil Co. in 1886.
If there were problems with oil exploration in Burma and Indian government licenses, Persian oil would protect the company.  
In July 1906, many European oil companies, BP, Royal Dutch Shell and others, allied to protect against the American oil company, Standard Oil.
D’Arcy needed money because “Persian oil took three times as long to come on stream as anticipated.”
Burmah Oil Co. began the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. as a subsidiary.
Ninety-seven percent of British Petroleum was owned by Burmah Oil Co.
By 1914, the British government owned 51% of the Anglo-Persian Oil Co.  
Anglo-Persian acquired independence from Burmah Oil and Royal Dutch Shell with two million pounds from the British government.

The lava burns the rock off the edge of the volcano.
In 1942, after the Japanese took Burma,
the British destroyed their refineries before leaving.
The United Nations had to find other sources of oil.
In 1943, Japan built the Burma-Thailand Railroad with forced labor from the Malay peninsula who were mostly from the rubber plantations.

The rock goes down with the lava, breaking through the rocks as it goes down.
In 1945. Japan destroyed their refineries before leaving Burma.
Cargill, Watson and Whigham were on the Burmah Oil Co. Board and then the Anglo Iranian Oil Co. Board.  

In 1936 Palestine, boycotts, work stoppages, and violence against British police officials and soldiers compelled the government to appoint an investigatory commission.  
Leaders of Egypt, Trans Jordan, Syria and Iraq helped end the work stoppages.
The British government had the Peel Commission read letters, memoranda, and petitions and speak with British officials, Jews and Arabs.  
The Commission didn’t believe that Arabs and Jews could live together in a single Jewish state.
Because of administrative and financial difficulties the Colonial Secretary stated that to split Palestine into Arab and Jewish states was impracticable.  
The Commission recommended transitioning 250,000 Arabs and 1500 Jews with British control over their oil pipeline, their naval base and Jerusalem.  
The League of Nations approved.
“It will not remove the grievance nor prevent the recurrence,” Lord Peel stated after.
The Arab uprising was much more militant after Peel.  Thousands of Arabs were wounded, ten thousand were detained.  
In Sykes-Picot and the Husain McMahon agreements, the British promised the Arabs an independent state but they did not keep that promise.  
Representatives from the Arab states rejected the Peel recommendations.
United Nations General Assembly Resolution181 partitioned Palestine into Arab and Jewish states with an international regime for the city of Jerusalem backed by the United States and the Soviet Union.  

The Israeli Yishuv had strong military and intelligence organization —-  
the British recognized that their interest was with the Arabs and abstained from the vote.  
In 1948, Israel declared the establishment of its state.  
Ground rock, minerals, and gas covered the ground from the ash plume.
The Palestinian police force was disbanded and the British gave officers the option of serving in Malaya.

Though Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy supported snd tried to get Israel to offer the Arabs concessions, it wasn’t a major priority and didn’t always approve of Israel’s plans.
Arabs that had supported the British to end Turkish rule stopped supporting the West.  
Many Palestinians joined left wing groups and violent third world movements.  
Seventy-eight percent of the territory of former Palestine was under Israel’s control.  

My dad left for college in 1957 and lived in an apartment above the United States Information services office.
Because he graduated at the top of his class, he was given a job with the public works department of the government on the electricity board.  
“Once in, you’ll never leave.”
When he wanted a job where he could do real work, his father was upset.
He broke the chains with bells for vespers.
He got a job in Calcutta at Kusum Products and left the government, though it was prestigious to work there.
In the chemical engineering division, one of the projects he worked on was to design a *** distillery, bells controlled by hammers, hammers controlled by a keyboard.
His boss worked in the United Kingdom for. 20 years before the company he worked at, part of Power Gas Corporation, asked him to open a branch in Calcutta.
He opened the branch and convinced an Industrialist to open a company doing the same work with him.  The branch he opened closed after that.  
My dad applied for labor certification to work abroad and was selected.  
His boss wrote a reference letter for my him to the company he left in the UK.  My dad sent it telling the company when he was leaving for the UK.  
The day he left for London, he got the letter they sent in the mail telling him to take the train to Sheffield the next day and someone from the firm would meet him at the station.  
His dad didn’t know he left, he didn’t tell him.
He broke the chains with chimes for schisms.


Anglo-Persian Oil became Anglo-Iranian Oil in 1935.
The British government used oil and Anglo-Persian oil to fight communism, have a stronger relationship with the United States and make the United Kingdom more powerful.  
The National Secularists, the Tudeh, and the Communists wanted to nationalize Iran’s oil and mobilized the Iranian people.
The British feared nationalization in Iran would incite political parties like the Secular Nationalists all over the world.  
In 1947, the Iranian government passed the Single Article Law that “[increased] investment In welfare benefits, health, housing, education, and implementation of Iranianization through substitution of foreigners” at Anglo-Iranian Oil Co.
“Anglo-Iranian Oil Company made more profit in 1950 than it paid to the Iranian government in royalties over the previous half century.”
The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company tried to negotiate a new concession and claimed they’d hire more Iranian people into jobs held by British and people from other nationalities at the company.
Their hospitals had segregated wards.  
On May 1, 1951, the Iranian government passed a bill that nationalized Anglo- Iranian Oil Co.’s holdings.  
During the day, only the steam from the hot lava can be seen.
In August 1953, the Iranian people elected Mossadegh from the Secular Nationalist Party as prime minister.
The British government with the CIA overthrew Mossadegh using the Iranian military after inducing protests and violent demonstrations.  
Anglo-Iranian Oil changed its name to British Petroleum in 1954.
Iranians believe that America destroyed Iran’s “last chance for democracy” and blamed America for Iran’s autocracy, its human rights abuses, and secret police.

The smoldering sound of the lava sizzles underneath the dried lava.  
In 1946, Executive Yuan wanted control over 4 groups of Islands in the South China Sea to have a stronger presence there:  the Paracels, the Spratlys, Macclesfield Bank, and the Pratas.
The French forces in the South China Sea would have been stronger than the Chinese Navy then.
French Naval forces were in the Gulf of Tonkin, U.S. forces were in the Taiwan Strait, the British were in Hong Kong, and the Portuguese were in Macao.
In the 1950s, British snd U.S. oil companies thought there might be oil in the Spratlys.  
By 1957, French presence in the South China Sea was hardly there.  

When the volcano erupted, the lava dried at the ocean into black sand.
By 1954, the Tudeh Party’s communist movement and  intelligence organization had been destroyed.  
Because of the Shah and his government’s westernization policies and disrespectful treatment of the Ulama, Iranians began identifying with the Ulama and Khomeini rather than their government.  
Those people joined with secular movements to overthrow the Shah.  

In 1966, Ne Win seized power from U Nu in Burma.
“Soldiers ruled Burma as soldiers.”
Ne Win thought that western political
Institutions “encouraged divisions.”
Minority groups found foreign support for their separatist goals.
The Karens and the Mons supported U Nu in Bangkok.  


Rare copper, a heavy metal, no alloys,
a rock in groundwater,
conducts electricity and heat.
In 1965, my Dad’s cousin met him at Heathrow, gave him a coat and £10 and brought him to a bed and breakfast across from Charing Cross Station where he’d get the train to Sheffield the next morning.
He took the train and someone met him at the train station.  
At the interview they asked him to design a grandry girder, the main weight bearing steel girder as a test.
Iron in the inner and outer core of the earth,
He’d designed many of those.  
He was hired and lived at the YMCA for 2 1/2 years.  
He took his mother’s family name, Menon, instead of his father’s, Varma.
In 1967, he left for Canada and interviewed at Bechtel before getting hired at Seagrams.  
Iron enables blood to carry oxygen.
His boss recommended him for Dale Carnegie’s leadership training classes and my dad joined the National Instrument Society and became President.
He designed a still In Jamaica,
Ordered all the parts, nuts and bolts,
Had all the parts shipped to Jamaica and made sure they got there.
His boss supervised the construction, installation and commission in Jamaica.
Quartz, heat and fade resistant, though he was an engineer and did the work of an engineer, my dad only had the title, technician so my dad’s boss thought he wasn’t getting paid enough but couldn’t get his boss to offer more than an extra $100/week or the title of engineer; he told my dad he thought he should leave.
In 1969, he got a job at Celanese, which made rayon.
He quit Celanese to work at McGill University and they allowed him to take classes to earn his MBA while working.  

The United States and Israel’s alliance was strong by 1967.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 at the end of the Third Arab Israeli War didn’t mention the Palestinians but mentioned the refugee problem.
After 1967, the Palestinians weren’t often mentioned and when mentioned only as terrorists.  
Palestinians’ faith in the “American sponsored peace process” diminished, they felt the world community ignored and neglected them also.
Groups like MAN that stopped expecting anything from Arab regimes began hijacking airplanes.
By 1972, the Palestine Liberation Organization had enough international support to get by the United States’ veto in the United Nations Security Council and Arab League recognition as representative of the Palestinian people.
The Palestinians knew the United States stated its support, as the British had, but they weren’t able to accomplish anything.  
The force Israel exerted in Johnson’s United States policy delivered no equilibrium for the Palestinians.  

In 1969, all political parties submitted to the BSPP, Burma Socialist Programme Party.
Ne Win nationalized banks and oil and deprived minorities of opportunities.
Ne Win became U Nu Win, civilian leader of Burma in 1972 and stopped the active role that U Nu defined for Burma internationally
He put military people in power even when they didn’t have experience which triggered “maldistribution of goods and chronic shortages.”  
Resources were located in areas where separatist minorities had control.

The British presence in the South China Sea ended in 1968.  
The United States left Vietnam in 1974 and China went into the Western Paracels.
The U.S. didn’t intervene and Vietnam took the Spratlys.
China wanted to claim the continental shelf In the central part of the South China Sea and needed the Spratlys.
The United States mostly disregarded the Ulama In Iran and bewildered the Iranian people by not supporting their revolution.

Obsidian—
iron, copper and chromium—
isn’t a gas
but it isn’t a crystal;
it’s between the two,
the ordered crystal and the disordered gas.  
They made swords out of obsidian.


Edelweiss

I laid out in my backyard in my bikini.  
I love the feeling of my body in the sun.  
I’d be dark from the end of spring until winter.
The snow froze my bare feet through winter ,
my skin pale.
American towns in 1984,
Free, below glaciers the sunlight melted the snow,
a sea of green and the edelweiss on the edge of the  limestone,
frosted but still strong.    
When the spring warmed the grass,
the grass warmed my feet. 
The whole field looked cold and white from the glacier but in the meadow,
the bright yellow centers of those flowers float free in the center of the white petals.
The bright yellow center of those edelweiss scared the people my parents ran to America from India to get away from.  
On a sidewalk in Queens, New York in 1991, the men stared and yelled comments at me in short shorts and a fitted top in the summer.  
I grabbed my dad’s arm.

























The Bread and Coconut Butter of Aparigraha

Twelve year old flowerhead,
Marigold, yarrow and nettle,
I’d be all emotion
If not for all my work
From the time I was a teenager.
I got depressed a lot.
I related to people I read about
In my weather balloon,
Grasping, ignorant, and desperate,
But couldn’t relate to other twelve year olds.
After school I read Dali’s autobiography,
Young ****** Autosodomized by Her Own Chastity.
Fresh, green nettle with fresh and dried yarrow for purity.
Dead souls enticed to the altar by orange marigolds,
passion and creativity,
Coax sleep and rouse dreams.
Satellites measure indirectly with wave lengths of light.
My weather balloon measures the lower and middle levels of the atmosphere directly,
Fifty thousand feet high,
Metal rod thermometer,
Slide humidity sensor,
Canister for air pressure.

I enjoy rye bread and cold coconut butter in my weather balloon,
But I want Dali, and all the artists and writers.
Rye grows at high altitudes
But papyrus grows in soil and shallow water,
Strips of papyrus pith shucked from their stems.
When an anchor’s weighed, a ship sails,
But when grounded we sail.
Marigolds, yarrow and nettle,
Flowerhead,
I use the marigold for sleep,
The yarrow for endurance and intensity,
toiling for love and truth,
And the nettle for healing.
Strong rye bread needs equally strong flavors.
By the beginning of high school,
I read a lot of Beat literature
And found Buddhism.
I loved what I read
But I didn’t like some things.
I liked attachment.  
I got to the ground.
Mushrooms grow in dry soil.
Attachment to beauty is Buddha activity.
Not being attached to things I don’t find beautiful is Buddha activity.  
I fried mushrooms in a single layer in oil, fleshy.
I roasted mushrooms at high temperatures in the oven, crisp.
I simmered mushrooms in stock with kombu.
Rye bread with cold coconut butter and cremini mushrooms,
raw, soft and firm.  
Life continues, life changes,
Attachments, losses, mourning and suffering,
But change lures growth.
I find stream beds and wet soil.
I lay the strips of papyrus next to each other.
I cross papyrus strips over the first,
Then wet the crossed papyrus strips,
Press and cement them into a sheet.
I hammer it and dry it in the sun,
With no thought of achievement or self,
Flowerhead,
Hands filled with my past,
Head filled with the future,
Dali, artists poets,
Wishes and desires aligned with nature,
Abundance,
Cocoa, caraway, and molasses.

If I ever really like someone,
I’ll be wearing the dress he chooses,
Fresh green nettle and yarrow, the seeds take two years to grow strong,
Lasting love.
Marigolds steer dead souls from the altar to the afterlife,
Antiseptic, healing wounds,
Soothing sore throats and headaches.
Imperturbable, stable flowerhead,
I empty my mind.
When desires are aligned with nature, desire flows.
Papyrus makes paper and cloth.
Papyrus makes sails.
Charcoal from the ash of pulverized papyrus heals wounds.
Without attachment to the fruit of action
There is continuation of life,
Rye bread and melted coconut butter,
The coconut tree in the coconut butter,
The seed comes from the ground out of nothing,
Naturalness.
It has form.
As the seed grows the seed expresses the tree,
The seed expresses the coconut,
The seed expresses the coconut butter.
Rye bread, large open hollows, chambers,
Immersed in melted coconut butter,
Desire for expansion and creation,
No grasping, not desperate.
When the mind is compassion, the mind is boundless.
Every moment,
only that,
Every moment,
a scythe to the papyrus in the stream bed of the past.  

































Sound on Powdery Blue

Potter’s clay, nymph, plum unplumbed, 1993.
Dahlia, ice, powder, musk and rose,
my source of life emerged in darkness, blackness.
Seashell fragments in the sand,
The glass ball of my life cracked inside,
Light reflected off the salt crystal cracks,
Nacre kept those cracks from getting worse.
Young ****** Autosodomized By Her Own Chastity,
Nymph, I didn’t want to give my body,
Torn, *****, ballgown,
To people who wouldn’t understand me,
Piquant.

Outside on the salt flats,
Aphrodite, goddess of beauty, pleasure and fertility and
Asexual Artemis, goddess of animals, and the hunt,
Mistress of nymphs,
Punish with ruthless savagery.

In my bedroom, blue caribou moss covered rocks, pine, and yew trees,
The heartwood writhes as hurricane gales, twisters and whirlwinds
Contort their bark,
Roots strong in the soil.
Orris root dried in the sun, bulbs like wood.
Dahlia runs to baritone soundbath radio waves.
Light has frequencies,
Violet between blue and invisible ultraviolet,
Flame, slate and flint.
Every night is cold.

Torii gates, pain secured as sacred.
An assignation, frost hardy dahlia and a plangent resonant echo.
High frequency sound waves convert to electrical signals,
Breathe from someone I want,
Silt.
Beam, radiate, ensorcel.
I break the bark,
Sap flows and dries,
Resin seals over the tear.
I distill pine,
Resin and oil for turpentine, a solvent.
Quiver, bemired,
I lead sound into my darkness,
Orris butter resin, sweet and warm,
Hot jam drops on snow drops,
Orange ash on smoke,
Balm on lava,
The problem with cotton candy.

Electrical signals give off radiation or light waves,
The narrow frequency range where
The crest of a radio wave and the crest of a light wave overlap,
Infrared.
Glaciers flow, sunlight melts the upper layers of the snow when strong,
A wet snow avalanche,
A torrent, healing.
Brown sugar and whiskey,
Undulant, lavender.
Pine pitch, crystalline, sticky, rich and golden,
And dried pine rosin polishes glass smooth
Like the smell of powdery orris after years.
Softness, flush, worthy/not worthy,
Rich rays thunder,
Intensify my pulse,
Frenzied red,
Violet between blue and invisible ultraviolet.
Babylon—flutter, glow.
Unquenchable cathartic orris.  

















Pink Graphite

Camellias, winter shrubs,
Their shallow roots grow beneath the spongy caribou moss,
Robins egg blue.
After writing a play with my gifted students program in 1991,
I stopped spending all my free time writing short stories,
But the caribou moss was still soft.

In the cold Arctic of that town,
The evergreen protected the camellias from the afternoon sun and storms.
They branded hardy camellias with a brass molded embossing iron;
I had paper and graphite for my pencils.

After my ninth grade honors English teacher asked us to write poems in 1994,
It began raining.
We lived on an overhang.
A vertical rise to the top of the rock.
The rainstorm caused a metamorphic change in the snowpack,
A wet snow avalanche drifted slowly down the moss covered rock,
The snow already destabilized by exposure to the sunlight.

The avalanche formed lakes,
rock basins washed away with rainwater and melted snow,
Streams dammed by the rocks.  
My pencils washed away in the avalanche,
My clothes heavy and cold.
I wove one side of each warp fiber through the eye of the needle and one side through each slot,
Salves, ointments, serums and tinctures.
I was mining for graphite.
They were mining me,
The only winch, the sound through the water.

A steep staircase to the red Torii gates,
I broke the chains with bells for vespers
And chimes for schisms,
And wove the weft across at right angles to the warp.  

On a rocky ledge at the end of winter,
The pink moon, bitters and body butter,
They tried to get  me to want absinthe,
Wormwood for bitterness and regret.
Heat and pressure formed carbon for flakes of graphite.
Heat and pressure,
I made bitters,
Brandy, grapefruit, chocolate, mandarin rind, tamarind and sugar.
I grounded my feet in the pink moss,
paper dried in one hand,
and graphite for my pencils in the other.  



































Flakes

I don’t let people that put me down be part of my life.  
Gardens and trees,
My shadow sunk in the grass in my yard
As I ate bread, turmeric and lemon.
Carbon crystallizes into graphite flakes.
I write to see well,
Graphite on paper.  
A shadow on rock tiles with a shield, a diamond and a bell
Had me ***** to humiliate me.
Though I don’t let people that put me down near me,
A lot of people putting me down seemed like they were following me,
A platform to jump from
While she had her temple.  

There was a pink door to the platform.
I ate bread with caramelized crusts and
Drank turmeric lemonade
Before I opened that door,
Jumped and
Descended into blankets and feathers.
I found matches and rosin
For turpentine to clean,
Dried plums and licorice.  

In the temple,
In diamonds, leather, wool and silk,
She had her shield and bells,
Drugs and technology,
Thermovision 210 and Minox,
And an offering box where people believed
That if their coins went in
Their wishes would come true.

Hollyhock and smudging charcoal for work,  
Belled,
I ground grain in the mill for the bread I baked for breakfast.
The bells are now communal bells
With a watchtower and a prison,
Her shield, a blowtorch and flux,
Her ex rays, my makeshift records
Because Stalin didn’t like people dancing,
He liked them divebombing.
Impurities in the carbon prevent diamonds from forming,
Measured,
The most hard, the most expensive,
But graphite’s soft delocalized electrons move.  






































OCEAN BED

The loneliness of going to sleep by myself.  
I want a bed that’s high off the ground,
a mattress, an ocean.
I want a crush and that  person in my bed.  
Only that,
a crush in my bed,
an ocean in my bed.  
Just love.  
But I sleep with my thumbs sealed.  
I sleep with my hands, palms up.  
I sleep with my hands at my heart.  
They sear my compassion with their noise.  
They hold their iron over their fire and try to carve their noise into my love,
scored by the violence of voices, dark and lurid,  
but not burned.  
I want a man in my bed.  
When I wake up in an earthquake
I want to be held through the aftershocks.  
I like men,
the waves come in and go out
but the ocean was part of my every day.  
I don’t mind being fetishized in the ocean.  
I ran by the ocean every morning.  
I surfed in the ocean.  
I should’ve gone into the ocean that afternoon at Trestles,
holding my water jugs, kneeling at the edge.  














Morning

I want to fall asleep in the warm arms of a fireman.  
I want to wake up to the smell of coffee in my kitchen.  

Morning—the molten lava in the outer core of the earth embeds the iron from the inner core into the earth’s magnetic field.  
The magnetic field flips.  
The sun, so strong, where it gets through the trees it burns everything but the pine.  
The winds change direction.  
Storms cast lightening and rain.  
Iron conducts solar flares and the heavy wind.  
In that pine forest, I shudder every time I see a speck of light for fear of neon and fluorescents.  The eucalyptus cleanses congestion.  
And Kerouac’s stream ululates, crystal bowl sound baths.  
I follow the sound to the water.  
The stream ends at a bluff with a thin rocky beach below.  
The green water turns black not far from the shore.  
Before diving into the ocean, I eat globe mallow from the trees, stems and leaves, the viscous flesh, red, soft and nutty.  
I distill the pine from one of the tree’s bark and smudge the charcoal over my skin.  

Death, the palo santo’s lit, cleansing negative energy.  
It’s been so long since I’ve smelled a man, woodsmoke, citrus and tobacco.  
Jasmine, plum, lime and tuberose oil on the base of my neck comforts.  
Parabolic chambers heal, sound waves through water travel four times faster.  
The sound of the open sea recalibrates.  
I dissolve into the midnight blue of the ocean.  

I want to fall asleep in the warm arms of a fireman.  
I want to wake up to the smell of coffee in my kitchen.  
I want hot water with coconut oil when I get up.  
We’d lay out on the lawn, surrounded by high trees that block the wind.  
Embers flying through the air won’t land in my yard, on my grass, or near my trees.  





Blue Paper

Haze scatters blue light on a planet.  
Frought women, livid, made into peonies by Aphrodites that caught their men flirting and blamed the women, flushed red.
and blamed the women, flushed red.
Frought women, livid, chrysanthemums, dimmed until the end of the season, exchanged and retained like property.  
Blue women enter along the sides of her red Torii gates, belayed, branded and belled, a plangent sound.  
By candles, colored lights and dried flowers she’s sitting inside on a concrete floor, punctures and ruin burnished with paper, making burnt lime from lime mortar.  
Glass ***** on the ceiling, she moves the beads of a Palestinian glass bead bracelet she holds in her hands.  
She bends light to make shadows against  thin wooden slats curbed along the wall, and straight across the ceiling.
A metier, she makes tinctures, juniper berries and cotton *****.
Loamy soil in the center of the room,
A hawthorn tree stands alone,
A gateway for fairies.
large stones at the base protecting,
It’s branches a barrier.  
It’s leaves and shoots make bread and cheese.
It’s berries, red skin and yellow flesh, make jam.
Green bamboo stakes for the peonies when they whither from the weight of their petals.
And lime in the soil.  
She adds wood chips to the burnt lime in the kiln,
Unrolled paper, spools, and wire hanging.
Wood prayer beads connect her to the earth,
The tassels on the end of the beads connect her to spirit, to higher truth.
Minerals, marine mud and warm basins of seawater on a flower covered desk.  
She adds slaked lime to the burnt lime and wood chips.  
The lime converts to paper,
Trauma victims speak,
Light through butterfly wings.  
She’s plumeria with curved petals, thick, holding water
This is what I have written of my book.  I’ll be changing where the poems with the historical research go.  There are four more of those and nine of the other poems.
Jane Tricky Mar 2013
March 3, 2004**

It was a cool night. We sat bundled up sweat pants and hoodies. She lived in a trailer (a mobile home for those who dislike such terminology) on the outskirts of town, on a farm to market road that many blunts had been smoked on. One of our favorite activities was piling into my four door compact car and rolling up delicious strawberry Phillies or Swishers filled with half brown, half green **** of the earth bud. But that’s a different story…
Her parents and sisters were gone for the evening. The porch swing was situated in the backyard just outside the sliding door, beside the riding lawn mower, ratty trampoline which had been bounced on one million and one times (she even broke her tailbone on that stupid recreation device), and the newly constructed chicken coop. The swing creaked every time we swung, but we didn’t mind. I’m sure a small spritz of WD-40 would have cleared it right up but our teenage minds were incapable of such logical decision making.
It was not the first time we had partaken in such events and it certainly would not be the last. The canister was plastic, red, and a familiar sight for most. Anyone who uses a combustible engine fueled by such a horrific liquid knows what I speak of. However, when you’re sixteen and too broke to buy *** and too young to purchase alcohol and cigarettes, sometimes your options are limited. But we must have a vice. It’s a requirement for all humans, regardless of what some might say. Being the reckless young woman I was at the time, I had many of them, and honestly, I still do today. On this particular evening, the heavenly aroma of gasoline was both our friend and our savior. We would inhale and then pass the canister to one another, over and over again. Between the intense sessions of déjà vu and cat naps, our night was a blur. Incessant giggling and talks of silly adolescent affairs was all that occurred. The feeling of being somewhere you’ve been before a thousand times in a row is overwhelming and really makes one question the concept of time and experience. How can I be somewhere now and have been in the exact same position before? How can I experience something that has potentially never occurred because of the inhalation of a substance? It is quite boggling really. After exploring the realm of drugs extensively, it is quite odd to look back at a night in question like this and wonder how a substance can do what it did.
My best friend and I sat there for hours on end, inhaling and chatting. We would occasionally salvage a blunt roach to smoke on or steal a cigarette from her older sister or father. They were never my choice in brands but it’s difficult to be picky when you’re a thief. Up until this point in time, I had always enjoyed the aroma emitted from gasoline. However, this night would mark a change in perception.
The majority of what occurred is not only uninteresting but extremely hard to remember. Gasoline has a way of doing that… expelling memories from your brain in a whirlwind of déjà vu and uncontrollable nap taking. But, at some point in time we decided to take our little private party inside; perhaps because of the weather but more likely because of a lack of clear reasoning.
All I can vividly remember is that we both woke up to her father beating on the window of her bedroom to let him inside the house. We were both so startled by this event occurring that she knocked over the canister filled with the petroleum based product. Quickly scrambling to resolve the issue, we hid the gas can in her closet. We then looked at each other in pure disbelief over the situation. Not only was it scary but it was also quite amusing. The situations we would put ourselves in were always quite delightful, even when they were horrific beyond belief. We tried to muster up a plan of action but it was no use.
She then ran to unlock the door to let her dad in. The first thing he asked upon entrance into the house was, “Why does it smell like gasoline in here?” Obviously we did not have an adequate answer for him other than, “We don’t know, we were wondering the same thing,” The best part is that he never even questioned us. Why would he? We were just sweet teenage girls with smiles plastered across our faces because we had been huffing gasoline all ******* night.
On a night not too far in the future, we would partake in the same type of inhalation but because there was not a canister at my house, we would huff it straight from my grandma’s van. Our neighbor saw us doing it and called the police. For the rest of my grandmother’s life (six short months) she passionately believed that people in our neighborhood were trying to siphon gas from her Chevy Astro. She made me go to an auto parts store to purchase a gas tank lock to deter such activities. That marked the end of our gas huffing days.
CK Baker Apr 2017
Sunday sermons are spilling on the inner city streets
through the green heaps and brown bags
through the downtown whisperers
and sage solitude souls

Army bands prepare for march
(their trench members filling packs with canister and cane)
the high command and tricked militia head pinned
quick on the look for splinter, lorry and skuttle

Traffic patterns change at the COP connect
camouflage bearers break formal stride
battle men slip between colorful floats
unsuspecting slumlords (vein pricked and weary)
grin in their second suite dying rooms

Twitching men and rubbernecks
sit discreetly on the corner wall
JJ and the chief revere a 21 gun salute
holy rollers raise cheer (in a moment of silence)
chess men hold steady
with ivory cues

Flames belt from the distant foundry
streets come alive with crackle and dust
members of the attic group glance down from their perch
an elderly man in a straight jacket (happy in the now)
sits solemnly with a cold reflective stare

It’s not far from the steely mud holes
from the flying fragments and sharp broken dreams
from the arsenal digs and madmen (who quietly turned the *****)
the ivy trellis
and flowing white gown
are a nocturne fit
for this elevated rolling highland
Candace Jun 2014
The driveway was strewn with rotted oak leaves, and Oscar wondered if the old man was still alive. He stopped his car just short of the rusted garage door, knowing that from this vantage point no one from the house could see him. Stepping out of his car, he strode toward the front door. The outside looked much the same as before, ivy gnarling up the walls and spiders webbing around the door. He held up his hand to knock.
“It’s open, Oscar.” He was relieved to hear the old man’s voice through the open window.
“Thanks, Harry. I’ll be right in.” Oscar nudged the front door open and walked into the kitchen. The green wallpaper was faded but the little square table in the corner was clean. The old man had his back to Oscar, stooped over the sink drying the last of a small batch of dishes. Oscar stuck his hands in his sweatshirt pocket.
“The wood looks like it’s staying dry,” Oscar said. The old man gave a slight nod, wiping the counter with slow, decided movements. “I heard it’s been a wet winter.”  
“Not too bad.” The man looked at Oscar with tired eyes. “Those gutters need cleaning, though.”
“I’ll do what I can before I go.”
The old man turned his pale neck back toward the sink. “That’s fine.”
“Do you need anything from town? Or anything?”
The old man didn’t respond. Oscar took his cue to leave, walking through the laundry room and out the back door. An enclosure of thick oaks and cedars faced him, not quite a forest, but more than he could count. His feet carried him on the familiar path, up the mountain where the air was thin, and he struggled to breathe deeply. The trees grew thicker and the path narrower, but he trudged on, finally coming to a stop at a small clearing housing the remains of several tree stumps. In the middle of these stumps sat a bright yellow lawnchair currently unoccupied. Oscar took the opportunity to catch his breath, closing his eyes and lowering himself into the squeaky chair, waiting for her to come. He imagined her sneaking up behind him, covering his eyes. She’d giggle and lope back into the trees beckoning him come to follow her.
He heard a slight rustle through the trees and saw her walk toward him, her steps slower than usual. Her once long hair was cut short against her scalp and her belly protruded in an obvious way. She stopped just short of his arm’s reach, resting one hand over her belly. She cocked her head to the side, looking Oscar up and down. Her eyes settled on his face but not his eyes.
“You got old,” she said.
“You didn’t.” Oscar smiled while she stayed serious.
“I got old and died three times,” she said. “This is me,” she said pointing at her belly.
Oscar reached out to touch her arm, but she took his hand, leading him back out of the clearing down the mountain. He didn’t wonder where they were going. He set aside all the world but her. As he followed behind her, he thought that she looked much different than last time. Her eyes seemed less savage and her skin less pale. He thought she looked strange without her long hair tangled with leaves and wind, and he wondered if the same person that put this baby inside her was also trying to fix her, to make her like everyone else. He tightened his grip on her hand and rushed ahead of her. She gave a tiny laugh and started running after him.
Soon she let go of his hand and sat gracelessly on the ground, resting her head against a tree. Oscar turned around and sat across from her, watching her pick the leaves off a fallen branch.
“This is my tree,” she said, holding up the branch.
“I’ll plant it for you, so it can grow bigger.”
“It’s already dead. Won’t get any bigger.” She began pulling the twigs off the branch, smoothing it into a pole shape.  
“Are you done with college?” she asked.
“Another year.”
“I’m going to go, too.” She sounded like she meant it. Oscar wondered if he had been gone for too long this time. “Soon,” she said.  
Oscar nodded. “You don’t have hair anymore.”
She looked up at Oscar, not meeting his eyes. “It was trapping all my thoughts in my head.”
Oscar smiled. “Now all your thoughts are running around like rabbits having little thought babies of their own.” She laughed out of courtesy, and it bothered him. They sat in silence. He continued to watch her.
“Do you think it’s going to rain today?” she asked.
“Since when do we talk about the weather?”
“I want to.” Oscar said nothing. “I think it’s going to rain. I can smell the water in the air. Do you remember Frankie, that gerbil I had as a kid?”
“I’m leaving again tomorrow.”
“I know.” She started to stand up, bracing herself against the bare branch in her hands. “Frankie knew when it would rain. He did this thing with his ear. Twitch.” She brushed off her pants. “Next time you come back, I’ll be a baby. Brand new and wrinkly.” She met his eyes.
“Are you going to name it after the dad?” He asked, hoping that the dad was long gone.
“No, me.”
Oscar thought she looked very young then, and he could imagine her becoming younger and younger as he continued to age. He would grow into an old man like her father, stooped over and feeble, and she would go to college, reborn without him. Without her hair, she would run faster and he wouldn’t be able to keep up.
“Let’s watch the sunset,” she said, taking his hand. “Go get some lawnchairs and I’ll meet you there.”
He watched her trek up the mountain for a moment before making his descent. As he neared the house, he saw the old man gathering wood, one piece at a time. His bones seemed to creak as he lifted the tarp off the remaining dry wood, feeling which pieces were dry enough. The old man seemed to acutely feel each footstep, pausing on every stair and taking a deep breath, before entering the house. Watching the old man repeat this process again and again, Oscar decided that all the youth in the world did not belong to her. He would preserve her forever as she was now, and by standing in her orbit maybe she could give him everlasting life.
He waved to the old man as he hoisted two lawnchairs over his shoulder. After the old man had walked back inside, seemingly for the last time, Oscar grabbed the half-empty canister by the woodpile and began climbing toward the clearing where she was waiting. He hoped the rain would never come. He arrived out of breath and set up the chairs in their usual places between the tree stumps. She stood at the edge of the clearing, her arms wrapped around her protruding belly, watching as the sun crawled below the tree line. She smiled at him and he beckoned her to sit down. She sat and Oscar told her to close her eyes.
“I want to see,” she said.
“It’s a surprise.”
Oscar crossed the clearing, carrying the canister. He looked as the base of each tree, trying to find the right one in the fading light. “It’s the one on the left,” she shouted.
“Keep your eyes closed.” He tried to sound stern, but he couldn’t stop smiling. He saw the tree and began to pour the contents of the canister onto the trunk.
“I knew you remembered Frankie,” she said. There was a large stone underneath the tree as a monument to the gerbil. Oscar remembered that it was the biggest stone that they could carry as children.
“I know.” Oscar took the makeshift walking stick she had made earlier from her hands and wrapped a piece of his shirt around it. He again crossed the clearing pulling out his lighter. He lit the end of the pole before putting the flame to the gasoline soaked tree. He backed away from the tree as the fire struggled up the wet trunk before flaring in the leaves overhead. It crackled and hissed through pinecones, trying to keep its hold on the damp tree.
Oscar’s leg hit the edge of a stump and he sat down. He felt her walk up next to him. Tearing his gaze away from the fire, he looked up at her, and it seemed to him that her skin mimicked the red of the fire, coming alive in its light. Her eyes were once again untamed, feral. Oscar imagined that no time had passed since he left for college and that no time would ever pass again.
She took his hand, just as the fire spread to another treetop, and put it on her belly. “It won’t burn forever,” she said, letting go of his hand and turning to carry the lawnchair back down the mountain.
It rained. Oscar stayed watching the last embers flicker and die before his feet blindly carried him back to the house where he would clean the gutters and leave.
What keeps you awake at night
Mathematical formulas which make wrong right
Do little planes flying above
Interrupt the little dreams you love

Are nooses plaid, are comforters warm
Do mass produced mattresses break the norm
Is your pillow made with feathers, can you answer the question why
Where, and tell me when, do old people die

In a house with no roof, I stare through ceilings glass
They keep out the rain so I can stare into the past
Every star is dead but I don’t keep corpses alone
Somewhere you’re awake too and I know we’re looking home

(Chorus)
Blue tape holds the crack
From falling apart through the back
Opaque handle
To a wooden cross candle
As spinning rooms concur
I think too much of her
So many thoughts clogging my head
Gotta clear them out with a canister of lead

Somewhere there is sanctuary I can rest at
Somewhere there is a rabbit inside a top hat
I know with a wave of the wand she will appear
Clad in the purest white and the crowd will feel no fear

Over my shoulder there is a map and a sign
The road leads two places, one less divine
I don’t know which I came, or where I’m going to
But I pray that on this road I’ll meet up with you

Over my shoulder spar the devil and the god
And I distance myself from both betrayers very odd
When the devil wins, he’ll come chasing after me
At no sanctuary can I rest; sleep is not to be

(Chorus)
Blue tape holds the crack
From falling apart through the back
Opaque handle
To a wooden cross candle
As spinning rooms concur
I think too much of her
So many thoughts clogging my head
Gotta clear them out with a canister of lead

So who is your devil and how far did he go
Did you let him leave a mark, do you let the marks show
Do you measure every man by the bruises and the kisses
When do you decide he’s worth it, after the hits or the misses

Do you sleep because you’re scared, do you sleep because you’re ready
Do you sleep at all, are earthquakes steady
When you break down is someone else holding the hammer
Do you confide in no one or do you confide in stammer

Faith is like a flame and your body is the wax
But the candle cross burns because wood pays less tax
Have you lost it all, is life now a game
When you dream of me do you see my face or hear my name

(Chorus)
Blue tape holds the crack
From falling apart through the back
Opaque handle
To a wooden cross candle
As spinning rooms concur
I think too much of her
So many thoughts clogging my head
Gotta clear them out with a canister of lead

In order to hold on are you addicted to escape
Can I be your drug; may I be your blue tape
My words are sincere when I say this is no cut and paste
I could always love you and my belt stays on my waist

You could banish demon, you could banish heaven and hell
You could hold my hand and I’d have no tales left to tell
Maybe if you guide me I could leave my road behind
Imagine if you’d guide me, imagine what we’d find

Old people never die; they simply sleep forever
Maybe we can sleep too, if we lie down together
And so is our star dead, but it can be seen far away
Night is for sleeping but it’s brighter than day
6/20/11
Natalie Jan 2018
I could tell you the exact day I became complacent
I can recall the way he parted his hair and the way he touched a steering wheel and the color of his eyes
And how he cared enough about me to make sure I didn't drink and drive
But not enough to stop mixing my drinks all night
And since I can't stand up for myself, he watched as I fell apart
I am a marionette with a broken string but ****, he's a master in the art
Constantly moving me; bending my frame and pulling my wires
And keeping me onstage whenever he desires
But it's hard for me to play my part and keep up with my lines
When I come home smelling like a different cologne each night
When I am just an empty canister they keep bringing to their lips
Begging and pleading me to offer them something with purpose

But it's always the same story:
They fabricate me
I break and I bleed under their idea of self discovery
And my selfish idea of recovery
Out of every sweet name or ***** word they've ever called me
I think I've found that "Lonely" is my favorite thing to be


I haven't lit a cigarette in weeks, but tonight I'll light three;
One for him, one for me, and one for the person I swore I would never be

Listen;
My biggest flaw is that when I settled for feeling comfortable,
When I settled for what he told me I was
I never even bothered learning self-love
Dead Puppy, Broken Men
add opening narration/exposition/explanation; scenario with Jared

Yesterday:

"I've felt alone my entire life. Please don't make me be alone when I'm with you," Shellie begged Jared.
"You're not alone. I love you," was Jared's reply.
"But you won't open up to me."
"It's just really hard. I've always been this way."
"But why?" Shellie desperately yearned for the answers she would never find. "You need to love yourself, or you will never truly love me. You won't be able to."
"I do love you."
"Maybe you just think you do. Saying 'I love you' doesn't make it true. You have to show me that you love me. I can't handle this much longer. Nothing has changed in two years. Nothing."
"I know," Jared begins to cry, "I'm sorry. I really am."
"Don't cry please."
Jared looks away at the black T.V. screen in Shellie's apartment. He is silent for a long time, but eventually Shellie is able to pry his entire childhood out of his sewn-shut lips. She wouldn't take silence for an answer. Not anymore. If Jared hadn't come home, Shellie would have spoken to no one all day. She liked her alone time, but depended on Jared to be her right-hand-man, her main squeeze, her soul mate, and right now -- he simply wasn't being that. He was being something else; a subject of inspection, a psych-ward patient; a lost friend, who she longed to have back.
"Thank you for telling me," Shellie said as she squeezed his shoulders from behind, comforting him with tiny pecks on his cheeks. "Things make more sense now."
Jared said nothing the rest of the night. He instead sketched photos of slimy creatures with clenched teeth into his notebook, creating meticulous lines, surrounding the figure, as if it were travelling through time and space, into a new dimension, far away from this one.

---
Today:
"Did you know that there is a lizard that can only be female, and they don't have ***, they just clone themselves?" Brannan asked Shellie, his best friend.
"I wish I was that lizard..." Shellie sighed.
"What! Why!" Brannan exclaimed with confusion and worry.
"Because. *** messes everything up. I don't know...Maybe I'm just crazy," she stammered, looking for the right words.
"It's Jared, isn't it?" Brannan asked, already knowing the answer, because he knew Shellie.
"Yeah...I'm giving him one more chance. One more and that's strike three, you're out!" She laughed nervously.
"Ooookay," Brannan agreed, "one more chance."
Eli glanced up from the TV and looked at Shellie, wondering how anyone could hurt someone so sweet. But what did he know? He killed people for a living.
"What did he do?" Eli pried.
"I don't want to talk about it anymore. I've talked about it enough. All guys are the same."
"That's not true," Brannan tilted his head to the side in pity.

"The king is here!" Andy announced, as he walked through Brannan's door with a pound of **** in his canister, which was covered in skateboarding stickers and graffiti. Everyone cheered, and Brannan stopped playing Call of Duty, put down his Xbox controller, and picked up the pack of rillos that Eli had bought prior to coming over.
"That game ain't nothing like real life anyway," Eli mentioned, as he put down the other controller and everyone hastily made their way over to the kitchen table. He walked over to the freezer to pull out some Jack Daniels and ice, then went to the cabinets for a glass, turning his army cap backwards, pouring his drink, and taking a swig.

"How much do I owe you?" Brannan asked.
"We'll talk later," Andy replied.
"I was going to tell you, I still don't have what I owe you from last time, but Alexa said there is an opening at Starbucks, so I'll be able to pay you back ASAP man. I really appreciate it."
"Yeah, no problem," Andy said disdainfully.
"I'll roll it!" Shellie yelled to break the tension, as she put down her phone, only to pick it up again to check the time. Her boyfriend would be off work soon. Would she have to text him first again? Was he even thinking of her?
"Go for it!" Brannan tossed the rillo pack to her.
As she was finishing the roll, her phone went off. Shellie believed that maybe there was hope after all.
"Nope, just my dad..." Shellie mumbled to herself and sighed.
"What's wrong?" Brannan asked, with concerned blue eyes, through his thick-rimmed, black glasses.
"It's just Jared," she said as she pushed her lips to one side and looked down at her phone.
"What did he say?” Brannan asked.
“That’s the problem. He hasn’t said anything all day,” she explained in distress. Brannan noticed she hadn’t worn makeup in days, and by the looks of her outfit, she hadn’t been doing daily yoga like usual.
“Maybe he’s just super busy?” Brannan asked reluctantly.
“HE’S busy?? No. I’M busy.” She paused as Andy and Eli raised their eyebrows and widened their eyes. Eli was confused, because she had always seemed happy whenever he saw her. "I'm in school AND I have three jobs. What does he have? ONE job. One. I think he has time to text me, thanks for your input though."
Brannan said nothing, but pressed his teeth together and opened his lips, revealing a worried look with sad eyes, toward his dear friend.
"Yeah. He just doesn't get it. I'm a fire sign and I'm full of passion! Well, partially an air sign, which is probably why I’m so forgiving and understanding. But if he doesn't reciprocate soon, I feel like I'm going to go insane! Like, really? You don't want to go see Star Wars with me? What kind of person are you? Who doesn't like Star Wars? Really though," Shellie added.
"Maybe he's already seen it and doesn't want to tell you," Brannan suggested.
"You think so? Who would he go see it with though? All of his friends have already seen it. Do you think he saw it with his ex?! Oh my God..."
"Here, take this," Eli said as he handed the blunt to Shellie.
She took a big puff and exhaled as she closed her eyes in relief.
"You know what. I'm overthinking this. He just gets anxious in public, that's all," Shellie explained and looked around for reassurance.
"Are you sure that's all?" Brannan asked as he swung his black bangs away from his face.
"I don’t know... He's really mysterious and quiet. It's really hard for him to open up, I think. He didn’t really have a dad growing up. He's gotten better at talking to me, but he's still weird around big crowds of people. He never wants to go anywhere with me. It *****. I think he's learning to get better though. Maybe he's just young, I don’t know, but I'm sick of acting like his mother, you know? Why can't he learn things on his own? We're all scared, but if you don't face your fears at some point, then what's the point?"
Andy couldn’t help but think she sounded like a nagging *****.
"You know you just partially described the personality of a serial killer, right?" Brannan asked with comedic horror on his face.
"Did I?" Shellie asked.
"You deserve better!" Brannan's mom yelled from the living room. She was watching some reality TV show that she shouldn't have been watching. She continued to Shellie, "You deserve someone who takes you out and treats you right! You're a sweet girl!"
Shellie looked down at her phone. Still no text.
"Do you want to hit this?" Shellie yelled to Brannan's mom.
"I'm good, thank you though! I've got to finish these lesson plans for the day care," she explained with a sigh.
"Aww, sounds kinda fun," Shellie said. Shellie had thought about being a teacher, or maybe a counselor, but after helping so many people with different problems, she was starting to second-guess her passion for it.
"Nice blunt," Andy complimented Shellie. He thought Shellie was kind of cute, now that he had caught Eli in Alexa's bed and was no longer drawn to her. Despite her messy hair and mix matched attire, she had things together. She had things going for her. What did Andy have going for him?
"Thanks," Shellie smiled. Jared hated blunts, but he loved cigarettes. It made no sense to her.
"So what have you been up to?" Eli asked Shellie. "It's been a while."
"Just busy, busy. School and work, you know,” she said as she took one final puff before passing the blunt on its way, into the final circulation, never to return to her. She wanted to ask Eli about his life, but knew he couldn't say much, so she just went back to her phone.
Eli looked at Alexa, "Cigarette?" he asked.
"Yes," everyone except Shellie replied.
They all went outside in the freezing cold to get a brief buzz, while Shellie stayed inside, in the warmth, jotting down new business plans for her yoga studio into her phone. She then opened one of her books, but couldn’t focus on the text, so she quickly closed it. She then sat there in jaded silence, waiting for her friends to return from their strange endeavor.

"All the girls at my work are such *******! Like, one day I think they're my friend, then the next day I'm like, who are you?" Alexas was saying to her mom in between inhales and exhales.
Brannan looked at Alexas then at Eli with a look of concern and distaste. His mom noticed his expression and gave a brief response of agreement with her eyes, quickly returning to her daughter's concerns with compassion and empathy.
"Like, Kate said she wanted to hang out and everything, then she just doesn't respond. What the Hell?"
"Yeah, you probably just shouldn't be friends with them," Brannan replied.
"I have to be! I work with them," Alexas explained.
Knowing it was a lost cause, Brannan turned toward the glass door, where one of his cats pawed at the frame. “Aw, look at Izzy,” he said, pointing.
“Awwww,” his mom replied as she sipped on white Beringer.
“Let her out,” Brannan said to Alexa, since she was next to the door ****.
“No! She’ll run away,” Alexa said.
“No she won’t,” Brannan argued, as he made his way behind his sister, slightly pushing her, and letting Izzy outside.
She looked at everyone, let out a small meow, then hopped down into the grass, under a bush, and out of sight.
“Look what you did!”Alexas said, raising her voice.
“She’ll be back…” Brannan assured her, with ****** eyes.
Alexas rolled her eyes and Brannan continued, “She just wants to be free, Al.”
Their mom watched Izzy as she scurried into the neighbor’s yard. “Yeah, she’ll be back,” she said.
Then Eli turned to Andy and said, "You trying to play Call of Duty?"
"Sure," Andy agreed, though all he could think about was how Eli had been in Alexa's sheets the week before. “I’ll ******* **** you dude.”
“Yeah right,” Eli said as he let out a laugh, not knowing that he knew what he knew.

Alexa went to the living room with her mom, and Brannan returned to his spot at the kitchen table next to Shellie. Smoke stained the air, as Brannan picked up his phone and began playing a Pokémon game. Shellie tried to act interested, but all she could think about was Jared. Eli and Andy finished shooting each other and came back to form a circle.
“Bowl?” Brannan asked.
“That’s okay,” Shellie said, “I’m trying to cut back.”
“What…” Brannan said in disbelief. He packed the bowl anyway and handed it to her.
“Naw,” Shellie said.
“Yaw! Brannan yelled.
“No.”
Brannan handed the bowl to Andy and as Andy hit the bowl, he turned to Eli and said, "Hey, so if someone sat 12 million dollars in front of you, and a puppy in front of you, and said: The money is yours, you just have to crush this puppy to bits. Would you do it?" He looked at everyone as if he already knew the answer; as if it was obvious. Andy waited for everyone else to reply first. Brannan had no intentions of replying, since he was trying to be Christ-like lately.
"No, I wouldn't do it," Shellie said.
"Are you serious?!" Eli asked with pure shock on his sun-kissed face.
"Yes, I'm serious. Would you do it?" She leaned forward, almost rocking out of the tall bar stool she was sitting on.
Brannan and Eli chimed in, "You would SO do it."
"I would SO not." She repeated angrily, hitting the blunt and blinking her brown eyes to moisten her contact lenses.
Brannan's younger sister walked into the room to sit down, and Shellie looked to her for an answer. "Would you??" She looked at her with eyes of a beggar's, pleading for understanding and empathy.
"Do what?" Alexa asked, and the boys repeated the scenario, talking with utter excitement.
"A puppy? A cute little puppy?" Alexa asked.
"Yeah, a puppy or 12 million dollars," Andy coaxed.
"I couldn't do it! I could never do that!" Alexa gasped. “Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t!”
"That's what I'm saying," Shellie agreed. "I'm not even a dog person, but I would grab the puppy and run! Maybe report that guy to the animal police or whatever."
"Yeah!" Alexa agreed, as she took off her Starbucks sun visor and laid it on the table, next to Brannan’s laptop, Eli’s sketches, Andy’s backpack, and Shellie’s books.
"You all are crazy!" Andy said. "If the money was right in front of you, you'd do it, no question."
"No," Alexa and Shellie both said firmly.
"You'd just have to see the money, right there in front of you, in person," he kept on going.
Eli took a sip of his whiskey, then made stomping motions with his feet and said, "Haha! Gone! 12 million dollars richer. You know what you can buy with that much money? Tons of new puppies, if you really wanted to." He laughed.
"Yeah, you could **** me and make tons of new friends, too," Shellie said as she rolled her eyes in disgust.
"That's not the same though," Brannan finally spoke. "We don't know this puppy like we know you."
"Well someone does," Shellie insisted.
"Maybe," Brannan replied.
"Someone could," Alexa said. "Unless you **** him."
"Who said it's a boy?" Shellie asked sheepishly.
"You're right. It should be a girl," Alexa agreed, "like sweet little Lola over here." She scooted her chair from the table, and beneath her feet lay her sleeping Border Collie. She got up from her seat and lowered herself to the floor, head to head with the dog. She touched her nose to the dog's nose, kissed the dog’s cheek, and patted her head before returning to her peers on the bar stools above.
Everyone went silent, and Shellie wondered if the boys felt ashamed - so obsessed with power, that they forget to love.

---
Yesterday:

"You know how I told you that I didn't really know my dad growing up?"
"Yeah?"
"Well, it's because he was in jail for a while."
"How come?"
Looking around, as if for help or guidance, Jared hesitated to say what would come next.
"What is it??" Shellie pleaded, her imagination running wild with fear and worry.
"He ***** me."
"W-what..." Shellie was taken aback. She would have never guessed this is what all Jared's anger had stemmed from. Life flashed before her like a lightning bolt. It surged through her entire body, carrying memories of her perfect childhood juxtaposed next to Jared's. She thought of all the times she had met Jared's dad. She thought of how they worked in the same office, and Jared had to see his face every single day. She wondered how deeply this must affect his life, and how little she had noticed. Had she misjudged him completely? Why were all of her boyfriends so damaged? Was she drawn to damage? What if he ended up like his father? She wanted to help him. She had to.
"But how? Or... Like, where?! Did your mom know?"
"That's why she divorced him. He used to rent hotels on the weekends and tell my mom he was taking me along on his business trips. It wasn't until I was seven... I started having nightmares. I couldn't wake up. I'd scream and yell, telling him to get off me."
"Oh, Jared. I love you so much. You know that? I'm here for you. **** him. You don't need him. Your mom is great, and your little brother loves you. I love you. It's surprising how great you turned out, honestly."
"Yeah..." Jared said, slightly offended, but also in agreement.


* note for author from author: add scene with Alexa and Lola -- Lola biting her over and over. He's hurting me, ow!! "She just let her bite her. Over and over again." She did nothing about it. She endured the pain.
Shellie teaches Brannan how to "train" his dog.. play with her, be her friend. She just wants to play. She doesn't want to watch us smoke **** all day. You have to act like a dog sometimes if you want her to love you and be good.
reference to god's of love.. maybe venus and mars
- add more in between blunt roation.. it burns too fast
- create more setting!! (vital)
- add physical fight between Eli and Andy
- add scene with brandon's dad at very beg
Betty Ponder Nov 2013
Retailers hope to net profits with the overlapping of holiday seasons.
Thanksgiving is yet to be history; but, out comes the Christmas trimmings.
No big surprise seeing holiday reminders arriving and filling mail box,
comes with pre-season, this early blitz of commercials on tv now the net.

Early arrival of holiday brings bell ringers standing between shopper's exit,
a failure to repeat and repeat donations, brings looks of extreme displeasure.
Each and every time you enter or exit discount, drug, and many retail stores,
shoppers face not only bell ringers; but, 365 days donate at register requests.

Most can't equal billion dollar give aways by Bill and Melinda Gates' circle.
Most work extremely hard and donate but also choose to live on budgets.
I donate and have nothing against charities; but, how much should one give?
Retailers, putting shoppers on the spot, asking for donations upon check out?

Never a pinch penny when it comes to sharing when there's an "actual" need,
generosity is always a personal choice, I let guilt not be my companion in giving.
Multiple donations to canister's of amnesiac holiday bell ringers? Wont happen!
Nothing against legit charities; but, giving until you're broke, you "will" be needy.
My mother never appeared in public
without lipstick. If we were going out,
I’d have to wait by the door until
she painted her lips and turned
from the hallway mirror,
put on her gloves and picked up her purse,
opening the purse to see
if she’d remembered tissues.

After lunch in a restaurant
she might ask,
"Do I need lipstick?"
If I said yes,
she would discretely turn
and refresh her faded lips.
Opening the black and gold canister,
she’d peer in a round compact
as if she were looking into another world.
Then she’d touch her lips to a tissue.

Whenever I went searching
in her coat pocket or purse
for coins or candy
I’d find, crumpled,
those small white tissues
covered with bloodred kisses.
I’d slip them into to my pocket,
along with the stones and feathers
I thought, back then, I’d keep.
Nat Lipstadt Jan 2014
the theory of entropy

A doctrine of inevitable social decline and degeneration.
or
A single toss of a fair coin has an entropy of one bit. A series of two fair coin tosses has an entropy of two bits. The number of fair coin tosses is its entropy in bits. This random selection between two outcomes in a sequence over time, whether the outcomes are equally probable or not, is often referred to as a Bernoulli process. The entropy of such a process is given by the binary entropy function. The entropy rate for a fair coin toss is one bit per toss. However, if the coin is not fair, then the uncertainty, and hence the entropy rate, is lower. This is because, if asked to predict the next outcome, we could choose the most frequent result and be right more often than wrong. The difference between what we know, or predict, and the information that the unfair coin toss reveals to us is less than one heads-or-tails "message",
or bit, per toss.[5]
~~~~~
**one bit per toss

one love per life

over time we entropy,
degrade our physic,
even our heart~need,
tho ever burning,
gives off less heat,
as the candle aged-consumed,
the eighth day canister of love oil,
the sole remainder,
slow level diminishes.

we keep on tossing the coin,
and with every failed love,
the need, entropies, declines,
the coin is worn down,
making tails-you-lose
the greater probability.

but then all it probably takes,
just another toss,
and bit you are
by the coin of the realm
that-once-discovered,
from her, this realm,
this woman,
you will never leave,
nor coin-toss ever again
Jan. 26, 2014
For my beloved
jesi Gaston Mar 2015
“I've realized,” I write, “the Groucho Marx of the mind is chaos personified. The Groucho Marx of *my mind *was chaos, I revise and already think I should revise again – “you never know where you'll end up,” I think, of me and of Groucho. Either way, Groucho Marx came to me in a thought when I was thinking about a poem I will not finish, that would have been about him. “We were just four jews looking for a laugh,” Groucho says at least twice – once when he was alive and once now as I invoke him – the heavy glasses, the synonymous greasepaint lip, the cigar – lit, with smoke that surrounds and engulfs me, threads tangibly through the air, through my eyes, and through the insides of my sinus densely, like mossy Eldritch Horrors and old movies somehow without stopping my vision. He has a mouth but it doesn't move, he is not alive – instead he is a ghost, instead he is dead but standing there, with me, in space lighted from within – space that's white like the smoke – thickly. Among all this, a ghost in a black suit. At least, I think the suit is black, or bluing black. It is tinged with 50 years of rotting celluloid, and paired with a white button up underneath – no tie.
         Growing up all five of them were poor, very poor – so poor they were Jewish-in-New-York-in-the-early-1900s poor. Forced outside of the world, into their world from birth, while their mother, Big Duck, put them up to instruments and got them begging early – vaudeville was their daddy after all (“after all” being a refrain in the poem I'll never finish, repeated like a mantra – after all! after all! after all! after all!– in that text, and used like a drug – afterall – and always driving deathward to an end that never came and can't, after all is written down) – with the jokes they told and sang and played, on their piano, harp, and banjo, all the time – and here is how she learnt how well Chico could play the piano, and how well Harpo could play the harp. And how poorly little Groucho played the banjo. The shame she felt, the shame she must have felt – but here my poem consumes them, because I am already sure that childhood is wrought with fear of birth order, sure as I am that middle children lack something, and maybe have something for that lack, but It's me, not Groucho, that takes over, saying Groucho was the obvious middle child, and of course lacked Big Duck's approval – Big Duck hated the banjo strumming and myriad puns he threw, I say – puns being a part of the poem, the poem which would have (but never) ended on Groucho ducking soup. I wanted it all as a joke and still do, but who will disappoint? Who could? There are options – Groucho, myself, the poem, etc. all working poorly. It is hard to imagine the lack that would culminate in a poet – maybe this gap is wider than a middle child – writing three brothers into a brawl, cartoonish in the streets. May be even harder to imagine the discontent and fear at work inside a child of five – birthing chaos. Maybe I misspoke – I can't know,  I'm not a child of five.
                  Groucho is dead, is still standing in front of me expectantly, not moving. Right in front of me when again I hear his voice – reanimate and filtered through a phonograph – weakly rising above it's own eroded texture – “I was misquoted, I was misquoted... Quote me as saying, 'I was misquoted.'” I wanted his life entropically spinning this place, spinning throughout this place, a ghost – to live forever is to die forever in every gaunt lie, misquote after misquote re-shaping our dead selves until grotesqueries we never intended are held comfortably under our name. Groucho, aimless, escapes because he pre-empts – he uses his whole self to decimate his cultural body, to save the self he's sacrificed. Groucho means to become a void, or Groucho becomes a void more correctly – Groucho means nothing, can only mean nothing, because he's focused his words – his self – around his lack – the words' lack. Because the words always lack, and Groucho is all words. I see him take out the greasepaint container, which is in a shoe-polish-looking canister, and then I lose Groucho again to facts – he was the outsider using words to one up them. I see his wit like a weapon. His being in Hollywood was a stress on Hollywood's peace of mind. I see him tearing balsa wood from up under the street and chucking it into styrofoam towers, which crumble. I see the SUVs that swerved to pass him run into walls, deflating the cars and the walls while the drivers run screaming with ketchup pulsing from the real wounds in their necks. This is where my poem was – more or less. My poem had Groucho gleeful – “Groucho skips, Groucho skips, Groucho skips,” it said, “down the streets throwing rocks at cars...” – the melodies of my naive poem's schoolboy nihilisms never broke enough – “In Groucho's perfect world every day would be spent disrupting traffic, smashing bugs and ******* everywhere,” it said because it was too young to understand, because it had no void, and could offer no revolt from meaning – revolution being radical agency expressed through violence against every order, hatred for every structure including itself – in Groucho's perfect world really there is no language and no one knows what happens after all.
            Lingering is the thought that Groucho means something – lingering is the vaguest, most insistent and warlike imprint of a metaphor on Groucho's face, ineffably moving me to continue but Groucho is no friend, and Groucho is not with me, because the Groucho of the mind is not Groucho, Groucho hates the mind, and Groucho negates all possible Groucho's so the imprint is not Groucho's. The ghost is a misquote, the poem is a misquote, the letters are a misquote, I am a misquote – and this is a misquote too. His cigar (growing bigger) is puffing out that white cloud smoke but still I can see him – the smoke just goes into the space around us, the space that redacts and recreates itself every time I consider it – a copy of an 18th copy, with only Groucho remaining in all iterations, like the borders of a decomposed jpeg quietly losing logic. Groucho the lie, Groucho the memory – a man shaped around the falsity of metaphor and language – floats, as subject, through my memory – punctum with no point, void. Here he is – naked, a stark black silhouette I'd never claim. He's staring, but he's not staring at me because I'm not there. What's left is overstated nothing – the ghost of a man who negated logic, left in the mind of a poet who has long since given up on the man, and soon will give up on the poem.”
There is nothing left here. I am alone, I am dizzy – overcome with boredom.  I want to say, “Groucho is not here, was not, cannot be here” – I know instead I need to end on a mute point.
formatting is wonk for this one anywhere except libreoffice. It's always prose but there it's prose with cool spacing (which is to say it fills exactly a page in 12 point times new roman font single-spaced)
Meena Menon May 2021
Twelve year old flowerhead,
Marigold, yarrow and nettle,
I’d be all emotion
If not for all my work
From the time I was a teenager.
I got depressed a lot.
I related to people I read about
In my weather balloon,
Grasping, ignorant, and desperate,
But couldn’t relate to other twelve year olds.
After school I read Dali’s autobiography,
Young ****** Autosodomized by Her Own Chastity.
Fresh, green nettle with fresh and dried yarrow for purity,
Dead souls enticed to the altar by orange marigolds,
passion and creativity,
Coax sleep and rouse dreams.
Satellites measure indirectly with wave lengths of light.
My weather balloon measures the lower and middle levels of the atmosphere directly,
Fifty thousand feet high,
Metal rod thermometer,
Slide humidity sensor,
Canister for air pressure.

I enjoy rye bread and cold coconut butter in my weather balloon,
But I want Dali, and all the artists and writers.
Rye grows at high altitudes
But papyrus grows in soil and shallow water,
Strips of papyrus pith shucked from their stems.
When an anchor’s weighed, a ship sails,
But when grounded we sail.
Marigolds, yarrow and nettle,
Flowerhead,
I use the marigold for sleep,
The yarrow for endurance and intensity
toiling for love and  truth,
And the nettle for healing.
Strong rye bread needs equally strong flavors.
By the beginning of high school,
I read a lot of Beat literature
And found Buddhism.
I loved what I read
But I didn’t like some things.
I liked attachment.  
I got to the ground.
Mushrooms grow in dry soil.
Attachment to beauty is Buddha activity.
Not being attached to things I don’t find beautiful is Buddha activity.  
I fried mushrooms in a single layer in oil, fleshy.
I roasted mushrooms at high temperatures in the oven, crisp.
I simmered mushrooms in stock with kombu.
Rye bread with cold coconut butter and cremimi mushrooms,
raw, soft and firm.  
Life continues, life changes,
Attachments, losses, mourning and suffering,
But change lures growth.
I find stream beds and wet soil.
I lay the strips of papyrus next to each other.
I cross papyrus strips over the first,
Then wet the crossed papyrus strips,
Press and cement them into a sheet.
I hammer it and dry it in the sun,
With no thought of achievement or self,
Flowerhead,
Hands filled with my past,
Head filled with the future,
Dali, artists, poets,
Wishes and desires aligned with nature,
Abundance,
Cocoa, caraway, and molasses.

If I ever really like someone,
I’ll be wearing the dress he chooses,
Fresh green nettle and yarrow,
the seeds take two years to grow strong,
Lasting love.
Marigolds steer dead souls from the altar to the afterlife,
Antiseptic, healing wounds,
Soothing sore throats and headaches.
Imperturbable, stable flowerhead,
I empty my mind.
When desires are aligned with nature, desire flows.
Papyrus makes paper and cloth.
Papyrus makes sails.
Charcoal from the ash of pulverized papyrus heals wounds.
Without attachment to the fruit of action
There is continuation of life,
Rye bread and melted coconut butter,
The coconut tree in the coconut butter,
The seed comes from the ground out of nothing,
Naturalness.
It has form.
As the seed grows the seed expresses the tree,
The seed expresses the coconut,
The seed expresses the coconut butter.
Rye bread, large open hollows, chambers,
Immersed in melted coconut butter,
Desire for expansion and creation,
No grasping, not desperate.
When the mind is compassion, the mind is boundless.
Every moment,
only that,
Every moment,
a scythe to the papyrus in the stream bed of the past.
I love my yoga practice and I’m finally taking a poetry class for the first time in my 41 (almost 42) years, though it’s online and free.  Our assignment asked us to fill blanks into this:  the [concrete noun] of [abstract noun].
JP Mantler Dec 2014
Can you not see me with the lights on?
Am I better to be seen in the dark?
When coolness creeps in our warmth
Is something wrong?

When the winter woods start to creak
And the fiery kindling cracks
Will coolness collect our souls
From the beautiful, burning fire?

And will my sunshine continue
To beat down on your darkness
And will I start to shiver from
how much sun I get
Deliver, deliver

How much more do we have?
I'll build you another home
And lock myself in the canister
So I can live in my work
Play with my work
And never stop to sleep, think, or feel and I will squeal at the edges hurt my shrunken baby head and bang on the edges with my shrunken baby head and I will scream for revenge and hurt my soft, soft voice and I could have bled but I won't because of you, Because I love you, So I will choose another day where work becomes a drug of choice and my illiteracy becomes my democracy, and how I feel that I am misspelled
But how you can right me just fine. How do you do that?
What is your magic?
Where is your rabbit?
I can feel canister's heat melting me
Gluing me onto it's surface
Your smile serves purpose

And your angelic blonde intrigue
Lets my fingers weave and weave
Through every shape and form
Of every sailing ship's storm
And the seashores sunny-blue welcome
Had spotted my loved one's realm

Her and I, we had sunk before we could swim
But we enjoyed drowning in ourselves
The Coral Reef was purple and orange
It had glistened with depth

But sharks had shown us how to swim
And now we swim in blood
We'll learn how to sink again
I know we will
mark john junor May 2014
her pale skin is moonlight breathing
like she has an essence of celestial beauty in
the palm of her hand and
without her the sun will never rise
without her the stars themselves utterly die
like the air itself around her flowing like soft waters
gently drowning all sorrows

she held within her delicate fingers a small canister
'within this is my heart'
made of wood laced with silver threads
it was worn but still retained its strength
it had an illustration of a phoenix
she buried it in the soft soils of her skin
with four nails to keep it in place
each nail carved with fine line drawings from the astral calendar
i ran a volley of kisses quick and soft on her pale skin
hoping to set ablaze
but she passed silent while lingering one hand along my arm
like a grief for our parting

i swim up her presence radiating with careful steps
and i run one finger lovingly along her bottom lip
but cannot contain the river of images that flow there
she photographs my hearts intent with eyes that see my soul
makes still life studies of loves blooming with her gentle wet kiss
and with her soft lip sets smouldering thoughts in my lustful soul

i am the canister she has woven with silver threads
i am the phoenix arising from the ashes
after she has destroyed me with a kiss
i hold her heart gently
for without her
i am a moonless void
empty of stars
i run one finger lovingly along her lower lip
adoring the very scent of her soul on the air
like moonlight breathing
M W Feb 2013
A clay *** holds your happiness.
It's halfway tall,
reaching up to your thigh,
Narrow, blown up in the middle, narrow.
Simple lid with a spherical dot for fingers to grasp,
and a black drawn line
that curls from base to lip,
and over.
Insides encumbered by sweet darkness,
shaded glory,
because outside,
gleaming.
Spiraled gold that must have dribbled off the sun's ice cream cone
leaked through the bottom where the end had broken
and flavor escaped
to land on your mirthful urn.
Blue so clear,
the sky surely lost a piece of itself
as a crack appeared
and a fragment cascaded downward
to shatter along your pleasant chalice.
And in between,
are lines of green
that could have only originated
on pinewood trees
in a forest so dark
that monsters beware.
Bordering a little town
where children played
and only truth was called,
never dare.
Because there is red on your delighted decanter.
Spattered droplets
of coagulated sparks.
Jaded needles saturated,
with pine fresh essence
emanating from your zesty flagon.
And a single spot,
Barren.
Bereft of treasure.
Parted from cerulean.
Robbed of Viridian.
And severed in the roots of a blushing Amaryllis.
Occupying there,
a white blemish,
a shape of infinite corners
immaculately defined
and so small,
you will never find it                                                                                                 ­               on the canister
that harbors your smile.
Lunarian Jan 2014
Sitting here writing some of my most inner thoughts and feelings
with the padlock closeby, I am scrawling in red ink in that I visualize as blood
my inner thoughts and understandings of life
while the clock ticks away the meaningless minutes I have wasted into writing about my days

I have wrote about my happiness and wrote about my saddness
the things that makes me cry and wish I would die
and the motives of why I even stay alive
I told about the day I tried blasting my brains out, but couldn't pull the trigger to try

I've told about the man I murdered
He'd shared with me everything and I couldn't bare him finding out who or what I was
Now his blood screams from the ground, crying out to me
and I take up alcoholism as a job, a worthwhile profession to comfort me

I have told about the pregnant ******* prom night
who was stuck, wasting away wishing she could party that night
who was thinking about self aborting her child, motherhood she dared to fight
until she felt her son kick and she sobbed, tears that she tried to fight

I have told about my first love
my first kiss and how I felt higher and more pure than a dove
i told about my grandmother and how she taught me that "god is love"
switching to blue ink now, because blue is for peace

I signed my name at the bottom of each page
saying that I have become stronger with each turn of the page
I no longer feel that I have to shove the whole canister of anti-depressants down my ribcage

I wrote with red ink scrawled in blood
that was full of agony,anger, and regret
Finished in blue because I found a happy place,peace, and acceptance
I lock the padlock onto it, in order to protect my secrets
and I stop the clock by taking out the batteries to remind me that my life isn't ruled by human time
and I smile as I look into the fireplace, at my book of secrets, finally erased.
another character-driven poem, not to be confused with a real person.. This is Alexa
I march alone,
a flaming candle,
clasped within shaky hands,
as I travel the rocky path,
of the darkest hour,
searching for my lost companion.

The intensity of the winds,
blow with invisible ferocity,
attempting to extingiush,
my only source of light,
in the obscurity of this journey,
to find what is no longer mine.

The cluttered valley of stones,
sporadic and jagged,
engenders my feet to lose,
their sight to guide me,
as a shadow blinds them,
stumbling with the challenge,
of yet another obstacle.

Raindrops stain my skin,
tingling through my core,
like an icy kiss of death,
burning my torso.

An intangible blazing arrow,
splicing through the hearth,
of my being,
trembling with fatigue,
as I fall to my knees.

Despite the weakness,
of my quivering limbs,
I now stand upon two feet,
unwavering in the harsh atmosphere,
engulfing my petite frame,
as I glance in all directions,
to behold what I have lost.

Unfortunately I shall never reach,
the one I once yearned,
to travel the vast lands with,
as our destinies collide,
but betrayal leaps from a canister,
opened by the hands,
of a ***** friend choosing to become,
my nememsis,
as a vile murky sludge bursts out,
of the jar.

Putrid animosity creeps out,
spreading upon my trusting soul,
like the black plague,
relentless with thorns of corruption,
leaving me to make no other choice.

The toxic Substance,
leaves me with a distaste,
burdened at the loss,
of what I seek;
Nausea sweeps across my bridge,
of loyalty,
wishing abandonment,
is not the lyrics,
I must sing to remain,
in the palms of safety.

Loooking behind me is not an option,
fleeing to an unexpected direction,
a turn resulting in a shift,
of purpose in my investigation,
of life beyond the rudiments,
I thought to be the focus,
guiding me.

Feelings of Isolation,
begin to blossom,
until I realize my possession,
of the lit candle,
my fingers cling to,
restoring balance.

As I lift my gaze,
away from the  dancling flames,
of fire,
I feel the desire,
to trust my intuition,
always drifting through,
the entirety of my chimerical mind.

Instincts take over me,
driving meto paint,
the world carrying the fruits,
of a visually compelling existence,
as I encounter the joys,
of a voice entertaining my ears,
the fiery memories,
emblazoning a scuplture,
moving me to create new stories,
sniffing the tantalizing aroma,
of Wild roses,
conjuring a persona,
bravely foolish enough to chance,
the tide Swirling,
with a sea of opportunities.
Ottar Oct 2013
Years ago When I Was A Child, a fragrance of
summer was on the hot air and winters white,
frosty and snowy hid the toes of your boots when you slid.
I was studious and sedate, except at play
when I became a wild,
part of a dog pile,
                            of other wild kids at play.

Limbs tangled and the weight of friendship,
was worth more than the ore and gold pulled
from the mine, then purified by smelting.
  
We could run, explore and hide
on our favourite mountainside,
change alliances,
pick teams,
fun was the factor
winning was the dream,
with some rivalry,
we did not need to
worry,
or hurry, it wasn't
about
car bombs in our markets, temples and churches,
we did not need to look alone through the rubble
that was once our humble home,
we needed to watch out
for poison ivy, poison oak and rusty nails
we did not need to look out
for mines that no one mapped,
in a war which neither side
cared for those
               whose future they have changed irrevocably.
                                                   And not for the better.

At night a train might disturb my sleep,
not a poorly dropped bomb intended for
the enemy camp, not on the edge of a village,
where the hole swallowed dreams and futures and spit out death,
we played kick the can, hide and go seek
where running, not hopping on one foot,
was the deal,
where seeing, was important with both
eyes, in the dark.

We did not blow out our ankle, unless we tripped
on a curb, unlike some children, blow off a lower
limb at the knee, because they tripped a wire, which
tripped a switch, of a metal canister in the dirt
which once was a playground, before became
a forgotten battlefield.  And a playground once again,
                                       after it was for a time a cemetery.
A mass grave.

This was supposed to be about play,
Play, what if every child who could play
stopped until all children were able.

You can pray for peace,
you can play for peace,
but can you play to stop wars.
Adults play at making peace,
as long as their interests (cha-ching)
are met, again and again,
then maybe the children's children's
children can play, if they remember how,
thank God
children
are resilient
and play is a
natural consequence of fun.
So run along children and
play
stay safe
and away from where your brothers... play no more.




©DWE102013
sadly death and destruction and mutilation is a man-made consequence of war
free writing, so play can be free
Megan Jones Jul 2019
Walking up the stairs, it was quiet
Feeling that old **** carpet, like pillows beneath my toes
The house smelled the same, of dust and wood, sometimes
a hint of clean laundry and vanilla candles
Approaching the room - hit like a stroke - or a baseball
to the left eye in 1998

A museum of furniture, clothing, trophies, memories-
Notes whose meanings no longer could be immediately recalled,
And some we wouldn't want to remember
A slip of paper, under my mattress, it read "Please
just let me say I'm sorry one more time, I can't lose you"
Signed, The First Girl I Thought I Loved
She now has three children and goes on vacations to Lake Tahoe
To see the sunset, to breathe again and again

I searched everywhere for the box, the one where we
keep sentimental **** because it feels wrong to throw it away
Then I remembered the day she threw it in the street, saying
"You think they care about you? You think any of these people know what you really are? Nobody will ever love you like your mother loves you"
The screen door cracked that day and my memories
Oh, they flew away like paper airplanes, flying so high

I sighed to release myself, to be free of it
Grabbed the bright red canister and began
Drowning the time capsule, the mausoleum, familiarity dissipating
I lit the match, paused for a brief moment of silence
Then watched as it was devoured, chemically altered

You both preserved this room, just the way it was
Locked me in that room, throwing away the key
Safeguarding these memories, only the ones easier to swallow
Maybe if it never changed, then I would not have
Maybe if it all stayed in place, it would be ready for my return
Let this serve as a reminder
That room killed me, and now it dies with you.
I'm writing a series about control. The ways in which people manipulate time, memories, feelings etc. as a means of determining and predicting what free-thinking individuals do/feel/say... All, supposedly, in the name of love or as a means to preemptively protect themselves from being subjected to the uncontrollable.
Austin Heath May 2014
Their wars are small, petty, and grey.
I was subjected to a dialogue;
a war story.
Side A walked to Side B's kingdom
to fight them. Side B formed a plan.
Side B sent one person to confront Side A.
She maced them.
In their faces. In. Their. Faces.
Her offense was successful.
I heard this story from Side A.
All I wanted to ask was,
"Why fight them in the first place?".
Why should I feel empathy; that they wanted to
initiate violence instead of dialogue,
and ended up getting outsmarted.
What was the alternative?
A fistfight, and now injuries that can't be fixed?
Who ever learns from the mistakes of violence?
Someone calls my love,
"A stupid white ***** who
needs to learn to keep her mouth shut",
and I can't tell her not to carry a knife.
In all my need for logic, even as a pacifist...
Now, I take what little money I have
and I buy her a canister of
mace.
Men are afraid women will undercut their power
or make a fool of them.
Women are afraid men will ****** them.
Astrotourist Al Apr 2014
I will rub an extract of evil over the papers,
I will dispatch my feelings through the electric wires.
When
The anger and fear beat the inside of me,
When it is cold
And empty.
My abstract castle is unbreakable,
Inside its tower there is a smell of a wild smoke.
Fairies and mermaids
do not exist here.
Their false ensemble left a deposit
On yellow pages of "News" and "Truth".
Cocoon-rooms, detonator-heads,
And a den of the hungry monster inside you.
Intrigues are weaved by the city,
Their dream is
A blind chase after a dollar.
I am counting the floors of a building,
I am burning this life.
I am spitting on a free ticket
To a world raging in a gray palette.
We continue to stir mirages,
While time aimlessly runs,
While the burning math flies over the petrol canister.
A bitter moment
Will not become sweeter with a handful of coins.
I will go to the darkness,
Which is inside me,
To experience light.
Mitchell Oct 2013
Candied black licorice.
Hair made of silk.
Memories mix dissolve meetings
Of love's labor of leering.
A warning between the moons.

She said her name in a whisper.
I knew by her eyes that I couldn't keep her.
Nightingale look razor strap barren.
Secrets between two torn in caring.

A can full of roses.
Dog dares in a moment.
Build me a fire
With two seats and the stars
We can look off in the distance
Not caring how far.

Since then I've never been able to hold
A thought longer then three seconds.
Leafing through these worn pictures,
Seeing these faces red and blistered,
I try to recall what I was feeling back then,
And what letters I wrote and what I didn't send.

Cabin alone up on the mountains *****
I take my canister and my four foot rope.
The sun's behind me, big and bright.
Gotta' make camp before the fall of the night.

When my name was misery, everyone knew me.
When my name was love, not a soul did.
When my name was honor, no one even bothered.
When my name was jealously, everyone writhed righteously.

Telling doorman upset by the Autumn;
He says it is too cold for him.
I - taking the things from its pockets -
Offer him my black, woolen pea coat.
He huffs and puffs and leaves,
Without even a word being spoke.

A simple sentence can change the world.
Reece Nov 2014
Words meander alabaster wanderers no rhythm for the panderer
Poetic evangelists sliding on the bannister, siding with a barrister
Space flown canister or crushing apples after Alistair
Prose left with the carrier, roses left in the carriages
Verse burst from the hearse serenade the ears and it'll carry ya
The skies are full of lies from the savages and the miracles
of marriages
But this disparages the ties between the higher dyes of oranges
These tobacco stained nostalgia skies are going away someday
to read the words of de Vries, mystique of poetic compromise
The only poems worth reading are the ones behind her eyes
Marie Jun 2015
I walk by the bridge of our memories
looking back at every moment
every disappointment
every pain
with my heavy heart and heaving sobs
dragging a leaking canister of gas along the way

Standing still on the other side
convincing myself I can do it
it's for the best
I have no choice

With trembling hands
a match is lit
thrown back as I walk away
step by step

Never looking back
As the world explodes behind me
burning everything down
to the ground

This is me taking back control of my emotions
This is me taking back control of my heart
This is me taking back control of my life
Lora Lee Aug 2017
surrounded by
shell-glossed earthtones
teals on magenta
images of americana,
from native moccasins to
an embroidered 50 states
(of slices of mind)
engraved tobacco canister,
grandpa’s favorite pipe
crafted crochet blankets
spun out from grandma’s hands
like magic
one antique menorah
lit in holiday memories
books and photos in movie star
glamour mixed with
wild-haired natural
smooth polished woods and
painted cityscape, all
slick rugged cozy
colorful trinkets against
subtle plush
of beige, elegance of
textures in tandem
love’s timeless flame
wrapped around me,
like a flannel blanket
acceptance and welcome
ringing
in my pores like freedom
and I float upon this bed
in my mother’s home,
once mine
(still mine)
as in a river
flowing out tendrils
our bond unbroken
past and present bathing me
in deep-seated roots of caring
what more could a daughter,
now also a mother,
ask for
New York love as I visit my mother's home with my oldest daughter <3
ERR Apr 2011
We brought a warm, vegetarian dinner to the homeless in a Christian shelter
The steaming pans burned my thighs for the duration of the ride
Our host was a self-described anarchist, married with four children and a dozen guests
He had participated in hundreds of protests; countless arrests
Travelled all over the globe to the site of genocide and hate
Saved lives one at a time, noble and tragic work
His first mission was in his early twenties, to the Gaza Strip alone
The night he arrived he slept in a friendly home
Woke to gunfire, screaming bullets and children, and mechanical roar
Get down! Said the Palestinians, closing the windows and doors
If you look outside
They
Will
Shoot
You
Israeli helicopters scanned the streets and mowed down pedestrians
Dropping massive glass beads
Marbles, they called them
These spheres would shatter and leave sharp edges for scared feet
Once impaled there was no running, blood trailed and so no hiding
Tear gas canisters cleared the capable, my host watched one enter a house
Inside children cried and begged for safety from war and smoke
A doctor huddled with my host heard and acted on a hero’s impulse
Leapt from his roof to that of the yelling young
Dove in through a window and snatched all three, along with the stinging source
The elder two were scared but saved, handed to the Palestinians
The baby with them had suffocated
Too late
The doctor gave my host the canister, still warm
You brought this here, he said
And he was right
Made In The USA
He brought the story back, called every major newspaper
No interest in anything he had to say
This stuff happens every day they told him, boring
Last week twelve Palestinians were killed by a bulldozer
Now there’s front page material
Something
More
Unusual
yāsha Jul 2023
i have tiny jars that are shelved
perfectly inside my brain
from category a to z,
sorted by themes,
and from one to a hundred
—a scale of how painful
life is in my repetitive experience.

i keep all my memories sealed
like a handful of fireflies shoved in a jar
that only live for three days;
i may forget every scenario with ease
but never the dying flicker—the feeling
that grow dim in each canister.

god, how fragile am i that it only takes
a trigger for each glass to combust tragically,
good thing i'm the only one
who knows how to pull it.
     i wonder which repressed emotions
     are going to choke me violently tonight.
Thomas Newlove Jul 2015
There are some days
When one fatal heart-wrenching
Rejection can cascade into a torrent
Of gut-punching, sick-inducing barrages of failure.
One rejection after another for one long week
Of un...something misery.

The first, well, I saw it coming.
There was a heavy inevitability about it in the air
Like the thick sweat before a summer storm.
Yet, despite this, almost foreknowledge,
My heart still lies in shattered pieces,
My head awash with regret, self-loathing,
And a deep inexplicable sadness.
Swiss chocolate - she was meaningless,
Surely soon forgettable,
But in that moment ever so sweet...
And the sight of her would brighten up my day.

The second was a reminder of my "situation" -
That constant battle between our demons and our angels,
The latter of whom have mostly hung themselves by this stage,
Or drowned themselves in vats of ciders,
Awaiting judgement or an epiphany.
Maybe they were waiting for a train,
And the demons simply gave a firm push,
Or whispered sweet infinities into your ears
As they bristled against the breeze atop a tall building.

The third was another, somewhat self-inflicted, destruction.
Less a rejection, and more an ultimatum:
"Sort your ******* life out Thomas
Because you're ruining hers tall, dark, and handsomely."
- That's not what she said, but it stung,
More or less, with the same venom,
Whilst maintaining that same tinge of flirtatious tone.
Somehow I stumbled into this mess without malicious intent -
Just a stupid little boy with a box of matches,
And a canister of petrol, and a blissful unawareness
Of the inevitable inferno.
Undoubtedly, the demons are laughing
At all the tears that will surely come.

The fourth was particularly unfortunate.
In classic "Thomas" style my first thoughts were to hit restart.
I wonder if all Thomas' are arseholes?
I mean obviously Edison was, and no doubt
There was malice behind Thomas the Tank Engine's smug grin,
But I wonder if it is a scientific certainty, or just dumb luck?
Needless to say I packed my bags in my head
And applied for the trabajo.
New start. New beginning. Old cliché.
And inevitable rejection -
One I didn't see due to my
Rebounded energy to avoid failure.
The repetitive nature of life's cycle is somewhat nauseating.
What kind of sadist designed this ride?
I wonder if his name was Thomas too?
Ah well, I've nothing better to do. "Another go, please."
Nat Lipstadt May 2013
We Hold These Truths to be Self-Evident


My life is bequeathed to me alone.
Title passes to me,
With my first breath.
Thus endowed, thus entrusted,
T'is my duty to throw off the
tyranny of fear and despotic rule of a
Life of looking over one's shoulder.

Therefore,
My life is mine to take,
Should I wish to choose the
Place, date, the time
To let the poetry cease,
I will announce it mostly gladly
with a blessing of
Shehecheyanu* and a
Smiling "by your leave."

Thrifty, stinking-thinking, I could hoard joy
Until such time, when best savored.
Backload the best for the latter days,
When worry was deceased,
Self-preservation necessity not a daily awakening curse,
The daylight-reminder, of my human status,
Check the box next to human stiff.

Choice,
Picking the time and place,
Freed me in away I had ne'er known,
Confounded the mind's logic,
For the heart murmured, joy is not
A penny earned and a penny saved,
But a disposable with a short shelf life.

Spend and spent it fast,
Be a spendthrift of life,
Viewed the miracle of the
Canister of oil and the burning bush
(Neither could be consumed)
Become me, and my song's refrain.

Ode to joy and self evident truths,
Owning this truth gave me
Pleasure without measure, for it
Replenished itself by daily use,
Evident then to preserve one's self
**Best served by wild, mad living.
----------------------------------
* http://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/Shehecheyan

Aboard AA# 1073
May 3rd 2013
Cate Mar 2017
My tongue flicks
Absent mindedly
Discovering and rediscovering
The new sensation
Of a missing tooth
Or a kernel of food
wedged in my gums
Or a ****** cheek
Bit ferociously while chewing.

In my same manor
My thoughts stroke
the idea of you,
Feeling for any new details
i may have missed
My first time
across your surface.

a mark, wrinkling
beneath your eye
a small  tattoo
above your elbow
a delicate crease
where your head
meets your neck.

Subtleties of self
are everything to me.
you hold your cigarette
between hits,
bent backwards between
thumb and *******
as if subconsciously,
you know
you’re damning yourself.

You hold your elbows
When you cross your arms
As though you are afraid,
Should you relax your grip
The contents of your chest
Will spill out before you
Like a toppled canister
Of produce remnants,
Juicy, sloppy, and sopping

But you speak quietly,
like a discarded bag
of shredded documents.
Rustling with partial importance
I try to piece together
your comments
almost as though your words
hang beneath the weight
of your breath
as an afterthought
of your exhalation.

I watch you
watch me,
calmly calculating
baiting conversations
with tactful insinuation
and later,

in deep rumination
they replay.
I select the moments
That fit the narrative
I've created,
rummaging through
until what I want
you to mean
is all I hear you say.
F White Oct 2013
it's already been written myriad-
the elusive verse,  
felt numerous
by others
dimensions parallel to mine

it's why we do
it isn't
it?

but what of
the depleted word bank?
slowly drained like blood so
precious with only
silver floating plasma left
ethereal, just synonyms and
consonants still clinging
to the edges of the canister


what will I say-
when nothing else remains?
copyright fhw, 2013
Bob B Nov 2016
At five a.m. the doors swing open.
The throng of shoppers lined up at the store
Pushes and shoves and jabs and elbows
Its aggressive way through the wide-open door.
 
Once inside, the crowd scatters
This way, that way, in chaotic motion.
The store clerks gasp, feeling like islands
Surrounded by a raging ocean.
 
"Oh, no you don’t!" one woman shouts
At another woman clutching a box
Containing the last flat-screen TV.
"Hands off; it's mine!" the other one squawks.
 
A mad tug-o'-war ensues
As the two women grapple to claim what's theirs.
An onlooker who is knocked down in the skirmish
Shrieks, "What a sorry state of affairs!"
 
Everywhere you look, items are flying.
The store resembles the scene of a battle,
OR, perhaps, a giant herd
Of loud, thundering, angry cattle.
 
A man stops to pick up a bottle
Of perfume that he dropped--a gift for his wife--
And is trampled by the surge of shoppers.
The poor guy nearly loses his life.
 
One bold shopper with her canister of pepper spray
Threatens to douse the belligerent crowd
Until she is tackled by security guards
And is escorted away, cursing out loud.
 
Announcements blare from the loudspeakers:
"Shoppers' special on aisle three."
Suddenly, the rivers of shoppers change course
As the curious hope to get something free.
 
In the background, Christmas carols playing
The hopeful messages of joy and peace
Are drowned out by the ear-piercing din
That sounds like the honking of thousands of geese.
 
"I want my mommy," a whiny child cries.
"What do you want for Christmas: a dolly?"
Asks Santa, losing his last bit of patience
And doing his best to try to act jolly.
 
The chaos never ceases to wane
As the shoppers vie for the best shopping deals.
One man rushing to grab the last smart phone
Slips and falls head over heels
 
And slides into an obese grandma,
Sending her sprawling into some shelves
Of decorations, which all go flying.
The injured lie covered with reindeer and elves.
 
Interminable lines at the registers await
The exhausted shoppers. You get closer; hurrah!
The woman in front of you then needs a price check!
No, that can't be! That's the last straw!
 
Another day of Black Friday madness.
Would that it could be over! But no.
You've barely started; that's store number one.
You have four more stores to go!

- by Bob B
Oli Mortham Sep 2014
How can I search for Truth in a world that's built on lies?
A lid resting heavily over a once glistening eye:
Shielding, masking, concealing
What last droplets of wonderment are trickling and asking to pierce the concrete ceiling...
...Instead I cynically note its off and aging colour...
"Yellow: Choice Number 4!"
Relays my proud voice, with a more
Assertive tone; I, the host...
Discussing aesthetics to collectively pathetically awe-struck guests, over specially served toast...
"Yes, I'm an impulse shopper, so it seems"...
...(Well, according to the ******...something article I read in my monthly subscribed to magazine)...
Happily consumed by consumerism...
But still unable to consummate
Anything really, Truly sacred...
...Unless I'm exactly half naked...
(That includes wearing Calvin Klein SoCKs)
And crucially still sporting my brand-named top,
Designed for tight fit to cull any ounce of shoddiness,
Whilst giving the impression of an existing healthy body, no less,
And then, due to superficial attraction,
An end will occur, hopefully, of distraction,
From the absence of my once healthy mind...
...but that never happens...
So then, how can I search for Truth when the bricks of my own guise
Only resonate deceit, sealed to create a facade of falseness?
Sure, I can articulate,
Wielding words like swords,
Pure, planned alliteration...
Baffling the bemused by barraging both beautiful and brutally belligerent brilliance...
But...
Showmanship is the tool of the restlessly minded,
Those who search the hardest for the key to authenticity but yet cannot find it,
And then paint their walls with vibrancy set out
By observing the mass hysteria of the layman,
Because nobody wants, Truly, to be classed as grey...
Do they?
Or it may
Be that that is exactly what we're all tactfully missing:
The fact that appearance, in some sense,
Is reliant on one sense,
And thus, in defiance of what we're meant
To wholeheartedly believe,
It is, in its very nature, subjective.
We were not designed
With a panel of judges judgmentally judging what pair of shoes should be selected,
Our mind's
Blueprint was principally a highly charged and thirstily receptive
Open book, with no printed prose,
No preordained guide to "Truth",
Merely a transient vessel:
A glowing red beacon of vulnerability in glorious, continuous distress,
Uncompromisingly afraid of its own ignorance, which, through an act of defense,
Strives to follow other's paths,
In arbitrary hopefulness that someone knows the meaning of it,
The answer to it,
The code that locks it,
The spark that drives it,
So in our fearful and ever conscious lives it,
Makes us want to hide behind this
Fantasy of an apex being,
Where our car seats vibrate and our carpet is soothing,
So that we seem to have a clue of what we're doing,
And instead of resting our ego-bulging heads and choosing to accept,
That we're just not quite, you know, as adept
As we might have thought, we choose to reject and neglect
Our opportunities
In communicative
And interactive discoveries of the beauty
That goes beyond and lies behind that neatly fashioned fringe,
Within.
Love is humble as we are stupid:
We'll see that one wise man has cottoned on, and knows
That even though
He hates that smell that his wife
Adores, he incessantly sprays it lovingly from a canister for the rest of his life.
But he'll never say a word,
Because, from what he's heard,
Truth no longer exists:
In fact, as soon as the larynx allowed the habit of opinions to persist,
It became a frozen entity,
A vague depiction of pure, untampered quality...
A poem I wrote 7 years ago on the back of an envelope in terrible handwriting when I was struggling to sleep.
Glenn Sentes Feb 2012
Fill my craving with your zesty rind
In the mist of my longing, come splashing
Ingest my inn with your piquant smiles

Will you rain like dew for my pipe is parched?
Drizzle my windows with decorative light and
Melt your *** in that multihued bend

Be my condiment in this insipid snack
But preserve your liquiscent state
No! Not in the canister

Who says this dye belongs to Freud?
After you entice my eyes and tongue.
Then citrus filled my air now back to stanza one.
Written for a contest with the theme "ORANGE"
John F McCullagh Mar 2016
“Clear the way, boys, clear the way” said Meagher astride his steed.
The fighting sixty- ninth stepped forth, they were not afraid to bleed.
Upon St Marye’s heights Cobb’s Georgians waited, behind a low stone wall.
The lads attacked that stout defense – how senseless was it all.
There were Irish too up on the hill and they saw the Emerald flag.
“Oh God, what a pity! Here come Meagher’s fellows” one Irish rebel said,
But all obeyed the order given; to fill the air with lead.
The sixty-ninth could not reply, they all carried antique stock.
Muskets are no match for rifles at the distance they attacked.
They climbed that rise into a storm of canister and shot
They got as close as 40 yards before their surge was stopped.
Sixteen hundred had started out from the little town below,
They took the fight as far as any of mortal flesh could go.
As darkness fell upon the field there were wounded men and dying.
Some muttered prayers in their foreign tongue, how pitiful their crying.
It was a dark December for the army Burnside led.
Fourteen assaults in all repulsed with eight Thousand Union dead.
With eighty percent casualties Meagher’s boys had it worst of all:
Fewer than three hundred  were left to answer the roll call.
December 13, 1862 The Irish Brigade assault St Marye's heights in the battle of Fredericksburg.  The Brigade commander's name is pronounced "Marr"
"Clear the way is the English Translation of the Gaelic motto of the Irish brigade.

Many of the Irish in the brigade had joined in hopes of getting military experience to use later against the British. They got experience that day, but for many it did not prove useful.
chewing each sound
like a dusty paint chip;
they don’t sit well, dark, wooden stairways
wrapped around my throat, banisters
sherry carpet running down the middle.
trial steps, you buy with each motion
swollen bones.
“sturdy windowsills,” that’s true.
we peel off raindrops,
closing the canister.
i sneer outside; that sun oscillates,
with its blistering pirouette.
costume design left it naked.
yet, this sallow creaking in my attic
is
a conscious decision.
possession, not ownership.
MMXI
Initially, a glistening syringe
Punctured our sullied vestigial
Denoting words withered and wispy
Also being barren, tapped as well as empty
That canister of pithy remembrances
Now outright, unique and unencumbered
Still
The torridly measly, meek and
Reflective dripping silver needle
Forgoes my waking-dream and other alibis
For fluids fleeting from us to
Be lapped up by the sun then bottled in the clouds
“Forever?”
…Yes, because time means nothing…
“So that’s where we are, when all they see is weather”
Goodbye to consciousness
Walking past the playground at the park
in the center of my grown up city

I hear children, but do not look at them,
their parents’ eyes seem to glare at me.

As I carry on, earbuds infecting my head
their vibrant laughter derides my shady afternoons indoors,
the things my mother said.

Once I wanted to drink grape Kool-Aid, but my mother wasn’t home
and even though she’d told me not to, I decided to make myself some.

I climbed up in the cupboard and took the faded pitcher
then I took the translucent canister below, in which my mother stored her sugar.

I mixed the sugar and synthetic flavor with a knife
a cloud of purple powder rising up.

Despite the fragrant odor, I couldn't be sure I’d added enough.

After the ingredients dissolved, I was ready to drink.
I took a big boy, breakable glass cup from the counter and washed it in the sink.

I dried the cup and set it there, beside the pitcher on the table
But when I raised the pitcher up to pour juice in the glass,

my little arms were just too feeble.

The pitcher slipped, as I lost grip and everything got wet.
As I took white cloths to sop up what I'd done,

the Kool-Aid fell in torrid sheets from the table's edge into my mouth
as warm Summer rain did years later, inhibiting a game I didn't want to play.

The water falling was relaxing and sweet for me both times.
Each accident was my momental, purple rain delay.
MMXII
Danielle Jones Mar 2012
I'm sorry I called you a pompous conservative,
and I'm sorry I'm not.

I'm sorry my focus is not on your intellectually cultured
examples of real life moments -
your 1988 Mercury Tracer taking its last gulp
of oxygen,
how nothing pans out to be,
your narrow expectations of others.

I'm sorry I don't fit in that canister.  

I'm sorry that others do not gravitate to
your beck and call.
your call is imperious.

I'm sorry my integrity flows in me,
rather than outwards.
I've never been one to exhibit my prizes.

(I'll just write about your buzzing blurbs
and your pick up sticks that amount to
your arrogance and pride.)

I'm sorry I'm a target
and my voice box turns into knots
when I turn the volume up.

I'm sorry that when I find nerves and pulses,
my body wants to notify you that you are
a *****.

I am sorry that I didn't.
Copyright Danielle Jones 2012
She slowly awakened, as if from a dream. On a small two-person boat, she was perplexed at how she had gotten there. She saw ahead the accumulation of storm clouds, and the confusion quickly turned into panic. Then, she heard from behind her, “You have woken up”.

   She turned around, almost as if when in a dream, and one is afraid of opening their eyes to the horror their own mind has created. When she was turned fully around, she saw a tribal-looking man, with stripes down both sides of his face with what appeared to be ash and an adhesive liquid of some sort. “You might be a little hungry”, the man said and handed over some bacon and a banana. She still did not speak, for she knew not what she would say if she did. She was hungry, so she ate the bacon and banana, both going down rather quickly as neither is very massive in size. He then handed her a canister which she assumed was water, and she drank from it.
He looked at her with a smirk of inquisitive anticipation.

    “You probably are wondering where you are, and who I am”. She shook her head yes. At this point in time, she was honestly not altogether sure her vocal chords would work, and she did not feel the desire to speak. So, she simply shook her head and at the same time relaxed her tense shoulder muscles.

   “Well, I am not going to tell you who I am. I am simply here to help you. Your guide, if you will.” She then suddenly was struck with the desire to speak. “How did I get here, because I really have no idea. I am actually quite confused and worried at the moment. I just remember lying down after going to eat with my boyfriend. I have been exhausted for days, in the mourning process. My favorite pet, my best friend passed away and I just have not been able to sleep. We buried him this morning, which was an ordeal which took all my energy away for today. We ate, came home and I lied down. I am really quite perplexed right now. Are we even in Ohio anymore?”
   The man just sat, with his almond-shaped eyes looking at her with an intent stare. He really did not look very modern-day, and yet he did not really look like a hobo, either. He was just wearing some men’s length shorts, no shirt. It was a pleasant temperature outside, probably around 70 degrees. She usually was cold in moderate weather, and she felt fine. However, she heard the distant rumble of thunder, which worried her.

   “We aren’t really anywhere. We are in a quiet, still place, a place where you need to be right now.” She was not sure what he meant, and she was becoming a bit irritated with this man’s vague way of handing her situation.

   “Well, I would really like to get back home. If you could take me somewhere where I could do that, it would be greatly appreciated. I’m sure my boyfriend is really worried about me. Does he know where I am, do you know?”

   The man kept looking at her. She began noticing a strange, orange hue in his almond-shaped eyes, a look that seemed familiar to her, although the look is not very common amongst men. It was almost like in werewolf movies when the man is turning, only a much, much more subtle coloration.

   “We are almost there. It will only be a few more minutes”, he said. She was becoming very frustrated, and moreso scared.

   “Really, we should not be out here, look at the sky. It is turning a rather bothersome shade of gray. And I hear the thunder. Warmth and storms are not a good thing. It means there may be a tornado, two different fronts colliding. I am serious, if you do not take this boat to shore, I will…”

   The man then stood up abruptly, almost with the agility of a cat. There was a very distinguishable spring in his step, and she wondered if he maybe had been an athlete. His eyes had become even more slanted now, and were a bit scary, almost like a gray alien, which terrified her to no end. His bald head shone in the light of what little sun came from the slits in the gray matter in the sky. He did not really look black, or white. He didn’t really look oriental or Hispanic, either. Honestly, if there were a color between green and black, a color that no one maybe had ever seen in a human being before, it would have been the color of his skin. Almost like a marble cake, with it all swirled almost entirely together, leaving only a very fine line to tell it was, indeed marble cake.

   “No, we are not going to shore. This is very important. I am sorry I cannot tell you, but a man cannot know where he is going when he is headed toward something unknown, something he has never seen before. For how could he? He has never seen. If I were to try to tell you without you seeing it with your own eyes, you may think you had gone mad and jump overboard. Not that you would drown, as this water is not more than twenty feet deep. But, there is indeed a pretty nasty storm coming, so doing so would not be in your best interest. Please, sit down and trust me. This is for you. You will soon understand. I am your friend…”

   The girl now felt in a bit of a panic. She seriously began to think she had been kidnapped by some crazy person, and she frantically dug through her pockets, trying to locate a phone she should have had with her…
   No phone. No idea where she was going, or where she was for that matter. Just that she was on a boat with a complete stranger, who was beginning to seem more familiar, and yet more odd and foreign by the minute. She could not have been more startled, nor dumbfounded.
Finally, a large ripping sound could be heard from the heavens, and rain began to pour down on them. She saw just ahead what looked like a formation growing in the water. But what could it be? A formation, in the water. It did not look like creature, but more like a hurricane. But a hurricane? On a lake, with a mere 20 foot depth? No way in hell that was even possible! She turned to the man, rain and hair streaking her face until all around her had become a mere blur of color and shape.
“What the hell is that?!” she screamed. She was beginning to shiver, partly from cold and partly from sheer terror. She looked at the man, and he actually looked like he was trying not to completely lose it, like a POW enduring water boarding to protect the secrets of his country. His almond-shaped eyes looked enraged. If she had to guess, she would have said he looked as if he had never touched water before, but tried to avoid it altogether his whole life.

   “No, it’s not a hurricane. It is something you will have to experience. I cannot explain it to you.”

   “Will it hurt me?”

   “No… it will show you…”

   She turned around then, and before she knew it they had entered into the gigantic formation of dark gray matter. She then felt a strange dizziness come over her, and then a sudden, almost unbearable burst of happiness and sadness, all at the same time. It was like a gigantic burden had burst from her chest, and she could finally rest in peace. She then looked over at the man… and she couldn’t believe her eyes.
To her, what her eyes wanted her to believe was that the man at this time, had turned into what appeared to be a cat, a tabby cat! The stripes of gray and black on his face had grown into fur of the same color, all over his face, like a Chia Pet on super speed. His eyes had become a very intense shade of yellowish orange, and his mouth looked tighter, puffier and had a few goatee hairs that seemed longer than the rest. His whole body, arms, legs, face… it all had taken a cat-like appearance. She felt as if he had to have been dreaming. But the rain, the wind, the “hurricane”… it all seemed so real. SO very real.


   “My name is Mr. Gingist, and I have brought you here to show you that I am okay. You do not understand it now, but when you do, it will all fit together perfectly. You can rest now. I am.”
Mr. Gingist in this story, represents Mr. Tiggins, the name I used to call my cat Tigger sometimes. I had this story in my mind right after Tigger died, and it kinda stayed there. This was written about three years ago, right after he died. It is not my best work, but it is definitely close to my heart, and that is what matters. Thanks for reading.

— The End —