Prickly cactus pins,
flurried toward my skin.
sinking down on sheets of lies,
my epidermis falsified.

Cells of blood like moss-covered bricks,
pierced right through by cactus ******.
The places where it stings,
lie deeper than I’ve ever been into my own flesh and bones,
and my heart would never condone,
but tonight I let it bleed,
to know myself a little more.

These prickly cactus pins,
dotted all over my skin,
I dare not try ever again,
to hide the contours of my brain.

Reams of envelopes lie in wait,
to say a few words to my mates.
The lies – they saw, although much of it they forgot,
and some were never for them to understand,
but now cactus ****** have serrated my heart,
only and only the truth pours out,
as the tissues of life, are ripped apart.

Go, dumb-born book,
Tell her that sang me once that song of Lawes:
Hadst thou but song
As thou hast subjects known,
Then were there cause in thee that should condone
Even my faults that heavy upon me lie,
And build her glories their longevity.

Tell her that sheds
Such treasure in the air,
Recking naught else but that her graces give
Life to the moment,
I would bid them live
As roses might, in magic amber laid,
Red overwrought with orange and all made
One substance and one color
Braving time.

Tell her that goes
With song upon her lips
But sings not out the song, nor knows
The maker of it, some other mouth
May be as fair as hers,
Might, in new ages, gain her worshippers,
When our two dusts with Waller’s shall be laid,
Siftings on siftings in oblivion,
Till change hath broken down
All things save beauty alone.

Milked and Pasteurized in infancy
I come of age and choke on the breast I've suckled and wrung.
Explore an open door of opportunity to meet the man who settled the seed.
Disappointed to find only horses, cracks, and neverland keys.
Recognize a social scheme of getting in, getting off, and moving on.
No longer ignorant in bliss,
Apparent to me that daddy left and all that's there is mother mirage.

She's climbing a ladder to complicated bliss,
Pockets full of posies, pills, and thrills.
Mind full of confliction,
self-deprecating inhibition-
hypocritical actions to condone.

Bake a cake.
Make a mermaid sandwich to oblivion
Talk metaphors to your minion.
Fake a place.
Call it home.

Be the hammer in my stone, help me tumble n' bow to your throne.
Sold me sideways lies and theory
Hypothetically, it seems to me that $commission$ was gained
from blackened eyes and skinned up knees
Come to find the wrinkled hand that led me was none but my own.

Guess your conscious forgot it's name
Guess your soul forgot my name.
Careful Grace that saved a wretch like no one.
She's carefully steppin' around your toes,
She's gracefully getting tired of recreating this unreality.

You're a ******' rabbit in a hole.
Lit a match and you've lost all self-control
What breaks you makes you.
What takes you, stakes you out to come and **** you, fake you
Knock on hidden hills door to get more
Swallow the roof that disproves your critics
Keeps you loose and ******* the alphabet dry.
Swallow Cold Alphabet Soup.  I try.

You're moving in with your girlfriend and many people have congratulated you.
You've asked me to do the same but that is something I can't and won't do.
I won't congratulate you because you and your girlfriend will be living in sin.
I won't condone premarital ***, don't ask for my congratulations ever again.
Yes, I have old-fashioned morals that you consider to be out of date.
I won't congratulate you because you're doing something that God hates.

Close the borders,
Do not let them in.
They might **** us all,
Those foreign families of sin.

Strip away their rights,
Put a gun under their chin.
Base our civil law,
On the color of their skin.

Go ahead and touch them,
After all, they didn’t say no.
The courts won’t do a thing,
But laugh and let you go.

Women have no say at all,
Their bodies aren’t their own.
We don’t care if you were *****,
Pro-life we loudly condone.

This is our society now,
Ignorance pollutes the air.
Respect for all human beings,
Disappeared without a care.

I admit these times are scary,
And some hope may now be lost.
But he won't get away with this,
Not at any miniscule cost.

So please, I beg you, do not fear,
The battle now begins.
You will lose Donald J. Trump,
And LOVE will always win.

I have never been anyone's first choice
But why would anyone want me to be
If they knew I knew would it make them change the way they think of me
Or would they lie to me like they do day to day
I can't seem to let this vile though ht escape throughout the ears connecting to the brain
Just to be thought of day to day but there is no more rooms left in the hearts now a days
I can't be cramped up with a charlie horse lingering around
I am just a pretty little flower but nobody's ruby red roses anyhow
Just under dressed while living in this distress
With thoughts of suicide hanging them self at the roof of my doorstep
If no one loves me now no one will love me in the times I will condone
The thoughts of sharp razor blades seem to reep into my skin
We get excited to travel the world but not for traveling someone within
I just want to be put first even if only for a day
I want to drown in the love and affection even if I can not breathe
Just simply someone standing next to me would put me at the greatest of ease

I've trudged the tracks of righteousness alone
And walked the walk of wickedness with grace.
I've done things I cannot now condone
On either side-- you'd see it in my face.

I thank god for this life which I have wasted
And all the gifts which it has given me,
But how do I repay when I've not tasted
The lavish love of such an old decree?

"By faith" you say. I say "you have it all,
For I'm not one to disbelieve my doubt
But faith? Oh, please don't make me lol.
Betrayal changes what men are all about."

Perhaps god's nothing. I'm fine with it;
Ex nihilo cogitatione fit.

They leave Jerusalem, with the acrobats from Shiraz. They were ghosts of poetry, wine, roses and fireflies; they were conjuring the path of the twelve camels to the intersection with the Cenotaph, where King David with the Cherubs of Kafersesuh will stay. They were Epi ghosts, basking in camelid footsteps. They went in all the intermittences of the bent nails and plants of the areas of the marquee of the other four ghosts that accompanied him. They were the jumpers with water wheels, wheel scales with tutelary cords, some with stilts of gold disgrace from the coins of Judas Iscariot and the last propelled by a caper that ruled all the others on the wings of the Fireflies. Withdrawn from the road that leads to the Kidron valley, 2,500 years of clay tablets from Persepolis fall on all of them, they were phonetized with the plaintive nightmare of Tirazis's one-eyed poem; which is currently Shiraz, in this way these ghosts escorted the Hexagonal Birthright, they were exiled from their ghostly cities for not paying the tribute of obedience to destroy and rebuild. As they began to be with them in the cove, the ghosts of the acrobats boiled with the eagerness to prevent everyone from being saddened by the departure from the orchard, which was falling further and further behind their footsteps, dancing with their pirouettes along the way, they told little stories. in the ears of travelers.

Hydro Saltimabanqui: “I come from Roknabad (also known as Aub-e Rokní), an underground canal that carries spring water to the city from a mountain located ten kilometers northeast of Shiraz. Here I have to mend the propellers and water ropes to do my acrobatics on the water, with greater songs in the poems of the Poet Hafiz. When we bite our tongues, we repair it with Hafiz's verses from the Koran; there are three hundred creeds, three hundred hectares to irrigate with my wheel the sadness of those who cannot have the gift of the rivalry of Montenegro and Monteblanco, to overestimate the liveliness of the caravan trembling with uncertain doubts on its way to Jaffa. "

Saltimbanqui of Bacule: "We are Epi ghosts, the reverie with tutelary ropes, to jump through the trapeze of the photometric units of the heavy Almería of the highest Mirror of the Sea. Here we look; from here we will board the barge that will take them from back to Limassol. Curiously, the same ship from Lepanto that sleeps in the swings of the sea and in the arms of Anaximander, in a new awakening from the lethargy of the super-string theorization, here is the intrinsic speculation of science, since this is not just to research purely empirical. "

Says Anaximander: “First…, we have no proof that string theory is not ultimately correct and in the future in any verifiable way. Second, we propose a project of the order of string theory, which is necessary for science and its importance, going even beyond the scientific to also project itself on the metaphysical and the religious, right here in this order of greater what to do together with the rope that leads me to Patmos.

Saltimabanqui of Bascule responds: “metaphysical and religious legitimacy, here we are tying knots in the rope that inaugurates a new masonry in the observable futuristic look. Here is the original fiction of continuing to raise the necks of the ants over our optics. We will jump on these ropes, but we will fall on intervals of placental physical dens, which were born from the new embryo in the twelve caves of Gethsemane, in a primitive late germinal process. The micro phonetic vibrations will lift us up from the hunger to follow and leave King David in his cenotaph, gored on his hips by the Cherubim, marking his holy antlers that become entangled in the blunting of the cuneiform scratches of his epigram.

In the middle of the magical theorists exotically as associativity of substance causally of the poetic and multiverse song, believing in the ghosts of Shiraz, as dreams injected to sublimate the Aeneids that they lamented on the bottom stones, even though they were independent of their material origin. Multi universes, multi paraphrase for who has to dress the word “Rosa in her noble long dress to the cliff of Ebdara when Vernarth acclaims his brother Etréstles, he comes with the Auriga from Messolonghi. Rested and determined to head to Tel Gomel, he comes with his horse Kanti to keep him company on this crusade. Kanti defied the Cliffs of Crete, he was servile to Markos Botsaris, 1821 (Royal Hero of the Liberation of Greece in the Turkish Invasion, Koumeterium Messolonghi - Palibrio USA), until in the afternoon he approached from a herd of beautiful places of steeds to him. This was heard by Etréstles and he seized His horse to have more than a Life from his company, more than a lost and lost aroma of his natural mother, to reach the one who would treasure it”.

The ghosts attribute quantitative passages from before leaving King David, and then continuing on the road to Jaffa and advancing on the ship back to Cyprus; Limassol. All were hyperkinetic bowls leveraged by the terrain that was on the **** of the acrobatic histrion foreshadowing the contours of the temporal filigree, which in each one made them smile at the carriage with oxidizing wheels, still being immaterial beings, but alive in its marvel gases, wading the serious bile that emerged from the glasses in his allegories. His footsteps and his undulating phonetic figures did not stop over the caravan, which had already passed Jerusalem. They were already undaunted by themselves and overshadowed by the foreboding modulation and encryption of the rehearsals they were doing, over the heavy atmosphere that seized and begged a small piece of the attention of those who did not celebrate their Shiraz pirouettes.
The areas, volumes, and lengths were fully encompassed by the Ghosts of Shiraz, the acrobats ran along the banks of Ramallah, it was already winter, the city received them with winds and rains from the southwest alternating with cold and dry winds from the northeast. The acrobats went like master geometricians to condone the fuss of the caravan, devising a dodexagesimal system. (Twelve centuries of ultra-nocturnal geometry and shipwrecks at the Alexandria lighthouse)

Positioning as a base the number 12, to measure times and angles that they needed to avoid the voluminous rains that hit the caravan.  Incredibly, the volumetric position of the plantar legs of the camels seemed like wheels that rotated without stopping in any anti circumferential radius, making some clouds a shutter that enclosed them like a trapezoid of God's flock in the high semicircle of the waters that tried to fall. , like axiomatic staves of Euclid's beard tempering his elemental construct.

The linear position of each one of those who were mounted was a perfect ergonometric based on the Muladhara pressing the four red petals on pressing the Achilles heel of Vernarth, which was dimensioning the Ramallah triangulation, with the fungi that were housed in its Xifos sword in the jet tip that carried the dodexagesimal cartography. In the same position, the Apostle Saint John seemed, he carried the rosary in his left hand in geometry that elongated his nose and feet in an adonis triangle, thirsty for one hundred and twenty degrees of the sextant that broadened its spectrum to align with this Birthright. Thus the stars and planets are positioned as celestial spheres with the gravitation of the Olivos Berna, revolutionizing curved and flat equations that intuited to go beyond the crossed pirouettes that the acrobats did all the way, even further than those of the withered path of oil, purposely of the axiomatic systems that the Ghosts of Shiraz intended to establish.

Shiraz  Ghosts

These Persian Epi ghosts, axiomatized abstract and ideal entities relating models of austerity and lyricism, which fluctuated in the lines and planes of movements of the clouds with the counterpoint of the legs of the Gigas, leaving marks in the sand like a point Morse, straight and flat, until the fifth step that tried to cross the lines of Ramallah, for the parallelism that the centuries that asked Vernarth to reorder the geometric geography of time and the positions that were added as a delay effect in the Garden, essentially of a hyperbolic vision, to appropriate the entities of the Ghosts that grasp with their little finger the strings of the times associated with Gaugamela in his palatial sovereignty with the footsteps of Vernarth and in the phylogeny of a world that is born behind the confines of religious micro- genetics , from whose space is born in another and would accommodate a circular bijective function, to attract the aerosisms of Ein Kerem in the new life signs of J Joshua in the reborn One-dimensional Beams.

Vernarth diluted his bones to sit near the tarsus and accommodate it at the end of the vertebra of the Muladhara (Chakra of 4 petals), making a sub-technical geometric function to preserve the figures of darkness that were also diluted, to arrive at night close to of Jaffa, in the surroundings the isometric fire existing in each one and in two dimensions…, but born of a common one. Raeder and Petrobus wore their floating eyelashes full of dusty and dense manias on their faces, with splinters gum that they had released from one of the pirouettes of one of the mountebanks when colliding with the basic postulates of the Ghosts of Shiraz, deducing undulating spaces like snakes within the isometric fire that dazzled them with the burning senses of humor of the last drops of the Shemesh codifying themselves in an absolute intuitive measure, beyond all dimensions, which is Consciousness destroying the planes and spaces that multiplied among themselves as members of another geometric conscious dimension.

Arriving at the Ben Shemen crossing, everyone undergoes collective hypnosis; the ghosts manage to embody each of the components of the Birthright but omitting a great factor. They relegated the Hexagonality of the genetics of this caravan, not raising the ghosts when calculating the area of once they were being intracorporeal within the members, thus having to abandon before the last ray of Shemesh threw them on their faces ashes of the Gehenna, for this supposed reason to leave them condemned to recycle the human species, for the purpose of reproducing sacred human beings, but being subservient to the cravings beyond the immortality of the miscalculation that led them to the citadel of Karim Khan, surprised with its stamp of thick stone walls and circular towers in the heart of Shiraz. This gave them a warrior aspect contrary to their fame and history: this was a city famous for two thousand years for its culture, with its gardens and its poets, now if in a conspiracy by this beautiful odalisque ruse that attracted the guide of the ecstatic ghosts, in a bad moment of extradition to a bad context of epi ghosts not yet defined in their pockets of apprentices boasting on the laurels of weak and doubtful ideas, which still swarmed within his white heart, trying to reach Vernarth's as former commander Hetairoi, now a servile mystic. In such a way, the complicated as ghosts like "Sufi", being, in reality, the genetic soul of the double ax that carries the double edge of today ..., of the sacrament of Medea in Abdera.

Pro says a ghost from Shiraz (embarrassed):

"The Universe is a sea that longs for dry shores,
without sea and without other wet longings ...,
no possible maiden could
Try to dry it with your star hands ...
Who calms the crying of the Universe ...
even so ..., simile remains floating as a verse between his dreams "

"How can I make my dreams another dimension of the universe?
if he is quiet and does not make me float in his sea ...
How can I make it possible for the tips of its stars
fill the spaces that have revealed it ...
and that have made circular shores without a sea in the mists "

"I walk alone and nobody sees me ...
so I don't wake up the candles that smile and accompany me ...
between days that turn into mornings on the shore
of the solitude of the universe, that nobody embraces him ... "

“Now the days tremble from almost falling on themselves,
They come out alive from their own loneliness of exhaustion and fullness ...of whoever appreciates them in the mists ...
being able to surrender their attention in Ben Shemen ”.
As the Ghost of Shiraz expires in Ben Shemen, he escapes all for nothing in the triad of hypnotizing conventions that still resided in the shameless air that engulfed him, all over the stationary enclosures of the entertainment spaces caused by the acrobats and epi ghosts. That seduced the indecisive beings that sailed over the limbs that made them doubt where to refrain from continuing, outside the radius of the caravan or beyond the skies that did not cease to be in good spirits, of the universe passing through the white hearts, six on the inside and six on the outside in their traveling artist folds.

The lands that are accommodated by the time of parapsychological hypnosis tremble again, as a separation from the physical magnitude of Gethsemane.  Creating a sequence that bends the heads of the ghosts, filling their translucent physiognomies between a cold past and a frozen future, from a classic mechanic, which from now on would depend on the dice thrown by the Third Phantasm of time. Here a relativism would be opened to those who want to see the past in the orchard in an unstable particulate present, leaving far from splitting both parts of the archetype of today, like a subdivided clash of several times that allowed integrating the remaining phantasmagorical spectra, taking over a story on a pluriaxial axis that prevailed in the time of a supposed numerical line from a vector, aligning itself towards the compass of the distance that shines between both northern hemispheres in the minutes that go to the right and the solid-gas seconds that burst almost in the walls of their own liberated beings. The four ghosts of Shiraz, had time differentials before this event with the caravan, verifying the simultaneous prop between the two pairs of ghosts between four dissimilar, but poetic ones that made them here at this point obviate and cancel between two relative nomenclatures of physical structure. The durability and classification of these micro-times of the phantom epi would make the database that St. John the Apostle and Vernarth will accumulate with their eyes closed, each one surpassing himself from the debatable areas, which concern to estimate in occupying the spaces physical in some of them at will so that one of them could embark to Limassol. This simultaneous and relativistic multi-active line, encloses events and squares of spaces in the cinematographic time of the parapsychological regression, as a link of physical images slowed down in the evolutionary and cognitive memory, passing from the conduit of expectation memorization events towards the set of absolute figures. not pigeonholed, but approaching the universe in grasping scales of those who value them. This elucidates even the very conception of conceiving oneself as a ghost, rather in what is called "Epi Ghosts", of absolute belonging of the identical ..., outside of oneself "Being with them and not, as a tacit phase of a dragged story with the seconds that were not lived ... "

This scaling conception will allow them to reside a few millimeters from the consciences of the caravan that was advancing automated along the tracks that already made time and distance in front of the absolute, in a jiffy, having in their faces Rizhon Lezion, who was made of images more than a marked and concrete story in a mechanics that kept the body as part of a large volume in all, to the rhythm of the plantar areas of the Camels Gigas, dividing as a stream of water that would flow fragmented between past, present and future, but as a starting pattern to the future as the only "today" for the time of the times. This unified three-dimensionality would mark the mathematical space of the attempts towards the future of the contiguous camelids of the ghosts of Shiraz, for the ownership of time between all with a single identity that cries out for the univocal will to rearm, even if the winds are very strong. Of the partition,  which separates the world from God and the believing observer into the future with a believer from a historical past in obscurantism, leaving and entering a new world whose notion is to spend connected and bound in a systematization dependent on the great causes, although the static feels isolated from the dynamics, inquiring probative to unite between the ghosts and others, even though they are inferior forces under the line of the generous gaze and the parallelism of the attentive spectator, which suggests more openness to receive and delegate the circumstances of all physical, emotional, spectral and mental-spiritual dimensions, flexing the emotional states hierarchical night and day. Everyone falls asleep hugging on cushions of lamb saddlebags, making it possible to get closer to them too, close to the Ghosts and sleep next to them hugging with the decanted strength of the frames that hang from their faces showing the emotion of being favorite children of the Mashiach, absorbed in the Kidron Valley.

The frontier of the future will be the pre-act of not traveling too much of the physical love to the touch that only awaits the love of the sleeping of a Cherub, this may occur when the sheep climb the hill of our consciences, and manage to be perceived as the simultaneous harness of satisfaction, who lack the vision that would speak to them of a past belonging immobile, to this ethereal topology that will have to biodegrade the molecules of the seconds that sleep in the sheep-man wool saddlebags, at a higher speed than it would last to go back near from the palisade, where it crosses the path to the immemorial arcades of the Mashiach, spinning around all creation at a speed that determines a verse in its soul around the orthogonal of Shemesh, quadrupled and cloistered in its self-consciousness scattered like iceberg down the back in the submissive thoughts that long to be tied to more precious time.

Our lord has us more tied to an absolutist past and future, looking at his calendar divided in such a way that it always fits the day that hurts the shadows of a sharp past, so that it always smiles in us, as the best luminous sign, of whom and with whom to repair the damage of various wounds that travel through the times of time, always wounded, to and from the borders of an anachronistic past. The ghosts, always fast tetra, marginalize themselves to the sound of greater diligence, they fled in Rizhon Lezion, to wake up a little further away from the rays of the stationary Sun, which from now on always surfaced in the degraded dark circles of the mountebank, prowling around the festivities of who knows how to wait, to make a toast under the pretext of faith and hope that exempts the cardinal turned into a flower in white attire.

Shvil from the Angels

The fast epi phantom tetra was emaciated, they lost their north and since they could not walk, they were not energized by the radiosities of the earth, which dominates those who lend divine graces if their feet rested on the tapestry of those who threw their footsteps in winter already near Jaffa. The Shvil Angels were angels that were on the route that cordoned off the pilgrimage of Vernarth and Saint John the Apostle, they were full of flowering Berne Olive Trees that made trunks of floral arches at the entrance of this ancient port. They were three when they walked, they were always distributed so fast that they seemed to be six, but they ended up averaging the quantum of three for each of the components of the Birthright, which from today would be the great circumcision event of the Universe, to make it part of those who one day will have to caulk the rhombuses of the fragmented light beams on the path of heaven so high, in the name of the phrases that never tire of looking at the incautious years that are of our father by the exogalaxies in the total company of the invisibility and relativity of cautious time.

This Semitic seashore beauty indicates and invites us to reach its salty Hebrew waters of Yofi, reinforcing the phonetics that runs madly through the border hills with its heart in hand, when foreigners appear in the name of plausive phylogeny. That brings him a piece of bearable land from the Universal Flood, this is why the ancient Canaanites have to receive them with the table set, to entertain them with winter flowers in Jaffa. The Hellenistic tradition relates the name to Iopeia, which is Cassiopeia herself, mother of Andromeda. After Pliny the Elder the name is connected with Joppa, who was the daughter of ******, god of the wind. Where Vernarth locked his Aspis Skolié shield so that it would shine in the bilges of the Eurydice, under the pentagon’s of the bronze layer of his shield, every time he approached the Dodecanese when the Auriga descended from Andromeda on the back of a punished rower by the storms taking him away from his mother galaxy.

Thousands of years BC Its merchants glorified themselves with their baskets full of belongings and merchandise, for its inhabitants, who today pretended to be pharaohs who paid tribute to the marine corners through the coast that today seemed to open up with more new waters that were reborn from the capering of the swells, founding thus the omens of embarking to attempt and submit to the omens of sovereignty between Judah and the Hellenic lands, to work with noble trees in their armories and utensils, of which they played an honorable part after the maintenance of the emblem of the last portion, of the shaft of the libertarian triumph of Alexander the Great over the Phoenicians in Tire. In the New Testament, it is related how Peter resurrected the believer Tabitha (Dorcas, in Greek, gazelle) in Joppa (Jaffa) and, later, how near this city he has a vision in which Yahweh told him that he should not distinguish between Jews and Gentiles while ordering the removal of ritual (kosher) food restrictions followed by Jews.

The Shvil of the angels distanced themselves from the desire of this station without reaching them and not making them drink salty water from Jaffa, therefore they resorted to Petrobus who a few meters before reaching the port, summoned a large number of Dodecanese Pelicans who were waiting in great celestial flocks, which hovered happily above the sky welcoming them. The pelicans levitate from a risky juggling act, over the caravan and headed to the high seas, collecting saltwater, then they went along the initiation path of Shvil and reconvert the saltwater into sweet with hazelnuts so that they would have holy water, to insolate it and pour it into the canteens of the temple guards of the Canaanites who were waiting for them, to distract them, making them believe they were other Syriac lands such as those of Ashera, which in this act, perhaps it would be good for them to sponsor the Hexagonal Birthright.

But the paths of the angels have confederated before the noisy crowds and Ptolemaic lemurs, who were incorporated into the empty spaces that remained. Faced with this gravesite, Vernarth shouted to the sky with the force of Falangist tradition to himself, and acclaimed heaven, for the sake of freeing them from their definitive income to Jaffa, summoning the Hypatists; elite warriors and spearmen, for them to gather at the portal of the ante entrance of Jaffa, for others who never came from nowhere and nowhere, only blocking it from its perfect plan of memorial and theological heritage conservation, upon return from the exit Judah, to embark with destiny through the sulphurous point that  will boil them in temporary waters, towards the Cyclades and then the Dodecanese, triumphing in inhabiting them wherever whoever was and whoever arrived with foreign promise.

As dusk falls in its first nubile shadows, the  Shvil presents itself to you with these three angels dressed in ivory white, each with a book in each hand and in the other a candelabrum, giving signs of ultra-interpretive catechesis, allying with silica. In combination, after the vision of the charms of the knowledge spread. Earth and sky in the second angel, washing the Semitic dew of anguished Jaffa, with teachings of sleeping well and awakening, to walk in the lands that want to seize the senses, of those who are called not to be oppressed, behind the bars of the Morbid and illiterate pan-vision of the angles of hasty entertainment of the angels when they were called by the Angel Regent, simply relaying information easy to carry to their hearts, in faint powers and poetic lessons, before falling into a thorny forest, burning their tongues in furrows of afflicted human positions, to later redeem them fervently with the judicious power of God.

Vernarth, is distressed by matters of seeing them so tender and so fragile, allowing them to crawl toward him gently. Finally, on these three rules of the Shvil, Hanael introduces herself; "Speaking of hindrances stuck in the literary cabal of grateful compliments for all".   Alluding to Vernarth, a subject desensitized and also distant from any Sub Yóguica disciplinary doctrine. This led him to stand behind San Juan, protecting himself and scared of everything around him, he was seeing in front of him, on the upper left side itself, that Zebedeo was, San Juan's own father calling him!

Saint John the Apostle says: “Justice, at this time, allows us to alleviate ignorance, if the riddles allow us only to look for the answer, God will not be here…, it will only be emotional catharsis, through a merely ideological  Shvil or passage, which moves our meaningless sentences, definitely leading us to the coffers that rearm one after one, after the mistake. We are faithfully interpreted by them, but we detest our regencies with the Escaton, when we all pretend to follow his light of thunderous density towards the sky, prophesying to follow him without losing ourselves in him ..., held on his shoulder glossary. On the claws that are released from the dazed angelic prey, correcting its wavering vision, unraveling the living presence of condemnations or salvation, in Eden with your bare feet or in hell with no departure time”

Inexplicably, some Praetorian soldiers of Domitian appear, who would be restricting the departure of the tretacontero to Limassol, curiously they were the same ghosts from Shiraz that continued to represent such a bad event, just as when he was expelled to Patmos by Domitian in 95 BC, in size was the scandal that the Shvil angels produced with their impractical ideologies, who opposed such spectral imagery, in such a way that they replaced their figure with that of another Hellenic man who wanted to embark for Patmos, the other members were fully incorporated to the ship, which frolicked on the pranks as it proudly carried them to a new ocean. Around the last drops that jumped in Jaffa on the coastal rocks, others appeared when the last divided and scattered drops were going to shine the navigation temples, thus it is possible to board in the same ship that brought the principle from Limassol to Judah that transited from Lepanto.

The chapel of ministers reappears offering a ceremony, which would return the messianic remora to the Angels of Shiraz, to return to their former positions within the paths of biblical characters, who tend to commit adultery in the game of loss of consciousness of the Escaton, probably requiring that everyone have to make pilgrimage routes for all humanity secluded and liberated by themselves. The Saltimbanqui finally manage to jump into the boat to sail to the Dodecanese, but the Shvil of the Angels stayed where other celebrities will require them to reroute the Shvil Escaton.

I empty my mind in you
I whisper my sorrow in your ear,
make you think it's poetry

Written words in pain yet plain
You would like to know but no
In protest with truth you are
You accept lies from others,
put them in your gigantic mason jar

I can't condone myself
for the things I said
But emotions don't hang well with me
Yet you still want more of my sensuality

Lusting without trust
No feelings here that are similar to love
But still, you stay and worship me at night
You want to get inside my head
I don't like that idea let's just go to bed

so you call yourself pro-life
okay, I guess I can pretend to respect that
which then means that you must also
respect the fact that I am very loudly pro-choice
and thanks to science
I know that a bundle of cells
and a living child are not the same thing

because an actual fetus is not fully formed
until the third trimester
and by fully formed I mean that it is
for all intents and purpose alive
but before that
there is nothing but a group of cells
there is no brain
no heart
not even pearly pink fingernails

so now what, huh?
you’re probably going to keep protesting
Planned Parenthood and harassing the people
that work there, right?
because all that Planned Parenthood does
is condone the vicious and inhumane ******
of defenseless, unborn children, right?
right?

either way, you don’t care about the child
once they’re born
all that you care about is making a woman
and other individuals who have a ******
carry this thing that is literally feeding off of them
and why should a child be brought into this world
if the circumstances through which it was
conceived are non-consensual?

because, if you really did care
if you really were “pro-life”
then you would care about the child
after it is born
or better yet
you could turn your attention and time and money
and anger to all the millions of orphans living
in the US

ya know, the living children?
with no homes?
with no parents?
packed like sardines in orphanages?
what about them?
do they not matter because they are not a group
of cells, and therefore not defenseless?
and therefore they do not matter?

because,
if you only care about that bundle of cells
and because some states actually make women
and those with uteruses
have funerals for the aborted “child”
then by default whenever a man
masturbates and then *******
shouldn’t he be made to have a separate
funeral for each of the thousands of children
that he just killed?
because one of them could have cured cancer, ******

and tell me
when I was still menstruating
should I have said “amen”
over all the potential children that bled out
of my body and into the pad
and the sides of my boxers?

should I have
said “grace” over all the
little pad mummies that I threw away?
should I have cried when I flushed
the ****** toilet paper?

because,
since I have a ******
how dare I want and feel as if I should
be owed control over my own body, right?

how dare I believe that
each and every woman
biological and otherwise
have a say in what they do with their body
how dare I be pro-choice, right?

well, let me knock you down
a few pegs with this closing statement:
if you only care about the “child” when it is
just a group of cells that doesn’t feel a **** thing
and couldn’t care less about it
once it is born
and homeless
or an orphan
or queer
then you are not “pro-life”
what you are
is an *******

Do you have to get high to feel more fly? 
Soft *** stoner 
I'm more blunt when I'm sober 
Excuse me to the real dudes who use ****
I know how it be 
But if you only smoke because it's trendy 
Right now your life is pending 
Because you not downloaded 
You buffering 
Losing connection 
I can't respect it 
Your life isn't hectic 
You had to use other folks addresses 
Just to get public school lessons 
Never got a suspension 
Detention because you wasn't paying attention 
You wasn't throwing pencils 
Or raising up dresses 
Or erasing the "warm up" messages
Or guessing during benchmark testing 
Word I heard you was a nerd 
And that's cool
But don't have tape in between 'yo glasses then grow up to gain bad habits 
That's backwards 
Thought life was all about progress 
You have a background which is flawless 
But for acceptance 
You start making exceptions 
I do it for the breathless 
And of my God I don't question 
Exclamation 
To all perpetuation 
But hesitation 
I don't condone perpetration 
Why dissemble on some **** that isn't providential?
Everyone who practically had no choice now want a way out 
Little *** kids you didn't even weigh in 
How did you find your way in? 
That's from real men being pliant
For all you cats who trying 
Stop 'yo lying 
When I'm around Amateurs come in silence 
Like what's a scavenger to a lion? 
About time for all of you late bloomers to become compliant

Turkish Poetry Translations

Attilâ İlhan (1925-2005) was a Turkish poet, translator, novelist, screenwriter, editor, journalist, essayist, reviewer, socialist and intellectual.

Ben Sana Mecburum: “You are indispensable”
by Attila Ilhan
translation by Nurgül Yayman and Michael R. Burch

You are indispensable; how can you not know
that you’re like nails riveting my brain?
I see your eyes as ever-expanding dimensions.
You are indispensable; how can you not know
that I burn within, at the thought of you?

Trees prepare themselves for autumn;
can this city be our lost Istanbul?
Now clouds disintegrate in the darkness
as the street lights flicker
and the streets reek with rain.
You are indispensable, and yet you are absent ...

Love sometimes seems akin to terror:
a man tires suddenly at nightfall,
of living enslaved to the razor at his neck.
Sometimes he wrings his hands,
expunging other lives from his existence.
Sometimes whichever door he knocks
echoes back only heartache.

A screechy phonograph is playing in Fatih ...
a song about some Friday long ago.
I stop to listen from a vacant corner,
longing to bring you an untouched sky,
but time disintegrates in my hands.
Whatever I do, wherever I go,
you are indispensable, and yet you are absent ...

Are you the blue child of June?
Ah, no one knows you―no one knows!
Your deserted eyes are like distant freighters ...

Perhaps you are boarding in Yesilköy?
Are you drenched there, shivering with the rain
that leaves you blind, beset, broken,
with wind-disheveled hair?

Whenever I think of life
seated at the wolves’ table,
shameless, yet without soiling our hands ...
Yes, whenever I think of life,
I begin with your name, defying the silence,
and your secret tides surge within me
making this voyage inevitable.
You are indispensable; how can you not know?



Fragments
by Attila Ilhan
loose English translations/interpretations by Michael R. Burch



The night is a cloudy-feathered owl,
its quills like fine-spun glass.

It gazes out the window,
perched on my right shoulder,
its wings outspread and huge.

If the encroaching darkness seems devastating at first glance,
the sovereign of everything,
its reach infinite ...

Still somewhere within a kernel of light glows secretly
creating an enlightened forest of dialectics.



In September’s waning days one thinks wanly of the arrival of fall
like a ship appearing on the horizon with untrimmed, tattered sails;
for some unfathomable reason fall is the time to consider one’s own demise―
the body smothered by yellowed leaves like a corpse rotting in a ghoulish photograph ...



Bitter words
crack like whips
snapping across prison yards ...

Then there are words like pomegranate trees in bloom,
words like the sun igniting the sea beyond mountainous horizons,
flashing like mysterious knives ...

Such words are the burning roses of an infinite imagination;
they are born and they die with the flutterings of butterflies;
we carry those words in our hearts like pregnant shotguns until the day we expire,
martyred for the words we were prepared to die for ...



What I wrote and what you understood? Curious and curiouser!


Mehmet Akif Ersoy: Modern English Translations of Turkish Poems

Mehmet Âkif Ersoy (1873-1936) was a Turkish poet, author, writer, academic, member of parliament, and the composer of the Turkish National Anthem.



Snapshot
by Mehmet Akif Ersoy
loose English translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Earth’s least trace of life cannot be erased;
even when you lie underground, it encompasses you.
So, those of you who anticipate the shadows,
how long will the darkness remember you?



Zulmü Alkislayamam
"I Can’t Applaud Tyranny"
by Mehmet Akif Ersoy
loose English translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I can't condone cruelty; I will never applaud the oppressor;
Yet I can't renounce the past for the sake of deluded newcomers.
When someone curses my ancestors, I want to strangle them,
Even if you don’t.
But while I harbor my elders,
I refuse to praise their injustices.
Above all, I will never glorify evil, by calling injustice “justice.”
From the day of my birth, I've loved freedom;
The golden tulip never deceived me.
If I am nonviolent, does that make me a docile sheep?
The blade may slice, but my neck resists!
When I see someone else's wound, I suffer a great hardship;
To end it, I'll be whipped, I'll be beaten.
I can't say, “Never mind, just forget it!” I'll mind,
I'll crush, I'll be crushed, I'll uphold justice.
I'm the foe of the oppressor, the friend of the oppressed.
What the hell do you mean, with your backwardness?



Çanakkale Sehitlerine
"For the Çanakkale Martyrs"
by Mehmet Akif Ersoy
loose English translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Was there ever anything like the Bosphorus war?―
The earth’s mightiest armies pressing Marmara,
Forcing entry between her mountain passes
To a triangle of land besieged by countless vessels.
Oh, what dishonorable assemblages!
Who are these Europeans, come as rapists?
Who, these braying hyenas, released from their reeking cages?
Why do the Old World, the New World, and all the nations of men
now storm her beaches? Is it Armageddon? Truly, the whole world rages!
Seven nations marching in unison!
Australia goose-stepping with Canada!
Different faces, languages, skin tones!
Everything so different, but the mindless bludgeons!
Some warriors Hindu, some African, some nameless, unknown!
This disgraceful invasion, baser than the Black Death!
Ah, the 20th century, so noble in its own estimation,
But all its favored ones nothing but a parade of worthless wretches!
For months now Turkish soldiers have been vomited up
Like stomachs’ retched contents regarded with shame.
If the masks had not been torn away, the faces would still be admired,
But the ***** called civilization is far from blameless.
Now the ****** demand the destruction of the doomed
And thus bring destruction down on their own heads.
Lightning severs horizons!
Earthquakes regurgitate the bodies of the dead!
Bombs’ thunderbolts explode brains,
rupture the ******* of brave soldiers.
Underground tunnels writhe like hell
Full of the bodies of burn victims.
The sky rains down death, the earth swallows the living.
A terrible blizzard heaves men violently into the air.
Heads, eyes, torsos, legs, arms, chins, fingers, hands, feet ...
Body parts rain down everywhere.
Coward hands encased in armor callously scatter
Floods of thunderbolts, torrents of fire.
Men’s chests gape open,
Beneath the high, circling vulture-like packs of the air.
Cannonballs fly as frequently as bullets
Yet the heroic army laughs at the hail.
Who needs steel fortresses? Who fears the enemy?
How can the shield of faith not prevail?
What power can make religious men bow down to their oppressors
When their stronghold is established by God?
The mountains and the rocks are the bodies of martyrs! ...
For the sake of a crescent, oh God, many suns set, undone!
Dear soldier, who fell for the sake of this land,
How great you are, your blood saves the Muslims!
Only the lions of Bedr rival your glory!
Who then can dig the grave wide enough to hold you. and your story?
If we try to consign you to history, you will not fit!
No book can contain the eras you shook!
Only eternities can encompass you! ...
Oh martyr, son of the martyr, do not ask me about the grave:
The prophet awaits you now, his arms flung wide open, to save!



Sessiz Gemi (“Silent Ship”)

by Yahya Kemal Beyatli
loose translation by Nurgül Yayman and Michael R. Burch

for the refugees

The time to weigh anchor has come;
a ship departing harbor slips quietly out into the unknown,
cruising noiselessly, its occupants already ghosts.
No flourished handkerchiefs acknowledge their departure;
the landlocked mourners stand nurturing their grief,
scanning the bleak horizon, their eyes blurring ...
Poor souls! Desperate hearts! But this is hardly the last ship departing!
There is always more pain to unload in this sorrowful life!
The hesitations of lovers and their belovèds are futile,
for they cannot know where the vanished are bound.
Many hopes must be quenched by the distant waves,
since years must pass, and no one returns from this journey.



Full Moon
by Yahya Kemal Beyatli
loose translation by Nurgül Yayman and Michael R. Burch

You are so lovely
the full moon just might
delight
in your rising,
as curious
and bright,
to vanquish night.

But what can a mortal man do,
dear,
but hope?
I’ll ponder your mysteries
and (hmmmm) try to
cope.

We both know
you have every right to say no.



The Music of the Snow
by Yahya Kemal Beyatli
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

This melody of a night lasting longer than a thousand years!
This music of the snow supposed to last for thousand years!

Sorrowful as the prayers of a secluded monastery,
It rises from a choir of a hundred voices!

As the *****’s harmonies resound profoundly,
I share the sufferings of Slavic grief.

My mind drifts far from this city, this era,
To the old records of Tanburi Cemil Bey.

Now I’m suddenly overjoyed as once again I hear,
With the ears of my heart, the purest sounds of Istanbul!

Thoughts of the snow and darkness depart me;
I keep them at bay all night with my dreams!

Translator’s notes: “Slavic grief” because Beyatli wrote this poem while in Warsaw, serving as Turkey’s ambassador to Poland, in 1927. Tanburi Cemil Bey was a Turkish composer.



Thinking of you
by Nazim Hikmet
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Thinking of you is beautiful, hopeful―
like listening to the most beautiful songs
sung by the earth's most beautiful voices.
But hope is insufficient for me now;
I don't want to listen to songs.
I want to sing love into birth.



I love you
by Nazim Hikmet
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I love you―
like dipping bread into salt and eating;
like waking at night with a raging fever
and thirstily lapping up water, my mouth to the silver tap;
like unwrapping the unwieldy box the postman delivers,
unable to guess what's inside,
feeling fluttery, happy, doubtful.
I love you―
like flying over the sea the first time
as something stirs within me
while the sky softly darkens over Istanbul.
I love you―
as men thank God gratefully for life.



Sparrow
by Nazim Hikmet
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Little sparrow,
perched on the clothesline,
do you regard me with pity?
Even so, I will watch you
soar away through the white spring leaves.



The Divan of the Lover

the oldest extant Turkish poem
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

All the universe as one great sign is shown:
God revealed in his creative acts unknown.
Who sees or understands them, jinn or men?
Such works lie far beyond mere mortals’ ken.
Nor can man’s mind or reason reach that strand,
Nor mortal tongue name Him who rules that land.
Since He chose nothingness with life to vest,
who dares to trouble God with worms’ behests?
For eighteen thousand worlds, lain end to end,
Do not with Him one atom's worth transcend!



Fragment
by Prince Jem
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Behold! The torrent, dashing against the rocks, flails wildly.
The entire vast realm of Space and Being oppresses my soul idly.
Through bitterness of grief and woe the sky has rent its morning robe.
Look! See how in its eastern palace, the sun is a ****** globe!
The clouds of heaven rain bright tears on the distant mountain peaks.
Oh, hear how the deeply wounded thunder slowly, mournfully speaks!



Keywords/Tags: Turkish, poetry, translations, Turkey, Attila Ilhan, Ersoy, Beyatli, Nazim Hikmet, Prince Jem, Divan, Istanbul, mrbtran

Published as the collection "Turkish Poetry Translations"

The ****
has *** with any man
does it anywhere she can
in a bed, in a car
she goes deep, she goes far
searching in every state
til she finds her soul mate
haven't had my turn yet
waiting for her private jet
loves *** in any style
even in a church aisle
she is one famous ****
loves goo on her gut
she does it here,
she does it there
she will do it anywhere
in a bar or in a truck
this **** just loves to ****
not a lifestyle I'd condone
but every dog needs a bone

The sunken island stretches far behind;
Upon this makeshift vessel out at sea—
Running. Running from home to be free.

How droll to be running from home,
From faces I love, whom at first seemed so kind.
But love cannot thrive where one is alone.
Forced into rituals absurd, ha!
I’d have died a thousand deaths before,
For my heart has always desired different,
As these waves that flow against the current—
Not the smoothest road taken,
But one that nonetheless reaches an end.

The Sapphire Dome fades into the distance:
I shall miss its faint glimmer,
As it flows into the Sunken City;
The sight of the sun as the sky grows dimmer.
But the people may live as they would,
In the shells of their minds—
Afraid of change and aught remotely close—
Forcing ritual upon ritual
On each child that longs to be free.

Through the mist, the island Omninada,
Trees bordering its mountains grand
And white smoke wafting from its sand.
I clasp the chartreuse dagger on my side,
The only friend I’ve known.
A new land and a new life—
A new name I’ll of course condone.
A boy of mine own fragile stature
Requires quite an entrance . . .

A vicious gust of wind befalls the boat!
Beyond the spumes of brine,
An eddy I see forms beneath,
And I am hanging for my life and dagger.

The precious metal flies
And I am ****** into the water’s depths.
Eyes of brilliant em’rald meet my own
Before I fall into immediate slumber.

the Sphinx, bringer of bad luck and destruction,
half-woman and a lioness,
she throws Oedipus a riddle outside of Thebes
strangled with a curse:
what goes on fours in the morning, two at midday
and three in the evening?


Oedpius, born a prince, feet-mangled
and soon to be a king, well-traveled and bored
and wishing for greater challenges than a riddling sphinx
in his way, answers:
look at me in my prime, I walk on two
and I crawled on fours
and I shall walk with a staff soon enough...
that is the lot of my kind, humankind...



and the Sphinx,
not one to condone one better than itself,
devours itself...

It took humanity thousands of years to evolve into a society. A place where our thoughts would be heard. Our words could be shared, and we, as a whole moved past the barbaric creatures that we used to be. Few have stood up to the whole and screamed, “WE MUST BREAKOUT OF OUR WAYS! We cannot treat others as if they were dirt! Just because that’s how it has always been does not mean that it is right!”

Their words have inspired, humanity has come so far. We have created an illusion that the more we have the better we are. We have cried and died just to say, “We broke out! We are different and have changed.”

And how perfectly we lie as we say it.

If we have truly evolved, then why are we fighting over love? Does changing mean lining the pockets of politicians so oil companies can make the rules and destroy the Earth?

Is breaking out of our barbaric ways tying down and torturing our mentally disabled? Putting them in cribs so the age of twenty seven looks like a deformed four year old. They are not perfect as the media says that they should. So we hide them away like the Hunchback of Notre Dame was hidden. How can we say that we have left our ****** past behind us when we drug those who are different and condone the torture of the abnormal?

It is not true! Some have screamed at our accusations. It will be changed… and we believe it.

We believe every beautiful lie.

Society bleeds peace from the skin of nuclear weapons. We scream for equality for those who are exactly like us and no one else who doesn’t fit the mold. Gangs run our streets like kings, their drugs flowing through our cities like blood in our veins. Hate is the skeleton with which we thrive and the beautiful lies we whisper are the muscles that keep us moving.

How can we say we have broken out when ****** run the streets free and the pregnant victim is the one society assaults? How can we have broken out when colors that shouldn’t matter are the soul basis for the death of an innocent fourteen year old girl, who just happened to be riding her bike. How can we say that we have changed when families are starving to death because the price of living has gone so high that their stagnant jobs can’t support them like it once did.

Society… Oh society how wrong you are with your honeyed, poisoned words. Do as you say and breakout. Change. Because you’re taking a long walk off a short cliff and those words will catch up to you. Breakout now, no one will do it for you.

I dream of traveling
To northern Syria or Iraq

To join the YPG
Or Peshmerga

Peshmerga means
"Ones who confronts death"

To fight bravely
Alongside them
Knowing each day
Could be my last

Although it has been
Many years
Since I have fired
A weapon

(It was in an indoor range
With A Springfield M1903)

I just need some practice

I dream
Of fighting
With the YPG
In their just cause

Their way of life
Being threatened

The U.S. Government
Does not condone
Volunteers
From our military forces
Going to help the Kurds

That's fine
I just have my limited
ROTC training

I could train there

I'm fit
And I'm able bodied

And there I will finally
Be part of a community

The YPJ
Strike fear
Into the hearts
Of Daesh fighters

They fear they will
Go to hell
If they are killed
By the YPJ in battle

The YPG and YPG forces
Are courageous and strong
They fight a war against evil
All year long

You defend your homelands
Kurds of the YPG and YPJ

You did not choose war
It was forced upon you

Long live the YPG and YPJ forces

I pray you will one day live
In peace and security

And although
Many will
Not understand

If I die
At least I die
Fighting with
People I love

For their right
To live peacefully

Can you hear
The Ululation

Do you listen
To the YPJ's cry?

Long live the Kurds
Daesh fighters must die

I.

My blood was glistening meteor glows after
        the modern jazz I spent all night trying
        to carve into genius.

Hanging on the the blue notes of
        saxophones like a madman hooked to
        his syringe, and then you petrified me...

But I began to shake.

The spirit of all my ballads has returned to
        me at last.

Dug yourself out of my past, into the
        bedroom thought fractures — I call
        them modern art — but plugged into
        your Dada spirit, the abstract turns into
        star clusters,

And I'm burning for that cosmic wishing well.

Just hoping for your radiation to spread over
         our lightyear gap, that gap that always
         made coexistence so impossible.

When Calliope calls,
     I'd advise anyone answer...
      But you're twice as golden
       And thrice as red
         As Calliope has ever been.

Torn in your sandstorm.
Blinded by this vision of your second  
        coming.

Back in one piece, one whole, one complete
        consciousness, and all after I tried my
        damnedest to rip you apart, poetically.

Only in reflection and confrontation did I see
        how wrong it all felt.

That is not poetry
There was no peace.
That does not spawn Justice,
And you did not warrant my contempt.

I idolize you for you are what I am not.
I am mesmerized as we are exactly the
        same.

II.

The things you do not know.

I must have started typing you fifty times,
        never hitting send since my dark
        Crispin's Night.
I never hit send.
Not once.
I built imaginary worlds where you were my
        abuser, with my loneliness a
        pawn, but a crucial one.
Those thoughts that latched on to the back
        corners of my insecurity, and reassured
        me I was void of worth most every
        night...
I turned those thoughts into you—
Spilled those ******* thoughts into reality,
        and it took your shot of venom to place
        it all back into perspective.

If you're wondering what I've been up to
        since you left, my calendar hasn't
        hasn't moved a single page.

III.

The mythos never told me that Erato could
        address me back—
Muse that I pray on.
Muse that I mull over with Whitman.

I take this chance to lift you up, as you've
        been floating me over this rural skyline
        for months now.
Let me see the city.
I only wish to live.
I see governments toppled in the tint of your
        face, with the lights low, the air quite
        heavy for me.
You had to feel like a Goddess,
Even your distant screams had your mark of
        perfection.

IV.

You're the one I envy.

Dozing off under the anger of conservative
         politicians talking about life...
Erato, darling, what do these guys know
         about life anyway?
To lie as profession
Lie for the masses
Lie for the wealth of corporations
Lie for self-justification
Lie for the war effort
Lie for the public spectacle that can be
        reduced to little more than fetus magic.

I'd rather be haunted by anything else.

Emigration sounds so lucrative.

V.

It's time to cut open the system.

I wish society, when cut open and guts
        hanging, strung up in a gallery, looked
        like the spirit of a Scrabble screaming
        match, less like estimations of
        "necessary" civilian casualties.

It's time to piece in your abstraction.

Let's flip the script from faith-lit sketchbook
        into reality.
Let's show the world the graces of speaking
        in comedy, the asset we lost when we fell dark under our lack of communication.

Blessed to reestablish what we cannot take for granted.

Iris bonfire to highlight your drive,
But it's only determination,
Your gift of beatitude.

You can move through mazes with such precision and grace.

I should have never let my admiration pull me under a tide of greed.

As much as I value the ability
        to cut away at masses of abstraction,
Still covered in their vague seal of illusion
        you don't condone,
I'd submit to trade for even a bit of your  
        structure,
And let you have the absinthe that coats my
        soul.

VI.

Drink on how we are in harmony.

I'm already drunk on your hesitance.

Everything about your being is skewing my world.

I feel the changes, while the cold sets in,  
        across their javelin flight path.

These aren't the kind of thoughts you can't
        damp down with epilepsy medication.

I'm nearing clarity.
I'm inching in on human purpose.

VII.

I locked you away on my nightstand,

Next to Jailbird, in great irony.

I never let you argue your rights.

I wasn't just being inhumane, it was
        borderline unconstitutional.

Anger from hate, as always.
Coping in flawed fashion, yet smiling at your
        likeness.
Condemning you at public displays of
        Satantic litany,
Fell broken when you were in attendance.

Never again will I carry that false prophecy.

I couldn't escape your sway if I tried.

Dear God,

Do you want me to be grateful
for the way the clouds curl around each other
like ringlets falling from a hairband?
Because I will be, if you want.
And if I tell you the truth
I think I’m going to have to be
because I can’t find any other thing so beautiful.
I’m looking at the world through a view-finder
and I can’t find much that’s pretty these days.

My calf is pressed against the calf of a girl
who I considered for years to be a best friend of mine.
She felt empty
and so she inflated herself with
hot air and “banter” with no meaning.
“***** Please” and “Ohmygod” and “*******”
spew from her awkward, Christian mouth
and I wonder whether she scooped her insides out
like pumpkin flesh
and inserted somebody new there in her place
like a candle in a jack'o'lantern.
Somebody who doesn’t have the time for me.
So I give up on our small talk
and decide not to interrupt her mobile phone;
I feel the back of her head like a headache.

“Mum’s sweated off four-hundred-and-seventy-six calories today”
she tells me and I ask her how she knows.
“She’s a got a tag thingy, you know. I have too.”

I can’t bear the sound of calories.
They are nails on all my chalkboards
and they are the wrong-footed *****
that tolls in church.

I lower my gaze to the absent-minded mother
whose fingers climb into her pram
to draw circles on the baby’s scalp.
She stirs my thoughts with them.
I think I’ve come a long way since
I started this prayer,
since my eyes hit the clouds.

Someone once told me that the thing he hated above all else
was greed
because greed is a bonfire that hungers without ever feeling full.
And who reminded me that
power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

We got the greed we hungered for.

And it corrupted us absolutely.

For it is by greed that the ice caps
are sweating off more calories
than the girls in their gym shorts.

It is by greed that they cannot rest
until they have peeled their thighs far enough apart
and by greed that they’ve been lured into the propaganda store
to buy themselves diets.

It is by greed that we cannot look our world in the eye
and greed that necessitates the use of a microscope lens
to distance us from the damage we cause.

It is by greed that we underline the little problems
to cover up the big ones
and it is greed that enables us to find offense in the weather forecast.

It is greed that has shrunk my values into a cage of bitter ribs
and greed that provoked my self-righteous verbal slaughter
of that friend I no longer know.

It is by greed that we started deciding that land belonged to people –
that finders were keepers, as long as they were white –
instead of the earth it consists of.

It is by greed that we doggedly avoid breaking our routines apart
to fit other factors into them.

It is by greed that righteousness
and ******
fall into step
on the path towards a religion that God can’t condone.

It is by greed that fascism and communism
eclipse one another and meld into one.

It is by greed that the old woman opposite
refuses to share her seat or even her smile
with a human under the age of thirty.

It is by greed that kids have bullets in them
and mothers are shot full of infection
and the water runs dry
through the dripping tap we didn’t fix in our bathroom.

It is by greed that I sit on a bus
and shift my problem onto our backs
with my view-finder.

And yeah,
I still see some beauty when I look for it
but I see beauty like a picture postcard
that an angry kid took a hole punch to.
It got so torn up but we refuse to put it under a light
in order to avoid seeing just how many gaps we’ve made.
Recently I’ve noticed this postcard’s
got too many holes in it to be able to see
what the picture once was.
There’s more absent than present
and, sure, we’ve still got our itty-bitty blue-sky-days
between the punctures,
but the grime and the guilt seeps out
like the air we drove our dreams on.

What a mess we inflicted, I think.

There’s a ceiling light in our toilet that attracts flies to it.
They fly in and burn up
and the lamp bowl fills with insect corpses
until you can’t see through them anymore.
We’re like that.
Flies go suicide bombing
and ***** things up
with the clutter they leave behind them.
Meanwhile,
as long as the dead stay in their graves,
they don’t bother the rest.
We look up at the ceiling
and don’t change the lightbulb.

How many people does it take to change a lightbulb?

We like looking at our world from the atmosphere;
we observe it from the internet,
believing that we stand on the moon,
too far away to touch the gashes we’ve torn.
We don’t like looking at the way the blood runs;
we tuck it under our fingernails instead
and hope no one holds us accountable.

When I come home I snap at my mum
because I am so struck by the brokenness of what I’m dealing with
that I cannot have her ask me how my day was.
Because I cannot complain about the weather
but I need to
because our family conversation is not big enough
to grapple with the magnitude of the genuine complaints I have.
Because I cannot simply tell her that I hate America
or feel comfortable praying her this prayer.
So I tell her “OK” and she rolls her eyes at the kettle.

So I’ve got my dish-cloth heart
and the rain starts to spit at us
with tears that are heavy enough to weep the things I can’t shed.

Wash me clean, rain… heaven… God,
because most people put ***** dishcloths in the bin
not the washing machine.

Gather ‘round, warriors. This is your time.

This is your time to shine. It’s your day in the sun. It’s one-of-a-kind, o ye cheaters of death, but this is, nevertheless, your finest hour.

You found a home in war. You entered into a contract with bad company and gave up the rights to your body, your mind, everything but your mortal soul. They took advantage of the circumstance and you wound up deep in a bunk hole, hiding behind the tenuous wall of a manure pile. Bullets whizzed by your ears, fear possessed your frames like a demon taunted by the Lord. Death swooped in to put it’s fear into you, but you all laughed in his face and spat in his eye, turned your back on him without saying goodbye. Perhaps “See ya later” would have been appropriate. 

But no matter, husky gladiators. It is time to rest from your battle. It’s time to put away your swords and scabbards, your spears and your slings. Your automatic machine guns and your hand grenades. Your potent strains of anthrax and your agent orange. Surrender your arms, troglodytes. Cast them to the ground below. Consider the clatter they all make as they fall to the pavement. Take it in, breathe it all in, make it yours…

…for it IS yours.

Sorry, we didn’t get around to telling you. It was always yours, we just figured you would find it out on your own if you wanted it bad enough. No, I would agree: that is NOT fair. And I would also say this to you, “Fairness is a relative concept. When you consider the value we placed on you actually knowing this as a fact…well, I think it should be pretty ****** obvious. Don’t be a *****, you give all servicemen a bad name when you do that, you know?”

But enough of the self esteem-building fodder all, that is not why I have gathered ye here to-day. Nay, not even close. I have brought you all here together because I wanted to be the first to tell you. You’re all going home. That’s right, you’re homeward bound. Soon you’ll be able to pack your **** and take a southbound train to ride. You’ve lost your minds killing innocent civilians, you’ve struggled to keep your eyes open most nights, as staying awake meant staying alive. But you’re going home! Warm nights tucked between clean linen sheets. Soft goose down pillows to bore your heads into. The smell of coffee in the morning, bacon and eggs if you’re lucky. The prospect of another day that won’t be defined by the number of lives you’ve ended between sunrise and sunset.

The journey home will be a victorious one, indeed. You shall see it from the comfort of a first class seat on the most expensive airliner we can afford! A small bottle of gin or whiskey is only a few feet away and all you have to do to get one is ask the attendant. If you ask nicely I don’t doubt she might let you have more of those little bottles than administrative policy usually allows. But she sees it in your eyes…you’re a grizzled soldier. You’re still warm to the touch from the heat of battle. You know this. This is who you are, it’s what we made you. And she will sense this. It will drive her mad with desire. Her knees will quiver, she’ll blush, she’ll radiate ****** charm…but all you’ll be able to think of is that Vietnamese farmer with the plaid shirt. 

A ***** plaid shirt. Dripping with dark, brown mud, he smiled at you from beneath the brim of a straw hat that looked as if it had seen many better years. A smear in the drying clay was on the right side of his face where he’d wiped sweat. His lips were dry and cracked and his nose was a little runny. 

The buttons on that plaid shirt were the cute mother-of-pearl finish jobs, the kind that snap shut real easy. How many men would have noticed that? How many of the sharpest minds in the known universe would have missed how his left boot didn’t quite seem to match the right. But you caught it right away and you stored it into that immense data bank that is your United States Marine Corps certified brain. 

If only you could forget it, though. Right men? I see a few tears in a few eyes. I know I’m on the right track here, so if you still think I’m not talking to YOU, I have an invitation right here in my back pocket that will entitle the man to whom I give it a 6 month stint in the back of a mess peeling spuds. You don’t want that, now, do ye? What? No takers? I thought not.

But where was I? Oh, HOME, that’s what I was on about. You all have very nice homes, no doubt, and I’d bet there’s not a single one of you who isn’t just itchin’ to get back to ‘em. Is it the one you grew up in? Is it one you just bought? No matter, when you leave this place it will either be in a body bag or on the better side of Uncle Sam, who looks after all of those fine men and women who have risked life and limb in his service.

So what’s it going to be, worms? Death? He calls often here, and don’t think I don’t know that his is the song of the siren to many a worn out Spartan. But faileth not, loyal comrades. 

Will it be insanity? Will the wage of life and death struggle prove to be nothing more than a tug-of-war between lucidity and madness? Yer going home, grunt, why should it matter? Either one’s better than lying face down in a pool of your own guts. Don’t worry about it, just get on the plane. Baby, it’s your ticket to ride.

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

I stepped onto the tarmac with a firm determination to forget the last 2 years. Maybe even the last 15. I don’t know. I don’t care. I’m just tired of looking for an answer. I’ve listened for the still, small voice of reason and wisdom, but it seems to have stayed behind in the battlefield. Probably where it belongs. 


The night was cloudy and the stars shone like pinpricks in a dark black veil that covered the most brilliant light…ha, I almost said “life”…I may not have been too far wrong there. I wanted to cut the cord of gravity, float through however many miles it might take to reach one of the punctured holes. Then I would tear the fabric and crawl into the other side. Disappear into the brilliant aura.

Only a dream, only a wish. I drug my weary frame from the bustling airport to the highway. An old two-lane road, dangerous after dark. It doesn’t bother me. It’s purpose is to facilitate the traversing of distance from one point to another. I could care less about where it could lead me. I only knew that I would not turn back no matter where I wound up, so I stuck out my thumb and waited for someone to give me a ride.

Does anybody stop to give rides to strangers anymore? I wouldn’t. It’s not something I condone. In fact, I have only done it once in my life, when I was just a kid, before seeing “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer”. After watching that seminal film I resolved to never, ever pick up hitch-hikers again. I wasn’t going to help anybody on the side of the road, either. **** being a “good Samaritan” if it means getting my brains blown clear out of my skull, flung to the side of the road like rotten fruit. 

Despite all of this I still had my hand stretched out, thumb in the universal position that signifies the need of transportation for the “down-on-his-luck” traveler. I remember asking myself what could be more pathetic. I was reduced, by circumstances beyond my control, to hitching or hoping that someone might be clueless enough to pick me up.

Yet, that is exactly what happened.

A hookah smoking caterpillar sat behind the wheel, and he seemed glad to do a small kindness to me. He could tell I was a veteran of psychic wars. He felt obligated, I was sure.

“Hop in, friend,” he said. “I can see that you’re a little down on your luck. I been there ma’self a time ‘er two. Just throw yer pack in the back seat and climb up here with me.”

I wasn’t shocked in the least that a hookah smoking caterpillar was driving a GMC Jimmy east on Route 66. It did, however, give me quite a shock to think that he would pull over and offer me a ride. I am no fool.

“Off we go,” I said to him. 


The road was a long one that took us out of the state. As we crossed the line the caterpillar turned the radio up real loud and started singing along to a Journey song they were playing on the classic rock station.

“Ooooh, wheel in the sky keeps on turning,” he wailed. “I don’t know where I’ll be tomorrow!!!”

I turned to him. “You have a very distinct grasp of Steve Perry’s vocal mannerisms. Have you ever sang professionally?”

“Oh no, not me. I could never go onstage in front of a lot of people and sing. I just don’t have it in me.”

“Well, you aren’t afraid to sing in front of me. What’s the difference between one stranger and a hundred strangers?”

“Oh, it’s not that. It’s not that at all,” he repeated. “I had a friend who used to play and sing in a lot of the bars on the circuit between California and New Orleans. It was a job to him, you know? He told me about a lot of the stuff that goes on in those places. He told me how one time he was singing a Roy Orbison song when some pool-shooting loser throws the cue ball right at him. Beaned him on the forehead, BOP! Had to hurt. Said the bruise swelled up so bad directly afterwards that people started calling him “the Elephant Man”. I was a beginner in the days when he regaled me with these anecdotes and mister, I’ll tell you, he put the fear of God in me. I was so terrified of getting conked in the head with a pool ball that I never pursued the craft.”

I felt a tinge of sympathy for his plight. “I’m sorry to hear that. I bet you would have been a star if you’d gone for it. Bigger than Steve Perry, even.”

“Oh, it’s okay. I don’t feel cheated or like I’ve missed anything essential to my happiness. As long as I’ve got wheels, my hookah and something to put in it, I am a happy caterpillar. Remember that: I am merely a caterpillar.”

“I will do that, but you’re a caterpillar who could kick Steve Perry’s *** any day of the week!”

“Wheel in the sky keeps on turning!”

“**** straight…I don’t know where I’ll be tomorrow!” 

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

The caterpillar held the wheel steady and kept on truckin’. He sang along with every single classic rock song that came on the radio. From Kansas to Boston to “Sweet Home Chicago” he knew them all and, to be perfectly honest, he did a **** good job. He belted ‘em out like Springsteen, he crooned like Bryan Ferry, he croaked like Joe Cocker, he wailed like Janis Joplin, he screamed like that dude from Slayer. No two ways about it. This hookah smoking caterpillar had serious talent. 

I was curious. “So, mister, what to do you do for a living?”

“My friend, I am a mortician. I deal with death every single day. I do a job that most folks would find distasteful and not a little disturbing. And yet I love my job. I do, oh yes, I do. I wouldn’t trade it for anything else in the whole world.”

“Sounds interesting,” I said. “How does a man get a start in a field like yours?”

“It’s not too hard, really,” he replied. “You come with me, I’ll make you an apprentice. You lookin’ for work?”

“No, sir. I can’t say that I am right now. Still got a little cache stashed away from military days.” I made a gesture with my hand that signified that I was grateful for the offer, but would have to pass. “Maybe one of these days I might change my mind. I think I could handle it. I’m not squeamish. No, not at all.”

“Oh, I’m sure you could handle it. I can tell by the way you look straight ahead, you don’t look back, you’ve got a grip on everything in this world and you think there’s nothing that could ever shake your foundations, whether it be from the east wind or the west. The north or the south. Do I read you correctly?”

“I reckon you do. I’ve had a hard run most of my days. Experience has taught me one lesson, but it taught me good and well: Nothing is as you really think it is, and it could all be gone tomorrow. ”

If I am not beautiful,
Am I not bountiful?
...........The problem with beauty is
that it gets old
after that, it can not be sold
it is a fleeting commodity
it will never, never last

If I am not successful
am I not relevant?
If I am not rich,
am I not important?
does money really talk?
and can fame
equal true , unspoiled
happiness
or peace of mind?

If I am not powerful
am I merely anonymous?
do I contribute anything at all
and do I matter?

We are living in a world
that does not tolerate mediocrity
it dwells in mores of hypocrisy
and so it breeds profanity
it encourages deception
and if you want to have your
name remembered,
take a few lives in your
gun powdered hands
they will splash your face
all over the papers
and you can hide behind
the curtains of insanity

how sad to be lonely
but these are the
scenes that we condone
plastic caricatures we are
living in lies and
false smiles
we have died while
we are still alive
inhaling the polluted air
that we so happily create

I've noticed the saddest days of my life have frequently been accompanied by heavy rainfall. It's almost like all of heaven is crying with me, or showering me with the grace to cry alone. Either way or neither way, I am grateful that the clouds darken my face as the tears flow unrelentlessly. Pouring pain from my soul to ready for more. The more the tears flow, the deeper the pain grows. Is there no end? Tears overwhelm me like a flood. Gasping for air in the pit of loneliness. Groping at the walls of hopelessness only to have it slip through my fingers and cover me with its sludge. To feel loved and hated by the same. To be looked upon in utter disdain. To be silenced in words that cut out the fight. To be defeated and left all alone with a self I can hardly condone. The loathing without has now turned within and grows with each breath I take. A smile will create the mask to wear that hides the pain inside. They'll never know the darkness yet grows until I am swallowed within. The sound of the break as strong as a quake that shudders the walls of its part. Tear asunder the thoughts I now ponder grinding them all to a halt. Where is the light that once was so bright it blinded the eyes that would see? How can I face how pain has erased the light that once was in me? The tears fail to wash the darkness away but instead leave a river of blood. Flowing from what was once my heart and is now a soul-wrenching flood. Good-bye heart and all that you feel I wish not to feel you again. Break from your place of utter disgrace and shatter with all of your pride. Crumble and fall for once and for all leaving no pain inside.

You see I am a silent Tao more words count less especially in this letter,
And when you're finished reading it you can laugh at me if it makes you feel any better.  
Which is okay with me but what's not is that you all just get to keep on living,
Without me with you during all of your tomorrows so this note is my forgiving;
To my family and friends who have hurt me and treated me wrong...
But maybe no fault of yours but still it hurt and didn't even make me strong.
To all except my daughter who needs no forgiveness from me she's done to me nothing wrong,
Unlike I did to her her whole life but it's like I said...because I'm not very strong.
A coward really!  But I'm not gay, a ****** or flamboyant,
It doesn't really matter though anyway I still am a dissapointment.
So I deserve your ridicule I'm no good to others and in my life it has shown,
I don't expect you to except me to forgive me or to even to condone...
This "Pipeline Boy" who in my youth which is how I was raised and I thought it was right,
From behind closed doors was I taught to be feminine and ladylike.
I tried to live my life straight marrying three lovely ladies..."myself" I tried to convert,
I helped to make a little girl (it was my crowning achievement in life) my marriages didn't work.
Attempting to ask for forgiveness I was rushed and sorta fell,
Falling fifty-five feet breaking twenty-one bones and on my way to hell.
Trying to forgive myself in front of God on my way down...
"I'm Still Falling!" were my very last thoughts just before my body hit the ground.
You see I've been treated like a ***** all my life by most these men,
I don't know if it's theirs or mine to own...this unforgivable sin.
So now I partake in the world's oldest profession,
Woman don't do what's done to me being a women's the only way for me to get to Heaven!
So now I am Robin Ashley and hope for as long as I am you'll be my friend,
Because It no longer feels right for me to go around living life just to pretend.
My last name stays the same so she won't feel I abandoned her again,
For she's the only one in this world that I do not want to offend.
So I'll live my life in cognito causing you all no consequence nor strife,
When you're apalled by this letter remember it's not yours-but it's "My" life!
I apologize for posting such an obscene  'b l of distaste,
I'm just so **** tired of living my life with a mask on my face.
I don't know how my family found me here on facebook I guess it really doesn't matter,
My name is now Robin Ashley Latham and its because it makes me less sadder!

     Robin Ashley

I am second best
That face you see when you want to
I condone this
Because I have to

A ghost in the halls
Transparent and iridescent
Noticed when convenient
Open mouthed and silent

Words do not alter my position
I fear they send me deeper into this state
Is it bad that I accept it?
And I the one who digs deeper instead?

I dig deep into the fur of isolation
I'm close to it, within my reach
Nestling into the in-between
The turning point

Where marinated in our murky past
have we found justification for the travesties we do,
build prisons where our prejudice lasts,
and allow its prisoners to fester as they stew

I have felt this heat.
The flame which boils in the toils of others,
whose oils lick embers into wildfire.
And we fall back into the Dark Ages.

where minds who place burden on those with different skin
slink flicking flint to fire, raising from the earth
the walls we have spent decades taking apart one brick at a time.

one brick at a time,
comment by comment,
each passing moment
condone it.
ignore it.

passivity pays the builders of this monument.
who see no wrecking ***** to stop them.
passivity, fills the pockets of the petty
coin by coin collecting courage to speak
outwardly outrageous
slurred hate speech contagious
barbary amounts its fortress from our silence,
one brick at a time.

I have seen the origins of intolerance,
holding together the cinder blocks of utterance
all the moments we should have said something and didn't.
In my selfish silence I see senselessness slip past my snares.
In my hush I hear hate harrow the ventricles of hearts much weaker
than the speaker.

Loathing left untended like
loose mountain snow
will like an avalanche gain strength
in movement.

To you,
the architects of abhorrence
the creators of execration
I plead:  lay down your urban dictionaries.
Know that you lay a foundation
whose structure will build  up,
but whose existence will tear down.

To you,
those who watch the construction
and stare in silence sufferance,
know that although no sweat has fallen,
and no aid has been laid by your hand,
That this malicious monument is as much yours
as it is theirs, through your willingness to watch it go up
one brick at a time.

A heart does not deserve to Break
Nor feel a Winter's bite alone.
A heart is such a beautiful thing,
No harm to it shall I Condone.
Yet, sweet Lover, why must you bring such danger near?
Your heavy burdened mind and soul
bring me too much fear.

Why do you leave me one sole soul
When I am meant to be one of Two?
Why do you break apart our whole,
When I am meant to be a part of you?
You've harmed me close to my
beating life.
Please don't lone babe, I beg you no.
My beating heart beats one beat less.
You've killed me dear with your single blow.

I saw a boy who was sitting alone.
Tears flowing like the river of Rhone
I went over, his sadness to me unbeknown,
He looked up muttering, "why do they not condone?

I am a normal person, just like you.
Born in the image of God, from my mothers womb too,
Two eyes, a nose, skin of the same hue.
So why to them am I the stomach flu?

They hate me, they want me gone,
Ha, as if I'm not already withdrawn.
They say I'm not normal, I'm sinful and so on,
But I don't listen, I just press on.

You see, this I never became,
Yet I am the target of their aim.
How can I be so different by loving the same?
God made me this way, so why am I the blame?
All I give is love, yet all I receive is shame."

I gave the boy a hug and said, "Don't accept blame, and don't feel shame. Embrace your name."

I turned water into coffee this morning
and sat by the four corner light box
while reading a book
that taught me not to judge it by its cover.
The twisted crooks
that the story entails
the end trails of coke heads
that still drop slowly down the walls of
East Harlem.
I turned water into coffee this morning
and sat by the four corner light box
and all of its massive holiness
creating a halo around my entire body
without fearing a bullet would come rushing in
and **** me dead
I sat and read of another universe where
life and love still exist
but in a way I could not bring myself to condone
I turned water into coffee this morning
and sat by the four corner light box
with a dark shadow created by the backlit room
safe and in place
just wishing I was one of the twisted crooks
the story entailed
with my end trails in a little more danger
than when
I turned water into coffee this morning
and sat with the purity of my whiteness,
by the four corner light box
while reading another universe
and doing nothing about it.

I pull back and backhand
you like an old school
**** checking his ***
I don't condone that
behavior, I'm making
a point... literally

Next comes that vicious
overhead smash in the
name of love as I
desire to keep you
in a confined box

Forehand after Forehand
to complete the point, set
and ultimately match
You may judge me with
your rules, but you
will not break me as
I am the winner.