[Greek: Mellonta  sauta’]

These things are in the future.

Sophocles—’Antig.’

‘Una.’

“Born again?”

‘Monos.’

Yes, fairest and best beloved Una, “born again.” These were
the words upon whose mystical meaning I had so long
pondered, rejecting the explanations of the priesthood,
until Death itself resolved for me the secret.

‘Una.’

Death!

‘Monos.’

How strangely, sweet Una, you echo my words! I
observe, too, a vacillation in your step, a joyous
inquietude in your eyes. You are confused and oppressed by
the majestic novelty of the Life Eternal. Yes, it was of
Death I spoke. And here how singularly sounds that word
which of old was wont to bring terror to all hearts,
throwing a mildew upon all pleasures!

‘Una.’

Ah, Death, the spectre which sate at all feasts! How often,
Monos, did we lose ourselves in speculations upon its
nature! How mysteriously did it act as a check to human
bliss, saying unto it, “thus far, and no farther!” That
earnest mutual love, my own Monos, which burned within our
bosoms, how vainly did we flatter ourselves, feeling happy
in its first upspringing that our happiness would strengthen
with its strength! Alas, as it grew, so grew in our hearts
the dread of that evil hour which was hurrying to separate
us forever! Thus in time it became painful to love. Hate
would have been mercy then.

‘Monos’.

Speak not here of these griefs, dear Una—mine, mine
forever now!

‘Una’.

But the memory of past sorrow, is it not present joy? I have
much to say yet of the things which have been. Above all, I
burn to know the incidents of your own passage through the
dark Valley and Shadow.

‘Monos’.

And when did the radiant Una ask anything of her Monos in
vain? I will be minute in relating all, but at what point
shall the weird narrative begin?

‘Una’.

At what point?

‘Monos’.

You have said.

‘Una’.

Monos, I comprehend you. In Death we have both learned the
propensity of man to define the indefinable. I will not say,
then, commence with the moment of life’s cessation—but
commence with that sad, sad instant when, the fever having
abandoned you, you sank into a breathless and motionless
torpor, and I pressed down your pallid eyelids with the
passionate fingers of love.

‘Monos’.

One word first, my Una, in regard to man’s general condition
at this epoch. You will remember that one or two of the wise
among our forefathers—wise in fact, although not in
the world’s esteem—had ventured to doubt the propriety
of the term “improvement,” as applied to the progress of our
civilization. There were periods in each of the five or six
centuries immediately preceding our dissolution when arose
some vigorous intellect, boldly contending for those
principles whose truth appears now, to our disenfranchised
reason, so utterly obvious —principles which should
have taught our race to submit to the guidance of the
natural laws rather than attempt their control. At long
intervals some master-minds appeared, looking upon each
advance in practical science as a retrogradation in the true
utility. Occasionally the poetic intellect—that
intellect which we now feel to have been the most exalted of
all—since those truths which to us were of the most
enduring importance could only be reached by that analogy
which speaks in proof-tones to the imagination alone,
and to the unaided reason bears no weight—occasionally
did this poetic intellect proceed a step farther in the
evolving of the vague idea of the philosophic, and find in
the mystic parable that tells of the tree of knowledge, and
of its forbidden fruit, death-producing, a distinct
intimation that knowledge was not meet for man in the infant
condition of his soul. And these men—the poets—
living and perishing amid the scorn of the
“utilitarians”—of rough pedants, who arrogated to
themselves a title which could have been properly applied
only to the scorned—these men, the poets, pondered
piningly, yet not unwisely, upon the ancient days when our
wants were not more simple than our enjoyments were
keen—days when mirth was a word unknown, so
solemnly deep-toned was happiness—holy, august, and
blissful days, blue rivers ran undammed, between hills
unhewn, into far forest solitudes, primeval, odorous, and
unexplored. Yet these noble exceptions from the general
misrule served but to strengthen it by opposition. Alas! we
had fallen upon the most evil of all our evil days. The
great “movement”—that was the cant term—went on:
a diseased commotion, moral and physical. Art—the
Arts—arose supreme, and once enthroned, cast chains
upon the intellect which had elevated them to power. Man,
because he could not but acknowledge the majesty of Nature,
fell into childish exultation at his acquired and still-
increasing dominion over her elements. Even while he stalked
a God in his own fancy, an infantine imbecility came over
him. As might be supposed from the origin of his disorder,
he grew infected with system, and with abstraction. He
enwrapped himself in generalities. Among other odd ideas,
that of universal equality gained ground; and in the face of
analogy and of God—in despite of the loud warning
voice of the laws of gradation so visibly pervading
all things in Earth and Heaven—wild attempts at an
omniprevalent Democracy were made. Yet this evil sprang
necessarily from the leading evil, Knowledge. Man could not
both know and succumb. Meantime huge smoking cities arose,
innumerable. Green leaves shrank before the hot breath of
furnaces. The fair face of Nature was deformed as with the
ravages of some loathsome disease. And methinks, sweet Una,
even our slumbering sense of the forced and of the far-
fetched might have arrested us here. But now it appears that
we had worked out our own destruction in the ******* of
our taste, or rather in the blind neglect of its
culture in the schools. For, in truth, it was at this crisis
that taste alone—that faculty which, holding a middle
position between the pure intellect and the moral sense,
could never safely have been disregarded—it was now
that taste alone could have led us gently back to Beauty, to
Nature, and to Life. But alas for the pure contemplative
spirit and majestic intuition of Plato! Alas for the [Greek:
mousichae]  which he justly regarded as an all-sufficient
education for the soul! Alas for him and for it!—since
both were most desperately needed, when both were most
entirely forgotten or despised. Pascal, a philosopher whom
we both love, has said, how truly!—”Que tout notre
raisonnement se reduit a ceder au sentiment;” and it is
not impossible that the sentiment of the natural, had time
permitted it, would have regained its old ascendency over
the harsh mathematical reason of the schools. But this thing
was not to be. Prematurely induced by intemperance of
knowledge, the old age of the world drew near. This the mass
of mankind saw not, or, living lustily although unhappily,
affected not to see. But, for myself, the Earth’s records
had taught me to look for widest ruin as the price of
highest civilization. I had imbibed a prescience of our Fate
from comparison of China the simple and enduring, with
Assyria the architect, with Egypt the astrologer, with
Nubia, more crafty than either, the turbulent mother of all
Arts. In the history of these regions I met with a ray from
the Future. The individual artificialities of the three
latter were local diseases of the Earth, and in their
individual overthrows we had seen local remedies applied;
but for the infected world at large I could anticipate no
regeneration save in death. That man, as a race, should not
become extinct, I saw that he must be “born again.”

And now it was, fairest and dearest, that we wrapped our
spirits, daily, in dreams. Now it was that, in twilight, we
discoursed of the days to come, when the Art-scarred surface
of the Earth, having undergone that purification which alone
could efface its rectangular obscenities, should clothe
itself anew in the verdure and the mountain-slopes and the
smiling waters of Paradise, and be rendered at length a fit
dwelling-place for man:—for man the
Death-purged—for man to whose now exalted intellect
there should be poison in knowledge no more—for the
redeemed, regenerated, blissful, and now immortal, but still
for the material, man.

‘Una’.

Well do I remember these conversations, dear Monos; but the
epoch of the fiery overthrow was not so near at hand as we
believed, and as the corruption you indicate did surely
warrant us in believing. Men lived; and died individually.
You yourself sickened, and passed into the grave; and
thither your constant Una speedily followed you. And though
the century which has since elapsed, and whose conclusion
brings up together once more, tortured our slumbering senses
with no impatience of duration, yet my Monos, it was a
century still.

‘Monos’.

Say, rather, a point in the vague infinity. Unquestionably,
it was in the Earth’s dotage that I died. Wearied at heart
with anxieties which had their origin in the general turmoil
and decay, I succumbed to the fierce fever. After some few
days of pain, and many of dreamy delirium replete with
ecstasy, the manifestations of which you mistook for pain,
while I longed but was impotent to undeceive you—after
some days there came upon me, as you have said, a breathless
and motionless torpor; and this was termed Death by
those who stood around me.

Words are vague things. My condition did not deprive me of
sentience. It appeared to me not greatly dissimilar to the
extreme quiescence of him, who, having slumbered long and
profoundly, lying motionless and fully prostrate in a mid-
summer noon, begins to steal slowly back into consciousness,
through the mere sufficiency of his sleep, and without being
awakened by external disturbances.

I breathed no longer. The pulses were still. The heart had
ceased to beat. Volition had not departed, but was
powerless. The senses were unusually active, although
eccentrically so—assuming often each other’s functions
at random. The taste and the smell were inextricably
confounded, and became one sentiment, abnormal and intense.
The rose-water with which your tenderness had moistened my
lips to the last, affected me with sweet fancies of
flowers—fantastic flowers, far more lovely than any of
the old Earth, but whose prototypes we have here blooming
around us. The eye-lids, transparent and bloodless, offered
no complete impediment to vision. As volition was in
abeyance, the ***** could not roll in their sockets—
but all objects within the range of the visual hemisphere
were seen with more or less distinctness; the rays which
fell upon the external retina, or into the corner of the
eye, producing a more vivid effect than those which struck
the front or interior surface. Yet, in the former instance,
this effect was so far anomalous that I appreciated it only
as sound—sound sweet or discordant as the
matters presenting themselves at my side were light or dark
in shade—curved or angular in outline. The hearing, at
the same time, although excited in degree, was not irregular
in action—estimating real sounds with an extravagance
of precision, not less than of sensibility. Touch had
undergone a modification more peculiar. Its impressions were
tardily received, but pertinaciously retained, and resulted
always in the highest physical pleasure. Thus the pressure
of your sweet fingers upon my eyelids, at first only
recognized through vision, at length, long after their
removal, filled my whole being with a sensual delight
immeasurable. I say with a sensual delight. All my
perceptions were purely sensual. The materials furnished the
passive brain by the senses were not in the least degree
wrought into shape by the deceased understanding. Of pain
there was some little; of pleasure there was much; but of
moral pain or pleasure none at all. Thus your wild sobs
floated into my ear with all their mournful cadences, and
were appreciated in their every variation of sad tone; but
they were soft musical sounds and no more; they conveyed to
the extinct reason no intimation of the sorrows which gave
them birth; while large and constant tears which fell upon
my face, telling the bystanders of a heart which broke,
thrilled every fibre of my frame with ecstasy alone. And
this was in truth the Death of which these bystanders
spoke reverently, in low whispers—you, sweet Una,
gaspingly, with loud cries.

They attired me for the coffin—three or four dark
figures which flitted busily to and fro. As these crossed
the direct line of my vision they affected me as forms;
but upon passing to my side their images impressed me
with the idea of shrieks, groans, and, other dismal
expressions of terror, of horror, or of woe. You alone,
habited in a white robe, passed in all directions musically
about.

The day waned; and, as its light faded away, I became
possessed by a vague uneasiness—an anxiety such as the
sleeper feels when sad real sounds fall continuously within
his ear—low distant bell-tones, solemn, at long but
equal intervals, and commingling with melancholy dreams.
Night arrived; and with its shadows a heavy discomfort. It
oppressed my limbs with the oppression of some dull weight,
and was palpable. There was also a moaning sound, not unlike
the distant reverberation of surf, but more continuous,
which, beginning with the first twilight, had grown in
strength with the darkness. Suddenly lights were brought
into the rooms, and this reverberation became forthwith
interrupted into frequent unequal bursts of the same sound,
but less dreary and less distinct. The ponderous oppression
was in a great measure relieved; and, issuing from the flame
of each lamp (for there were many), there flowed unbrokenly
into my ears a strain of melodious monotone. And when now,
dear Una, approaching the bed upon which I lay outstretched,
you sat gently by my side, breathing odor from your sweet
lips, and pressing them upon my brow, there arose
tremulously within my *****, and mingling with the merely
physical sensations which circumstances had called forth, a
something akin to sentiment itself—a feeling that,
half appreciating, half responded to your earnest love and
sorrow; but this feeling took no root in the pulseless
heart, and seemed indeed rather a shadow than a reality, and
faded quickly away, first into extreme quiescence, and then
into a purely sensual pleasure as before.

And now, from the wreck and the chaos of the usual senses,
there appeared to have arisen within me a sixth, all
perfect. In its exercise I found a wild delight—yet a
delight still physical, inasmuch as the understanding had in
it no part. Motion in the animal frame had fully ceased. No
muscle quivered; no nerve thrilled; no artery throbbed. But
there seemed to have sprung up in the brain that of
which no words could convey to the merely human intelligence
even an indistinct conception. Let me term it a mental
pendulous pulsation. It was the moral embodiment of man’s
abstract idea of Time. By the absolute equalization
of this movement—or of such as this—had the
cycles of the firmamental orbs themselves been adjusted. By
its aid I measured the irregularities of the clock upon the
mantel, and of the watches of the attendants. Their tickings
came sonorously to my ears. The slightest deviations from
the true proportion—and these deviations were
omniprevalent—affected me just as violations of
abstract truth were wont on earth to affect the moral sense.
Although no two of the timepieces in the chamber struck the
individual seconds accurately together, yet I had no
difficulty in holding steadily in mind the tones, and the
respective momentary errors of each. And this—this
keen, perfect self-existing sentiment of
duration—this sentiment existing (as man could
not possibly have conceived it to exist) independently of
any succession of events—this idea—this sixth
sense, upspringing from the ashes of the rest, was the first
obvious and certain step of the intemporal soul upon the
threshold of the temporal eternity.

It was midnight; and you still sat by my side. All others
had departed from the chamber of Death. They had deposited
me in the coffin. The lamps burned flickeringly; for this I
knew by the tremulousness of the monotonous strains. But
suddenly these strains diminished in distinctness and in
volume. Finally they ceased. The perfume in my nostrils died
aw

Sense touch feel know Sense touch feel know Sense touch feel know Sense touch feel know Sense touch feel know Sense touch feel know Sense touch feel know Sense touch feel  

Lying spirits. Those are real you know. You know? Don't you?

Mad is ill defined, dis-ease, decease, desistere, eh? You Roman?
You serve a mad man you know.
And the Roman said,'I serve the empire, a' and he stopped…

Might right be virtuous and power called might
be not-right,
like hands, chirality? Right and not.

Shame, we should not know that.

Perhaps the vector was the chirality connection.
Hers was upgraded.
So when the shame bomb hit, it was him,
not her, who blew it?
He did that?
Yeh, I see how now,
It's the hypo-thalish, estrogen receptor steward system.
Who named that ****** thing?

No, left-right brain variablity was designed
to counter the estrogen-tester if it went mal.
This is the Left HIS Branch, a resistor,
it changed the way breath gets to that "It is,
good" receptor complex just inside
the ventricles
where the first sparks releaze
the ozone reaction.
The reaction to that lost loving feeling,
That was the shame bomb.
The action taken to a switch burned out
in a rush of knowledge of good and evil beyond
the heart's experience with expansion.
The opposite seems to have happened in the wombedman,
he comprehends hope is a new treasure.
Hope. Who coulda seen that coming?

A witness.
Some mind saw that happen and it was never washed into the sea of forgetfulness, so

Wow.

Like in the mountains, that ozone,
first breath feeling, that's great!
No, like that first free hit. That's it. You will pay…

Like, this first reaction is not "That's wonder-filled",
but it's
"that was not deep enough,
not good enough,
too shallow,
faked it".

On every breath the man takes,
a voice in his head is saying,
"not good enough, keep
trying/dying/breathe/harder.
Sweat it all.
Shame on you."
Shame.
That was the trick.
Make him think he is not related to God,
on any level?
Make him think he does not have a knower
in good working order,
save for that tiny electrical glitch in the
official HIS bundle builder gene. That's nothing,
Who told him she was naked?
That's evil.
What he knew was good, what he believed was evil.

How did it work out?

Okeh. It took several millennia longer
than first estimates.
Starts out kinda dun'dat, don't it?
Things get brighter near the end.
According to the legend I learned.

Knowing liars lie does not make every man a liar, I think,
Only the ones who say they do not
lie have no truth in them,
if they can truly believe that.

It's a chapter, a colloquy of consciousness grounding out.

The story is told,
this is the way men were built, original specs,
able to do anything they agreed to do.
But their hearts had been corrupted because
the whole heart building system in Adam
was dis - turbed, mixed up with that sweet deceit.
If it weren't for mitichondria the sifting needed,
could have taken forever.

By Noah's first beard, the gene pool was so turbid, no one could see the bottom.

Living water flowing from men's bellies,
ta, lemme say,
that be some evolvin' involvin' some
a priori
somethin' or anotha.
Ax that wombedman at the well, what the hell?

There, here, is a whole story about ****** and the seeds of all the myths that point so straight
to Jesus as they red-shift into historical
mysteriums twisted and warped by time and chance tyrannies.
Holiness hierarchical hegemony funds
that sprang from Eve's first hope,
have no hope at all for
cowards and fools and fraidy cats.

Heroes, those compound interest, all things are possible,
except
God can't lie, or die, or fail.

Is living heroic, no. We choose to live.
Life favors life.
That's easy.
All things are possible with life,
as a whole.
Very complex plots and schemes and schemas and media
and magi-level tech
this is working, you know.
We agree. Who could make us enemies?

Still, any plan men made was clear in the minds of all the planners
and the builders and the men they used as tools to
multiply the strength of the ideas that possessed them.
They built cities that way.
By agreeing together to do it. Gobekli Tepi?
You know, what was that ? A
thousand years of CCC park bench building and trail
marking benignly buried with never a mark of destruction?
They, the men planners and builders and laborers, right after the Ice pulled back from the Caucusus
or the Levant lifted up, 12,000 years ago, or so,
somebody builds this place called Gobekli Tepi
about a morning walk, a Sabbath Day's Journey, from
Terah's Local god shoppe in Urfa
the Turks are said to say..

----
Original specs, reset, it's all software.
We can cipher this out,
if we keep our heads
while others about us are losing theirs.

Men with the new softer hearts can do that, they can,
when they put their heads together,
they can make anything happen.
Knowledge is increasing, as we know it.

Nothin''s done in darkness that shan't be made known.

That's no threat.
Never was.
It's a promise. Like, the meek inherit the earth.

KUSTA BEN LUKA is my name, I write
To Abd Al-Rabban; fellow-roysterer once,
Now the good Caliph's learned Treasurer,
And for no ear but his.
Carry this letter
Through the great gallery of the Treasure House
Where banners of the Caliphs hang, night-coloured
But brilliant as the night's embroidery,
And wait war's music; pass the little gallery;
Pass books of learning from Byzantium
Written in gold upon a purple stain,
And pause at last, I was about to say,
At the great book of Sappho's song; but no,
For should you leave my letter there, a boy's
Love-lorn, indifferent hands might come upon it
And let it fall unnoticed to the floor.
pause at the Treatise of parmenides
And hide it there, for Caiphs to world's end
Must keep that perfect, as they keep her song,
So great its fame.
When fitting time has passed
The parchment will disclose to some learned man
A mystery that else had found no chronicler
But the wild Bedouin.  Though I approve
Those wanderers that welcomed in their tents
What great Harun Al-Rashid, occupied
With Persian embassy or Grecian war,
Must needs neglect, I cannot hide the truth
That wandering in a desert, featureless
As air under a wing, can give birds' wit.
In after time they will speak much of me
And speak but fantasy.  Recall the year
When our beloved Caliph put to death
His Vizir Jaffer for an unknown reason:
"If but the shirt upon my body knew it
I'd tear it off and throw it in the fire.'
That speech was all that the town knew, but he
Seemed for a while to have grown young again;
Seemed so on purpose, muttered Jaffer's friends,
That none might know that he was conscience-struck --
But that s a traitor's thought.  Enough for me
That in the early summer of the year
The mightiest of the princes of the world
Came to the least considered of his courtiers;
Sat down upon the fountain's marble edge,
One hand amid the goldfish in the pool;
And thereupon a colloquy took place
That I commend to all the chroniclers
To show how violent great hearts can lose
Their bitterness and find the honeycomb.
"I have brought a slender bride into the house;
You know the saying, ""Change the bride with spring.''
And she and I, being sunk in happiness,
Cannot endure to think you tread these paths,
When evening stirs the jasmine bough, and yet
Are brideless.'
"I am falling into years.'
"But such as you and I do not seem old
Like men who live by habit.  Every day
I ride with falcon to the river's edge
Or carry the ringed mail upon my back,
Or court a woman; neither enemy,
Game-bird, nor woman does the same thing twice;
And so a hunter carries in the eye
A mimic of youth.  Can poet's thought
That springs from body and in body falls
Like this pure jet, now lost amid blue sky,
Now bathing lily leaf and fish's scale,
Be mimicry?'
"What matter if our souls
Are nearer to the surface of the body
Than souls that start no game and turn no rhyme!
The soul's own youth and not the body's youth
Shows through our lineaments.  My candle's bright,
My lantern is too loyal not to show
That it was made in your great father's reign,
And yet the jasmine season warms our blood.'
"Great prince, forgive the freedom of my speech:
You think that love has seasons, and you think
That if the spring bear off what the spring gave
The heart need suffer no defeat; but I
Who have accepted the Byzantine faith,
That seems unnatural to Arabian minds,
Think when I choose a bride I choose for ever;
And if her eye should not grow bright for mine
Or brighten only for some younger eye,
My heart could never turn from daily ruin,
Nor find a remedy.'
"But what if I
Have lit upon a woman who so shares
Your thirst for those old crabbed mysteries,
So strains to look beyond Our life, an eye
That never knew that strain would scarce seem bright,
And yet herself can seem youth's very fountain,
Being all brimmed with life?'
"Were it but true
I would have found the best that life can give,
Companionship in those mysterious things
That make a man's soul or a woman's soul
Itself and not some other soul.'
"That love
Must needs be in this life and in what follows
Unchanging and at peace, and it is right
Every philosopher should praise that love.
But I being none can praise its opposite.
It makes my passion stronger but to think
Like passion stirs the peacock and his mate,
The wild stag and the doe; that mouth to mouth
Is a man's mockery of the changeless soul.'
And thereupon his bounty gave what now
Can shake more blossom from autumnal chill
Than all my bursting springtime knew.  A girl
Perched in some window of her mother's housc
Had watched my daily passage to and fro;
Had heard impossible history of my past;
Imagined some impossible history
Lived at my side; thought time's disfiguring touch
Gave but more reason for a woman's care.
Yet was it love of me, or was it love
Of the stark mystery that has dazed my sight,
perplexed her fantasy and planned her care?
Or did the torchlight of that mystery
Pick out my features in such light and shade
Two contemplating passions chose one theme
Through sheer bewilderment? She had not paced
The garden paths, nor counted up the rooms,
Before she had spread a book upon her knees
And asked about the pictures or the text;
And often those first days I saw her stare
On old dry writing in a learned tongue,
On old dry ******* that could never please
The extravagance of spring; or move a hand
As if that writing or the figured page
Were some dear cheek.
Upon a moonless night
I sat where I could watch her sleeping form,
And wrote by candle-light; but her form moved.
And fearing that my light disturbed her sleep
I rose that I might screen it with a cloth.
I heard her voice, "Turn that I may expound
What's bowed your shoulder and made pale your cheek
And saw her sitting upright on the bed;
Or was it she that spoke or some great Djinn?
I say that a Djinn spoke.  A livelong hour
She seemed the learned man and I the child;
Truths without father came, truths that no book
Of all the uncounted books that I have read,
Nor thought out of her mind or mine begot,
Self-born, high-born, and solitary truths,
Those terrible implacable straight lines
Drawn through the wandering vegetative dream,
Even those truths that when my bones are dust
Must drive the Arabian host.
The voice grew still,
And she lay down upon her bed and slept,
But woke at the first gleam of day, rose up
And swept the house and sang about her work
In childish ignorance of all that passed.
A dozen nights of natural sleep, and then
When the full moon swam to its greatest height
She rose, and with her eyes shut fast in sleep
Walked through the house.  Unnoticed and unfelt
I wrapped her in a hooded cloak, and she,
Half running, dropped at the first ridge of the desert
And there marked out those emblems on the sand
That day by day I study and marvel at,
With her white finger.  I led her home asleep
And once again she rose and swept the house
In childish ignorance of all that passed.
Even to-day, after some seven years
When maybe thrice in every moon her mouth
Murmured the wisdom of the desert Djinns,
She keeps that ignorance, nor has she now
That first unnatural interest in my books.
It seems enough that I am there; and yet,
Old fellow-student, whose most patient ear
Heard all the anxiety of my passionate youth,
It seems I must buy knowledge with my peace.
What if she lose her ignorance and so
Dream that I love her only for the voice,
That every gift and every word of praise
Is but a payment for that midnight voice
That is to age what milk is to a child?
Were she to lose her love, because she had lost
Her confidence in mine, or even lose
Its first simplicity, love, voice and all,
All my fine feathers would be plucked away
And I left shivering.  The voice has drawn
A quality of wisdom from her love's
Particular quality.  The signs and shapes;
All those abstractions that you fancied were
From the great Treatise of parmenides;
All, all those gyres and cubes and midnight things
Are but a new expression of her body
Drunk with the bitter sweetness of her youth.
And now my utmost mystery is out.
A woman's beauty is a storm-tossed banner;
Under it wisdom stands, and I alone --
Of all Arabia's lovers I alone --
Nor dazzled by the embroidery, nor lost
In the confusion of its night-dark folds,
Can hear the armed man speak.

find a lover who writes you sonnets
who uses the darkest flecks of your eyes as ink
and the shades of your skin as paper
writing along the edges of your wrists and arms
with tongue and teeth
with purpose, truth, and love

find a lover whose heart sings to yours
a pianissimo summer sonata, dolce
using their words sotto voce against your ear
melodiously humming against your body
with their lips pressed to your neck
with passion, fire and tenderness

find a lover who creates art
using line weight in colloquy and canvas alike
to paint you with diamonds, as they see you
watch them carve your essence
with rainbows and pearls
with intensity, feeling, and beauty

find a lover who gives to you
who presents all the joys of life
unselfishly and without expectation
and when they give freely and openly
ensure that you, too, become a lover
who writes, sings, creates, and returns

The shadows of youth drape my body
As the sun encompasses a tree
Beneath the leaves and scratchy bark
Water flows through veins
Each drip of sunlight
Passing through
To reach the ground below
Falls from my skin
And each inch of earth’s rotation
Goes unnoticed

1

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,
Out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle,
Out of the Ninth-month midnight,
Over the sterile sands, and the fields beyond, where the child, leaving his bed, wander’d alone, bare-headed, barefoot,
Down from the shower’d halo,
Up from the mystic play of shadows, twining and twisting as if they were alive,
Out from the patches of briers and blackberries,
From the memories of the bird that chanted to me,
From your memories, sad brother—from the fitful risings and fallings I heard,
From under that yellow half-moon, late-risen, and swollen as if with tears,
From those beginning notes of sickness and love, there in the transparent mist,
From the thousand responses of my heart, never to cease,
From the myriad thence-arous’d words,
From the word stronger and more delicious than any,
From such, as now they start, the scene revisiting,
As a flock, twittering, rising, or overhead passing,
Borne hither—ere all eludes me, hurriedly,
A man—yet by these tears a little boy again,
Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves,
I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter,
Taking all hints to use them—but swiftly leaping beyond them,
A reminiscence sing.

2

Once, Paumanok,
When the snows had melted—when the lilac-scent was in the air, and the Fifth-month grass was growing,
Up this sea-shore, in some briers,
Two guests from Alabama—two together,
And their nest, and four light-green eggs, spotted with brown,
And every day the he-bird, to and fro, near at hand,
And every day the she-bird, crouch’d on her nest, silent, with bright eyes,
And every day I, a curious boy, never too close, never disturbing them,
Cautiously peering, absorbing, translating.

3

Shine! shine! shine!
Pour down your warmth, great Sun!
While we bask—we two together.

Two together!
Winds blow South, or winds blow North,
Day come white, or night come black,
Home, or rivers and mountains from home,
Singing all time, minding no time,
While we two keep together.

4

Till of a sudden,
May-be ****’d, unknown to her mate,
One forenoon the she-bird crouch’d not on the nest,
Nor return’d that afternoon, nor the next,
Nor ever appear’d again.

And thenceforward, all summer, in the sound of the sea,
And at night, under the full of the moon, in calmer weather,
Over the hoarse surging of the sea,
Or flitting from brier to brier by day,
I saw, I heard at intervals, the remaining one, the he-bird,
The solitary guest from Alabama.

5

Blow! blow! blow!
Blow up, sea-winds, along Paumanok’s shore!
I wait and I wait, till you blow my mate to me.

6

Yes, when the stars glisten’d,
All night long, on the prong of a moss-scallop’d stake,
Down, almost amid the slapping waves,
Sat the lone singer, wonderful, causing tears.

He call’d on his mate;
He pour’d forth the meanings which I, of all men, know.

Yes, my brother, I know;
The rest might not—but I have treasur’d every note;
For once, and more than once, dimly, down to the beach gliding,
Silent, avoiding the moonbeams, blending myself with the shadows,
Recalling now the obscure shapes, the echoes, the sounds and sights after their sorts,
The white arms out in the breakers tirelessly tossing,
I, with bare feet, a child, the wind wafting my hair,
Listen’d long and long.

Listen’d, to keep, to sing—now translating the notes,
Following you, my brother.

7

Soothe! soothe! soothe!
Close on its wave soothes the wave behind,
And again another behind, embracing and lapping, every one close,
But my love soothes not me, not me.

Low hangs the moon—it rose late;
O it is lagging—O I think it is heavy with love, with love.

O madly the sea pushes, pushes upon the land,
With love—with love.

O night! do I not see my love fluttering out there among the breakers?
What is that little black thing I see there in the white?

Loud! loud! loud!
Loud I call to you, my love!

High and clear I shoot my voice over the waves;
Surely you must know who is here, is here;
You must know who I am, my love.

Low-hanging moon!
What is that dusky spot in your brown yellow?
O it is the shape, the shape of my mate!
O moon, do not keep her from me any longer.

Land! land! O land!
Whichever way I turn, O I think you could give me my mate back again, if you only would;
For I am almost sure I see her dimly whichever way I look.

O rising stars!
Perhaps the one I want so much will rise, will rise with some of you.

O throat! O trembling throat!
Sound clearer through the atmosphere!
Pierce the woods, the earth;
Somewhere listening to catch you, must be the one I want.

Shake out, carols!
Solitary here—the night’s carols!
Carols of lonesome love! Death’s carols!
Carols under that lagging, yellow, waning moon!
O, under that moon, where she droops almost down into the sea!
O reckless, despairing carols.

But soft! sink low;
Soft! let me just murmur;
And do you wait a moment, you husky-noised sea;
For somewhere I believe I heard my mate responding to me,
So faint—I must be still, be still to listen;
But not altogether still, for then she might not come immediately to me.

Hither, my love!
Here I am! Here!
With this just-sustain’d note I announce myself to you;
This gentle call is for you, my love, for you.

Do not be decoy’d elsewhere!
That is the whistle of the wind—it is not my voice;
That is the fluttering, the fluttering of the spray;
Those are the shadows of leaves.

O darkness! O in vain!
O I am very sick and sorrowful.

O brown halo in the sky, near the moon, drooping upon the sea!
O troubled reflection in the sea!
O throat! O throbbing heart!
O all—and I singing uselessly, uselessly all the night.

Yet I murmur, murmur on!
O murmurs—you yourselves make me continue to sing, I know not why.

O past! O life! O songs of joy!
In the air—in the woods—over fields;
Loved! loved! loved! loved! loved!
But my love no more, no more with me!
We two together no more.

8

The aria sinking;
All else continuing—the stars shining,
The winds blowing—the notes of the bird continuous echoing,
With angry moans the fierce old mother incessantly moaning,
On the sands of Paumanok’s shore, gray and rustling;
The yellow half-moon enlarged, sagging down, drooping, the face of the sea almost touching;
The boy extatic—with his bare feet the waves, with his hair the atmosphere dallying,
The love in the heart long pent, now loose, now at last tumultuously bursting,
The aria’s meaning, the ears, the Soul, swiftly depositing,
The strange tears down the cheeks coursing,
The colloquy there—the trio—each uttering,
The undertone—the savage old mother, incessantly crying,
To the boy’s Soul’s questions sullenly timing—some drown’d secret hissing,
To the outsetting bard of love.

9

Demon or bird! (said the boy’s soul,)
Is it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it mostly to me?
For I, that was a child, my tongue’s use sleeping,
Now I have heard you,
Now in a moment I know what I am for—I awake,
And already a thousand singers—a thousand songs, clearer, louder and more sorrowful than yours,
A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me,
Never to die.

O you singer, solitary, singing by yourself—projecting me;
O solitary me, listening—nevermore shall I cease perpetuating you;
Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations,
Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me,
Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what there, in the night,
By the sea, under the yellow and sagging moon,
The messenger there arous’d—the fire, the sweet hell within,
The unknown want, the destiny of me.

O give me the clew! (it lurks in the night here somewhere;)
O if I am to have so much, let me have more!
O a word! O what is my destination? (I fear it is henceforth chaos;)
O how joys, dreads, convolutions, human shapes, and all shapes, spring as from graves around me!
O phantoms! you cover all the land and all the sea!
O I cannot see in the dimness whether you smile or frown upon me;
O vapor, a look, a word! O well-beloved!
O you dear women’s and men’s phantoms!

A word then, (for I will conquer it,)
The word final, superior to all,
Subtle, sent up—what is it?—I listen;
Are you whispering it, and have been all the time, you sea-waves?
Is that it from your liquid rims and wet sands?

10

Whereto answering, the sea,
Delaying not, hurrying not,
Whisper’d me through the night, and very plainly before day-break,
Lisp’d to me the low and delicious word DEATH;
And again Death—ever Death, Death, Death,
Hissing melodious, neither like the bird, nor like my arous’d child’s heart,
But edging near, as privately for me, rustling at my feet,
Creeping thence steadily up to my ears, and laving me softly all over,
Death, Death, Death, Death, Death.

Which I do not forget,
But fuse the song of my dusky demon and brother,
That he sang to me in the moonlight on Paumanok’s gray beach,
With the thousand responsive songs, at random,
My own songs, awaked from that hour;
And with them the key, the word up from the waves,
The word of the sweetest song, and all songs,
That strong and delicious word which, creeping to my feet,
The sea whisper’d me.

The heat opened a casket somehow
Entombed in a white hot vacancy
Rests my summers day melody
Of gentle feet patting crunchy gravel
Along the pink spines of swamp snails
Out there with listless goats inhaling
The moss infected water
And how I am trapped in my protective
Jalousies like a silly little lifeguard
Waiting for a dip in the surface
An action in the preface

The fields are screaming silver mutiny amidst
The drought on their legs
What travesty happened here?
What reverie of the cosmic nature?
They left it bald as an onion
Sifted as cement
I can hear their pleas
To drop them my sweat
Like a mother to her children
All to ease their parched throats

The wind hangs like a scandal
Whip there, calm somewhere
Or a fusion in between
As fickle as my feet could carry me
I feel like a sponge in all
My sublime holes
Waiting for rain to drop its mercy
Submerge me in its ocean of rumination

It is horrible
I am fried like chops
Of hard meat about to skitter and burn
Rare you say?Not possible in this
Omniscient oven.
The birds turn brown in my eyes
Like lumps of soil with feathers for feet
They seem to be getting along
With the unforgiving sky.

I'm tilted and insist that you know I am grateful now here we
are-
an alliance. Let's see ourselves onwards, be borne by our
fondness-in accord, be our love for the colloquy.

Spry, exuberant. We are free spirits draining oceans of ink, bathing in rivers of lies to find the truth while saturated by pride.
We are propelled to propinquity, as we seek for a better prospect while drowning in propensity.

Our hearts bleed onto the paper,
wanting more love of passion
to spill out endlessly,
so others can relate
to share this burning fire
Deep within our souls.
we seek endlessly for acceptance and relatability,
with someone who we can feel
safe to share these wonderful feelings,
feelings of want from our vulnerable hearts.

In sharing our vulnerable hearts,
I becomes We
the divine flame burns brightly, guiding lonely souls
to meet heart to heart on this happy road of destiny
a stream of gratitude flows from our bloods, and we discover that we write to connect
to the divine source that empties us and fills us.

I could drown myself in cups of coffee, in nicotine, old books, and whiskey.
But that won't make me crave you any less.
I could immerse myself in the deepest of enthralling literature, poems, a sea of colloquy,
Waves, strangling the current of my mind.
But you'd still be the resonant word.
I could listen to the sweetest of voices on repeat, golden like honey, sticky,
But my ears would only ever truly answer to yours.
Serpents tend to bite their own tails, a mythological and alchemic symbol of the cyclic nature of the universe: creation out of destruction.
But I'm not breaking my heart, loving you.
Swollen, yearning, daydreamed astray, gathered fast by night.
Curiosity deniable no more, innocence lost, hands wandered exploratory below.
Clambering desperate over themselves, those hands fell over folds of warmed flesh, over forgotten nooks and unfound crevasses, over trembling thighs and aching calves.
Astounded by the vast array of fresh delicacies, of unencountered sensations and deepest pleasures, she stood by loyal as those hands swiftly accustomed themselves to pursuing true ecstasy.
What divine rapture. What soaring heights of pleasure to ascend to. And what a delicious revelation to encounter such unimaginable ecstasy.
That twelfth year become a fourteenth, a fifteenth, a sixteenth.
And with the passing of each came a series of ever more adventurous trysts, the sorts of which Cousteau, Armstrong, and even Columbus could all be truly proud of.
Depths sounded, crevasses plundered, self’s nectars tasted and devoured, the pleasures of the flesh went unearthed.
Elaborate constructions lovingly shaped, waxed and honed, years of heady experimentation, trial and errors, fantasy and dreaming, all in the pursuit of even harder, better, faster, stronger *******. Perhaps it was that, or was it more a case of welcomed companionship? Ambidextrous frustration? A carnal appetite, most terrifying in its magnitude?

Isn’t it time then, you tried a little tenderness?
Be good to you.

The purgation or Katharismós that was unleashed, all the imperfections were gleaned by the elevations that descended due to ignominies and pathogenic lineage that were falsified by the demonicity of one who does not walk soullessly to another who is immune. The dark and cloaked darkness slipped away through the first sense of the fifth son that began to become sensitized, being the hearing that agreed in Vernarth with its great hypersensitivity of the Eclectic Portal, in which they are disconsolate when listening in unison, and who are shielded from the noise of the night when crushing the souls in pain that they purged from their places at midnight and on the way to the third midnight that appeared at 03:00, when the spirits lined up looking with their faces in the first night, at the cessation of all objectivity of Aesthesia. All already emigrated from all the dungeons of the leprosarium with meager living bodies and crowded souls in purgation; The Manes Apsidas with the remote light of the night of the antelucan, preceded the dawn following the darkness of midnight and not the second, to protect souls in expiation, with the lightning of the four Xiphos crusades of Vernarth, Etréstles, Theus and Vikentios, when Wonthelimar and Vlad Strigoi lagged behind them from hours to minutes, until within the same night three septenaries passed by, illustrating the supernatural Hijra of the Apsidas, transporting themselves to the dark souls of Spinalonga. The living went in double rows from blind rationality and without words to mention, only souls in purgation followed the path of Marie des Vallés who was exteriorized with the Apofisi in her palm, as a written object, and of great passive sensitivity, to then activate what that exceeds a body and a soul incapable of self-help, with excessive darkness, only being transported by hearing as the only sense present before others, who were de-empowered when what deprives beautifies the eyes of those who have no light to see, but if to feel. The atonement continued, and from the altar archangels came down, making those who for different reasons exceeded the privation of the dawn, which is shone in the small spaces of the natural light of Crete, rejoice. The omega overcomes the darkness and the crossed swords Xiphos extended beyond what oppresses the emptiness and non-material belonging of his Hyletic or Hilética, but if from a synod of beings that were abducted from the Kidron Valley and the Beit Hamikdash to the unearthly silence that inked dawn with pale and slimy light in the ranks of the lepers on their way to Agios Andreas where they will reside. The light conquers the darkness of the understanding that only looks with light, but without it, it was upset in the figure of the entities, believing that the Apsidas could be beings of category that are born from a countenance that provides feet to leave without looking back. Thus they would be guarded and not be involved with animals with semi-human figurative characters, in the stubbornness that none of them make sense, being able to be oblivious to the obfuscation of confusion and purgatory, changing all the conscious senses before the authoritarian light and darkness, reaching levels from Isaías “Si non-credideritis, non-intelligetis”, this is portrayed like this: “If you don't believe, you won't understand”.

Then, of course, faith is a dark night for the soul, and in this way it gives light; and the darker it darkens, the more light of itself, because by blinding it gives light. This was pronounced by Marie des Vallées when it was admired that the graceful specimens of Spinalonga were already going away, losing themselves in the dark cloud of uncertainty until Agios Andreas, while more darkness was concelebrated in the private blindness of the night that watched him. Thus in this way, the Saint leaves with the Apsidas Manes in a long night that was allied with the perplexity of dawn, going through the clouds of mourning through each lapse, with the lights that were enough to make her his disciple, erected of a David ascended alongside them. An Apollo resurfaces from the mist overcoming the abyss of temperance, which creates sudden chapters of generating and silencing pain with howls of those who compromise in their aching souls, being able to migrate to slow dimensions with a sensitive voice superior to that of hearing. From this topic the exchange of Gehenna as a voice inferior and superior at the same time to the sense of hearing was closed, when the clouds were already serene with their snowy colors, leaving the lights that dimension everything and transformed into a rational colloquy, which predominates over classic stratagems that will err in those who are not led by error, but by the slovenly voices escaping from whoever conducts the hearing of those who are members of an unconduced purgation, but rather from the twisted fact of free will, burning what is understood not to imagine what would happen, rather what is proper to mortality without faith. The young night was transformed into sovereign dawn, each one coming closer and coming to each one who understands himself. Before a small night that was enlarged in the gloom. They all go to their rooms, going to the third instant of sensitivity, before the intuition of seeing and hearing, together with the aftertaste that each one was pairing with who is not his nature, and thought that was once again renamed in Marie des Vallées, the signage of Isaiah and Saint Paul, “what God has prepared for those who love him, no eye ever saw it, nor ear heard it, nor did it fall into the heart or thought of man”, this being the last message of the Saint when all were discovered from the perennial distance, in glory and submission where the just endures the most intrepid pain seizing their senses towards the Mashiach, alleviating the fantasy that disturbs any deconcentration that should not be admitted together with the halo of Marie des Vallées.

Pressure isn't always harsh.
It doesn't have to be the grim and guttural.
It isn't always in regard to the coarse.
There's the soft kind, sweet.
The gentle pressure of lips against a collar bone.
Fingertips tracing freckles,
Valves working at elevated speeds.
Pressure needn't be a villain.
It can be a tender confession by means of softly spoken words.
Poignant colloquy put down with clean intentions,
The hum at night of dulcet tones into a receiver.
Mellow pressures on the heart and mind are pressures, too.
The pressure of eyes directed toward skin,
A foot on a gas pedal.
The pressure caused by closing distance.

Pressure me.

Upon the table in their bowl
in violent disarray
of yellow sprays, green spikes
of leaves, red pointed petals
and curled heads of blue
and white among the litter
of the forks and crumbs and plates
the flowers remain composed.
Coolly their colloquy continues
above the coffee and loud talk
grown frail as vaudeville.

between the lines of conversation, you have the words. the fragments of thoughts that seep through letter after letter combination. emotion and experience placed in the minute spaces within the letters. each phrase is a cracked door. opened ever so slightly, but enough to catch a glimpse of its contents. between the lines of conversation, you have your Leo Tolstoys and your Virginia Woolfs. you have an idea of the artistry of living. you have the ability to keep breathing. between the lines of conversation, you have the hesitations and the “wait a minute”s. you have the slow, heavy “i love you”s. you have “i miss you”s and “don’t forget about me”s. between the lines of conversation, though, you also get your “*******”s and your “leave me be”s. you have relentless chasing and lonely nights. your messy break-ups and flaccid first loves. when you have a conversation, it is more than thin letter arrangement. it is response and meaning and power. between the lines of conversation, you have the words. the fragments of thoughts that seep through letter after letter combination. you have life.

Of what she said to me that night--no matter.
The strange thing came next day.
My brain was full of music--something she played me--;
I couldn't remember it all, but phrases of it
Wreathed and wreathed among faint memories,
Seeking for something, trying to tell me something,
Urging to restlessness: verging on grief.
I tried to play the tune, from memory,--
But memory failed: the chords and discords climbed
And found no resolution--only hung there,
And left me morbid . . . Where, then, had I heard it? . . .
What secret dusty chamber was it hinting?
'Dust', it said, 'dust . . . and dust . . . and sunlight . .
A cold clear April evening . . . snow, bedraggled,
Rain-worn snow, dappling the hideous grass . . .
And someone walking alone; and someone saying
That all must end, for the time had come to go . . . '
These were the phrases . . . but behind, beneath them
A greater shadow moved: and in this shadow
I stood and guessed . . . Was it the blue-eyed lady?
The one who always danced in golden slippers--
And had I danced with her,--upon this music?
Or was it further back--the unplumbed twilight
Of childhood?--No--much recenter than that.

You know, without my telling you, how sometimes
A word or name eludes you, and you seek it
Through running ghosts of shadow,--leaping at it,
Lying in wait for it to spring upon it,
Spreading faint snares for it of sense or sound:
Until, of a sudden, as if in a phantom forest,
You hear it, see it flash among the branches,
And scarcely knowing how, suddenly have it--
Well, it was so I followed down this music,
Glimpsing a face in darkness, hearing a cry,
Remembering days forgotten, moods exhausted,
Corners in sunlight, puddles reflecting stars--;
Until, of a sudden, and least of all suspected,
The thing resolved itself: and I remembered
An April afternoon, eight years ago--
Or was it nine?--no matter--call it nine--
A room in which the last of sunlight faded;
A vase of violets, fragrance in white curtains;
And, she who played the same thing later, playing.

She played this tune.  And in the middle of it
Abruptly broke it off, letting her hands
Fall in her lap.  She sat there so a moment,
With shoulders drooped, then lifted up a rose,
One great white rose, wide opened like a lotos,
And pressed it to her cheek, and closed her eyes.

'You know--we've got to end this--Miriam loves you . . .
If she should ever know, or even guess it,--
What would she do?--Listen!--I'm not absurd . . .
I'm sure of it.  If you had eyes, for women--
To understand them--which you've never had--
You'd know it too . . . '  So went this colloquy,
Half humorous, with undertones of pathos,
Half grave, half flippant . . . while her fingers, softly,
Felt for this tune, played it and let it fall,
Now note by singing note, now chord by chord,
Repeating phrases with a kind of pleasure . . .
Was it symbolic of the woman's weakness
That she could neither break it--nor conclude?
It paused . . . and wandered . . . paused again; while she,
Perplexed and tired, half told me I must go,--
Half asked me if I thought I ought to go . . .

Well, April passed with many other evenings,
Evenings like this, with later suns and warmer,
With violets always there, and fragrant curtains . . .
And she was right: and Miriam found it out . . .
And after that, when eight deep years had passed--
Or nine--we met once more,--by accident . . .
But was it just by accident, I wonder,
She played this tune?--Or what, then, was intended? . . .

(I am sick of writing love poems for you, so here’s another)*


Do not fall in love with me, I am a poet.

I’ll scrawl down your every word,

Your most innate gestures,

Your bent and whims;

That you will grow conscious of your natural being,

About how your skin breathes,

You’ll run your fingers down your face wondering if you are even normal.


Do not fall in love with me, you’ll hate me.

I’ll write about you incessantly and obsessively.

When I’ll hold your face to kiss you,

I’ll leave ink stains on your aerial lips.

I’ll write till my fingers weep and lungs rip apart.


Do not fall in love with me, you’ll feel empty.

Because I’ll kiss this crooked stick between my fingers more than your lips;

This pale paper brighter than your smile.

I won’t smell of perfumes and lilies,

But ink and *** and cigarettes.


Do not fall in love with me, I am a greedy scribbler.

I’ll make your every colloquy an artwork (against your will)

That you’ll crave normalcy.

I’ll stay awake to watch you sleep at night

For my words, for my penniless art.

I’ll feed on you like a parasite,

I’ll script your existence in my veins,

You’ll have nothing of your own.


Do not fall in love with me,

There will be days when you’ll be talking to me in a fine-looking coffee shop

But I won’t be listening,

Because I’d be writing in my head, nodding along, smiling mindlessly

And your soul will ache.


Do not fall in love with me because more than anything

I want to be an obsessive writer.

I’ll forget your name,

Thinking if I should call my character Kurt or Keith.

You will feel trivial and ignored.


Do not fall in love with me,

I won’t love you like an ordinary girl,

I will be self-absorbed and oblivious.

But oh my darling, my flame, do love me, else I’ll have nothing to live for.

Star crossed lovers, were we
Passion burning bright
We took upon wings
It began to take flight

Wordless conversation
Your name on my breath
Macabre heart melodies
And the dance of death

My ultimate act of hope
An act of valor
Desolate tears
Adoration colored pallor

Acid dipped colloquy
Mind tires, succumbs
Angelic contradictions
Senses numbs

Whispers of footsteps
Paramours’ ceasefire
Blood spilled emotions
No longer my desire

Unwept severed promises
Hearts struggle to breathe
Disunite in same direction
Faceless anonymity

your words muddle together like a horribley woven web of broken promises.
but I know the power of words, I am a poet.
Your colloquy is irregular and nonsensical.
your mind can not put together one and two since the cancer knocked him out.
but that does not give you the golden pass to be a trainwreck, with your moods like a train.
stand up for yourself and get your head out of that deep rabbit hole you've stupidly been digging for too long.
help me love life and look foward to my future, instead of stating what is best for me.
strangers walking by have given me more hope in a single conversation than you have.
maybe me wanting to be a hostess is my literal way of flying from the nest, but i'm not afraid to jump.
I'm eager to blindly jump, possibly fall, scrape my hands and keep on going.
I look foward to the day that my flight lands and I will be in a foreign hotel room all by myself.
The true problem I believe is that I am okay with being alone, sometimes all the time.
Never have I found that one person where I would truely be sad to be away from all the long day and night.
There is my true problem.
I do not get close to people in fear that I will become attached and then it will make me crazy when they are not near.
I harden my heart and hurt myself instead of others.
I know how it feels to get slashed down by the saber of rejection or desertion, so why would I ever force that upon another?
I am alone in this world and I am content.
Not happy about it nor am I sad, simply content with what is always going to be.
Do not get me wrong, I do feel emotions, I am not a robot.
I have times varying from complete happiness to absolute blubbering depression.
But other than that I am in a neutral zone of numbness.
both mind and body, completely numb.
My body goes into a sort of hibernation of its own.
where my mind is speeding up but the functions of my body start to slow and fade away.
My life is stuck and often constipated, like I'm am at then end of my road.
I stay in this same motion because I am comfortable and too afraid to leave that isolation blanket that has kept me warm for so long.
There are blips in my life where I feel I found someone worth anything.
Our eyes will meet at a social gethering, we get to talking and then when he leaves, the look he gives is like no other.
His eyebrows furrow, wrinkles lay besides his eyes, his smile makes me feel wanted for once in a long time.
what's bad is that i'm already obligated to another, so why do I want to spend time with this new brown haired boy?
I guess he gives me something my own does not give to me now.
what he gives me is hope. A new light of guidence that carries me on through the current prison in which I am entrapped.
Where I am right now, I still don't know.
I curl up like a baby on my cold bed and sob, wondering what I am doing with my life.
I listen to the music of sugar plum fairies and tin men dancing to calm me down.
I realize that what I want most of all is a dream.
Dreams get you through the rough patches in life.
But that is when it hits me, what I don't have is a dream. I've never been blessed with that gift.
I am okay with that now. Because now I don't have to spend so much time on my dreams.
I get the chance to watch others live their dreams, and that makes me happier than anything.
To watch anothers face light up because of pure bliss, that is my happiness.
I've learned to live through others, and I am content.
I'll be okay.

Not a professional writer
Not a commercial writer
Not an academic writer
    —of tomes

Not a writer of poetry
Not a writer of prose
Not a writer of colloquy
   —heaven knows

Not a writer of fiction
Not a writer of fact
Not for comic depiction
    —do my words then attack

Not a writer in residence
Not a writer then banned
Not a writer of circumstance
    —just a writer, I am

(Villanova Pennsylvania: April, 2015)

She
wished
to write
the diary
of a flower,  
unknowing
of how the
pages were
endless,
as the
song
of her
beautiful
mind the
garden
came
forth
from,
her
soft
angel
eyes
opened
for the
eyes of
a book
within
her private
perusal,
where her
being had
came to the
embrace,
and so
followed
her heart,
the rest
came
In waves
as her
hands
stroked her
gentle
features,
her skin
was the
winter
moon,
though
not fairer
than her
deeper
thoughts
as a blue
sea with
the softer
whispers
of clouds,
her home
lyed within
the deepest
part of the
library,
seldom
wandering
to the cafe,
her heart
wished to
sees beauty
In others
veiled to
the eyes,
wondrously,
she meditated
upon the light
waiting to be
sought, the
butterfly
to touch
her palms,
eventide
fell as
she walked
through the
garden by
the moon,
hidden
with the
roses
forever,
the poet
of love who
gazed upon
a symphony
of dew-beads
as stars,
appearing
as shrines
of memory,
as the night
lights of a
universe
for only
her,
as she
gazed
upon them,
with her
gentle
voice,
she sang,
“can I call
this love,
or the words
of falling rain?”
as she watched,
with the leaves,
and the gentle
dew, opening for
love letters
untold,
her lips
touched
the petals,
and tears
fell from
her eyes,
and upon
the white
petals,
the night
sleeps
forever,
the tears
became
the far
tides
of an
ocean,
love is
the rose
of suffering
and beauty,
and the one
whom has
known it
lives forever
as a home
for others,
the nightingale
sings as her
ink flowed as
waves
upon her
papers,
where she
wandered, with
meditations upon
Monet arose
as lullabies
of a secret
world,
songs of
honeysuckle
and wisteria
brighter
than the
wings
of fairies,
the small gifts of
precious wonders
she held with all
the curiosity
in her hands,
as she
thought
to herself,
were these
lights, or
the few
thousands
teaching
her to
dance
from
within?
she reaches
the waters,
and the
delicate,
fair form
touched
the moonlit
mirrors,
where she
witnessed
the truth
beyond
words,
amongst
the tear
painted
petals, the
moon sings
the symphony
for her, “are you
the one I have
been seeking?”
as it’s light
touches her
wandering
steps, she
returns to
her home,
and in her
blankets,
she writes,
“to my lover,
I will remember
how we met
each other
as waves,
from the
lost, far
away
parts
of the
ocean,
we found
the shores
becoming
eyes, they had
sought themselves
to be lost in legions
of constellations
in the galaxies
of hearts,
with the stars
that waited
to be born,
the flecked
specks of light in
divinations of the
midnight hours,
and reminisced
the dappled
dreams of
colors and
witnessed
beauteous
musing, in
the cafe,
where our
conversations
poured
the seas
into cups
of tea, and
explored
the question
of metamorphosis
through words,
shifting time
through the
touching of
marble cups
and the colloquy
of our eyes, the
artistry in the
miracle of the
gentle, I walked
In flight with you,
as we shared the
unspoken stories
of our hearts
woven through
the rain,
under the
umbrellas
leading
to your
home,
where we
watched
the paintings
of the night
skies as the
memories
of us, the
lights
touched
by the
secret
garden,
where I
wandered”.
her hands
then closed
the pages,
and her eyes
rested upon
the pillow,
and the
moon
chants,
“O fair
maiden,
you are
the one
whose
existence
Is loved, the
nightingale
has sung to
you upon
It’s branch
near your
window,
though
fairer is
your
voice,
you are
the gentle
one who
turns all
of what
you have
seen to
artistry,
when
you love,
all is in
bloom,
la fleur
de lune.

I write poetry when thoughts infect me
catching colloquy in a web to feast
my thorax alates pearlescent scales
I capture nectar from dewy books
***** waxy words that form in the back
of my throat in honeycomb shapes
they taste sweetest directly from my lips
until you notice six legs protruding
or ten eyes staring up at you in fear
the apex of my elytra is rainbow chrome
but all you see is a hardened shell
admittedly, all I've ever had is ability
to filiform syllables and sounds
dangle lexicon delicately from silk pages
in hopes of creating all the beauty
that I have never felt I possess in this form

-Why are you shedding tears? (raising the eyebrows)
=Why are being dunce?..you are(choking) departing dear(helplessly).
(The former passing a beam and holding his fingers).
-No,you are being dunce,(by wiping the tears of the latter) my hero. (Embracing).
=I love you(the former heaving a sigh). There you go,your Prince is waiting for you.
Daughter-I love you too Papa (clasping the hand of her partner,took a seat in the car,bidding farewell and the matrimony ends).


Poetry technique-Colloquy.

“Gonna tell me where we’re headed?”
“You’ll know when we get there.”
“Come on, man. You haven’t said a word since we left. You turned up unannounced, told me to follow you, and here I am, following you, once again, and again you won’t tell me ****.”
“You’ll know when we get there.”
“No, I’m not playing your games any more. This is it. Tell me where you’re taking me. Too many times I’ve had to do this, This isn’t your time, just a warning. You know how many times you’ve said that now? Eighteen. I’ve been keeping tally. Honestly, I’ve had enough.”
“This is your time.”
“Finally, a ******* answer. So, what, I’m supposed to be all depressed now? Too late, you’ve been winding me up for months now, teasing me with this ****. Finally I get to spend the rest of eternity not having to look over my shoulder every five minutes waiting for you to turn up and ruin my day. You know, I hope you enjoy yourself, I really do. You need to be a complete ******* to do what you do. Did you ever have a life, or have you done this for all time? I bet you have no idea what it’s like for us, constantly in fear for when you knock on the door. You just saunter about in your flowy robe looking all menacing, but you have no heart or soul, you’re just a puppet the universe had to create to chaperone the creatures that actually have hearts and souls to some afterlife where we do what we already did when we were alive. Honestly, what is the point of you? Why have life then death then life again? What’s the point in that? It’s just job creation with you, isn’t it? Middle management, pointless to a fine point. Ha ha. Death is a job, nothing more.”
“I have no heart, that is true. You have no idea what that feels like. You get to feel, you get to see, you get to experience love and hope and fear and loss. I have none of that, just the words used to describe them. They mean nothing to me. You can make jokes about me, about how unfeeling I am, but you don’t want this, no one does. You’re right, I never had a life. That is my curse, not yours. You get experience. Death keeps you in check, gives you purpose, a finite time to try to force you all to do good in the world. Without me, without even the concept of me, living forever, you would have no deadline in which to do anything. You people think that if you had eternity, you’d learn every musical instrument, teach yourself every language, travel to every country, love countless men and women, but none of you would do that. You would start tomorrow, and when tomorrow comes, you’d start it tomorrow, ad infinitum. An infinity of tomorrows. Nothing would get done, you would sit all day and stare at your TVs and computers, idling away eternity. We are here.”
“A grave. You brought me to a grave? My grave, I suppose?”
“Yes.”
“So what now? You want me to lie in it, stare out of that rectangle at my little patch of sky? Wallow in self-pity, start regretting every little ******* detail of my life? I’m not interested in that. Just tell me what I have to do or where to go and I’ll be on my way.”
“You have already been judged, I have been told the outcome.”
“Surprise me.”
“You failed. You spent your life caring only for yourself, without any shred of humanity for your fellow people. At the moment you died, there were seven billion, five hundred and twelve million, seven hundred and twenty three thousand, two hundred and ninety nine other people alive. How many of them did you care about, how many did you think of when you threw away your leftovers, how many of them did you fall in love with, how many did you help?”
“Look, if I’m not happy, how the hell can I make others happy?”
“By being there. You don’t have to be happy to make others happy. Making others smile and laugh will cause you to smile and laugh. It is infectious. To help yourself, you must help others in the process, it just doesn’t work one way. I have been around since the beginning of time and it has happened far too much. You have failed, as so many before you have. This is your punishment. You will stand here forever, unable to move, staring down into your own grave. This is your reminder, this hole in the dirt. This is the culmination of everything you have ever done, every thought you have ever had. This is your life, confined to the darkness of a grave.”
“Wait, this is ****. I don’t want this. No book ever told me it would be like this. Where’s the fire, the torture, the pain? At least I’d be kept busy. There’s nothing here, no feeling, no company. Why must I be alone? Because I was alone in my life? That wasn’t my ******* choice, it was the choice of everyone else. No one took any time to ask me how I was doing. What happens to them, will end up like this?”
“Perhaps, but that is not for me to decide. There is more than one punishment, those who decide on such things have decided this is befitting of the way you lived your life. I must go now. There are many more souls in need of me.”
“Wait! Is there anything I can do? This can’t be it, I have time left, I can do good.”
“That time has passed. There is no time here. I must go now. This is your punishment; your trial has already finished.”
“So I stand here forever?”
“Yes. Goodbye.”
“****. I don’t want this. I’m sorry! Can you hear me? I’m ******* sorry! Give me another chance, please. Just one more chance.”

Sometimes you feel so inferior that you will tear away the flesh of anyone in your path to simply ascend. You are struggling to breathe. Sometimes you are suffocating so intensley that you will slay the souls of anyone in your path in your colloquy. Sometimes you will set tempers ablaze from the embers within your belly. Sometimes you scar fabricated memories with truth.  

Sometimes your heart burns to a degree that can and will collapse stars. Sometimes your temperament will destruct star systems.

Sometimes all you are capable of is cremating worlds. Embrace it, mother dragon. On every plane in every realm. You burn for eternity. You are the personification of hell.

“Poetry teaches one to read casuistry and put into fluency of words,
A reality of contributing the internal thoughts of rapture in mending,  
Come to pass but it is a poet’s way of living the arts of expression,
Art of expression for the poet as well as a benefit for the reader,

Life through philosophy of words affixed to realization of the subject
When there is obscurity another spectrum of an unusual piquancy,
A poet and writers life is always looking for that germane connotation,
Daydreams of delusion or a nightmare with a colloquy word equanimity,

When everything is onerous we reach a point of imperious efficacy,
Mind body and soul an inimical to dream and precipitous thought with no end,  
An uninterrupted moment of solitude and words moments of cessation rest,
In all this words teach a poet care for loved one or dear friend to aplomb,
Until lovers or friends may meet once again earnest  in Poetic Acclimation”  
By Andrew Guzaldo 03/11/2019 ©

Waking up, curtains closed near the bedside.
The alarm clock ringing, reading six past two.
You bring yourself to, walking past the obstacles scattered on the floor.

The entrance of the door, only arms length away.
You open it, only to feel betrayed.

You expected presence,
You wanted something more than solitary,
Something more than waking up alone.

You're only talking to yourself.
In your head, your conscious wanting insight on what lead you through this path.

You carry on the day,
With a weight on your shoulders.

Everyone you see is a familiar face,
Are you sure they're your friend?
Would you believe what they say, just for the sake of colloquy?
You go along with it, only to feel betrayed.

Approaching the buildings ahead, the debate conveys.
You stop & stare.
Consternation, fear, the crowds see through you.

You walk along, only to feel betrayed.

The facts keep on going,
You keep on showing,
Dreading, knowing, they remember the worst of you.

Unlocking the door, five stories above your home,
You study the people from before, lacking in trust, faith. Promises and fate. The closer they get, the more you hate.

You close your eyes, only to feel betrayed.

an undulating reverie
hangs heavy in the silence
past canyons abundant with sunlight
and dreams made out of cotton

there, beyond the intoxicating haze,
you stood.

my lips uttered no words
that the universe could decipher
but the midnight tide understood
what i truly meant

now, if only you could, ma chérie

but the scrupulous colloquy is bound to break
and the stratosphere rewinds again
past divine oculists and obstinate facsimiles
and beyond the desolate valleys
where no sunshine dares to embark

and what’s left in the end
at the very edge of such a disenchanting,
morose fantasy

is you, and me,
and an undulating reverie.

I finally got front row nosebleed seats,
I looked at you like a blind man seeing for the first time, and you look like the rest of my life,
My heart became a macaw in a canary cage as I envisaged little red ticks marked all over your skin,
You blew smoke rings like halos from your lips, you made death look beautiful as they burnt umber through my lungs as I inhaled, and I inhaled a lot of you,
Every strand of my hair became a kite string,
My ribs wore my skin a size too small that day,
There are some things in life that are so beautiful they hurt,
It hurt when I looked at you, and it hurt when I didn't. But my heart still became a runway.
A flash. This all happened within the first ten seconds of meeting you, after your very first words to me;  them being; "oh ****."
I didn't know entirely how to take that, but I always liked making an impression, and if; "oh ****" was it, then i'd take anything.
You made me stand in the very middle of the haunted hollow tree, although i'd already picked up on how beautifully you filled spaces.
You had your suspicions about the supernatural but,
Your hands and heart are made of all things we have trouble believing,
Like an ocean, you had the waves and I was a girl again, terrified of swimming,
We sat before the sea for hours, watching the clocks dance around us until time became nothing but the rise and fall of our heartbeats.
Feeling you near me, as apposed to any other woman before was the difference in being drunk and being sober, women like you slay anything ordinary.
You quickly became everything I saw, everything I did and everything I felt.
Whenever you tell me you had difficulty with words, to make sense of what's inside of you, words are just tiny winds with sounds of different arrangements, and even if you are never able to find the right ones, know this; you have and always will make sense to me.
I want to press you, not in a book, but against me, imprint the lines of your fingertips on my ******* like maps of Atlantis, because I want to go places with you that I never knew existed.
I want your nails engraved on my back like train tracks, so I can always find my way back to now, to then. Red arrows pointing North, South, East and West. Forever leading me to the auroras beneath our eyelids.
I keep wishing on your eyelashes, hoping they'll fall as fast as I do.
Push your nose against mine one more time before I leave to my own bed, how you wait for me to get my key in the door before you even dream of driving away.
Little do you know, you are home, I never knew I could feel homesick from a person too.
How I wish I could carry on the kiss from your car door, to my room, where our waists crash together so hard the earth spins off its axis. Pressing my lips onto yours like the little red button in the presidents office, the one that puts an end to everything.
Escaping to a world where I can use the wool from my eyes to knit me a telescope to see the stars between your thighs.
You're the one I think of when I stand on a mountain, before the open sea, when I look to the sky, and when I nuzzle my face into my pillow at night.
One day we won't have a twenty year olds legs, or a ten year old heart,
My eggs are all in one basket, that's true, but I wouldn't have it any other way,
I could drown myself in cups of coffee, in nicotine, old books, and whiskey.
But that won't make me crave you any less.
I could immerse myself in the deepest of enthralling literature, poems, a sea of colloquy,
Waves, strangling the current of my mind.
But you'd still be the resonant word.
I could listen to the sweetest of voices on repeat, golden like honey, sticky,
But my ears would only ever truly answer to yours.
This may well destroy me,
But you know what?
I am entirely,
Completely,
Magnificently,
Alright
With that.