1.
From my
uneasy bed
at the L’Enfant,
a train's pensive
horn breaks the
sullen lullaby of
an HVAC’s hum;
interrupting the
mechanical
reverie of its
steadfast
night watch,
allowing my ear
to discern
the stampede
of marauding
corporate Visigoths
sacking the city.

The cacophony
of sloven gluttony,
the ***** songs of
unrequited privilege
and the unencumbered
clatter of radical
entitlement echoes
off the city’s cold
crumbling stones.

The unctuous
bellows of the
victorious pillagers
profanely feasting
pierces the
hanging chill
of the nations
black night.

Their hoots
deride the train
transporting
the defeated
ghosts of
Lincoln’s last
doomed regiments
dispatched in vain
to preserve a
peoples republic
in a futile last stand.

The rebels have
finally turned the tide,
T Boone Pickett’s
Charge succeeds,
sending the ravaged
Grand Army of the
Republic sliding
back to the Capitol,
in savage servility,
gliding on squeaky
ungreased wheels
ferrying the
Union’s dead
vanquished
defenders to
unmarked graves
on Potters Field.

The Rebels
joyous yell
bounces off
the inert granite
stones of the
soulless city.

The spittle
of salivating
vandals drips
over the
spoils of war
as they initiate the
disassemblage,
the leveling and
reapportionment
of the grand prize.

The clever
oligarchs
have laid claim
to a righteous
reparation
of the peoples
assets for
pennies on the
dollar.

Their wholly
bought politicos
move to transfer
distressed assets
into their just
stewardship
through the
holy justice
of privatization
and the sound
rationale of
free market
solutions.

In the land of the
pursuit of property,
nimble wolf PACs
of swift 527, LLCs
have fully
metastasized
into personhood;
ascending to
the top of the
food chain in
America’s
voracious
political culture;
bestriding
the nation to
compel the
national will
to genuflect
to the cool facility
of corporate
dominion.

As the
inertial ******
of the plaintive
locomotive
fades into
another old
morning of
recalcitrant
Reaganism,
it lugs its
ambivalent
middle class
baggage toward
it’s fast expiring
future.

I follow
the dirge
down to
the street
as the ebbing
sound fades
into the gloom
of the
burgeoning
morning,
slowly
replacing the
purple twilight
with a breaking
day of cold gray
clouds framing
silhouettes of
cranes busily
constructing
a new city.

The personhood of
corporations need
homes in our new
republic; carving
out new
neighborhoods
suitable for the
monied citizens
of our nation.

First amongst
equals, the best
corporate governance
charters form
the foundation of
the republic’s
new constitution.
Civil rights
are secondary
to the freedom
of markets; the
Bill of Rights
are economically
replaced by the
cool manifests
of Bills of Lading.

The agents of
laissez faire
capitalism
nibble away
at the city’s
neighborhoods
one block at a time;
while steady winds
blows dust off
the National Mall.

Layers of the
peoples plaza are
plained away with
each rising gust.  

History repeats
itself as the Joad’s
are routed from their
land once again.

A clever
mixed use
plan of
condos and
strip malls
is proposed
to finally help the
National Mall
unlock its true
profit potential.

As America’s
affection for
federalism fades
the water in
the reflection pool
is gracefully drained.

We the people
can no longer
see ourselves.

The profit
potential of
industry is
preferred over
the specious
metaphysical
benefits
of reflection.

The grand image,
the rich pastiche,
the quixotic aroma
of the national
melting ***
is reduced to the
sameness of the
black tar that lines
the pool and the
swirling eddies of
brown dust circling
the cracked indenture.

From his not so
distant vantage point,
Abe ponders the
empty pool wondering
if the cost of lives
paid was a worthy
endeavor of preserving
the ****** union?  
Has the dear prize
won perished from
this earth?

Was the illusive
article of liberty  
worth its weight in
the blood expended?

Did the people ever
fully realize the value
of government
by the people,
for the people?

Did citizens of
the republic
assume the
responsibilities to
protect and honor
the rights and privileges
of a representative
government?

Now our idea
and practice of
civil rights is measured
and promoted as far as
it can be justified by
a corporate ROI, a
shareholder dividend,
an earmark or a political
donation to a senators
unconnected PAC.

The divine celestial
ledgers balancing
the rights and
privilege of free people
drips with red ink.  

Liberty, equality
fraternity are bankrupt
secular notions
condemned as
expensive
liberal seditions;
hatched by
UnHoly Jacobins,
the atheist skeptics
during the dark times
of the Age of Enlightenment.

Abe ponders
the restoration
of Washington’s
obelisk, to
repair the cracks
suffered  from
last summer’s
freak earthquake.

I believe I detect
a tear in Abe’s
granite eye
saddened by the
corporate temblors
shaking the
foundations
of the city.

2.

The WWII Memorial
is America’s Parthenon
for a country's love
affair with the valor
and sacrifice of warfare.

WWII forms the
cornerstone of
understanding the
pathos of the
American Century.

During WWII
our greatest generation
rose as a nation to
defeat the menace of
global fascism and
indelibly mark the
power and virtue of
American democracy.

As Lincoln’s Army
saved federalism, FDR’s
Army kept the world safe
for democracy.

Both armies served
a nation that shared
the sacrifice and
burden of war to
preserve the grace of
a republican democracy.

Today federalism
crumbles as our
democracy withers.

The burden
of war is reserved
for a precious few
individuals while
its benefits
remain confined to
the corporate elite.

Our monuments
to war have become
commercial backdrops
for the hollow patriotism
of war profiteers.

We have mortgaged
our future to pay
for two criminal wars.

The spoils of
war flow into the
pockets of
corporate
shareholders
deeply invested
in the continuation
of pointless,
destructive
hostilities.

Our service
members who
selflessly served
their country come
home to a less free,
fear struck nation;
where economic
security and political
liberty erodes
each day while the
monied interests
continue to bless
the abundance
of freedom and riches
purchased with the
blood and sweat
of others.

America desperately
needs a new narrative.

The spirit of the
Greatest Generation
who sacrificed and met
the challenge of the 20th
Century must become
this generations spiritual
forebears.

The war on terror
neatly fits the
the corporate
pathos of
militarism,
surveillance
and the sacrifice
of civil liberties
to purchase
a daily measure
of fear and
economic
enslavement.

It must be rejected
by a people committed
to building secular
temples to pursue
peace, democracy,
economic empowerment,
civil liberties and tolerance
for all.

Yet this old city
and the democratic
temples it built
exulting a free people
anointed with the
grace of liberty
is being consumed
in a morass of
commercial
polyglot.

3.

During the
War of 1812
the British Army
burned the
Capitol Building
and the White House
to the ground.

Thank goodness
Dolly Madison saved
what she could.

The new marauders
are not subject to the
pull of nostalgia.  

They value nothing
save their
self enrichment.

They will spare nothing.

Our besieged Capitol
requires Lincoln’s troops
to be stationed along the
National Mall to defend
the republic.

The greatest peril
to our nation
is being directed
by well placed
Fifth Columnists.

From the safety
of underground bunkers,
in secure undisclosed
locations within the city’s
parameters, a well financed
confederacy employing  
K Street shenanigans
are busy selling off
the American Dream
one ear mark
at a time, one
huge corporate
welfare allotment
at a time.

The biggest prize
is looting the real
property of the people;
selling Utah,
auctioning off
the public schools,
water systems, post offices
and mineral rights
on the cheap
at an Uncle Sam
garage sale.  

The capitol is
indeed burning
again.

Looters are
running riot.

The flailing arms
of a dying empire
fire off cruise
missiles and drone
strikes; hitting the
target of habeas
corpus as it
shakes in its
final death rattle.
I make a pilgrimage
to the MLK Jr.
Monument.

Our cultural identity
is outsourced to
foreign contractors
paid to reinterpret
the American Dream
through the eyes
of a lowest bidder.

MLK has lost
his humanity.

He has been
reduced to a
a Chinese
superhuman
Mao like anime
busting loose from
a granite mountain while
geopolitical irony
compels him to watch
Tommy Jefferson
**** Sally Hemings
from across the tidal
basin for all eternity.  

MLK’s eyes fixed in
stern fascination,
forever enthralled
by the contradictions
of liberty and its
democratic excesses
of love in the willows
on golden pond.

Circling back to
Father Abraham’s
Monument,  I huddle
with a group of global
citizens listening
to an NPS Ranger
spinning four score
tales with the last full
measure of her devotion.

I look up into Abe’s
stone eyes as he
surveys platoons
of gray suited
Chinese Communist
envoys engaged
in Long Marches
through the National Mall;
dutifully encircling cabinet
buildings and recruiting
Tea Party congressmen
into their open party cells.

This confederacy
is ready to torch
the White House
again.

Congressmen and
the perfect patriots
from K Street slavishly
pull their paymasters
in gilded rickshaws to
golf outings at the Pentagon
and park at the preferred
spots reserved for
the luxury box holders
at Redskin Games.

They vow not to rest
until the house of the people
is fully mortgaged to the
People’s Republic of China’s
Sovereign Wealth Fund.

4.

A great
Son of Liberty like
Alan Greenspan
roundly rings
the bells of
free markets
as he inches
T Bill rates
forward a few
basis points
at a time; while
his dead mentor
Ayn Rand
lifts Paul Ryan
to her
Fountainhead teet.
He takes a long
draw as she
coos songs
from her primer
of Atlas Shrugged
Mother Goose tales
into his silky ears.

The construction
cranes swing
to the music
building new private
sector space with
the largess of
US taxpayers
money; or
more rightly
future generations
taxpayer debt.

Libertarians,
Tea Baggers, Blue Dogs
and GOP waterboys
eagerly light a
match to the
the crucifixes
bearing federal
social safety
net programs
to the delight
of NASDAQ
listed capitalists
on the come,
licking their chops
to land contracts
to administer
these programs
at a negotiated
cost plus
profit margin.

Citizens
dependent
on programs
are leery
shareholders
are ecstatic.

To be sure
our free
market rebels
don disguises
of red, white
and blue robes
but their objectives
fail to distinguish
their motives and
methods with
some of the finest
Klansman this
country has
ever produced.

5.

DC is a city
of joggers
and choppers.

Corporate
helicopters
wizz by the
Washington
Monument,
popping erections
for the erectors
inspecting the progress
of the cranes
commanding the
city skyline.

USMC drill team
out for a morning
run circles the Mall.

The commanding
cadence of the
DI keeps us
mindful of the
deepening
militarization of
our society.

A crowd  
rushes
to position
themselves,
genuflecting
to photograph
a platoon on
the move.

I try to consider
the defining
characteristics of
Washington DC.

DC is all surface.

It is full of walls
and mirrors.

Its primary hue
is obfuscation.

Open
communication
scripted from well
considered talking points
informs all dialog.

The city is thoroughly
enraptured in narcissism.

Thankfully, one can
always capture the
reflection of oneself in
the ubiquitous presence of
mirrors.  

Vanity imprisons
the city inhabitants.

Young joggers circle the
Mall and gerrymander
down every pathway
of the city.  

They are the clerks,
interns and staffers of
the judicial, executive
and legislative branches.

They are the children
of privilege.

They will never
alter their path.

You must cede the walk
to their entitlement
of a swift comportment
or risk injury of a
violent collision.

These young ones
portray a countenance  
of benevolent rulers.  

They seem to be learning
their trade craft well from
the senators and judges
whom they serve.

They appear confident
they know what's best
for the country and after
their one term of tireless
service to the republic
they look forward to
positions in the private
sector where they will
assist corporations
to extend their reach
into the pant pockets
worn by the body politic.

6.

Our nations mythic story
lies hidden deep in the
closed rooms of the
museums lining the
Mall.

I pause to consider
what a great nation
and its great people
once aspired to.

I spy the a
suspended
Space Shuttle
hanging in dry dock
at the air and
space museum.

Today America’s
astronauts hitch
rides on Russian
rockets.

America rents a
timeshare from
the European
space agency to
lift communication
satellites into orbit.

Across the Mall
I photograph
John Smithson’s
ashes in its columbarium.  

I fear it has become a
metaphor for America’s
future commitment
to scientific inquiry
and rational secular
thinking.

I am relieved to
discover a Smithsonian
exhibit that asks
“what does it mean
to be human?”

The Origins of Humans
exhibit carries a disclaimer
to satisfy creationists.

The exhibit timidly states
that science can coexist
with religious beliefs and
that the point of the exhibit is
not to inflame inflame religious
passions but to shed light on
scientific inquiry.

I imagine these exhibits
will inflame the passion of
the fundamentalist
American Taliban and
provide yet another
reason to dismantle
the Moloch of Federalism.

The pursuit of science
remains safe at the
Smithsonian for now.

7.

Near K Street at
McPherson Park
a posse of
well dressed
lobbyists, the
self anointed
uber patriots
doing the work
of the people
stroll through
the park
boasting a
healthy population
of bedraggled
homeless.

The homeless
occupy the benches
that have been
transformed into
pup tents.

Perhaps some of
the residents of this
mean estate were
made homeless by a
foreclosed mortgage.  

The K Street warriors
can be proud that their
work on behalf of the
banking industry has
forestalled financial market
reform.  

Through it exacerbates
the homeless problem it has
allowed these K Street titans to
profit from the distress of others.

Earlier in the day
I photographed
a homeless man
planted in front of
the Washington
Monument.

I wonder
if my political
voyeurism is
an exploitation of
this man’s condition?

I have more in common
then I probably wish to
admit with my K Street
antagonists.  

In another section
of the park the
remnants of a
distressed OWS
bivouac remain.

The legions of sunshine
patriots have melted away
as the interest of the
blogosphere has waned.

As the weather
improves Moveon.org
and democratic
party operatives
pitch tents in an
effort to resuscitate
the moribund
movement.

They hope
to coop any
remaining energy
to support their
stale deception,
a neoliberal vision
based solely on the
total capitulation
to the bankrupt
corporatocracy.

I heard someone say
a campaign lasts a
season; while a
movement for social
change takes decades.

If that metric proves
correct, and if the
powers don’t succeed
in compromising the
people’s movement
I’ll be three quarters
of a century old
before I see
justice flowing like
a river once again.

8.

I circle back to
the L’Enfant and
find myself
tramping amidst
the lost platoon
of Korean War
soldiers.

My feet drag
in the quagmire
of grass covering
the feet of this
ghostly troop.

My namesake
uncle was a
decorated
veteran of this
conflict and Im
sure I detect
his likeness
in one of the
statues.

The bleak call
of a distant train
sounds a revelry
and I imagine this
patrol springing
to life to answer
the call of their
beloved country
once again.

Yet they remain
inert.  

Stuck in a
place that the
nation finds
impossible to
leave.

The eyes of the
men stare into
an incomprehensible
fate.  

They see the swarms
of Red Army infantrymen
crossing the Yellow River
streaming toward
them in massive
human waves,
the tips of
sparkling bayonets
threatening to slash
the outmanned
contingent fighting
to bits.

They are the
first detachment
to bravely confront
the rising power
of China many
thousands of
miles away
from their homes.

America like
this lone company
is overwhelmed
and lost in the
confusion
that confronts
them.

Looking up
I perceive the
bewilderment
of my muddled image
reflected on the
marble walls
surrounding
the memorial.

I am a comrade-in-arms,
a fellow wanderer sojourning
with th

Given the apparent magical surrealism that the months of April is the month of fate for and death of writers, artists, dramatis, philosophers and poets, a phenomenon which readily gets support from the cases of untimely and early April deaths of; Max Weber, Miguel de Cervantes, William Shakespeare, Francis Imbuga, and Chinua Achebe  then  Wisdom of the moment behooves me to adjure away the fateful month by  allowing  me to mourn Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez by expressing my feelings of grieve through the following dirge of elegy;
You lived alone in the solitude
Of pure hundred years in Colombia
Roaming in Amacondo with a Spanish tongue
Carrying the bones of your grandmother in a sisal sag
On your poverty written Colombian back,
Gadabouting to make love in times of cholera,
On none other than your bitter-sweet memories
Of your melancholic ***** the daughter of Castro,
Your cowardice made you to fear your momentous life
In this glorious and poetic time of April 2014,
Only to succumb to untimely black death
That similarly dimunitized your cultural ancestor;
Miguel de Cervantes, a quixotic Spaniard,
You were to write to the colonel for your life,
Before eating the cockerel you had ear-marked
For Olympic cockfight, the hope of the oppressed,
Come back from death, you dear Marquez
To tell me more stories fanaticism to surrealism,
From Tarzanic Africa the fabulous land
An avatar of evil gods that are impish propre
Only Vitian Naipaul and Salman Rushdie are not enough,
For both of them are so naïve to tell the African stories,
I will miss you a lot the rest of my life, my dear Garbo,
But I will ever carry your living soul, my dear Garcia,
Soul of your literature and poetry in a Maasai kioondo
On my broad African shoulders during my journey of art,
When coming to America to look for your culture
That gave you versatile tongue and quill of a pen,
Both I will take as your memento and crystallize them
Into my future thespic umbrella of orature and literature.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, an eminent Latin American and most widely acclaimed authors, died untimely at his home in Mexico City on Thursday, 17th April 2014. The 1982 literature Nobel laureate, whose reputation drew comparisons to Mark Twain of adventures of Huckleberry Finny and Charles Dickens of hard Times, was 87 of age. Already a luminous legend in his well used lifetime, Latin American writer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez was perceived as not only one of the most consequential writers of the 20th and 21ist centuries, but also the sterling performing Spanish-language author since the world’s experience of Miguel de Cervantes, the Spanish Jail bird and Author of Don Quixote who lived in the 17th century.
Like very many other writers from the politically and economically poor parts of the world, in the likes of J M Coatze, Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer, Doris May Lessing, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, V S Naipaul, and Rabidranathe Tagore, Marguez won the literature Nobel prize in addition to the previous countless awards for his magically fabulous novels, gripping short stories, farcical screenplays, incisive journalistic contributions and spellbinding essays. But due to postmodern global thespic civilization the Nobel Prize is recognized as most important of his prizes in the sense that, he received in 1982, as the first Colombian author to achieve such literary eminence. The eminence of his work in literature communicated in Spanish are towered by none other than the Bible, especially  in its Homeric style which Moses used when writing the book of Genesis and the fictitious drama of Job.
Just like Ngugi, Achebe, Soyinka, and Ousmane Marquez is not the first born. He is the youngest of siblings. He was born on March 6, 1927 in the Colombian village of Aracataca, on the Caribbean coast. His literary bravado was displayed in his book, Love in the Times of Cholera.  In which he narrated how his parents met and got married. Marguez did not grow up with his father and mother, but instead he grew up with his grandparents. He often felt lonely as a child. Environment of aunts and grandmother did not fill the psychological void of father and mother. This social phenomenon of inadequate parenthood is also seen catapulting Richard Wright, Charlese Dickens, and Barrack Obama to literary excellency.Obama recounted the same experience in his Dreams from my father.

Poverty determines convenience or hardship of marriage. This is mirrored by Garcia Marquez in his marriage to Mercedes Barcha.  An early childhood play-mate and neighbour in 1958. In appreciation of his marriage, Marquez later wrote in his memoirs that it is women who maintain the world, whereas we men tend to plunge it into disarray with all our historic brutality. This was a connotation of his grandmother in particular who played an important role during the times of childhood. The grand mother introduced him to the beauty of orature by telling him fabulous stories about ghosts and dead relatives haunting the cellar and attic, a social experience which exactly produced Chinua Achebe, Okot P’Bitek, Mazizi Kunene, Margaret Ogola and very many other writers of the third world.
Little Gabo as his affectionate pseudonym for literature goes, was a voracious bookworm, who like his ideological master Karl Marx read King Lear of Shakespeare at the age of sixteen. He fondly devoured the works of Spanish authors, obviously Miguel de Cervantes, as well as other European heavyweights like; Edward Hemingway, Faulkner and Frantz Kafka.
Good writers usually drop out of school and at most writers who win the Nobel Prize. This formative virtue of writers is evinced in Alice Munro, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, John Steinbeck, William Shakespeare, Sembene Ousmane, Octavio Paz as well as Gabriel Garcia Marquez. After dropping out of law school, Garcia Marquez decided instead to embark on a call of his passion as a journalist. The career he perfectly did by regularly criticizing Colombian as well as ideological failures of the then foreign politics. In a nutshell he was a literary crusader against poverty. This is of course the obvious hall marker of leftist political orientation.
Garcia Marquez’s sensational breakthrough occurred in 1967 with the break-away publication of his oeuvre; One Hundred Years of Solitude which the New York Times Book Review meritoriously elevated as ‘the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race. The position similarly taken by Salman Rushdie. Marquez often shared out that this novel carried him above emotional tantrums on its publication. He was keen on this as his manner of speech was always devoid of la di da.so humble and suave that his genius can only be appreciated not from the booming media outlets about his death, but by reading all of his works and especially his Literature Noble price acceptance speech delivered in 1982.

Coming from unknown shores, arrived these Western boats,
with disastrous as well as deceitful tactics they took our gold,
jump to the modern era, they are the ones' promoting ***,
they bare minimum death rates due to *** and Aids,
while African's lives in bitter ruins as the notion of "safe ***" seems perplex.
*** promotion misconstrued as our kids continue ****** the old,
Such consequences were never told,
when they sold us back our own gold.
Systematical control is now the definer of societies
Africans not taught of Qamatha but tested on Socrates,
African souls enticed into materialism by paper and cheese,
while Western supremacists economically ****** African Identities.
African child, fight back please!

(Sorry Friends, for posting educational type of poems, I know Haiku are easier to read & comment! But if you happen to like this true story, kindly recommend it to your other friends! Thanks, -Raj)

STORY OF EUROPEAN RENAISSANCE: PART TWO

THE CITY-STATE OF FLORENCE :
The city of Florence lies in the historic valley of Tuscany ,
Along the banks of the Arno river, surrounded by hills
of scenic beauty !
Here during the first century BC , the conquering Romans
established their ‘Colonia Florentina’,
To settle the war veterans of Caesar’s army in Northern
Italia !
But later after the fall of Rome , it became a battleground
for the Holy Roman Empire and the Pope ;
But the independent nature of its people refused foreign
yolk !
They preferred commune rule led by a powerful leader –
called the Signore ,
Just like the city-states of ancient Greece, in those days of
yore !
But unlike Greece , Florence saw no Democracy ,
Since the Medici family finally usurped power in this
city of Northern Italy !
Unlike Venice , Florence is landlocked and not a port
city ;
Relying on banking and trade to prosper economically .
Their gold coin florin became the standard coinage
throughout Europe ;
While through the export of its quality textile and woolen
goods, great wealth got secured !
But to become patrons of art and letters mere wealth is
not enough ,
One must have a refined taste to become a true lover of
letters and art !
And here the Medici carved out a niche for themselves
under the Florentine sun !
Writers like Francesco Petrarca , Dante, and Boccaccio ;
And artists such as Giotto , Lippi, Dontello, Leonardo ,
and Michelangelo , were all born Florentines !
Even classical Athens couldn’t boast of such a vast
galaxy ,
Of artistic talents within such a limited time frame of
History !
These artists embellished their city with their literary
works, sculptures, architectures and paintings ;
Made Florence to reawaken, dazzle, and shine ;
Carving out a proud moment in history for the
Florentines !

CONTRIBUTION OF MEDICI FAMILY OF
FLORENCE :
Giovanni de Medici (1360-1429) :
This Medici family became the Godfather for the Italian
Renaissance ,
And I feel obliged to narrate their story tracing their
historical source !
In those early days Art was considered a lowly craft ,
There were no art galleries, and one couldn’t make a
living out of Art !
Without patronage the artist and his art couldn’t survive ,
So I speak of the Medics, who had originated from the
Tuscan countryside !
Gaining power through wealth and political astuteness,
And not through military force for dominance !
The founder of family’s fortunes was Giovanni de
Medici ,
An educated man with a simple life style , who
traveled on a donkey !
A humble man who had never aroused any enmity .
He established the Medici Bank with innovations
in ledger accounting system ;
And became a pioneers in tracking credits and debits
through a double entry system !
He opened branches of the Bank in Rome and Northern
Italy ,
Facilitated bills of exchange and credit bills, to multiply
his money !
After the return of the Papacy from Avignon to Rome ,
The Medici Bank was made the official bankers of the
Pope ;
And Giovanni became the wealthiest man in Italy , if
not in entire Europe !
In 1421 Giovanni was made the Chief Executive of his
city ,
And he commissioned its leading architect Brunelleschi , -
to glorify Florence city .
The challenging task for Brunelleschi was to build the dome
of the Cathedral of his city .
This was the first octagonal dome in history , a breakaway
from the earlier Gothic structures ,
And even surpassing the Roman Pantheon as a marvel of
Florentine architecture !
It took sixteen long years to complete this huge dome ,
And stands today as an icon of Renaissance Europe !
Giovanni had taught his son Cosimo to follow a simple
life style ,
To patronize art and letters, and to his people be kind !

COSIMO De MEDICI (1389-1464) :
After Giovanni’s death , Cosimo the Elder built upon
his father’s inherited wealth ;
Absorbed most of the 39 Florentine Banks, operating its
branches in London and Bruges as well !
The greatest rival of the Medici fortunes were the Albizzi ,
They plotted against Cosimo and the Medics ;
And in 1433, exiled Cosimo and his family out of jealousy !
But after a year the Medics were recalled back as heroes ,
Since the Florentine coffers without the Medici Bank , -
had become almost zero !
But both peace and prosperity are needed for flourishing
of art and culture ,
So Cosimo engineered the Peace of Lodi (1454) with Milan
and Venice , -
To prevent future wars and misadventure !
Scholars were made to collect precious manuscripts from
the East, and the churches and vaults of Europe ;
And an ensured period of stability , contributed to Early
Renaissance’s growth !
Sculptor Donatello’s bronze **** David stood up as an
unique art form ,
And with paintings of Fra Angelico, and Filippo Lippi , -
the style of art itself began to reform !
Architect Michalozzo built the famous Medici Palace ,
And Cosimo opened the Medici Library for the spread of
classical knowledge !
After the fall of Constantinople in 1453 , the Greek scholars
with their classical manuscripts fled to Italy .
They flocked to Florence where Cosimo established a
Platonic Academy !
Renowned Humanist Marsilio Ficino became its President ,
And complete works of Plato got translated from Greek
to Latin !
Thus the growth of Early Renaissance owed much to
Cosimo’s patronage ,
And the Florentines inscribed “Pater Patriae” on his tomb , –
(‘Father of His Country’) after his death !

LORENZO THE MAGNIFICENT (1449-1492) :
Cosimo’s son Piero the Gouty died within five years ,
Never achieved anything spectacular worthy of tears !
The Medici Bank had loaned large sums of money to
King Edward IV of England and Charles the Bold of
Burgandy,
Failed to recover getting into bad debts and insolvency !
So when Cosimo’s grandson Lorenzo succeeded at
the age of twenty one ,
He focused on other areas of creativity, and the period
of High Renaissance begun !
Lorenzo , a genuine lover of arts, also wrote poetry in the
dialect of his native Tuscany ;
Following the footsteps of Tuscan born poets Donzella ,
Davanzati , and Dante the author of ‘Divine Comedy’ !
On 26th April 1478 , the Pazzi family in connivance with
the Archbishop of Pisa and backing of Pope Sixtus IV ,
Tried to assassinate the Medics during the High Mass, -
in the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore !
Younger brother Giuliano was fatally stabbed , but they
failed to **** Lorenzo .
All the conspirators were hanged including Pisa’s
Archbishop !
Ecclesiastic censure was issued against Florence ,
And Lorenzo was excommunicated by the Pope !
But Lorenzo worked out a treaty of peace with the King
of Naples ,
And became the undisputed ruler of the Republic of
Florence !
Unfortunately , Lorenzo died young at the age of forty-
three ,
At the dawn of the great Age of Exploration and
adventures by sea !
During his rule Renaissance reached its Golden Age ,
And literature, art, and architecture blossomed with
Lorenzo’s patronage !
It earned him the title of ‘Magnifico’, now know to
us as Lorenzo the Magnificent !
Leonardo da Vinci , Michelangelo , Raphel , Giovanni
Bellini ,Titan, Veronese, Correggio , Tintoretto ;
All became superstars of the Renaissance era ;
Their works are cherished, valued and treasured to
this day of our Modern era !
In the year 1492 with Lorenzo’s death , Italy entered
a period of turmoil and instability,
And the Renaissance saw a period of decline in Italy !
But the flames of the Renaissance spread to other
parts of Northern Europe ,
And in the 16th century reached England’s shores !
The Medici Family had also provided three Popes to
Italy, and three Queens to France ;
Besides patronizing the growth of the famous Italian
Renaissance !
Now dear readers, to do justice to Renaissance art ,
architecture, and literature briefly ,
I propose to narrate its story in Part Three !
-- By Raj Nandy of New Delhi .
*ALL COPY RIGHTS ARE WITH THE AUTHOR

RAJ NANDY
37 followers
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE IN VERSE
                                    By Raj Nandy
THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE WAS A PERIOD OF TRANSITION
BETWEEN MEDIEVAL & THE MODERN  WORLD. I propose to
present in three installments my researched work for both the Art &
History lovers of this Site. Kindly take your time to read at leisure before commenting. Thanks, -Raj Nandy, New Delhi.

                   PART ONE: BACKGROUND
The Term Renaissance :
The word ‘Renaissance’ means ‘to be born again’ ,
Derives from French ‘renaistre’ and Latin ‘renascere’, -
both meaning the same !
Swiss historian Jacob Buckhardt by writing “The
Civilization of Renaissance in Italy”,
Helped to popularize this term during the 19th Century !
The Renaissance evolved out of ‘Christendom’ , which
was Medieval Europe ;
Ruled entirely by the Catholic Church and the Pope !
It formed a period of transition between the Medieval
and the Modern Age ,
And as a contrast to the preceding thousand years , -
Which the Latin scholar Petrarch christened as the
‘Dark Ages’ !
This era saw a revival of interest in classical learning
of Greek and Roman art and culture ;
Focused on individual’s life on earth , with a new spirit
of adventure !
Happiness was no longer shelved to an afterlife and
repentance for salvation ;
But it lay in the advancement of human beings on Earth , -
with secular contemplation !
Thus individualism , secularism , and humanism , were
chief characteristics of the Renaissance ;
With innovations in art, architecture , and a scientific
temper of thought !
Knowledge no longer remained confined within the cold
ecclesiastical walls ,
But it spread from Italy across Northern Europe , -
To distant English shores through France !
During the Renaissance era Humanism became its
dominant philosophy ;
And there begins our Renaissance Story, since knowledge
is no man’s monopoly !
Events leading up to the Renaissance were many ;
Let me now dwell upon some salient features which
shaped its History !

THE BLACK DEATH (Peaked between 1347-1352) :
It was brought by Genoese merchant ships from the Orient ,
The fatal bacillus of the bubonic plague carried in the blood
stream of rodents !
The plague from Sicily and Italy spread to Northern Europe ,
All medicines failed , and even the Church provided no hope !
After having raged for almost a decade it started to abate ;
But by then almost one-third of entire Europe’s population
lay dead !
This deadly plague which followed the Hundred Year’s War
between England and France ,
Created social , economic and political upheavals in Europe,
leaving little to chance !
People began to lose faith in the church and on sermons of
afterlife ,
Secular thoughts now prevailed in a world where only the
fittest could survive !
Shortages of labour brought an end to Medieval feudalism
and serfdom ,
And Europe gradually emerged out of those Dark Ages, -
to greet the rising Renaissance sun !
The meager labour force could now bargain for better
wages and individual rights ;
Later, merchant guilds protected specialized labour and
their human rights !
Cities got gradually built and a new social order began
to emerge ,
Historians say that Europe saw the rise of a new Middle
Class !
As Europe gradually begun to recover from the aftermath
of war , plague, and devastation ;
The City-States of Italy lit the torch of a new intellectual
emancipation !
But before moving onto the Italian city-states, I must
mention the Holy Crusades ;
Since the Crusades opened up the doors of knowledge
and trade ;
Helping this ‘New Learning’ of the Renaissance to spread !

THE HOLY CRUSADES (1095-1270) :
At the behest of Pope Urban II and his battle cry “God
Wills It! ” ;
The First Crusade was launched to recapture the Holy Land
from Muslim infidels !
Within a span of next two hundred years eight Crusades
were launched ,
The First one took Jerusalem , but the Second failed to make
Damascus fall !
The Third led by Richard the Lion Heart, made Saladin to
grant the rights , -
To Christian pilgrims to visit their Holy shrines in Palestine !
The Fourth Crusade had sacked Constantinople , - then a
commercial rival of the Italians !
Now cutting a long story short , let us see what History
has taught !
These Crusades helped in opening up the trade routes ,
For importing paper, spices, soap, silk and luxury goods !
Trade was carried out with the countries of Levant region ,
Which included the countries from Turkey to Egypt , -
Bordering the eastern seaboards of the Mediterranean !
These trade routes formed a major conduit of culture
and knowledge ,
And exchanges and interactions broadened the mental
horizon of the Italians !
From Constantinople, recently Christianized Spain , and
the Arab lands , -
The preserved ancient classical knowledge now reached
the Italian hands !
In their School of Salamanca the Arabs of  Spain ,
Had translated works of Aristotle and classical scholars
into Arabic , - thereby preserving the same !
Later scholars translated these precious works into Greek
and Italian ,
And thus the Ancient Classics saw a glorious revival !
The scientific, philosophical, and mathematical thoughts
of the Arabs had also entered Northern Italy ,
From Egypt and the Levant region , to enrich Pre-
Renaissance Italy !
And when Byzantine Empire fell to the Turks in 1453 ,
Its Greek scholars with their precious manuscripts flocked
into Italy !

THE CITY-STATES OF ITALY :
‘Italia’, once the epicenter of the mighty Roman Empire ,
Disintegrated into several small principalities breaking
up Italy entire !
Its mountainous rugged terrain was a barrier to effective
internal communication ;
And no strong unified monarchies emerged, as in other
parts of Europe !
Italy with its peninsula jutting out into the Mediterranean
Sea ,
Had begun to monopolize the trade routes, and also to
prosper economically !
During the time of the Renaissance , Italy had numerous
autonomous city-states and territories ;
Where a powerful leader called the Signore , ruled for
a fixed tenure initially ;
But later this post was declared as hereditary !
Kingdom of Naples controlled the south ;
Republic of Florence and the Papal States the center ;
Genoese and the Milanese the north and west respectively ;
And the Venetians the eastern part of Italy .
These Italian city-states prospered greatly from its growing
trade during the 14th century ;
Its cargo ships visiting Byzantine , and the cities bordering
the Mediterranean Sea !
It became a status symbol for rich families to patronize
art and culture ;
They vied with one another commissioning paintings
and architecture !
But the Italian city-state that had prospered the most ,
Was the city-state of Florence which became the host ;
And the ‘Cradle of European Renaissance’ !
...............................................................­­................................
* ALL COPY RIGHTS WITH THE AUTHOR -RAJ NANDY*
(My Part -II will contain the Story of Florence , - " Cradle of the
Italian Renaissance". Thanks for reading, do recommend this Verse to
your other poet friends!
Comments from Gita Ashok, an Educator, from ‘Poetfreak.com’:- A thoroughly researched erudite collection of historical facts presented in a very lucid and interesting manner. This write made me reminisce all those history lessons that I learnt in school many years ago - many of which I found boring as it was taught in an intimidating way. I feel like going back in time, becoming a student once again and learning history through such creatively written works of art. But I realize that we are all yet students of life and can still continue to learn and grow. I feel fortunate to have read this great piece of literary work and I look forward to reading the second part.-  by Gita Ashok | Reply
Edit poem

AN INTRODUCTION TO ITALIAN RENAISSANCE was added 21 hours ago.

i just don't some things,
i don't understand that under the pretense
of writing very little
being able to write a rhyme is enough
to suggest that you're toying with
an art-form...
   personally? i don't know how i got here,
but right now that doesn't really matter.
the whiskey is cold and a cigarette is
only 10 minutes away, gone is the macho
strive to impersonate the Kray twins,
or in that line of thought: blue for boys
pink for girls,
why is the transgender movement happening?
erm... could it be because of
gender stereotyping?
   it probably has nothing to do with
annexing the words from St. Thomas' gospel,
it could really be a rebellion against
                 gender stereotyping...
out comes a woman dressed as a nun,
then out comes a woman dressed in a niqab....
  curtain-sellers! i knew it!
                 what's pajamas in punjabi?
     chuckles?    chack'ah chuck chittering?
**** me and a throng of sparrows, land ahoy!
what i don't get is that there's a science in poetry,
poetry for its lack of volume gets this leechy
science of itemisation, this vague anatomy...
i don't think i write for an anatomy,
i ****** well hope i don't write something
worth an anatomy... i basically write to give people
a feeling of eating sushi, or raw red meat...
    i entrust them with the notion that it's a narrative
that needs to be there between having a glass
of whiskey... i don't write with the hope of being
itemised and stripped bare by some English students
equating a metaphor with liver...
******* bog-standards... i really do not understand
this whole concern for a hussle-and-bussle
that surrounds poetry: you have a ******* pelican
taming the skies, why invite a Mongolian beehive
to fill in the blanks intended with "notes"?
     it's to do with the fact that you don't need to
strain your eyes, *******, it's not:
i write sparingly so you have to comment...
           why note the ****** crap from four words
when you're intended to sorta spread them out,
and feel them over a spectrum of a few days,
so that there's no synonymous-amgiguity ascribed
to them, which means you can act upon
deviating from the idealism of words thought,
and antonym them within the realism of words acted
upon...
        i just can't stand people mutilating poetry,
they're not even performing a postmortem surgery,
they're hacking at a stump of wood
    in a forest, when there are so many trees to be
looted...
               again the point... maybe the transgender
movement is due to the fact of gender-stereotyping?
blue boy, pink girl, salmon fading pink of shirts on
metrosexuals? hey, Sherlock! i'm not the answer!
   what i'm bothered about it the fact that
poetry attracts bothersome flies...
who feel a need to make poetry into prose:
economically speaking, yes prosaic literature is
worth the money, with more words in a chapter than
in a poetry collection.. how's your eyesight though?
    then there's this girl, a Joe Pachelbel (sorta),
and she does the worst thing imaginable to poetry,
the educated norm...
              the bothersome fly bit...
              it's just narration girl, it's just narration
too lazy to invent characters fake schizophrenia
          and say too many words that don't appear in
urban conversations about a ****** or a juicy mango...
and that's why i think people are put off poetry,
the fact that poetry is like this magical artefact that
might give you eternal youth... that you have to
scrutinise it so much that you almost get sick of it...
you couldn't even if you tried put a question of metaphor
into a journalistic entry...
                      so why put so much science into
an area of the humanities?
            where's the feeling part, and the part where you
have to create volume from poetry for it to compete
for an existence alongside prose?
    most prose works these days don't even deserve
a campfire anyway... in the same way that poetry shouldn't
really accept all this excess of narrative,
it's like people who read poetry are characters in
    a prose novel, they're asking for the part of
lynching the narrator into suggesting less ambiguity...
   in prose the narrator is almost too easily discredited
from playing chess, in poetry the chess pieces gain
consciousness that they're being moved and subsequently
rebel and ask too many questions...
          what the **** dragged me into this realm?
the question serves itself...
   and even donning a cravat or a boutique corset you
suggest not talking *****...
   then off the donning attire gets ripped,
   and it's heathen sprechen in onomatopoeia of
knocking on a door to open, a flower to open in spring,
a ***** to get juicy, and de Sade coming home.
                i say fiddle with the idea of a river...
  end this bogus fly-trap of people playing surgeons
with poems like they might play doctor with dolls...
                 it's getting annoying:
it's written sparingly for a reason, the blank spaces between
the words is not a prompt to comment and vandalise
the poem, which they do; pristine bourgeois? you'd
think, wouldn't you... graffiti on some urban slum wall,
a comment in a poetry book: same ****, different cover.
i never understood why they needed to say
so much about poetry in order to make it
economically viable to compete with prose custard,
     i just thought: poetry and photography are akin...
say much more than the photograph endorses
and you've just started blinking...
         which to the photograph in-itself means:
  look at another if your eyes are watering with
            peppery tears that itch; and another... and another...
and another.

Some introductory 'food' for thought...

"When people say they prefer organic food, what they often seem to mean is they don't want their food tainted with pesticides and their meat shot full of hormones or antibiotics. Many object to the way a few companies - Monsanto is the most famous of them - control so many of the seeds we grow."
  - Michael Specter

"My grandfather used to say that once in your life you need a doctor, a lawyer, a policeman and a preacher but every day, three times a day, you need a farmer"
  - Brenda Schoepp

"Economically, many folks don't feel they can afford organic. While this may be true in some cases, I think more often than not it's a question of priority. I feel it's one of the most important areas of concern ecologically, because the petrochemical giants - DuPont, Monsanto - make huge money by poisoning us."
  - Woody Harrelson


Who is Monsanto?
Monsanto is a Chemicals/Pharmaceutical/Agriculture company that was established in 1901 in the United States, and over the last century has occupied a particularly interesting and questionable history that has within recent times took to the global scale, growing into a multinational corporation, well nigh on the complete monopolisation of the Agriculture industry whilst having established connections to the chemical and pharmaceutical industry. They are less well known for their creation of Agent Orange, of which they claimed had no harmful effects on the human body, which was utilised very predominantly during the Vietnam War by the U.S. military as a defoliant, however, caused hundreds of thousands of deaths by poisoning, and has now led to an epidemic of birth deformities in the regions of use. Monsanto experienced more involvement in war through their involvement in the Manhattan Project, which resulted in the creation of the first nuclear bombs to be tested on Japanese civilian populations. They also have a background in their production of PCB's (Polychlorinated biphenyls) which once again, had the negative human and environmental effects ignored and misrepresented hitherto 1977 when they were banned, however, was not before many fresh water supplies and the air had been contaminated and was a known carcinogen in humans, along with other health damages. There was then of course their production of DDT's in the post war period that was advertised as a 'wonder-chemical' to be used in agricultural pesticides. However, it was later uncovered that its spraying caused a high percentage of food breakdown in crop and in humans caused breast cancer, male infertility, miscarriage, developmental delay and nervous system/liver damage. They even tested the effects of radioactive Iron on 829 pregnant women in a bizarre experiment. Having no shortage of scandalous and often at times frequenting blatantly corrupt behaviour on their dubious track record, with an abundance of data and study arising in protest of the company's use of dangerous chemicals and genetic modifications in food, it is surely best to question the activity and history of this company.


What chemical poisons are being used?
Some of you are probably aware as to the fact that within many food products today there are various chemicals being used in modification, cultivation and in processing, many of which are harmful, often deadly to the human body and to the ecosystem. So harmful in fact that in cultivation workers are required to wear bio-hazard suits and due to the toxicity of the area in farming these GM crops, are required to ***** signs in the surrounding area warning of the danger.

So one chemical that has been pushed into foods and drink by Monsanto since the early 20th Century is Saccharin, an artificial sweetener made from coal tar which is used predominantly in Soda, Coke and processed foods, and is 700 times sweeter than sugar. In 1907 when Saccharin was first investigated by the USDA it was quoted as,"a coal tar product totally devoid of food value and extremely injurious to health" , and by the 1970's, when the chemical began to garner greater use, the FDA attempted to ban its use in products after discovering it causes cancers (particularly bladder cancer) in animals and humans, however, today is still used as an artificial sweetener, and between 1973-1994 the National Cancer Institute saw a 10% increase in bladder cancers.

Monsanto are also responsible for the pushing of another artificial sweetener onto the market to be consumed by humans, that being Aspartame, even more harmful than Saccharin, and since being used in Coke, particularly Diet Coke, since 1983, the rest of industry followed suit. When melted down at 30°C into its liquid form in use for soft drinks, it become far deadlier than in its powdered state. It was found that it caused tumours and holes in the brains of rats and is more addictive than crack *******. After a multitude of independent scientific studies arose in protest of the use of Aspartame, Monsanto bribed the National Cancer Institute to produce fabricated data. Here are some of the know side effects of Aspartame consumption in humans according to the US Food and Drug Administration:

• mania  
• blindness
• joint-pain
• fatigue
• weight-gain
• chest-pain
• coma
• insomnia
• numbness
• depression
• tinnitus
• weakness
• spasms
• irritability
• nausea
• deafness
• memory-loss
• rashes
• dizziness
• headaches
• seizures
• anxiety
• palpitations
• fainting
• cramps
• diarrhoea
• panic
• burning in the mouth
• diabetes
• MS
• lupus
• epilepsy
• Parkinson’s
• tumours
• miscarriage
• infertility
• fibromyalgia
• infant death
• Alzheimer’s

As is quite evident, Aspartame not only lacks any nutritional value, it also can have grave effects on humans when consumed. In fact, over 80% of complaints made to the FDA concern Aspartame and is now used in over 5000 products, yet facts are still being misrepresented and as primary producers of Aspartame such as Monsanto produce false data to cover their tracks.


How is their monopoly being secured?
Monsanto within recent decades has somewhat become the archetype of corruption and corporatism, devoting many millions to Government lobbying in order to maintain its hegemony over agriculture, its use of harmful chemicals and to maintain restrictions of food labelling of GM products. In fact, the company seems to have a revolving door between itself and Government now, one example being the FDAs Arthur Hull resigning due to controversy and going straight to an employee at Monsanto as a Public Relations representative. This means that the FDA, the central official force against the use and proliferation of harmful products is in bed with Monsanto, the main proliferator.

Another creation Monsanto have pushed into pastoral agriculture is their Synthetic Bovine Growth Hormone which is a genetic modification of the E-coli virus to be used in dairy products and cows. And in order to make sure this product is pushed onto farmers, Monsanto sues any that do not use it with teams of lawyers. They also, in a far more cunning and destructive method, are able to and have destroyed other, natural crop cultivation by the use of their Genetically Modified crops themselves. What they have done is modified their crops in order that they self pollinate, and that bees that come into contact with their crops are killed, causing mass hive collapses, which then means any natural crop in surrounding farms die off due to a lack of bees to pollinate them, forcing them to join the monopoly of Monsanto's GM supply.

Also, before the aerial spraying aluminium and barium into the skies began in 1998, that has seen a rise in the content of aluminium particles per/cm from near 0 to 30,000 in many areas, Monsanto patented crops that are resistant to soil with such high concentrations, meaning they now have legal ownership over crops, whereas the natural produce may be ungrowable in a number of places where the spraying concentration is high. On a side not, the spraying of aluminium into the sky since 1998 has also caused a massive spike in Alzheimer disease and lung cancers, rising from the tens of thousands to the millions of cases per year.

To Conclude, Monsanto has recently made a very big merger deal with the Pharmaceutical company Bayer, the ones who produced Zyklon-B for the **** extermination chambers. Sure sounds like some safe operations.


- an essay by JDH

Betwixt of any sense beyond experiment, I sat on the bed between shifts and out-whipped the bag of Concerta given to me by Matt, o'timey hard-worker-soft-souled Matt, who felt, perhaps, that I had a legitimate reason to explore this legal avenue of pharmaceutical mind-manipulation for reasons he would rather fathom in retrospect. I popped a single pill, and voilà, the legal-cocainnabinoid began to flow between my red and white blood-cells playing cops and robbers.

It is when I feel nostalgic that I feel the need to write. I remembered, at work, with all those strange everyone-elses faces gliding past (and myself annoyed at the general lack of positive reception "Hello there!" "h .. i ." is one sour-looking businessmans sultry whispered reply.. once, a woman told me 'look, I know that you are told to say hello at the door to everyone who enters, but I don't like it. I just want to shop in peace, and no, I don't need any help' and without case to what my managers could say, I somewhat-hissed-back, "if you don't want to be greeted, then perhaps you shouldn't walk into big private corporate establishments to find the books you're looking for," and she shrugged and muttered some ****-talk under her breath and glided upstairs to find a copy of Ayn Rand's Fountainhead or Machiavelli's The Prince to validate her bitter attitude, I bet, the sour witch), my time spent living in that backwater Esso suburb of Port Coquitlam back in 2011 when Occupy Wall Street was still a hungry potential, not yet bogged down in procrastinates over herbal teas and talk of chakras and enlightenment and how the typical Wall Street businessman probably never had a real ****** and hence had never truly satisfied the energies now burnt-to-crisps inside his Root Chakra or whathaveyou, where I believed I would find a better, more interesting world further from the musty-smallness of forest-drenched rain-drenched Powell River, only to discover I may be right outside my front door, but that's EXACTLY where I was, no further than right outside my front door.. I mean, for Goddaskes, I was born in Vancouver, this isn't a culturally-shocking move to New Delhi or Kathmandu--- and so on and so forth is how I once berated myself thru constant cycling thoughts of no-escape, I, a little walking hell of devils-advice and panic disorder-- the Great Big Port City of George Vancouver only succeeding in further overwhelming my already delicate attempt at false optimism thru self-voided Buddhist smalltalk as I travelled from bookstore to bookstore reading Alan Watts in shady attempts to save-myself but only digging my walking grave even deeper into the soil of feared-insanity.

Port Coquitlam itself was a small-town wearing a business suit and holding hands with an angry father forcing him to college for computer networking as it's the most economically viable market at hand.. at first, I did not see this. I saw my idolized imaginings of Vancouver (never Port Coquitlam), the shining water-reflected skyline of my past and present legacies, where my father once snorted ******* with a bohemian group of someones, and my mother tried LSD just to prove to her friends how bad it was (and lo and behold, what a terrible time she had!), all this Otherness, Strangeness, yet still Connected-- an Otherness with which I was taken, left to whisper into empty Campbell's cans so-as to speak with the city from a distance, two children growing older together 'til my inevitable return and our agreement to share costs on rent.

I returned, as planned. I returned, and found that old-best-friend hating the Homeless and loving the Rich-- spending time with the Peppy Plutocracy whilst enslaving the Middle Classes (first Letter Capitals to Assist YOU in Grasping my Anger with All Five Thumbs) and the horrors I saw in my already delicate state, all the starving addictives slouching-inching down the sides of ***** old walls, the only thing missing a smear of blood to follow their corpseish collapse, all just footnotes to history, footnotes to wealth and progress-reality, all footnotes with no shoes O my God O my Goodness and O Canada, Our Home and Native Land!

It hurt like it did, but I felt powerless and gaited. Felt like it were just as well me (*** it just as well is), I, in Vancouver.. *Great Big Port City of George Vancouver.. saw the end-stretching-cold-legs of Nietzsche's Dead God.. those in cutthroat-black-suits armed with calculators and wives could afford private jets and yearly trips 'round our globular strangeness whilst others had to beg and berate and debate and break-down to get a crummy old bagel and a past-due mostly-empty jug of old milk and perhaps a 'side of fries with that order.'

What crushed me so much about this playing a Witness to God's Death (or, not so much a 'witness' as a relative asked to the morgue to identify the body) was my intuitive grasp that this is the poverty of the First World.. this is not as bad as it gets and on a scale of 1 to 10 this would only be a 3.. all the poor and displaced of Eastern Europe.. Moldovan families indifferent to the whims and what's taken.. someone called me a Socialist and said I would later grow out of it as 'reality' angled its rearing-ugly head to chop me smithereens like it did so mercilessly to the Poor and Irrelevant.. I looked at them and still look at people like them and think 'that is evil unsure of itself.. that is evil unaware... that is evil and evil is  evil to watch..' the Evil Act being the use of Money to purchase the world, demanding us all to pay royalties (mass royalties) for the privilege of life so afforded by them.. (the Sons and Daughters of God first stabbing their father then stabbing themselves then locking away and ignoring their young brother with cerebral palsy '*** he could never be armed with a calculator, nor wife)..

I learned, thru practice, to cope with these evils as laws-for-now. Coping did not mean tolerance, nor did coping mean agreement.. I had charged at life expecting hugs and bottles.. what I got was hugs and bottles.. all while I watched over the shoulder of whoever embraced me and saw young-others doing the same, where are the hugs and bottles..? they sank into the nether as the crowd ebbed past, ignoring the cries of pleading love, pleading love over time so traumatised as to distort this love (so inherent and implied in the Heart) into confusion, confusion into loss, and loss into hatred.. as the crowd ebbed past, the crowd ebbed past..

After 3 and a half months, I moved back home to Powell River.. the soggy ol' calm of what I already knew.. the warm arms of the rest, the warm arms of water-reflected sunsets.. and I got my hugs and bottles.

but was this really a happy ending?

AN EXOTIC JOURNEY TO THE
               KHYBER PASS!
              By Raj Nandy

“When spring-time flushes the desert grass,
Our caravan wind through the Khyber Pass.
Lean are the camels but fat the frails,
Lighter the purses but heavy the bales!
As the snowbound trade of the North comes down,
To the market square of Peshawar town.”
- Rudyard Kipling (Dec1865- Jan 1936).

Those immortal lines of Kipling had enticed me,
To delve into famous Khyber’s exotic History ;
And today I narrate its wondrous story!

THE KHYBER PASS:
Steeped in adventure, bloodshed and mystery,
The Khyber remains the doorway of History!
Winston Churchill, then a young newspaper
correspondent in 18 97 had said, -
‘Each rock and hill along the pass had a story
to tell! ’
Cutting across the limestone cliffs more than
thousand feet high,
This narrow winding path of 45 km’s stretch,
Cuts through the Hindu Kush mountain range!
Forming a part of the ancient Silk Route between
Central and South Asia;
Linking Kabul with Peshawar town during those
early days of Pre-Independent India!
The area is inhabited by fierce Pashtun tribesmen,
who live by their ancient Honor Code;
They value their land and liberty, and their winding
mountain roads !
They can be the greatest of friends and deadliest
of foes;
And as the saying goes, for a friend a Pashtun
can even give up his life;
But he never forgets a wrong or when rubbed on
the wrong side !
He always avenges a wrong deed done, -
Even after decades, through his sons!
The indigenous tribes living along the pass,
Regard this area as their sole preserve!
They have levied a toll on all travelers from
the earliest days,
For their safe conduct and passage through the
Khyber, - as Historians say!

HISTORIC INVASIONS THROUGH KHYBER:
At its highest point the Khyber is 3500 ft in height,
But its strategic importance can never be denied!
Around 2000 BC came the Indo-Aryan tribes
from Central Asia,
Migrating to the rich fertile plains of Ancient India!
In 326 BC, the great Alexander came through,
By bribing the local tribes to gain their favour,
To defeat King Porus on the banks of Jhelum River;
And set up his short-lived Bactrian Empire!
In 1192 AD Afghan warlord Mohammad Ghori, -
Invaded India to set up The Sultanate at Delhi!
In 1220 Genghis Khan with his Mongol hordes
came through the Khyber;
With the help of local tribesmen to plunder the
ruling Arab Empire!
In 1380 through this pass came Timur Lane,
To wreck and destroy the Delhi Sultanate!
And finally from Kabul through the Khyber path,
Came Babur to establish the Mogul Empire with
his victory at Panipath!
From 1839 till 1919, here the British had fought,
- three ****** Anglo-Afghan Wars!
And before retreating, drew the famous Durand
Line to ally fears;
But this Line is now the cause of bickering and
tribal tears!

THE BRITISH KHYBER RAILWAY:
At Jamrud Cantonment town 17 km west of
Peshawar,
Lies the doorway to the historic Khyber!
The track passes through a breath-taking rugged
mountainous terrain, -
Through 34 tunnels, over 92 bridges, a 42 kilometer’s
of winding stretch!
A five hour’s journey at Laudi Kotal gets complete;
The line stands as a tribute to British Engineering
feat!
The legendary Khyber Rifles had guarded the
western flanks of the British Empire,
With garrisoned troops guarding this route entire! @
Since 1990 this train is run by a private enterprise, #
With local tribesmen always taking a free joy ride!
Recent Taliban attacks made Pakistan to close
the Khyber Pass,
An uneasy truce prevails, only God knows how
long it will last ?!
But with that Durand Line of 1893 demarcated,
Forty million Pashtuns today stand divided, -
Between Pakistan and Afghanistan!
With hopes, aspirations and dreams of becoming
United!
- Raj Nandy
New Delhi .

NOTES:-
Battle Of Panipath, April 1526, where Babur defeated numerically
superior forces of Ibrahim Lodhi; thereby establishing the Moghul
Empire in India!
On 04Nov1925, the British inaugurated the Khyber Railway to carry
troops up to Laudi Kotal on the other end, short of the Afghan border
to guard the western flanks of the British Empire!
@KHYBER RIFLES: - Raised in early1880s with HQs at Laudi Kotal,
& garrison troops manning the Forts at Ali Masjid near the
mid-way point of the Pass, and also at Fort Maud to the east of the
Khyber Pass.
KHYBER RAILWAYS: With 75 seats, a kitchenette, and two toilets;
pulled by two old Lancashire engines of 1920 vintage! It cuts across
Peshwar Airport under Air Traffic Control! It was stopped in 1982, as
economically not viable! Started again by a Private Enterprise
in 1990, in collaboration with the Pak Railway! After the Partition of
India in 1947, the Khyber is under the Federal Administered Tribal
Area of Pakistan! A difficult and a volatile region to govern! The
Khyber now remains closed due political reasons! Thanks for
reading.
* ALL COPYRIGHTS ARE WITH RAJ NANDY

I think there was a time
In this country

Where young people (20-30)

Could go out
And socialize
And could afford it I think

Where they had decent jobs

When they didn't have
So much student debt

But now we just live in
The suburban homes
Of our parents

Economically grounded

Unable to afford going out
And instead talking on chat rooms

I used to live in a country
That was based on liberty
And where just anybody
Could achieve prosperity
That with assured equality
And working diligently
One could expect definitely
To succeed economically
If you saved all the money
Left over from your salary
To save to bring your family
A step closer to solvency.

Not an impossible proposition,
It was based on the condition
Of a grand national institution
Which promised that stabilization
By taxing us and corporations
With an equitable correlation
Between folks of humble station
And the larger organizations
Working in happy syncopation.
A welcome feeling of elation
Would descend upon our nation
And keep us from stagnation
Or going into nationwide deflation,
Or just as scary, a huge inflation.

Now I look upon our history
And see decades of misery
Laid upon us by calumny
By those meant to fortify
And build up our security.
The constant forces of calamity
If we accept less than probity
From those who have no honesty
Choosing leaders based on beauty
A national cult of personality
Then permit political chicanery
By people with no dignity
Only a greedy criminality
That pretends to propriety
And a devout base of spirituality
When what we have is actually
A kangaroo court of dishonesty
Without a care for the citizenry.

and would i ever get embroil myself in a morning of: coffee,
croissant and a newspaper? i find it strange how newspapers
are printed for workers - sold in the morning,
and read in the hazy hours before the mind
catches up with the body at noon
lead to nothing but village sentimentalism -
and dupe sensationalism -
they really know when to baptise them:
a few weeks into their lives (most never
object to confirmation, i, for one, started inquiring
about the Gnostic cults, and said: nah, you'll
alright without me) -
baptism is a bit like newspapers:
i really didn't ask for it... sorry, i was in diapers,
i knew that i'd be wearing diapers
if i went to my confirmation by the Bishop
of Chelmsford - imagine what a cardinal
could do to me... but that's what newspapers
are, they are written in reasonable comfort,
i don't mean the sort of journalism
akin to all the president's men -
that's valiant... i mean the opinions sections,
i read a newspaper and think of only one thing:
****! i threw away something i actually
need in the recycling pile of garbage...
so you go back to the bag and sift through it...
which is what it's all about:
newspapers pulverise the half-awake readers
on the tube... making newspapers free is also
a tactic... i read newspapers, about this time,
nearing midnight... i've spent the entire day
occupying myself with colours, squares and clouds,
i leave my desire to see phonetic encoding a - z
till last, when i can relax, and actually recycle
all the opinions of the day...
shamefully, others pick up a newspaper,
early in the morning, and just nod, agree, nod, agree,
pigeon on parade... makes it easier to earn
a few more disciples when half of them (if not all)
are still trying to remember a dream at 7 a.m.,
all the opinions sections are fabulous!
mental health matters... like **** it does:
you're saying a box inside that storage room that's
your brain aches like broken arm...
you go to a doctor, and he replies: it's all in your head...
well, d'uh, metaphysical health was always clumsy
with what became spaghetti entanglement
for philosophers - the one never translates into
another as honing in on, and synonymous -
but that's life... but the two were never supposed to
be at odd, or, quiet simply: parallel -
after all, thinking, if a limb or an *****,
is more than what the automation of the brain is:
receptor to nervous stimuli - if there's an *****
such as a mind, and it's verb optimum is sick...
it's like seeing the desperation of someone doing
cartwheels on a tightrope, while deciding a next
chess move playing someone down below,
and smoking a pipe - thought, in the end,
is a dilemma where to many verbs are associated with it:
it's so spatial in that it tries to encompass a near
exponential number of ? / hmm hiccups -
                              as it does encompassing a near exponential
number of ! / eureka hiccups -
the German Chancellor and the fourth cottage -
and the opinion: nacktarschuzdeckenwunsch
(the desire to cover their own naked backsides) -
ah, newspapers and the morning,
whoever reads a newspaper in the morning is a sheep...
who doesn't even thinks that comics didn't slowly evolve
to be comics? they are pristine Geminis -
i wouldn't read a newspaper in the morning,
because i know most of these articles are written in
the afternoon, notably the opinion sections,
by people donning kimonos, drinking wine
and smoking Magritte's phrasing of: not a pipe.
i can't treat them as trash either... i call them
midnight literature... after i've spent the day not
looking at phonetic encoding symbols,
i finally zoom in, revise my eyes and ease into a crescendo
of appreciating newspapers, for whatever they're worth,
which, according to the Thursday's edition of the times:
£1.40 - but reading newspapers in the morning
is horrid - too much world, too much care,
too much moral acting - too much conversation...
the world is too big, and i'm too small...
so i do what the writers of these articles read:
although i have a stronger solvent to read their preaching
parody of Mt. Sinai - but what i found, apart from that,
well... couldn't poetry steal something from
the journalistic medium? in the way art is appreciated
without critics? shouldn't poetry be the only medium
of art where other art mediums are appreciated?
for example, i find that when i'm hearing the clicking
of the keyboard, and there's a record in the background
i have a full meal in front of me,
i forgot how good tubeway army's album replicas
is... as a second course meal... nothing of the top 30
canape charts of nibbles of artistic output...
poetry can congratulate over mediums of art,
it can steal from what journalism encompasses -
namely the critical pieces of the journalistic anatomy -
art, doesn't necessarily have to be a matthew arnold
moment of as soon as i returned home, i pulled off
my coat, flung myself on the sofa, and wept the
bitterest, sweetest tears: after coming back from
a Liszt concert... really?
i think that ballet is supreme sadism and Bach
had wax in his ears... fame and the adoration of women?
too lazy... like drinking too much, and listening
to what i like: without adverts selling me car insurance
and German shampoo.
yes, i am bothered, i'm seeing something in England
that's worrying, something akin to a Marx & Engels'
study of Victorian England - only this time it's
existentially tinged - not economically -
and yes, reading a newspaper at any "sensible" hour
of the day is rather pointless...
you can get very impressionable in the morning,
at around midnight, with a whiskey and a cigarette...
while everyone is already nodding off in Luna's
embrace - never understood reading newspapers
in the morning... or in the early afternoon -
it's better to digest the **** of the individual by the world
while everyone is asleep... less democratic constipation
of everyone having a go... or as Auden said:
all the ****** of the world write at night...
well, during the night: everything is apparently black
& white... the vacuum of the space, and the punctuation
of Zodiac are what this sort of writing best describes,
given that, we are the mediators of two opposing
chasms... to be honest... poets hate colour,
the whole spectrum of colour, from
red (λ nanometres 760 etc. and Herr Hertz, whatever)
to violet (λ nanometres 424 - 380) -
    so tiny, this puncture... equatable with
the size of the universe and that spec that's called earth -
to me? all of this is a massive accident -
as the gambling king said (god): oops... dunno.
but from what i can see... poets have colour -
hence the white page where all colours are entombed,
and better than scattering the white into the visible
spectrum, beginning as Newton with a needle hole
and a prism... no... we're probing it with something else,
intent on it being given to us in total,
a sum of all parts... or as they say: shying away from
the people in grey suits... virtually taking risks on meeting
the people in white coats - and how to slur and
window-lick our way into confined spaces
perfecting our skills in Paper Mâchés and Matisse-like
cut-outs.

so... i know that i will not be richer than
my parents...
they're heading off for two weeks
to Costa Rica,
while i'm heading back to Poland...
a tourist hellhole,
back to the town of my birth,
a ****-hole (once communism collapsed,
the steel industry collapsed)
to spend five masochistic weeks
with a neurotic grandmother,
who hums a lot,
a song i'm still to decipher...
and a dementia riddled grandfather,
to read a book,
       not drink, not use the internet:
on that point... thank ****!
i'll need about 5 weeks to forget how
**** youtube became in the past year!
it's not exactly a, "holiday"...
when i think of the tropics i think...
that one time in Kenya...
looking for shade...
why do these people travel
to the most obscene destinations
for a ******* suntan?
or some, other **** and *******?!
go somewhere colder...
i said to them... go to Norway...
you'll come back to England...
hey presto! the tropics!
instead, going to a tropical region,
and then experiencing holiday
blues, shell-shocked by the return
to the cold...
   it's like you're in an ice-bath one
minute... foo! into the sauna with
you....           eh?!
but i appreciate the offer...
it's not like enjoyed Kenya that much...
what, a, waste, of, time...
the macaque monkeys and
the pirate baboon were the only fun
bits staying at this tourist resort...
the rest?
bland bland blah blah...
i was so bored that i just pretended
to sleep most of the time...
just give me the ******* basics,
a book to read, long nights,
and two old people,
and enough recipes to cook for them...
i'll be fine...
    i'm not exactly the type
easily distracted like a cat might
be with a laser pointer...
5 weeks? a 3 volume book?
over 1000+ pages?
                smithy...
                   ****... it's more
than a holiday, it's a hiatus...
i can leave this garbage lewd language
behind and turn to the high-brow
19th century *******...
no, i think this time, i'll cut off
the internet completely,
i'll not buy credit...
i'll not drink for five weeks,
i'll certainly not ******* for five weeks...
i'll not smuggle in bottles
of ***** and drink and write
at the kitchen table during the night...
**** it, i'll make this classic...
i'll be armed with 70cl of liquor
for the trip,
that should do it,
the alcohol ought to run out by
the time i'm as Warsaw Western
train-station...
so me cooking dinners for two old
people for a month...
obviously i'll take a book in English,
so i don't, "forget" the language...
Heidegger's ponderings VII - XI...
plus... i sleep better in the fellow
land...
   i don't need alcohol to lullaby
me...
   which is a nice relief...
one thing you find out,
after doing a self-imposed rehab...
you appetite comes back,
you actually eat three meals
a day...
given the day's genesis of
a coffee and 2 hour's worth of reading...
i guess that's why i wouldn't
bother going on holiday
to some exotic location,
sieving through two weeks of
a tourists' resort...
         who the **** expects to read,
on the beech?
  in Kenya i could hardly breathe
in the sun... shade shade... show me the shade!
i almost can't wait...
a hiatus mingling with a reading
holiday...
  a neurotic grandmother
and a dementia prone grandfather...
match made in heaven...
  i just can't wait for the nights
were he attempts to wander out
from the apartment wearing his
pajamas... working on calming him
down and getting him back to bed...
oh, don't worry...
dementia isn't that bad...
it doesn't involve any
   hostile proteins... that eat the brain
away... he's just super-charged
with memories...
that, yes, that flaw of being
mortal...
the cameo cinema floods
the old mind...
                           but i do like
the fact that my presence uplifts him...
i still feel pretty ****** not
bothering to read a book suggestion
he's nudging me to read...
what?
  Leopold Tyrmand's
      book zły,
and i'm like... but when you die...
i won't have any meaningful association
with this country, or these people?
if you're into the vlogging scene
you'll know this...
tim pool / tim cast...
'they're just, economic migrants...
oh? so... that makes me less than
what is a, "genuine" migrant...
a refugee...
you know, the Kosovo refugees
that came to England in the late 1990s...
and were prominent around
the Ilford train-station?
they ****** off!
   but the economic migrants remained,
integrated...
  just economic migrants...
yeah, because economic migrants
were not just the same old migrants
with not language skills they had to learn
as, muted 8 year old kids in
a primary school...
     oh no... economic migration is
privy to all the benefits of...
"other" migrations...
      oh yeah... i was ready, economically...
oomph...
             i had it easy... all the way through,
having my *** smeared with
honey sitting on a laurel wreath!
we're just economic migrants...
           **** it... let's call Pol ***
and get this party started...
we can even groove out
to the brian jonestown massacre's
song fingertips...
                        while we're at it!
god... 5 weeks... no internet...
the rekindled fascination
with the texture of paper in my hands...
this is more than a holiday...
     this is a well earned hiatus;
where i'm going to, isn't my "home"...
all it is, is a memory...
of a child leaving it aged 8...
there is no longing of me for it...
i'm not some czesław miłosz...
who left with a longing...
   economic migration has that aspect
worth its worth...
you... have no emotional investment,
in either the place you left,
or the place you went to...
Poland gave birth to me,
but England isn't a home either...
    this... this language?
this isn't ownership of the British people,
since anyone can acquire it...
conquer it, without even wanting
an inch of the language's geographic
extensions...
  i, i own, this, language...
because, it, is, mine!
this is my home...
            and sure as ****...
Poland is a vague recollection,
the day my grandparents die,
the die when i have no one to speak
Polak to...
                that will be my first death...
i'm, white, you see, i'm privileged,
i get to experience more than one death!
   i really have a vague sense
of identity...
         the best assumption i can
make of myself is... to be... rōnin;
i pledge no allegiance to either camps,
i have a certain critique of both...
i have my reasons...
but it's not like i'm going to tell people
what they are.

Alexander K Opicho
(Eldoret,Kenya;aopicho@yahoo.com)
This essay is based on the observation research that had been carried out  by a social research firm in  Eldoret, Kenya, in the preceding six moths, which has been concluded on 30th January 2014.I the writer of this essay was among the lead team that carried out this study.We unobtrusively observed two thousand University graduates from east African states of Kenya,Uganda,Tanzania,Rwanda,Ethiopia,Sudan,and Burundi plus a few form some parts of Congo .Our target population of two thousand graduates was used under the guiding assumptions that it would help the study to arrive at water tight social conclusions.Our problem of focus was that ;why are male graduates in east Africa not marrying fellow graduates but instead go for marital partners who have substantially lower education qualification and even academic achievement.
The conditions of serendipity was also encountered and taken care of , when we also deviated from the natural social settings and charted with our digital social media friends who were approximately two thousand as well.They were digital social friends from Facebook and twitter digital social platforms. We  posted a thread in question form that ; if you were marrying today , would you marry a girl you graduated with the same year? Eighty percent of the responses to this thread was no , only twenty percent was yes.
The actual situations in an empirical experience is that male graduates prefer marrying ladies who stopped schooling in high school,and male high school or diploma college graduates prefer marrying ladies who don’t have clear high school education.And male primary school leavers prefer marrying ladies with inferior social positions like those who come from poorer families or from different tribal communities that are geographically, economically or culturally disadvantaged.
And in case where a male graduate dares to marry a fellow graduate , the dominantly observed social behaviour in this juncture is that ; the boy will go for the girl in a different school or faculty that is perceived to be inferior within the university academic climate.Like a student of medicine or law will go for a girl doing education or any University course perceived to be inferior.But the observation  produces insignificant cases of where a medicine student daring to marry a fellow medicine student.The minor cases of where a medicine student dares to marry a fellow medic will only take place in a social fabric that the male student at fifth year level will go for a girl in first year.Still there is a social tilt.
When we asked for reasons in a non-obtrusive manner from our unsuspecting respondents.We got both positive reasons and negative reasons.The positive reasons our respondents gave are that in most cases girls who don’t make it to the university happen to be more beautiful or their physique is more sexually appealling than those ladies who make it to the university.when we projected this type of reasoning , we also found that ladies who are in schools like education,journalism or any other school perceived  inferior in the cultures of the University are again more beautiful and more socially enticing than the girls doing University courses like law ,medicine or engineering.One of the respondents made a socially outlying remark by saying that girls at the polytechnic or certificate colleges are usually light in the skin,**** in character and blessed with big or pronounced bossoms than ladies at the university.
When we asked the negative reasons , our respondents argued that  ladies from the university are not controllable,neither are they prepared to be controlled come even the marriage. Further argument for these behaviour by male  graduates is that the University ladies are sexually exhausted,As they usually stay with a man in the hostel or in the cube during the four or the five years of their live at the University. Some even live with different men interchangeably, after which they divorce those many on the graduation day.Another response is that University ladies have a proclivity towards social hangout behaviours like smoking ,pinching or revving in the wine spree and loving the pocket but not the owner of the pocket.
This social phenomenon have imperative concerns that there is high level of genetic mismatch through marriages in east Africa or any other part of the world which east Africa can be socially generalizable to in such particular socialization.Graduate ladies are often forced to marry as second wives , or marry non graduate husbands or stay as a single mother but playing a mistress somewhere, a social behviour described as mpango wa kando or chips funga in the the east African Kiswahili parlance. Such social encounters have a long term consequences of fettering the genetic potential of the family in terms of  academics.When we conform to a warning by an eminent American psychologist that ; ninety percent of academic brilliance is contained in the genes but not influenced by environment we then obviously concur with the findings of this study that if a graduate marries a graduate there is a guarantee for academic performance among the offspring , but where a graduate marries  a non graduate ,  academic performance among the offspring is either mediocrous or probabilistic.The findings of this study also fall in technical tune and intellectual tandem with the observations of Lee Kuan Yeow in his book; From the third world to the first world in which he pointed out that; failure by the male graduates from  Universities in Singapore to marry the fellow female graduates was an impeachment to development as the ultimate consequence of these social behaviours is unnecessary inhibition of good genetics at a macroeconomic level.
The conclusive position of this study is that University leaderships in Africa, with a particular focus on east Africa, must inspire new University culture that has a turnaround effect on this behavioural status quo.The reality is that male graduates behave like this out of a dominance syndrome not out of anything technically worthwhile.Kindly , let our graduates change their marriage behaviour so that we can substantially protect our genetic advantages.

References;
Lee Kuan Yeow; From Third World to the First World
Alexander K  Opicho, is a social researcher at Sanctuary Research agencies in Eldoret, Kenya.He is also a lecturer  for Research Methods in Governance.

We the citizens, who live as refugees,
We keep earning & see if our life is turning,
To the price rise, we lose savings,
Still we remain rock-bottom in standard of living.

We belong to the middle class,
Whose life always a breakable thin glass.
Our life remains completely unsettle,
Every second, life tests our mettle.

Life chases us with pressure, failure and useless lecture,
We are nurtured with a fear of future,
Happiness remains just a leisure,
Live with the unsecure & unsure present for a secure future.

We keep us busy and function,
We fear, when there arrives a function,
Towards happiness, we run as a pilgrim,
For the corporates, we become a mere victim.

We run like an athlete for salary, food and target,
For this globalized world, we are just a market,
Like hungry dogs, we wait for increments,
We keep running with bitter disappointments.

We live in own house, only in our dreams,
Our hearts cry with hopeless screams,
Failures remain our tutors,
Inability has turned us the irrecoverable debtors.

Our appearance has a rich look,
We have untold hidden burdens,
That keep us shook,
Keeps us forbidden and fear-ridden.


Low class think us rich,
High class always want us to be their *****,
Politically neglected by the rulers,
Economically exploited by the rich powers.

We exhaust ourself for subsistence,
We remain victorious and satisfied only in our existence,
We lose our life to sustain in competence,
We run our life with a mere persistence.

More than the high class and low class, we suffer,
Our lives never progressed as governments differ,
All see low class with empathy and sympathy,
To our difficulties, we are looked with apathy.

On rich, we are not jealous,
Towards our aim, we are zealous.
Never think we are nothing,
We truly have nothing to lose.

We take risks to make history,
Our path is nothing less than a mystery,
You never allow us to come up,
But we are not going to give up.

Hello High class,
Never pretend to live like us, to exploit us,
Gone are the days, we remained fools,
You will stand a day as the super intelligent fools.

Before, we are hungry for food,
Now, we are hungry to rule,
Before, we feared to live,
Now, we are ready to win the world.

We are nothing! We are nothing
We have nothing to lose!
We won’t stop until having nothing could do nothing to us.

.i (am) giddity giddity getting it... lying is an economic policy that
exhausts all investment in reality.

blow backs and...
i've never heard so much
politics on the citizenry level of
implementing the discovery
of politics...
    
    i love Tuesday nights in
these parts of the world...
German army jacket, hood...
walking really slow,
drinking a beer,
smoking a cigarette...
tense upper-body frame,
not moving my hands
that much,
intimidating posture...

  passing cars don't count...
**** me...
like a scene fro the Vanilla Sky
beginning...
in Times Sq.....
but this is Romford,
the outback that somehow
constitutes London...
i made a count...
how many people did i spot?
3... and that includes me...

i love Tuesday nights...
and then making lunch
for my father going to work...

next time i hear the following...
all these internet bums
imploring for donations...
they're...working?
making ******* videos?!
that's work?!
  that's work?!
and me writing is what...
Stephen King ***
David Koontz?!

they're working?!
right... making existentialist
quasi-*******
with a return of: how else
to be a consumer?!
that's work?!
    work... come to think of it...
what's work?
low unemployment levels...
yeah... go figure...
but the jobs on offer...
aren't they, just a tad bit
*******?!
         the sort of work that
is summarized by ctrl + c
              and a cntrl + p?
if there is so much work available,
sure as **** the work is "work",
i.e. it's *******...
it's not a plumbing spot...
it's... the sort of work
that... could also come with
a contraceptive message,
a ****** career...
            why even bother doing this,
this... "job" when you can align
yourself to making contraceptive
precautions?!
so... you want me...
to do this, "job"...
this waste of time bollocking of
the lesser actor?
        no ******* chance...

unemployment is down...
well of course it is...
more meaningless jobs
have been re-imagined!
    no wonder!

i'd understand a cinema cashier,
there was a sense of aura,
notably with the popcorn scent...
but now?

no... over-population isn't
a problem...
but meaningless jobs are...
a ******* problem...
    ******* attempting to suffice
my escapism with a meaningless
function that is...
about as much a trade
as a peanut is a watermelon...
*******!

i'll huff... and i'll puff...
and... ****... forgot the cucumber...
make my father
the sort of lunch that
kings dream of...
   yeah... but just sandwiches?
and only sandwiches?
  ****... forgot the cucumber...
      a thai cucumber pineapple salad...
oh no... you little ***** bank donation
******* and *******...
you get to rent...
       you get to rent a flat...
coughing up money to the most
deplorable people... your landlords...
should have thought about your
teenage tantrums...
   and thought about
  talking to your parents differently...
incidence...
i dated a Russian girl once...
and she told me...
that her grandmother was her mother,
and that her mother was her sister...
a ******* confusing relationship...
**** yeah that it ended!

well... evidently the retards coughing
up money into strangers' coffers
will deem me ******...
    then again...
only in the west there's the parental thesis
of being a child, and subsequently
an adult... only if: you are ashamed
of having parents to begin with;

hello, test-tube Dan,
frozen egg Hilary,
           IVF... Peaches?!

counter argument: well...
i could live in a shack in a forest,
or call my shadow a roof,
lingering on the paved streets...
then again...
my neighbors lied that
they bought a house,
and they're... what... 30 something?
saying they're renting it out...
and yet...
  they have house parties
under their parents' roof...
and smoke **** in their car...

lying is an economic policy that
exhausts all investment by reality;
i do not find lying
to be a moral encompass,
more an economic bypass...
      lying, simply doesn't make any
economic sense...
  "morally" (in question)
      advantageous in
the short term...
   but economically...
lying is exhausting...
            given that it's a lived
fiction... rather than
a non-lived fiction of a book...
i don't lie...
  because...
              what one cannot love,
one better be ashamed of...
****... does that even make sense?!
to be denied a love,
     one can at least bask in the shame,
that the truth of denial entails...
yeah... that sounds better.

School's coming to an end,
and it's GCSE's,
using all my expertise gained through-out the school years,
It could all end in tears.
Teachers say it's a big deal,
that's what they convey,
it is for them, anyway.

The last few weeks of term and you hand in your coursework,
that was fine, I wish I could shirk the exams,
not very good at revising,
but our teachers are advising us to watch GCSE Bitesize,
but it doesn't really cover what we've learned,
which is a bit of a concern.

We all cram into the exam hall,
it's a bit last minute,
but I'm trying to recall my revision notes.

An Inspector Calls by J.B Priestley,
something's stirring,
Arthur Birling,
a public scandal is too much to handle,
Eva Smith,
Eric and Gerald both had affairs,
but the latter actually cared.
That's a start, I guess.

The exam invigilator sets the clocks,
and permits one hour and forty-five minutes.
The Science exams are multiple-choice,
Biology is fine, but Physics and Chemistry haunt me.

Geography next,
tectonic plates,
and the traits of EDC's,
as well as Less Economically Developed Countries.

That's all over,
we await our mark,
the best part is still to come,
everyone meeting down the park,
and that too me is the abiding memory of my school days,
one last time we're all together in glorious weather,
before going our separate ways.

early on i left an imprint for me to remember,
kinda like 2 x 2, equating to 4,
not as simple with words:
i like this dialectic between Dionysian and
Apollonian attempts to express aye arr parley!
shake the pine trees to get the toothpicks
like you might get a mojito, onward! toward
El Dorado! transgressing 24 hour hours
and you get the flavour:
first beer in in from dieting, oh ****, it's bitter,
second beer, mm, sweeter... then the headline
of whiskey and coke... Kazakhstan nice... yok sh'eh mash?!

three movements working their way,
those conquered and exposed to direct roman rule,
presiding over the "charm" with roads, western europe,
now they're so pride to reach that far back,
mention Boudica, one, more, *******, time!
i'll give you Britain that made Louis XIV
the peasant king at Versailles, and Charles II
wise with a Guy Fawkes firecracker... mm, guess
it happened here! in the yeast of a baker's
reincarnation via Malachi's heresy:
Elijah coming soon? Elijah not coming any time
you blunt sword of monotheism excluding
the chance of many, democratic influences!
either the fish or the aquarium...
the aquarium... a billion of them plus Islam will
be anarchic China, people never wish for better,
they only wish to better themselves,
including the social strata stampede that's necessitated
in the process... scientific positivism of Enlightenment
died, the absolute necessity (god) / the absolutely
necessary thing became trapped in the Bermuda
or the Copernican triangle, no good for crossing
oceans, just ably whirling east to no east outside
the atmosphere, try me with two thing:
Copernican vectors with a stable point constantly moving,
rather than sunny, constantly expressed economically
as usurper against usurer and the university grant
of simony, although worthy of an actor to spread
charitable work and paedophilia in Asia dubbed
Portuguese Missionary - well i'm sure the apologetics will
come, my neighbour hugging her dog watching television,
closest kin of the genesis story having secondary reminders
determining whether the lie was white or instructive,
a joke or seriousness - indeed entombed in treating these
words as a holiness worth for all the present religious attire.
absolutely necessary Kant said,
he also said: you said omni- etc., indeed you're on a
roundabout of intellectual yawns, there's nothing new here!
i need god as a concept of vectors and cursors, mediating
more than the caging of man's affirmation of himself
with Freud... the sounds and equally shared optics
need to accommodate a oneness, god is a predicate
of essential function: a. the triple affirmative:
i, thought, existence... something to concern myself with,
b. the duo affirmative:
denial, thought, existence... the arithmetic goes further,
i am writing quickly hence i will not brood over,
except a comparison in cinema, the film *hostel (2005)
and pretty much all of Hollywood's 1970's grit output...
take for example Al Pacino in the panic in needle park,
you know what i see? modern american interpretation
of what eastern europe represents, the farts
leave flamboyant Amsterdam hopeful for Slavic ******,
they come to Slovakia, and it hits them,
the passive lack of jealousy and need to impress
building a chrysler building, the oddity like landing on mars...
but it's already been done with, New York in the 1970s,
the same slavic grit, even the way the cinematography looks
like the colours were shaded with a peppering of sand...
new york in the 1970s is like Eastern Europe in
the horror set in 2005 in Slovakia... globalisation's paranoia,
there are still people out there who we can't ascribe
metaphors to being exclusive: no iron lady lifted the
iron curtain, the iron lady had an iron skirt, and she
couldn't lift that up either... Churchill puffer a cigar
and a million bees emerged heralded by Edward the Confessor.
that's the relation though, Hollywood's 1970's urban grit
and what the tourists encountered in Slovakia in 2005,
a sleepy kingdom, 2nd Mongolia, second to none,
which i beg to differ with, given the Scots were tight
stretching 2 pence copper coin to invent copper wire
and the Swiss (also in hilly surroundings) have us
elaborate paedophilia via Nabokov catching butterflies...
hardly two mountain ranges and hardly two plateaus.
it's called exotica these days... yep... the dissection of
the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth and the emergence
of both Lach, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian
and White Russian is what the Czech say made them
speak both cesky and saksonski... tseba! holy roman
prague ****, disintegrated into the Austrian intervention...
very much as if: thank you for defending Vienna from
the Ottomans, Jan Sobieski.
but the Jews got reparations at the end of the ordeal,
and western Europe received the Marshall Plan...
eastern Europe received Marx... too proud they said,
it's not exactly Mama Russia surrogate,
it's Papa Khan also... moon gall! no news from Mongolia
i hear, sooner a tale from an American zoo
where a retired silver-back dragged a baby from
drowning in an inch of water, hero shot,
where were the parents? a four year old can hardly
sit on a kitchen stool let alone climb over zoological
fortifications... ah the blessing given unto man
by Iblis to ape ably a delay he has no chastity over:
if Iblis defended his pride, then man can but
defend his chastity - Iblis was given a longer time-frame,
man was given a shorter time-frame, Iblis'
choice expands furthest into myth, man's choice
implodes further into repetition - for Iblis' mistake
was but one, when knowing of man's aplenty;
it is said that when a man is to become a father,
he relives his childhood - legality i say would have
obliged me, but pride took no notice of symbols as signatures
of such love, especially given the expenses,
or as in the supermarket today, the cashier invested ?
into the one buying the goods:
- where is she? you're not together any more?
- oh, she's moving to York, it's her work, she has to.
- you're not moving with her?
- well, it's only for 2 years, and then she'll be back,
  training, it will take her 4 months...
na'h ah... bye bye...                       she ain't coming back...
tell you what mate, keep a cat, the most selfish animal,
bestia ex solipsism - no necessary petting by constantly
showering it signs of jealousy and ownership and upkeep,
as if having to punch a gorilla to hold hands.
i love feminism for one thing only:
it made sexism a branch of Darwinism, *** warfare...
in relation to me? two girls chatting away:
- *******! how could he leave you!
- but he did!
- what ***** made him do it!
- philosophy!
don't get me started on those who read very little
and can't allow philosophy a poetic form, and necessarily
have to plagiarise Aristotelian stylistics to be considered
philosophy (albeit only in scholarly musings).
i'm sure it was something about the fruits of our
presupposed wisdom that bore knowledge that individuated
us, to the point of extremes, as hardly scraps for
vultures, to no animal nobleness, parasitic amongst each other,
defining the 16th century or such desires to keep
afresh, minted and pampered for the next cohort of dupes...
some find the memory of dogs towards us keener
than our fellow men should wish to share...
the animal domesticated and not eaten is seemingly our
prefect to walk toward a seize-less craft of un-exhausted thought,
only un-exhausted because of missing interaction,
say there, is that Hegel's mirror (master) and narcissus (slave)?
the emergence of these belittled nations is clear in
western europe, the bombing of Libya,
the usurpers of Syria, the once conquered having a taste
for empire and colonial rule think they cherish
the biblical conundrum when the resurrection was inclined toward
the lands Sven and Mietek - toward the lands
of conquerors and the ones converted -
four movements thus (sketched):
a. sonata: βορας ηλιος - μακεδων να ινδια
b. adagio: βιργιλιος ως καντηνoν -
                  μεσoγειος: μαυρος (ex),
κoκκινος (ex), ειρηνικoς (ex),
ατλαντικoς (ex), βoρειος (ex), βαλτικη (ex),
south a poet, north a philosopher,
from only one sea came two oceans and many other seas
to sustain the thirst for seawater among men!    
c. scherzo: Casimir the 3rd welcoming the Jews.
d. sonata: an die mitternachtfreude - more like a calm
before taking up the arms.

Read, watched, Listened for snippets
Wore the buttons,
Devoured anything…
Apartheid

Had my own personal
Bedroom Revolution...
Jumped high…In place… with the best of them
Little balled up fists…
Pumping…
Chanted the chants
Sang the song

Freeee-ee Nelson Mandelaaaa
Freeee-ee Nelson Mandelaaaa

And I meant it!  
Oh My God I meant it from my
young revolutionary soul
Cried adolescent girl cries
For our South African brothers and sisters
All of the martyrs
Known and unknown

STOP APARTHIED!
STOP APARTHIED!

Free Nelson Mandela!!

To this very day

I love me some Nelson Mandela

Love the man he is
Mourn the man he was
Big Fine Educated Pugilistic
African
Man
Passionate
Compassionate
On that serious mission

Who, though technically still breathing upon his release, in reality
Gave his life
To promote the cessation of
An idea more merciless even than the Rwandan genocide
In that Death
Seldom came quickly
A system more sadistic even than the African Slave Trade
In that it was not based economically

Therefore ALL the
“Kaffers”
Could be maimed or die
And it wouldn’t cost a thing…
Monetarily speaking

A society wherein
Each Black death  
Someone’s Job… or
Someone’s Entertainment
Every atrocity’s purpose to serve only to
Douse fuel on the already
Brightly burning fire of
Hate and torture and hate

I love Nelson Mandela

For making like David
And having the *****
To take on the Goliath
Apartheid

Satan is creative
His minions resourceful
We will never know the indignities;
Can only imagine the violations
My Nelson was forced to endure
Imprisoned for 27 years

I love
Nelson Mandela
For having the strength
To keep living
When so many others couldn’t
Still able to put
One
In front of
The other
Albeit gingerly
But still locomoting
Out of hell
On his own two feet…
That alone makes him a hero
To me

In my heart he will always be
The

Big
Fine
Educated
Pugilistic
Passionate
Compassionate
Hero
­
That the young revolutionary in me
sings about…

i could be an alcoholic is i simply drank...
fair enough, completely docile and
   enslaved by an addiction,
but the mere fact that i utilise this potion
for ulterior purposes says something
other than merely the fact that i drink.

we live in a world where half of the world's
believers are enforcing a monotheism,
and where half the world doesn't understand
that it has, sort of lost touch with
the prefix *mono...
                                  i can understand both
sides of the story, and both are rooted in
a globalisation agenda... a unification
that's a supposition with the already established
presupposition of: two worlds colliding
and an alien invasion akin to the meteor
and the dinosaurs, which we thankfully
reinvented with the atom bomb... ****!
i feel like that talking Gremlin in part deux
that gets to do the news anchor post...
it's a self-conscious moment within that
trans-whatever feat of realising something...
ok ok (Leo Getz), you cut your nibbly parts off
i get to wear a leather-gimp suit and talk
a load of *******, how's that?
Islam is not only practising the fledgling
model of monotheism, but given it borrowed
the omni model for a deity, it's stating that
even the Chinese need to speak Arabic:
monotheism within omni parameters translates
as omni-phonos (we all speak the same
language)... the English tug-warfare to implement
this has seen the Arabic retaliation...
my solution: poverty stricken Marx would also
had said this (not that i'm alluding to anything
economically restricted): i've got whiskey
and trance massaging my ear-drums, what the hell!
    i can only see one alternative to the current
zeitgeist distaste to Islamic monotheism / mono-phoneticism...
  the optic-phoneticism is too archaic for Europeans,
they need a lot of wheels, cartwheels and voids
to located like a feline behaviour within undisturbed
autistic kindrence: better left undisturbed
less it be found in a third ***** darting motion -
given that Islam is both a monotheistic model
            and a mono-linguistic model (linguistics:
where optics and sounds collide) you will
find the old monotheistic guardians bewildered
where they're going wrong... the fact being:
a Jew might tell you that some people haven't
integrated properly (the rebel news outlet):
it really doesn't matter what language you speak
at home, as long as you speak the correct language
at a supermarket... to actually force people to speak
the native language at home is ******* tiresome...
this is the next generation of migrants,
the generation prior had parents completely discarding
their native tongue, so that they might propel their
children to higher positions in society,
well applause to them, but that's like a polite way
of saying: ethnic cleansing...
    now, there's another generation of children who's
parents didn't dictate such rules for the simple
   dislike of feeling awkward... the children that dictated:
we're keeping this language, just in case.
       of course my cognitive realm has built a spider-web
of ease in the acquired tongue: that's my soul
on pixel paper... but my body? i'll speak English
when i encounter and English person...
you flay the ******* donkey, i'm not going to bother.
truly this technique will not provide you
a zoo of cultural diversity with rap and the next
thing coming... but within the work ethic of:
work ennobles... you also won't get
                     terrorist attacks... so that's all Le Chatelier's
principle right there, in front of you.
     it's the part that suggests that i can only be
fully integrated into a society once i do a Michael
Jackson on my tongue, and basically bleach my
roots and call all tree roots leech-chwasty /
weeds. you'd think that bilingualism would benefit
society... apparently it doesn't when society tries
to look pretty on the outside: and termite infested
in terms of possessing a soul: hence the sometimes
odd materialism that suggests you shouldn't buy
a book for $60.            
  which is what relates this piece to answer the current
militant monotheism with its stance on pursuing
a mono-phoneticism: mono-lingua.
             for the old monotheisms to wake up,
they have to embrace bilingualism... i'm not talking
the exceptions of polymaths,
i'm talking the Benelux & Scandinavian practices...
if you people from those proud nations of post-imperialistic
glory remain in their indolence to learn something,
they'll attract bothersome flies of Islam...
   these monotheistic elders of Christianity and Judaism
can't simply waved a star of david or the crucifix about
at primitive natives of north / south america:
i actually cringe at white New Zealanders dancing
the hakka with their tribal tattoos... i, cringe.
     these "monotheisms" can only retain a moral "superiority"
by establishing a bilingualism -
     because isn't that what the whole point of the trinity
is? that the third "person" of the trinity cannot be
personified, but is rather collectivised?
                     that the existence of the Paraclete
would dissolve any chance of a Christian community?
         i already said once: the notion of the Paraclete
is as diabolical as what has already passed,
    the anti             and diffused in the existence of antimatter.
that really was a Greek touch to the whole story,
starting with the atomists.
        these ancient monotheisms have already being
polytheistic within the groundwork of polyphony,
a Bulgarian says something, an Egyptian Coptic
copies him, an Anglican says something else,
                        a Spanish cardinal nods at something else...
so i could say that Christianity is a "polytheism"
due to the fact of the polyphonic nature of the message...
Islam on the other hand is mono on the side of theology
and mono on the side of phoneticism...
                   Christianity as a monotheism is
mono on the side of theology, but poly on the side of
phoneticism... hence the vacuum of power...
but as already stated: the Benelux and Scandinavian
model of a well established bilingualism
                       has made former colonial nations seem
like neanderthals... which they are... all the more funny
to still proceed to popularise a 19th century theory...
no wonder the turmoil and bewilderment;
they simply haven't evolved: and they talk of evolution
like it was uniformed around their belly-button
gravity of pulling the entire world to look at their ****.

let's have a game of reverse-phraseology....

man up...

   hmm... let's see what i can conjure
up, within this, gender-neutrality...

how about...

  that old english saying...

buckle down,
    buckle up / knuckle down?
  (i never know which
is the correct phrase -
clench your hand into a fist,
or lose weight -
   or, tighten them
for a bumpy ride).

   take the knuckles
to the grit / sandpaper...

   how's that?

any bwetter?
            no?
   oh ooh um, ah...
          
            i thought these people
were into gender neutral pronouns...
which, oddly, enough,
have to also be singular and plural
neutral:
  
last time i checked: they...
referred to a plural description
of gender neutrality, to begin with...

but hell! ha ha ha ha ha!
we can play this game, all day,
and all night, long...

       but NOW, for a wild idea...
how can you enforce the adrenaline
junk from being stabbed,
not anticipating a stabbing?

i guess... i guess you have to heat
up the knife...
   so there's a warm butter sensation
ascribed to the flesh...
               flesh...
  i like that word...
     i can almost imagine
a slaughterhouse,
   with raw pork in full attire of
a corpse, dangling off the hooks...

and that believable scent,
outside of a Parisian perfume factory
attached: what if i fried this,
exponent of a gutted pork torso?

- and why isn't bush-meat
prohibited in the Qu'ran?
    pork? the most economically constructed
animal in the history of:
anti-vegeterianism anti-veganism...

      rats are, apparently, omnivores...
my neighbor owns four albino rats,
saved from a testing laboratory...
seen one ******, scuttle the garden
looking for a labyrinth
to be experimented on...

oh i love the tease of policing language...
man up contra
            buckle down...
you just sizzle...
   imitating a rattlesnake with
your tongue on trilling the R
with that kind of ****...
   you really end up wanting to poke,
and poke...
    at this sort of genesis phraseology...
with either a reversion,
or an inversion...

i'd prefer you to allow me to exercise
my right for compelled speech,
in which "manning up" is degraded
from the casual phraseology attainment,
and that the old school
english buckling down
is used...

      man? up? there's nothing copernican
about that expression...
please... can you excuse
my politically correct counterpart
to be allowed a phraseology blunder?

we too, are for gender neutrality
in... bashing a man down...
   we call "them" the brash knuckles
brushing off of preconceived
sexuality indicators...

    no blue boy, no pink girl...
no tractor boy, no Barbie girl...
               but there is no...
  "manning up"...
         WE UZ A PEOPLEZ' PEOPLE...
A PEOPLEZ' **** TANK...
running low... on thought -
or whatever the once glorified
moral ought used to be...
   mahatma mah'gandhi -
liked the name for one reason...
see how the H appears and disappears
in the nouns?
   it's there's at mahatma...
but... turned surd in gand(h)i...
   i don't even know why it's not a surd
in (h)indi -
   so blue blue, i'm blue...
      
extensive culinary and musical
traditions kept them afloat,
from biting the razor,
   when drowning...
   and not, exactly, opening
      the oompa-loompa casinos.

Another enchanting "Barry Hodges Memory" poem for you all!

O glorious Art Deco edifice, tucked away behind the 'Dilly!
In your near century of hospitality, how many millions of visitors
Must have thronged your rooms, meeting, greeting, eating, sleeping
And (need I specify the obvious?) ******* away the fleeting hours?
How sad it is to think that the dear Regent Palace has fallen victim
To the money-grabbing developers' philistine wrecking *****.

Rumour came to me in the Seventies that the ground floor cocktail bar
Had gained a somewhat , shall we say, *louche reputation,
Being frequented by ladies of the night and part-time gigolos;
And that the hustle and bustle of the reception area meant that
Staff would hardly notice if guests invited a newly made friend upstairs
For some horizontal entertainment, be it on a cash or ex gratia basis.

Several evenings, perhaps after a night at the theatre, I paid a brief visit
To the dimly lit bar, with its sophisticated black pianist tinkling out a tune
In the very best Casablanca tradition, perhaps even crooning a little ditty.
One summer night I recall I dropped in, probably post-prandially
More in hope than serious expectation, ordered an over-priced G&T;
And settled down to assess the odds on some casual leg-over action.

Much to my surprise I was soon joined by a large middle-aged blonde
(to a naive young chappie, any woman over 35 is no spring chicken);
She was Icelandic and big with it in the mammary department,
But not fat I hasten to add, just sturdy, like a splendid Wagnerian Valkyrie;
Yea, I knew she was gagging for it when she confided that, only last week,
She had shared l'amour with a young stranger in the Wienerwald al fresco.

I cannot recall much of our no doubt fascinating intellectual conversation
And I certainly can't remember her name, but I do know I readily acquiesced
To her generous invitation to participate in a glug of her duty free allowance
Within the intimate privacy of her spartan little bedroom on the seventh floor.
Delightfully, to my mild pleasure, our upwards journey in the crowded lift
Enticed her to caress my eager testicles in a heart-warmingly experienced way.

Over a malt whisky and, following an extended exchange of warm saliva,
We ended up stark ******* naked in the rather narrow single bed;
Sadly, my recollections of our coupling have gone the way of all flesh
(but my well-preserved diary for that year notes I gave her the works thrice)
And I do vividly remember wondering what time the Underground started
on Sunday mornings as I was no longer enamoured of her tobacco breath.

Now, dear reader, we come to the ****** of my night of Nordic nookie:
Just as the dawn's early light was filtering through the ill-fitting curtains,
My partner in lust informed me that she desperately needed a squirt
(I fear I omitted to mention that the RPH didn't run to en suite facilities)
And that, rather than struggle down the corridor to the communal bogs,
She intended to void her bloated bladder in the waiting washbasin.

She enjoined me to be a gentleman and to refrain from watching her
As she performed her toilette and I assured her, with a covert smile,
That I would not breach her urinary modesty. Thus I slyly observed her
Waltz over to the window and, with the assistance of a handy little chair,
Hoist her ample buttocks up on the basin and let fly her steaming ****;
O, what a romantic sound it made as it splashed onto the porcelain!

As I lay there, entranced by the sight of my piddling blonde Brünnhilde,
An unexpected sound intruded over the splatter of her seething waters:
O Jesu! Suddenly, in the veritable twinkling of an eye, the basin's supports,
Unequal to the unscheduled weight of the female Goliath squatting thereon,
Gave way and what's-her-name fell to the economically carpeted floor,
Screaming in fear, spread-eagled in ****-drenched shattered chinaware.

To say I was beside myself with mirth would be an understatement but,
Gentlemanly as always, I managed to pass off my gargled giggles
As evidence of gallant concern. As soon as common decency permitted,
I made my excuses and left the disconcerted dear to tidy up a bit.
But I will confess to emitting a huge howl of uncontrolled laughter
As I raced off to the nearest toilet (I too was bursting for a huge slash).

A square, white, four bedroom, one bath country home
With fourteen kids, parents and much family love
We didn’t have abundance:  fiscally poor
But we had each other:  banked on our family
We shared our victories and or trying pain
We were a modest Scottish Catholic Clan

Isolated, we were not to our immediate clan
Our uncle’s lived within a trot, fifteen in his home
We kids worked and played on the farm without pain
It was an adventurous labor of extended family love
We worked, laughed, cried, and played as a family
In the early years, we young ones were anything but poor

However, in grammar school, we learned the meaning of poor
And materialism and envy, outside our cloistered clan
But together we lived and loved as a close nit family
Sure we had disagreements, not material goods, but a solid home
White paint peeled on the outside, yet inside was painted love
Still, there were poverty jokes, ridicule and masked pain

Every family has strife, baggage, and superfluous pain
Our parents didn’t drink; we had faith, yet fiscally poor
Ole Dad plumbed toilets; Mom slaved in the house, both with love
So we wouldn’t trade riches for our impoverished meager clan
Summer berries to pick, winter sledding, spring kites, and forever home
Kickball games, splashing  in ponds, nature hikes and family

We were not taught to show emotions, hug, not an “I love you family,”
Albeit, an honest, polite, and proud Scottish Clan
The old house was eternally warm; it was our forever home
Until 1999. Dad passed from cancer still money poor
Yet rich in the knowledge of family and that his true pain
Was never saying that word; on his deathbed he whispered “Love”

Though our patriarch was laid to rest, we rose with the word “Love”
Eventually, the house was sold, but always one huge family
Mom spends her days in a retirement home remembering her clan
As time passes and memories fades, it lessens the pain
Of the loss of a noble father, economically poor
Yet with a strong work ethic, church, and love, built a home

Fourteen children now forged fourteen homes on love
Many, still, financially poor, but rich in forever family
Correcting mistakes that caused pain, while perpetuating our clan

OOO!
He is worried!
Again!

the Mr. Perfectionist.

It’s almost Carnival but
He hasn't yet got a mask

with specifics
outlining
his ballads
and jests
he
surly lists his bests
in two principle steps
of CAPS :

1)  
* Feeds the Bats and
* Tempts the Charms

2)
* Cheap N Handy
* Quixotic but Scary
* Not too Trendy

and he cries

Yuck!  
EW!
Husky!

What's worse than
a self-adoring pathetic bat
in my whereabouts!

I can't get the stink and shrill so I help him fast

'Yo what's the worry!'

-I say friendly -

'you need not hurry
cause I think you already are ready!'

-I continue enthusiastically-

'Here! Try this one
My top design
Custom fit chemistry
A truly  NO Risk Recipe
and of course
Specially designed for you! '

'for you for youuu
   to echolocate
such is an eye-gaze
for the half-blind
such is sound
a vibration that propagates
in ears and brains of pretty gulls
and of course
only  for youuu'

-  I sing loud a common bat ad just to stimulate
my client and continue- merrily explaining my serviceable recipe

for 2)

Wear your white shirt just
...as always

the one I know
you know?
the webbed one
weaving grace
and don't forget to
iron it well this time.

for 1)

Put on your true face!
I reckon then
and can guarantee
...as always
no one will ever recognize you .

In a flight he disappears glad and I hope he won't show up till next year
What can you do I say to myself and quote a encyclopedic fact about my client.
All things have a place, you don't really need to like them but these ones pollinate flowers and disperse fruit seeds and they are economically important as they consume insect pests reducing need for pesticides.  

I say while I ventilate my head with an OM mantra and an incense stick
Bah what a stink what a stink...

AMERICA, THE BEAUTIFUL?

Were you aware that our nation opposed Haiti's revolution for democracy in the early 1800s; that our nation's war against Mexico that began in 1846 resulted in our taking half of Mexico for ourselves; that our nation defeated Spain ostensibly to liberate Cuba, but actually established a military base on the island and furtively gained de facto control of its puppet government; that our nation seized Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and Guam; that our nation had fought a brutal war to subjugate the Phillipines; that our nation had opened Japan for trade with us with threats and gunboats; that our nation created an "Open Door" policy with China to exploit it economically; that our nation engineered a revolution against Colombia to create the nation of Panama so we could build the canal through it; that our nation sent 5,000 Marines in 1926 to Nicaragua to counter their democratic revolution; that our nation in 1916 intervened in the Dominican Republic for the fourth time; that our nation in 1915 intervened in Haiti for the second time, and so on. Imperialism, not democracy, steered our nation's decisions and movements.

Did any of you learn about, let alone study extensively, any of these flagitious Ameican acts and policies as you sat and squirmed in your high school American history class? My surmise is that you did not. But I bet you were required in at least one of your classrooms sometime between 1st and 12th grade to stand at attention, as it were, and recite the Pledge of Allegiance as you saluted the flag in the corner. My riposte: What does it matter if our flags are waving, if our spirits are flagging?

Epilogue: Most importantly, never forget that it was the two evils of slavery and genocide that propelled our nation into what once was the most influential nation on Earth.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks

if god is dead,
then poetry is nought: but suicide.

could it be the evermore question, a year from now
the same autumn will rinse the lands of once budding colour,
and stretch, as the eye can see, the witry skeletons,
where once the birds nested their young in bulbs of harvested
twigs  bundled up? for what if the wintry tree, if not
the last remnants of the airs of spring,
a lizardly womb of flight...
   so the paupers of Rome argue
about the benefits of monogamy,
as they might about monotheism...
and they say monogamy is not "natural",
but what is? why take the burden of
a widower swan, why extract monogamy from
swans and later find the harem of monkeys?
and then simply say: it be unnatural... why?
we were never gracious enough to mirror
swans, hence the brothers Grimm and the
ugly duckling mistook...
        oh wagers of the translated Graeae
of Scotland, where it Hamlet on the couch,
or where it Macbeth?
what matters is how populist media makes
a franchise of a form of athletics that cannot bed
a guised look of despondency -
      puritan saxon conference on sexuality
that gone beyond the ******* use:
***** therefore thinking,
            flaccid therefore not thinking...
you can utilise language to a point where mathematical
certainty is given, as is the missing blemish of
woad... no wonder the Saxon maidens
    retain their virginity at home,
but treat themselves for a nibble of the Magdalene
on the isle of Malaga... puritanism disintegrates
2 weeks in...
                   and still they bemoan,
if they have been growing more and more depressed
since the second world war...
                why allow them to create this viral infection
that's like a virus ingested by unsuspecting
       victims... are they not the ones
prescribing premature depression since they
heaved no foetus in their womb?
          and having done so, are clear of the command:
remove that alien **** from me!
   aren't they?
       if god is dead... all those who write poetry
have committed suicide...
           i once made a lament statement:
given that god is dead, then so is poetry,
i don't which is more lamentable...
but i'm sure to spot a few more eager-beavers of
kneeling and prayer than i'm to see poets...
and can i return to the heights having sunk so low?
      evidently i didn't sulk on my way down,
could poetry ever be tamed with no populist
acrimony? no *auld lang syne?
      i doubt it...              i very much doubt
a care for anything else sing-along astute than that,
for all i can compete with, is, some sort
of individual... a shadowy statuette...
         it's what's called the reverse of having a heart
for the cardiologist, a brain for the neurosurgeon,
a pathology for the psychiatrists,
  an ambition for the philosopher (mistook them
as humanists you have, for those that are simply
relegated from the realms of language by linguists) -
  for the oncologist that's hardly an ontologist....
swans epitome monogamy with the widower...
apes are Islam with the harem...
          and they say gods do not exist...
but if one sees no god, how is one to replica
a god's existence, if man borrows from the purest
sense of plagiarism that hides no legal documents
enforcing a slack on plagiarism, namely that of anima /
animal? man cannot grasp a concept of god
by sacrificing himself on the altar of imitable animal...
swans have their monogamy... man too presumptuous
also chose swans as the guiding beacon...
softened core, a mongrel of mammal and lizard
that the birds became... furry but borne from
a cracking of the eggshell... man too presumptuous...
he looked elsewhere to no visionary guide since
Narcissus: for mythology is the guiding hand of
new poetry, should god be indeed dead, and poetry
akin to that statement be merely suicide...
then at least mythology is equivalent of history
for poetry... at least there is a logic involved..
   for assuredly should god be dead,
and chlorophyll as pointless as the logic of bio:
be that of life outside one's own graphic or within
one's graphic... should life be nothing more
than the tactless usurping of history that is merely
a blank hole between the omni toward a speciem,
then why have we bothered recording history?
of all scientific theories, of all that rampantly
degrade all human dignity, why create a despotism
within science, that constantly repeats itself
to be overvalued, for reasons that suggests:
en masse applicability due to its pictorial invigoration
for a cruising simplicity? i gather this be a reason
for the emergence of technophobes, or men equipped
to war armed with nothing but sticks!
it's one thing to popularise an idea, later morphed
into a theory, then morphed into an ideology
(an idea that recurs persistently and has no
theoretical basis to not succumb to its theoretical
premise of becoming dodo - the theory of evolution
doesn't take into context the notion that it too can
become extinct... surpassed by something more
invigorating)... later morphed into a shiva
construct that destroys itself...
          we've seen 20th century's pinnacle of this
idea... we've seen eugenics emerge from a pristine
monkish background that said: how best
to economise the case of: the accurate *****-count...
is Darwinism the zenith of invigorating man?
              i find it's too arrogant to even imagine
a square tilting into a rhombus...
       suggesting a rectangle...
       but the days of roaming the Savannah are long gone
and past us... the dependency on oil and gas
and central heating has created a prison-like Akeley...
from what we've inherited, toward what we can
expect, or with suspicion: demand.
            and to think having begun erasing history,
and to think, having erased history of what's noteworthy,
we turned the slapped cheek into a cubist abstraction:
it seems pointless naming pubs after Charlemagne
(shar-le-maine) let alone singing about them...
let's all celebrate running ****-naked on a Kenyan
plateau... and rather than dealing with the past
on a poetic scale... rather: on a literalist scaling of things...
it's almost like biblical literalism kinetics....
     in either case: everyday poetry dies...
or as the case is minded to refresh the argument:
    with the death of god, poetry committed suicide...
i don't know which is the more tragic evidence
of what language has become...
                     this doesn't even invoke an analysis
of the marketplace use of language that politics is...
god forbid it should ever come to that...
  aren't we supposed to feel something otherworldly
at some point in our lives?
                     it's not that i can't rationalise my existence
into this world alone... and feel all the contentment
i need by mere concern for thought trickling into my
being within it...
            it's just that i can't rationalise my existence within
this world alone, based upon a hierarchical
          symptom... much akin to Guy "Lucifer" Fawkes
tried to state by blowing the houses of parliament...
which doesn't suggest a need for a celestial conjuring
of dictator... man has already encouraged that
with English 24/7 c.c.t.v.,
                                                   and as might be suggested...
the point you reach when catching yourself trying
to persuade or enforce a point...
         that lacks all emotive sensitivity hoping for
a romantic excavation invoking the zeitgeist of the times...
neo-romantics are on the rise...
                            we do live in a time of neo-romanticism,
as a few might have suggested: globalisation's
and the audaciousness of militant Islam's offspring:
lying dormant, like a speech by Pope Urban II:
     it just lay there, under a fog of submerged Calvinism
and secular sensibility... waiting patiently
        till the nibbling stopped and it had a chance
to counter... it truly was a case of Damocles' seconds...
tick-tock, tick-tock... and thus the guillotine dropped;
you could feel the carcass stench in the air
         or what cultural-marxisim would make of
an economy that attacked its own economic model...
  it would be deemed dead economically,
but culturally? resurgent...
         you could sniff it out in the air, that rotting
carcass menu: providing a wake of vultures,
                                  or a comedy house of hyenas.

See it's easy to rap about
The ghetto
When u don't live in ghetto
We got blacks raps
Takin us back
And got whites makin fun
Of our slacks
You see it's apart of plan
To destroy society
Without the use of hands
Instead words laid over instrumentals
Once the voice is planted
It can become influential
Or detrimental
See thirty eight years ago
The ghetto was bout surviving police
Brutality and violence
And uprising of black unison
But it wasn't until ****** crack ******* from our beloved government
Entered the scene it became
A reality nightmare
Far from King 's
dream pushed away from teams
*** we wanted to be the next dope king
Pin enjoyin sin punishing pur women men and children
But we're helping the establishment
With the destruction of our race
We can't even look each other in the face
Yet we cry its about race
Yes socially mentality and economically
But in actuality the hood locality
Is where most of the hatred be
I see my folks walk around
Looking at me
Like I'm the reason behind slavery
And they mugg me
But don't mug the p-o-l-i-c-e
Feel me so duck the ghetto
The pimps the hoes
The dope the jewels the clothes
Its nothing but holes
In a womb far from being patched up
Wake up and let's abrupt
And stop letting stereotypes corrupt
Our mindset
We natural born warriors
our existence is fearful
Enough towards them
So let this marinate to ya temple
And stop being so love struck
By the
**** luxury of the ghetto

And the Hippy-dippy,
Squeaky-clean -
The tattoo'd-up
And arrogantly mean;
The never-know originality,
Mere followers of others:
Take comfort in crowds,
Talking amongst their "brothers".

Neither God-fearing,
Nor Devil-may-carers -
Just followers of fashions:
The latest and greatest,
Economically-driven
Sheep to a register's beep!
And when they die -
As they must -
To whom do they fall?
And to whom do they trust?

Women Stereotypes
10w40
This is so popular, proven to have high performance even if it is synthetic. That does not make any sense realistically. It strokes engines brilliantly. The most expensive even on sale. It does not deter dirt.

3 in 1
The lubricant  can be trusted the fact that it dries quicker, penetrating the stuck locks as well preventing further corrosion.

Exotic Graphite
As exotic as graphite is, it does a good job by providing a long lasting lubrication. It repels water too! It’s cheaper that the rest and it extends life. It makes a proper logic economically. You pay less but get more!

Lubricant Affordability**
3in1 and graphite deter dust and are cheaper than 10W40.

Does that make you more ambivalent?... ;0)

Anticlimax lubricant  ambivalence has reached it’s ******.
Armed downhill by the rusted adjusted shielded knight.
Pasted in exquisite oil, no distaste or aftertaste.
Dunked in abluent..........Dented but affluent!

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that no man is an island, whole unto himself/herself.

Every person needs to feel safe to express his or her desires in as open and direct manner as is available.

Each person should be told what is expected of them, and what can be done in the case said expectations cannot be met.

Each person should be encouraged to pursue his or her own interests and given the tools necessary to do so.

The striving of each person is as important as the collective aim of all mankind.

We believe in a world which achieves its goals through the focused, deliberate behavior of determined agents.

Any person striving against another’s interest or aim should declare their reasons for doing so.

No person should secretly plot against another.

All motivation for action should be weighed against the public good, and all actors should be held responsible for behavior directly hostile to the betterment of one’s neighbors.

One should act with the mindful awareness of the impacts his or her actions could have on the other.

We are indebted to each other’s needs and desires for our very existence, as it is the movement of the commodity market which ensures our existence and this is dictated to a large extent by real human demands.

We are dependent on one another to use resources wisely and economically, bearing in mind that waste threatens the survival of our species.

Being the bearers of a legacy stretching back to the haze of pre-history, and an even longer biological chain of inheritance, we as humans, are dependent on each other for a collective understanding and appreciation of the world.

Without wasting time, we must acknowledge that it is in our best interest to act deliberately, without giddy outbursts of petulant exasperation, to solve the problems that our mutual dependence creates.

There is no alternative to the necessity of working together to understand and amend the dire circumstances of our existence.

All lines are controversial
Average performance is extremely intelligent,
My answer to the riddle is this God never wrote fables
In the bible, Qur’an, Gita, Ramayana, Dini ya Musambwa
Nor anything you will mention that amount to mankind's
Mental peregrinations in search for God.
Jewish literature in the form of the bible
Is strongly successful as a misleading literature
And firmly founded in racial prejudice.
Similarly the Qur'an is Arabic adjustment
Of Jewish literature in the bible.
The Apocryphal of them all is enigmatic.
The sons of Asia are dangerously gifted in literature
And their epics often form religion, think of Tagore’s poem
That became Indian nation anthem,
Karl Marx's das kapitel that became revolutionary religion
Blue print or even Gautama's sermons recited by Jesus Christ
Six hundred years later as a sermon on the mountain.
Now; to me Asians must stop racial chauvinism
And accept humanity as there are very many human beings
Who are living away from Jerusalem and are prosperous
Both economically and spiritually, take a case of Vatican.
In my faith therefore, God himself
will give Jerusalem to African immigrants in Palestine and Israel,
Because Abraham was a refugee in Africa,
Ishmael was born in Africa; Jesus was a refugee in Africa
And even a Libyan; Simon the Cyrene helped him
To carry the ominous Roman cross, doen to Calvary
Thus, Christianity is founded on the innocent misery of an African race.

i think i chose the wrong artistic medium
to express myself,
i'm expressing, that's undoubted,
but as we all know success in the marketplace
needs you to be tacky, cheap,
ready for the tourist memorabilia,
too many professions attacked poetry,
first the philosophers, then the psychiatrists,
it became a beehive of femininity and teaching;
no, i definitely chose the wrong medium,
there's no raw product, the un-popularity
of poetry is due to the memory-market of
vocabulary, there are no raw materials used,
no paints or brushes, just backward experiences
used for the banking of investment,
poetry is either cheap or priceless,
a poet can confuse someone like a tarantula
what a philosopher must do in dialogue or paragraph.
my father was never taught german,
i rekindle the strangeness of germany on the autobahns,
eerie feelings feed the warmth of former home;
and they do, every winter i remember travelling east
from west germany always appealed to me for its
melancholia unforced where rome's light never shone,
britain is the perfect historical satellite,
it's moaning like a ***** when rome ***** her
and she becomes nostalgic... the ideal ***** i say,
she wishes rome's return like a boomerang.
'killed the wallaby?'
'aye and koala too.'
'**** the Tasmanian devil?'
'if only there was an angel to counter
freckled ****-in-boots readied dodo.'
capitalism is really heavy on poetic shoulders,
given that poetry doesn't sell, it's a near-identity of
dodo, near extinction, what will remain of poetry
in terms of language expressing poetic technique is rhyme,
the other rhetoric, rhyme the other rhetoric, sounds good,
nothing like couplets making you speak more, or more
persuasively: and all will be song, and no volatile
singled-out voice in the wilderness speaking,
whether actual with honey and locust diet
or homed wilderness of click click pixel algorithm.
poetry is almost like classical music these days,
with bach's wedding cake layering: there's a difference
concerning poetry and classical music:
classical music is almost non-vox, whereas poetry
is almost pure vox,
polyphony must be translated - the layering,
poetry must listen to bach, instead of sounds it
must be a poly- of subject matters, after all polyphony
is impossible given symbiotic otherwise chiral
resemblance: cat, kettle, knife (silent k),
                        psychology (silent p), gnostic (silent g)
                        pseudo (silent p), wrath (silent w), etc.
πολoιθεμα (many subjects, rather than sounds if poetry
was music, but it isn't): anecdote,
in england your ability to engage many subjects in
a conversation (the only antidote to engage with dialectics)
is summarised and thanked for by: you need a girlfriend;
good to be appreciated.
poetry has to change, it can't be as monochromatic and scarce
as it allowed itself to be, it has become akin to atlas
holding up the globe of the monochromatic theme of love,
modern poetry idealises too much, itself not the ideal medium,
after all, poets don't invest in oil paint, canvases,
brushes, studios, these compact artists need to escape
the sheered sheep laziness when engaging with the world,
first of all, they need the shield of honesty,
and a sword cutting through their comfort zone of scarceness
duping them into an adequacy of expected productivity.
and what will keep πολoιθεμα sustained?
the once famous enemy and murderer of poets, kant,
and the concept that fuels this poetic project:
per se, poetry has to become a relief, tentacles of an octopus,
range beyond the vector of safe coordination,
the only subject of relevance of poets is poetry in itself,
make poetry scarce in terms of aesthetics... but make
it distracting, distracting enough to be engaging.
what i mean by the poetic aesthetic is that
it's written with scarceness in my - but so much
blank space is left for so little wording,
it's almost like a telescope enlarging a needle-head,
of course you can keep it terse, keep it neat,
but will you vouch to keep it remotely relevant?
prose is far more economically sound in terms
of ink use and two-dimensional wood compressed,
it's economic to write prose, and less economic
to write poetry, and due to a forced interaction
with poetry, many more songs are heard
by impasse of laziness than poems are uvula coupled
for a sunday feast: where sabbath laziness was replaced
with a need for prayer; odd.
see these gesticulating lunatics before a non-existent
subject they poured so much attention at,
so many subjects appear so the non-existent object
can be gratified in the mimic or mute fluency:
not a sound mind among them, yet still the need to
assert some direction worthy of both prayer and
sacrifice... their salah is like a whirlwind of
cognitive contraception: put a ****** on your head
and be safeguarded against the thought of
refrigerators / frozen meats... and with prayer
all hope withstanding cancer; ******* lunatics;
islam is the best example of prayer, i could handle
the christian need for ******* at the stump of the crucifix,
but muslims mumble when raising their *****
to be ****** by shadow satans, and it's peculiar
to see them in their psychiatric asylum known as the mosque
freely going about their daily business
(personal reasons for criticism - given the pervasive
spirit of a few that tried to convert me, one that
almost killed me - and this need to be literate from
only one book, rather than many - this inherent
perception of a superiority of any monotheism,
which evidently implodes and provides schisms,
a bit like a w. b. yeats poem: things fall apart;
                                            the centre cannot hold).

                                                         *θ = φ.

(10/25/12)

The black days of history that many do not know
And many refuse to accept - of how the black man
Helped AMERICA to be the greatest country yet.

They was brought here as slaves because the
Color of their skin !
But their minds was never searched to see
What lied within.

Every ethnic group that came to the states
Had many a hardship that they had to face.
Every race that came was given a derogatory name
Which they had to accept and had felt the shame.

But they all contributed to this great nation of ours
Which is now known as the greatest power.
These are just a few facts of what the blacks
Had given to this nation, and many of these
Became part of our salvation.

FACTS: )1)  john love- invented the pencil sharpener in 1897
2) Joseph lee -invented a bread making machine that mixed
The ingredients and kneaded the dough in 1895
3) Thomas l Jennings was the first African American to receive
A patent in 1821 which was for a dry cleaning process.
He used the money earned from his patent to purchase
Relatives out of slavery and support abolitionist causes.
4) madam c.j. walker (1867-1919) daughter of a former slave
Who suffered hair loss in her twenties and created hair care
Products , and allowed her to open a factory and school to
Train hundreds of black women to be economically self sufficient
And become one of the first female millionaires in U.S. history.

There is still something that burns in my heart
And when I think of it -it tears me apart
Of all the people  in this great nation
That have been put to the ground
There lies one race that still lives
Way below the poverty line and
The government says there doing fine.

The “AMERICAN INDIAN”  who had
Most all treaties broken and of this the
Government hasn’t spoken.

Many families of five and more
Living in a shack without a door
Just a blanket to stop the wind
To me this is a crying sin.

The Indian charities having to buy
fifty five gallon drums for water
And many of them on “back order”.

I know that I started writing this poem for the blacks
But on the Indian nations - I can’t turn my back.
We have to help one another, for we’re all
Sister and brother.

GOD BLESS US ALL

© L . RAMS