Through an open window, I hear
      the Big Thompson's steady music
drifting up from the valley below.

May breezes and gentle rains
     coax the snow-capped peaks
to surrender their alabaster cloaks
      downslope into gathering streams.

Silhouetted by light from the waxing moon,
      a cinnamon bear lopes along water’s edge,
pauses for a draught and meanders on.

A bull elk newly coifed with velvet antlers
        folds his legs beneath its belly
and kneels into grasses beside a tranquil pond.
        while the Big Thompson rushes on.

Spring beauties, calypso orchids and geraniums  
       shake off their winter's sleep and
dot every vagabond trail and verdant hill
        while fresh new leaves adorn the aspen boughs.

The Big Thompson inexorably presses on
        bound for rendezvous with time and space
and tumbles into the always patient sea.

© 2017 by Robert Charles Howard

The story is in Grimm’s ancient tome
Of the girl who wove straw into gold
Bamboozling the evil, gnarled gnome
With subterfuge both cunning and bold.

Sing songs of cold tea in Styrofoam
And rude brown bread, dry without butter;
She knows no carriage nor castle home
Awaits the princess in the gutter.

The dwarf chose not to concede defeat,
Rightly convinced that a deal’s a deal;
Filings and pleadings finally complete,
The circuit court to hear the appeal.

Sing songs of cold tea in Styrofoam
And rude brown bread, dry without butter;
She knows no carriage nor castle home
Awaits the princess in the gutter.

The panel’s judgment swift and direct;
The lower court had most gravely erred.
Petitioner may rightly expect
Payment plus damages, they concurred.

Sing songs of cold tea in Styrofoam
And rude brown bread, dry without butter;
She knows no carriage nor castle home
Awaits the princess in the gutter.

Bailiff took heir and inheritance,
Leaving nil which could be sold or pawned,
The king’s glances gave full evidence
The scapegoat would be a clever blonde.

Sing songs of cold tea in Styrofoam
And rude brown bread, dry without butter;
She knows no carriage nor castle home
Awaits the princess in the gutter.

There was no chance she could be returned
To her former home life in the woods
The miller’s girl, derided and spurned:
She’s a beauty, yes, but damaged goods.

Sing songs of cold tea in Styrofoam
And rude brown bread, dry without butter;
She knows no carriage nor castle home
Awaits the princess in the gutter.

A room in Amsterdam’s red-light tract
The former princess is on the game.
Still works under an implied contract;
The terms, however, not quite the same.

Sing songs of cold tea in Styrofoam
And rude brown bread, dry without butter;
She knows no carriage nor castle home
Awaits the princess in the gutter.

Jacob Ekirapa! who killed you?
Your body was found puddled,
In blood that oozed out behind your head,
In your car you slept humble as in life,
Gorged in a trench downslope Kanduyi,
You were smiling in death as you ever did in life
Mindless to the murderer’s lethal object that crushed
Your head from the nape, an early a shot to the realm of deads,

Your Life in Lodwar City was Godly and peaceful
Serving God via varsity teaching as service to mankind
You quarreled not but you ever oozed intellect,
The Turkana chicken that roosted in your hearth you never
Went foxy to un-feather, deep in purity, a godly conscience,
As colleagues and friends were on a pageant of amorous mighty,
In a rampage, chasing women, money and Tusker at costs possible
Within the range of snobbish freedom that Lodwar-heat allowed,
Then you beautifully pitched and harvested a job at home,

Only to work at home with vintage discipline,
Serving the County people, Bungoma of your birth,
Least in your ken that the owl is ogling at you
With the certain lust of death, it killed you whole-meal
As if it has never killed, as if it has never killed, as if...
Killing you was the apex of glory for those that fear a spark
Of talent, discipline, brilliance, ****** hygiene, generosity and
Technical competence in the nerves of a youth which you evinced,

Jacocb Ekirapa! Who killed you?  was it a man or a woman?
Did the Bukusu people **** you because you are son of a Teso?
Or the a Teso killed because you had a job and then becoming rich?
The accident theory was a smoke-screen, to throw us off-sleuth
You killer hides behind a stage managed crush of your new car,
God could have allowed dialogue between the dead and the living
For you to tell me the man who killed you, why he killed you and how,
You are a friend that death robbed me, leaving me in a lurch of full despair,
In this world that is full of gossipers, sadists, bigots, wrys, sardonics, waifs, saddos,
Thieves, stooges, copy-cats, tribalists, self-congratulators, killers, egotistic egoists,
Making me now a neurotic listologist, but all in all, your death hit me hard below my belt,
Like the lunch treat of full Tilapia and Ugali you often did to me in the Oasis of Lodwar town,

Life on earth is a precursor of death, and death a harbinger of eternity
An obvious quoith for the arrow of your soul, truly, amid the 24 elders of heaven,
An obvious station of your un-blemished soul, Godly defiance to the folly of your killers,
Stupid, imbecile, idiotic, buffoonish black Africans that killed you, their own Sun, educated son
They **** a milch-cow that saves them from kwashiorkor, marasmus and poverty, a black man is comfortable in despair of poverty where voodoo looms, but not in a clime where young-men are schooled, clean, educated, employed and rich-a promise of tomorrow,
They killed you but forgive them, they also killed Ken Saro Wiwa, Stephen Adongosi, Steve Biko, Martin Luther King, Jacob Juma, John Kituyi, Meshack Yebeyi, Dr. Masinde of Kanduyi-thence, they are like that, they **** their own solutions only to fall back into mire of poverty-these black idiots,

I felt you, Hemingway
Ghost lit in pale blood electric lights
On the downslope of the Holy Spirit's introspective nightmare
Cacophony in the bathroom stall, savages at war in the gutter
Kings in their drug fueled conquest of modern man's spatial reasoning
Angry cyclops guards the gate to the Fourth ***** Garden of Eden
The learned alcoholic in wino wonderland bursting at the seams for a halogen fix
Cultist camoflaged in black leather combat boots spiked iron altercation
Public domain genocide for the demure nihlist lower class
Never give those ******* the satisfaction
I felt you in Rapture, like lilac swastikas dripping melted candle wax down my frail spine
Blunt force trauma tinged lunacy for the jet engine martyrs, screaming at the empty spaces
For the imposters stigmatized by yellow journalist hype men
And the psychos just along for the ride
Be shameless in your insanity,
Be reckless in your love
Live forever to spite the mad god that molded your angry heart
And **** the sun with your empathy

On one summit
Among the myriad
Mountains

Ups and downs
Of the hiker

Crawling valley
Pilgrimized

Leaping crevass
Energized

Climbing huff-
Puffing

Downslope
Freewheeling

Each dawn
Each sunset

Uniquely
Surprized

believe the voices falling down the rift
of fading memory all lost to time
recall the faces touched with soot and grime
in days so clear and calm they seemed to drift
through subtle air and now all is too swift
hardly a moment between every chime
the downslope now but we were on the climb
and had not valued the taste of the gift
so here the choice is made and in the cold
dark of the rainy afternoon each deep
cutting word is truly cruel in its burn
the message is expected we turn old
and each day must bring reasons more to weep
even this day at eve of sunreturn

The weeds are spare creatures,
tall lines, with few spurs
earringed at the top,
more jewelry than hair.

They are taller than me,
reaching up from my yard to the deck.

The kitchen bulb
gives color to what it can,
a fluorocarbon corpse light on my face
and over the weeds.

Meanwhile the sky has collected black
and gray and bruise-orange
from all the lights like mine,
evoking a half-resurrection.

Weeds are bowled, even in the easy breezes.
And the breeze is easy,
like a woman petting a cat.

I must cut them down tomorrow.
They are taller than the fence.

Through the near trees,
I can see another hill
as maybe a surfer, or a seabird
resting on one wave

when it crests, can see the next.
It is smaller,
perhaps still in deeper sea.

I can pretend, because it is midnight,
that the air is a giant room,
houses cluttered on its floor,
and that the floor,
earth, is not just some hill
with thirty other houses.

A hundred other people
aren’t busily sleeping themselves
into their foundations,
with the fact of having bought a house,
weeded a yard,
agreed to a neighbor’s fence line.

The earth moves.
We know it moves;
I am sliding downslope,

grasping at my seat in great fear.