Sundays, too, she got up early and let her feet lead her through the dusty alleys of that small town
It was a luxury to have this kind of time alone, silence was vital food for her soul  
Enduring the weekday demands to relish a few hours of nothingness, rare meditation,
An escape from a world of momentary necessity
The sweet morning air that kissed one’s skin now turned heavy and stagnant
Back down again through the same storied streets that,  
Had become unbearably hot by the noon-day sun, the pace of life slowed accordingly  
A weight came over her, the sort of fatigue where every exhaustible cell in your body yearns for rest
She would wander all day if she could, meandering over ground hallowed by history  
By now the shadows of the afternoon had casted their long, lanky bodies behind the old chalk buildings
The pulse of life reached a complete pause, as if away on vacation in a more hospitable place
Everything bent, decaying, surrendering to the heat, and everything marked in contrast by the sun’s glare
Here, she stands straight and strong, gazing into the burning face of the oppressor and giver of life
And deny it the desire to win this vague war of attrition
When rung out on the floor she’d smell of autumn and satisfaction
Speaking to me she’ll tell of the faith in self, strength in solitude, and love of something greater than we dare to know.

Nine months after I was born, the Twentieth Century began to collapse.
East Berlin,graffiti-mural concrete, a jutted enigma scratched
on ordinance maps, the sort found
landscaping westernized Primary School walls.
Where within, labored in real time, the television told my parents
(and everyone else given to social conservation in 1989) that a wall falling down
would bring an end to the gap between the working and the working poor.
Freedom waited for many on the other side.
But of course, History draws up different plans.

Never content to just go out with a bash, or to
fleetingly drift by leaving
in its absence an underwhelmed lull
The bloodiest century yet
left the new world entrenched
in an odyssey of hatreds
handed down from the past
right about the time human suffering became a bit dull
and the peaceful countries were too busy
tripling their money instead.

What does History really teach us and what are the real benefits
of being free, or freer than you were before?
Human ambition, which burns it way out of any oasis of calm,
which calls children out of sleeping in the night
Always seeks out the exhaustible
An inveterate Black sheep leading astray
the ever susceptible ****** lamb
Delusion’s strange bedfellows are the worthiest adversaries
to run away from, to reserve contrition for.

Unlike the inevitability of uprooted animal migration
during a monsoon swell
Can a people with an invested addiction
to the pursuit of happiness
Ever truly be prepared
for the inevitability of rapid change?

Sidestepping shadow-plays
boxed in bonus-sized portions
for garden-varietal religions,
I've had these scuzzy intimations
great big (voids) lie behind
most altruistic inclinations
and the biggest news is,
we're still expanding
with-in-exhaustible potentials
to be eternally filled greater.

Now I'll admit to being
hampered in my cognitive
capacity for meaningful
pattern recognition
by my debilitating
predisposition toward
concentrated forms of myopia,
ergo, I can't shape
a formless mess into anything
but incoherent flimflam.

I've tried alleviating this
condition with meditative
concoctions and palliatives
of sensory deprivation,
yet I fear I'll need
a silicon-chip-enhanced head
before I can glimpse
the cosmic legerdemain spinning
its paradoxes of endless
surfaces but no top.

If I finally do, I'll smile big
as a great-white gull winning
his first demonstration hand at
the three-card monte of not-to-be
reconciled contradictions.

art is the most expandable resource, bound in each,
and in each easily bound to famine,
for even earth produces less coal mined
than man's footing on it produce more art
that earth's coal volumes, and both are keenly
wasted with one used up greedily, and the other
languishing although electric for proof of shadows:
for art is the most accessed resource
that does both burn and become exhausted,
for those in the practice know by the maxim,
art be exhaustible, via loss via exhaustion
we are known by, and we are, filled, by an enjoyment
for the riches never claimed in rags and tatters;
kept the truth for the sole author's
authority: signed moon, sun, earth -
we also claimed a graffiti of signature on
things that ought not levitate, but indeed
levitated across years from ovid's time to our own (e.g.).

Like a garden unattended
our society is an epitome of confusion.
Integrity is a word so common,
and a value so rare.
Good values fill our lips,
yet our hearts suffer a chronic deficiency,
entangled in decayed morals,
'positivity' hardly grows nor influences.
This fact,
that a single rotten potato
sufficiently poisons the whole sack,
is a so bitter reality.

We need more than good-will of a few,
we need an in-exhaustible source,
a positive drive to change our course.
We need a permanent stream of integrity,
a stream to counter moral impurity.
That which will stand the opposition of hypocrisy,
bare the pain of isolation,
and pay the high cost of not compromising.

...to be continued.