There is a Mouse in this House.
Insatiable,
He keeps me up at night,
thin fine claws on metal stove tops,
whispering to the birds what a fool he's made of me,
because I couldn't make the fibers of my home work with me.

There is a Mouse in this House,
Immortal,
I've fished him drowned out of drains,
fed him bleach on silver trays,
listened to him choke in air vents,
his chestnut jacket perpetually in the corners of my eye,
leaving reminders in my cereal,
this rodent he refuses to die.

There is a Mouse in this House,
Intangible,
he is not slipping through my fingers he's dancing on them,
quick petite feet tapping on my counters,
fleet and fast like smoke,
I've seen him seep through a clenched fist and still escape with wedding bands,

There is a Mouse in this House.
Impish,
he waits 'till I'm alone to play his music,
the crack and chew,
too early with the morning dew,
he will not play his song for you, it'd be too easy to be seen.

There is a Mouse in this House,
primeval,
he's been waiting,
mapped the walls and painted my flaws,
tactician skilled and iron willed,
this beast knows war far more than my militia mind was ready for,
plotting out insurgencies for restless and anxieties,

There is a Mouse in this House,
emaciated,
what's his is his,
what's mine is his,
there is no sacred to things with tails.
clearing out my pantry,
his jaws now tasting for my sanity,
finished with the:
Rye,
White,
and Sourdough,
he's fixed his tongue on sweat breads,
scuttling with unnatural flow,

There is a Mouse in this House.
Charming,
too handsome a creature to ever be singed,
he peddles on the burners simply too strut,
scampering through flames to test his luck,

There is a Mouse in this House,
Insomniac,
from now until each evening hour,
his paws touch turns time sour.
Ivory teeth clanging out a new ink-printed deed,
he owns the tenant and never even had to rent it,

There is a Mouse in this House,
arrogant,
too self-assured and clever,
cunning, devilish a creature he may be,
but he has yet to get a load of me,
holed away within his den,
his first mistake was not letting me win,
setting aria's on fly's wings to declare his victory,
this furry phantasm is all too aware of what he did to me.

There is a Mouse in This House,
sleeper,
I'm plotting my comeback,
sure-footed,
slow breathes,
and savage hands,
I'm ready,
silent and steady;
this beautiful monstrous mouse had best prepare for battle.

There is a Mouse in this House.
But it's my House.

Sweltering insurgencies of electric power chords
Tribal reverberations of skin-stretched drum boards
Rolling and filling; syncopating the noise
Of the ***-less toys
The ****-less boys
Enraptured in the music
The anthem
Of invidious phantoms
My eyes hurt inside and
I want to pull them out and
Scrape out the gunk and rust
that’s behind my self-indulgent perseverance
so I can cry
for the first time in years…

Wrapping my hands around his slender torso
Licking away the paint, the dripping ooze; more so
Than hastening my ****** and mordant urges
To bite what emerges
And my mouth purges
The obelisk from underneath
The iron-pierced jester
The voracious molester
My hand tightens as I grip
his throat tighter and
I want to squeeze until his eyes pop
from his sockets and
laugh until I puke against the walls,
watching the ****** fluids mix
like an execrable marinara sauce…

I turned thirty while still being sixteen
The vivid beauty of the world was only in dreams
But none of mine, none that I can recall
Many years have passed since I took the oral fall
Where no one saw
Intransigent need to live
For the snake in my veins hungered for more
So many had their way
until I was limp and sore.
Defamatory fingers of mire and strife
Probing and stretching
My insides
And devilishly comforting
With limpid ambrosia
That’s infected by bilious worms and maggots covered in icing
And fruit

Amatory gauntlets fastened and secured over
Handless limbs that retract under matriculated frictions
That fracture, crack, morph, distort
Emphasize, marginalize
Rationalize, desensitize
Acts of *******, evasion, moral drainage;
Pieces, bits, chunks, sections, portions, servings;
Arms, legs, eyes, tongues, fingers, toes,
Love, lust, infatuation
Adoration
Boys, girls, women, men,
Angels, demons, monsters, humans
Creators, gods, titans, divas
All extended and limited from the minds that worship
Sanctify, mesmerize, glorify, rectify
While humans eat more, love more, **** more
Than the angels, demons, monsters, and titans
We ponder and cherish
Nevermore, for me
Ever lore, for all
Crows surround
And chaos found.

new manners are being formed
as the era of the dawn is getting warmer
groping with ***** hands
for candy bars that can’t be bought
our names have become sullied
as our souls were polished in the serpentine waters
welcoming women into the thick of it
the folds of this organization
are still unmentionable
i prefer to remain in the vital spark of the species
our hearts are clocks
keeping time to rhythms long gone
and forgotten by most
except the loyal soldiers
who carry spears in their teeth
your hurt is clear
yet i must keep wary of your fear
thank you dear for everything is clearer now
and that's the way we like it
our hearts and minds can’t hide it
the chronicles of complexity are such
that we expect the unacceptable
somatic insurgencies
the chronic divergence from field to flatland
cubicles are likely as carcinogenic
as cantankerous old ladies are successful
at liberating the hearts and minds
of their children's babies

A confinement to the street,
I likened it to a bliss of pain.
Not extended like an overrun episode,
But the anxiety is sleepless,
When yesterday approaches,
I wrap myself in the ignorance,
Homeless, timeless,
It grows and defines,
Coarses through my fundamental
Lapses,
A boy becomes an atitude,
I wish i had these experiences in youthful insurgencies.

Its someday in the week,
I lose the raptured schedules,
To hunger is life.
To thirst is life.
The misled winter wraps itself
On my frozen life.
A faint emergence of time
Resumes,
There in the shadows
I once knew a man,
The visions of him asking to feed
My souless self.
Stretched by insistent graces,
In a road of certain contrasts,
Gentle into the street,
I laugh; the revolving doors,
I cry; what or who i never was,
A certain kind of grace to be
Within the containment,
the poor, the  restless,
bleeding my facades,
Shredding the faces I once knew
Destroying my world.

Once I sat upon a throne
Lost in the decimations,
I dont know who I am.

Keep walking.
Telling myself as the night freezes
I will be just fine.
Keep walking
Telling myself in minced
Thoughts as hope flutters against
Nowhere to go.
Keep walking,
The sun rises
And blisters on my feet
Calm the night as the safety
Of day lets me rest.

I will bounce back tomorrow,
And the streets become a ripened spring fruit,
Losing myself
And the art of loss
Is no disaster,
Not unlike losing my keys,
Not unlike losing places,
Not unlike losing names,
Until i reconciled myself
At the fork of the river,
Losing myself is not an art:

The beauty was in finding who I was meant to be.

Rush Transcript. May include inaccuracies.

Andrea Marsino: We're here today with "     " to talk about his recent best-seller, The Orchestra, which has swept bookshelves across the nation in recent weeks. A stunning display of literary craftsmanship, the book has generated a whirlwind of dialogue in all sorts of settings, from University coffee shops to local dive bars, and even, we're told, in the Pentagon. Tell us "     ", did you have any expectation at all of this kind of reaction?

"     ": Never in a million years would I have thought that I could stir up such a...a hornet's nest really. Sure it's a kind of inflammatory piece of fiction, but I never thought it'd result in so much backlash.

Andrea: Talk about unintended consequences right? How did the idea first come to you?

"         ": Well it didn't just pop into my head fully formed one day. I guess it first started to take shape at a bus station in Florida. I had just been kicked out of my Dad's house and was moving to another part of the state, so naturally I was a bit, I don't know, out of sorts. I was waiting for the connecting bus and was smoking a cigarette to **** the time and just sort've fell into conversation with this black kid who was also waiting for a connection. This was in I think May of 2013, so the situation really hadn't started to fall part yet, but the cracks were definitely showing. And that's what we were talking about, just the overall sense of things not going well, the feelings of helplessness that we as individuals, and seemingly the community as a whole, were feeling at the time. I told him that it'd get better one day, somehow and that change always is a painful process. Then the light came on and I started pondering how that sweeping societal change might be accomplished.

Andrea: There are a lot of themes in the book, a lot of subtext and implied conclusions. You've been criticized for what seems like hostility to faith and some say advocating violent political activism. What are your responses to some of the accusations that have been leveled against you?

"         ": Hostility to faith? Absolutely not. Faith is one of the overriding points of the whole thing. The objection is to organized and subverted religious teachings. Faith exists to aid humanity in the struggle of their lives and I feel like....if you examine history faith has time and again been co-opted into a tool of oppression. That's what I object to. As for advocating ****** revolution, that's another flat out misinterpretation. Yes, politics is a huge part of the story and plays a huge part in really tying the whole thing together. But it's not really about that, it's not about any single issue. It's about people, as a whole, taking back their right to not be dehumanized by anything or anyone, especially their government which is supposed to protect them.

Andrea: I see. So it's not so much about the mechanisms of power politics as it is about people's inherent value?

"        ": Absolutely. Our conception of what power really is I think is grossly inaccurate.

Andrea: But surely you can understand how your depiction of terrorist acts and a domestic insurgency is very disturbing to some people? You were a Soldier yes? Did this affect your style, and the arc of the plot?

"         ": Of course I can. And it's meant to be disturbing, it's meant to illustrate how positive forces of change can be corrupted into violence. And yes, I was an Intelligence Analyst in the Army. We were fighting an insurgency, so in order to learn how, we basically deconstructed insurgencies throughout history. We learned how they functioned, all the sides you could throw at it. And then I learned from two Defense Intelligence Agency Instructors how to start one too. Those experiences most definitely gave me the technical knowledge I needed to write something like this.

Andrea: There's also been a lot of talk about how graphic your imagery is. Many prominent individuals call it a lack of talent on your part, that you can't write without going in for the shock factor so to speak.

"        " : Ha! It's not a children's book. And besides, life is graphic. You can't portray something accurately without tackling the nasty stuff. Besides, things like ****** assault and drug use are essential to some of the characters. It wouldn't make any sense for someone to react as violently as they did in certain scenes without the reader knowing exactly what had occurred previously to form that character's identity.

Andrea: I can understand that. Doesn't make it any easier to think about though.

"       ": I don't know what to tell you. The truth is a painful thing sometimes, and portraying it was not exactly a fun process.

Andrea: And what about those very colorful characters? How did you get your inspiration for them?

"          ": Oh all sorts of places. Honestly, some are based on real individuals that I've known at some point or another. And others are pure imagination. Ta'ra and Clara were inspired by a Dane Jones ***** for instance ha ha.

Andrea: 'Blushing' That's, er, interesting. Characters from ******* is one I haven't heard before. Anyway, throughout the book is this sense of individuals being swept into something bigger than themselves and how they react to that. It's kind of ambiguous sometimes, swinging between very New Age concepts to mundane life on the same page. The quote at the beginning for instance. Very spiritual, very deep. But then you open with an interaction on a street corner.

"          ": Hmm, I guess I could try and explain about things like Theosis, which is one of the main themes by the way, but I don't think it would illustrate what I was trying to convey very well. I guess I was always kinda on the fence about divine intervention and that sort of thing until I read a piece by a friend of mine about an experience she had some years ago. Basically, she was in a diner when a Muslim woman came over and asked to sit and talk. They spoke about spirituality and the woman turned to her and said that anyone could be a prophet, like it wasn't something reserved for saints and such. It was very powerful and finally convinced me that humans aren't just ants on an anthill, so to speak. It spoke to a very, very intimate part of me. So, I took it and incorporated it into what I do. Which is write.

Andrea: Wow, that's an amazing explanation that I really didn't expect. I'd love to talk some more and I'm sure our listeners would love to hear more, but unfortunately that's all the time we have for the show today. "     " thank you so much for joining us today and sharing so many insights about your new book, The Orchestra.

"           ": The pleasure was all mine Andrea, thank you for having me.

Andrea**: This is Andrea Marsino with NPR and thanks for listening. Coming up in the next half hour we have Peggy Walker from Floyd Virginia talking about some of the exciting ways her community is fighting to keep their traditions alive today.

A school in a village without any pastel –
Divine Child which never cares for riel
Strives for excellence. Does propel
The children upwards and rebel
Against injustice gigantic or sea shell;
Strives to let its stars and carvings excel
With the artistic hands of its roselle.
All play ups and disobeys did she quell
For all discourteous and insolent is knell.
Insurgencies and Illiteracy repel
As soon as they hear Divine’s yell.
She made IAS, engineer and Laurel
Who are shining brightly in parallel.
The capacity to write is more in noel
As during Christmas less is evil’s spell
And more golly and blimey impel.
She is still like a nice damoiselle
Not touched by corruption or rebel.
This is pond. In it many a Raphael
Have drowned to break a cell
From which brains emerged like sail
Which drove young minds to foretell
Their future. With Anandi ma’am’s spell
She still does prosper, flourish and excel.

We fought wars,
Rough, ferocious and deadly deadly,
Genocides and Holocausts,
We killed, got killed and lived to tell the tale,
We still touched our mouths, noses and faces,
We sneezed, coughed and had high fevers,
We shook hands, hugged and kissed,
Yet we survived and lived to tell the tale at the tail-end.


Wars were fought throughout the world,
World wars and wars for supremacy,
Nuclear wars and cold wars,
Religious wars and wars against colonialism,
Tribal wars and civil wars,
Trade wars and industrial wars
Insurgencies and conventional wars,
Wars against Ebola and wars against the SARS virus,
Wars against slavery and apartheid; and wars against oppression,
Wars about us against them and them against those that are against them,
Some, really senseless wars.


We emotionless watched them fight their wars with arms folded,
As they emotionless watched us fight our wars with arms folded,
It is not our war, they felt,
It is not on our soil, we reckoned,
They are not our people, we believed,
Our economy will not be affected, they said,
After-all, we share no common Ancestry,
With pride, we developed a defensive “Them” and “Us” attitude,
Every nation for herself and only God for us all,
We never wanted to be part of others’ wars,
Neither did they want to be part of ours,
Depositing the spirit of Worldianship into acute non-existance.


Today, a horrendous and cataclysmic war has been declared against the world – them and us,
Ruthlessly savaging, ravaging and bulldozing the lugubrious world full of them and us, like a demented storm really gone mad,
A devastating and ruinous world war 3 with some shift of gear,
An atrocious insurgency against a common but deadly and hostile enermy,
A silent, ruthless and predatory bandit which intentions are catastrophically loud, heavily thudding and explosively explosive,
The wide world has been dolorously and traumatically held to ransom,
And ransom of the worst order and disorder,
Plunging the outrageous and despicable West and the rest of the cultured world on one side,
Fighting side by side in a war they never wanted to fight,
Not even side by side,
Desperately befriending my unspeakable enermy because he is the enermy of my enermy,
And the enermy of the enermy of the enermy who is my enermy,
Just imagine the symbiosis,
Just imagine.


Desperate and distressed children of the world have been unintentionally isolated and agonisingly violated,
Tightly curfew-ed and strictly quarantined against their will,
Some, with neither food nor means of survival,
All, converted into Inmates in their own homes and excuses for homes,
As the catastrophic war notoriously spreads like a ravaging bushfire on defenceless nations,
Taking with it innocent children of the subconscious and powerless world,
With some, falling dual victims of the calamitous virus and also the armies,
Little-minded combat and action-hungry armies that are supposed to be protecting them,
Siding with their own enermy and the enermy of their own people,
Shame on the children of the sorrowful soil,
Children of Kunta Kinte, Zwangendaba, Mzilikazi kaMashobana, and Chaminuka,
Children of Moshoeshoe, Kgabo, Kaguvi and Kazembe,
Children of Skwati, Sikhukhuni, Shaka and Shiriyadenga,
Children of Soshangana, Christopher Columbus, Jan Van Riebeck and Vasco Da Gama,
Shame.


A little child distantly cries elsewhere in Africa’s distant peripheries of domineering poverty,
She sickly cries her last cries for food and last cries ever,
A little bundle of a network of visible veins lying on a reed mat like a ragged rag doll,
A tiny, vulnerable innocent crossfire victim of the massive deadly disorderly war,
Last in a family of twelve, that never had food since the first day of the lockdown,
As father and mother sadly gaze at each other, tears are shed and shared in capitulation,
They cannot leave their landlocked tiny shack to go out to look for food,
Their poor offspring lackadaisically closes her tiny eyes for the last time,
Departing from the weird world in a war that was never hers to fight,
Not even her “church mice” parents,
She dies in painful hunger and of a painful hunger that was the grandchild of Corona’s making,
A child of the African dusty soil prematurely returning to the African dusty soil,
A crossfire victim of corvid19 of the Chinese ancestry,
An indiscriminate weponous weapon of mass destruction,
Shame.


Amidst all this, songs get sung phonetically in different languages and tunes,
By different nationalities of different nations and nationalisms,
Touching and emotional songs, embodying and incarnating just but one and the same theme,
Coronavirus, corvid 19, the heartless witch which is son to a heartless witch,
Where do we run or even crawl to for safety?
Where really, at this humanity’s tattered and shattered darkest hour,
Our hour no longer our hour,
We have fought worse wars with worst enermies than you,
More titanic, more ravaging, more calamitous, more faceless,
Albeit, we lived to tell the tale,
The fearless warrior children of the fearless warriors that we fearlessly are,
We do not fight to fight another day,
And we cannot just fold our cold arms as you recklessly scotch our lovely earth to oblivion,
Rapacious Corona, it is just a matter of time,
Just a matter of time,
Corvid 19 – obnoxious bandit father of an obnoxious bandit wizard,
Heartless dissident son of a heartless dissident witch,
The epitome of prolific disrespect, involuntary solitude and proliferated solicitude,
The personification of convulsive misery, spasmodic destruction, and multitudinous deaths,
What goes around, comes around,
Just a matter of time.

A leaked sanity
derived from a single unintentional stimulus
She immediately drowned in her illusions
A cascade of ecstatic emotional state
Led her to unexplained exhilarating lub-dubs
She entered a trance
An imaginary setting of pseudo-relationship,
originating from a deceptive analysis

Butterflies lodged in her stomach
Like drifting into the sweet tranquil breeze of fall
Odd feeling brought by an accidental impulse
an addictive sensation, continually sought
Like an ice cream that thaws
and never did she regret for this

Like a bud that delayed its bloom
She is a fixated lass
fast-tracked into maturity,
Depriving her of being subjected to adolescent giggles and anguishes
Coping for deficiency,
to undergo short-lived fascinations

It was never an ordinary night,
for it would happen only but annually
It was extraordinary
where angels descended from heaven

She looked at him
as a critical thinker *** philosopher inside a venerable physique
His intuitive notions flowed
keeping his cleverness inhibited,
ingenuity simply emanated
Decisive metaphorical analogies were mesmerizing,
in the depth of the gyros and sulcus
in his intellect she wanted to drown

The mystery of his smirks
she wanted to decipher.
In the profoundly of his personality
she wished to be familiar.

Electrocution!
Extreme voltage in her physique
sanity almost dripped
She cared less about reality,
forgetting about lucidity and rationality
A plethora of outlook insurgencies
led to confused convictions

Nothing big really happened,
just a matter of split seconds summarized as a simple skin-to-skin contact
an exhilarating interaction between epidermal layers
A premature ventricular contractions.

What could ever be more important
Than these semiotic emergencies
The latent insurgencies of our mouths
And the symbols that come out (of them)
These images are equipped with violent rhythms
And we must determine the measurements
Of uncertainty before communication can begin

Up and down the street
they shouted and yelled!
An applauses over the
sky and atmospheric
nature blink and gaze
...can be seen, every corner
is a mixture of shine and dark,
in the far eastern is a balloons and
lanterns escaping to the above
earth, in the mid-eastersn a towers
blink and exploded
Above the black quarters, tension
and conflict are competing, and in
the ebony estate the insurgencies
took a ride on their roads...
In every home, there is a bed and the blanket of conflict but in the western
Shelters there's comfort mats to dwell

Insurrections and insurgencies
Maiming and killings
How did we get here?
Africans killing Africans
Was freedom a blessing or a curse?

These ethnic cleansing
Genocidal acts
Betrays our collective objective
A people desirous of peace

How do we seek justice?
In the hands of a dictators
Who have justice in their pockets
Swaying decisions with wads
Or oppression at worse

As the death toll increases
In a continent so naturally blessed
Yet so poor
Who cursed Africa?
That we may go and restitute
These sufferings are too much

At this point
Tired of seeking justice
Which can linger unto death
Especially for the poor
And truly oppressed
We seek peace
A season of quietude

To achieve peace
We must defeat corruption
The biggest enemy of advancement
It starts with you
When you know right
And do wrong
You are corrupt

If you practice African time
You are corrupt
If you play sentiment
To evade a cause
You are corrupt

Let's go back to the basics
Bring back moral instructions
Bring back home economics
Mix education with skills
That we raise a new generation

On the journey to freedom
Peace, justice and equity
You have a role to play
We can achieve SDG's
If we only but try

Vote when you have to
Failure which you are the real problem
As you would have done nothing
When you had the chance to
Just by a single vote

Take politics to our schools
Churches and mosques
Preach tolerance and oneness
But refuse manipulations
Let your conscience
Be your greatest Police

Africa is on a move
To her God ordained destination
Be a part of this change
Let us shape our world
And it starts with you and i

If you think that it’s fated
Just go ‘head and state it
Just say that you stayed
All too long
In awaiting
For me to be
Some kind of man
You’d expect
To be there all the time
Not the mind who’d object
To the social injustice,
The coup d’etat bloodless
The ******* plays
Charlemagne
To the Dulles
Insurgencies crushed
By the hush of corruption
The lush ****** lands  
***** by corporate seduction
The merciless,
Unyielding
****** of production
Duplicitous,
Profligate
Lust of consumption
The numb to the slum
Mum’s the word battle won
And some
Before even
The Russian bear stirred
Others still
Before even
The King Leo purred
When the purge isn’t fiction
I urge the revision
Enlist in the war
Upon carbon emission
And see with the heat-seeker
Serpentine vision
But spit it unwritten,
Unscripted
If needed
Concede not an inch
Of this ethical Eden
And in the endgame
Existential
Checkmate
Is the movement I make
To still you
Captivate

A new sister has come,
And older one has forever gone
She gone with bad miracles like
COVID-19 and war invasion and
insurgencies around the universe

Please new sister, be kind to us
as Salmabanu requested in her
beautiful pen work

"Be kind,
Be compassionate,
Hear our cries,
Let us out!
Give us wings to fly" (c) salmabanu  21