"glyphs" poems
A bridge is a curious thing to cover.
mile after mile of naked road -
then a wooden box over stream or ravine.
Why not cover the road instead
leaving the bridge unclothed?
But where's the charm in that, you say?
So perhaps it was fashioned for Currier and Ives
or to embellish the music
of iron shod hooves on oaken planks.
Or maybe was built as a kiosk
for fading feed and carnival posters
and jackknife glyphs of amorous initials.
No, all our covered bridges, imagined or real,
guide our passage over deadly waters -
holding us fast on the road
and safe from drowning.
March, 2007
Aug 9, 2013
Aug 9, 2013 at 4:17 AM UTC
Let’s take a silver train underground
to the back streets of Atlantis
thru the corrugated iron roots &
then to the peak itself, to the
saddle of the last ridge past strewn
boulders,
finally meandering thru cascading snow
wearing miner’s hats on the perpendicular
dark night &
going up to the edge of the Southern Cross
where we reach at last the pure white
glistening glaciers &
begin to chant over bones in rags
of Scorpio
Armless in the sticky substance how could
they ever have had a chance?
Permission will not be required
only poems of blood offered to
the memory of TREE
It is not ice which is eternal
but the fury of the absolute
separating the void from the spirit
of man,
uplifting like life when it is used
against itself,
that is, Radical Love -- & again, we
are reduced to living beings
Caught by the instant
we are taken away
We live in the imprint of the flame
& we are helmeted within the internal
blackness
where the ray begins its passage
across the indignant sky
Vain clouds uncaring in a tangle of
crossbeams
culminate in the hermaphroditic mirror
of the epileptic dancer
asleep
And during sleep
the light is joined
to the light
It is all a matter of getting up
and then to abandon the pain
It is there that the journey beings
in the self generated flame of
Spontaneous Combustion
(Swayambhunath)
The main line running counter
to the triangle comprising the
MAELSTROM, the DOLDROMS & the
SARGASSO SEA where sleeping Atlanteans
dream forever,
this line, this battlefield of the ages,
crosses the divide of my most wandering
backdoor heart.
We will all have to go
if we want to reappear
in the rhythm of the ritual
It’s the wheel of fools spinning
over my bed
If I put my left foot first
they will find a way to call me
by that name
tracking tremors
like glyphs
on drunken walls
in the negative palace
just before taking eave
of my senses
the white powder dissolves
in the sunlight
& making noise like a peacock
he hops on one foot up the mountain.
Apr 17, 2013
Apr 17, 2013 at 4:07 PM UTC
I want glyphs inked into my skin
A needle to caress and stab
Crying stains as an apology for the pain
Leaving behind a mark
But not a scar
Never a scar
A reminder, a promise, proclamation
All the sigils that ever were
Etched into our coverings
Leeching into bone
Changing and reminding
I want something permanent
Even if I change
Apr 20, 2015
Apr 20, 2015 at 2:08 PM UTC
I love you the way the sun rises every day, without fail. I love you like the night loves the moonlight, covering the darkness with her glow. I love you the way the universe expands into infinity. I love you for each star in existence and that ever will exist. I love you like seeing a streaking comet that comes around earth once every 80,000 years. I love you the way the soil huddles and heaves in winter. I love you for every grain of sand, and I love you the way sand becomes glass, solid and liquid, when put to heat. I love you for the lovebirds in your eyes. I love you as silkworms spin fine reflective threads. I love you past galaxies and superclusters when seen at the speed of light. I love you at the speed of love. I love you with the wild abandon of migrating butterflies being taken by summer’s wind. I love you for each tear that’s ever washed your face. I love you for every smile anyone has had the fortune of witnessing. I love you like a sunset’s last rays of the day, turning everything pink and fiery. I love you as a boulevard winds between houses with closed blinds and closed minds but the road ahead is open. I love you as words meet paper and poetry is created. I love you for every ant that ever worked to make a home in dirt mazes. I love you like the snowflake, vast in number and each unique. I love you the way bullets explode from chambers stopping at nothing but nothing. I love you like jellyfish sting, unforgettably. I love you the way a lioness defends her cubs unflinchingly. I love you the way fog slinks in, engulfing and blinding and in love with the moonlight. I love you like time heading forward and backward and all that is is now. I love you for every ‘I love you’ ever spoken, written, and thought. I love you like sage growing in a sidewalk crack. I love you as hieroglyphs carved within Egypt's tombs, for the way glyphs of people all face towards goddesses and gods. Je t’aime, je t’aime, mon petit rouge.
Feb 26, 2015
Feb 26, 2015 at 2:27 PM UTC
Forgive Me Warlock, For It Is My Nature
You Summoned Me By Despair
I Responded By Love
Your Soul Darker Than Mine
I Was Agonizing For Your Call For Eons
Lost Into The Limbos Of Time
Waiting For You To Understand The Keys
Pierce The Dark Sealed Secrets Glyphs
You Made Them Dance In Your Soul
Looking For The Perfect Combination
Lightning The Dark Flame Of Your Energy
Opening The Dark Vortex Forever Closed
You Showed Me The Mortal Realm From Your Eyes
Exposing Its Magnificence And Darkness To My Soul
You Shared Your Love Exposing You Weaknesses
Giving Me The Lost Keys Of Your Own Being
I Drank Your Eternal Blood Warlock
Absorbing Your Sorrow And Pain
Which Made Me Loving You Ever More
You, The Half I Separated From
I Could Not Let You For A Second Time My Love
I Drank Blood To Your Death
So I Could Keep You In The Place You Belong
Mixed In Me For Eternity
We Are One Again Forever Warlock
For You Are Filling My Veins
Your Soul Trapped With Mine
At The Moment Of Your Death, I Revived
Warlock
Sep 10, 2012
Sep 10, 2012 at 3:37 PM UTC
This song is written on my heart.
Each note hangs in the air before turning to smoke
and we inhale it here in your little bed,
breathe it in as we have most nights since you were born.
Not so long ago
I was someone else
Who was not your mother.
You don’t know her,
the Me who spent months of her young life poring over the sheet music.
I still have it, teenage pencil scratch covering the entire first movement.
“Sticky top notes” and “written when he was going deaf!” and rows of chord forms,
glyphs,
a cipher.
(Did you know:
Beethoven was dead when Ludwig Rellstab compared the famous first movement of his Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor to moonlight shining on a lake?
The sonata previously entitled “Quasi una fantasia.” Almost a fantasy.
The sonata written in blood from a broken body and a broken heart.
Poor dead Beethoven. Our art is truly not our own).
It strikes me odd
that a song such as this one
has become what it has become.
Radiance in despair, I suppose,
is universal in its bright raw frankness.
We stare. It stares back.
Tonight, blessedly,
that chasm of grief alive still and forever in the delicate weaving vines of plaintive melody stemming darkly from it
is far from your door.
Your breaths are slow and even now.
The song closes,
as it always does,
trying and failing to claw out of the darkness.
But you don’t know that.
Tonight it’s just a beautiful song.
And I am no one else
but your mother.
Sep 13, 2025
Sep 13, 2025 at 1:25 AM UTC
Rattle on
And do so backwards
In the insular hole
Strangle lo’
To and fro, in herds
Build for me a pole
Wail along
And do so sweetly
In my crooked glyphs
Sail strong
To lands discreetly
A flintlock at your hip
Walk across
And do so sideways
In a tiled oasis
Count the cost,
To hands that play
Deal out epistasis
Swim away
And do so upwards
In a veiled monsoon
Drown the day
In Carinae
Seek its vagrant moon
Dec 1, 2018
Dec 1, 2018 at 2:25 PM UTC
Gorgeous and lushly coloured
West End lights so brightly shine
Reflected in the obsidian road wet with rain
And slick with reckless hope
The painful slope of tired dreams
Winds down around a bronzed
Soldier, toting his gun, who grimly
Sets his lantern jaw against the
Long dead faces of war and fear
I sit at his feet and watch the cabs
I draw on my cigarette and pick out
Eyes of the people sitting in their seats
They are travelling fast to places
Where I’ll never go and I don’t care
Their lives will play out and we’ll never
Speak or smile together though
Our atoms are siblings in phase
I lift my head to the stars and
Marvel at the time passing many
Years ago when the world was young
And nature was naive enough to
Believe she had got it right
The night lights flicker slowly on
And off and mimic the pinprick
Glows against the raven wing
Canvass above my head
Nothing in this world can shake
My beliefs or so I thought
Until the days when life became
A subtle masquerade and the
Food in the dishes no longer gave
Me the nourishment I craved
Everything I knew was wrong
And right was just a wishful thing
So here I sit, my suit crumpled and
Wet with sweat, the tears and rain
My case is thrown over there and it
Has burst its gut spilling those once
Important papers but now just covered
In vacuous glyphs known to others
But no longer to me
At home that think I am this
They think I am that
They say they know what I will say
When this or that happens
They know me little and
Like all men when grips slacken
Just the few square inches in my brain are
Truly mine and infused with logic
That tumbles central and
Squats on a raffia mat
In a windowless room
Happy in my world and loving
In my deepest thought
Placid in my retrospective views
Motionless against the swell
Of the crowd around me;
Nothing more of me is required of me now
I am free to leave they tell me
And for that I’m
Pleased
I close my eyes and fall to imageless sleep
The cabs keep whizzing by and
The stares are still fixed upon their
Days of lives as they approach
And when they finally come
I will greet them with a simple
“You know me”.
Feb 19, 2012
Feb 19, 2012 at 11:49 AM UTC
The primitive revision,
A sign eastward glistened
Glyphs beyond the walls we
rose in solstice greetings. Listen,
hear the swelling rhythm -
Peregrine crests are where the
seal is written. Our serpent's guile
had the children smitten, and lost in
the cave they're baited and bitten.
Feb 20, 2013
Feb 20, 2013 at 1:33 AM UTC
All eyes scanning across us,
They all
Know
Ears hear and understand us,
And they
Show
Connection with severence
Blue lipped armed with contention
to mumbled fears
from bodies
Still warm
For what it's worth the hurt means
very little
It's love lacking in life that I give
that flows this ocean
Callous tongues that lash upon
Broken
Spines
Siphon will till palms open
Flowing
Black
Water once pumping crimson
Transmute wishes into ink
for those close for
clarity
Or not
From distance
The trembles
Shake young hands
From cynics
The whispers
Turn lovers away
Glyphs giving
Strength consume
Who follows through
In ocean
Clean lines
Drawn in secret
Seep mess
Into
Life stream
Jan 22, 2014
Jan 22, 2014 at 9:44 PM UTC
You know you are wrong
when you bed me in our own litter
and The Feaster raises its head
to feed our relations with its attention
We persist
and you're having none of my boring objections
This bed has become a field
of mammal ply and spell craft
We sign out glyphs
in energies and positionings
In The Feasters eyes
we have meaning
we are positive
we glow for it
Feathers from air
we tap out
with a shared vocal hark
..in crash the mind ;
plan flown on
an excercise of oblivion
Criminal tide rising
to feel upon the doggy moon
When The Love has only known The Night Time
with little illumination
the revealed is a frightful thing ;
a Medicine and a Leviathan
Mar 23, 2019
Mar 23, 2019 at 7:57 PM UTC
My poetry is thought unbridled.
It exists to exist and is simply nothing more.
I, the speaker rare, write thoughts when I dare,
before they, streaking by, are never to be reminisced.
The gods of my words strike as lightning, quick and strong,
leaving me stunned, thunderous resound within my mind,
but these titans of colossus thought are too strong to be snared and restrained
Then fate would have it, with grace they do appear but...
the sylphs are marred by the scars of these glyphs.
And so, I'm left with the mortal drabble,
the fragments of a various whole.
They exist as I exist and are simply nothing more.
Jan 24, 2012
Jan 24, 2012 at 8:41 AM UTC
15 June:
“...its half way in a morning that glistens with slow reminiscences from last night. We find ourselves a respite for the hour, an oasis of sweet temper and our favourite elixir. We sit at the burdened edge; separated by transparency from passing furies; watching with rapt attention and fascination the range of creation displayed before us...We hunt down todays metaphors on clean pages; virginal expanses that congregate with a sublime notion of the art; death; logic; lust and wonder...we span serial glyphs across our vision to prevent a dissolving into the expanse before us; forming borders; signs; structures...Only to be de-constructed again and again; time dissolving; seconds inverting the quantum flux as HereNow paints the Tao over the moment...nothing-everything...we blink in and out; existence define by our presence; the reason and the way forward...delicately; smoothly; succinctly; we pick out secrets from between our worlds; Heartblood squeezed from the cries of angels; the force of supernovas; the very point of transition...again and again the universe spins us. A point – transition-how we create. This secret way. Again and again we play the Fool...again and again we play the Wizard. The tattooed skull of Intimacy grins from the ink on our backs...”
21.8.2010
“...Sunday materialises. Its a smouldering glance across the smoky eternity of a crowded room. A lost sonata barely recognised on faded parchment dusty in a forgotten draw. Its the breeze in the wake of an angels wing. The seconds chip away; each tick a foreign language, the dissonance of grace. We're sitting, hidden, in plain sight, a wayward stop-over; a cafe somewhere on the edge of reason, but the coffees good and the service fast. We watch the people; reading signs and portents in the oblivious expressions; each grin and scowl, each glance, each distant look a codex of requite dreams; a subtle picture puzzle colouring destiny’s reverie. We join the dots. The music over the cafes soundsystem; beats with inevitable consequence. We feel deep into the heart of Journey and Moment...”
Jun 17, 2010
Jun 17, 2010 at 8:33 AM UTC
Hair entwined upon a frogs throat no words escape,
Phrases silenced upon glyphs her fingers shift.
Skulls oculus vacant onyx blighted in introduction
Or demise, unseen glyphs taint your sight mine.
Hair warped on twigs embrace, like a servant I
Usher your will entwined on fingers legacy.
Soul is charcoal in my thoughts no purity, nevermore.
I am the shadow lingering with string behind the door.
Oct 11, 2015
Oct 11, 2015 at 7:33 AM UTC
I am birthed from an egg in the forbidden land,
standing proud I stretch my arms out wide.
I open my eyes and open my heart,
emoting memories pour into my cold mind.
And the flames, and the flames and the sacred flames.
carry me out to the infinite stars of knowledge,
to where the Twin Goddesses of Truth
petition the serpent to deceive the future.
The barge of the Gone Forever sails past
and it bows its bows to the flail and the sceptre,
turquoise and gold with the face of millennia,
its image forever burnt into my countless lives.
I, Mighty One of Enchantment,
now fly from the shell that holds my long sleep
to the thirteenth direction of my smile.
And the flames, and the flames and the sacred flames.
I beseech and invoke, with secret Words of Power,
the hidden wisdoms of the ancient spell.
I scribe, weighing words in their charm
to call forth the Magic of the Dark Night.
And the flames, and the flames and the sacred flames
of he who abides throughout all time,
consume me with a thousand thousand names,
and make me the Lord of All Laws.
All Hail! to the girdle of the stars.
All Hail! to the secret glyphs.
Guide my journey through the eternal time
and take my Sphynx as your devoted sacrifice.
I, Mighty One of Enchantment,
now sail my boat of millions of years
to the thirteenth direction of my smile.
And the flames, and the flames and the sacred flames.
Jun 4, 2024
Jun 4, 2024 at 8:06 AM UTC
what to do.
where to go.
how to
get
there.
icy whitened teeth gleam earthy chartreuse canine slant glyph
is, really,
the only possession that
i have
on my person,
in my backpack.
---- well, err that, and
this flat slab of lit stone,
thought up by small gods,
and made by smaller people that live in
far far away binary lands that eat the sky
with rolling saturated ebony clouds,
which help smelt those inner beings of light,
and force them inside these tablets -
which I, then, use
to inscribe my
scream-of-conscience
wrought into thinky pixel arc
across the once blank page.
all is not well. sure. i get that.
but the visible spectrum
still bows forth colorings
in the hurt skies above,
over metro rush and mirth cursed.
but we still
can rewrite it.
this
is
why
i sit.
alone.
this monkish
quietude
i exist in:
living room consumed.
it's where, under a relatively nice high ceiling,
i do my
pirouettes,
yogic forays,
and taekwondo kicks
on the apt. faux hardwood floor; or
i am laid out in unmade bed
with a small boring hole 10 microns across,
drilling into my slurring skull -once removed-
it's lonely dome
grasped by two trusty amputated hands
of mine. my two floating seers roam free,
searching out a truer scene.
i mean, what im trying to say is:
the road
calls
me;
long languid abyss strip cruising
blurring lights through
spaceytime-ish. it's silly,
really, how i always
get ants inside my bones. home is not
a concept i know; nor wish to.
i have
resting glitch
syndrome.
new glyphs always are calling me,
like **** Sirens licking my every sense,
filling all my holes with fallen lily petals.
come
save me,
my poet.
ride me
into your
own. fix me into
your hip bones, protruding
toward it.
be
mine.
mover
too.
us
pushpulling
flux.
Apr 26, 2016
Apr 26, 2016 at 4:22 PM UTC
So many poems birthed at dawn
or just before
when the trickster gods
are passed out and cannot
plot pratfalls for mere mortals.
Turmoil eases up a bit,
but anything can come next.
You might lose the courage
to eat breakfast or find yourself
trying to type on liquid paper.
You could be struck by
nostalgia for hula hoops or
begin to feel your teeth dissolve.
You want to make a poem that
coils, rises up and strikes
the heart like an angry snake,
but it is easy to get sidetracked.
After all, you are only bones
in a sack spitting out words
that vainly seek forever and
the present so successfully
hides the future. But it's early,
go down into the quantum
quarry of language,
pick up a few likely chunks,
haul them back and let the world
select the words. Be patient as
a telephone waiting to ring.
Dare to shit a peach. Let the
words gather unto themselves
like clouds until each new page,
scarred by those glyphs,
becomes the living promise
of the day just begun, like
a butterfly gliding over clover.
No task. Only the being of.
~mce
Feb 2, 2016
Feb 2, 2016 at 11:57 AM UTC
Everything is chance. We name the random to create the idea of order and predictability. It's a stab in the abyss.
What is choice? Plinko. Go, pick the arbitrary with stars in your eyes. What you want is only an arm's-length away. Scratch the ticket. Feel the neon in the night wheel like time is in your corner. Let it hurt you. Learn.
the tree limb
crawls up and out
tangent into
the stuttering cool air
I sleep so. ******* much. It's pathetic, really. I've many theories as to why: I'm lazy; I'm not being challenged enough; society is, well, society; I'm a misanthrope; I'm a dreamer.. But, in the end, these all miss the mark.
The impetus behind my sleepmoresleep is, it seems, a direct result of that sentimental urge to bring order to a cosmic court whose very fabric is made of change and chance.
buds waiting
limbs feeling, again
slumber shook off
but this tilt too will end
and bring the wilt back
Start again. Turn the page. We love our metaphors. Why? Because they remind us of the flux. Things won't stay still. Ever. Dictionaries breathe too you know. New glyphs itch to get in.
Let them.
rosette of jag leaf rawr
bright yellow flower
head of seed and
a mane of downy tuft
reaching through
neglected suburb
concrete sidewalks
Sep 11, 2016
Sep 11, 2016 at 2:06 AM UTC
(Scribblenaughts and swoon theories) (c)
The stars part
The comets hail our victory over the death of love
Galaxies cartwheel
The fanfares of supernovas herald our impending union
Finally after tracing each trail of ether humming your frequency,
Looking under and over every last hope
Twisting into one dimension after the next
To feel this indefinable moment of chasing so close now,
Through everlasting travels to find eacother over uncountable millenia,
Infinite universes with nothing but a burning desire to find you
Tracing the whispers left as webs crossing the universe
Drawing the constellations marking our tribulations,
And declarations of love with glittered lines
As signs to bring you closer,
As answers to your own markings
To show you where I've been,
Where i'm going,
Like notes in the sand.
Only the lines got crossed and the countless glyphs so many
In desperation became scribblenaughts
And my desperate hope to find you an endless exercise in swoon theories;
All leading to this one true moment when I hold you in my gaze
Will you remember me for what the whole universe is now
Ablaze?
I'm here,
I'm on your frequency,
In your atmosphere
Love,
Please say you remember me?
Oct 18, 2015
Oct 18, 2015 at 3:33 AM UTC
woman not womanly.
living's dry gesture
at the open gown of the sick.
scraped by leaves a body.
a second son
in a blanket grandmother makes.
of god we've been speaking.
hospitals when we were younger.
the tree where snakeskin.
hope not for. but for
statues of them.
live in a dent. the electric
left in a crater.
we release, outside, a balloon.
bury in the land an arm made of earth.
to curtains as fingertips
of babies
to scars.
click in the hall of yesterday with.
heels of irretrievable mercy.
*hope not for. but for
statues of them.*
an agreeable ****** in stirrups. a cradle
taken by birds.
Jul 26, 2012
Jul 26, 2012 at 4:31 PM UTC
i want a billion stick n pokes
that are dedicated in honor of you
obscure little markings that you and i
will only understand as our lips kiss the tips of beer bottles
glyphs that we can only decipher if we first forget our names
symbols that show us that you cant take love too seriously
i want to forget what balance is and fall for you over and over
Jan 25, 2014
Jan 25, 2014 at 2:39 PM UTC
Tonight I disappear
back to the land
of my ancestors
Back to the land
of pyramids
and burial sites
Back to the land
of zealots
and sacred rites
Of hallowed halls
and moonlit nights
Of alabaster,
smooth and white
And as I walk
through corridors
Foreign glyphs
paint walls and floors
A tongue I do not
comprehend
Knowledge I can’t
Understand
. . .
I finally returned...
Only to find
this too is tainted.
Dec 12, 2011
Dec 12, 2011 at 8:56 PM UTC
Chaos,
grandness around us, within us
our pasts and our fates,
the heads and the tails you bring us,
nothingness,
mistress, our all that is free and forbidden
forgiven, forsaken, forseen and forsworn;
Our endlessness,
countless infinities that you defy
our unbreaking circle of charities your grace is defined by;
our mother, our barrens of space who is bearing existence;
our eminence,
baroness, dancing the torments of pregnance
our sorceress, chanting the songs of emergence;
our senses and souls,
your spawn, your kin, your death and your sins
our servant, your serfs
kneeled down and bowed over
your lust that is shameless, yearned for and proud,
raised up and all that is tall afly
your will that is mindful, yearning, forgiving;
our Godesses, our locks and our keys,
around us, within us, the now and the here,
listening through the ears of machine elves
our absolution from words uncertain;
speaking through colours of clockwork glyphs
our faith to bring magic into our lives;
teaching through picture puzzle pattern cellar doorways
our choice to approach whenever we wish.
You are awareness. We are mindful.
You are presence. We are eternal.
Jan 25, 2022
Jan 25, 2022 at 6:00 PM UTC
buried alive; (in) sane; or harakiri?
a trifecta of horror
cuts through the lush foliage while i
writhe in a nest of
eldritch entrails
anxiety
rises up like an ophidian
coils shedding every quarter of a noon
ready to strike -
i lose movement
and falter through the streets
the meeting rooms,
and the endless conversations that end in stalemates;
my anxiety
an ouroboros of volcanic self-effacement
spills into posh mental facilities (lies)
and shoddy hospitals that turn the sick into the living dead
humiliation
burns bright red (magenta)
and brands my delicate skin with age-old glyphs
they mark the end of a civilization
the birth of a metropolis
with twin suns and dark monoliths
where the mob guillotines the visionaries
and the artist dies a dog's death.
May 28, 2019
May 28, 2019 at 7:59 AM UTC
I walk into
the ruins
of the ancient temple
and feel the presence here
it is all around me
gently surrounding
in invisible caresses
it feels so strangely familiar
like the silent
understanding glance
of an old friend
or an unseen talisman
it is beating within me
pulse quickening
yet is unnamed
I let myself breathe it in
like an echo
of the spells of yore
wander through archways
of broken yet graceful doors
touch crumbled walls
let my fingers trace
the cracks in the stone
soon my words will fill them
as parched paper
is filled with legends
This is where
the ancients prayed
where people brought
their hearts
in chanted verse
This is where people
placed hopes and dreams, made
requests to the universe
This is where faith
was expected
to be so vitally forged
where offerings of fruit and grains
would fill up their hopes,
souls engorged
This is where eyes saw
timeworn brightness
of semi-precious stones
glyphs that held
significance, now under dust
like tiny bones
One can still see the
a venerable alter,
once held sacrosanct
under watchful, chiseled eyes
of the goddesses and their ranks
I sit upon the low stone bench,
run my hands across mosaic,
feel the force
I know that, despite its
acclaimed holiness
this is not
love and light's main source
for that has all along
been inside me
pumping love within my veins
taking my spirit in journeys
to its own sweet, celestial planes
How we claim our
own private battles
determine whether we lose or win
As the sound
of my grounded heartbeats
rises up,
I am ignited
from within
May 31, 2016
May 31, 2016 at 11:35 AM UTC