wraith of white
you wander wild
the hinterland
Valkyrie's child

your breath pants mist
in icy caves
you have made
10, 000 graves

your image is
in winter skies
its crystal glitters
in your eyes

loping through
the cold chill wood
its secrets you
have understood

born to lead
long of fang
through the glaciers
your voice rang

lonely in your Lycan heart
you made the ****
your kindest art

wolf of legend
wolf of lore
you'll reign untamed

forevermore


soulsurvivor
(C) 2/16/2014
Rewritten 6/12/2015

Empty rabbit holes
no wonderland
I live in winterland
head up in hinterland
frozen kneeling at the stand
holding out my hand
snowflakes are falling
not touching me though
arctic fox calling
under branches low
beneath the white
fox colored
fox match
they won the fight
they live in hinterland
head up in winterland
take me to where they fish
in sunhordland

Sky bleeds thin red line__
    Obsidian blade cuts deep
    hinterland of time.

r ~ 8Mar14

i am the proud pond
you are the ocean
our worlds cross a tortuous  route
I am the mottled web
you are the hinterland
mighty when expressed
through the seasons we endure

It is morning-time, and I walk
meandering paths pull me, a crisp breeze pushes me
the earth supports me and falls away with each passing step
it can only hold me when I'm there

softwood trees bend around the trail, and hardwood trees enrich their denouement. A glittering canopy of dewy leaves curls atop my route, the moonbeams seeming to dawn from inside each perfect ornament. but I know the finished moon floats just above them

my steps flow in a steady rhythm, regularly broken by the passage of a memory. Sometimes it is time. Sometimes it is a dance. Once it was another Being that caught my consideration; a ghostly doe, visible just through a break in the wood, a brown and white-speckled spectre crashing through the hinterland, startled by my feet, by my breath-

the breeze is stronger now, and made anxious by the din my pace quickens. memories stream by faster, woken up by the filtered moonlight, pulled out from abeyance. leaves drifting upon a whirling river, clouds being ripped into a storm.

it is morning-time, and I walk
the sky is deepening, though the moon is descending
too much has happened, too much has passed into yore
I remember just enough, and it is mourning-time

Have you ever come to my country to Russia?
It may be nay or yes, but Russia is a strange country,
It is people are funny and lively, with strong sense for success,
Those from Moscow are tall and confidently walking in a bounce,
Those from hinterland Russia often display inferiority on the face,
But conventional Russian has a keen nose for property and success,
A scientist in Russia is a beacon of interest like a pastor in Africa,
All Russians are somehow intelligent with humour and strong success motive,
Like once the case of a Russian barren woman, in the city of Moscow,
She was a Muzhik by class disposition, but proselytized into Bolshevism,
By the then Bush fire of Vladimir Ilyanov Lenin through his song of workers,
She was thus a dear comrade or comradess? Her Name was Sofia Ludwickfna,
She had been barren, o no! Childless for generations and generations,
Her marriage had been on-off and on-off due to this misfortunate pale,
Of inability to bear a child at most a son to be name after Lenin,
Every Russian man condemned her after a short while of marriage
To public distaste whenever it was discovered that Sofia was barren,
As usual, Russian men hinge their love manners on the native wisdom that;
Bogy Vysoky Tsar Dalyko; meaning God is far a way but the tsar is near,
But one day when Sofia had celebrated her menopausal day of 40th birthday,
She realized that something like a lump is felt in her tummy,
She rushed to the medic at the high street Moscow
For clinical service lest the lump grows in to cancerous tumor,
But to her stark surprise; the medic declared her pregnant,
In fact two months pregnant, and nothing else,
She asked if the pregnancy carried a boy or a girl,
For she feared to sire a boy as it was only a peasant,
That mated her in the fields during the previous full moon,
But the medic declined a comment, as his technology was not fit,
To establish the fetal gender, may be she better tries America or Germany,
But any way, she walked home happy, whistling her best lyrical
Perhaps a sonnet to the revolution and Vladimir Lenin,
The ninth month came, and Sofia delivered peacefully,
In fact a bouncing baby boy, with strong jaws like a Moscow Muzhik,
It was a moment of her joy as the gods of Russia had remembered her,
The baby grew and developed so well, it suckled and swallowed with sound,
It kicked nicely and waved its spatulate hands; a young son of Russia,
And indeed the joy of the baby made Sofia to grow fat and fat,
She named the baby four names; Tsar Alexander Tolstoy Vladimir Lenin,
On one warm after noon, Sofia chose to have a nap under the jacaranda tree,
To feel the breeze as her baby suckled, light slumber over took her nerves,
Then she fell into a deep sleep, the baby was on her teats suckling and waving,
Making soft nice sounds of thaa thaa thaaaaaaaa!
Sofia began dreaming; she saw a very huge African man,
Utterly naked with bush hair on his deeply black ***** skin,
He was not circumcised; he came unto her making stupid sound,
Like wild Russian swine chasing a rhino, he came straight to her,
She began fighting and kicking the ***** away,
She kicked mightily in the style of Russian woman,
But the ***** was strong; he began biting off her *******,
One by on, he was biting and making gnomish ***** abracadabra,
She jumped at the *****’s kneck, she began strangulating him,
She pressed tight and tight, the ***** began making stupid sounds
Like a chimpanzee, again and again as she pressed hard into his Adams’ apple
Finally Sofia managed to **** the *****, and then she woke up from her sleep,
Only to realize it was not a ***** that she had killed, but her baby, it was dead!
She was a arrested by the KOSMOSOL and taken to the judge, accused for infanticide,
She recounted the ***** story on her defense, the judge and all Russians were agog,
They uniformly blamed the misfortune of Sofia on the increasing number of Negros in Moscow,
The judge ruled that all Negroes to be thoroughly beaten and chased out of Moscow,
To be confined in a more remote bushy area in the hinterland beyond the prison of Siberia.

She opened the door of the gallery and there it was, there it lay, before her, nearly perfect: her exhibition. The opening was an hour or so away and there were, naturally, a few adjustments to make, but in essence it was right, and as she walked to the middle of the rectangular space (to survey the full effect ) she felt held by the quiet wonder of it all; that she had made all this and with ‘the quality control of nature’s accidents’. He’d written those words some years previous when a solo show was but a dream she would enter between sleep and wakefulness, when she would think of the west coast of Scotland and the poetry of its seashore, the infinite variety in the seashore strand between sand and sea. It was such natural accidents of form and transformation by nature’s hand that had guided her imagination into rightness and towards this exhibition.

At breakfast that morning she had come to the table dressed to greet her audience, and for the first time as a featured artist in a festival of some repute. She had felt the quiet joy of choosing the right combination of clothes to be the public person she had now become. He had loved the new dress she had bought to clothe her gallery persona. She had been conscious of his eyes following the lines this frock so generously drew around her body’s shape and form, the way the material fell across her *******, lay smoothly on her thighs.  It was a very grownup frock and with the jacket and scarf made her look purposeful, confident. His looking made such confidence possible, his admiration and what she could tell was that coming together of love and passion that, her being dressed in this formal way, so often evoked.

In the gallery she had worried over the lighting, climbed up the metal ladder with the fluffy green glove thoughtfully provided to enable those small adjustments of direction to be made on a hot spotlight. There were four large pieces flanking a corner that had embossed lines running across their surfaces, lines that needed oblique light to reveal the shadowing of this effect of swirls and marks of a retreating tide on sand.  Two smaller pieces needed rearranging; she’d placed them, late the evening before, in the wrong sequence. Poster boards were to be filled with her poster and put outside on the pavement by the gallery entrance. She opened the main door, a very green door with its top and bottom bolts and black-painted handle ring. The street outside was a welcoming mix of 18th and 19th C buildings, hardly one the same, the sort of three storey buildings that had simple plaques prominently placed into the brickwork from a distant past when proud builders would describe a structure’s use or ownership with a title and date. By ten o'clock this one-way street was lined with parked cars, but now there was little traffic. It was a quiet sunny morning in a market town.

‘Don’t mind the dog, ‘ he said. ‘He’s used to coming in here.’ It was a long-haired verging on the side of scruffy sort of dog, used to keeping its own counsel, probably used to being taken to exhibitions. ‘Just popping in,’ he said, this man who, and she couldn’t help noticing this, seemed to hold much in common with his dog; the long, but retreating on the forehead, hair, slightly scruffy from the want of a comb or a good brush (like his dog), he had dressed without much thought (because who dressed thoughtfully to walk a dog?), and that’s what he was doing, walking the dog and, seeing the Gallery open, thought he ought to look in.

Giving him her brightest smile, she embarked on performing the artist’s music of conversation, that score holding gentle melodies and welcoming harmonies. Although she had become quite practised in talking to her audience there was always the challenging inquiry that would catch her off guard.

‘Well, are you finished with the seashore now?’ said the man with the look-alike dog. For a moment a half dozen possible answers seemed possible. ‘Could one ever finish with something so extraordinary and various as that hinterland between land and sea?’ No, that was seemed a mite critical and clever. ‘Oh, I’ve hardly started’ was tempting, but rather smug and too confident by half. ‘I just love the seaside’ would probably do, as no one else was listening. ‘Merleau-Ponty says the complexity of the seashore is a metaphor in the search for self-identity’. She did wonder what he’d make of that, but finally decided on ‘It’s such a rich source of ideas and images I’m sure there’s a lot more I want to do with the subject.’

”It’s all the same colour”. She’d had that one a few times. ‘When I’m on the beach I’m fascinated as much by the texture and shape of what I see  and feel than the colour. I like the subtlety of the colours in the sand. I think my pieces – and she waved her hand towards what she had titled her Sand Marks pieces – show so many of the different shades of colours you find on the seashore.’

Those Sand Marks, a collection of variously dyed and marked two metre plus linen-lengths, dominated one wall of the gallery. They floated a few centimetres from the white wall, and when people moved past them the slight shadows cast by the linen lengths seemed to ripple in the human-made breeze. She could never look at them without thinking how their very accidental making – binding a linen cloth with inner placed objects and using the natural dye of tea – could create such absorbing results. She would follow with her gaze one of the linen-lengths from bottom to top (or top to bottom) and find herself walking on the wet sand of a Scottish beach, overwhelmed by the clear light and space with only the sea sound surrounding. He would tell her, had told her often, how moved, how affected he had been when he first saw them hung. To him, these ‘marks’ carried an essence of this aesthetic she now owned and for which had become recognised.

Even on this, her first day, she had been visited by a small number of admirers and supporters, some travelling distances to see her work with the aura of the original, a truer view than that possible on the back-lit screen of their computer monitors. Ladies who loved textiles, the containment and privacy to sew and stitch secured in their busy lives. These friendly and smiley women (the comfortable side of sixty) understood something of what she was doing here, and perhaps imagined themselves as thirty-somethings walking Scottish beaches free from children and the relentless list-making of house and home and occupation, able to create imaginary worlds of marks and folds, pleats and textures. Full of enthusiasm for the medium, what they perhaps didn’t have was the skill of seeing, a skill she had grown up with, had always owned to some degree: found, fostered, honed, developed into a second-nature activity of always looking.

There would be the occasional brief lull when the gallery was empty or close to empty, as though needing the space to come up for breath after being occupied by people and their movement. She would then walk slowly around the long well-lit room viewing her pieces and her arrangements of pieces from different angles. She would look at his poems placed antiphonally between her work, commissioned for her catalogue, her book of images of the sea shore paired with, incorporating even, her made pieces. She’d chosen a favoured few she’d felt caught the essence of being in the sea’s company, in the sand and shore’s domain. Like everything he did it had been undertaken with the utmost intensity of purpose. She saw him now in her mind’s eye with his notebook sitting against rocks, paddling in the great shallow pools, walking head down along the tide line, those bright days on a Scottish island and before, before on that ellipse of beach by the fishing station.

He would tease out an idea formed from a little motif of words, perhaps like the very music that was his private territory: here, alone, apart we are marked by the tide’s turn. Yes, we are marked by being solitary in such unconfining space, the marks at our feet become the lines, the mounts, the fingers, those interruptions, breaks and blockages found in the tridents, chains and crosses of the art of palmistry. We read the seashore as a psychic oracle reads the hand, hoping, as Kathleen Jamie so rightly says, for the marvellous. And marvellous it so often is.

Standing in this gallery was like being gathered about by the seashore. It was a short jump in the imagination’s miracle to hear the soft breathing of the sea, the wind caressing the face, the warmth of the afternoon sun on the freckled cheek.

See how those we love are transformed
when the sea is their only boundary

a figure stands before a sand bar
in a crescent of water left by the tide
an affecting geometry of solitude
. . .

These words had always stopped her in her perambulating tracks. She thought of her son, far distant on the beach, at rest for once, still, motionless within the confluence of the elements of the beach, at the epicentre of her gaze, all things flowing to and from his tiny, far-away figure.

take me to the hinterland
undress me in the violet dusk
in desolate beautiful country

show me the way forward,
or ask me what it means
to be here now

feel the wind on your skin,
the earth between your toes,
and taste the scents in the air

Lately, all I want to do is stare at the ceiling and let my consciousness descend in the cellar of perpetual dreaming.

It happens, I guess. Friends vacate their spaces and walk quietly out of your life. Without warning, and sometimes, when we need them most.

All those times you've spent together, those nights you've skipped sleep just so you could drag them out of their loneliness before sunrise, all those they've buried in the farthest corner of their memories, to be left forgotten and cold like ordinary days.

I will let you be. It's your prerogative to leave. I cannot make you stay, I can only give you a piece of myself as a parting gift -- last cup of brewed coffee, a sleepover, random snack, crackling laughter, secret language, and a silent, desperate plea for you not to decamp and disappear.

If you do, do something for me, please? Walk away without noise. Leave a breath of your memory under my pillow where my hand would find them in the morning. Let them live on, in my mind, as you were, as we were.

I will plant trees and seek solace in the uninhabited forest of our bygone days. The olden times will no longer be drifting in exhaustion. In each leaf, I will build a cabin and a home and I will remember the time when you never asked questions, when you never judged, and when you were just kind.

I will remember the look of understanding in our eyes as I unraveled my thoughts and bled out. I will remember, always, when you reassured me that it is human to be vulnerable.

One day, we will find a way out of this harm and regain a kinder hope. And perhaps, in an unloved hinterland, a miracle will happen and the rain will dance, dearly, in barefoot.

The  spotlight  is  on the  broken  coastline
porous - like  archers  spilling arrows
into  the vanquished hinterland.
In the ancient West  Mercia
wooden bridges collapse
uproar, as the King's regiments
long disbanded , ghosts
into fading memory.
Our  defenders, our  loyal subjects
enmeshed into the  wider  fear
our  citadels breached,
and where  is  the  valour
the self reliance of  our  septic isle?

Is there anything more lonely than the sound of boy playing a banjo on a spring afternoon? Oh yes, yes, it’s the sound of girl playing a banjo on a spring afternoon. A boy would lean back on the porch chair and let the instrument fall and rest on his chest to feel the raindrop-plucked vibrations, one by one. This girl, she sits on a kitchen chair, but not in the kitchen, and folds herself over her Daddy’s 5-string. The banjo rests on her blue-cottoned thigh, the lower metal edge firm against her stomach, her slight ******* pressed against the upper wooden rim. If you were standing in the doorway of the workshop you’d see her blond hair falling, falling over her face. There would be that dead-centre parting and just visible the edge of her wire-rimmed glasses.  Then, the denim jacket worn over the kind of summer-blue flowered frock pulled from her Mummy’s clothes that with her passing have now migrated into her bedroom. The thought of clothes is what there is close to hand at the break of day.

When Kath woke this morning, when the morning woke Kath, the valley air was already as sweet, as fresh as any April morning could possibly be in this green hollow of her home. She had lain there feeling the air caress her forehead. The window, always open beside her tangled bed, let in the ringing song of the waterthrush. Newly returned this handsome brown migrant warbler, his whitish breast streaked with brown, more thrush than warbler, she’d watched in the stream yesterday wading on his long, pink legs bobbing his tail like a spotted sandpiper. Soon there would be a nest somewhere in the beech and hemlock hollow along by the stream in the interstices of some fallen tree.

Ellen was due home this morning. She’d hear the Toyota from way up the track, driven overnight from Philadelphia she’d have stopped and stopped. Tired and so tired, she’d go from truck stop to truck stop, the radio her only company and the thought of Joel between her legs arching into her to keep her warm. But she’d drive with the windows down swallowing the night air as the ***** brown car swallowed the miles. Kath would have the coffee waiting, potato cakes on the stove, she’d have a fresh towel placed on her bed, underwear warm from the dryer, spring flowers bunched in mug on the window sill.

Ellen would never come right in when she arrived home, but sit down with the dogs on the porch step and gather herself, watch the mist rise down in the valley, drink in the bird-ringing silence. Kath would steal open the door and crouch beside her with Mummy’s coffee cup thrown, glazed and fired at Plummer’s Fold. Head resting against the porch supports Ellen would allow the cup to be placed between her hands, her fingers uncurled then curled by Kath around its rough circumference. There would be a kiss on the back of the neck and she’d be gone back upstairs to sit with her notebook, those new lyrics she’d been fashioning, her Plummer’s Fold diary – yesterday had been a rich day as she’d walked the bounds of Brush Mountain on the Big Tree Trail singing and plucking an invisible banjo all the while. Those songs of her great-great uncle she’d discovered in a pile of Library of Congress recordings just echoed through her, had become part of her. They were as much a part of the hinterland of Brush Mountain as the stones on the trail. Garth Watson’s voice, well she knew every turn and breath. She’d been listening to them since she was thirteen. She saw herself at the old Victrola blowing off the dust, placing the forgotten disk on the central spindle, scratching the needle with her finger to test the machine, gauge its volume. Then, that voice surrounding her, entering her, as lonesome as the scrawny girl just out of junior high that she had been, the dumb silent girl from the backwoods with that cute clever sister who played guitar and was everybody’s friend, who the boys rushed to fill the empty seat next to her on the school bus.

They’d recorded this song on their Lonesome Pine album. Kath had it all arranged, had it all imagined, brought it to that session at One-Two Records. She had been so scared Ellen would smile gently and say ‘Kath, not this ol’ thing surely. Why I remember Daddy singing this song into the night over and over.’ But no. When Kath had sung it through, looking into the bowl of her denim skirt, she’d raise her eyes to see tears running down Ellen's face. Everything between them changed at that moment. The location studio in The Farm House disappeared and they were girls on their home porch. In an hour they had it down and Larry had said. ‘My God, Holy Jesus, where did that come from’. So they went straight home and listened to those old records all night and most of the next day. They rewrote the album they’d spent a year planning (and saving for).

So now when they came together on those country fair stages, in the cafes in Baltimore or Philly it was that haunting Appalachian music that ran through their songs. Kath still shy as a blushing bean, hiding in the hair and glasses, reluctantly singing harmony vocals, Ellen– well, that girl had only to look wistfully into the audience and they were hers.  

And so they were living this life holed up in their family place, keeping faith with Plummer’s Fold. Daddy was in a home in Lewis now. He’d taken himself there before his dementia had taken him. He played his girls’ CDs all day long on his Walkman, had their pictures in his near to empty room – just a rocker, a table, a pile of books by his bed with Dora’s wedding quilt.

This music, this oh so heart-breaking music, the loping banjo, the tinkling, springing, glancing accidental guitar and their innocent valley voices. They’d exhausted the old records now and, their education in the old ways done, were back with new songs and Kath’s ideas to only record in the Fold and build songs with soundtracks of the world around them. She’d been laying down tracks day after day whilst Ellen was on the road with the Williams Band and often solo, support for the Minna Peel as ‘an outsider folk artist from deepest Appalachia.’

Kath wouldn’t travel more than a day away from the farm. Every show was an agony, except for the time they were performing. She couldn’t bear all that stuff that surrounded it – all that waiting, the sound check, more waiting, that networking **** One-Two constantly wanted her to be part of. She’d ***** off as the guys gathered around Ellen. She’d take a book and sit in the Toyota. She couldn’t do people, though she loved her folks, she loved her sister like she loved the trees and stones, the birds and flowers on Brush Mountain. Always shy, always afraid of herself ‘Too sensitive for your own good, Kathy girl’, her Daddy had said. Never been kissed in passion, never allowed herself to fall for love, though her body drove her to feelings she had read about, and thus fuelled had succumbed to. There was a boy she’d see in Lewis just from time to time who she thought about, and thought about. She imagined him kissing her and holding her gently in the night . . .

enemies - the needed element to make a warring mind.
How was war imagined,
how, was imagined
easy to imagine,
kwo-, stem of relative and interrogative pronouns. Practically a doublet of why, differentiated in form and use.

From <https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=how>

These be ambush thoughts thinking they may be read if any one is patient enough to see beyond the sheer longwindedness
of this character lacking an enemy to war with.
Looking for
Enemies - the needed element to make a warring mind.
How was war imagined,
how,
per se,
was imagined
easy to imagine,
person-if i am able to attribute such qualia to a body
how any unthing is realized is
imaginable as well.
Add a jot or title, a li'l art mark, an art-tickle.
Games teach us how,


how any unthing is realized is
imaginable as well.
Add a jot or title, a li'l art mark, an art-tickle.
Games show us how,
not why.

Why is the quest at the moment. There are rumors of enemies.
The we of me and thee, herenow, we lack emnity.

Hey, sports fan,
where is the frontier, the edge of the maddened crowd
whose
enemies are those who
stand pat, calling the game as game-over, and life a lessoning
as we speak, abundance of known knowns
rotting all around us, putrefying under pressure,
seeping to the surface,
to be burned.
Why,
let us guess---

Disnified pride of pur pose, positional sign-ifiers
of place,
a destination for faiths full pursuants
bemused in bubbling joy,
or shrieks of terror when
the child from the hinterland locks eyes
with Mickey Mouse, and finds no joy, no love, no depth,
but a mask.
The reaction reverberates al(the)way to la Brea,
Peacemaker say,
It's okeh, baby girl, daddy said,
ignor them, they ain't real.
Monsters ling grrrring, then
it's agrin
for now, of course. Here we are. We've arriven,
Happiest Place on Earth,
as imagined realizable by a child in 1917, say,
better yet, 1925, and oh, there were major Wars
being imagined winnable in pressure
application to the spiritual slippage from rite,
the ritual passage of child into adultery at a whim,
so such imagined haps fade.

connect or break connection, on the bus or off the bus

you all
sing
think nothing new under the sun,
teach preach reach out and touch

the face of Java man, eaten, swallowed, and gone to
the believable
history of life,
the accident,
the unplanned, yet
taught as known believable, a pre-dict-ible,
one in ten to the seventy-nine-thousandth power,
yet, if one pays his life time to learn when to bet and when to hold.
Then in this,
the secret journey to the soul,
to the core,
we must assume,
we become
as wise *** (***, the word for a donkey, why would some one prevent you from reading *** Asteriscktical ignorantce,y'axme, stupid AI)
the ***,
as harmless as the serpent from the fire on the island
Ask,
are we of the bovine ilk or pithec-ant-us or
embodied soul-cores
forming, en nue
fitting the mold, the pattern, the plan of projected nexts
built on Locke steps from whence to
whither did we wander?

have we all forgotten the actual question just axt?
Or the answer?
Have we not
gotten what we now
know
we miss,
or was it only I who missed and as the
photons forming the shapes
you see, these breathing commas and such
here
is the point.
You see bits of things.  We see so.
Time and time again thinking less and less.
Least fusion, least pressure, least heat, cool idea ideal or ideology,
twisted idio,
You shape them on patterns.
Ones you imagine formed from
Patterns recalled from some out perienced
time, ere now were ever subjected to the supertwistition
of tongues and interpretsations of unseeable things seers said they
see us seeing.
How come means why, by reason of time.

Palindromiclew, missing el signs missing hahi ai

tia tic, we're in
Ai got this,
whole ball o'wax, thats how we disconfuse the big mess age,
the catas
trophy finale
phase of
world three,
or two, or one, all valid world views,
deepend-enteron discerning spirits,
winds, breezes used to disperse
the heat,
{fans,eh}
evenly in harmony with the heavenly winds,
and the planned six gyros of earth,
guiding the mists that feed the rivers from the seas,
no clouds needed,
save for shade by day.

When all the geo-waves have settled in geo-time,
see,
here is broken:
this old earth is folded and fractured,
surely,
a wreck of a world, yet, as a whole,
we live, we won.
Winds and clouds and continents,
all islands seen from the moon,

which, if the stories hold some truth,
can be manipulated by massminds of mankind, as if, if I am

seeing this
right
each voice might be seeable in one dimension,
or several, four at least,
time, the ever outlier
of sorts
as a flame with fuel source of
flamable fluid upon which
the transcended space
twixt fuel and flame,
floats
seen, merely seen, that emptiness twixt wicked,
mastered flame and
hell's fire spreading on the oiled harbour
protecting our shore
where our little boats lie in anchorite fantasy, asif

we see a way to quench hell per se,
Percy, ah, he lives.
My grandsons know of Percival,
there, here's hoping they get the joke before the yoke.

Riddle me a riddle, son of man.
Is there any hidden thing that shan't be known?
Is here a true place?
Is now a true time?

(to be continued)


squeezing out the lies, the idle words abused,
spreading them thin as the light we see right
through
transcending this at most feared mortal failure
finding
impressions... are from pressing points, dulled by ab
use, tempted uses succumbed to,

didja try to sell your soul for rock and roll?
wadjagit?

My point. out acted, ex-act, en nowd by your creative self,
who never copped,
out or in,
es no mi culpa, all along. I was the voice of resistance,
Job's en core inner held horde of known knowns and
an old key to ever, should the worse he can imagine
best his best laid plans for perfection
in the eyes of God and man.

--- enemy at emnity with me?
--- I see none, save me, as in except me as in me being
--- free from the grasping grip of the reality
--- war is realizable in. You see?
--- I and thee, at this degree of seepeance, as we coagulate
--- we behave as chaos, we be having chaos and entropy as tools

used right, we troubled our house,
which is now known to be the bubble of our being
a child in each popped bubble
of being,
squeezed for the thrill of explosive pus,
gross and good to be rid of, dam the infection,
wipe the blood with the back o'my hand,

I ain't no disgrace. I won that battle with the zit on my gnose.
Wanna piece o'this, this mind of mine,
shelved since,
who knows when, says the old man, with a wink.

We be a lotta beings sorta rolled up. Like a whole ball o'wax
waning into a puddle
as the flame sheds us as bits of light leaving the rest of us
spread over a vast imagination,

resting, willing to burn,
should any wick drain me near the flame once more.

The snipers rifle hung from the parapet
still warm, cordite drifted from
the business end.

It resembled a cigarette,
dangling in the groove of an
ashtray which was given to you
as a souvenir from a place
you had no desire to go.

And you had no desire to go there
as you had read stories of donkey
cruelty and the militias’ refusal to
accept Greenwich as the
centre of time.

Their struggle against the meridian
has been well documented in film and
prose.

Stories and rumours filtered in
from the hinterland, carried home in
economy flights from different time zones
arriving at the terminal, milling around the
carousel.

****** victim 4 lay in a forensic
scene, white tapped surrounded by
duty free bags, and the secret dossiers
exposing the militias plans drifted, blood
stained in the breeze.

what is the blurry
between the joy and the blues,
we are daffodils flying in the wind
one moment
butterflies falling in the rain
another?

My waking time
in the narrowest part of the creek
chases spots in the shadows
a streak between bushes
thirsty tongue lapping green opal
cautious cotton on the fallen leaves
the priceless prowler in the morn mist
or in the dusk
the graceful glory
in the hinterland of my heart.

Not knowing where I am going
I am lost in an forgotten hinterland

I used to have such direction
But now I have absolutely none.

Wondering in this place
I am lost in Outer space

Surrounded by cloud
Like cotton wool

As all my lists
Dissolve into the mist

I look north, east ,south and west
No land marks valleys or peaks

As I sniff a little heather
And become as lite as a feather

Somewhere in my stomach
I feel an empty passage

But I take a gentle breath as
Something says nothing is urgent

I am cushioned by the cosiness
of the spongy undergrowth

As I Feel myself grow I delve
Into the peaty marshes bellow

Lost in this sleepy land
I can not help but enjoy

The forgotten Hinterland

dolly lyrics
doldrums drum's roll

dollop lopsided

doll llama amazon on
dolphin hinterland
dole dolts
dollar large, largess

scavenger bride,
she counted periods
before the children came along,
but never suspected
eyes like bottles
beginning to blue,
a tangle of scars
hermetically sealed,
the new order of
a broken romance,
dead love cassettes
in the glove compartment,

her cold and empty
constellations,
like cold breath
passing through a beam of sunlight,
grid of points, pendulums,
the ratio of freckles to stars,
no subtle countenance,
martinis and bikinis,
soft ******* and ice cream,
slight, elusive things, on a beach
with no more meaning,

the repeating pattern of
her mistakes and reliefs,
a preservation of decay,
sustained by the tiny
human fault line
in that oneiric hinterland,
between dreaming and waking,

she draws around the noise
and the clearings,
she creates within that sightline
the way her sadness can feel
comfortable,
an extension of loss that turns
her ruins into a home.

The Open Studio

Usually the journey by car flattens expectation, and there’s that all-preoccupying conversation, so one only takes in the view where there’s a halt at a traffic light or at the occasional junction. A pattern on a wall, a damaged sign, a curtained window. Waiting, one looks and sometimes remembers, and what one sees later reappears in dreams or moments of disordered contemplation. A train journey is another matter: you sit and look, and when it is a trip rarely made, you put the book away and gaze beyond the ***** windows to a living landscape that scrolls past the frame of view. When you arrive there’s inevitably a walk: today through a town’s industrial hinterland, its pastness where former mill buildings have tactfully changed their use to become creative places, peopled with aspiration and strange activity. Walking reveals the despair of forlorn roadside business falling back into alleys ending in neglected and empty buildings, so much *******, silences of waste and decay.

But here’s the space, there’s a sign on a board outside, OPEN STUDIO TODAY. Entering inside it is quiet and cold, the door remaining open to let in the December air and the hoped-for visitors. But it’s bright and light: a welcoming presence of work and people and coffee and cake. And here’s the studio, a narrow space between make-shift walls where the artist works, where the work awaits, laid out on the surfaces of desks and tables, on shelves and walls, specimens of making; ‘stuff’, the soon-to-be, the collected, the in-progress-perhaps, the experimental.

Good, a heater blows noisily onto cold fingers. In the turbulent air pieces tremble slightly from their hangings on the walls. They are placed at a good height, a ‘good to be close to examine the detail’ height, the constructed, the made, the woven, the stitched, the printed, all assembled by the actions of those quiet, intent, those steady hands. There, a poem on a wall next to the window. Here, photographs of places unlabelled, unrecognised, but undoubtedly significant as a guide to the memory. Look, a dead badger lying in a road.

Next to the studio, a gallery space. Two walls covered with framed prints, well lit, a body of work captured behind glass, in limbo, waiting patiently for the attentive eye to sort the detail, that touch of the object on paper, that mark found and brought out of time and place. Perhaps these ‘things’, some known, some mysteriously foreign adrift from their natural context, have been collected by that bent form on a windswept beach, by the hand reaching out for the  gift in the gutter, struck by the foot on the track, unhidden in the grass by the riverside, what we might pass as without significance and beyond attention. This artist gives even the un-namable a new life, a collected-together form.

Moving closer let the eye enter the artist’s world of form and texture - and colour? There is a patina certainly, colour’s distant echo, what is seen on the edges, a left-behindness, more than any subtlety of language knows how to express, beyond comfortable descriptions, not excitable, where the spirit is damped down and is restful to the mind, a constancy of background, like a capturing of a cloud but bulging full of hints and suggestions, where texture is everywhere, nature’s rich patterns colliding with things once invented and made, used once, once used left and changed, thrown away, to be brought before the selecting eye and the possibility of form with meaning its patient partner.



J.M.W.Turner writes  on poetry and painting

Poetry having a more extensive power
Than our poor art, exerts its influence
Over all our passions; anxiety for our future
Reckoned the most persistent disposition.

Poetry raises our curiosity,
Engages the mind by degrees
To take an interest in the event,
And keeping that event suspended,
Overturns all we might expect.

The painter’s art is more confined,
Has nothing to equate with the poet’s power.
What is done by painting must be done at once,
And at one blow our curiosity receives
All the satisfaction it can know.

The painter can be novel, various and contrast,
Such is our pleasure and delight when put in motion.
Art, therefore, administers only to those wants,
And only to desires that exercise the mind.



Twilight

A day aside and diaried into busy lives
So to a morning walk to Turner’s View
Above the River Wharfe and Farnley Hall
Where it is said the inspiration came
For his famous oil of Hannibal,
with elephants and storm-glad Alps.

On to lunch where six around a table
Souped with salad before we homed
Mid afternoon the day in decline
We were done with words so watched
The edge-timed light flow between our hands.

Inevitably we climbed the stairs to lie
In twilight’s path beneath the skylight’s
Square a sliver-moon we couldn’t see
Gracing the remaining daylight hour
Marbled with shadows our collected
Curves and planes lay as sculptures
In the approaching dimity and dark
Each experimental stroke of touch
Holding us dumb to speech and thought
As night’s soft blanket covered us entire


Northcliffe Woods

Oh nest in the sky, empty of leaves,
Those tangled branches
Reaching out from twisted trunks
Into the sullen clouds above, when

Suddenly a crow -
‘Corvidae’, she said -
And simultaneously pulled
a hank of ivy from a nearby tree.

Hedera Helix I thought
But did not say, instead
I whispered to myself
Those ancient names I knew.

Bindwood, Lovestone
(For the way it clings
To bricks but ravages walls),
A vine with a mind of its own. But

She, in a different frame that day,
Apart, adrift and far away
From our usual walk and talk,
Fixed her gaze on the woodland floor,

Whilst skyward I sought again that
Corvid high in the branches web
Black beyond black beyond black
Against the pale white canopy above.


Franco*

Blow She Still
Ed insieme bussarono
Sweet Soft Frain
Cloche Lem Small
Spiri About Sezioni
Portrait Eco Agar
Le ruisseau sur l’escalier
Etwas ruhiger im Ausdruck
Jeux pour deux
For Grilly Fili Argor
Atem L’ultima sera
Omar Flag Ave
The Heart’s Eye*

play joy touch
code panel macro
refraction process solo
quick-change constrained
hiatus sonority colour
energy post-serial scintillating
aleatoric reuse transformation

A lonely child who imagined music
on sunday walks, he would talk about
how one lives with music as someone
would talk about how one might live
with illness or a handicap. He said,
‘You cannot write your life story in
music because words express the self
best whereas music expresses something
quite beyond words’.

em...
  what's the difference between
refugees, economic migrants...
and ex-pats?
   not much...

    esp.with regards the latter...
who are ex-pats?
immigrants,
from a de- host nation...

English women sipping tea
with Mussolini...
  ex-pats:
  
   out of, what? patriotism?
maybe my latin prefixing is
a bit rusty...

                     ginger amy adams...
by god....
  if a rose... that...
that is a rose...
   strawberry blonde...
mmm mmm...
kentucky fried chicken...
          
         f'now i wish for an ***
i can ***** all day long in
Manhattan...
  and be like:
yummy and **** me three ways
sinister...
   because? why not?!

     ginger ninja...
             nunchucks up the ***
to replace the ****** or
the cucumbers...
                  bridegroom of
Bruce ******* Lee...
               makes up for a degenerate
market...
  

slurp an oyster...
bargain on clam economy...
  
  point being?
          self-harming of girls
replaces
   the tattoo industry...
of girls...
         and the world continues
its carousel "enterprise"...

       then the world dies...
   and then the world revives itself...

            self-harming text books...
and then comes along...
tattoo -
                         the spiral,
deficit woman -
    her due, her, own,
her: albatross swoon -
dive into the curtailed unknown -

     a woman hindered -
a woman governed by the hinterland -
a scrap of,
what became the scoop of
what later became -
the crown of Poseidon's
scavenger
                          ushering in...
the last, of what remained:
a peeled onion.

                       St. Basil -

                  came the crow,
came the cathedral,
   came the gauged out eyes..
came the croak...
         came...
the span of wings...
came...
               the labors -
        a mind, a lost digestion...
came...
             a vision of a future...
without the fiction
of an immovable past.

Across the road was the land
homesteads mixed farming
in acid air are the animals
clearing their throat, safe

behind the teeth of the dog
each of them servient
to a higher order
only the rooster didn't know that

I grew up at that fringe of the city
and in my absence the farms
have grown to giants
which have eaten the landscape

but they don't have an appetite
for hills and gorges, winding roads
choke them, so they leave
the Hinterland alive

My window has no seat, why would it? I wish it did.
There is just a glossy magnolia ledge, barely wide enough to
cater a slender bottom. Upon the ledge books and candles
rest, illuminating the murk outside. Directly opposite orchard
trees recede as I welcome autumn with a zealous smirk.
For now faintly visible between their visceral arms are the
all-seeing hillocks that in winter will dominate my view.

An impartial observer once stated they were mere freckles
on the landscapes recumbent spine, but to me their sight alone
is vertiginous. On balmy April days I would surmount them,
a personal expedition, up there where I’m the valleys curator, wearing
pristine white gloves I meticulously unravel the terrain: an ancient
manuscript, the vellum inked with meandering streams, occasional farms,
cursive hamlets and little else - a land of sobriety and dearth.

In November though there is a permanent mist and its source
inexplicable. Does it simply effervesce from the precipitous tors about?
Is it the villager’s enshrined collective sigh? No it is something
more. Sitting atop the villages head it’s the beloved satin bonnet you
wore religiously as a child. Wholly impractical for this season
its gossamer fabric offers little solace or insulation to those below
as its pleated extremities elope with the moss-brown hinterland.

Fervently stoking their hearths the villagers broaden the
ethereal cloth with a smoke not acrid but satisfying and nourishing:
with a terrifically edible, hardwood flavour. From my hillock
vantage, the sanguine stone of the manorial chimneys is all that
penetrates the film; casually they release torrents of smoke like
ivory doves that weft patterns instinctively into the sky’s pallid damask.






©*Thomas Gabriel

As the bats fly out of the barn
During the sun sad night falls and wonders
Come alive and so beauty
There can only be seen at night
Star patterns
The moon and the planets
We are at the hinterlands of daylight my friends
So look up words to the sky and see the Big Dipper
And what’s your problems disappear as they are smaller than the universe

i sporadically entertain my uncle's ex-girlfriend
at the house from time to time:
don't ask me why...
    she dated him when i was...
8 through to 11...
                       donkey's years ago...
days when the st. valentine's park in ilford,
essex... was like: alice in wonderland...
it had tennis courts, it had a mini golf course,
it had an open air swimming pool...
   it had exotic bird cages...
                                it had row boats
on the pond...
                 i mean: if my ex-girlfriend was
still visiting me...
                  i don't know: rather... i don't want
to know... my uncle is rather estranged and
that's that... i saw her a year ago:
i made her a curry...
                         i saw her today: in between
the odd house job: flinging concrete etc.
i made...
         she could practically be a stranger...
but that's... exactly the point...
here's to extracting water from a stone...
   i'll write this and it will not really tickle my
fancy...
    once, perhaps, not so long ago -
                    i'm just fudge-packing myself
into a lullaby of lolz... from the "narrative"
prescribed to me, you, "us" by the...
ahem... philanthropists...
                    hell: better with the misanthropes...
at least they are not scheming
philanthropists...
        indeed a "polyphony" of tastes...
which is a curry...
                    nowhere in europe except in england
this demand for the blues and the Raj...
the compliment:
   'this tastes like a restaurant dish...'
  and she wasn't kidding... she did bring a bottle
of wine and a bottle of gin...
i did used about 6 chicken *******...
i hoped that with the coconut rice
and the naan breads i'd have enough for
4 people today and for 3 people tomorrow...
    em... yeah...
                i watched her like i might have
been a woman and cooked for a coal miner
in a 20th century Silesia...
              the sri lankan curry with apple cider
vinegar and the coconut milk blah blah...
but... hell... apparently i can save myself
for a night (once in a while) from
self-deprecating humour and take a word
of a stranger as: rigid dogma...
      that i can cook better than i can write...
            i felt sorry for... having read enough
of Knausgaard and know: fish-fingers...
   scandinavian food?
   oh, you mean like two days ago when
i figured: rödbetsallad - sure... if you have
the right meat... but it doesn't **** to know that...
raw beets with carrots an onion
   chilly and some greens with a....
balsamic vinegar, orange juice, olive oil
and dijon mustard is a **** good dressing...
i mean: hide the japanese sushi..
give me raw herrings in a creamy / tangy sauce...
baltic "sushi": suit you, sir... oooh...
fastest eaten dish in town...
    tow the town across the atlantic -
settle the score on the coast of maine...
or nova scotia: scou-shia...
         nova orbis...
                 i cook good food... that's so much
more comforting that scribble these little details...
after all... i pride myself on the arsenal of spices
i own... whoever has their nukes can keep 'em!
i drop one black cardamom grenade and we're
in for a proper party!
the kolhapuri masala - which is poetry -
a "polyphony" of sorts:

10 dried red chillies
2 tbsp sesame seeds
1 tbsp coriander seeds
1 tbsp cumin seeds
2 tsp fennel seeds
1 tsp black peppercorns
1 tsp fenugreek seeds
6 cloves
1 tbsp black mustard seeds
50 g unsweetened desiccated coconut
½ tsp ground nutmeg
1 tsp red chilli powder

i surprised star anise is not invoked -
surprise me less: i am not - no black cardamom?
it must have been a different masala -
obviously a textbook use of ginger / garlic pulp
and turmeric... and onions...
and tomatoes...
and how is it that the "west indies" survived
so intact: was it purely on the argument from
sanskrit - perhaps...
who am i... little ****** from a place
where haggis might have originated...
but most certainly a type of broth that
uses... cow intestines: honeycomb tripe...
well... that's just ******* spectacular!
we're also the people that will eat
a chicken heart goulash / chicken stomachs...
nothing is wasted but...
hell... to have the oil fields of arabia
or the spice garden of india?
              tough question!

what was or is leftover?
   the parsley revolution?
        the basil    "
                            coriander?
     what was haggis... is still haggis...
and neeps and tatties?!
        allspice - nutmeg and paprika...
bland (apple imports from "kazakhstan")
europe of old...
blushing spanish oranges...
        whale fat from the north...
chimichurri: give me curry for an oak
of beef: a stump of it... argentinian -
give me spices for a steam engine...
                   trade offs...
                 and that buddha soft-patch of
inquisitive philosophy spin-offs in
the western canon: feng shui pseudo-zen
or tao...
     unlike selling protestantism
when none arrived with the spanish toward
the west or the port-of-geese in hai!nippon!

followed up by listening to some iron maiden:
after all: they did release brave new world
at a time when their x-factor etc. days were
over so they could delve into hiring a new
army of listeners: they weren't going to
sit on their laurels like led zeppelin et al.,

- only prior i watched two woodland pigeons
battle on a pergola i erected and weaved
a wisteria into it... the female was perched looking
on... i never imagined woodland pigeons
to hold such ferocity in their slender guise -
they would jump on top of each other
in an imitation of mating and with their
feet as fangs rip into the manes of each other...
throats throbbing with a short-of-breath pulse...

i broke the battle by having to pass
under the pergola with bags of sand and cement...
as man and with dealings in imitating
nature:
    well... a history as an etymological affair of sorts:
hardly...
   pigeon: gołąb (******),
              holub (czech),
                         golub (croat),
               golob (slovenian),
                     porumbel (romanian),
        balandis (lithuanian),
               galamb (hungarian)...

   looks like... the closest etymological
cousins of a ******'s pigeon is:
the croat and the *** pigeon...
               but... uncle auntie here...
pidge-on: pij-off:
      the german           taube...
the french pigeonne...
               picciona (italian)...
                                paloma (spanish)...
   "hence" the romanian porumbel...
but not the alt-saxon taube...
     or the norwegian    due...
or the swedish: duva...
           estonian tuvi finnish kyyhkynen...

do i dare see what...
not to bother dear mater mortuus...
greek!  περιστέρι (well... sure looks like...
a future of pigeon... em...)
turkish!                   güvercin...

almost like the story of Islam is a story
that ended with Muhammad
and began with Ishmael ibin
     Hagar the housemaid for Abraham's
wife Sarah...
     almost that: "same ****, different cover"
scenario...
but with words...
   and words alone:  after all...
is there any relevant history outside of
etymology - given that... napoleon invade
russia ****** invaded russia:
i.e. that shamelessness of repetition?

it's so apparent: to be hung-up on the trifles
of "love":
more like... the barrage of youth and hormonal
cocktails of agonies that must end in defeat
and monasticism at best...
"defeat" is rather an open word...
becoming tamed with: retreat and introspection...
she asked me to get her shawl
as the sun was setting and
while bringing it to her i had a sniff of it...
no perfumes... just the scent of skin
and a woman in her 50s...
   the smell of: an old maid... not a ******...
an old maid...
but how refreshing: tame make-up...
nothing too protagonist or shock-circus!

second slurps from an uncle's engagement
of ***** in pigtails?
well... it's just nice to hear a stranger
compliment your food...
esp. since this wasn't some formal setting
for a restaurant...
if i could earn on the basis of peanuts
and compliments and...
               how michelangelo was...
           no not constipated...
no not conscripted...
        not contained...
                        pope julius II...
michelangelo was... COMMISSIONED...
   well... what a noble begotten proof of...
the truth of labour...
            so much for the derelict promise:
the ugly work - although still towing
a grand scheme of aesthetic with it:
akin to plumbing or electrical scrutiny -
or waterproofing -
   but as i have learned:
   the work less scene does gravitate toward
repaying a man with a sense
of ingratitude -
for the work itself -
   after all: there's no work of art to slobber over...
to guise oneself in a fetish for
sending postcards...
the work itself harbours an ingratitude
to the person who performs it...
that "minor detail" of something working
without fail...
hardly a bureaucratic competition:
grizi-piórek (a slang term for a bureaucrat)
literally: feather-nibbler...

    the bewildered youth of man and that
which comes of him in the later posit of life
as aging - for not enough has been
cited concerning old maids -
the crippling opportunism of girls
that turns us into comic atlasas with
only poses to a name -

     i have to hide my admiration for old men:
esp. those that write their little
jokes: praying on existential shot-hand
and their unshakeable rationale -

a brief interlude into a concept of a new
life: my uncle's ex-girlfriend:
i've been to the brothel:
the "joys" of flesh *** flesh are such
unwelcome avenues that i know
how desperately i ******* to smother
the solipsist in me but at the same time
nullify the ****** out of
respect for a caricature of conversation:

that the stars were mentioned and that
venus or mars was among them...
by the geographic posit of edinburgh:
and the firth of forth i held with a certainty
a more than concept of n.e.w.s.:
north east west and south...
but north east london: that gargantua is no
edinburgh...

only today i posited myself on mashisters' hill
and the mouth of the thames...
and where the dartford bridge is
and where canary wharf is...
it doesn't help much to travel into
central london and stand before Thames...
to finally flip out a compass...
this odd river that has no flow
but a tide...
a river with no mountains...
no Vistula no Danube...
this cruel passable detail:
  a river without mountains with
a tide but now flow...

decipher for me this grey murk of eels
wriggling hollow...
she asked me: is it difficult to go back
"home"...
burden by the tired toiling among
so many monolinguals:
can i tell apart the accents on these isles?
that i can tell a scot from an eire-fiction
that the welsh still: hope for god grant
them their same old future tongue...

veneti...
                  veneti...
                                         veneti:
it is that it has become more and more
difficult to leave "home" than arrive
at it... but from populist english so
thoroughly breeding into a stiffening sire
and clamour of pict sacrilege -
grand echoes of unused words...

old maid who graces the same existential
pangs as me: aimless hollow head spermatoid...
after all the hormonal whirlwinds pass
and there comes a second nakedness...
before trust and a spontaneous jumping
to conclusions that never arrive at anything
more than the generic cul de sac...

to have to disbelieve mothers...
             it is necessary to have to disbelieve mothers...
for no greater grandiosity incumbent...
a brief interlude and how i can:
simply peacock-strut... exfoliate like
i might... have forever succumbed to
the latin variation of bulimia and that old
variant of ****...
willingly running ****-naked into
a riddling throb of nettles...
with disembodiment and an aspect
of freely arrived at nerve extensions
clinging to an ancient eucharist of
tentacles that the tongue would only counter
having to bite and nibble and suckle
on a mint leaf: with the body's proposal
of immersion in nettles...

to make rous of numbing ****** details:
no ****** from taking  a ****...
no litany of broken words:
clinging to consonant prone onomatopoeias...
crude ascertaining archaic:
purity of vowels: mongrel heart and soul
whilst towing... a mongol or two...
pictures of fortress crimea... the grand sicz...

only because she was not a woman
in her prime: a new orientation that doesn't begin
with me in middle age having amounted
enough poison apples and **** frenzies
and all those lies spoken during ***...
at best: even in the brothel...
for the love of god i dared not speak...
so much for anything
when *** has to invoke words...
not the silence not the pulsating vowel
throttle...

                    i linger for the last linear concept
of unnerving details...
that last came with these words
and will last revel in them alone...
for the greater audience i...
i have no scheme to usurp the pop from
the better hidden...
that some things have to:

let "them" have their feast!
once i am wed to the mother over mothers:
when death finally tallies my shadow
as her ******-on from fear loitering
of shrapnel!
let the people have their feast!
once i am wed to the mother of all mothers:
- but given the inbetween leave
me to my cenobite affairs of a bedroom
i keep for a nursery of moths...
to ward off the spiders with my drunken
breath...
give me clarity in the depths of
a bottle's end met...
            
  - so this is what it feels like to arm-wrestle
with a hand strapped to the bone crushing
revelation of hanging on a crucifix -
so this is what nodding with approval
feels like when competing to the end scenario
when lying erratic and scared
on the tablature of the falling guillotine...

it must do! i feel a need to concern myself
with feeling than with thinking:
i despise this celebration of numbing
objectivity: as someone once said:
subjectivity is the only truth...
after all: i am subjected to...
i am firstly subjected to...
only later i object: i objectify:
i give me spatial pardons and awareness...

as a subject under the protection
of a queen i am: first come first served...
not last... in this secular objectification
policy of "what if" futures...
i answer to the queen:
i am subject of the queen:
i am subjected by the queen...
such a ****** party to attend with no
god and this object cranium per crown...
that it has to become so impersonal
that the h'american free verse poets:
that elizabeth II has so much more
than mere grandma edifice...

i am subjected to something prior:
only later can i object to it...
some variation of a "double negation":
a talk over more gin and tonic...
or bourbon...
how could subjectivity become
so defamed... like it was forever a lesser
variation of the res extensa /
thought attache...
that subjectivity is lesser has to come
from people who only regurgitate
a once fabled scientific positivism of
a new and glorious age of Eiffel...

objectively "speaking"...
the regurgitated "facts": it's not like
science is even the incessant harangue!
from voice and a well:
an echo and a re-:
                             by now: there are "concerns"
as to why the echo fades and is
not gravitating toward perpetual
momentum...

               by now to revel in tired bones,
sinew... in the perfumes of burning fat:
vegan protests... vegan wishy-washy...
that somehow in a future 2 years from now...
the cows will have the eyes
akin to petted critters like that of:
fortune of future:
demands of cats and dogs...
i stated today: big cats' eye do not
hollow out... there is no serpent-esque
"myopia" of the eyes...
cats are spies for the serpent kingdom...
disguised as fur-*****...
but intact the blistering choke
of the slither... eyes that ****...
eyes that could feed the most blue-bodied
extract from the speark-head
of mammalian hierarchy...

   what little dough for slaughter eyes me
in the fashioned cow..
i leave all honesty for the dogs:
among the tying with bones...
but never these bonsai tigers...
heavy shields of hipolites...

                             - is there a need to drink
and write... while marrying yourself
to the barrage of unnecessary bricks
that align themselves to the cuddle-cradles
of kcal-atoms?
     i thought that drinking was
synonymous with exfoliation...
hell begot peacock-strutting...
              old maid didn't have me leeching
for ****-practice tendencies to posit
proofs...
             at some point i am going
to have to leave people without a comfort
of a diatribe...
i'll extend my over-arching scrutiny and
tell you:
on this basic base prize...
i leave no selling of satellite...

come 2am and i'm still awake and drinking:
it doesn't matter...
what matters is...
being invested in a repetition
and the glorified emblem for all that's
the worth of tomorrow:
the conjunction barricade of english:
my queen's last ordeal...
well **** me... it has to be my queen's
last ordeal before i **** up to the h'arab
sheikhs...
n'est ce-pas?

oh... wait... like the french didn't look
glum and whatnot...
like the past wasn't a pass at rebirth...
like venice didn't pirate away details of
constantinople...
i am tired of guilt...
you... italian fuccofinickyfuckers
bless venice... now! now! have complaints
concerning the hagia sophia...
because who isn't to abandon the greeks:
because of greek pride...
which is all that little: pride...
designated to books:
greek schoolchildren... will not read...
some ancient anthem of
northern barbarians: perhaps the bulgars...
most certainly not the... island-bound
mongrel...

            the english will not be reminded:
yes... that much is true:
but they can be executed for a lineage
of inconsistency...
that poland can somehow be associated
with polar bears...
hell... "we" are associated with
bisons... and storks...
          no need to educate the new
or keeping an ordeal of the old...
let's call my mediocre
the no-mans'-land rupture...
it's not exactly dervish planned territory:
citing india as borrowing extension
with afghanistan, pakistan,
bangladesh, sri lanka...
            who am i buddha tow: juggle...
jumble wisconsin proto: or a collective:
pan-european...
mingling justices... arms told to be torn
off...
   romance from 18th century europe:
kissing the feet of Kiev...
while in the western: what if...
the sea affords us... no need teasing
a wait for a tide...
      this little scare and...
      my little future of cain that...
arrived at a blinding prospect of
nationhood that has to retain a presence
akin to Siberia...

belly-tow flipside an agony of
this fissure of gill and borrowed depths of
searching for the dolphin aided dive...
i have no befriending lefts...
had i the rights i'd make them
pronounced: enough to champion
diacritical scrutinies...
but no but now...

- how is that:
   -rhetoric          has reached a fever;
and a pitch to make
a ***** into a jerusalem
as a prefix towing exemplar...
before a noun
and a yankie akin to
pre-
          variation of pro-
               not withering into the anti-
cyst and some future be told...
                      chimes from haven:
and the pennies from ginger-root borrow
of lobotomy...
        
   gutting a pig: glorifying a monkey...
chanting: freed red sox...
                a somewhat: hives
of Boston... while we all have to retort
to a question...
not because we woz all hebrewz...
but coz whizz or: or else...
worst hinterland:
an estonia: that there's
more of new york than there's
of this.... hinterland...
of... convincing: this is not "asiatic"...
this is still DOS europa...
bulging to bug the bothersome
chastised bullock off a bull
and the silent churn tow charge...

some variation of a pre-
and a self- prefix:
          to compound this custard
nostalgia sweet-tooth jesus h'americana...
same old variation of how
estonia is about the sizing up
of new york: and...
              
                     my own sowing tow-tie
this little increment this little
wave this loiter masquerade...
   such privy to make a choice!
from the slaves toward a slam-dunk..
otherwise making rummanations
to towing a sanctity of old pauper
Warsaw...
                 my little little first and last idle
concern that's a Cairo agitated.

Trump's targeted the EPA,
an agency that's in the way
of rich polluters everywhere
who foul the water, land and air.

Employees there may no more tweet.
With journalists, they may not meet.
No external communication.
No Facebook use across the nation.

For issues such as climate change
don't fit the script that Trump's arranged.
Oil wells and pipelines he has planned,
to snake across the hinterland.

He wants to dig and burn the coal.
He doesn't care. He has no soul.
He showers his troupe of alt-right *******
with platitudes and promised riches.

Oh what a sad and tragic day
when Trump destroyed the EPA.

We drove the kids North East to
our adopted hinterland
of moreish moorland, the Brontes
heath and heather hiding-place,
near peacock splendid Castle Howard.

Town kids need more stimulation,
animal animation.
A newly opened zoo park
offered flamingos in the pink,
fapping, fluttering, squarking
round a stinking muddy pool.

We splashed about, rain soaked,
licking mud spiced ice creams,
shivering, slipping, thinking
it's what you try to do for kids.

(Scene I)

Heeding golden days pays


Making a circle around a big oak tree in paradise Ethiopian patriots are seen sat. The valorous Yohannes IV, Alula Abanega, Tewodros II, Menilik II, Balcha Aba Nefso, Jagama Kelo and the like are seen on the front. They were discussing the current political situation of Ethiopia.

(--> Enters Mai Kadra holocaust victims/martyrs)

Hacked to death
By those who
Lost their mental health
Obsessed by ethno politics
In the wrong-headed
‘We and they’
Political matrix
And also who
Sold their soul
To devil
Inured to acts
Dubbed horrifyingly evil
The fledgling, feeble
Children, pregnant women
Their feet and hands tied
What is more chopped
Were committed to
A mass grave
When the atavists
Lost battle
In the hands of
Nation’s cherished
Sons & daughters brave.

(Stands up Yohaness IV and putting his hands on his head says.)

How barbaric?
To me such an act
Is Greek.

(Enters Ethiopian soldiers who were attacked by the Junta, while maintaining peace.)

Deployed to guard
The border
From any enemy
That conspires
To put Ethiopia
And its people asunder,
By traitor Juntas
We were stabbed
In the back
When it got pitch dark,
Yet, heroically,
We mounted
Counter attack
Till support
From hinterland
Arrived from
Our side.

Traitor Junta’s
Plan had to fail
Together we chased
Them away
Between their legs
Placed their tail.

(Balcha Abanefso stands up and waving his pointed finger says)

It was standing one
Many battle engagements
We won,
Unity, love, peace & cordiality
Must mark our identity!

I am angry
Ethiopians’ super chemistry
Is fast turning
Behind us left history.

This send
It must be known
It is high time
Ethiopians reverse
This trend!

How come, selfless,
The land
We kept once
Barring it
From colonizers’ advance
Fast gone?
This calls for a new dawn!

(Stands up Jagama Kelo and walking to and fro says)

How come the self-centered
And selfish
Than their mother Ethiopia
Their ethnic base relish.
It is with chemistry
Great things like
Adwa or Karamara victory
People accomplish.

In the face of adversity—
Colonial aggression
What is more
Expansion—
Helped us most
Unity& fraternity
To preserve
Our religious, language,
Cultural identity.

Forgetting what
We are displaying today
Let us live
In forefathers way.

Come rain or shine
Considerateness, unity
Peace are fine.

                      A poetic Drama – Scene II

Rewarded Satan’s way

A weekly devil council about evil prowess is being held in hell. Devils were standing on tongues of fire waving their tails and howling in a frightening manner that sends a chill down one’s spinal cord. They were gritting their saw-like teeth and holding double-forked arrows. All were soot greased horn to toe, twisted and long. They were submerging the sinful like Judah deep into the fire.

(Enters lost- in-action TPLF Junta’ informal army members referred Sameri.)

Aghast, at last
Vanquished, to retreat fast
Inflicting vengeful attack,
Tying and strangulating
Mai Kadra people
Brutally, we had made them
Breathe their last.

(A Satan on the front puts his hands together and says ‘How impish!’ ‘What news to relish!’ Then he says,)

Spilling the blood
Of fellow human beings
Is something
We appreciate
The level of
Your cruelty
Is  not
Heard to date.

By inflicting on
The innocent damage
With us
You have come to
The same page
As goes
“Out Heroding
Herod!” adage.

(Enter Junta group members. They were the ones who were killed by counter attack, while stabbing the northern wing of ENDF in the back. Rearing his grotesque face out from the fire ‘bravo!’ says Judah the culprit. A devil pushes his head back into the fire)

Averse to
“Love your friend
Like yourself ”
We ambushed
Fellow soldiers
Off their guard
Though our action
To the sane
Is hard to understand.

Looting heavy arms
Heavy damage
We were to score
No doubt
Had it been successful
Which sadists and Lucifer
Would adore.

(A Satan at the back stands up to accord him a high five)

Stabbing in the back
Fellow soldiers
In the military ditch
Is something
Not heard to date
That is animosity
We compliment,
As it is top
Among sins
God said
“Felony I hate.”

(A veteran TPLF official on top of his voice says)

Unless ethnic groups
Get at loggerheads
We didn’t feel comfort
Because we are heinous,
Who understand
“Cut your cloth
According to your coat!”

We adored
“Divide and rule”
to exercise,
Cognizant to outsmart devil
That is an approach wise.

In a two-year-and-half time,
One crime after a crime,
We had committed messes
To 113 which add up
In the nation’s
Massacres map.
As a result
Reigned supreme turmoil
On Ethiopia’s soil.

We didn’t want
The prime minister
Ethiopia, tranquil,
To administer.

Without us,
The diabolic,
In the top brass
Also trampling on
The broad mass
Allows we not
Ethiopia to continue
Reformed or anew.

Fabricating lies
Was our characteristic feature
As we got it by nurture
And practice it as if
It was our nature.


(At last when a pin drop silence falls Satnael got up and said)

Outsmarted by TPLF junta
For three decades
That lavished
The flow of blood
Like a flood
And which milked
The destitute
But pious Ethiopians
Till they cry
Until their woes
Reached the sky
“God punish us
With TPLF Junta why?
Alive must we die?
For what evil
Are we being punished
By those
Ever who outperform
The devil?”

Today
I have to reward you
My way
“I will throw you
In to a more
Smoldering fire—
Inferno—
As atavism
Is your desire!”

A lacerating fire
Devoid of light
Will be
Your plight.

Devils are seen outrunning each other to drag the atavists into the inferno.////

Palm Kiss,
my spooky little ***** house
at Halloween,
you are amazing.

I am aware of that...
and, and, and
I'll be thinking of you...

at the moment,
I can't.

That's a waste of time.

Our finest words
hit her bathroom sink,
I know you can't see
the afternoon right now...

not with the Hinterland gleaming
a mustard seed *****
with stems of bushy brown
all aglow where
the sun slants into
heaven's gate.

Love has a selective memory
murmuring an opuscule
melody,
when the sky slides into
droplets,
broken- beaded chain
playing in the dripping
golden pediment
blushing red feathered veins
into the autumn leaf.

I will be thinking of you...
though at the moment...
I
can't,

That's such a precious waste of time.

Maculate Cheddar Moon nights o'er Aquarian countryside
Hinterland for young lovers , pathways for romance rediscovered
Shangri-La midnight glen , flaxen mane , astral beacons of
Smoke blue in concerto with Flame red
A reflection on a chosen star at curiosities unlatched gate
Traipsing rain washed , cool clover with strawberry tressed , porcelain 'Inamorata'
Ebony hour capitulation and seduction* ...

They trade with my dream
training their skills
They shop with my temper
dabble their patience
They bet for my breast
Measure their libido
They drink for my health
get drunk with their money
They are sleepless
Concerned about my problems
They hire a private detective
to write my black biography
counting my lovers.

For all the time
For them
I’m at the public auction
And they try to steal my eye
To **** my dream to push me in the hinterland
And to play  play with me.

They march
withered but undying
with mud
fallen sweetly on their faces.

A new sky and a tender wind
grant severance from the sea.

Haunt us no more
with your pikes and arrows.
Blend our moanings and call our names:

the sunflower,
the wind,
the moonshine breaks

a mirrored frame,
a knighted sky,
and iron cast in embroidered lace.

I lay my hopes in
a hinterland of grace/waste.

What will a soul bring
that a body cannot
in sorrow or in death?

When sentiments of corpses
hang high from windows
paneled by offense,

stars fall on broken strings.

We are in the hinterland
The frontier of change
Making decisions into
The wind and crossing

We are in the borderland
The edge of known ideas
Stepping forward into
The storm and breathing

We are in the wasteland
The place they don't see
Advancing across terrain
The sun and enduring

The python crawling
and winding through the land,
decimating,annihilating
and choking lives
out of our youths,
there's fear in the land,
stench smell of blood
from the calamity spreads
through the land.
We must stand firm,
hold the line,resist them
and vehemently oppose them.
This monstrous tragedy
is dreadfully depressing.
weeping of our mothers
whose sons are taken
heard from afar.
There's no war but
there's war in the land.
Who is next to be taken.
This python dangerously
dancing it's way
among the people.
The young men bruised
and wounded by its venom.
Dance of this python scares
the little ones in the hinterland.
They attempt to break,
demonise, belittle,
vilify and wipe us out
through intimidation,
disinformation, mass ******  
and ethnic cleansing.
Can the elders magically
unleash the anaconda
to swallow up their python
just like Moses did to
his adversaries.
©2017. Emeka Mokeme.All rights reserved.