He cranes tiredly over folds of parchment
As sunlight falls across his ashen features
And the restless night becomes lost
Within a sea of fading maps and broken compasses.

Worn pencils collect on hardwood like dust,
And discarded errors in calculation fall into the corners.
He stumbles weakly between varying levels of consciousness,
And exhaustion claims an inch more of his body
With each exasperated flutter of his eyelids.

He spins the globe to his right with a lazy hand
And catches Africa with his finger
Wishing that he could’ve been anywhere but here
Because it is immeasurably heartbreaking
To have the entire world at your fingertips
And to have never seen any of it.

j.s.

I saw you standing there
As you were staring straight at me
You mustn’t have heard me calling
Because you carried on walking
As if you hadn’t heard a thing
Like an island on the verge of crumbling
Into the deep blue sea
I am desperately trying to find someone to save me
From my dull reality
Like an island on the verge of crumbling
Into the deep blue sea

I Don’t want to come across as ***** or rude
But I’m not here to hold your hand and
Whisper sweet nothings in your ear
The ****** fantasies flickered through my mind!
As you stood there unaware
Of the fire’s you were kindling up
Girl won’t you let me fan your flames!
Ohh fan your flames! Cmon!

Opportunity came a knockin for a few swift moments
Only for father time to whisk that chance away
Ohh Where have you gone?
I’ve been searching for so long
So SO long
Like an island on the verge of crumbling
Into the deep sea
I am desperately trying to find someone to save me
From my dull reality
Don’t want to come across as ***** or rude
But I don’t just want to hold your hand
I saw you walking over there
I’m no geographer but I know my basic geography
The world ain’t flat
So by walking down there
You should be coming back
My way sometime soon
I meant to tell you all my thoughts and feelings
But I swallowed them up in the boldness
That is my pride
Hands so clammy
I choked on my words
Forming incoherent blabber
I want to be more then friends
Please disregard what those scousers told you
I don’t want to come across as ***** or rude
But I don’t just want to hold your hand
Let me take hold of this opportunity
I don’t want to spurn this chance to say
My hormones are about to implode
And I must confess
I don’t just want hold your hand tonight

I’m a geographer who doesn’t much like to travel,
A writer who reads slow,
Artistic scientist,
With not a lot to show.

An enigmatic person
With strengths and foibles too.
For I am only human,
Very much like you.

A historian with a bad memory,
That just sums me up.
I have my limitations,
Yet still a half-full cup.

I may be self-effacing,
But have the strength to be honest.
I’ll get there in the end,
To fulfil what I’ve promised.

I know that isn’t a lot,
But I do have my talents.
When all is said and done,
My books do more or less balance.

I’m happy with myself I have to say,
So if you are a critic
Get on your way.

Paul Butters

Odysseus and Calypso in the caves of Ogygia.
Painting by Jan Brueghel the Elder 1568–1625
Ogygia /oʊˈdʒɪdʒiə/; Ancient Greek: Ὠγυγίη
Ōgygíē [ɔːɡyɡíɛː], or Ὠγυγία Ōgygia [ɔːɡyɡíaː]
is an island mentioned in Homer's Odyssey,
Book V, as the home of the nymph Calypso,
the daughter of the Titan Atlas, also known
as Atlantis Ατλαντίς in ancient Greek.

In Homer's Odyssey, Calypso detained Odysseus
on Ogygia for seven years and kept him
from returning to his home of Ithaca,
wanting to marry him. Athena complained
about Calypso's actions to Zeus, who sent
the messenger Hermes to Ogygia to order
Calypso to release Odysseus. Hermes
is Odysseus's great grandfather on his mother's
side, through Autolycos. Calypso finally,
though reluctantly, instructed Odysseus
to build a small raft, gave him food and wine,
and let him depart the island. The Odyssey
describes Ogygia as follows: ...and he Hermes
found her within. A great fire was burning
in the hearth, and from afar over the isle there
was a fragrance of cleft cedar and juniper
as they burned. But she within was singing
with a sweet voice as she went to and fro
before the loom, weaving with a golden shuttle.
Round about the cave grew a luxuriant wood,
alder and poplar and sweet-smelling cypress,
wherein birds long of wing were wont to nest,
owls and falcons and sea-crows with chattering
tongues, who ply their business on the sea.

And right there about the hollow cave ran
trailing a garden vine, in pride of its prime,
richly laden with clusters. And fountains four
in a row were flowing with bright water hard
by one another, turned one this way, one that.
And round about soft meadows of violets
and parsley were blooming... Calypso's Cave
in Xagħra, Gozo. According to Maltese tradition
this was the cave of Calypso and Odysseus.
Ogygia or Phaeacia have been associated
with the putative sunken Atlantis. A long-standing
tradition begun by Euhemerus in the late 4th
century BC and supported by Callimachus,
endorsed by modern Maltese tradition, identifies
Ogygia with the island of Gozo, the second
largest island in the Maltese archipelago.
Aeschylus calls the Nile Ogygian, and Eustathius
the Byzantine grammarian said that Ogygia
was the earliest name for Egypt, while other
locations for Ogygia include the Ionian Sea.
Many modern scholars are reluctant to place
Ogygia or indeed any of the locations Homer
describes in any existing geography,
and the literary tale is acknowledged
as a work of fictional mythical intent.

                   Geographical account by Strabo,
Approximately seven centuries after Homer,
the Alexandrian geographer Strabo criticized
Polybius on the geography of the Odyssey.
Strabo proposed that Scheria and Ogygia
were located in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
At another instance he Polybius suppresses
statements. For Homer says also, 'Now after
the ship had left the river-stream of Oceanus',
and, 'In the island of Ogygia, where is the navel
of the sea', where the daughter of Atlas lives;
and again, regarding the Phaiakians, 'Far apart
we live in the wash of the waves, the farthermost
of men, and no other mortals are conversant
with us.'All these clearly suggest that he composed
them to take place in the Atlantic Ocean."

Geographical accounts by Plutarch also give
an account of the location of Ogygia: First I
will tell you the author of the piece, if there
is no objection, who begins after Homer’s
fashion with an isle Ogygian lying far out at sea,
distant five days’ sail from Britain, going
westwards, and three others equally distant
from it, and from each other, are more
opposite to the summer visits of the sun;
in one of which is the barbarians' fable that
Cronus is imprisoned by Zeus, whilst his
son lies by his side, as though keeping
guard over those islands and the sea,
which they call ‘the Sea of Cronus.’

The great continent by which the great
sea is surrounded on all sides, they say,
lies less distant from the others, but
about five thousand stadia from Ogygia,
for one sailing in a rowing-galley;
for the sea is difficult of passage
and muddy through the great number
of currents, and these currents issue
out of the great land, and shoals are
formed by them, and the sea becomes
clogged and full of earth, by which it
has the appearance of being solid.
The passage of Plutarch has created
some controversy. W. Hamilton indicated
the similarities of Plutarch's account
on "the great continent" and Plato's
location of Atlantis in Timaeus 24E – 25A.

Kepler in his Kepleri Astronomi Opera
Omnia estimated that “the great continent”
was America and attempted to locate Ogygia
and the surrounding islands. Ruaidhrí Ó
Flaithbheartaigh used Ogygia as a synonym
for Ireland in the title of his Irish history,
Ogygia: Seu Rerum Hibernicarum Chronologia
"Ogygia: Or a Chronological Account of Irish Events"

I don't need a geographer
To take me round the world
I don't need a compass
To direct me south west east north
I don't need a sailor
To sail me in the dark light seas
I don't need a pilot
To fly me all way above the earth
Let me whisper the truth in your  ears
My lady is the world
Inside her is the map
She takes me round the world
She magenetizes me to the paths
She sails my heart through the storms
She flies my mind out of the earth
And she whispers the truth in my ears
You must travel round me my Love
(c) Kuvar

Photography is natural
shutters laced in mascara
I capture things more quickly when things start to get to me
Teardrops on my lenses always did make things hazy
But most of the time I look for things in their simplicity
Like capturing your step
Just to learn the cadence
My memory is but a stop motion
Of everything set to earth’s rotation
and It always did seem creepy
That id remember things exactly
So I started pretending
That I forget almost everything
But when the theater lights go out
I replay all my favorite movies
Of exactly what life truly meant to me
Because with a photographic memory
Nothing is left coyly
Which comes to remind me
Of why I have to break things to see them differently
Because if you stare at a photo long enough
A thousand words come to mind
Which is why I was never a good photographer
And instead a bit of a geographer
Painting the world as I saw it
In the words that were left unspoken
Because they tend to make my life feel a little more vibrant
Like the saturation got turned up a bit
And it changed the way I remembered all of it