As a woman, and in the service of my Lord the Emperor Wu, my life is governed by his command. At twenty I was summoned to this life at court and have made of it what I can, within the limitations of the courtesan I am supposed to be, and the poet I have now become. Unlike my male counterparts, some of whom have lately found seclusion in the wilderness of rivers and mountains, I have only my personal court of three rooms and its tiny garden and ornamental pond. But I live close to the surrounding walls of the Zu-lin Gardens with its astronomical observatories and bold attempts at recreating illusions of celebrated locations in the Tai mountains. There, walking with my cat Xi-Lu in the afternoons, I imagine a solitary life, a life suffused with the emptiness I crave.
 
In the hot, dry summer days my maid Mei-Lim and I have sought a temporary retreat in the pine forests above Lingzhi. Carried in a litter up the mountain paths we are left in a commodious hut, its open walls making those simple pleasures of drinking, eating and sleeping more acute, intense. For a few precious days I rest and meditate, breathe the mountain air and the resinous scents of the trees. I escape the daily commerce of the court and belong to a world that for the rest of the year I have to imagine, the world of the recluse. To gain the status of the recluse, open to my male counterparts, is forbidden to women of the court. I am woman first, a poet and calligrapher second. My brother, should he so wish, could present a petition to revoke his position as a man of letters, an official commentator on the affairs of state. But he is not so inclined. He has already achieved notoriety and influence through his writing on the social conditions of town and city. He revels in a world of chatter, gossip and intrigue; he appears to fear the wilderness life.  
 
I must be thankful that my own life is maintained on the periphery. I am physically distant from the hub of daily ceremonial. I only participate at my Lord’s express command. I regularly feign illness and fatigue to avoid petty conflict and difficulty. Yet I receive commissions I cannot waver: to honour a departed official; to celebrate a son’s birth to the Second Wife; to fulfil in verse my Lord’s curious need to know about the intimate sorrows of his young concubines, their loneliness and heartache.
 
Occasionally a Rhapsody is requested for an important visitor. The Emperor Wu is proud to present as welcome gifts such poetic creations executed in fine calligraphy, and from a woman of his court. Surely a sign of enlightment and progress he boasts! Yet in these creations my observations are parochial: early morning frost on the cabbage leaves in my garden; the sound of geese on their late afternoon flight to Star Lake; the disposition of the heavens on an Autumn night. I live by the Tao of Lao-Tzu, perceiving the whole world from my doorstep.
 
But I long for the reclusive life, to leave this court for my family’s estate in the valley my peasant mother lived as a child. At fourteen she was chosen to sustain the Emperor’s annual wish for young girls to be groomed for concubinage. Like her daughter she is tall, though not as plain as I; she put her past behind her and conceded her adolescence to the training required by the court. At twenty she was recommended to my father, the court archivist, as second wife. When she first met this quiet, dedicated man on the day before her marriage she closed her eyes in blessing. My father taught her the arts of the library and schooled her well. From her I have received keen eyes of jade green and a prestigious memory, a memory developed she said from my father’s joy of reading to her in their private hours, and before she could read herself. Each morning he would examine her to discover what she had remembered of the text read the night before. When I was a little child she would quote to me the Confucian texts on which she had been ****** schooled, and she then would tell me of her childhood home. She primed my imagination and my poetic world with descriptions of a domestic rural life.
 
Sometimes in the arms of my Lord I have freely rhapsodized in chusi metre these delicate word paintings of my mother’s home. She would say ‘We will walk now to the ruined tower beside the lake. Listen to the carolling birds. As the sparse clouds move across the sky the warm sun strokes the winter grass. Across the deep lake the forests are empty. Now we are climbing the narrow steps to the platform from which you and I will look towards the sun setting in the west. See the shadows are lengthening and the air becomes colder. The blackbird’s solitary song heralds the evening.  Look, an owl glides silently beneath us.’
 
My Lord will then quote from Hsieh Ling-yun,.
 
‘I meet sky, unable to soar among clouds,
face a lake, call those depths beyond me.’
 
And I will match this quotation, as he will expect.
 
‘Too simple-minded to perfect Integrity,
and too feeble to plough fields in seclusion.’
 
He will then gaze into my eyes in wonder that this obscure poem rests in my memory and that I will decode the minimal grammar of these early characters with such poetry. His characters: Sky – Bird – Cloud – Lake – Depth. My characters: Fool – Truth – Child – Winter field – Isolation.
 
Our combined invention seems to take him out of his Emperor-self. He is for a while the poet-scholar-sage he imagines he would like to be, and I his foot-sore companion following his wilderness journey. And then we turn our attention to our bodies, and I surprise him with my admonitions to gentleness, to patience, to arousing my pleasure. After such poetry he is all pleasure, sensitive to the slightest touch, and I have my pleasure in knowing I can control this powerful man with words and the stroke of my fingertips rather than by delicate youthful beauty or the guile and perverse ingenuity of an ****** act. He is still learning to recognise the nature and particularness of my desires. I am not as his other women: who confuse pleasure with pain.
 
Thoughts of my mother. Without my dear father, dead ten years, she is a boat without a rudder sailing on a distant lake. She greets each day as a gift she must honour with good humour despite the pain of her limbs, the difficulty of walking, of sitting, of eating, even talking. Such is the hurt that governs her ageing. She has always understood that my position has forbidden marriage and children, though the latter might be a possibility I have not wished it and made it known to my Lord that it must not be. My mother remains in limbo, neither son or daughter seeking to further her lineage, she has returned to her sister’s home in the distant village of her birth, a thatched house of twenty rooms,
 
‘Elms and willows shading the eaves at the back,
and, in front,  peach and plum spread wide.
 
Villages lost across mist-haze distances,
Kitchen smoke drifting wide-open country,
 
Dogs bark deep among the back roads out here
And cockerels crow from mulberry treetops.
 
My esteemed colleague T’ao Ch’ien made this poetry. After a distinguished career in government service he returned to the life of a recluse-farmer on his family farm. Living alone in a three-roomed hut he lives out his life as a recluse and has endured considerable poverty. One poem I know tells of him begging for food. His world is fields-and-gardens in contrast to Hsieh Ling-yin who is rivers-and-mountains. Ch’ien’s commitment to the recluse life has brought forth words that confront death and the reality of human experience without delusion.
 
‘At home here in what lasts, I wait out life.’
 
Thus my mother waits out her life, frail, crumbling more with each turning year.
 
To live beyond the need to organise daily commitments due to others, to step out into my garden and only consider the dew glistening on the loropetalum. My mind is forever full of what is to be done, what must be completed, what has to be said to this visitor who will today come to my court at the Wu hour. Only at my desk does this incessant chattering in the mind cease, as I move my brush to shape a character, or as the needle enters the cloth, all is stilled, the world retreats; there is the inner silence I crave.
 
I long to see with my own eyes those scenes my mother painted for me with her words. I only know them in my mind’s eye having travelled so little these past fifteen years. I look out from this still dark room onto my small garden to see the morning gathering its light above the rooftops. My camellia bush is in flower though a thin frost covers the garden stones.
 
And so I must imagine how it might be, how I might live the recluse life. How much can I jettison? These fine clothes, this silken nightgown beneath the furs I wrap myself in against the early morning air. My maid is sleeping. Who will make my tea? Minister to me when I take to my bed? What would become of my cat, my books, the choice-haired brushes? Like T’ao Ch’ien could I leave the court wearing a single robe and with one bag over my shoulders? Could I walk for ten days into the mountains? I would disguise myself as a man perhaps. I am tall for a woman, and though my body flows in broad curves there are ways this might be assuaged, enough perhaps to survive unmolested on the road.
 
Such dreams! My Lord would see me returned within hours and send a servant to remain at my gate thereafter. I will compose a rhapsody about a concubine of standing, who has even occupied the purple chamber, but now seeks to relinquish her privileged life, who coverts the uncertainty of nature, who would endure pain and privation in a hut on some distant mountain, who will sleep on a mat on its earth floor. Perhaps this will excite my Lord, light a fire in his imagination. As though in preparation for this task I remove my furs, I loose the knot of my silk gown. Naked, I reach for an old under shift letting it fall around my still-slender body and imagine myself tying the lacings myself in the open air, imagine making my toilet alone as the sun appears from behind a distant mountain on a new day. My mind occupies itself with the tiny detail of living thus: bare feet on cold earth, a walk to nearby stream, the gathering of berries and mountain herbs, the making of fire, the washing of my few clothes, imagining. Imagining. To live alone will see every moment filled with the tasks of keeping alive. I will become in tune with my surroundings. I will take only what I need and rely on no one. Dreaming will end and reality will be the slug on my mat, the bone-chilling incessant mists of winter, the thorn in the foot, the wild winds of autumn. My hands will become stained and rough, my long limbs tanned and scratched, my delicate complexion freckled and wind-pocked, my hair tied roughly back. I will become an animal foraging on a dank hillside. Such thoughts fill me with deep longing and a ****** desire to be tzu-jan  - with what surrounds me, ablaze with ****** self.
 
It is not thought the custom of a woman to hold such desires. We are creatures of order and comfort. We do not live on the edge of things, but crave security and well-being. We learn to endure the privations of being at the behest of others. Husbands, children, lovers, our relatives take our bodies to them as places of comfort, rest and desire. We work at maintaining an ordered flow of existence. Whatever our station, mistress or servant we compliment, we keep things in order, whether that is the common hearth or the accounts of our husband’s court. Now my rhapsody begins:
 
A Rhapsody on a woman wishing to live as a recluse
 
As a lady of my Emperor’s court I am bound in service.
My court is not my own, I have the barest of means.
My rooms are full of gifts I am forced barter for bread.
Though the artefacts of my hands and mind
Are valued and widely renown,
Their commissioning is an expectation of my station,
With no direct reward attached.
To dress appropriately for my Lord’s convocations and assemblies
I am forced to negotiate with chamberlains and treasurers.
A bolt of silk, gold thread, the services of a needlewoman
Require formal entreaties and may lie dormant for weeks
Before acknowledgement and release.
 
I was chosen for my literary skills, my prestigious memory,
Not for my ****** beauty, though I have been called
‘Lady of the most gracious movement’ and
My speaking voice has clarity and is capable of many colours.
I sing, but plainly and without passion
Lest I interfere with the truth of music’s message.
 
Since I was a child in my father’s library
I have sought out the works of those whose words
Paint visions of a world that as a woman
I may never see, the world of the wilderness,
Of rivers and mountains,
Of fields and gardens.
Yet I am denied by my *** and my station
To experience passing amongst these wonders
Except as contrived imitations in the palace gardens.
 
Each day I struggle to tease from the small corner
Of my enclosed eye-space some enrichment
Some elemental thing to colour meaning:
To extend the bounds of my home
Across the walls of this palace
Into the world beyond.
 
I have let it be known that I welcome interviews
With officials from distant courts to hear of their journeying,
To gather word images if only at second-hand.
Only yesterday an emissary recounted
His travels to Stone Lake in the far South-West,
Beyond the gorges of the Yang-tze.
With his eyes I have seen the mountains of Suchan:
With his ears I have heard the oars crackling
Like shattering jade in the freezing water.
Images and sounds from a thousand miles
Of travel are extract from this man’s memory.
 
Such a sharing of experience leaves me
Excited but dismayed: that I shall never
Visit this vast expanse of water and hear
Its wild cranes sing from their floating nests
In the summer moonlight.
 
I seek to disappear into a distant landscape
Where the self and its constructions of the world may
Dissolve away until nothing remains but the no-mind.
My thoughts are full of the practicalities of journeying
Of an imagined location, that lonely place
Where I may be at one with myself.
Where I may delight in the everyday Way,
Myself among mist and vine, rock and cave.
Not this lady of many parts and purposes whose poems must
Speak of lives, sorrow and joy, pleasure and pain
Set amongst personal conflict and intrigue
That in containing these things, bring order to disorder;
Salve the conscience, bathe hurt, soothe sleight.

I think sometimes, about what it means to be transgender. I probe and probe for answers, because as the possibility for a new age of enlightenment and safety increases, the others want to know. I’ve come up with many answers, but I can hold to none. I don’t deserve to paint the definition of a culture with the limited experiences I’ve had. I don’t see myself in the transgender identified people allowed on television. I don’t see myself in the transgender identified people making news feeds and giving high profile interviews. And as my nation’s exposure to our culture increases, likely will their curiosity. Am I transgender? Do I have the right? I’ve heard doctors, psychiatrists, may refuse transgender patients access to hormone therapy based on how dedicated or convincing their portrayal of their identified gender. If you want to be a man or woman, you’ll have to look like the women and men on TV. If you want to be transgender, you’ll have to look like the trans identified people on TV. Every single one of us who has an active role as either participant or observer in our society is prey to the crisis of validity. Am I pretty enough? Am I strong enough? Am I brave enough? Mom enough? Dad enough? Competitive enough? Successful enough? Rich enough? **** enough? Pious enough? It never ends. We’re, as a nation of people, being crushed and compartmentalized by this ever present lens, looming over us, exploiting our weaknesses and fears so it may grow wider, and support itself as it follows us, seemingly forever into the future. And one of the worst fears this camera of existential torment exploits, in most of us every day, is, “Do I have a reflection?” “What does it look like?” “Do I look like me?” What does it mean to be transgender? I can’t get away from that question. But I don’t have an answer. There are varying degrees of anguish, depression, panic, anxiety, and other wonderful emotional states that creep up on you and breathe down your neck nearly every waking day. Absolute contempt for the lie of a life you’ve lived till now, and contempt for the fragments still stuck to you, in memories, attached to your body and mind. Fear of those in your own community who would purposefully humiliate, invalidate, or attack you, choosing their own universal moral code over the innate urge and capacity to support the health and continued well being of another human. A ******* neighbor. A ******* pupil. A ******* employee. A ******* sister, brother, son, daughter, mother, father, cousin, ******* blood. What is being transgender like? By my experiences, it’s just like being anyone else in the country. But with a lot more fear, death, exclusion and medication.

he came to the door one night wet thin beaten and
terrorized
a white cross-eyed tailless cat
I took him in and fed him and he stayed
grew to trust me until a friend drove up the driveway
and ran him over
I took what was left to a vet who said,"not much
chance...give him these pills...his backbone
is crushed, but it was crushed before and somehow
mended, if he lives he'll never walk, look at
these x-rays, he's been shot, look here, the pellets
are still there...also, he once had a tail, somebody
cut it off..."

I took the cat back, it was a hot summer, one of the
hottest in decades, I put him on the bathroom
floor, gave him water and pills, he wouldn't eat, he
wouldn't touch the water, I dipped my finger into it
and wet his mouth and I talked to him, I didn't go any-
where, I put in a lot of bathroom time and talked to
him and gently touched him and he looked back at
me with those pale blue crossed eyes and as the days went
by he made his first move
dragging himself forward by his front legs
(the rear ones wouldn't work)
he made it to the litter box
crawled over and in,
it was like the trumpet of possible victory
blowing in that bathroom and into the city, I
related to that cat-I'd had it bad, not that
bad but bad enough

one morning he got up, stood up, fell back down and
just looked at me.

"you can make it," I said to him.

he kept trying, getting up falling down, finally
he walked a few steps, he was like a drunk, the
rear legs just didn't want to do it and he fell again, rested,
then got up.

you know the rest: now he's better than ever, cross-eyed
almost toothless, but the grace is back, and that look in
his eyes never left...

and now sometimes I'm interviewed, they want to hear about
life and literature and I get drunk and hold up my cross-eyed,
shot, runover de-tailed cat and I say,"look, look
at this!"

but they don't understand, they say something like,"you
say you've been influenced by Celine?"

"no," I hold the cat up,"by what happens, by
things like this, by this, by this!"

I shake the cat, hold him up in
the smoky and drunken light, he's relaxed he knows...

it's then that the interviews end
although I am proud sometimes when I see the pictures
later and there I am and there is the cat and we are photo-
graphed together.

he too knows it's ******* but that somehow it all helps.

i have interviews;
plastic plants are placed squarely throughout stale spaces
the real plants are on desks and on window sills,
mainly private offices
where women sit and look out windows;
they wait once a month
for window washers to lather the glass
and it’s calm, their legs are crossed
they wait for the squeegee to screech
and then they wipe away the rain stains
that should have been pressed in a diary

windows get clean slates
at night you can hardly tell that anything is *****
but today the windows are stained
through sunlight one can see it all
even the grasshopper leg pinned to the fourth floor window
where a man is flossing his teeth
after having craved a super food salad
that he won’t allow his assistant to know about

i have interviews;
and i will pick at my **** stockings
hide my pleasant coffee stains
but not shave my ***** hair
i will sit with the women who take pleasure in windows;
collar bones with freckles and sun kissed tints
eyes always nearly closed
because of the succulent hisses by cubicle #3;
they slither through lungs and offer more
than how many words i can type
before someone lights up another cigarette

It's Parent/Teachers interviews today,
Come along and share the blame,
They're graduating just the same,
Kids have a teacher free day,
We gave them Standardised tests,
Their self-esteem needs a rest,
That's why this school has a fence,
Who's got the common sense?
Yes, the PT interviews are today,
Come along and share the blame!

Thousands of us were displaced
Started careers late
Not lucky enough to have had great jobs

So we work hard
Put ourselves through night school
While taking care of family

Finally ...
Yes, yeah,  whoopee
Did it !
Once again completed school

Another certificate added to the growing list of achievements.
More bills owed to uncle Sam

Going on numerous job interviews
No one's responding
Instead ...
All this knowledge stored in your head

Current jobs pays minimum wages
Those colleges attended; mounting

When you try to get ahead  -
They hold on to their employments
As if,
It's Rocket science

Looking for younger, greener admits

Once AARP comes a knocking on
Your door
You know they don't want your
Expertise anymore

What's one to do
Still strong, healthy, seasoned
Educated, no strings to boot

Hopelessly stuck in a world of
"We will call you "

So at the tender age of fifty
Thoughts of starting your own business floats in your head

Right
Now, back to school
For another certificate
A chance to use that knowledge
Put bread on the table
Feel useful

Quality of life renewed.

JRap /2016

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after the painting by Mary Fedden

I kept seeing her around and about, but mostly on the beach. This is a small community and after five years or so I know who everyone is, except those who visit in the summer, though I am getting to know some of the regulars. I reckon she’s my age. When she looks at me in the store, and I look at her and smile, her smile tells me these things.

I have trouble with my hair. It’s thinned and doesn’t grow quite as it should. When I was pregnant and then nursing my children it was positively luxuriant. But later, and despite medical advice (and treatment I was unsure about and abandoned) it became an embarrassment, until he reassured me (just once) and I became an ‘adored woman’. He never ever spoke of it again and loved me so wholly and beautifully I had no reason for it to matter in his company, in his arms.

But seeing her, and often on the beach, more and more regularly, seeing her with her mane of strong dark brown hair flowing behind her in the wind, I felt a curious desire for such a wealth of hair. In fact, I began to feel something stir in me that was desire of a different kind. I can’t think I had ever looked at a woman in quite that way in any previous life. It was always men I sought, I wanted.

Her name is Sara, no h, just an A at the end. She said that when I eventually introduced myself. We were walking towards each other, barefoot both on that glistening skin of water the sea creates between the tides coming and going. It was about midday and I was, I was thinking and walking. I do this now. I don’t bring my sketchbook, I don’t look everywhere I can and more so, I have begun to retreat into my most private self. Perhaps it’s my age and so many years of feeling I had to be wholly attentive and active. Being in this remote place, almost permanently, has slowed me down, and I have begun to dream, to see beyond what I usually would have seen moment to moment. I’ve been re-reading the prose and poetry of Kathleen Raine, who understood this sea-swept place and was haunted by its ghosts, and who dreamed.

Never, never, again
This moment, never
These slow ripples
Across smooth water,
Never again these
Clouds white and grey
In sky crystalline
Blue as the tern’s cry
Shrill in the light air
Salt from the ocean,
Sweet from flowers

Oh yes,  ‘the sun that rose this morning from the sea will never return . . .’* I have become a watcher, no longer an observer. I put my camera away last winter and now hold moments in my memory. Here I can sketch. I can have all the time I need, and more. And I knew when I began to talk to Sara I wanted beyond anything else to sketch her, to know her line by line with the pen, and later bring the texture of her into paint.

Painting is where I am now. It’s direct, mesmeric, challenging, wholly absorbing. My needles and thread only deal with our clothes, my clever printing and collaging lies dormant in my studio, a studio I rarely enter now. I have a room upstairs in the loft that is all light and sky. There’s just an easel, a table, a chair, a small bookcase, a trolley-thing of paints and brushes. Even that’s too much. I always collected things around me. I brought so much in from outside and now I’m trying, trying to have as little as possible. This is where I will paint Sara. I’m already thinking this as we take the first tentative steps towards knowing one another. Names, where we live, (we both know). Partners, family, children? I have all this, but not here, only my companion, my love who caresses me with such care and attention. There are my cats and my hens. She has no one, or rather she talks of no one. She asks the questions and avoids giving answers. She just nods and doesn’t answer. Otherwise, she’s a straight yes / no person. She doesn’t feel she has to qualify anything.

We’re standing together. We’re intent on looking at each other. Words seem a little unnecessary because what we both want to do is look. ‘I can tell you paint’, she says, ‘It’s your finger nails’. My perfect nails and the pads of my fingers hold the evidence of a morning at my easel. ‘I have seen your work’, she says, ‘One could hardly not. You’re well known beyond these shores.’ I feel myself blushing slightly. I thought blushing had stopped with the menopause, not that it troubled me much, the menopause that is. Blushing though was a torturous part of my adolescence, but let’s not go into that.

‘Your husband,’ she says, ‘he’s up very early. I see him sometimes here, on the beach.’
‘Do you get up at five?’ I am surprised. My husband gets up before five.
‘Sleep is difficult sometimes. I walk a lot. I need to be out, and walk.’

Her face, her head is larger than mine. She is a larger woman altogether, bigger *****, long-legged, but with youthful ******* that seem taut and well-rounded under her brown frock, no, her brown dress. I only think frock because that’s what he says – ‘I love that frock.’ And he means usually whatever I am wearing now that’s old and rich in memories of his hands knowing me through a dress, sorry a frock, which remains for me (and possibly for him) the most sensuous of sensations, still. Au nature has its place, and I love the rub of his skin and body hair. But when we are lovers, and we are still lovers and usually when travelling, in hotel rooms or borrowed cottages, or visiting friends and dare I say it, staying with our various children. Last autumn in Venice, in this large, amazing marble-tiled room, with this huge bed, he undressed me in front of a window opening onto our own terrace, and I was beside myself with passion, desire, oh all those wonderful things. And for months afterwards I would return to that early evening, remembering the lights coming on all over the watered city as he kissed and stroked and brushed my body through my Gudrun Sjödén frock. I would replay, find again over and over, those exquisite moments of such joyful touching as he then undressed me, and with such care and tenderness I felt myself crying out. Well, he says I did. In one of his poems (for your eyes only, he had whispered) he admits to his own celebration of those moments again, again.

Sara’s dress is calf-length. There’s nothing else. As the breeze wraps itself around the loose-fitting brown cotton her naked figure is revealed inside itself. No ring, no jewellery, nothing to hold her hair now flowing behind her. She has positioned herself so it does; flow out behind her. This is so strange. Am I dreaming this? We have become silent and together look in silence at the sea. I can hear her short breathes. She turns to me with a smile and looks straight into my eyes – and says nothing – and then walks backward a few steps – still with her warm smile – turns and walks away.

I tell him I met Sara today and ask if he sees her on the beach in the early mornings. Yes, he has, in the distance, mostly. He has said good morning to her on a few occasions, but she has smiled and said nothing. Five o’clock is far too early to say anything, he says. She swims occasionally. I keep my distance, he says with a grin.

I tell him I would like to paint her. I should, he says, You should go and ask her, do it, get it done and out of your system. It’s time you stopped being afraid of the face, the portrait, the figurative. I’d give so much to have been able to paint you, he says ruefully, my darling, my dearest. And he strokes my arm, kisses my cheek, then, he slowly and carefully kneels down beside my chair, places his arm across the top of my thighs so when I bend to kiss him his bare forearm touches the edge of my *******. He puts his head in my lap, and I caress his ears, his quite white hair.

Sara’s door is open. She’s living in Ralph’s cottage, a summer-let habitable (just) in the nearly autumn time it is. I call, ‘Sara, it’s me’, thinking she’ll recognize my voice, not wishing to say my name. She appears at the door. ‘I have the kettle on, she says, ‘I had a feeling you might be by.’ Her accent is, like mine, un-regional, carefully articulated, a Welsh tinge perhaps. There’s an uplift and a slowness in some of the vowels. ‘You will come in’, she says, more a statement than a question. It’s rather dark inside. There’s a reading lamp on, but she has the chair, her chair, close by the window. There are letters being written. There are books. Not Ralph’s, but what she has brought with her. Normally, I would be hopelessly inquisitive, but I can’t stop myself looking at her, wondering even now, in these first few moments in this dark room, how I will position her to paint her form, her face, her nature. What will I paint? I look at her still-bare feet, her large hands.

And so, with mugs of tea, Indian tea I don’t drink, but here, as her guest I do, but without milk, we sit, I on the only other chair (from the kitchen) she on the floor. And she watches me look about, and look at her.

‘I’m rather done with talking, with polite conversation. That’s why I’m here to be done with all that for a while.’
‘I came to ask you to sit for me. To let me draw you, paint you even. You can be completely quiet. I won’t say a word. I’ve never, ever asked anyone to sit for me. I’m not that sort of painter. But when I saw you on the beach it was the first thing that came into my head.’
‘I should be flattered. Though I have sat for artists before, when I was a little younger,’ surprisingly she mentions two names I know, both women. ‘I know how to be still. But, those are days in a different life.’
‘I only want to paint you in the life you have now.’ And I realise then that what I want to paint was Sara’s ‘aloneness’. I think then I have never been truly alone since he came into my life and took any loneliness I had from me. Whenever we are apart, and still there are times, he writes to me the tenderest letters, the most touching poems, he quotes his Chinese favourites down the telephone. We always, always speak to each other before bed, even when we are on different continents and time-zones. He told me I was always his last thought before sleep. And I wonder if I would be his last thought . . .

‘Do you want to do this formally?, said Sara.
‘I don’t know. Yet. I’d like to draw you first, be with you for a little while, perhaps to walk. A little while at a time. Whatever might suit you.’
‘Would you pay me? I have little money. It would be useful.’
‘Of course’, I say this directly, having no idea about what one pays a model. He will know though. He knew Paula Rego and didn’t she have a female model? I think of those large full-length figures rendered in pastels. Her model’s name was Lila, who for more than 25 years, had sat for her, stood for her, crouched for her, hour after hour and day after day. I remember a newspaper piece that went something like this: since 1985 Lila has helped to give life, in paint, and pastel, and charcoal, to the characters in Paula Rego's head. Lila was all Paula Rego’s women.

‘Sara’, I said, ‘help me please. It’s taken more than a little courage to come to see you, to ask you. My husband says I should do this, finally get myself painting the person, the face, body, not as some exercise in a life class, but the real thing.’
‘Of course’, she says, ‘Let’s go and walk to the point.’

And we did. Not saying very much at all, but I suppose I did. She made me talk and gradually I laid my life out in front of her, and not the life she would have found in those glossy monographs and catalogue introductions, and God forbid, not in those media features and interviews that I suppose have made me a name I’d always dreamed of becoming, and now could do without.

‘I suppose you have a studio’, she said suddenly, ‘Is that where you’d want me to come?’
‘Yes, I have a studio. No, I don’t think I want you to come there. Not at first anyway.’ I was floundering. ‘ I’d like to draw you, paint you possibly on the beach, where we met, so there would be sea and sky and breeze blowing your hair.’
‘And a steamer out on the horizon belching smoke from its funnel and the sea blowing white horses and dancing about. I’d be right by the seastrand with waves and spray and foam, and under a greyish sky. Not a sunny day. A breezy day. In my brown dress, sitting on the sand by the tide marks, looking out to sea, looking at the steamer away in the distance, sitting with my left hand behind me holding myself up, and the shape of my legs akimbo bent slightly under my brown dress. How would that be?’
‘Perfect’, I said.

And it was.

I wear the letters NYU sprawled across my chest as my individuality is asphyxiated.
Lungs choke under the weight of the added pressure. 

The thought of college plus my complexion,
Equals complexed looks that ponder my intellectually-heightened direction. 



Will you think a little bit more of me, with my conformity?



Attempts to better myself meet enough ignorance to even cloud the vision of God.
Segregation and alienation cause mental spasms the strength of lightening rods. 




I guess you're just a product of the environment to which you were exposed. 


But I'm always trying to fight the stereotype that black people are ultimately foes.



I am the ant and the kids of rich parents are magnifying glasses. 

Cremating me with the solar power of son's who were taught that their existence was worth more than mine. 



I lay motionless, in bottomless quick sand pits, itching to alleviate my stomach stitch, engulfed by set standards that could not be met. 


I am tired of trying to be what you'd like to see.
Astute, respectable, young black man-just so you can approve of me and hopefully think that we are not all "up to no good."



Say it loud,
I'm black 

And I'm,
Not going to lie,
The proud part is kinda hard to say. 


Because I walk down the street and see my face in the homeless everyday. 


I fill the prisons and I'm famous when the news reports crime. 

And when I show up early to interviews,
they look confused to see that I,
Don’t run on Colored People's Time.



I don't hate black but I hate the fact that black means that sometimes I have to find alternate routes to success. 



While other people's roads are already paved, I suffer from all the stress. 



I try my best but I'm always categorized as less, then a man. 


And I'm trying to change perceptions but I still feel like a visitor on American land




And the poor are physically trapped so I relate mentally.

We both suffer from the oppression and accept the hatred like it was meant to be.




Society has led you to believe that blacks are not worthy of equality



But take a long, hard look into my eyes and tell me that you don’t see my humanity.

When you say racism doesn't exist, you are saying one of the most detrimental things you can say in our society. You are saying I know better. You are saying that it is okay. The things that you have experienced and the pain that you have felt is okay. Because I don't think it's real. I don't trust your experiences. I don't believe that you know more about what it is like to be you than I do. I don't care what history has to say. I don't care what you have to say. I don't trust you so your words don't matter to me. I don't trust you so your pictures, videos, interviews don't matter to me. When you say racism doesn't exist... What you're really saying is, "I still can't hear you."

And what then won't a person do to be heard?

We overestimate the probability of the improbable through eyes and ears that are susceptible to vivid imagery. Social media screams that 100 people died from poisoned cantaloupes instead of saying in less emotional terms 100 in 7,000,000,000 or .000000000001% of the population. Really It’s all about fear and manipulation. You viewed all the news interviews, watched YouTube videos and even read the compelling articles. Now you’re in the grocery store avoiding cantaloupes like the plague because you might be next! Conversely in positive outcomes this is the same rationalization that compels people to buy jack *** lottery tickets. Can you see how we extremely over weighting the probabilities of events based on the vividness and prevalence of the coverage? The news—the government---companies---all individuals have agendas but not everyone is looking out for your best interest. Many are “wolves in sheep’s clothing” that feed on these manipulations in regards to rare events with the sole purpose to covertly produce a particular behavior that prospers outcomes that are favorable to their own position.

Now her goes the paradox of overestimation and underestimation in regards to rare events. A strange thing happens when rare events are not being perceived vividly through our senses. They are simply ignored! We no longer over estimate probabilities but instead begin to under estimate probability! For example during Hurricane Katrina victims yielded to evacuate due to this under estimation. The probability of the rare event was neglected in part to lack of vividness. In hindsight they seemed foolish for not leaving but in actuality were quite human in their behavior that lacked the emotional experience towards the rare event (obviously the decision was intertwined with a myriad of other individual variables). In the aftermath the vividness of the Hurricane’s media coverage allows the opposite to occur once more---a heavy overestimation of a future storms probability. This produces disproportionate fears for many in regards to actual hurricane probabilities. Leaving the door open for exploitation.

What we see is a human nature that goes extremely over or under in estimations towards the outcomes of rare events compared to the events actual probabilities. The danger is that people know this!! They can pump your head with what they want you to overestimate and be silent on what they’d like you to neglect, all in the manipulation of their cause. The perceived good guy can easily be one in the same with the bad guy. The best sociopaths are quite charming. People can easily be manipulated with the news and Youtube videos for example. Often times the information provided has traces of truth that are used to spark emotions that lead an individual further away from actuality while simultaneously using them towards their own divisive agendas. They will stay silent to other matters---producing neglect till it’s time to play the good guy once the neglected issue (often created themselves) explodes. In the after math the information they provide makes you feel empowered but it's only manipulating you further into their own aspirations--they look like a hero for doing it --again they produce the overestimations of fear where they want while staying silent to what they wish for you to neglect. Whether it’s the government, a conspiracy theorist or a manipulating relationship partner be attuned to how we process information and the susceptibility to manipulation (overestiamation-underestimation). Although not every situation is a source of manipulation from others it would be unwise to neglect the fact that our own emotions can lead us to these same ignorances all by our selves. I give glory and honor to my Savior Jesus Christ for this knowledge in which Faith in Him alone helps me discern and weight the emotional information and there intentions

Here in America,
we improvise morgues
as needed.
in the cafeterias
or by the lockers,
near the ticket booths,
and at the altars.
We divvy up the dead.
Tally them
and report the number
like an answer.
13, 20, 49, 58, 6
Every death count
a timely national shock.
Almost as if  
our well-televised  
monthly tragedy
was ever anything less
than a game of roulette.
anything less than a matter of time
and time and time again.
Covering them each
with our bed sheets,
we try and stifle it.
Do our best to
staunch the the sights,
the noises,
(“just like chairs falling”)
the names
that keep bleeding out
onto our thoughts  
and tongues,
Far too much and
too often
not to choke on.

Here in America,
we’ve learned that  
horror is level-headed.
It is debatable.  
It is pangless.
It seeps, deep to the core,
perverting with a silent smile.
the steady, feverish dread
weaving itself into the mundane.
the “god help us”  
annulled by the
“respectfully disagreed”
the nightmare that lies  
always just underneath,
and just out of mind,
Until it insinuates itself
Again and again...

Here, in America
We line the bodies,
death slumped, and  
bled out on the pavement.
We arrange them-
Side by side.
Most are missing things-
a hat, a piece of face.
one shoe, a dulled pencil
(fill in C)
phones
buzzing on the ground
lit up with unread messages
(“Please call me”)
They are missing-
an upcoming  
7th birthday party,
(Star Wars themed)
They are missing-
their vacations.
their first dates.
their college applications.
job interviews.
kids.
fiancées.
Lined up lifeless,  
they are missing
far too many things  
to gather.

I always thought making lasagna,
is like a religious experience for me.

And it is I mean,
it's always different depending,
on what I have,
for meat or no meat,
and vegetables,
and cheeses,

You can use cream cheese,
gruyere and cheddar believe it or not,
definitely need mozzarella though,
haha,

All those epic lasagnas I've made,
geez,
amazing what I've learned,
NO failures, ever,
and so many lessons in leftovers,
appreciating the depth of flavors
the gifts of the day,
and those yummy memories,
emmmm, boy.

When you can pause,
a -second-
to appreciate the
finer things in life,
like this here leftover lasagna.

It might be what makes you a good chef,
I don't know,

But it sure is better next day.

Cherie Nolan © 2016

yep, and the Welsh and the Chinese were intuitively drawing dragons before dinosaur bones were dug up.

i'm poor, in tatters, worn-out rags,
i slashed my cowboy denims
to show a plagiarism of the gaping holes
in my encoding -
listen... the Chinese were working
on the serpent long before you came along,
it's can be more abstract as that,
cold gaze venomous rattler, or sidewinder,
a spine of what was once a tyrannosaurus rex,
fair enough, arms too short to make a bed
but you wonder where the Koranic
reference about Iblis and pride came from,
if not that, meaning the prior to
mammal was somehow superior,
the lizard coliseum - looks like i'm
the Gremlin that drank all the brain juice
and became a talk-show host for the night -
and become famous for simply interviews interviews,
interviews? crackpot nostalgia,
bull ******* nostalgia swinging my way?
oh, i think i hear the church bells ding-****
the uvula of the anthem: mm mm Albert Hall,
hmm hmm, one ball... Colonel Bogey
boogied in the Elizabethan **** with a
Kit Kat... maybe two chunkies, depends on
the lung capacity of thrills too ooze up
that soaked sponge... granny gotta take,
she's up to her pleas for a deathbed seance;
was it me or was grass' *the tin drum a bit ****?
i mean, i loved the Bolshevik granny stuffing
potatoes into her skirt at the beginning,
but then the scenery changed into undecipherable,
images coming thick and fast like a tube
journey from Liverpool St. to Bank - the roller coaster
part of the Central line, ride it someday,
then you'll know what i'm dabbling about -
a real Karma Sutra geometric twist and turn
etching out what pop lit. would testify as a real
page turner, a thriller, a Tom Clancy -
here me with the Parisian boys, upturned nose
and a stiff-upper lip;
but like i said, i'm poor, look at my phonetic encoding,
**** just pours right through me,
thanks to the added space i get Voltaire Newton
Mary Sinclair... it just rapes the **** out of me,
if i were Chinese i'd be taking fancy to the words:
**** building a wall to keep the Mongol out,
let's just write ~ (tai) ~ (ji - chee, chi or źee),
that'll keep the ******* out.
i mean, look at it, it's so ******* complex compared
to the arrogant simplicity of the Latin text that
it's no wonder the Chinese were well grounded people,
necessarily staying gravity prone in one region
and no other, lucky them... i've got a lot of backpackers
to mind, ants in their pants crew, brothel safe-haven
in Spain or Corfu for the summer, and then
top-hat christian goody-two-shoes back home.

.there are only two aspects of forgiveness worthwhile, kept in anticipatory slumber, (1) is watching the masses congregate within the confines of your thinking, but (2)... watching how individuals in said massing of resources... seem to be akin to: someone walking on tip-toe on a bed  egg-shells... i'm met a few crazies... and i've prescribed myself investigating a few normal-folk, who are seemingly petrified, "thinking" than such: negations of ease, akin to depression, have an epidemic ontology.... that they are contagious... more or less.... like a sick ego, that bribes one's thinking and sows a false duality between what constitutes a body, consumed, with what otherwise, constitutes a mind... i've seen a few crazies... they seemed to like me, even when i suggested that we only just met...  the most senile people in the world... thus, to be frank... i'm more concerned with the sanity projects... with their emotional intelligence worth less than the emotional relativism of a gnat to a bear, which begs the reason os arguing: none... who... are so barren... they'd prefer the status of a pawn, in a game of chess, akin to Jimmy Savile...so much for the Saxon logic of: innocent until proven guilty... more like: innocent proven by death, after which... there is no case for either innocence, or guilt... i'm of the conviction... that... i'd rather see an innocent man claim redemption in life... than a guilty man laugh at a redemption in death; sorry... but i don't share the sort of sentiment that argues otherwise... better an innocent man claim redemption while alive... than a guilty man "claim innocence" while dead... part-and-parcel of the legality of the death penalty... the former argument: guilty until proven innocent makes a whole lot of sense without a death penalty... and the latter? no logic behind it... it makes no sense... then again... i am drunk, and i do not delve into sober issues or: serious circumstance... i allow sober people to meddle in such affairs... after all... sober people... make... the most... compelling arguments and, to boot, the most convincing opinions for up-coming affairs! why become a thief in their ordinances?! please! let the mice play, while the cat is away!  i need no bargain with ****-stormers and ******-buggery!

oh i've been to a few psychiatric interviews
over the past 10+ years...
always wondering: what am i doing
here? psychoanalyzing the psychiatrists?

you do know what a psychiatrist is
a poor man's psychologist -
with the added branch of pharmacological
applicability?
  a psychologist will just talk,
perhaps serve you camomile tea...
but prescribe zero drugs...

the talking, the endless talking,
the talking
of a west London psychologist...
who ends the relationship when
you mention:
i've had a dream of Allah...
god he's grotesque...
but, point: there was
someone with him...

  i thought that Allah had no
companions, or rather: he took none?
oops...

i remember analyzing this
situation once,
a ****** psychiatrist brought in
aa medicine student
who wanted to specialize in
psychiatry...
   apparently he concluded that
i was sane...
nice... being the subject
of learning curvature
surrounding a medicine student...

next came the allotment plant
to mind the crazies
while mingling them with the physical
retards...
stole a lot of potatoes that day...
the retards slurred,
exposed their genitals...
and were huddled together like
cattle by the social workers...

******* marvelous!
couldn't expect a lesser
Moulin Rouge reinterpretation
if i wasn't watching harlots
dance the: flinging
of the undergarments on show
that warm July afternoon!

but always, whenever i visited
a psychiatrist in a clinic:
always...
  why am i here?

you know what scares psychiatrists?
EM-PA-THY...
scares the living life out of them...
empathy is what psychiatrists
apprehend the most...
   so you're neither a psychopath
or a sociopath?
what are you then? comes the auto-suggestive
interpretation
of the ****** expression that
comes with suggesting,
even the slightest lack of contempt
for a basic human emotion...

scared, ****-less!
as if on a diet of ****** ruling
over Sudan, or similar ****...
famine after famine,
scared, but unable to soil their underwear,
given... well... the ******* famine...

oh i love psychoanalyzing
psychiatrists,
they have a shorthand blistering
beneath their appreciation for
listening...
their pharmacology branch...
caught one psychiatrist off guard...
he says, out loud,
that... i was abused as a child...

and?
  perhaps i was, perhaps i wasn't...
better that than being treated like
the modern Humpty-Dumpty...
walking on egg-shells typo,
rather than type, of what constitutes
the ontology of individualism...

i had to retort  with / resort to seeking
the opinion of a Polish neurologist
who, with a basic question
'doctor, am i mentally ill?'
replied
  'whoever said you're mentally ill,
is mentally ill themselves!'
case closed...
    
hence the statistics are believable
surround the death of Ellie...
teenage suicide rose in England
by 67% between 2010 and 2017...
    
so you do know the difference between
a psychologist, and a psychiatrist?
camomile tea...
   a psychologist is a humanist,
a psychiatrist is a physician...

if you're rich enough...
you see a humanist...
  poor? shorry...
   the pharmaceutical branch
of the practice is coming into practice...
but don't worry...
chances are...
    you talk what they want to hear
for a while, and then you start
talking what: they don't want you to hear...

hell...
  with this type of medication
and the whiskey...
i could turn into a semi-variant of a
hibernating bear!
i don't mind...
           i found that the glorification
pompous camp of cancer "survivors"
had their stab in the dark...
   because can we only regress
to glorifying surviving one type of
disease, while making stigma of
another kind?

the mentally ill are less of my concern....
i'm worried about the dim-wits
who abuse antibiotics!
   and i am... ******* numb-skulls...
taking antibiotics like
free-prescription vitamins!
creating the perfect niche for
super-bugs!
                      dim-wits!
         numb-skulls!
  and i thought that head-banging was
a source for erasing brain cells!

i wonder




if someone else called you

to tell them a story

because the nightmares wouldn't cut their ropes,

would you kick your heels

upon your desk and spin

a tale as long as the night itself

until they fell asleep?



"a beautiful red-haired princess

lived in a land

far far away

but she was so amazing

that the prince would scale

the highest of the mountainsides

to see her"



you were always writing me

into fairytales

and sometimes they helped

fight the darkness



did I ever tell you about those nightmares?

how I heard an old Chicano folktale

about La Llorona

and how she came to me in a dream

weeping and screeching

and clawing at her eyes

and shrieking "Ayudame!"

through the tangle of the black woods in front of me

twisting riddles through my slumber.



do you know that

sometimes during barre stretch,

when we shoot our legs skyward,

or when i'm filing college interviews

your smile-laugh ripples

through my ears

and I grit my teeth

through peppermint pain

and try to drown it out?



did I ever tell you

when I got the phrases

"La Llorona"y "la rana"

scrambled up in my brain?

La maestra told us we would be

leyendo un cuento

sobre la rana

en the pond

and I thought she meant a story of

La Llorona

the wailing woman

maestro of a symphony of screams

and my heart stopped working

and I told her, "No puedo, I can't."

and she said, "Silly girl, la rana es 'the frog'."

and laughed.



do you remember when

they took me to a grave

and you told me about cancer

and how you thought that you'd die young?

you said it

so calmly

as if the dead around you

were offering up their Easter lilies

as a bridal bouquet

to be tossed to a lucky relative

and i just looked at you

with sea-glass eyes

and you kissed me

as the tears spilled over

into silent rivers

down my cheeks



i wonder

if sometimes

when you listen closely

you can hear the bottle-sculptures'

mouths lisping with the wind

or la rana

croaking in the pond

and smile-laughing right along with you

at me.



if the story has a different beginning now

or a middle

or an end



or if you've written me out entirely

or maybe just changed my fate



"a beautiful red-haired princess

was punished for her vanity

and doomed to wander and wail

for all of eternity

for she had done wrong."



and am I La Llarona,

the weeping woman?

because that's all I ever

seemed to do

The dreams are gone now

or, rather, the nightmares

but there are some things

more haunting in reality.



i wonder if she hears

the coded tick-tock

of the static

or the shrill cries

of tortured souls

forever searching

forever lost



i wonder

if you love her

more than me.

Dear Self,

For you it is November 9th, 2016. Despite all odds, Donald Trump is president. Mike Pence, governor of your home state of Indiana, is his VP.

You are 17 right now. You were born into a world run by George W. Bush. You spent your whole childhood hearing your parents yelling at the tv, angry at the Texas governor in the White House.

You grew up in Obamanation. You saw months of “YES WE CAN” and “CHANGE” stickers going up, and a magnet your family still has get put onto your refrigerator. You heard your mother’s sigh of relief when Barack Obama was announced the 44th president. That was half your lifetime ago.

You spent the last year following the campaigns. You were not surprised by Hillary Clinton running again. You “felt the Bern” of the somewhat radical Independent candidate previously unknown to you, Bernie Sanders. You laughed off the wild reality tv star Donald Trump’s campaign.

Months went by. Bernie and Hillary were fighting hard leading up to the primaries. Republicans slowly started to drop out. Big names like Jeb Bush, Mike Huckabee, and Chris Christie left the race. Bernie didn’t do good enough in the primaries, which was upsetting to most of your friends, your older brother, and your mom, who all voted for him. Ted Cruz fell off, defeated, in May.

It was down to Hillary and Trump.

You followed the comments made at their rallies. On their social media. You heard a lecture about the election from Josh Gillin of Politifact at Indiana University over the summer. You won an award for an opinion piece you wrote on Trump. As the election day grew closer, you watched every presidential debate. You analyzed them in class.

Last night, you stayed up until 4 A.M. to see the results of this election. You sat through excruciatingly slow interviews, political analysis, and different predictions. You couldn’t turn away from the blue and red maps, the aggressively American backgrounds, the anxious masses.

The tired tv hosts were right, it was a nail-biter.

As Trump gave his victory speech, you wept.

You wept for the months you spent wishing this wouldn’t happen. You wept for the 1920’s suffragettes, for the descendents of MLK and Cesar Chavez, for the Orlando victims. You wept for me. The people I joined. The people who will join me.

I am dead.

You learned in your final moments that homophobes look like normal people. They are not all rednecks with beer guts wearing ten-gallon hats. They are more elusive than that. They can be dressed smart. They can have friendly voices. Familiar names and faces.

A friend of a friend of a friend of a friend killed you. Someone you live near. You might have passed them in a car. In the mall. In the school hallways. It was someone that people you knew,  knew. You probably could’ve gotten their Twitter handle if you had heard their name before.

You were killed in a city that VP Pence had once stood in.

People tried to learn about your killer. Were they someone you knew? Someone who just went crazy? Someone who couldn’t handle who you held hands with?

You were too young, the local news anchors said. Your school administration said. Your mom said.

Mike Pence didn’t say anything at all.

Your friends didn’t say much. They cried. They withdrew. They wore baggier clothes. They bought switchblades. They washed “*****” and “ladyboy” off of your tombstone. They wondered about joining you, voluntarily and not.

The school newspaper’s headline: DEAD AT 17.

No one thought it would happen to you, except you. You stayed up late at night, imagining your funeral. The first thing you did in the morning was practice for your wake. Every time you left your house, you were a dead man walking.

No one  believed this more than you did.

The news anchors said it was just one of a string of murders. People said it was an isolated incident. Your friends said it was a hate crime. Your mom said it was the worst thing that  ever  happened to her.

There was no question that you were gone, even when they found you- chest jumping. There was only one thing to wonder: who was next?

Not an if, but a when.

I hope the when is  never.

All my love- to you and everyone else,

Yourself

Moved from my home state.
Got a job doing **** I hate.
Got five kids between you and I.
They are ill tempered sometimes and we are on the fly
coming up with ways to handle the stressers
of food and shelter.
Why...
can't we leave today... Enter the fray... the edge of culture...
and make our own future?
I am caught in the thought
of my hands in the dirt and the sweat in your shirt
and no relief from the work of growing our own food.
Would it be rude to say that I've had enough of the days
of "super" markets and moving targets
and job interviews that bring hope and then bad news
when you find that it will never be enough to sustain even you, alone?
And really, what do we own, but ourselves?
Can it not be shared instead of set on shelves and hidden away in accounts that have safety nets and passwords and relationships that leave regrets and bridge-burns?
Could we be all-for-all?
Is it possible?

I never gave interviews
There was nothing to say,
No one needs to know
What I had for breakfast
The day I made my mark
On an impressionable city.

They don't need my opinion,
It would just be another color
On their palette, and
I can't have that.
I don't want to see myself
Painted on the homes and faces of strangers.

I have lived to prove my worth,
Not to have it affirmed -
Mirrors are not worth their reflections.
Mirrors can be vacant.
I know my selfishness prevails on them
Only while I live. I don't mind.

Perhaps when I am gone,
They'll look me up.
They'll forgive my stinginess
When they have me pinned up in a glass case.
They will thank Death for transparency,
But use my name to save face.

At least I will be spared the sight;
That's all I have come to expect.
I console myself that it won't quite
Be me those empty minds reflect.
Imagination travels miles with a breath,
For that I thank the generosity in Death.

You asked me how I am doing
and I said “Good”
You asked me to be honest
and I said “I’m fine”
You told me to expand.
I replied,
"I'm not good at all.
And I want that to be simple enough.
I'm not being exaggerative
or selfish
or birthing drama for drama's sake.
It's just that I am here.
Here on silly earth,
And I feel alone at crossroads in my life.
I am under no illusion
of my incredibly blessed
or undeserving existence.
But that's just the problem.
LIFE is starting now.
And for the first time,
I have had to make choices
choices on my own
choices
that
(according to mother)
will shape who I fundamentally
become as a human.
So that's a bit distracting.
‘You need to remember not to let people down.’
‘You should consider how you love someone, not just when to.’
‘You ought to be more assertive or it'll all come crashing down.’
She reminds me of my
uncontrollable imperfection
on a daily basis
Not necessarily through her words
I doubt she wants to inflict this on me.
But the way way she stares at me sometimes
from across the room.
Silently.
Like she’s trying to admire a painting
that secretly
no one quite appreciates
or understands
but everyone seems to find profound meaning in it
so you go along
with the show.
Which I wouldn't have a problem with
if I could wake up refreshed in the
morning.
And not tired
like I am.
All the time.
I’m tired of being fifteen.
Because inside,
I don’t feel fifteen.
My mind turns on fifty year old gears
churning up one hundred year old
philosophies.
But
The age in which I currently must suffer through
is misunderstood
and incorrectly represented.
Teenager is a word parents
shudder to hear.
A word elders instantly accuse.
A word authorities doubt without reasonable basis.
The drum pumping my soul
is in fact a solo ensemble.
But
I am naturally clumped in with the lot
of marching bands
that clash and crash,
stomp and slam their drums
as they parade the flag
of fickle rebellion
into the air they barely know.
Don’t get me wrong,
the stereotypes of my age and time
are drawn up
from some truth,
but one truth shouldn’t result
in one outlook.
You don’t roll dice with
only threes on the faces
or only ones.
So it is hard to watch as
everywhere I go,
titles and labels
are being stuck into me
like toothpicks in a fruit salad.
And first of all,
just because society cuts me up
and breaks me down like a pineapple
you can buy with leftover quarters
doesn’t mean that I’m up for grabs.
And secondly,
No one should be branded
simply because
it is easier to ignore them
than to know them.
Don’t hear this as a “oh she’s a teenage girl” moment
hear this as a “she’s a human and wants to be heard without your filter over her words” moment
So, I’m having a hard time with that.
Not to mention the rest.”

“The rest?” You asked.

“You know,”
I said,
“How I have to decide what school
I am going to commit to
which is slightly like choosing
between your two parents.
You can’t pick one happily
and freely
without knowing what could’ve been
if you lived with dad instead.
It’s tricky to wake up in the morning.
It’s tricky to get out of bed
because I know that sooner than later
I will either be moving
that bed into the basement
or into a dorm
which won’t be on the campus I really desire
because God knows I didn’t
save enough pennies for that.
My whole future is before me.
Almost literally
considering the number of pamphlets stapled
over the dreams I carved so meticulously
out of my ‘mind wood’
with my ‘What do you want to be when you grow up’ knife.
So that’s intimidating.
And all those “it’ll work itself out” speeches
that surround me
don’t make the choices
suddenly blare across the radio
or start blinking from neon signs
telling me what to do
what to chose
what to be.
In the end,
all those “don’t worry about it”
and “you’ll figure it out”
do nothing but put a knot in my gut
that no amount of research
or interviews
or Friday night pig outs
can untie.
Because this stuff,
these moments as I build my foundation
for my single LIFE with little slippery Lego blocks
are not made with cheery hand-outs
or inspiring quotes.
LIFE is formed by me
choosing which Lego brick color
choosing which Lego brick shape
and of course
choosing which people will
help me to construct it.
It’s tricky
It’s messy
It’s loud
and it makes other things
hard to focus on.”

“Other things?”
You said.

“Other things.”
I reply.
“You know,
those books I have to read
those graphs I have to draw
those tests I have to study for
those miles I have to run
those words I have to memorize
those labs I have to finish
those annotations I have to complete
those poems I have to parse.
Just THOSE.
Don’t get me wrong.
I don’t mind school
Unlike the kids who complain
that they are forced to educate themselves.
I have no problem learning.
In fact, I want to
long to.
TEACH ME, WORLD!
TEACH ME HOW TO UNDERSTAND YOU IN EVERY LANGUAGE I CAN!
It’s not the books
or the deadlines.
It’s the people.
Bleh.
The people.
The cowardly childish people
with their smug clothes
and horrendous attitudes
that you can smell just over
the stink of their pomp.
Truthfully,
I feel for them
because they don’t feel for themselves.
and because there is little way to prove to these kids
that they can be them
not doctored them
or decorated them
the “them” they thrive to be
not the “them” they try to be.
So I’m surrounded by people
icky people
whose glares and stares
and whispers like cold ghosts
leave me too feeling torn between
being myself
(whatever that even means)
and being accepted.
I want to be free
to try new things,
but new things are poison here at school
new things are demeaning
because they’re demanding.
So,
I have moments where I say
‘Be you. What does it matter?’
But then when I am alone
at the table
at the only open table
with the last chair
the one that squeaks if you
rock to the left
when I am
listening to the music no one knows
and reading the book no one chose
thinking about the movie even no theater shows
that’s when moments of guilt ridden
loneliness bring me to say
‘Put yourself away for now.
Put in a pin in it.
Come back to what you want
after you’re done being what
society thinks you need.’
Because
it is hard to be loved
by one sided people
it is hard to be loved
when the world wants you to say
what it wants to hear.
Us teenagers think we wear invincibility cloaks
So we never have to see those under the invisibility cloaks
‘Don’t question it!’
seems to be the motto of most I meet here.
Because who wants to learn,
who wants to try
if it makes them question their comfort?
And of course that all just touches the surface
of that other thing.
The thing I don’t want to really talk about.”

You pushed me to tell you.

So I did.
“I’m afraid
of God.
I’m afraid
of Death.
I can’t go off of blind faith
like I did when I was young.
I can’t accept ‘Jesus loves you
this I know’
because this I don’t know.
And no one
Not my parent
Not my mentor
Not even my Bible
can give me enough hope in this regard
to bring me to accept not knowing.
This amount of stress is me
Sits as a damp frog
Pestering me to choose
Croaking up unformed opinions
in the form of tar
that I get trapped in.
How can I believe in something
How can I devote my life to something
How can I pray to someone
that I am not even convinced has cared
for a thousand years?
I want to think God knows my name
that he is above me as
those shiny, divine painting portray.
But they’re lies.
And people expect me to believe
that he is smiling down on me like
a new daddy over a crib.
He isn’t a father to me.
So, I feel lost
and confused
and scared that I’m wrong
and even more terrified that I am right.
I’m scared of
God.
And I’m scared
to die.
I don’t quite think I even know
how to live yet.”

“Oh,”
You said.

“Yeah,”
I whispered.
“I know.”

We both paused.
Remember?
My arms rested
at my sides.
Heavy.
Yours swung across
your chest.
Nervous.

“So you’re doing great then?”
You managed to slide through a smile.
“That’s good to hear.”

viewer discretion is advised. The following program has graphic images that may not be suitable for all audiences

The television stains my eyes
I can barely see myself in the mirror
While steady reporters shed not one tear
Don't you see the dead behind you?
Don't you feel the pain of their families
While you just "tell the story"?

27 dead, most of which young children, in a school shooting

The sickness creeps into my bones
Its impact rattles my spine
Debilitating me, confining me to a stupor
Why? Why?
Why end such bright futures and presents?
Do you not see the damage that you've done?
Do you not feel the blood pouring from
Your own body? Do you?

back to you, overpaid talking man*

A three minute blurb
That's it
Hundreds of people have been forever changed
Millions more afraid
And all you can do is harass them
Beg for interviews
While they still are in disbelief?
But beyond that
You show it over and over and over
All with the political lean
Of your respective stations
Could you not stop for once
And let mourners mourn?

My mind is buzzing from the over-sleeping, cups of coffee brewed too strong, and thoughts about the future, stuck in the present. To be stuck in the present however, is to be stuck in the past. Every moment that passes becomes the past, and the present is an unattainable concept, forever lapsing. Like water pouring from a kitchen sink, the present falls, is no longer new, and is never again. So here I sit, in the past, at 2:08 p.m. on a Wednesday, stuck with my tangled thoughts.

I really need a job. I have a job, as a server, and I’m ashamed. I work at a food-chain sports bar, where I’m encouraged to heavily line my eyes and have my mascara looking perfect, have straightened hair pulled back in a pony-tail and sass that leaves an impression. It’s not the worst job, at times I’ll admit it can be fun, in a superficial, extrovert type of way, but it leaves me depressed. Two months after having received my Bachelor’s in Psychology, and I am a part-time waitress.

I wait for the phone to ring. I want them to call me, as I consider myself a fit candidate, but I wonder if they will. “We’ll start calling people on Monday to schedule interviews.” Well, it’s Wednesday. So I called around noon, shortly after I woke up this morning. There was no real rush to wake up this morning, as there is no real rush to remind myself that I am once again trapped in my forsaken parents’ house, the one I swore I would never return to. A man answered, and I gave him my name and asked about interviews, saying I hadn’t yet received a call. “Her assistant will be calling people for interviews this week.” Pause. “Do you know when?” I asked. “No, sometime this week.” “Okay thanks.” And that was all.

All of this is in the past. Having occurred only moments ago, when I chugged my last cup of coffee; hours ago, when I woke up and called the place I wish to work; months ago, when I felt so proud for graduating college and holding promise the world (and employers) would view me as accomplished. It’s all the same, cemented in the past, the same past that decides my future. I wait for it.

Waiting for it is hard. It leaves me bitter and impatient. I feel weak. I want to spend my time asleep, but sleeping is a placeholder for facing reality once again. The future beckons, and mocks me. I inch closer to it every minute, trapped between it and the past in this abyss considered the present. I am stagnant. I am the collected drops falling from the faucet of the sink, running water spinning down the drain. I never fall to the pipes, but I am constantly lingering at the metal bottom, waiting to fall but never doing so.

I think. I think about all the courses I’ve studied, A’s and B’s I’ve earned in classes, C’s I’ve gotten on tests, D’s I’ve gotten on certain papers. Even then my mind was buzzing. I don’t even smoke *** anymore, but it seems I was better off then. I had a purpose. My schedule was to work, study, and complete assignments. I could socialize as I felt able and appropriate, and the past made my present validated. My presence in the present is absent. I yearn for those days, and consider going to school again. I stall in my thoughts and remind myself that I don’t have the money to go, nor the desire to take out more loans. I would need to study for the entrance exam. My mind, while buzzing, is mush. Even my vocabulary is lacking. I’ve lost the ability to think critically, and I waste my days in routine, bored and struggling to look forward. The days blend together. I don’t work until Saturday. The time is 2:25 now

Drag isn't weird if you know and understand what it is on all levels.
Is it dressing like a man or vice versa? Yes.
But that's only part of what drag is and what it means to people.
First, there are many forms of drag used by people around the world.
There are men who dress in drag as women.
There are women who dress as men.
Then there are Bio Queens or Faux Queens.
Which are drag queens who are performing as their biological gender.
Like when a women puts on drag make-up and looks like a girl.
That's because she is a girl.
She'd just doing a different form of drag because she likes doing drag.
By the way, drag queens are people who dress in drag.
This can be done for fun, as a career choice, and for both reasons.
Some people just dress in drag because they like to.
Others do it because they like making people laugh and have fun.
It's acting because you are becoming someone else when in drag.
It's a full body commitment that takes more than a minute to do.
Someone once said that they thought it was weird to see it on TV.
And I can say that weird was my first impression to when I saw it.
But then I started to get into someone (who will remain nameless unless you want me to reveal them. Which I will when you want me to.)
Who got me to see that drag really was a form of art and not silly.
Drag is a serious and comedic  part of the industry that's noticed.
Shows done at Cabaret's and at ( dare I say it) gay bars.
Yes, it's very common that people who like the same *** do drag.
But let me remind you that plenty of straight people do drag.
But there is a misconception that drag is putting on a wig.
And that is far from the truth because it takes a lot of work.
You're constantly experimenting with make-up and outfits.
You have a collection of wigs that you were daily.
And if you are a drag queen professionally, then you work.
And by that, I mean that you work long days in drag.
By the way, when you are in drag you are covering a lot.
You need to wear a bodysuit that fits the gender and uh.
You also need to do something so your, well, you know.
Friend can't be seen, if you aren't a girl that is.
And you need to pin back your hair so the wig stays.
Which people say is very tight so you need to get used to it.
But believe me when I say that drag isn't weird.
It's a form of expression that tends to help people.
Many performers use drag as a escape coat, you know?
A way to get away from pressure and open up more.
It helps them be who they wanna be and say whatever.
When you're in drag playing a character, it's fun.
Because you can say what you want without worrying.
Because it was said by your drag persona, not you.
So when you see drag on TV and don't get it.
Look it up online and do some research before you judge.
Don't say that it's weird and it's not normal.
Because that's an insult to all the people who do drag.
Drag is a community where there are many people.
Thousands of people believe in drag and do drag.
People are in drag right now going to another city.
Going somewhere because they have a performance.
Where they make you laugh and forget for 2 hours.
You can find humor if you don't let it bug you.
Not all of them are innocent in terms of manner.
Some have a very explicit way of thinking & speech.
But that's their style and how they like to be in drag.
Give it a chance before thinking that it's nuts.
Look into some people and see how they really are.
Look up interviews of people out of drag.
Because they tell you how the character was made.
And then you find out that they are normal people.
They just act for a living as sometimes the other gender.

ROOM. 148
(Benjamin.)

This morning,
as I showered.
I saw the face of
Genghis Khan
appear,
just fleetingly
in the suds,
as the swirled at the drainpipe
he brandished,  a grinning leer
and then was gone.

This morning,
in my coffee,
institution brewed.
There he was Van Gogh,
Vincent,  from when,
he still had an ear.
Today, blue paint,
smudged his nose.

In the carpet, after
the cleaning lady had
come.
Amy Whitehouse
visited n'said,
"Rehab might have been
useful afterall."

They the faces, concerned,
and attached to bodies,
encumbered by white cloth.
Tell me, this is non-classic
pariedolia, a symptom of a larger syndrome.

And  if I wanted, to improve
my state of well being,  
that I should not
have any further....hmm
conversations...huhuh,
with the people.

I see in,
the woodgrain of the  
dining  table,
or the man in the
light's moonlike  cover,
or the chap in the door,
of the communal bathroom's
stall wall.

Yet I won't listen,
I don't trust them.

And besides, my buddy Freud
who pops up with the toast.
Told me today,  
"They don't know,
what they are,
talking about.
Not at all, not at all."
In any case,
my muses pariedoliac,
are far better
conversationalists.

With them, I have a ball!!!


ROOM 212
(Gwendolin.)

Today, I am good!

But some days.

My mind, is a battlefield
and I the maniac,
with the finger.
Hovering over the big red button.
So wanting to:
slam my hand down and end it, all.

On other days,
I barely have the energy within,
to lift my head from the
grey, black sludge,
I am drowning in.
On those days,
breathing is sisyphean task and the world is a *******
ball.
Balanced precariously,
on a weary and depressed Atlean hand,
as he drops defeated to the sand.

Then, there are the days I am so up and bright and bubbly
I am appalled and I exhuast myself with my happiness.


But truly, the worst days are,
when,
I am all this and more.
Those are the days,
that my mind becomes,
a feudal state.
Where I am foresaken
to the rage of mutiple realities, engaged in battles for prime position.
I struggle valiantly,
to hold, the bastion of sanity,  painstakenly created and found, in the smallest corner,
of my brainspace,
But they rage and rant
and roil and take,
my precious sanity,
and soil it,
in their mindless games.

And at the end,
of those days.
I am left to pick up
what is left of me
All the tattered pieces
and start all over again.

But the medication helps
smooth me out a lot, it does.

ROOM 179
(Bob.)

"Hello, do you have
a word for me?"

"Blatherskite, oh
you beautiful thing"

"Wordscore 21"

We can begin now,
I know I am not normal.
That I think differently to most.
My mind, is a mendicant,
beggarly thing.
Sitting in library corners.
It's arms held up in supplication, palms outstretched
begging alms, of dictation.
And slathering like a dog,
at a feasting table
snatching at syllables
and sentences.

I sit for hours engrossed
in thesuari
and would gleefully
stab your back multiple times
if you  carried a rare dictionare.

I am a wordaholic
words they are my
sorrowing addiction.

My scrabble tiles,
runic of my affliction.

When stressed the
smoothness
of a spelling bee
is my only solace.

I want to be very clear
I do not see my
addiction
as a affliction
adversely
affecting,
autonomy
but, the
surgeons
of the
psyche
differ,
in their
extrapolation,
of my
lexigraghical
pre occupation
apropos,
vis a vi,
my life
and functionary
state, therewith.
So my tiles and I,
stationarilary
codepend
in this spatial
reality,
until my
mind can find
a state
of equilibrium.

And to be brutally honest
with you.
I don't think that will be
soon,sooner, soonest.

Once I met a platypus;
I took her to my heart.
We held hands by the lake at night,
And flew kites in the park.

We drank red wine by moonlight,
And closer, by degrees,
Expressed our deepest feelings;
Explored our fantasies.

And then, as these things happen,
There came a happy day:
We took an ad out in The Times
Announcing progeny.

But outrage at the outcome -
Our beloved platy-pups -
Was front page in the tabloids!
What was the platy-fuss?

We gave the papers interviews,
We gave our truth and trust -
But still my Love was slandered
Just for being oviparous!

We formed an equal rights group.
We founded charities.
To educate, to celebrate
Our ovi-parity!

We swore a solemn, binding oath,
Between the two of us
The Wedding feast and party was
Quite monatrematous!


Uncle Mallangong was tearful;
Aunt Echidna was abeam:
The Boondaburra “Moonwalking”
Was something to be seen!

There were Joeys sloshed on cider,
Wombats smoking ****;
Emus snogging at the bar -
Koalas wild on speed!

For sickness, health; for poorer,
Or for great prosperity;
I will love and hold and cherish,
Through all adversity,

My nondarwinian lover;
My mutant, duck-billed Queen!
My unconventional ******;
My monotreme – my dream!

In the morning the mist arises
but some will say it is
yesterday's hubris.
I dont have an attic
to wayleigh communications
or require windows
to twitch gingham curtains
so the deep chill
void remains.

A debutante passed by my uncut grass
but she was no better served,
a dream interview with ******* Club
turned sour, this time of year.
At least she hasn't endless dealership openings
or humoured the word "exhilarating" in interviews
when inventing a rich Stepfather.
Like me there be few visitors.
Thirty  stubborn years will pass
but at least she know the meaning.
The pride of the morning.

The writer is

                                                             ­ bound by the Oedipus
                                          cauldron stewing          can't relax

                          --all women are mine--
                                                          ­       but this doesn't stop the bloating bubbles.

                     But the writer did not invent Wonderlandia
               --no double-sided tape or wrong number or sloppy poetics.

                              Wonderlandia was born from the ***** of the stars
                                                         --our fathers,
                              and the void of space,
                                                     --our mother's womb.
the writer

                                             was busy staring at the girls that walked by
                                        ditch diggers for renovations on Euphoria.
                The hippies are disappointed in this current Wonderlandia,
   or they would be.

                               Their dreams had dirt in the mud,
                they walked upon.                Our Woodstock
                                                       ­         is celebrity interviews,
                                                     ­           reservations failing,
                                                        ­        political satires--the last ring of change
             sold at five cents a word. Period.

the writer
                                        says it understands and writes:
                      "Sticks shaped from elitism
                        rare.
                        Usually a vibe too brittle,
                        breaking in battle.
                        The bass thundered robins.
                        The snare's firearm stabled the swift,
                        electrifying beat.
                        The brass was addiction
                        to the crowd's ears.
                        All before the elitism was born,
                        a symphony was constructed in the drug's head."

the writer
                                knows about D. A. Levy and his revolution,
                  we all felt that voice, so the writer replies:
                               "Did you hear about the John Lennon poser
                                 waving his gun on TV?
                                 While listening to the Beatles, you
                                 sit and watch the vagabond cry.
                                 He says, "Counter-culture is dead, entombed
                                 in a metal casket.
                                 We need a new flame. Those watching TV
                                 get your hands out of the basket."

the writer
                                        walks with grandma Alice
                                       by lakes,
                                                       thrilling dementia
                                    "Don't tell me what taurine
                                      and caffeine can do to my heart.
                                      I can have alligators in my rib meat
                                      eating away at bone marrow.

                                      High? That's your question?
                                      Hi...I am a float
                                      in a useless pond
                                      bordered by malnourished trees.

                                      By the love of hell you better not
                                      fertilize those ****** trees
                                      because if I die
                                      the alligator of my ribs
                                      will dine and take your ****
                                      girlfriend straight to the vet.
                                      I thank you for asking though."

    the writer misses
                                 the syrup in the tree completely
              
                     I am not your beatnik
                                or future idol--burn your 1970's classrooms away.

These are poems about Ann Rutledge and her romantic relationship with Abraham Lincoln.

Winter Thoughts of Ann Rutledge
by Michael R. Burch

Winter was not easy,
nor would the spring return.
I knew you by your absence,
as men are wont to burn
with strange indwelling fire —
such longings you inspire!

But winter was not easy,
nor would the sun relent
from sculpting ****** images
and how could I repent?
I left quaint offerings in the snow,
more maiden than I care to know.



Ann Rutledge’s Irregular Quilt
by Michael R. Burch

based on “Lincoln the Unknown” by Dale Carnegie

I.
Her fingers “plied the needle” with “unusual swiftness and art”
till Abe knelt down beside her: then her demoralized heart
set Eros’s dart a-quiver; thus a crazy quilt emerged:
strange stitches all a-kilter, all patterns lost. (Her host
kept her vicarious laughter barely submerged.)

II.
Years later she’d show off the quilt with its uncertain stitches
as evidence love undermines men’s plans and women’s strictures
(and a plethora of scriptures.)

III.
But O the sacred tenderness Ann’s reckless stitch contains
and all the world’s felicities: rich cloth, for love’s fine gains,
for sweethearts’ tremulous fingers and their bright, uncertain vows
and all love’s blithe, erratic hopes (like now’s).

IV.
Years later on a pilgrimage, by tenderness obsessed,
Dale Carnegie, drawn to her grave, found weeds in her place of rest
and mowed them back, revealing the spot of the Railsplitter’s joy and grief
(and his hope and his disbelief).

V.
For such is the tenderness of love, and such are its disappointments.
Love is a book of rhapsodic poems. Love is an grab bag of ointments.
Love is the finger poised, the smile, the Question — perhaps the Answer?
Love is the pain of betrayal, the two left feet of the dancer.

VI.
There were ladies of ill repute in his past. Or so he thought. Was it true?
And yet he loved them, Ann (sweet Ann!), as tenderly as he loved you.

Ann Rutledge was Abraham Lincoln’s first love interest. Unfortunately, she was engaged to another man when they met, then died with typhoid fever at age 22. According to a friend, Isaac Cogdal, when asked if he had loved her, Lincoln replied: “It is true—true indeed I did. I loved the woman dearly and soundly: She was a handsome girl—would have made a good, loving wife… I did honestly and truly love the girl and think often, often of her now.”

Ann Rutledge’s grave marker in Petersburg, Illinois, contains a poem written by Edgar Lee Masters in which she is “Beloved of Abraham Lincoln, / Wedded to him, not through union, / But through separation.”

Ann Rutledge’s original grave at Old Concord, once neglected, has a fairly new marker provided by her family. One side of the maker, along with her name and dates, reads: “Where Lincoln Wept.” An account popularized by William Herndon in his biography is that Lincoln was so distraught by Ann’s death that he knelt and wept at her grave. On the reverse side of the marker is carved “I cannot bear to think of her out there alone in the storm. A. Lincoln.”

Herndon was Lincoln’s law partner and a friend. He also attended poetry readings with Lincoln, who wrote poems himself. Lincoln called Herndon "my man always above all other men on the globe."

Following Lincoln's assassination, Herndon began collecting accounts of Lincoln's life from people who knew him. Herndon wanted to write a faithful portrait of his friend, based on the hundreds of letters and interviews he had compiled, plus his own recollections. He was determined to present Lincoln as the man he actually was, not as a romanticized national hero and saint, and this meant revealing things other biographers would omit or elide, due to the puritanical conventions of that day. Such details included Lincoln’s suicidal depression and his contentious relationship with his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln. And Herndon maintained that Ann Rutledge was Lincoln’s only true love.

Keywords/Tags: Ann Rutledge, Abraham Lincoln, poem, poems, poetry, love, lover, mistress, paramour, romance, romantic, quilt, grave, Dale Carnegie, William Herndon

Waiting for an audience , practicing every move , critique every nuance , critical eye contact with animal counterparts . Your display of affection is most disheartening , the only reason for you presence ? So politically correct friends can feast their eyes upon a " shelter dog " . A rite of passage like your tie dyed t-shirt , sandals and voter registration ! Claim to be  a PETA activist but your only a charade , a most dangerous psychopath walking from cage to cage ! Who stands before me ? You appear delusional as well ! In two days I'll be sentenced to the backyard , shackled to a tree ! Living off of rainwater and sporadic feedings ! Crying for release , tortured with fleas .. I have found the one ! Any guess on how I can tell ? You've the unmistakable look of loneliness coupled with the scent of depression .. An aroma within your gradient most vivid and easily detected ! The same odor within my cage , surrounding this wounded animal ! You and I will remain side by side , play off each others affections , render great joy to one another and form a bond that will last forever !

Dear Mr. President

This is a letter from me to you.  There are many who are displeased with you....but I'm actually quite proud of you.

  You helped the automotive industry get back on track......even though you had the naysayers upon your back.

I feel many people put too much of the blame on you.....especially when there are other's involved.  You can't achieve success alone....you need a team. Just like Dr.King.... I know you also have a dream.

I recall your visit to my state and eventually my city.  You blessed my neighborhood with your presence.  I saw people of different ethnicities standing as one.  Everyone was smiling even the sun.

You bellowed words of inspiration into the mike.  My family was gathered on the sidewalk and for once everything seemed to be alright.

I like how you are just a regular guy and love to play ball.  I admire the fact that you get to play with the superstars who will eventually enter the Hall of Fame.

  Your name has been etched in history .....I'm honored because I never thought I would see this in my lifetime.  An African American giving The State of the Union Address in primetime and granting interviews on Nightline.

I love the example of marriage and fatherhood that is on display.  It is often stated that  "we" don't commit and are dead beat dads.....from what I've witnessed you aren't doing bad.  Thank you for the positive image you have provided me.....it's a form of motivation for me.

I saw a picture where you had your feet on the desk and you were on the phone....but I knew that you were a hard worker from the hole in the bottom of your shoe.  You were about the people and walked where we lived..... not in Hollywood or Rodeo Drive with your finger in the air doing your redition of  ' Staying Alive."

Mr. President...the thing that really gets me upset....is the blatant form of disrespect.  They continue to call you by your last name....You earned the title of President yet they deliberately leave it out.  I often hear Mr. Obama or Barack.....how is this cool when you are obviously on the clock.


They showed respect to President Clinton and George Bush.....both of them even though he tried to steal a whole state....but no one will discuss that issue.....I guess I'm a few years too late.  

You are highly educated and intelligent more than the media would like to say.  I'll make sure to add you to my list of leaders when I pray.

Thank you President Obama for the example you have been.  I believe that you deserve the opportunity to do it again.

Sincerely.......a struggling poet.