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Meena Menon Sep 2021
Flicker Shimmer Glow

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





















Lava

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


















Circles on a Moss Covered Volcano

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





Warm Light Shatters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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


Edelweiss

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

























The Bread and Coconut Butter of Aparigraha

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

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

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

































Sound on Powdery Blue

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

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

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

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

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

















Pink Graphite

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

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

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

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

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

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



































Flakes

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

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

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

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






































OCEAN BED

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














Morning

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

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

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

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





Blue Paper

Haze scatters blue light on a planet.  
Frought women, livid, made into peonies by Aphrodites that caught their men flirting and blamed the women, flushed red.
and blamed the women, flushed red.
Frought women, livid, chrysanthemums, dimmed until the end of the season, exchanged and retained like property.  
Blue women enter along the sides of her red Torii gates, belayed, branded and belled, a plangent sound.  
By candles, colored lights and dried flowers she’s sitting inside on a concrete floor, punctures and ruin burnished with paper, making burnt lime from lime mortar.  
Glass ***** on the ceiling, she moves the beads of a Palestinian glass bead bracelet she holds in her hands.  
She bends light to make shadows against  thin wooden slats curbed along the wall, and straight across the ceiling.
A metier, she makes tinctures, juniper berries and cotton *****.
Loamy soil in the center of the room,
A hawthorn tree stands alone,
A gateway for fairies.
large stones at the base protecting,
It’s branches a barrier.  
It’s leaves and shoots make bread and cheese.
It’s berries, red skin and yellow flesh, make jam.
Green bamboo stakes for the peonies when they whither from the weight of their petals.
And lime in the soil.  
She adds wood chips to the burnt lime in the kiln,
Unrolled paper, spools, and wire hanging.
Wood prayer beads connect her to the earth,
The tassels on the end of the beads connect her to spirit, to higher truth.
Minerals, marine mud and warm basins of seawater on a flower covered desk.  
She adds slaked lime to the burnt lime and wood chips.  
The lime converts to paper,
Trauma victims speak,
Light through butterfly wings.  
She’s plumeria with curved petals, thick, holding water
This is what I have written of my book.  I’ll be changing where the poems with the historical research go.  There are four more of those and nine of the other poems.
Mateuš Conrad Apr 2018
the **** am I doing here, I've stashed the milk
into the basket,
I stashed the kiwi lime soda
for grandpa... and a Czech beer...
now I'm standing in the heavy
machinery aisle..,
looking at shelves of,
about... 15 different types
of *****... behind me, coco chanel...
or as ***** drinkers like
to call the whiskey,
the bourbon... perfumes...
i'm scratching my head,
15 types of *****...
am I really making a ****** choice?
apart from the labels...
I'm standing, looking at
hundreds of identical bottles...
it's a supermarket,
it's not a indie brewery...
akin to the edradour distilkery...
serving tokai whizz...
sure... the trip would have been
great, but a Russian,
a Jewish a Belarusian
and my then Russian scoop
talking Russian and making
me feel like a Dostoyevsky novel...
n'ah ah sour grapes...
           blood was indeed shed,
on a waterfall...
mind you.., what the difference
between  western slav drinking
whiskey, and a Russian pleb /
actually a son of a lecturer
in residence at Edinburgh university?
the ******* Pole sniffs the glass
to get a bouquet of flavours...
the Muscovite pleb gets all philosophical...
peering into a glass...
it's hardly an insult
when it's a nibbling...  
                   more came looking at
amber gems of the baltic,
than looking at this, Pict ****...
    hardly the cas with *****...
5 minutes in and I still attempted
to make a choice...
thing with *****...
         you only receive critical
feedback from the a posteriori script...
now, I can be a civilised drinker
in company... i'll have one beer with you...
but that's where the trail ends...
that 500ml of kłosówka?
that's for me, in the company of
candles flickering,  and my shadow
dancing...
        5 minutes though, spent
trying to pick a ***** for a Saturday
excavation...
        god forbid the macabre love
bound to the cinema of
the notebook...
                 dogs really have
eyes more beautiful, than women...
notably viril Alsatians...
        mind you...
in the western slavic tongue
the are animal names,
and human names
     for certain correlations...
a human has oczy...
while an animal has ślepia...
a human has a buzie,
while an animal has
pysk... or... akin to a pig:
                     ryj...
no wonder... since
buziaki means kisses...
snogs...
          a dog kisses oral...
self-oral...
        slobbering the best he can...
and sisters always say
of the girlfriends of brothers:
coincidental with edradour distillery,
and her idea of Loch Lomond...
I brought the lonely swan though...
in general, men without women...
'oh tbut he wouldn't have seen
so much of this world without her...'
oh this, oh that... sigh...
and I'm cure he wishes...
to have seen Eden... peace...
than: one man's *******'s
worth of the taj mahal...
     postcards will do, just fine...
hated the equator weather
of Kenya mind you...
kept to the shace...
    watched people make proof
of holidaying,
scorching themselves for a tan
like buying Svarovky crystals...
back at the supermarket I finally
decided on the painkiller...
a shaft of wheat soaked in
the bottle...
   western perfume behind me...
scotch ****... ice tea...
and as ever,  the rule holds...
the civil beer in company...
but when it comes to 500ml
of straight Vladimir...
                     conversation is glum,
the graves open,
there is no party, no social unibhibition,
no drinking games,
no boasting...
     just a severe glued to
the marrow stare into
        a conversion of blank into
script...
      down below, two locals
talk into midnight
with a Yorkshire terrier on a leash...
5 ******* minutes
chosen a *****...
        like a gorilla, scratching its head,
looking for a straight banana
in a pile of the atypical curvatures...
5 ****** minutes...
mind you, there is compensation...
late evening, nearing half past 8,
mid-April...
continental spring,
lack of light pollution,
more stars than the outskirts of
London allow...
    and susumu yokota's grinning cat
album...
     albeit the missing Scorpio
constellation, bound to the British Isles:

                  
              
                           ●
      
                                    ●

                  
                    ●
                 ●



●                                  
                      ­             ●


no algorithm no search engine
no dictionary... will equal
asking a grandmother for botanical nouns...
namely, the blooming forthynsia tree,
****** yellow almost neon
against pale kiwi green of April spring wake...

and the electric pale green,
or woken from slumber
blooming baby leaves of
a wierzba...
    a willow...
     electric in that,  almost
quicksilver drooling over
platinum in th spring night
              with a missing moon...

casually, a talk with woman,
and the technical nouns
of botanical expedience...
no algorithm to boot...

always the anticipated digression,
from the most mundane posit of
unraveling pidgin...
I compensate for my father not
speaking pristine english...
but certainly doing a chore
of industrial roofing,
than most, spaghetti finger
pancake arm coming of age bistro
*******...
        the more they aspire to sing,
the more we can hope
to be cured by karaoke on
a Saturday night...
  
    and always the anglophone perspective
of... bellybutton, Greenwich
syndrome... said the English,
so must say th rest of the world...

his shortcomings are my...
what he might as well have said...
tak your toys,
and take a warm dump in their sandpit...
then move into the next sandpit,
and **** in it...

personally I don't unerstand
the attack on grammar...
this antithesis of etymology,
this quasi slang... or rather slang
in a straitjacket...
of... well, at least the orthodox
communists had an economic model...
it was going to fail
because it was going to fail...
        but how lonely...
it must be... being unable to compete
with an external counter,
and merely, implode...
          must be lonely in the current
economic asylum...
imploding all the time,
having to compete with 600 years
after golgotha, and rí'bāh...
      
   5 ****** minutes picking out
a ***** for a Saturday night solo...
went for the shaft of wheat,
akin to a lodged locust corpse
in an absinthe bottle bought
in Amsterdam...

               apparently, there is a difference,
but most notably...
only when, drinking alone...
   the talk of sober people
bores me, how they can hide their
apathy behind so much gesticulation
and **** fakery...
    silent as a grave...
drunk people talking
is..
    perhaps outside the party mentality...
and th sudden spurring of
amnesia, a moral hangover,
a loose tongue comes across
darting eyes...

                   hardly a conneisour of
beer, or *****...
      more, on the lines of...
a conneisour of the knockout
falling asleep method...
      and... not allowing myself
be impregnated with dreams...
strange thus... how people
allow unknown forces to impregnate
them with dreams...
               **** them with dreams...
I deem a sleep impregnated
with dreams to be far from rest...
either sleep and the night
of today, with a morning of later on
today... or nothing...

                    perhaps the safety of the sleep
environment,
of the naturalally produced
hallucinogens that are called dreams...
surely the brain must secrete
a hallucinogen when in th state
of sleep...
              as far as I am concerned,
there is no need to interpret dreams...
coincidentally, this implies...
the counter to the stigma surrounding
lucid intoxication...
     because aren't dreams,
the byproduct, of the brain secreting
hallucinogenic compounds,
      when in a hypo-conscious
state of sleep?
   medically induced coma...
naturally invoked
psychedelic carousel...
             which might explain why...
people wanted to tap into this
chemistry dynamic via the 1960s...
of waking into a dream...
        but there must be some sort of
chemical, secreted by the brain
during sleep...
        that allows for the conjured phantasma...
symbiotic to the state of safety...
the brain, not attached to
spacio-temporal coordination...

   and some would argue that all drinkers
at noon, are dancing sloppy tango
with their shadows.
JJ Hutton Apr 2013
we, mistakes made in groping dark,
ironed and cheekkissed happy accidents,
told we arrived by love, and our purpose forward: to love.

we were chocolate milk runners.
we were completion grades.
coloring sheets of MLK and jagged cutouts of billy goats.
we were girls in sequined jeans with scraped knees.
on the basketball court we pushed pigtails to concrete.
rumors of us kissing in the lobby waiting for our rides
did circulate.

we, skinny white girls of Moore, Okla.,
skipped supper and laid at the feet of TV-watchers
like bleached branches of fallen oaks garnishing their standing brothers.

we were doorbells.
we were passenger seats.
peeking in the teacher's edition and handshaking answers in fluorescent bathrooms.
we were the first ones on the bus and the last ones off.
knees to chin, untied laces on heater's ****, winterlong sweat factory.
rumors of us agreeing to go to prom over fourth-period lunch
did circulate.

we, writers suffered writers' morality,
disregarded right, wrong, norm; lounged, waiting to be under the bus,
suffering for the story. tense matchstick lovers --  dim light for a moment and then.

we were someone else's *******.
we were someone else's hairpins.
as whatever ran so hot in us cooled, dried on thrift store comforters,
so did we. ceiling fans and ***. fingernails and boxed wine.
rumors sustaining.

and so it came, after announcements, after invitations,
after subbing in one bridesmaid for another, we were getting married.
we were grooms with empty pockets and full of sound advice.
our fathers took us behind the church,
chaplipped our foreheads,  and said,
"I know, we promised you were made from love and to love.
But I gotta be real honest here. You were made from whiskey.
And there's always the distillery."


we were jobless in wrinkled suits.
we were brown shoes; black belts.
and this will look good on your resumé. and this will look good on your resumé.
translation: how about ******* this ****? or how about this one?
a resumé was one page. we couldn't fit all the ***** on one page.

we, beardheavy and deodorant-streaked,
lived in dream houses in Ulysses, Kan., drove dream Tahoes,
watched dream Netflix, next to  portly wives who looked like
QUEEN MOTHER OF ALL THE BROTHELS OF THE LOWER MIDWEST.

we were childless.
we were wanting.
after consulting a physician and a bottle of whiskey,
we lifted and pinned the sagging belly of our wives with
a wooden board. one good **** in. one borrowed pregnancy test.

and so it came, the weddings of our sons. behind the church,
we took them aside and said,
*"I know, we promised you were made from love and to love.
But I gotta be real honest here."
Mateuš Conrad Jan 2020
just discovered a really funny girl,
            itsdivya -
                 and in all honesty...
instagram poetry was looming,
  somewhere, in the back of the mind,
but unlike a haiku
by some Chinese ****-'ed...
   or that Li Bai "dross" (there is ever
a problem of drinking alone?
    i thought you could only really
drink when alone? drinking with others,
i tried it, but after the initial
jovial backwards and forwards,
laughter... "micro-agressions"...
                   that deep seeded sense
of regret at having started drinking
to begin with... drinking alone...
                is there really any other way
to drink?
     but beside that...
        a poem about "coloured women" / people...
and, mind you: this is only after
a cider having chopped 8 onions
    and having not found the crocodile tears...
and perhaps two ms. ambers nibbling
ginger...
               (mind you, drunks always
have affectionate nicknames for their...
ahem... what would a ****** addict
call ******? H... smack...
      leech... i don't know...
  i once tested positive for *****
    in a ****-test when i was
being monitored for relapse into
smoking dope, skunk, marijuana...
but that's prior to me having
eaten somepoppy-seed cake,
                 makowiec, so, go figure)...
yadda-yadda-yadda...
      "people of colour"...
what the **** am i then?
           bedsheets?
            porcelain?
     a ***- geisha with full make-up?!
   a ******* african albino sacrifice
    of tanzania?
     you should see me after a few ms. ambers...
well... there's either a piglet hue on me...
or when i start laughing,
    eh... pale crimson...
          and that's not red as in a: "red indian"...
certainly not as blue as a Hindu indian...
and when i get a chance to **** up
some vitamin D in summer...
     i look like someone from Bangkok,
a copper dragon emerges...
                  bū'bū'*******...
                  ­              i'm done...
                         i come from very stubborn people...
i'm not going to capitulate...
                   because, yeah:
                  even ol' whitey overe 'ere had
the "easy ride" throughout history...
             you can bash a native englishman...
sure... m'ah colonial past...
                       colonial past?
                             in the ukraine?
                              under the prussians,
the russians or the austro-hungarians?
                         then under the nazis,
   then under the russians again?
            that, "colonial past"?
                just because i speak this language...
doesn't mean i have to listen
    to what the englishman has to endure.
                
so now, i guess: the draft...

the **** am I doing here, I've stashed the milk
into the basket,
I stashed the kiwi lime soda
for grandpa... and a Czech beer...
now I'm standing in the heavy
machinery aisle..,
looking at shelves of,
about... 15 different types
of *****... behind me, coco chanel...
or as ***** drinkers like
to call the whiskey,
the bourbon... perfumes...
i'm scratching my head,
15 types of *****...
am I really making a ****** choice?
apart from the labels...
I'm standing, looking at
hundreds of identical bottles...
it's a supermarket,
it's not a indie brewery...
akin to the edradour distillery...
serving tokai whizz...
sure... the trip would have been
great, but a Russian,
a Jewish a Belarusian
and my then Russian scoop
talking Russian and making
me feel like a Dostoyevsky novel...
n'ah ah sour grapes...
           blood was indeed shed,
on a waterfall...
mind you.., what the difference
between  western slav drinking
whiskey, and a Russian pleb /
actually a son of a lecturer
in residence at Edinburgh university?
the ******* Pole sniffs the glass
to get a bouquet of flavours...
the Muscovite pleb gets all philosophical...
peering into a glass...
it's hardly an insult
when it's a nibbling...  
                   more came looking at
amber gems of the baltic,
than looking at this, Pict ****...
    hardly the cas with *****...
5 minutes in and I still attempted
to make a choice...
thing with *****...
         you only receive critical
feedback from the a posteriori script...
now, I can be a civilised drinker
in company... i'll have one beer with you...
but that's where the trail ends...
that 500ml of kłosówka?
that's for me, in the company of
candles flickering,  and my shadow
dancing...
        5 minutes though, spent
trying to pick a ***** for a Saturday
excavation...
        god forbid the macabre love
bound to the cinema of
the notebook...
                 dogs really have
eyes more beautiful, than women...
notably viril Alsatians...
        mind you...
in the western slavic tongue
the are animal names,
and human names
     for certain correlations...
a human has oczy...
while an animal has ślepia...
a human has a buzia,
while an animal has
pysk... or... akin to a pig:
                     ryj...
no wonder... since
buziaki means kisses...
snogs...
          a dog kisses oral...
self-oral...
        slobbering the best he can...
and sisters always say
of the girlfriends of brothers:
coincidental with edradour distillery,
and her idea of Loch Lomond...
I brought the lonely swan though...
in general, men without women...
'oh tbut he wouldn't have seen
so much of this world without her...'
oh this, oh that... sigh...
and I'm cure he wishes...
to have seen Eden... peace...
than: one man's *******'s
worth of the taj mahal...
     postcards will do, just fine...
hated the equator weather
of Kenya mind you...
kept to the shace...
    watched people make proof
of holidaying,
scorching themselves for a tan
like buying Svarovky crystals...
back at the supermarket I finally
decided on the painkiller...
a shaft of wheat soaked in
the bottle...
   western perfume behind me...
scotch ****... ice tea...
and as ever,  the rule holds...
the civil beer in company...
but when it comes to 500ml
of straight Vladimir...
                     conversation is glum,
the graves open,
there is no party, no social unibhibition,
no drinking games,
no boasting...
     just a severe glued to
the marrow stare into
        a conversion of blank into
script...
      down below, two locals
talk into midnight
with a Yorkshire terrier on a leash...
5 ******* minutes
chosen a *****...
        like a gorilla, scratching its head,
looking for a straight banana
in a pile of the atypical curvatures...
5 ****** minutes...
mind you, there is compensation...
late evening, nearing half past 8,
mid-April...
continental spring,
lack of light pollution,
more stars than the outskirts of
London allow...
    and susumu yokota's album
grinning cat -
                       which, if coupled
with London's outer-suburbia can
be a real motivational piece
of music to pretend to be lost
and have the persistent "ambition"
to keep on walk...
      until finally walking into
a forest, or climbing over a park
fence to drink a beer on a bench
admiring the skyline,
              on, say, mashiter's hill.
Joe Feb 2012
There are two unfinished gins
By our bedside
The night took us
And made us forget

I reach out to quench thirst
In the morning
The juniper taste of regret

I watch you while you're sleeping
I listen to you breathe
You'll wake up and leave soon
Then it's back to the distillery

There's just one unfinished
By my bedside
The night's over
You fell through the net

I reach out to quench thirst
In the morning
The juniper taste of regret
When the haze of how we met finally cleared,
And your broken heart weighed heavier than it appeared,
When the nicotine air was overcome by a sweaty aroma,
And I awoke from my whisky-induced coma,
I remember seeing your face among the smoke,
And for once I felt someone hearing the words I spoke,
The long talks of fantasy and timeless novel,
Turned quickly into fear and endless grovel,
How you decorated your room with blood soaked artillery,
The long hours spent in your bathtub distillery,
All the while I offered you my heart,
To love you no matter the distance you put us apart,
Met only with your constantly draining rejection,
I came to find I was only part of your bed post collection,
But how I longed to feel your warmth once more,
The longing for you grew me tired and sore,
I thought you would never reciprocate my affections,
I placed my worth in your pathetic erections,
And now you ask me to stay- to love you in another state,
Oh but my dear this love is too much too late,
I cannot love someone I can never see,
I cannot love someone who could never love me.
The man in Sin City
Rose Dec 2011
You know, it's not bad
I thought I would be messed up mentally
but instead I'm succeeding - they call it reality
I can't lie and say I don't long for
the outdated admiration, insincere adulation
from your clientele  - embarrassed millionaires
Wasting what's left of their fortunes
to stash and squeeze
While I was caring what you would think,
they crafted a creation out of me

I like to
think about
the curve of my words
compared to the small of your back;
the dot over i
to the ones on your skin
the lines crossing t's
like those that run beneath your vision
Were
you any letter,
you would take the form
of a hook and a swoop in another direction;
a question never ending
That's
always
asking
"Why?"

I drink ***** as I write poetry
Focus on my handwriting to keep myself from
Wondering what you're doing
or what you'd think of me
Sipping my way out of my head,
Jack Daniels for breakfast
freedom from the distillery
the dirty poet Jul 2019
how tough?
i don’t need a bar
i need a distillery
Overwhelmed Dec 2011
oldest distillery in
the country

still using the
original method
of cooking,
fermenting,
distilling,
and
aging
in
new oak
barrels

the nectar of the hicks
of the world
brewed
in such a beautiful
and natural place

future and past
fused together

quietly keeping the
whole world
wasted
Kay Ireland Mar 2017
I witnessed your birth.
Oak barrel wombs,
unknown fathers.
They presented you with so much pride
that I felt guilty refusing a taste.
So smooth.
Too smooth.
Unnatural.
Fire should not destroy so calmly.

You witnessed my redemption.
Your name on his tongue
returned me to a Dublin distillery
but I did not fear you.
His offering was one of comfort.
You didn’t hurt as much
with his eyes on me,
my lipstick on the rim of his cup.
I was perfectly warm
in the dead of winter.
Fire should not destroy so calmly.

You will witness my unapologetic sins.
I swig straight from the bottle
to prepare for my numb lips against his;
our numb tongues ruining lives.
It won’t hurt anymore.
You gave me courage.
You showed me intimacy, unflinching,
with your solo cup facade.
You put my heart in his hands
and watched us test the waters,
gently.
You will be there
when we collide again.
Fire should not destroy so calmly.
david badgerow Aug 2012
her hair was a cloud of cigarette smoke
and flowed down like beer
but smelled more like a whiskey distillery

she looked down on me
with her knees on my chest, she
popped her gum and
arched her back,
drilled a hole in my heart

but my heart still pounds and pumps
just like thunder or gasoline
when i remember that night,
and those next four days
we spent storming into
each other's secret hiding places
and driving reckless into the night.

we shared a nickel's worth
of bourbon
and a crumpled cigarette

when her parents found us
we were both
wrapped 'round each other
and in the stiff dawn light i wished
i was still wearing those
silly-looking shades.
Olivia Kent Feb 2014
Once, my life I would have given, for the man of driven snow.
Purity in heart and crying soul, laced only with pure lunacy.
Provided by distillery.

He was beautiful, a gentle man, but, truly is a mental man.
My glasses misted with dripping love and body heat, bi-laterally
What a silly little girl I was, old and nearly grey, a wild child still wanting play.
In need of taming, but never whipping.
(C) LIVVI
Desiree Jul 2018
Flowing footsteps from skytrain to street
Trying to stay calm, but I'm so excited to meet
You, here, under the changing glow
Of signs, of places, hoping we slow our
Pace and enter. But we are in search
Of another establishment, on the whim
Of a word, a nudge in the right direction.
The winds blow us into the red glow
Of ambiance, of elegance, the right selection
Portobello perfection, Mezcal gin,
Beautiful soul sitting close with a grin,
We can't help but laugh "this is how you win!"

Foggy to recall the way that we went
Home on the bus, or the money we spent.
None of that matters much when you are lost
In the depth of another being, intriguing
To find kin where you are not used to seeing them.
Laughing up the stairs in the corridor,
Knowing in this moment, this is your life,
It is beautiful, you are not needing more.
Both of us feeling this as we reach the door,
"Welcome to Buzzer 2" let's see what's in store.

Waking up cuddling, always a delight.
So much accomplished already, but you might
Have to run out quickly and buy some beans
For the bullet coffee that will be our means
Of mobilization, into the street,
Rubber soles on our feet, ready to meet
The pavement outside which will guide
Our path from delicious morning smoothie
Over bridges, through the downtown core,
Both realizing we would make a great movie
If film could ever capture the way that we soar.

Hats tilted slightly sideways, we even get work done.
Painting quickly so we may continue our run,
Over the Granville bridge, lilac in the air.
And there is no hiding the way that you stare
At my ***, and the mountains, a beauty so fair.

Rangoli's is next, fine dining, the best chai!
Decadently treated to Portobello twice.
Sweaty in our running gear, we are here
Trying to avoid timestamped bills and clock chimes
But you give me your best guess, lately spot on!
I glance at the sun to figure how much day is gone.
Even though there are so many moments left
To unravel, I embody the feelings - being
Ever present to crystallize the memory of our travels.

We turn towards the sinking sun, and I run
My fingers through windblown lion-locks.
Basking in the energy we emanate, we stun
Onlookers with our badassery and good looks.

Granville island is next on the docket
Searching for elusive sumac, in the spice shop
It is tucked away on a shelf, among rarities.
You light up at the till, and guarantee
The next place we head to is going to be
The crown of the afternoon - The Distillery

In shorts and tanks we stroll in with class,
Walk up to the bar and order a glass
Of the finest and most signature gin,
But just a taste, not enough to make the head spin.
A nectar so pure, so incredibly smooth
We continue our stroll, we continue to lose
Sight of places you were expected to be,
Apparently easy to do when you hang out with me.

Crossing under the bridge, sunset rays shine
Through the city canopy, it is nearly time
For the moon to transition us into the night,
But I pull you aside for a moment, while its still light
And kiss you with passion, with fever, with might.
That gin in the afternoon has increased our delight.

And it's not over yet, we play for a while.
Horsing around at the bus stop, we smile
And pose on the blue wall, gangster-style.
Moments in snapshots, spirit of the child
Creating our reality, embracing our WILD.
Ysa Pa Mar 2016
One word, a single syllable
Five letters, short but powerful
Simple definitions
With hidden connotations
Carrying multiple meanings
A word, secretly beautiful and beguiling
It may pertain to static photographs
Allotted for promotional stuff
It can refer to a purification machine or distillery
It may indicate silence, calmness and serenity
It’s commonly described as to devoid from motion
Abstaining from movement or action
But the definition I most love
Is “IN SPITE OF”
“Existing before and continuing into the present”
Stillness oozes with something desirable and pleasant
There is no complete explanation
It should be used to describe devotion
It is a concrete representation
Of one’s love and passion

In spite of everything that has been and will
*I still…
It may sound like tragedy
But beauty lies in calamity
The obstacles that test us
That make us and test our sanity

Self consciousnessness vanity
insecurities causing pressure
Forcing us to experiment with
Our limitations that help measure

What's important, what we treasure
What we sacrifice for pleasure
Giving us vision of clarity to find
What were carrying buried never

To be seen until bad weather
Makes us reach deep inside
To pull out courage that couldn't
Flourish without desperation to try

Our resilience that's why brilliance
Comes from hardships facing
Us opposed to expose weakness we
hold and learn to control making

The wrong move or fall to the
Inevitable damage inflicted
Helping us discover the strength
Covered never needing it evicted

But the loss of comfort from
bad situations start to train us to know
Our capability til like a distillery
our body produces an adrenaline buzz

That gives confidence like beer does
Like whiskey like ***
A natural substance like adderol
Now seeing the potential that some

Never uncover until there smothered
In fear nerves and sweat
Reminding you that a man
holds in his hands all he needs to stand next

To hurricanes and endure the rain
Cuz if he boards a plane and runs
He'll never know if he can survive &
if he runs the next time u come

To face fear it'll never be done
You'll always live scared your not
Able to stand your ground and reach
Deep down and evolution will stop

So sacrifice causer a loss
Is the cost of what will be found
Learn to be the master
of what happens after a disaster surrounds

Cause a master sees faster means of
recovery then goes to master these
Compilations of complication
s in the Situations of a catastrophe

And then he'll always have with him
the tools to fight Cataclysm
And learn to shape fate and hate
to tolerate misfortune like its Fascism

And by the end the little mishaps
And trials and tribulations
Will be welcome as u learn the pain
is worth the outcome&inspiration;

Not to mention the confirmation
That misfortune brings fortune
Like any adversity brings pain like
Surgery but the aftermath assuringly

Will be more asset than liability as
your left with something intangible
The knowledge that you are stronger
Than you imagined& still amicable

So charge toward fear, stand tall
Never hide or run away
Cuz unless the earth breaks
ull survive the earthquakes, and be ok

Hardships, cataclysm catastrophe
Calamity&disasters; are unusual
Cuz their misfortune brings fortune
So remember tragedy is beautiful
Busy being distilled
filled,then
spilled out drop by tiny drop
dripping,dripping,dripping
stop,
and proof,
enough and more to blow you off the roof.
Busy being fortified
scented,
reinvented,
dyed in the wool and full to overflowing.
This distillery's not killing me, but
strengthening and lengthening the shadows in my day,
making way for more,
building my reserve to serve me
opening the door,
giving me the nerve to carry on,
to carry going on
until
the last drop
has gone.
Ky Philbilly Nov 2014
Crossing the bridge to Lawerenceburg
As the fog is rolling on the river
A real and definite chill in the air
Enough to send a shiver

The woods are all around
The leaves are mostly fallen
Which we all know means
Winter's definitely callin'

There on your left
The old train trestle high in the air
No way I would ever cross it
Even the thought does me scare

Then there's the Wild Turkey distillery
There on top of the hill
The smell of sour mash whiskey
The air around to fill

Crossing the bridge to Lawrenceburg
These are the things that I see
Though I wasn't raised here
Lawerenceburg is now a home to me.
Laura Oct 2022
I'm your jester here. In the dawn of early fall
evening crosswalks, I point out my favourite book stores.
Look, the red maples, turning into dust,
paint-by-number yellows. Look, the dirt is drying up
crisping your white shoes on edges.
I walk through Ossington with you
stirring through my mind. Street lights flicker well into
the signs of cold October. Look, the fancy stores,
the cute golden retriever in the red rain coat.
Fall is when the only things you know
become the things I've named them.
Soon I can offer you a new season:
frosting window panes and shiny Distillery lights.
The first time you see me okay with change -
see me laugh with my friends boldly,
coming back into my honest self. I'm forlorn for you
to love the world the way I do, because I brought you here.
Nikkie Jan 2021
The core of your emotionally charged vibration gives me shivers,
then evens me out, like an illegal drug shocks the system.
You calm me down like a deep ****** after an exhausting ******* primal event!
I can’t say when, why, or the exact moment in time,
when you entered into my solitary world.
I can’t seem to let this go, the feeling of passion, the warmth of unity,
the wholesome finality of not feeling alone.
I don’t want to wake from my fragmented sleep,
because I feel you deeper when my eyes are closed.
I know it takes time and patience to hone in on what you feel.
I’ve waited so long for this slow dance to happen,
and I’m not about to give up now.
You make me feel like a female dragon in ****** heat,
expelling thunder like an old-time flashcube, dancing within my murky emotions.
Brandy filled chocolate covered cherries; melt from the heat inside of me,
Intoxicating the alcoholic burn on my tongue.
You’ve become a distillery of thoughtful contentment, that slowly releases
a flowing continuum of deliberate desires.
I’ve had some ups and I’ve had some downs, when it comes
to relationships and emotional intensities.
The air around you have pierced my reality and rebuilt the broken
chambers of my heart.
Feelings have been set free, with re-deposits of evaporated pain;
changing charged up devotions into kinetic realties.
My Mister Devine you bring out my divinity,
from the safety of your embrace to the finesse of your masculinity.
Megan Sherman Feb 2017
You are as gorgeous as the Saint of Love
Thy mouth is the distillery of immortal gifts
Thy spirit bonny, beau as turtle dove
Pouring down treasures from the rift
Of thy mind's heaven, a paradise
A kingdom to me and treasure is
One peep in to its climes suffice
To foster deepest passions bliss
I quail and cry in the knowledge
That you hold me in low esteem
I exit passions magnificent stage
Ashamed for what I feel and dream
    O I had been uncynical
    But they gloated to see me fall
Mateuš Conrad Mar 2018
sometimes reality is the most infuriating thing
to some people,
               and sometimes its bites,
unexpected, as if: it didn't have an allowance
to exist in the first place...
         oh no, not some mediocre:
ahem, hollywood fiction therapy sessions
that turn into: less a fiction, and, more a fantasy.
me? some people paint,
                      i cook indian cuisine...
take for example the following two recipes:
thai massaman curry...
              the perfect antithesis to thai green,
and yes, i went to the local turk to ask if he
had some lemongrass shoots...
     fortunately for me, i still had some stashed
in my fridge...
          or the chicken pathia...
            who would have thought that indians
use vinegar mingled with sugar,
  well, on top of the plum tomatoes,
   i'm not surprised that you'd need to add
cinnamon to the couldron...
                   you know: to balace the sweet
from the acid...
                              i love when married
men talk about prostitution, and ***,
   you know, those beef men all jacked-up,
boot-strapped, well: wearing boots without
any shoelaces...
                         somehow, if you managed
to see the atypical example of what 110 quid
will get you...
                from the elder prostitutes...
                    sure... you can spot acting
                        like you might spot
                               a dove among crows...
see... mmm... problem is when a *******
expresses a certain, piquant pain...
              no, no sadomasochism type *******...
expressed with the words:
      ouw... that's only the second time
it's ever happened to me while working...

   see the difference between acting,
           and, well... it must be a moral conundrum!
the pleasure of the act is there,
   but not by the way it has been achieved...
razors tearing through flesh...
        a kiss on the hand, and a hapless naked
body bewildered as to whether sit on
                the bed naked, or get dressed...
or how you can jump out mid-*******
because the bulgarian is so **** ****,
jump into a bath in the same room that
the bed occupies, and spray ice-cold water
onto yourself, while she's still in bed,
         ******* herself, watching you
react to her body in such a way as to not
    employ: *******, ******-clippers or *****...
that must have been acting too...
          two or three memories will suffice,
and this **** can go on like
   fast & furious 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7... 8?!
                        hard to be bored when
certain memories are engraved onto your
forehead like the hebrew's name of their
god are, but instead: a loop of what
  i'd like to return to, if eternity, were but
an hour... in that brothel soaked with an air
of jack daniel's perfumery...
don't ask me how they did it,
   but bourbon, unlike whiskey is riddled
with brothels, rather than some highland
                                        distillery...
so when the public discourse goes steaming
ahead into absurdity, there's me,
sitting in a dark corner, brooding over Dalí
               ******* Bacon: or rather...
                         adding lacklustre to the latter;
because bragging is one thing,
       and spotting a terrible actor is another...
nothing pains a ******* more
      than experiencing authentic pleasure
  from what she deems both pleasure,
       but also a chore...
                                    as of now:
          i have already washed my hands clean of
engaging in this popular mainstream narrative...
*** in vitro is probably an adequate picture
to visualise...
                         mind you:
   harder to steal a kiss from a *******
than it is from a ******...
                               since there's
   the lex labium:
                                  of those who ever
used nettles to cure an itch,
                       but hey...
             a wife is a wife,
                     and a child asking to be kissed
goodnight... must certainly be the least
of your troubles as i kissed both the lips
          of a skull, and the lips of a flower...
but of course! that's the problem!
                    as with the past,
          and the children tucked in neatly for
the postcard smooch into the land of nod...
          my... behind closed doors,
anything can happen!
                                           but as i said:
some people paint...
             no army as great as that of russia or
america, has this sort of arsenal of spices
as i have in my possession...
                         it's a ****** hard lesson
to utilise fenugreek seeds...
                       i guess i'd have to begin with
the leaves first.
Ken Pepiton Jan 2022
Rich in time, at the distant shore
of Stix, laughing with the ferry men
and pall bearers, all retired, the gig is up.

There never was a Santa Claus,
and there never was a hell… that is,
an everlasting grief for failure to know
what no authorities allowed known,
even grown to full stature,
the things we agree
1798 was for some reason, poetically
important
now 2022

I hear Cordelia. What? "nothing, my lord."

With graven mudpies,
patty-caking clay and straw, straw
another story creature, or
character, entity, yes, an ity-ness
some being, whether operator or
operand, all opera is
some minds presenting das gestalt,
nicht whar?
A we.
Heavy, cold molasses heavy, very
worthy, measured weight, shipped,
dripped,
sent, in hope, one day,
the effect of a message in a bottle,
occurs, as any reader
sees another knowing for a reason,
hidden
upto, perhaps a true 151st preposition
aiming at an upper limit,

How high can mind go after body,
augmented with nets of ordered signals,

is laid to rest, in my future, all the books
I never wrote, drip from my fingers, I am
the trained brained qwerty and morse guy.

Ghee of Auvergne. But for the e, I remembered,
though you may know now this is after
I paid effectual prayer through AI,
to ality of Rheality, all the knowledge in the tree,

in the nut, that falls to the ground and grows,
morpheus, makes it symbolic as hell
and the eucharist hoc es pokemonic -****!
you're a scannable canticle cannibals' cambial
allusion .
cambium (n.)
1670s in botany,
"layer of tissue between the wood and the bark,"
from Late Latin cambium "exchange,"
from Latin cambiare "change" (see change (v.)).

From <https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=cambial>


Are we under your skin, slow think, we
is who
we are thinking. Let ter by letter stepping on

the compliants subsurface, softer than sand,
that cave - null arbor, tree of null-ity
annul - ah, "to make to nothing,"
that fine a dust,
a locale thought, linked, in a beautiful way
I may show you some day, these silken threads
that tie me to a wombed man,
in the land down under,
distant thunder, no sense of doom, this is happy
summer rain,
come to settle dust and fill all the puddles and ponds,
wells and cisterns,
gullies and wadis and broad sandy beaches,
visible from space,
any augmented eye may see, we live
on the wreck of a world.

One shell told Ben Franklin that, he said
that to many sons, many sons,
has Father Ben, the Humanist,

I insist, a hume-man ist, a human being
sapient, the action in the term sapience,
using that, knowing
I am thinking in terms any who read may define,
sift to the essential Eu-clade, literal
silence in time stop state, patient waiting if this
is why I live,
something I may have done, I did to dare the liar
smite me, many's the time,
cliché click heels snap

I salute my double mind minions, characters
set in array, as suits in a soap opera rich guy's
closet, close, close
always be
closing, set, the scene then changes and now
matters
- was Plato a big blue ox?
Why were poets banished? Truly, we are dealing
in common knowledge now, the sheet let down
from heaven, pick and choose,
you cannot or can not, wrestle with God,
and walk away,
without a limp.

Distillery stories, lotta sittin' around, drinkin'
spirits from former years,
we was young and in heat of the moment, tuned
to TV news, because we could know, what was
goin' on, after reality included knowledge
of fusion energy in seventh grade science,
right, when confusion was a word in spell-
ing bees, hmmm
ding
weedy insights, like first grass in fields burned
last fall, tender shoots for tiny kids and lambs
and calves and colts, and coyotes and squirrels
and cotton tails, and quails.

How rich are we?
charles Jan 2023
without you for two days,

still, i tip my head without shame,

nightly, draining life from a drink,

the steaming distillery lies in bed.
Evan Stephens Dec 2021
A year ago today,
I walked the dark canal bank,
water chopping the long stone
as we went to the grocery
& bought wine and meat.

We cooked, fed each other,
as the wind came down
to shake the branch.
My mouth was full of love.
My hands played cat's cradle with fire.

Oh, love: you were a camera,
shutter snapping my best days.
I posed against Wilde's grave,
when the magpie played
with your blue boot.

You caught me against the red trees,
you caught me in the flat green.
You caught me among the rare books
scented with old glue, you caught me
with a Guinness in my hand.

It happened a year ago,
but it could have been this morning.
It could have been twenty year ago.
My life has not moved on, at all.
I see other women and feel nothing.

My Irish and Turkish girl:
What did you do to me?
The swans in the canal glanced my way,
the distillery cooked their malt and grain,
& my life froze forever in a high, foreign place.
Robert C Ellis May 2022
A tree is a cemetery of atoms
much like me
Together we bend skyward and see
Where we, ourselves, used to be

My Yorkshire terrier likes to sleep
Where these particles tend to breed
Within me they stitch a harmony
And he lays his head, devotee

Space it seems is a distillery
Where every emotion ceases to be
And God is cultivated to believe
That we are the vehicle
to everything
Mateuš Conrad Jan 2020
i don't actually remember writing these words
(ref. to a schematic revision (b)...
all the way through to 5 minute sketch
in a Polish supermarket / edradour distillery)...
am i to find myself being ashamed by them...
i clearly saved them for the draft tenure...
to find myself agitated by their very existence...
getting drunk and writing...
it would be so much easier to simply drink and drive
and cause an accident...
then i'd sober up... there on the spot!
but to have to feed into a responsibility of writing
when under the influence?
and there are no hallucinogenic drugs involved:
to... "expand" on?
every time i see something that i clearly wrote...
i am doubly clear in:
an inability to recognise it... something came over me...
most -esque to a cynddaredd...
rage... to write with a ferocity of a blindman's
sneaking a peek from within behind the prop of blindness...
i don't remember writing these words:
but i do remember that i was drinking...
and if i remember that i was drinking...
i can't expect myself to remember writing these words...
to write poetry sober?
well sure... but what would happen if,
"somehow" a self-censorship impetus overcame me?
what if cages of narrative and the prosaic
took over me? and i could... quiet simply...
find the iron maiden of poetics in a drinking session
to boot?
then i wouldn't be: uninhibited...
with a pairing to the ears catching a drift of:
years of denial - body map e.p. -
i do not recognise myself with or in these drafts...
i see the poems of architecture that
never surprise with a rhyme...
i can see the zoological animal of a man bound
to customs and regulations of a lexicon...
never such roughage... such fibre...
in a spontaneity...
never a letting go... or rather...
hanging onto a razor that's the only "leftover" base
for a ledge...
it's never feeding a quality of fleeting
or of chaotic... esp. that the vicinity shelters...
a made bed... a private library of records and books
that have been dusted...
the house is clean... the dinners are cooked...
i do not remember these berserker outpourings...
it's almost "funny": to have written something...
but at the same time... being unable to recognise...
except for the idiosyncratic punctuation markers...
and a knowledge of diacritical markers...
it's not for my eyes to peer at a second time...
it was already agony the first time round
when i wrote what i wrote as... this most uncertain "i"...
if these drafts are better for those about
to squat... i am not their owner...
these are forbidden children with mother past...
i see no father future worth for them...
they are to be chained and beaten into
an archeological rubric: aye! december the 22nd 2019...
etc.,
come midnight i will want to have forgotten
even having written this!

at least when taking photographs...
there's something you can detach yourself from...
not when making these escapades of wording...
you can allow yourself: most assured...
a pressure to be alien to them...
to be ashamed by them...
there is never a novelty to them:
never a novel binding -
such is the nature of these words...
they are the houses that are to be abandoned...
perhaps stop-over places of cohabiation
by (psychological) squatters...
i gave these rooms, these words,
the original dimensions...
stop-over places between finding (a) ritual
and sacrifice and altar at the feet
of a Dostoyevsky... or some other...

esp. the somehow arrived at:
over-burdening tone of "know it all"...
which none of it is allowed a translation
into a formal use of the tongue...
because it was never about finding a cutie
in a rhyme...
or a psychology to be washed in rose water
without some knee-**** and bulimia reaction
when the sulphur would come out...

these drafts are abandoned poems...
because i am most certainly cruel to myself...
i cannot help not being cruel to myself...
that's how i always mistake kindness...
i have always mistaken kindness...
since whatever kindness i offered i did so
from a lense of selflessness...
the ghost aid... trivial 3rd party seances of
kindness... ghost hands and ghost tongue...
because i am a tyrant unto myself...
i am most cruel: unto myself...
the number of times my "ego" becomes
a tool for self-laceration is... quiet frankly...
hardly the 2nd tier of unit for
a personality and a fathomability of character
that would ever allow a person in...

even if i am right... i cannot allow myself to gloat...
happiness is such a butterfly of time...
such a whimsical affair...
it can be appreciated...
but once it is... a tonne of bricks
must fall onto it for a sense of stability and:
how best to feed capriciousness
with an immovable object?

it's one of those questions that will never allow
itself to arrive at "wisdom"...
a notable statement usually juggled
by certain youthful muslims is:
there's no water in the desert...

i'm pretty sure that's supposed to imply,
something, other than...
of note... i have stopped biting my nails...
the argument was:
i like the taste of keratin...
and i "know" keratin in nails and the keratin
in hair...
how i have succumbed to enjoy
clipping my nails...

like i never smoked a cigarette because
i was nervous...
i needed circa 5 minutes to lag behind me...
or scout ahead of me...
something to scout ahead and lag behind...
something to capture a pensive
evil-brooding of the brows...
or imitate a cat inclined to entertain
itself over some cobweb it would later
ingest...

now these clipped nails...
it's almost as if i found my teeth to be
necessarily itchy...
itching bones...
of note: those bones that itch when
left exposed, signatures to the former
muscle, flab and ghost tenants they were
once landlords to...

how else? there's no more a dissatifying ending
as that in cinema of: the end...
i still don't know why the credits roll...
the old movies...
the old... the passed...
this has to feel like an abandonment
to the very last...
i might as well call it: 15th january 2020...
circa 15 minutes past midnight.
we used to make things in the kitchen from scratch,
no poly wotsit or monogluts, no additives from factories
that pump in E-numbers, just good wholesome organic
produce
which I am sure they now produce in a plastics distillery somewhere in Swansea.
'Come home to a real fire' made in China and run on gas piped in from Russia,
(do I look old in this poem?)

Changing the record which is no longer a record,
discs should be what you slip.

everything gives me the pip
except for
fruits which have been genetically
modified.
RICES LANDING – Forty years ago today, Duane and Charlotte Makel laid to rest their 8-year-old daughter, Debra “Debbie” Lynne Makel, the victim of ****** and ****** assault. Her killer has yet to be charged, but that may change, thanks to advances in science.

Sitting in their living room, the Makel’s talked about their brown-haired, blue-eyed little girl.

“She giggled all of the time. There was a big tree with an L-shaped branch that she used to love to climb. She’d hang upside down from it and swing back and forth with her long hair brushing the ground,” Charlotte said. “Debbie was very outgoing.” When a new child moved into the area it was Debbie who befriended her when others did not.

“She was the top of her class, straight A’s,” Duane said.

On Thursday, cold case Detective John Marshall, who was assigned the case Wednesday, looked over four thick binders, containing information, photographs and interviews, laid out in front of him at the state police barracks in Uniontown.

He said he believes advancements in science creates a strong opportunity to discovering who killed the young girl.

“There was no DNA (testing) in 1973,” Marshall said. In fact, it wasn’t until 1987 that the first DNA based conviction occurred in the United States.

In 2003, the cold case detectives investigating Debbie’s ****** sent evidence from the crime scene to a police lab where the killer’s DNA was extracted.

“We have a DNA profile of somebody. It has been put into a database but as of this date there have been no matches,” Marshall said. “Over time, various individuals have confessed, who, through DNA, interviews and a polygraph test, have been eliminated. Whether they were braggarts, had a hero complex, or were thinking they were helping the community by confessing to this, the DNA profile showed to be negative.”

Marshall said there were only a few men who stood out during the original investigation as persons of interest. One of them, currently deceased, passed a polygraph. “Ninety-nine times out of one hundred they say, ‘Sure, let’s help,’” Marshall said. “I will be reopening all of the interviews in the investigation. My purpose with every male I talk to is to try to get consent from them for a DNA swab,” he said.

On Oct. 5, 1973, Debbie rode the school bus less than two miles from Dry Tavern Elementary School to Ferncliff Road in Rices Landing. From there it was a short walk to her home, situated at the end of Hoy Street, a dead end. Investigators placed the time at around 3:45 p.m.

There were only four houses visible from the Makel residence in 1973. It was a warm fall day. Her brothers did not ride the bus, choosing to walk home to sell magazine subscriptions for a school fundraiser.

Charlotte and Duane were both at work; he at Avella High School where he taught at the time, and she at a sewing factory. The boys arrived home before their parents to find their sister’s books, coat and house key on the table. She was nowhere in sight.

Times were different then. There was no cause for alarm. It was assumed she was off playing with one of the children on the street, said retired state trooper Elmer “Bud” Schifko, 77, an original investigator of the ******. Schifko’s family lived across from the Makels.

Schifko, who worked in the Uniontown barracks, was asked to join the investigation after Debbie’s body was found two days later near an old distillery foundation, less than 200 yards from her home. She was covered by branches and brush.

Prior to the body being discovered Schifko remembers Charlotte and Duane started to get worried when it was getting close to dinner time and they started making phone calls,Schifko said.

“We drove around the neighborhood, all over Rices Landing and kept thinking, ‘This doesn’t make any sense. We called the police and they had it announced at the football game in Jefferson,” Charlotte said. “You just couldn’t wrap your head around it, couldn’t sleep,” said Charlotte. “You wondered, ‘Is she in the river?’”

Charles and Betty Riecks, who lived in Clarksville at the time, were at the game.

“They announced that she was missing and asked for volunteers to search and people just started leaving. When we got there they told us to hold hands and walk. People were calling her name and it was lit up like daytime with these big search lights,” Betty said.

This type of shoulder-to-shoulder searching went on through Saturday night with hundreds of volunteers combing the woods and farmland near the residence. Many believed Debbie’s body had been moved there when searchers took a break from Saturday night to Sunday morning.

Former Greene County Coroner Frank Behm, Schifko and Marshall all said the forensic evidence proved it impossible that this was the case. Behm said, as hard as some find it to believe, they simply missed her when they searched that area.

Sunday morning, two family members, who had come to town to aid in the search, found Debbie.

The inconsistencies in stories published in the years since her death are many. Internet sites, where wannabe detectives discuss this and other cold cases, have suggested a cover-up.

Charlotte, who only recently learned of the mirth of speculation online about Debbie’s death, said she finds that thought disturbing.

“Of course you think about who may have done it but if you are wrong then what have you done to this person,” she said.
Robert Guerrero Feb 2021
Collection of non collectables
Cellar of my soul
In the penthouse of my existence
Rooms filled
Floor to ceiling
Wall to wall
I'm an emotional distillery
Not one bottle sold
Refusing as they've grown stale
Aging like milk
Bottles to bottles
I'm an avid collector
I'll store these emotions
Till someone comes with a flame
Burning this monstrous mansion
Shattering glass and melting stills
I'm the master of bottled emotions
Entrepreneur of killing myself slow
Connoisseur of fragile humanity
So one after one
I'll bottle till I implode
Becoming an emotional alcoholic
Silently and unseen
Rotting my mind
KorbydAngyle Aug 2020
Iced Dark Beer and Gallon of Margarita...
Faire terns relinquish the draught from tempest boast that
Daughtered the spiders running spout which
gland nor goad had taken a' sure
Fire maw lapse to foment by
the lash of tongue words an 'bout

Still many heinous fledgling derricks
for citrus n tequila  flapped aurum
Allows a fledging heckle doers 'n feisted
their doubt to fink the stockade
Which earnestly held embossed
spiritual letters donning clad
That spoke of weddings and joy
soaked frost not a catch of the day lost
They had

Heft the clod hopper or tankard or masskrug or pale
Dainty once winged and free swanks none
other all folks of the townehall
Choose the beast path forward for previous
rather than bourgeoisie commercial of other
Thou who thanks loess n troll of vanity
which doled the age an name of the
Finest distillery and brewery still derives a
Djinn waster fought and over with
As trial of nepotism mocks on an the liver's faith
shows magic's jist once more
'what now this been all 'bout'
5 years now soon maybe 6 drug and alcohol free....somehow this almost improvised off my tentative peace

— The End —