I’m curious tonight.
Don’t isolate yourself, they say.
Don’t Isolate yourself.
How do I not feel isolated
When I can’t type up into a google bar
Please google, show me some abuse poems
Please, google, Show me somebody like me
I wanna know who else has ever looked in the mirror
Scared
Scared of what I’m gonna see
Scared I’m gonna wake up and look and see the bruises on my collarbone
And the bruises on my arms and legs and confidence and hope
Google, I wanna see my future. Can you show me that?
I wanna see the 35 year old woman or man who lived through that ****
I wanna see the 35 year old woman or man who can put their arm on my shoulder
Lean his or her head on mine and say
“don’t you worry, honey, we’ll make it through alright.”
We’ll make it through alright.

But Google I can’t find them.
I’m scared they don’t exist
I’m scared I’m never gonna be the 35 year old woman who lived through that ****
I’m scared I’m never gonna be 35.

Tonight I’m curious.
Where are the poems about blood?
Where are the poems about abuse, google?
I can’t find them.
I don’t want to be the first one.
I don’t want to be the first search result.
I wanna know that I’m not isolated
Because I can’t isolate myself because they say
Don’t isolate yourself.

Don’t Isolate yourself, they say
Mommy how do I not feel Isolated
When I look in your face and swallow every single thing
I ever wanted to say to you because I realize
I don’t want to say a **** thing.
Daddy how do I not feel isolated
When I can’t look at you and really LOOK at you
Because I’m so scared you’re gonna look at me.

Don’t Isolate yourself, they say.
Hell, I’ve been isolated for so long
How do I not feel isolated?
When it’s all I’ve ever known?

Don’t ISOLATE yourself, they say.
How do I not feel isolated
While I can’t put the words to the feelings.
I can’t put the words to the pain
Because it wasn’t just pain.
It wasn’t just fear.
It wasn’t just love.

My brother.
How do I not feel isolated
When I can’t look at you and see a brother
When everybody thinks I’m an only child
Because I can’t put words to you.
Because you’re not just my brother.
It wasn’t just anger.
It wasn’t just fear.

Don’t isolate yourself, they say.
How can I not ISOLATE myself
When nobody can get close.
I can’t put words to it
Because its not just isolation.

She is suffering.
Her energy is draining.
Day by day, little by little
Her thoughts are going deeper
Deeper and deeper as the oceans.
She is fighting within herself
But sadness always dominate.
Starting to isolate herself
Never going out with friends
Always have her own reasons not to
This and that, No because
Really isolating herself
Face always at the web
Posting and liking things
Things she wish to be glued
Glued to her mind and soul
But all she wants is someone
Someone to push her to encourage her
But no one sees it, no one feels it.
All of her thoughts
She is always fighting it
She knows she could make it
She knows she could change
But at this moment
She needs time, longer time
She wants to be alone
She wants to escape
She wants to sleep for a long time
She wants to cry
But time wouldn't allow her to
All she could do is to isolate herself
Isolate to protect herself
Isolate for her to be strong
Isolate for her to realize
Realize that to isolate herself is not the answer.
Never the answer.

A Poem for Three Voices

Setting:  A Maternity Ward and round about

FIRST VOICE:
I am slow as the world.  I am very patient,
Turning through my time, the suns and stars
Regarding me with attention.
The moon's concern is more personal:
She passes and repasses, luminous as a nurse.
Is she sorry for what will happen?  I do not think so.
She is simply astonished at fertility.

When I walk out, I am a great event.
I do not have to think, or even rehearse.
What happens in me will happen without attention.
The pheasant stands on the hill;
He is arranging his brown feathers.
I cannot help smiling at what it is I know.
Leaves and petals attend me.  I am ready.

SECOND VOICE:
When I first saw it, the small red seep, I did not believe it.
I watched the men walk about me in the office.  They were so flat!
There was something about them like cardboard, and now I had caught it,
That flat, flat, flatness from which ideas, destructions,
Bulldozers, guillotines, white chambers of shrieks proceed,
Endlessly proceed--and the cold angels, the abstractions.
I sat at my desk in my stockings, my high heels,

And the man I work for laughed:  'Have you seen something awful?
You are so white, suddenly.'  And I said nothing.
I saw death in the bare trees, a deprivation.
I could not believe it.  Is it so difficult
For the spirit to conceive a face, a mouth?
The letters proceed from these black keys, and these black keys proceed
From my alphabetical fingers, ordering parts,

Parts, bits, cogs, the shining multiples.
I am dying as I sit.  I lose a dimension.
Trains roar in my ears, departures, departures!
The silver track of time empties into the distance,
The white sky empties of its promise, like a cup.
These are my feet, these mechanical echoes.
Tap, tap, tap, steel pegs.  I am found wanting.

This is a disease I carry home, this is a death.
Again, this is a death.  Is it the air,
The particles of destruction I **** up?  Am I a pulse
That wanes and wanes, facing the cold angel?
Is this my lover then?  This death, this death?
As a child I loved a lichen-bitten name.
Is this the one sin then, this old dead love of death?

THIRD VOICE:
I remember the minute when I knew for sure.
The willows were chilling,
The face in the pool was beautiful, but not mine--
It had a consequential look, like everything else,
And all I could see was dangers:  doves and words,
Stars and showers of gold--conceptions, conceptions!
I remember a white, cold wing

And the great swan, with its terrible look,
Coming at me, like a castle, from the top of the river.
There is a snake in swans.
He glided by; his eye had a black meaning.
I saw the world in it--small, mean and black,
Every little word hooked to every little word, and act to act.
A hot blue day had budded into something.

I wasn't ready.  The white clouds rearing
Aside were dragging me in four directions.
I wasn't ready.
I had no reverence.
I thought I could deny the consequence--
But it was too late for that.  It was too late, and the face
Went on shaping itself with love, as if I was ready.

SECOND VOICE:
It is a world of snow now.  I am not at home.
How white these sheets are.  The faces have no features.
They are bald and impossible, like the faces of my children,
Those little sick ones that elude my arms.
Other children do not touch me:  they are terrible.
They have too many colors, too much life.  They are not quiet,
Quiet, like the little emptinesses I carry.

I have had my chances.  I have tried and tried.
I have stitched life into me like a rare *****,
And walked carefully, precariously, like something rare.
I have tried not to think too hard.  I have tried to be natural.
I have tried to be blind in love, like other women,
Blind in my bed, with my dear blind sweet one,
Not looking, through the thick dark, for the face of another.

I did not look.  But still the face was there,
The face of the unborn one that loved its perfections,
The face of the dead one that could only be perfect
In its easy peace, could only keep holy so.
And then there were other faces.  The faces of nations,
Governments, parliaments, societies,
The faceless faces of important men.

It is these men I mind:
They are so jealous of anything that is not flat!  They are jealous gods
That would have the whole world flat because they are.
I see the Father conversing with the Son.
Such flatness cannot but be holy.
'Let us make a heaven,' they say.
'Let us flatten and launder the grossness from these souls.'

FIRST VOICE:
I am calm.  I am calm.  It is the calm before something awful:
The yellow minute before the wind walks, when the leaves
Turn up their hands, their pallors.  It is so quiet here.
The sheets, the faces, are white and stopped, like clocks.
Voices stand back and flatten.  Their visible hieroglyphs
Flatten to parchment screens to keep the wind off.
They paint such secrets in Arabic, Chinese!

I am dumb and brown.  I am a seed about to break.
The brownness is my dead self, and it is sullen:
It does not wish to be more, or different.
Dusk hoods me in blue now, like a Mary.
O color of distance and forgetfulness!--
When will it be, the second when Time breaks
And eternity engulfs it, and I drown utterly?

I talk to myself, myself only, set apart--
Swabbed and lurid with disinfectants, sacrificial.
Waiting lies heavy on my lids.  It lies like sleep,
Like a big sea.  Far off, far off, I feel the first wave tug
Its cargo of agony toward me, inescapable, tidal.
And I, a shell, echoing on this white beach
Face the voices that overwhelm, the terrible element.

THIRD VOICE:
I am a mountain now, among mountainy women.
The doctors move among us as if our bigness
Frightened the mind.  They smile like fools.
They are to blame for what I am, and they know it.
They hug their flatness like a kind of health.
And what if they found themselves surprised, as I did?
They would go mad with it.

And what if two lives leaked between my thighs?
I have seen the white clean chamber with its instruments.
It is a place of shrieks.  It is not happy.
'This is where you will come when you are ready.'
The night lights are flat red moons.  They are dull with blood.
I am not ready for anything to happen.
I should have murdered this, that murders me.

FIRST VOICE:
There is no miracle more cruel than this.
I am dragged by the horses, the iron hooves.
I last.  I last it out.  I accomplish a work.
Dark tunnel, through which hurtle the visitations,
The visitations, the manifestations, the startled faces.
I am the center of an atrocity.
What pains, what sorrows must I be mothering?

Can such innocence **** and ****?  It milks my life.
The trees wither in the street.  The rain is corrosive.
I taste it on my tongue, and the workable horrors,
The horrors that stand and idle, the slighted godmothers
With their hearts that tick and tick, with their satchels of instruments.
I shall be a wall and a roof, protecting.
I shall be a sky and a hill of good:  O let me be!

A power is growing on me, an old tenacity.
I am breaking apart like the world.  There is this blackness,
This ram of blackness.  I fold my hands on a mountain.
The air is thick.  It is thick with this working.
I am used.  I am drummed into use.
My eyes are squeezed by this blackness.
I see nothing.

SECOND VOICE:
I am accused.  I dream of massacres.
I am a garden of black and red agonies.  I drink them,
Hating myself, hating and fearing.  And now the world conceives
Its end and runs toward it, arms held out in love.
It is a love of death that sickens everything.
A dead sun stains the newsprint.  It is red.
I lose life after life.  The dark earth drinks them.

She is the vampire of us all.  So she supports us,
Fattens us, is kind.  Her mouth is red.
I know her.  I know her intimately--
Old winter-face, old barren one, old time bomb.
Men have used her meanly.  She will eat them.
Eat them, eat them, eat them in the end.
The sun is down.  I die.  I make a death.

FIRST VOICE:
Who is he, this blue, furious boy,
Shiny and strange, as if he had hurtled from a star?
He is looking so angrily!
He flew into the room, a shriek at his heel.
The blue color pales.  He is human after all.
A red lotus opens in its bowl of blood;
They are stitching me up with silk, as if I were a material.

What did my fingers do before they held him?
What did my heart do, with its love?
I have never seen a thing so clear.
His lids are like the lilac-flower
And soft as a moth, his breath.
I shall not let go.
There is no guile or warp in him.  May he keep so.

SECOND VOICE:
There is the moon in the high window.  It is over.
How winter fills my soul!  And that chalk light
Laying its scales on the windows, the windows of empty offices,
Empty schoolrooms, empty churches.  O so much emptiness!
There is this cessation.  This terrible cessation of everything.
These bodies mounded around me now, these polar sleepers--
What blue, moony ray ices their dreams?

I feel it enter me, cold, alien, like an instrument.
And that mad, hard face at the end of it, that O-mouth
Open in its gape of perpetual grieving.
It is she that drags the blood-black sea around
Month after month, with its voices of failure.
I am helpless as the sea at the end of her string.
I am restless.  Restless and useless.  I, too, create corpses.

I shall move north.  I shall move into a long blackness.
I see myself as a shadow, neither man nor woman,
Neither a woman, happy to be like a man, nor a man
Blunt and flat enough to feel no lack.  I feel a lack.
I hold my fingers up, ten white pickets.
See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks.
I cannot contain it.  I cannot contain my life.

I shall be a heroine of the peripheral.
I shall not be accused by isolate buttons,
Holes in the heels of socks, the white mute faces
Of unanswered letters, coffined in a letter case.
I shall not be accused, I shall not be accused.
The clock shall not find me wanting, nor these stars
That rivet in place abyss after abyss.

THIRD VOICE:
I see her in my sleep, my red, terrible girl.
She is crying through the glass that separates us.
She is crying, and she is furious.
Her cries are hooks that catch and grate like cats.
It is by these hooks she climbs to my notice.
She is crying at the dark, or at the stars
That at such a distance from us shine and whirl.

I think her little head is carved in wood,
A red, hard wood, eyes shut and mouth wide open.
And from the open mouth issue sharp cries
Scratching at my sleep like arrows,
Scratching at my sleep, and entering my side.
My daughter has no teeth.  Her mouth is wide.
It utters such dark sounds it cannot be good.

FIRST VOICE:
What is it that flings these innocent souls at us?
Look, they are so exhausted, they are all flat out
In their canvas-sided cots, names tied to their wrists,
The little silver trophies they've come so far for.
There are some with thick black hair, there are some bald.
Their skin tints are pink or sallow, brown or red;
They are beginning to remember their differences.

I think they are made of water; they have no expression.
Their features are sleeping, like light on quiet water.
They are the real monks and nuns in their identical garments.
I see them showering like stars on to the world--
On India, Africa, America, these miraculous ones,
These pure, small images.  They smell of milk.
Their footsoles are untouched.  They are walkers of air.

Can nothingness be so prodigal?
Here is my son.
His wide eye is that general, flat blue.
He is turning to me like a little, blind, bright plant.
One cry.  It is the hook I hang on.
And I am a river of milk.
I am a warm hill.

SECOND VOICE:
I am not ugly.  I am even beautiful.
The mirror gives back a woman without deformity.
The nurses give back my clothes, and an identity.
It is usual, they say, for such a thing to happen.
It is usual in my life, and the lives of others.
I am one in five, something like that.  I am not hopeless.
I am beautiful as a statistic.  Here is my lipstick.

I draw on the old mouth.
The red mouth I put by with my identity
A day ago, two days, three days ago.  It was a Friday.
I do not even need a holiday; I can go to work today.
I can love my husband, who will understand.
Who will love me through the blur of my deformity
As if I had lost an eye, a leg, a tongue.

And so I stand, a little sightless.  So I walk
Away on wheels, instead of legs, they serve as well.
And learn to speak with fingers, not a tongue.
The body is resourceful.
The body of a starfish can grow back its arms
And newts are prodigal in legs.  And may I be
As prodigal in what lacks me.

THIRD VOICE:
She is a small island, asleep and peaceful,
And I am a white ship hooting:  Goodbye, goodbye.
The day is blazing.  It is very mournful.
The flowers in this room are red and tropical.
They have lived behind glass all their lives, they have been cared for
        tenderly.
Now they face a winter of white sheets, white faces.
There is very little to go into my suitcase.

There are the clothes of a fat woman I do not know.
There is my comb and brush.  There is an emptiness.
I am so vulnerable suddenly.
I am a wound walking out of hospital.
I am a wound that they are letting go.
I leave my health behind.  I leave someone
Who would adhere to me:  I undo her fingers like bandages:  I go.

SECOND VOICE:
I am myself again.  There are no loose ends.
I am bled white as wax, I have no attachments.
I am flat and virginal, which means nothing has happened,
Nothing that cannot be erased, ripped up and scrapped, begun again.
There little black twigs do not think to bud,
Nor do these dry, dry gutters dream of rain.
This woman who meets me in windows--she is neat.

So neat she is transparent, like a spirit.
how shyly she superimposes her neat self
On the inferno of African oranges, the heel-hung pigs.
She is deferring to reality.
It is I.  It is I--
Tasting the bitterness between my teeth.
The incalculable malice of the everyday.

FIRST VOICE:
How long can I be a wall, keeping the wind off?
How long can I be
Gentling the sun with the shade of my hand,
Intercepting the blue bolts of a cold moon?
The voices of loneliness, the voices of sorrow
Lap at my back ineluctably.
How shall it soften them, this little lullaby?

How long can I be a wall around my green property?
How long can my hands
Be a bandage to his hurt, and my words
Bright birds in the sky, consoling, consoling?
It is a terrible thing
To be so open:  it is as if my heart
Put on a face and walked into the world.

THIRD VOICE:
Today the colleges are drunk with spring.
My black gown is a little funeral:
It shows I am serious.
The books I carry wedge into my side.
I had an old wound once, but it is healing.
I had a dream of an island, red with cries.
It was a dream, and did not mean a thing.

FIRST VOICE:
Dawn flowers in the great elm outside the house.
The swifts are back.  They are shrieking like paper rockets.
I hear the sound of the hours
Widen and die in the hedgerows.  I hear the moo of cows.
The colors replenish themselves, and the wet
Thatch smokes in the sun.
The narcissi open white faces in the orchard.

I am reassured.  I am reassured.
These are the clear bright colors of the nursery,
The talking ducks, the happy lambs.
I am simple again.  I believe in miracles.
I do not believe in those terrible children
Who injure my sleep with their white eyes, their fingerless hands.
They are not mine.  They do not belong to me.

I shall meditate upon normality.
I shall meditate upon my little son.
He does not walk. &n

I love the evenings, passionless and fair, I love the evens,
Whether old manor-fronts their ray with golden fulgence leavens,
In numerous leafage bosomed close;
Whether the mist in reefs of fire extend its reaches sheer,
Or a hundred sunbeams splinter in an azure atmosphere
On cloudy archipelagos.

Oh, gaze ye on the firmament! a hundred clouds in motion,
Up-piled in the immense sublime beneath the winds' commotion,
Their unimagined shapes accord:
Under their waves at intervals flame a pale levin through,
As if some giant of the air amid the vapors drew
A sudden elemental sword.

The sun at bay with splendid thrusts still keeps the sullen fold;
And momently at distance sets, as a cupola of gold,
The thatched roof of a cot a-glance;
Or on the blurred horizon joins his battle with the haze;
Or pools the blooming fields about with inter-isolate blaze,
Great moveless meres of radiance.

Then mark you how there hangs athwart the firmament's swept track,
Yonder a mighty crocodile with vast irradiant back,
A triple row of pointed teeth?
Under its burnished belly slips a ray of eventide,
The flickerings of a hundred glowing clouds in tenebrous side
With scales of golden mail ensheathe.

Then mounts a palace, then the air vibrates--the vision flees.
Confounded to its base, the fearful cloudy edifice
Ruins immense in mounded wrack;
Afar the fragments strew the sky, and each envermeiled cone
Hangeth, peak downward, overhead, like mountains overthrown
When the earthquake heaves its hugy back.

These vapors, with their leaden, golden, iron, bronzèd glows,
Where the hurricane, the waterspout, thunder, and hell repose,
Muttering hoarse dreams of destined harms,--
'Tis God who hangs their multitude amid the skiey deep,
As a warrior that suspendeth from the roof-tree of his keep
His dreadful and resounding arms!

All vanishes! The Sun, from topmost heaven precipitated,
Like a globe of iron which is tossed back fiery red
Into the furnace stirred to fume,
Shocking the cloudy surges, plashed from its impetuous ire,
Even to the zenith spattereth in a flecking scud of fire
The vaporous and inflamèd spaume.

O contemplate the heavens! Whenas the vein-drawn day dies pale,
In every season, every place, gaze through their every veil?
With love that has not speech for need!
Beneath their solemn beauty is a mystery infinite:
If winter hue them like a pall, or if the summer night
Fantasy them starre brede.

Ah, Yorkshire, thou art purer than Coventry;
and thy promises whiter; than my fluid poetry.
Thou art braver, prudent, and all the way more intelligent;
thy lands are mightier; and perhaps in every possible way-more imminent.
Thou art sincere-and so more delicate than wine, and thoughtful;
Thou adored my words, and made everything else healing, and more beautiful.

In my heart but there might have been no Yorkshire at all-
had I attended not one Coventry last fall.
I witnessed not-at t'at time, all t'is rude twilight-and toughness and madness;
and every chapped breath it had in its roughness, and hilarious-though indeed fake, felicity.
No soul has even bits of a heart, here, to forgive others' soreness,
No being wants to share; no human lives in joy, nor simplicity.
No delight indeed; as I stream my way through every roads;
Everyone is either busy with their selfishness or their coats.
No living is cared for; for humans are phantoms at night and on morns;
Vulnerability is mocked, and demised and often slyly torn.
Ah! Coventry is but a sphere of hell!
For even hell is still lighter when has it not hellfire;
As well cities are, when there is no scoundrel nor liar;
But Coventry is not at all tender;
Its wicked gasp is alive, and never to heartily surrender.
It falls for glory; it bows to such fears for pleasure;
And wanes by the light of whose death; the end of whose allure.
But thou art true-thou art as shy as every flash of virtue;
Thou art indeed-everything t'at is solemnly agreeable and brand new.
Ah, and just now-I had dreams of a fine image of thee;
Smiling within thy fullest verdure, bushes, and lavish undergrowth.
And thy summer is but vivid and friendlier;
Healing every sore heart, and turning 'em all, merrier.
Thou adored the nouns and verbs I wrote,
and admired such simple notions I quoted;
Thou shine upon me-asthe light that shall makest me grow
and the promising dim, faraway region, that lets me glow.
O, Yorkshire, this is still but too early in the transparent evening;
But I am deeply endorsed yet, by t'is poetry writing-
And with thy soul that remains but too witty,
Tearing me away, but with loveliness-
from my cautious present engagement,
Thy charms might be just too hard to bear,
for thy tongue is too sweet;
and thy veracity too chaotic, ye' imminent.
In thee shall I find peace-of that I am convinced,
Peace whose soul is calm, neat and on all occasions, careful-
Unlike t'is bustle which is at times perpetual, and sorrowful;
Unlike t'is very city of Coventry,
Which is damp with exultant bareness, and haziness,
In many ways exalted, but indeed too proud;
And its tongue which is blurred with sin and poison-
Its all-too-loud excitement makes everything but faint,
And at times sends my heart to exile, sends my heart to pain,
In every possible way too unlike thee,
With an imagery, and coaxing voices so sweet
Thou shall leave all my poems bright and freshly lit,
Even though I am still here, even though we are still yet-to meet.

Coventry is too proud and vibrant-yes, too vibrant,
Amidst its own foolishness, which sadly made itself formerly too elegant.
Too elegant to me-in various shapes, and keenly cloaked in unseen deceit,
But only by some beings, whom I was to meet, and my breath to greet.
And as I wake up to an early morning hour,
the plain summer strangely makes me thirst for honest water.
And should I love still-one intelligence t'at is so bitterly repugnant?
I shall certainly not; I shall turn to thee, Yorkshire, who is truer ye' far above, tolerant.
Ah, Yorkshire, but honesty is something Coventry promises not;
for its soul has been maliciously beheaded, and twitched,
It has been paled, corrupted, and despaired-
by its own claws, derived from the jaws of those evil souls
Veiled by their even still inhuman, disguises,
And shall still be wicked, otherwise.
In t'is sea of hate, and these waves of despondency,
I shall think of thee with tantalising depth and scrutiny,
Though thou art still imprisoned in my soul,
Thou who hath flattered and accepted me as a whole.
But Coventry is-still, accidental with some of its bindings,
For mortal as thou art, itself, and is unable to escape its fate,
Still I canst think only of the beauty of thy linings,
And upon thy lands shall I venture to fill my plate.
Ah, Yorkshire, remember that virtue is in thy hand,
but neither is vice-thy dormant enemy, is in its therein,
Virtue who is vile to all of t'is world's inconsolable men,
like in Coventry, as deemed it is, unreasonable and ungenerous, within.
Virtue which is tragically abandoned, in its pursuit of honour;
virtue which was rich, but flattened, and dismayed and disfigured
within the course of one unsupervised hour.
Ah, York, Yorkshire, when shall I ever taste the grandeur
And the very superiority of thy dignity?
For in yon picture, thou art still but a comely neighbour,
Which endorses and attests to my mute, yet unaffected-virginity.

Ah, but Coventry shall despise thee, and with its stubbornness
and overwhelming pride, shall jostle and taunt thee;
Shall defect and isolate thee-when I am but by thy side,
But God be with me still, and blind shall not, my virtuous sight.
Detesting and confronting thee for the remainders of years-as 'tis to be,
Which for thee lie ahead; as how hath it deluded me-just now!
I, who, disconcertingly, placed my heart within its sacred vow,
hath been robbed of my satisfactions, and utmost fortune,
All were perused in centuries and gone in one moon.
Ah, Yorkshire, shall I continue my poetry here-but call out endlessly to thee?
And shall I abandon this tiny caprice of mine-which is a fine, tiny desire of glory
And let myself on the loose, and for evermore be in search
of thee, whom I shall've lost-under the very indulgence of their mirth?
O, I think not!
For I shall mount my poetry-and achieve my silent dreams,
I shall take him with me, if allowed am I-to conquer him,
And make him and thee mine, just like I hath made my poetry,
And be thy light; and thy spiritual and endless reciprocal adoration
All day and night, at the end of our quest for destiny
Wherein I shall dwell, and thrive as my intellect be granted-its long-lost coronation.
O, Yorkshire, for within thy hands now I shall lie my faith-
and trudge along thy forking paths, unto the light of my fate.

Ah, Yorkshire, I am infatuated with these paintings-
these very paintings of thy lush green lands,
And of myself wandering and skulking idly about thy moors;
With my best frock, and his fingers, the one I love, entwined in my hand
As lights procured and on our storming out of yonder wooden doors.
I am shining like a bee is-upon the sweet finding of its honey;
but in whose tale 'tis like thee-to sweet and unpardonable to me.
Be with me, Yorkshire, and be with me forever, only,
As I leave behind this faint malice and commence my journey;
I shall be with thee, and my poems shall be free,
And t'is bitterness of winds shall be no more tormenting me,
Furthermore-be them what they desire to be;
But let me write; and play my song as beautifully as yon naive bee.

Ah, Yorkshire, and wait, wait again for me;
But before let me sink again into a deep sleep,
and tease thee again in my dreams;
Read me once more-the very passages of thy indolent poetry,
Take me out of my stiffness; swing me out of abhorrent Coventry.
Coventry shall be envious, and waiting forever for thy demise;
but honesty is honesty-and one that has no lies,
for thy virtue is clear as thy Western gem,
which is to God, shall always be virtue, all the same.

Too long this rot has run its course, too much the damage done
When men deflect acknowledged glance, they know that wrong has won.
Across this land and far afield the wrongness seeps within
And pride becomes a memory through distant halls of spin.
How can we bow to tyranny, how can we shy away
From that which causes  eyes to slide.... and coaxes will to sway?
To tolerate the bombast, the bullying, the lies
Succumbing to a hopelessness, which, both we despise.
Division in the nation, uproar in between
A man and wife’s contention-ness beyond what should be seen
Brothers loathing brothers, silence in the room
Where a word  uttered wrongly can erupt to screaming soon.
Allies left in tatters, trust is cut to shards
Tariffs injudiciously, imposed to **** the cards.
International uproar, industry in strife
Teetering disastrously when NATO flees the knife.

Putin sits and rubs his hands, hilarious the show
Disorder and disharmony to lubricate his glow.
Beijing sits inscrutably, always opportune
Manoeuvring judiciously, in place, to call the tune.

America, the isolate, sails away to sea
Blondini, at the helm, wears smirk indulgently.

M.
The White House
HAMILTON NZ
12th July 2018

My anxiety is not me.

My anxiety is shaking hands.
My anxiety is imaginative.
My anxiety is sleepless nights.
My anxiety is never satisfied.

My anxiety sits on my shoulder.

My anxiety keeps me from making important phone calls.
My anxiety forces me to want to isolate myself.
My anxiety makes me cry over nothing.
My anxiety makes me cry over everything.
My anxiety tells me a C may as well be an F.
But my anxiety forces me to avoid important tasks I have to deal with. Everything scares me.

What am I so scared of?

My anxiety wakes me up vomiting.
My anxiety forces me to pull away from the people I so badly want to fall into.
My anxiety keeps me from living.

My anxiety makes me at least two to twenty minutes late everywhere because I don’t believe I am ever prepared,
so I have to retrace my every other step,
constantly checking and re checking.
Constantly doubting.

My anxiety is a thin stream of fear trickling through my mind.
My anxiety is a menace, a monster, a fish with teeth,
black yarn, lawn chairs sinking in the sand.

My anxiety rules me.

It was the summer of 1954. David Ito was from the only Japanese family we had in our town. I was glad he was my best friend. Actually, he was my only friend. His father moved his family to our small town of Prichard, Illinois when David was only eight years old. That was three years ago.

Only two and a half months apart, I was the older one of our daring duo. I even was a couple inches taller than David was, so that settled it. In spite of being an awkward girl, our differences in age and height made me quite superior at times, although David always snickered at that notion. To me, theses differences were huge and monumental, like the distance of the sun from the moon. To David, that was typical girlish nonsense. He thought it was so like a girl, to try to outdo a boy.  And he should have known. He was the only son of five children, and he was the oldest.

At first, David was not interested in being friends with a girl. But I was Josephine Dunn, Josie they called me, and I was not just any girl. Yet, like David, I did not know if I really liked him enough to be his friend. We started off with this one thing in common.

I knew he was smarter than anybody I ever knew, that is except for my father, a self-taught man. The tomboy that I was, I was not so interested in books and maps, and David was almost obsessed with them. Yet, there was a kindred spirit that ignited us to become close, something coming in between two misfits to make a good match. David was obviously so different from the rest. He came from an entirely different culture, looking so out-of-the-ordinary than the typical face of our Anglo-Saxon, Protestant community, and me, never really fitting in with any group of peers in school, I liked him.

David knew he did not fully fit in. I surely did not fit, either. My brother, Carl, made sure very early on in my life that I was to be aware of one thing. And that one thing was that I did not belong in my family, or really anywhere in life. Mostly, this was because I was not of my father’s first family, but I came after my father’s other children and was the baby, the apple of my father’s eye. But that wasn’t the real reason why Carl hated me.

During World War Two, my father enlisted in the army. He already had two small sons and a daughter to look after, and they already had suffered one major blow in their young lives. They had lost their mother to cancer. Louise Dunn was an important figure in their lives. She was well liked in town and very much missed by her family and friends.
  
Why their father wanted to leave his children behind, possibly fatherless, made no sense to other people. But Jim Dunn came from a proud military family and would not listen to anyone telling him not to fight but rather to stay home with his children. His father fought in the First World War, and three of his great grandfathers fought for the Union Army in the Civil War. It was not like my father to back out of a fight, not one with great principles.  My father was no coward.

Not only did my father leave three small children back home, but a new, young wife. Two years before World War Two ended, he made it back home to his lovely, young wife and family. Back in France, my father was wounded in his right leg. The result of the wound caused my father to forever walk with a limp and the assistance of a cane. It was actually a blessing in disguise what would transpire. He could have easily came home in a pine box. He was thankful, though, that he came away with his life. After recovering for a few months in a French hospital, my father was eager to go home to his family. At least he was able to walk, and to walk away alive.

This lovely, young woman who was waiting for him at home was twenty-year-old Flora Laurent, now Flora Dunn, my mother, and she was eleven years younger than my father. All soldiers were certainly eager to get home to their loved ones. My father was one of thousands who was thrilled to be back on American soil, but his thrill was about to dampen. Once my father laid eyes on his wife again, there was no hiding her highly expanding belly and the overall weight gain showed in her lovely, plump face. She had no excuses for her husband, or any made-up stories to tell him, and there really nothing for her to say to explain why she was in this condition. Simply put, she was lonely.

Most men would have left such a situation, would have gone as far away from it as they possibly could have. Being too ashamed and resentful to stay, they would have washed their hands of her in a heartbeat. Having a cheating wife and an unwanted child on their hands to raise would be too much to bear. Any man, in his right mind, would say that was asking for way too much trouble.  Most men would have divorced someone like my mother, kicked her out, and especially they would hate the child she would be soon be giving birth to, but not my father. He always stood against the grain.

Not only did Jim Dunn forgive his young wife, he took me under his wing like I was his very own. Once I knew he was not my true father, I could never fully fathom why he was not ready to pack me off to an orphanage or dump me off somewhere far away. Why he was so forgiving and accepting made him more than a war hero. It made him my hero. That was why I loved him so much, especially because, soon after I was born, my mother was out of our lives. Perhaps, such a young woman should not be raising three step children and a newborn baby.

My father never mentioned any of the details of my conception, but he simply did his best to love me. He was a tall, very slim and a quiet man by nature. With light brown hair, grey eyes, and a kind face, he looked every bit of the hero I saw him as. He was willing to help anyone in a pinch, and most people who knew him respected him. Nobody in town ever talked about this situation to my father. To begin with, my father was not a talker, and he probably thought if he did talk about it, the pain and shame of it would not go away.

One of my brothers, Nathan, and my sister, Ann, seemed to treat me like a regular sister. Yet, Carl, the oldest child, hated me from the start. As a girl who was six years younger, I never understood why. He was the golden boy, with keen blue eyes and golden, wavy hair, as were Nathan and Ann.  I had long, dark brown hair, which I kept in two braids, with plenty of unsightly brown freckles, and very dark, brown eyes.  Compared to my sister, who was five years older, I never felt like I was a great beauty.

I was pretty young when Carl blurted out to me in anger, “Your mother is a *****!”  I cried a bit, wiped away the tears with my small hands and yelled back, “No, she isn’t!” Of course, I was too young to know what that word meant. When my brother followed that statement up with, “and you are a *******”, I ran straight to my father. I was almost seven years old.

My father scolded Carl pretty badly that day. Carl would not speak to me for months, and that was fine with me. That evening my father sat me upon my knee. “Daddy, what is a *****?” I asked him.

My father gently put his fingers up to my lips to shush me up. He then went into his wallet and showed me a weathered black-and-white photo he had of himself with his arms around my mother. It was in that wallet for some time, and he pulled out the wrinkled thing and placed it in front of me.

My father must have handled that picture a thousand times. Even with all the bad quality, with the wrinkles, I could see a lovely, young lady, with light eyes and dark hair, smiling as she was in the arms of her protector. My father looked proud in the photograph.

He said to me, his expression serious, “whatever Carl or anybody says about your mother, she will always be your mother and I love her for that”. I looked earnestly in his somber, grey eyes. “Why did she go away?” I asked him.

My father thought long and hard about how to answer me. He replied, “I don’t know. She was young and had more dreams in her than this town could hold for her”. He smiled awkwardly and added, “But at least she left me the best gift I could have—you.”  

I would never forget the warmth I felt with my father during that conversation. Certainly, I would never forget Carl’s cruel words, or sometimes the odd glances on the faces of townswomen, like they were studying me, comparing me to how I looked next to my father, or their whispers as the whole family would be out in town for an occasion. It did not happen every day, but this would happen whenever and wherever, when a couple of busybodies would pass me and my father walking down Main Street, or when we went into the ice cream parlor, or when I went with my father to the dime store, and it always made me feel very strange and vaguely sad, like I had no real reason to be sad but was anyway.


- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -


That summer of 1954, I was a bit older, maybe a bit wiser than when Carl first insulted my estranged mother. I was eleven years old, and David was my equal, my sidekick. Feeling less like a kid, I tried not to boss him too much, and he tried not to be too smart in front of me. I held my own, though, had my own intelligence, but my smarts were more like street smarts. After all, I had Carl to deal with.

David seemed destined for something better in life. My life seemed like it would always be the same, like my feet were planted in heavy mud. David and I would talk about the places we would loved go to, but David would mark them on a map and track them out like his plans would really come to fruition. I never liked to dream that big. Sure, I would love to go somewhere exciting, somewhere where I’d never have to see Carl again, or some of the kids at school, but I knew why I had a reason to stay. I respected my father. That is why I did not wish to leave. And David respected his father. That is why he knew he had to leave.

David Ito’s father was a tailor. David’s parents came from Japan, and they hoped for a good life in their new country. Little did they know what would be in store for them. After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, their lives, with many other Japanese Americans, were soon turned upside down. David was born in an internment camp designed to isolate Japanese people from the nation once Americans declared war on Germany and their allies. David and I were both born in 1943, and since the war ended two years later, David had no memories of the internment camp experience. Even so, David was impacted by it, because the memories haunted his parents.

There was no getting around it. David and I, as different as we were, liked each other. Still, neither he nor I felt any silly kind of puppy love attraction. David had still thought of girls as mushy and silly, and that is why he liked me. I was not mushy or silly, and I could shoot a sling shot better than he did. David loved the sling shot his parents bought him for his last birthday. They allowed him to have it just as long as he never shot it at anyone.

David Ito, being the oldest child in his family, and the only son, allowed him to feel quite special, a very prized boy for just that reason. Mr. Ito worked two jobs to support his family, and Mrs. Ito took in laundry and cooked for the locals who could not cook their own meals. Mrs. Ito was an excellent cook. Whatever they had to give their children, David was first in line to receive it.

The majority of those in my town of Prichard respected Mr. Ito, at least those who did business with him. He was not only able to get good tailoring business in town, but some of the neighboring towns gave him a bit of work, too. When he was not working in the textile factory, Mr. Ito was busy with his measuring tape and sewing machine.  

Even though Mr. Ito gained the respect of the townspeople, he still was not one of us. I am sure he knew it, too. Yet Mr. Ito lived in America most of his life. He was only nine-years-old when his parents came here with their children. Like David, Mr. Ito certainly knew he was Japanese. The mirror told him that every day. But he also knew felt an internal tug-of war that America was his country more than Japan was, even when he was proud of his roots, even though he was once locked up in that camp, and even when some people felt that he did not belong here.

If David was called an unkind name, I felt it insulted, too, for our friendship meant that much to me. How many times I got in trouble for fighting at school! My father would be called into the principal’s office, and I was asked by Mr. Murray to explain why I would act in such an undignified way. “They called David a ***** ***”, I exclaimed. “David is my friend!”

Because David and I were best buddies, we heard lots of jeering remarks. “Josie loves a ***! Josie loves a ***!” some of the children taunted. And Carl, with his meanness, loved to be head of the line to pick on us. He once said to me, “It figures that the only friend you can get is a scrawny ***!”

In spite of my troubles at school, Father greatly admired David and his father, and he thought that David and I were good for each other’s company. Mr. Ito greatly respected my father, in return, not only for his business but because my dad could fix any car with just about any problem. Jim Dunn was not only a brilliant man, in my eyes, but the best mechanic in town. When Mr. Ito needed work done on his car, my father was right there for him. It was an even exchange of paid work and admiration.

Both my father and David’s father felt our relationship was harmless. After all, everyone in David’s family knew and expected that he would marry a nice Japanese girl. There was no question about it. Where he would find one was not too important for a boy of his age. Neither of us experienced puberty yet and, under the watchful eye of my father, we would just be the best of buddies.

David pretended like the remarks said about him never bothered him, but I knew differently. I knew he hated Carl, and we avoided him as much as possible. David was nothing like me in this respect—he was not a fighter. Truly, he did not have a fighting bone in his body, not one that picked up a sword to stab it in the heart of someone else. It was not that David was not brave, for he was, but he knew the ugliness of war without ever even having to go to battle. Nevertheless, he used his intellect to fight off any of the racist remarks made about him or his family. He had to face it—the war had only ended nine years prior and a few of the war veterans in town fought in the Pacific.      

Because of the taunts David had experienced in school, I was not surprised what David’s father had in store for his beloved son.  Mr. Ito could barely afford to send one child to private school, but he was about to send one. David was about to be that child. When David told me that when school resumed he would be going to a boy’s school in Chicago, my heart sank. Why? Why did he have to go? I would never see him again!

“You will see me in the summer”, he reassured me. He looked at me as I tried to appear brave. I sat cross-legged on the grass and stared straight ahead like I never even heard him. I had a lump in my throat the size of a grapefruit, and my lips felt like they were quivering.

We were both using old pop bottles for target practice. They sat in a row on an old tree stump shining in the evening sun. David was shooting at them with his prized slingshot. I had a makeshift one that I created out of a tree branch and a rubber band.

“You won’t even remember me”, I complained.

“I will to”, he insisted. “I remember everything.”

“Oh, sure you will”, I said sarcastically. “You’ll be super duper smart and I will just be a dummy”. In anger, I rose up my slingshot, and I hit all three bottles, one by one, then I threw the slingshot to the ground. David missed all the shots he took earlier.

David threw his slingshot down, too. “For being a girl, you are pretty smart!” he shouted. “You are too smart for your own good! The reason I like you is because you are better than anyone I ever met in my entire life. Well…not better than my parents, but you are the neatest girl I ever knew in my life!”

For a while, we didn’t talk. We just sat there and let the warm, summer breeze do our talking for us. I pulle

isolation
just me in my own world
creating perfectly impossible scenarios
it’s not loneliness
it’s getting lost in my own mind
and getting tangled in the beautiful mess that makes up who i am
my brain transforms into a galaxy of swirling blue and purple with the brightest moments shining like stars
i remove myself from reality and let my spirit drift off into the ideal universe i have created
that wonderful boy stares into my face so intensely i feel like it’s melting
our hands are intertwined
he draws me closer until there is no space between the two of us and we are breathing the same air
our chests rise and fall in unison
it’s as if our bodies are one like a cell and we never want to split
and our love is like the mitochondria because it’s power keeps us living and living on and on and…
isolation
i remove myself from the deepest parts of my mind and become familiar with my normal surroundings
reality doesn’t ****, but this perfect world i have created inside my mind makes me feel free from the polluted minds of people in this society
so i isolate
isolate myself from fake friends who hide behind a mask of smiles and empty conversations and only remove it when my back is turned so they can see where to shove the knife
isolate myself from the boy who i’m madly in love with, but had broken me because “it wasn’t me it was him” and now i’m just another passing face in the hallway
isolate myself from the men who now see me as fresh meat and my personality and interests and who i am are just the appetizer and all they want is to peel off the wrapper and devour the main course just to throw away the leftovers
sometimes i just need to escape
I’m not lonely I’m a dreamer
and to dream you need
isolation

Passion in the soul roars to fight out.
Thoughts disastrous and its a black out.

Played by the rules to be a part
Waste, the energy 'n drained, the heart

Fingers rise to isolate
and demons gather to desolate

My land is left high and dry
with not a human left to cry

The marooned soul is free to fly,
abandon the world and climb the high

Revive now, to a raw life
uninhibited and ready for a strife

Nothing to lean on, its a rebirth
and gather the dreams, buried under the earth

The craving had been
More of a need
As of late

Energy taken
Energy generated
Or one could also say
One cultivated
One gave away
Every little thought
That you think

Isolated
from the rest of you
With steel walls
And the tallest gates
Barricade myself
In a little
Me sized
Cave

Wouldn't be surprised
If I never
            Even
                Came Out!

I smoked ***** with friends last night
'cause I can't relax, need
a reason to session
after attenuating those drives.

Dark as it seems, this
functional human being
continue to search for signs
of life.  Is it the good fight, or

is it the lengthy flight?

there are two types of sadness

there's the kind that i can't bare
so i watch friends
and listen to happy music
and find someone to talk to

then there's the other one
when you know you're sad
but you want to isolate yourself
and just
drown
in the pool of emotions
listen to sad music
read quotes about life
and
basically
just feel empty

Reclining in their rocking chairs, the brothers Beau and Cletus gazed despondently out
Past the final farm toward the convergence of the worn highway
And the fritz horizon. Cows paused their chewing; an ashy sun
Obscured in incongruous fluffs of cloud; it grew
Greyishly chilly. "Shame the kids're movin'," Beau squeezed out before a deep belch. Cletus only
Mumbled, his voice lost in the light drizzle rapping on the milky sheet-plastic roof. The
          porch

Was unfurnished, save the chairs, one ashtray, and a novelty sign reading: "Get off my porch."
Cletus took a long, pensive drag off a cigarette before stubbing it out.
He coughed a raspy croak wetted with sixty-six years. Besides Cletus' sporadic coughs, the only
Distinguishable sound to be heard in Moody Creek wafted in from the highway:
Rattles of the day's final Spokane- or Boise-bound semi-trucks grew
Inaudible as Beau transiently  murmured, "Purtier than a string of fried trout, that there
          sun-

set." "Whaaa?" Cletus wheezed. "It's settin'," answered Beau, loosely gesturing at the sun.
Fractaled-orange-shafts webbing manifold shades of yellow – amber, belge, stil-de-grain – grew
Plumply stout upon the farmland, edged between properties and crumpled on the porch.
"I'll tell you what Beau – I'm glad they got out,"
Cletus uttered with assurance, his eyes scanning the reaches of light upon the highway.
Beau fixed his cap, musing over Cletus' words. He cleared his throat before beginning, "If
          only..."

Then stopped and itched his belly-button. Cletus turned to his brother. "I know one thang only
Beau: they'll do good in California. They'll be livin' high on the hog. Yer son n' my son
'll 'ave secure futures." Jack nodded somberly. He hated the highway.
He hated its ability to isolate everything. It had been his original revamp, the now-rickety porch,
His first project on his fixer-upper after marrying Dorothy West. They'd wed out
In his father's corn field; bought a house a mile or so down the road. Kids were born. Love
          grew,

And in its growing all things tangible and gorgeous – like tangrams piece together – grew:
The farm, the house, savings account and family. They ate hearty; drank canned beer only –
Living was smooth – but it changed when Dorothy took Little Dale and got out.
She wanted what the farm couldn't give or grow, leaving tiny Moody Creek with their son
As the last moon of May, 1955 went up. "*****!" Beau had yelled from the porch.
He'd woken to his Buick's rev and watched its taillights wane upon the
          highway.

And though he remarried, this was, in truth, mostly why Beau never squarely looked upon highway.
The light drizzle grew
Heavy, intensifying. "Gosh **** rain might near knock the coverin' off the porch!"
Hollered Beau. Cletus looked up and blew a cloud of thick grey smoke. "It's only
Rain Beau. No need gettin' ornery." That morning they'd seen off their youngest sons as the sun
Was just rising. One left to work for a dairy ******* in The Valley, the other went to figure
          out

Himself and his career. The porch shuddered. Beau absent-mindedly repeated "If only..."
Daylight died; black inked upon the highway. Cletus lit a new cigarette. Moody Creek grew
Dense, compacted by the darkness. The sun inched away. Cletus hacked and put his cigarette
          out.

i want to disappear
from this world,
this planet because
i can not be reminded
of you, anymore.
all this reminiscing and
memories are just too much
for my empty soul.
i ignore you and try
to forget you,
but it's impossible.
i want to avoid you,
and maybe i am succeeding
at it,
but i also want to find you
because you seem to
disappear lately, too.
all i need is closure,
because without it
i cannot move on,
and maybe,
i do not want to,
maybe i want to
love you until
the end of time,
but i also want to
forget you and
escape the spell you
had cast on me.
i don't want you
to invade my thoughts,
anymore.

As children, we are told to be a Beowulf.
To be brave and to put others before ourselves,
To be the strongest and the best,
We are told to be the perfect hero.

In this day and age, it is never really okay to make mistakes, even if they say it is.
We have a drive within us that being the best and the strongest is our only option.
We put the pressure on ourselves to be the Beowulf, which only causes us to wake up the Grendel.

But the real problem is, we are ashamed of that.
We are ashamed of fear, which causes us to act out and create evil.
But when you think about it, what is bravery without fear.
Because the truth is, no one is ever going to be one-hundred percent a Beowulf.

All of us have a little Grendel inside, it’s called being human.
We yell, we scream, we scare each other,
We lie, we cheat, we judge.
We are vicious and hurtful with our words.
At times, we see no light in our hearts,
We let evil win.
We are often so far from perfect.
In fact, the Grendel in me is sometimes more prominent than the Beowulf,
But we have to realize that sometimes, that’s okay.

You see, if not for the Grendel in me, the Beowulf wouldn’t know it’s true strength.
For the Beowulf in me, within all of us, would not fight nearly as hard, because it would have nothing to overcome.
The point isn’t to be ashamed of the Grendel within,
The point is to keep pushing through so the Grendel doesn’t win.
Do not isolate yourself and hide away in the depths of darkness when you can’t seem to find the light.
Find the Beowulf within yourselves,
Embrace it’s fierce loyalty and drive to destroy evil.
Welcome the light within you,
If you do that, you will win the war within yourself.

To all those out there desperately trying to be the hero:
Accept that losing the battle sometimes is okay,
Try your best to win the war,
But do not take on that army alone,
Because the person who fights with no one by their side is bound to lose eventually.

Because how can you be a hero, when you have no one by your side?

O My Lord, greatly blessed are You!
I’m thankful and trying to express
the growing gratitude within my soul;
however, mere words lack the finesse

to exalt Your full grandeur… properly!
You are my sun and protective shield!
Let your righteousness flood my soul;
unto You alone, will my spirit yield.

Don’t let my ignorance and sad sighing
imply a lack of personal satisfaction;
I’m joyful and pleased from accepting-
Your Son’s, eternal gift of Salvation!

I’m humbled by Your grace and power;
Your wisdom defeats the inner violence
that seeks to isolate me from You;
quiet my thoughts with divine silence,

as I focus on our ongoing relationship.
Permit The Holy Spirit to blow over me
with a portion of Your sacred essence;
reveal the blessings that You foresee,

regarding my humbled heart and life;
make me sensitive to Your touch and will;
teach me to be productive with my time;
allow Your purpose for me- be fulfilled.
.
.
.
Author Notes

Inspired by:
Phil 4:6; Psa 34, 84:10-12; 1 Thes 5:18

Learn more about me and my poetry at:
http://amzn.to/1ffo9YZ

By Joseph J. Breunig 3rd, © 2015, All rights reserved.

Spread claims you are the only one who can stop corrupt politicians and their dependence on the rich (even though you yourself belong to the rich)

2. Spread lies and insults about anyone who might look like a serious opponent

3. Once you are in power, continue 1. & 2. and put your rich friends into influential positions in state offices and courts, give tax breaks to the rich and claim that everyone benefits from them. Declare any information that runs counter to your lies „fake news“.

4. Invent threats to the security and well-being of the nation and then claim you are the one who can solve all the problems by strict measures, like building a 2,000 mile wall against those criminal immigrants that threaten your people – what the „fake news“ reports as a few thousand refugees from neighboring countries who flee from misery and persecution and crime and hope to get asylum in your country of 350 million.

5. Cut your aid programs for the home countries of those resfugees so that the situation there worsens even more and even more people will try to run for a better life, and you can rhetorically justify inhuman security measures at your borders.

6. On a different field, isolate your country internationally, be the elefant in the china shop, break or end international agreements, destabilize whole regions, and then threaten to send the military – all of which, you tell your voters, makes your country great again.

7. Start trade wars with old global partners, accusing them of taking advantage of your countrty, and when your own economy suffers from such idiocies, calm your afflicted followers with federal subsidies that jolt the nationl deficit to singular heights.

8. Fire (or mob into retirement) any critical person in your government until all your officials speak with your voice.

9. Look around for a worthy cause to be the focus of your consoldidated power.

10. Start a world war and lose it.

Aloof you stand, aloof, alone
High moral ground you make your throne,
So sacrosanct as one to be
Despoiled by pride's hypocrisy.
Above the fray that hostile stare
Entrenched, assured to show the care
That others err whilst you yourself
Preen with sanctimonious wealth.
Aloof you stand, aloof, alone
Enshrouded destitute, poor crone.

© 2012 Marshal Gebbie

Spaces distance themselves--
to isolate the purpose of longing.
A depth where memory forgets
itself...spaces backwashed
lucidly.
Genuine seeing sets in--as if a
searchlight disconnected from
its lighthouse...swimming toward
the horizon's conclusion.
Longingly, as it is to bleed and
be bled for...the exchange of the
heart's chalice.
Eyes are lit by the asking of
salvation...so many eyes...tenderly
placed for their hapless duration.
Spaces distance themselves--to
isolate the purpose of longing...it
is therefrom a genuine seeing sets
in.
How else may emotion unfold...how
else may this temple stand amidst
the wilderness?
A temple destined to die into life...
as life is irreducible from a genuine
seeing.

you're only hurting yourself,
putting in all this effort,
for people who don't give a **** about you

you would comb the earth
a thousand times over
searching for a pin
if they asked.

they wouldn't even bend over
to pick up a pencil for you,
let alone risk cutting themselves
trying to mend your shattered glass heart.

for Ruth Fainlight

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root;
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was you madness?

Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it.
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

All night I shall gallup thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.

Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, the big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin white, like arsenic.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand,a hand of wires.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.

I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it ***** out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches? ----

Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That ****, that ****, that ****.

Chapter 1- The Saga of the Dragon-Power and Federation Battlefare
Stanza 1-Lady of the Night
You’re such a parcel, but not much of a marvel, you lack a price
But that is good because now we have the Oathed Sacrifice!
Such was the words when Dragon-Man stood before his main foe.
He dare not think what types of devices Drent had for pain though.
Dragon-man was taken off the Lynxian Road and it was a horror soon.
I was watching with my cousins one of the last of the Saturday morning cartoons.
My cousins watched for more, I had already seen it all twenty years before.
I was just shocked that they would show Dragon-Man to Generation Y
Dragon-Man looked to me now like one of those ventilation guys.
I could see Dragon-Man smiling, and I knew exactly what that smile meant.
Because he needed the Composi crossbow, and he could only get it from vile Drent.
The arrows were like missiles that sought out and broke down the body.
It was the type of weapon so strong, it was almost ungodly.

The Abyss-Sword, tell me what does it feel like to be killed by your own weapon.
Dragon-Man replied with a smirk, I don’t know you tell me, and got to steppin.
He reached for the Composi crossbow, but it was snatched away by a Brackti Guard.
**** him with the full arsenal we have, and make sure his death is especially hard.
It is amazing that Dragon-Man could withstand such an onslaught.
He cannot stand up against it for long, with such brawn brought.
Some of the firepower gets close, Dragon-Man might not survive for long.
What manner of man can withstand such a powerful throng?
Suddenly, there is a noise, and all of the Brackti Guard fall dead.
Drent you might have to sacrifice yourself, said a voice that they all dread.
Beside all of them were gleaming bullets, which had a hole in them but were filled with lead.
It was the Lady of the Night, who came in with the Nike sling.
This weaponry was fierce and devoured enemies and their everything.
It also  made a hellish noise when it fired Byzantine bullets, nothing could stand in its path.
Drent suddenly disappeared because with the both of them, his death would be the aftermath.
You forgot your cross-bow, she said as she gave it to him with a smile.
What took you so long, Dragon-Man asked, I was waiting all this while.
You forget it takes long to reach you when you put yourself in trouble.
At least be happy I turned the Brackti Guard into pebbles of rubble.
Dragon-Man looked at the Composti cross-bow and this was good weaponry.
If he saw Drent it would be the last time Drent ever stepped to he.
Let’s go, I got the Paroah chariot, there is no time to waste here.
Drent probably went back to regroup inside of his lair.
Dragon-Man climbed inside the chariot and said “I will drive.
The Lady of the Night replied, I got it, because I want to survive.
They drove the chariot away, and Dragon-Man got back to his place
Little did he know that waiting for him was a criminal court case.

Stanza 2-Dragon-Man’s Advocate
Dragon-Man went back to his home, he did not have a chance
To take back from Shark-Devil the Winged- Fire-Lance.
The next day, he got dressed and went to the building.
They say work is supposed to be the epitome of fulfillment.
See, Dragon-Man’s alter-ego was Jonathan Maine, Esquire.
This is what he would do if he ever had to retire.
But when he got to his desk, there were police all around.
Who told him to get down on the floor and put hands on the ground.
Jonathan never thought this would happen, a lawyer needs an advocate.
He was mad as **** but knew that he had to sit because he was bad at it.
Jonathan was brought to the precinct and placed in a prison cell.
When someone asked what he did Jonathan said I’ll never tell.
Well, well, said a voice and Jonathan instantly knew who it was for dinner.
It was Shark-Devil, also known as Joseph Grant, Police Commissioner.

I’ll let you out if you will work for me, Joseph Grant said with a’
smirk.                                                                                              
Jonathan sneered, Two wrongs don’t make a right so that would not work.
Well then, I guess your days of being Dragon-Man are over and done.
When I am through with you, only in your dreams will you see the sun.
Don’t’ I get a phone call, I know my rights and I know you know them as well.
Shark-Devil tossed him a cell phone and said, Tell them you are going to hell!
Jonathan picked up the phone and said, Now we have Shark-Devil where we want him.
The only problem is the court case, and to get the Winged Fire Lance from Shark-Devil
They accused me of assault, false pretenses and 4 counts of conspiracy and embezzlement.
In came Shark-Devil, holding the Winged Fire-Lance with evil in his eye
So isn’t it ironic that the Fire-Lance you so desperately wanted will make you die.
No need to go before a judge to say that you will not testify, I’m not that kind of guy.
Drent was an idiot, his powers were almost abysmal and worthless.
I needed something  good who would serve my every purpose.
Jonathan looked at the Fire-Lance, it was so hot and the blade was double-edged.
He knew I had to do something quick, or else he was in trouble drenched.

That’s not irony it’s a paradox, Jonathan shouted as I fumbled with my watch.
Jonathan pressed a button and the Abyss Sword came into his hand to launch.
So now we will battle in jail, Shark-Devil sneered as he changed into his form.
That is no big deal to Dragon-Man because that was where he was born.
The Fire-Lance was a marvelous weapon, good for melee or to throw.
But it was not as good as the Abyss-Sword at the brute hacking blow.
Suddenly Dragon-Man gave Shark-Devil a mighty swing, and he fell down.
This is not the last thing you have seen me, Shark-Devil said as he left town.

Dragon-Man pressed his watch, and now he was Jonathan Maine, scarred.
But now he would have to answer to the disciplinary board to not get disbarred.
He picked up the Winged Fire Lance, and that now made his weapons and arsenal.
The Fire-Lance belongs to those who can use it, and use it then well.
Now the lawyer needs a lawyer, Jonathan said with a sigh.
One of the prisoners said to him, I think I know a guy.
Jonathan picked up the phone, the one call did not now apply
The voice on the other end said, Don’t worry, I’ll get the charges dropped.
Now Jonathan just has to sit until he can make bail and get this trial stopped.

Stanza 3-We Are the Dragon-Power.
The dinosaurs did not die out, the survivors became the Dragon Power.
They left for higher ground in the Arurian Tower.
They worked on the Abyss Sword, Winged Fire Lance, Nike Sling and Composti Bow on their grind.
Because they thought that the power that killed the dinosaurs would come a second time.
To succeed where the first time, they had failed.
But they could not leave the tower, they were jailed.
I, Jonathan Maine, stumbled on the Tower, but the weapons were not there.
That someone malevolent would take them was the worst of my fear.

Suddenly I heard a voice who said, We are the Dragon Power and you are chosen.
To become Dragon-Man, and fight against our enemy called the Drozen.
This adversary is also yours, but our weapons were stolen by various evil.
Now you must go on a journey to get this arsenal back, and save your people.
I asked them why they could not fight, and they said, We do not have a presence.
When the Drozen fired asteroids at Earth, he disembodied our essence.
We could make the weapons, but we could not use these instruments.
But we will give you the power of disembodiment as our influence.
And here is what your people called a watch, it will tap into the power of Dragon.
But do not talk about us, no posts on social media or bragging.
I was astounding, but I was glad to have such nice bling.
Now it was the time to save all of Earth and everything.

The Dragon Power warned, Drozen wants to destroy everything, even the darkness
You will have to fight the evil on Earth, but keep your eyes on the ultimate test.
I took the watch, and pressed it, and instantly I saw the Diablo-Robots
The Dragon said, the power of the sky-animals on Earth was transformed to throw shots.
Because the asteroids contained a powerful source called Warbeuite.
We took some of it and used it to make the weapons to fight for good and right.
I just had one more question, how do you speak English so fluently?
People would walk by our tower and have conversations beside the tower’s sea.
I took the watch and pressed another button, and suddenly I was at home.
Out in the day, unbeknownst to me, a powerful being was getting off his throne.

Set a course toward Earth, he said, because this earthling will ruin my plan.
I am going to finish now what I should have done in the beginning.
Master Drozen, we are on our way, the Diablo-Robot said with glee.
Little did I know the strongest force in the universe was coming to fight me.

Stanza 4- The Council of the Faceless Tongues.
Drozen stood before the Council of the Faceless Tongues, kneeled before them.
He was the Commander of the Numberless Clans, and knew his superiors.
The Prefector murmured, you said with great confidence Earth was dealt with.
The Dragon Power and Dragon-man proves that your speech was myth.
Drozen replied, My liege, I was conquering other worlds to isolate the Earth rock.
Because to allege that I cannot subdue little Earth would be the worst talk.
The Prefector sneered, Maybe we need the Legate to acquire this oceaned planet.
And send you to a realm that is more manageable as a colonized hamlet.
Drozen urged, Not at all my Lord, I will make sure that the deed is done.
And by the end of my warmonger, there will be no doubt who has won.
I don’t want any interference, just let me leave and give me clearance
You are the Council of the Faceless Tongues, and I bow to you tyrants.
The Prefector motioned, Very well prepare your Diablo-Robots and go vanquish.
But be warned that if you cannot conquer this Earth rock, you will be banished.
The Drozen left muttering, I must destroy this Dragon Power and Dragon Man.
As the Drozen teleported to the Alieno-Mechanism, he called on the Numberless Clans.
Dragon-Man on Earth felt uneasy, he knew someone was coming in defiance.
But he could not face this threat alone, Dragon-Man knew he would need an alliance.
The Dragon Power told Dragon-Man, we must start to  form the Federation.
Drozen is on his way, and is coming to destroy by annihilation.
Stanza-The Gloryless Cause
As Dragon-Man he knew he had to find the Lady of the Night
Because she would vital for the Federation’s ultimate fight.
The only problem was that Dragon-Man did not know where to locate her.
He went to his house and thought, The search can continue later.
Suddenly the light turned on, and the Lady of the Night was there frowning.
So you would be in this fight without me after I rescued you, she said hounding.
Dragon-Man looked closer and saw that she was only clowning.
You know that I could not fight without you, Dragon-Man said with a grin.
And the best part is, you already are armed with your own weapon.
Lady of the Night observed, But there are two other weapons, and you have one hand.
Dragon-Man replied, I will recruit others for this Gloryless Cause but I will be in command.
Because this Gloryless cause needs the Oathed Sacrifice to fight.

I'll take on this burden to save, Drozen wants to put out the light.
Lady of the Night said, We can use the Paroah chariot as our battlecraft ride.
Dragon-Man wondered how the Paroah chariot would work with a fighting team inside.
Suddenly they were in the Dragon Tower, and the Dragon Power said we have to say.
That your collective powers together form the Nova Knighthood Way.
The Federation is made up of various Knighthoods to fight against this dire day.
The powers you have now are not enough to fight Drozen in his quest.
So we decided to fashion together a team that would have power to contest.      

Dragon-Man, you will be the Alpha Knight, and pilot the Isotrain Mechanism.
Lady of the Night, your power is the Beta Knight, you will be in charge of the Gem Prism.
But what about the rest of us, Dragon-Man asked the Dragon-Power with surprise.
You must search for them, and remember, you cannot rely on just your eyes.
Dragon-Man woke up in his room, and sighed because he had a hearing.
It was at the end of the day, so when he went to work he knew Joe  would be jeering.
As Dragon-Man drove to work, he thought that he had forgot something.
Little did he know that an entity was not there, but it was coming.

Stanza 5-I will bring the War to Drozen
Dragon-Man took the letter from the mailbox and opened it.
When he saw who wrote it, he gasped and had a fit.
It was Drozen, who said I will bring to you The War
On a level your Earthlings have never known before.
You might have the Isotrain Mechanism but I have a machine
No use trying to wake up, because this is not a dream.
Dragon-Man crumpled the letter up and threw it away.
He knew that he had to be ready to fight right now today.
He contacted Lady of the Night on his Galvalar watch.
And told her to get here as soon as possible to this spot.
She came and Dragon-Man prepared to get the Isotrain Mechanism.
Lady of the Night protested, The rest of the team isn’t here or risen.
I hope you would get reinforcements and rethink your decision.
Dragon-Man said, With the Isotrain Mechanism, I will take the war to he
Search for Drozen across the worlds and bring battle to make us free.
The Iso-train Mechanism came, Dragon-Man put the Abyss Sword in the Damocles Stone.
It roared to life, and Dragon-Man proclaimed, Drozen would wish he left us alone!
Lady of the Night parked her Paroah Chariot in it, and now they were ready.
With the Isotrain Mechanism and the Nova Knighthood, the Federation is deadly.
Lady of the Night took the Elysian Scabbard, this would help to ward off injury.
They searched the skies with the Spacecraft scope, looking for their enemy.
Suddenly Lady of the Night screamed, Look at that light headed right towards us.
Dragon-Man turned on the Isotrain Mechanism and said, Engage Supernova rockets full ******!
Drozen and Dragon-Man are on a collision course, the universe will bear this battle’s brunt.
Little did Dragon-Man know, one of the Dragon Power was working for the Faceless Tongues.

Stanza 6- When our Paths Cross Again, Drozen will meet the Hades-Grasp.
The Isotrain Mechanism was getting ready to go take flight.
When a voice cried out, Don’t leave yet you need me for this fight.
Who are you, Lady of the Night cried, and how do I know I can trust?
What about me, Dragon-Man protested, and Lady of the Night said it’s not you it’s us.
I am the Breastplate-Bearer and it is my life’s fulfillment to be the Delta Knight too.
Because Drozen is coming after all of us and what we love, it is not just you.
I carry the Breastplates for all the Knights of the Federation to carry.
So we must be going on our way soon, we cannot stop or tarry.
Because The War will be the event that will define our generation.
And it for this reason that we are all warrior-soldiers in this Federation.

Dragon-Man said, You speak like one who knows war and does skirmish
Bring the Breastplates to the Isotrain Mechanism so it can be furnished.
Breastplate-Bearer also said, I have a Space-craft Vehicle ready to conquer.
Dragon Man replied, We fight to win, but we carry the battle with honor.
You can handle the Lifeforce-Seeking Missiles as your job on the team.
Suddenly Lady of the Night let out a primal, unladylike hell-scream.

A woman was lying on the ground, and she looked so close to becoming a vegetable.
We need to rebuild her, said Breastplate-Bearer, because she looks so dead and still.
There is no time for chivalry, warned Dragon-Man, and she is too delicate to dismantle.
Lady of th

"The question should not be in what ways writing and utterance trope each other, but how both are involved with number. Without relating the technology of writing to number (as opposed to sound or drawing), it is impossible to discuss it meaningfully as an aspect of versecraft."

          Courage to write and courage to not write. Read
          The great poets and highly accomplished letters
          Of leaders. Yet the war and the book have lives
          Of their own. Vacuum house, analyze mankind.
          His idea of himself. Ideas subsumed by
          Better ones unite people in melting pots.
          I watch from my little bowl of nuts. Watch
          The one red squirrel and the many gray.
          Watch the nuthatch pair, platoon of chickadees.
          Here is what I say: When we can go
          From planet to planet on nothing but air,
          Leaving behind a drop of water,
          No burger bags blowin’ in the sun,
          I’ll love my sons, and my dogs will be happy.

"What is needed is a way to pry apart the polar, mimetic fiction that undergirds discussions (even sympathetic ones) of writing and versification, and see how we can relate writing to measure. Roy Harris’ investigations into the origin of writing make this connection possible."

          Electronic millennium. A long silence
          Wouldn’t hurt. Not that the national debate
          Should cease, it should proceed, passionate
          And furious. Those who have studied the matter
          And have something to say should write cogent
          Opinion pieces on the totalitarian
          Tendencies of minaret Islamists,
          The terminal contradiction of advancing
          Democracy with the unitary military.
          George Washington would not have approved
          And even Lincoln vacillated between
          The practicalities of preserving union
          And the ideal of freeing slaves. The president
          Carries his burden of matter, the physics
          Of existence cannot change our aloneness
          Or the butterfly’s importance, the very
          Last insects at the screens of August.
          It is life we face and death we meet.

"He argues that the origin of writing did not lie in the drawing of figures, or attempts to imitate speech, but in the recording of number. According to Harris, the oldest ‘writing’ that we have, like that on the 11, 000-year-old Ishango bone, is in ‘lines.’ The surface is scored with rows of short, parallel strokes, which probably served a numerical function. We still use such scoring systems today on occasion."

          OK, different strokes. But reading North’s poems
          And his predecessors’ in which noun and verb
          Are so far separated by modifiers,
          Post-positioned prepositions, diversions
          Into ditches, gardens, heavens, I don’t know
          What to do laugh or put the book down and eat
          Several cookies. In other words, anything goes,
          There truth resides. 1/3 life in suburbs,
          1/3 on the subway, and the last third
          On the mountain. A fourth hallucinating
          In heaven. That’s how it goes. You get what you believe.
          Bones in mud. It’s always possible I suppose
          That for nine months analogous or symmetrical
          With gestation our souls wander call it limbo,
          Doing the limbo and harassing the living
          With unanswerable questions, finally accepting
          Free molecular rent in a cubic meter
          Of interstellar space, a rose hip.
         
"Harris speculates about counting by scoring:"
'What is relevant for our present purposes is the fact that counting is associated in many cultures with primitive forms of recording which have a graphically isomorphic basis... The iconic origin of such recording systems is hardly open to doubt: the notch or stroke corresponds to the human finger...'

          Partridgeberry, mugwort, mats of raspberry,
          Cranberry, bearberry, autumn eleagnus,
          Autumn Nocturne, Autumn Leaves, the changes
          To the tunes and the scientific names.
          When it doesn’t matter what you do
          You’re probably doing something new.
          That’s a woodpecker. That’s a moth. I’m bounded
          By my surroundings, I feel at home.
          Could be Schenectady. Could be Troy.
          One of many small cities in which to
          Await my anonymity. Be specific.
          Not asphalt but impermeable surface.
          Not trees but mature stems. Quercus rubrus—
          Quality veneer. Into such a garden
          Have a victor and a fool penetrated.

'In short, the rows of strokes are graphically isomorphic with just that subpart of the recorder’s oral language which comprises the corresponding words used for counting. It makes no difference whether we ‘read’ the sign pictorially as standing for so many fingers held up, or scriptorially as standing for a certain numeral.'

          In a crowded world every action results
          In an equal and overwrought reaction.
          Yet, all the energy recycles
          And there is not one thermal unit more or less
          When all is said and won. Even when the tribes
          Were isolated behind mountain ranges
          And rushing rivers, they sought each other out
          For trading and for taking. Humanity
          Is lonely. Humor is the only remedy
          And going to your daily discipline
          The only way past Monday. Join the torrential
          Flow of words, emotion, wit and erudition.
          It is embarrassing to see a good writer
          Work himself into a lather, having
          Something to say. A system of beliefs
          To illustrate, characters dressed accordingly.
          Gardens and wilderness in which to wander.
          A cave with a view. The plumbing problem never
          Resolves. But we will do what we can and
          Some things we shouldn't because that is human.

"Along with other evidence, this leads him to argue that the invention of writing–or the division of writing and drawing into separate functions–occurred when the graphic representation of number shifted from the token-iterative system that appears on the Ishango bone, to type-slotting."

          Electricity is occult enough for me.
          Excessive classifying could be fascist!
          Yet how else can one organize people
          Into contexts. By their associations.
          Family, work, habits, each assigned
          A day of the week, moon of the month.
          Poets rhyme, jazz musicians count time.
          There is more than one way to make war. By
          Declaration, by punishing offenses
          Against the law of nations, by granting letters
          Of mark and reprisal, by making rules
          Concerning captures on land and water, by
          Suppressing insurrections and repelling invasions,
          Erecting forts, magazines, arsenals,
          Dock yards and other needful buildings. Today
          I face the blank page between the finished pages.

"Harris gives the following example of what he means:"
'The progression from recording sixty sheep by means of one ‘sheep’ sign followed by sixty strokes to recording the same information by means of one ‘sheep’ sign followed by a second sign indicating ‘sixty’ is a progression which has already crossed the boundary between pictorial and scriptorial signs.'

          When my grandmother considered it favorable
          That I would be a writer, she had in mind
          Clear commentary from which many people
          Would derive meaning. No such luck. My writings
          Are like the flicking tail of that flycatcher,
          And I am the flycatcher, weighing but an ounce.
          My grandfather’s rough-hewn peasant chairs
          Are well known by my sons though they never knew him
          And the chairs were not hewn, just owned by him.
          One is in a corner of the room and two
          Are scrimmaged around a computer screen.
          Computers post-date him and cars post-date
          His father and so on. If the grid collapses,
          The crops fail and the roads close, some will be forced
          Across boundaries among boulders, naming snakes
          And stars according to memory.
          They will be hungry, mortal and strong.

'A token-iterative sign-system is in effect equivalent to a verbal sublanguage which is restricted to messages of the form ‘sheep, sheep, sheep, sheep...’, or ‘sheep, another, another, another...’, whereas an emblem-slotting system is equivalent to a sublanguage which can handle messages of the form ‘sheep, sixty’.Token-iterative lists are, in principle, lists as long as the number of individual items recorded. With a slot list, on the other hand, we get no information simply by counting the number of marks it contains.'
"When this change occurred it opened ‘a gap between the pictorial and scriptorial function of the emblematic sign’, which had been previously inseparable in the counting represented by rows of slashes."

          No book I know tells if blue cohosh
          Caulophyllum thalictroides—a barberry—
          Is edible. Other barberries are
          But that blue berry looks risky to me.
          And May-apple—Podophyllum—other
          Than the fruit itself which is definitely
          Sweet. So I read, not sure of myself.
          There is a patience with which to wait out anger,
          And a patience with which to endure ignorance.
          The job is everything. It is freedom
          And purpose and religion. It is acceptance
          And shelter and sustenance. Last night
          We were watching Tweet’s show: groveling before
          The rich pharisee’s judgements. I said no
          Amount of money could make me grovel
          Before that guy. His toupe’s gayer than his lisp.
          But who am I? You think bullets won’t ****?
          I’m the guy they put before a wall and shoot
          Then eat lunch. But that feeling passed quickly.

"This semiological gap, made writing possible because it meant that signs could be manipulated to ‘slot’, or identify, anything whatsoever. The open-ended quality of the scriptorial sign was a necessary precondition for the development of writing systems."

          Lately I’ve been copying wholesale
          From the great poems, lines and ideas not my own
          Or owned by all? It’s ok, I can be ignored
          Or appreciated in a future city,
          By a future shore. The honest man can
          Only recognize what he loves and point to it.
          That Borges poem called In Praise of Darkness.
          Emerson and snow. A meditation
          That bumps serenely, with acceptance,
          Between things and thoughts. It is said one should
          Know for whom, to whom one is writing.
          These are letters to those who love letter writing.

"As Harris points out, no writing system is accurately phonetic. Even the alphabet only highlights certain phenomena in the speech stream. The reason for this is that alphabetic writing did not begin as a simpler or more accurate way to record speech than other writing systems, but as an easier way to write."

          A possible cancer had taken me
          To the edge of my endurance. Pokeweed,
          Poisonous, became attractive. Red stems
          And juicy black berries. I had packed warm clothes
          And pain killers. Why the warm clothes if this
          Was to be my last walk? To die in comfort
          Without a fly’s buzz. Overlooking a ravine,
          Sea of mountains, dawn. But it proved a false alarm.
          Now Sunday will be a holy day of plant
          Identification. Nothing better
          Than lying in leaf litter, skin drying
          To a taut drum. Ravens stay away!
          Until cougar’s had his fill! Instead
          I showed the boys pokeweed growing among blackberries
          And taught them the differences and uses.

"Through a radical reduction in the number of signs, the alphabet simplified the scriptorial system in and of itself. The evolution of writing therefore may look like this: simple forms of counting preceded the complications of pictorial representation, which in turn led to simplification of the writing system in cultures that adopted the alphabet."

          I was running uphill, parallel to
          The Taconics extending northward into
          Vermont (I find Vermonters in their jalopies
          Annoying but admire them for planning
          To arrest the president for war crimes) when
          I happened upon a flock of cedar waxwings—
          Said to be a gentle and politic bird—
          Sharing—very orderly—dried frozen grapes
          On the vine. (Rose hips, buckthorn, ash, pokeweed.)
          I tried one, too, the two seeds in my mouth
          Keeping me company down the mountain.
          I see no downside whatsoever
          To compensating for global warming,
          Constructing the green energy economy.
          New inventions may facilitate
          Our transportation to other planets.
          Yesterday a young man, Barack Obama,
          Won Iowa. I’m hopeful he will
          Articulate an international vision,
          A world order in which each neighborhood’s
          Good as another. I have no particular
          Love for writers; they’re a dime a dozen.
          But so are chickadees and I love them!

"Discussing the power of inscriptions of number, Harris points out:"
'Counting is in its very essence magical, if any human practice at all is. For numbers are things no one has ever seen or heard or touched. Yet somehow they exist, and their existence can be confirmed in quite everyday terms by all kinds of humdrum procedures which allow mere mortals to agree beyond any shadow of a doubt as to ‘how many’ eggs there are in a basket or ‘how many’ loaves of bread on the table.'

          True, nature would be a stern, unforgiving
          Mistress too, and man is but her right hand
          Acting on her command. How cold! How hot!
          The individual doing what he loves or not.
          Trees and cities. Herons, hawks. What we fail
          To govern in ourselves, nature will.
          We caught the killer and his gorillas,
          Now let’s go home, let the “innocent” choose
          Up sides. A good thing was done but the tyrant
          Should’ve been undone through global governance.
          Writing is divination using rhymes
          And estimations. Words like mammals
          Come near your sleeping head. Last night I emerged
          From the hum of our refrigerator
          Under a hazy, phaseless moon. The peepers
          Were an exact expression of my happiness.

"Or, one might add, for how many stanzas there are in a poem, or lines in a stanza, or stresses, feet, or syllables in a line, or occurrences of particular syntactical or grammatical patterns, and so on. As every serious student of versification has always understood, versification is about counting language."

          5:30-6 write poetry,
          6-7 ****, shave and shower, stretch
          Then get dressed, 7-7:30
          Clean house, 7:30-8 drive to work
          8-6 work (except Monday and Friday
          Work 8-4, basketball 4-6)
          6-7 drive home, shop, help make dinner
          7-8 eat dinner, read paper,
          Watch McNeil-Lehrer News Hour,
          8-9 play trumpet, study plants, type poems
          9-10 watch TV Mon: Murphy, Cybil,
          Tues: Frazier, Grace, Wed: Roseanne, Ellen,
          Thurs: Seinfeld, Friends, Fri: go out to dinner,
          10-11 read, except Tues watch
          NYPD Blue, Fri: Friday Night Lights,
          11 sleep. I could send this to the networks,
          Get a gizmo in my box. I hope my
          Schedule won't be interrupted for war.
          My dentist asked had I seen this morning’s
          Press conference, didn’t it just scare the ****
          Out of you. I said your bill is what scares
          The **** out of me. But here I am, writing
          And the sphere’s still turning. Or should I say
          Burning. As long as you write one poem per day
          You’ve left a little litter in the world.

"The reason to write verse is less to score the voice than to imbue words with the magical quality of counting. That is why meter, or measure, is at the heart of debates over all verse forms, including free verse."

          Vigorous wind, voracious ocean,
          Many merciless hard frosts, hurricanes.
          The bed of a human, its smell and warmth
          36 teeth, 46 chromosomes, 2 feet, a loose dime,
          61 summers, some soot, some sand,
          Thunderstorms. I wake up to a lightning strike
          And my dream incinerates. When they say
          Life is but a dream, that’s what they mean.
          The writer working hard, telling the story
          Of what happened yesterday or yesteryear,
          A man’s born to a country not his choosing,
          Let labor flow like capital, of mere being!
          Pomegranate juice, broccoli, arugula,
          Brussel sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower,
          Collard greens, kale, radishes, turnips,
          Garlic, leeks, scallions, onions, 2 lbs
          Swordfish, tomatoes (8 medium),
          3 cups almonds, carrots, a sweet potato,
          Winter squash, cantaloupe, mangoes, watermelon.
          2 daily writing exercises,
          50 words on any subject: complaint, headache.
          The imagination applies a
          Countervailing pressure to reality.
          Writing badly is the best revenge.

"Number is one of the creative grounds of poetry, and the idea that writing grew out of counting is the missing link in studies of the graphic in versification. It is almost uncanny that lines of verse look exactly like the most primitive ways of counting–parallel scorings that can be numbered."

          What you do to one side of the equation
          You gotta do to the other. Isolate
          The variable. Combine like terms. Metaphors
          And analogs are reduced to least common
          Denominators. Multiply through (parentheses).
          Write a new equation after each operation.
          Inscribe neatly. Check your work. Imagine
          That if you’re wrong, the astronauts burn.
          Change the signs which will avoid going
          The wrong way down the number line. Zero
          Is the middle of your universe.
          There it is, calm, comfortable as an egg
          On a spoon. That is, before possibilities
          Become probabilities. This is just
          Another equation manipulated
          With opposable digits. For at the ends
          Of your guns is the earliest calculator
          A magical machine which converts
          Numbers to words and words to numbers,
          Measures the mists, frequency and wavelength,
          Of the material penumbra.

"Verses are countable in exactly the way that token-iterative digits are countable, from either end of the sequence. Each one indicates only its singularity, not a number. Every poem in lines effaces, or predates, the distinction between writing and drawing in the same way as the lines on the Ishango bone."

Suzanne was an only child, adopted at only a few weeks old. This was no secret, she always knew from the time she was a small child. Her mom would tell her beautiful stories, while she sat in her bed, of how she and daddy waited so long to get her, and how special she was.
She used to feel special, but that was a long time ago. Things were simpler back then, when she was four or five. Mom and Dad seemed happy, and Suzanne did not feel any different being adopted. She was the one kid in the small neighborhood that was an only child. Every other house had five, six, seven kids. Suzanne never knew what it was like to live in a house with other siblings. She was happy with the way things were.

Then the storms in the house began. By the age of five things started falling apart at home. Dad was always sick it seemed. Mom was always upset, crying or yelling or both. It seemed to always be toward Dad, a quiet man. He never fought back, he just sat and took it. She was never be sure what came first, her dad’s sickness or her mother’s madness. She just knew things were not right.

Her mother’s anger and frustration caused her to lash out at out at Suzanne as well. She was filled with fear and embarrassment at a young age. Her relationship with her mom was strained to say the least. From being “special” she suddenly could do nothing right, always being compared to a cousin or the neighbors’ kids.

Now 10 years old she hid in her room a lot, it seemed safer there. But she could not stop the sounds from downstairs. Her mother’s voice booming throughout the neighborhood. How embarrassing! She has to face her friends, doesn’t her mother realize everyone can hear her?
Her father became very ill. He was drinking a lot, falling down and passing out, sometimes on the front lawn. Embarrassment was something Suzanne was becoming very familiar with. He was a gentle man, there was no fear of abuse. But her mother’s emotional abuse was far worse. She was always screaming and crying. There were the nights he didn’t come home for hours, and Suzanne and her mother would wait, hoping he would be coming home, alive.
At 12 years old, her father went away to a hospital, a mental ward of some kind. Shock treatments, pills and therapy. He was always making leather belts while he was there, and that continued long after he got home.

Her father was gone for months. Suzanne stayed with her Grandmother very often. She was an old Italian woman who spoke broken English and always had a tale of woe. Her mother would come get her after a visit to the “hospital”. There wasn’t much time for Suzanne then, the focus was on her father. She drifted through the Catholic school system easily. She was a bright girl, but had to grow up fast, too fast.

What does she tell her friends? Mom said don’t tell anyone anything, ever. No personal information! That’s when she learned how to lie. Over the years she became very very good at it. Hiding things and lying, that’s what you were supposed to do, right?
Her father finally came home, a new man. He had stopped drinking and seemed stronger than ever. Her mother’s ranting and raving did not seem to bother him a bit. He just shrugged it off and went on with what he was doing. But Suzanne could not shrug it off, it killed her spirit a little more every day.

Suzanne was no beauty growing up. She was the ugly duckling among the swans. And she was very aware of it. "Pleasing plump" her mom would say, as she made the big, heavy, fat laden dinners every night. Donuts and crumb cake were breakfast. Always on one diet or another, but nothing worked. Food was an escape for her, and all too available.

She was the fat girl, crazy hair that her mother cut, glasses, buck teeth, which eventually turned her mouth into a sore, metal mess, and of course the Catholic uniform she wore day after day. The other girls her age were all thin and pretty pre-teens. Suzanne was none of that. She went through childhood embarrassed over her family and her looks. Friends were few for her back then. It wouldn't be until much later, when the braces came off, the contacts went in, and the weight became somewhat normal, that her beauty started to shine through. But that didn't matter in Suzanne's mind, she was still the fat ugly kid inside. She would carry that with her for years.
The time for graduation from Catholic School finally came. Instead of joy, all she could feel was fear - fear of embarrassment. Would her father show up drunk? God only knew what would happen. But the night came and went. Dad was on his best behavior, mom was quiet for a change. No carrying on tonight, no-no, she had to put an act on for everyone. No one could ever know how dysfunctional our family was. So the show went on, the good Catholic family, happily ever after. Suzanne was just glad to get out of there without a scene. But now what?
The thought of High School was as scary to Suzanne as a trip to Mars! She was sheltered in Catholic School for eight years, uniforms and nuns, no dating, smoking or drugs. Was she in for a surprise! It started the summer before High School, when she met some kids that went to a “real” middle school. They were no stranger to smoking, boys or drugs. They seemed so grown up, and they went out with boys! Suzanne was going to be just like them.

The first day waiting at the school bus, Suzanne was more nervous than she had ever been in her life. She felt awkward; the clothes her mother picked out were just horrible. After years of uniforms, she had no sense of style, and her mother bought clothes that looked like they came from a thrift shop. It was too late to do anything about it, the bus was coming and she had to get on.

She didn't know that first step on the bus would change her forever. The next four years would steal her innocence, opening up a different world which years later would only be a blur.
She floated through the first year only slightly touched by the devil. Cigarettes were her only vice. Not yet an addiction, just a way to fit in. Her art of lying served her well. She was good at hiding things from her parents. They were too wrapped up in their own misery to notice her. She escaped in her room and dreamed. Her dreams were of being part of them, the cool kids. Whatever it took, she would do. And so it began....
Four years flew by, much of it a blur for Suzanne. By sophomore year she was becoming a pro. A pro at being “cool”, smoking joints, drinking a keg in the woods with the older kids, dabbling with a pill here and there. The few times she threw up in a shoebox in her room didn’t stop her, but makes her cringe now. Her parents never caught on. Even the days she came home tripping on acid. Were they that stupid or that uninterested in her life? It didn’t matter, she lied good and did what she wanted. Including boys.

She met him at 16, he was a bit older, had his own house and grew his own ****. Doesn’t get cooler than that! And ***** galore. Of course there was ***, but that wasn’t the relationship, the party was. Always looking for the next party, the next drink, the next joint, the next line of coke. So of course they got married! She had to get out of her parent’s house, what better way? Say “I do” just to get away, and the party could really take off. And it did, for years….
Suzanne couldn’t take the coke anymore, or the ***, or the drugs. It was too much for her, so she gave it up, one by one. But not the alcohol. That was her thing, and she wasn’t gonna stop, not for a few more years. So she drank and drank every night. Maintaining a job but hating her life. She realized at 25 that her husband was her best friend, party buddy, but not a lover. The thought of divorce was too scary. Nobody got divorced, right?

So at 25 she quit drinking, only to become obsessed with running and working out. That was the new addiction. She became distant from her husband even more. She worked out and he partied it up. She couldn’t be around it, or him. She just didn’t love him that way…. Hell, she didn’t even know what real love was. Would she every find out? She was determined to try. On to the divorce…

It was pretty painless, once her husband got over the realization that it was going to happen. They parted friends. He fell in love right away, and married again within a couple years. Suzanne wanted to have some fun, not ready to settle down. She never had the experience of dating before, or being wanted by different men. If there was any flirting during her marriage, she couldn’t act on it. So act on it she did! What a wild ride, three years and countless guys later, she started to play with the wine again…

It started slow, a glass here and there, months would go by without. Drinking wasn’t a problem, right? Oh how wrong she was. She’ll eventually find out later on, after much pain, self-hate and heartache. For now, it was easy to pretend everything was just great. Life was great, although lonely. She was worried about finding a man now. She was 30 for God sake, she should be married again. Well, be careful what you wish for! At 31 she met her next ex-husband.
It was a whirlwind romance, took off fast and ran fast. He drank, so she drank more. Still, not a problem. Everybody blacks out, right? He didn’t mind, he was just as bad at that time. Together they could not be stopped. They were the “good looking” couple, the entertainers, the hosts of every party and holiday. And Suzanne continued to drink, more and more. Always looking for the next party.

She worked hard, moved up in her career and did very well for herself, despite the drinking every night. She was young enough to handle it, but that would all change. She had a son, and didn’t drink while pregnant, a glass of wine here and there, nothing crazy. But the flood gates opened again after the baby was born. No sooner was she back from the hospital than the wine cork popped.

The next several years would be somewhat of a blur. The drinking was still manageable for a while, but soon the chaos would begin. Divorce, DUI’s, blackouts, bad men, drugs… Life was definitely unmanageable now. Things were out of control. The drinking became an everyday thing now, weekends were non-existent, only a drunken blur. Something had to be done, before she killed herself. She didn’t want to die, at least she thought not.
Time had somehow stopped one day. There was no day or night, just one long drunk, in and out of consciousness. Her son was older now, the men were gone, she was heartbroken, her only love was the bottles of wine she drank day after day. Without a license, for 10 years, it was easy to isolate. And isolate she did. Suzanne had a driver, who everyday knew to pull into the D&D; liquor store on the way home from work. She would call him on weekends, anytime of day, early morning, afternoon or night, whenever her wine was finished and the liquor store was open. She could never seem to buy enough.

She stated to sink into the dark hole. Was she losing her mind? She didn’t know what day it was or time it was, was it morning or night? Did it matter? As long as the bottle was not empty, it would be ok. But the pills for anxiety weren’t working anymore, she had to take more and more, and still the shaking would not stop. There was not enough ***** or pills for Suzanne to calm her nerves when she wasn’t passed out. She didn’t sleep anymore, it was just a blackout state, over and over again.

One day Suzanne woke up in the emergency room, again, not the first time. She didn’t know what happened, but she knew she had to do something. Her hair was filled with dried blood. How’d she get there? Who called for help? How was she going to go to work? Her mind wandered as she lie there, now awake, wanting to get out!!! They finally released her, 18 stitches in her head, with no coat, no shoes, it was mid-January in Jersey. She got her driver to get her home, with the one stop on the way of course, D&D.; "Really," she thought. "Am I serious???" But Suzanne was very serious. She went back to her tower, her bedroom of isolation. How could she explain this? She couldn’t.

That’s when she picked up the phone, glass of wine in her hand, and made the call. This is where her next journey began….

Flashing warmth and faded light
//tell me I'm beautiful
sleeping softly in your arms\

"There is no quicker way to destroy someone than to isolate them."

Well-kept and unclaimed,
preserve the illusion
that to live in excess equals control
and control is safety
of never fearing change

Control is love and love is fear
You know someone well enough
to cut them deep
once you realize
you won't be able to keep them.

Flash them warmth and re-make their home into your faded light
grounded in affection
Which tastes
Yet again
Of fear.

"Enough is enough,"
but that won't stop the hold
The cold fingers grasping for fire
stripping bare the soul--
But hands can't bear
The Burden
And I can see
More light has drained from your eyes.

Fading light, fading warmth
Let us anchor our fates in each others' existence
sharpening the blame
Which soon will be used
To carve our hearts.

"The only way through is forward"
But i say
Take aim
****** deep,
With force enough to dislodge
Everything you no longer can keep
The only way through is through.

Enough wasn't enough.

There is no quicker more effective way
to destroy each other than fear

The illusion of knowing someone,
preserved well enough
to poison them
for the burden of their existence

Time, as a symptom
Of innocence
Of vanity
Spent sharpening your release:

"You're so beautiful"
"My sweet prince"
"Delicate Flower"

and finally:

"Why would I ever want to speak to you again?"

--///--

Truth is the product of the pursuit of knowledge.
Though most people, I have found, do not embrace but fear knowledge.
I believe this to be due to the fact that knowledge is something that cannot be tailored to an individual.

What is, is.
Whether you like it or not.
Knowledge can often be daunting and go against the very foundation of everything you hold "true".

But truth is not there to keep you complacent, it's there to drive you, it's what you should live for.
The pursuit of knowledge is an ongoing process, constantly evolving.

One day you can feel without a shadow of a doubt that you "know" something,
and the next day be proven utterly wrong.

This is why it confuses me so that people hold steadfast to antiquated "truths",
catalogued by humans, and passed down through generations.

Like high school gossip, slipping from one grimy hand into the next,
riddled with the stains of ignorance and manipulation.

Knowledge can often isolate.
Spark hatred in those comfortably numb.

But those on the pursuit are not to be feared or confined,
they're to be celebrated and joined!

Because truth is freedom, and it will only unify.

Don't give up, don't give in.

.i honestly don't know who Spengler is... perhaps just a zenith for a man of his times, who, needs to be carried by someone like Heidegger, into a notable mention in the 21st century reader...

point being... man is not an illustrious
biological creature...
             yet how Heidegger puts it...
this ignorant proclamation of
the abandonment of beings by being...
which, if i remember correctly,
    instances of the intimidation of
"facts"...
      now... i understand facts as those
pointers with a numerical back-up...
a fact isn't a fact if it is merely worded...
that's an opinion...
  a fact looks something like this...
      the area of a circle = πr²
to me... that's a fact...
          for a fact to be a fact
there has to be a numerical addition
to said fact... what is a big bang theory,
or the Darwinism of "history"?
approximations...
         even in face of π... being seemingly
endless...
   well... the infinitesimal division of
the square...
  in short... π = o / ω
               π equals the omicron divided
by the motion of omicron
in the form of ω... rolling... spinning...
in an orbit...
a fact is a fact, to me,
when the "fact" isn't merely worded...
Darwinism doesn't have a definite
numerical proposal for its wording...
as neither does the big bang theory...
after all... we are biologically flawed
animals...
          we're not pristine biological
artifacts... for ****'s sake...
we get a toothache and we turn ballistic!
how is the biology of Darwinism
actually translated via
humanism and philosophy?
                    it's translated as
the zoology of Darwinism...
               yes, we are zoologically on
top...
  but biologically? don't think so...
we are inclined to think about
(if any) history interference with creating
the present borrowing from Darwin,
precisely because we are the highest
zoological outcome...
we're the ones who can cage animals...
animals can't cage other animals...
we're not the highest biological
specimen...
   but we are the highest zoological
specimen...
                       if we were the highest
biological example...
we... say... wouldn't be susceptible
to... viruses...
  our complex brains could avert infections...
i don't know how... telepathically?!
we're such a grand zoological specimen
in that we can interest ourselves
in borrowing traits and characteristics
  from the specimens we isolate...
but to my "knowledge"...
     bad ******* move...
                  i still don't understand
the mindlessness of accepting both the big bang
theory, and the theory of evolution
as facts...
                       concrete facts...
this scientifically secular dogma
                       with a rigidity that defends
itself with ridicule... oh no... not the religious...
humanism...
       it's not going after religion...
humanism is at stake,
esp. the bridge between humanism and
science... philosophy...
so we evolved to do x, y, z...
  just as the gorilla evolved to do x, y, z...
i find that we're biologically
intimidated by an animal...
the fact that an animal requires
so little, and so little has changed...
to perpetuate its existence...
while we have been forced into an endless
spiral of over-complicating things...
we're not fallen in the classical respect
of what that Genesis metaphor implies...
you chose, the harder route...
doesn't anyone think that...
hell... one monkey in the tribe
gets eaten by a snake...
these days it's a dozen peeps get shot
by a PTSD crazed ape-**** ex-marine...
what's the difference?
   but having a body like a gorilla,
and having the gorilla strength,
from what? a ******* vegan diet?
       how much... whatever the body-builders
take does it take... to have the equivalent
of a fifth of a gorilla's strength?!
see... an over-complication spiral...
and how do animals resolve their
social problems and their fears of death?
on mute.
                  no chit-chat... instinctively...
it would appear that silence can convey
more truths than the logos of man's
blah blah blah...
          we didn't evolve biologically...
but sure as **** we evolved zoologically.
trick question...
  in this... glorious labyrinth of thought...
would you rather be killed
by a tiger... mercifully...
or by a jeffrey dahmer... mercilessly?
              i'd pick the ******* tiger!
evidently psychology emerged after
people inverted their zoological
"evolution" on themselves,
     having, somehow exhausted
their first curiosities with the originally
caged animals.
  we didn't evolve biologically...
what has thinking to do with all
the biological advantage of the current animals?
like bears... who don't have to put up
with the blues of winter, escaping
it to hibernate?!

p.s. and this whole feral animal living
in constant stress of finding food?
yeah... pandas, sloths and koalas
look... really stressed...
and whatever happened to the carnivorous
thrill of the chase?
at least these specimens don't
need to deal with the *******
of having it inverted into a ***-honing
metaphor;
   i suppose a filled stomach
feels much more gratifying than
emptying a ******* sack.

outgoing?
I'd say outspoken
never been arbitrary
or overbearing-
just vocal

my passion runs deep
and pours out
excited
overflowing
when it finds
another soul to share it with

the energy
others direct towards me
I absorb
and like a mirror
reflect it back towards them

the energy
that rests inside me
is like water
waiting
for an outside force
to heat me up
excite
my molecules
or
to cool me down
mellow
the chaos inside me
making me stable
making me solid

if being an extrovert
makes me
popular and
domineering,
a fun-loving,
party animal
who lacks introspection,

tell me why
I always choose
to isolate myself

why
my few friends I do have
I keep at a distance
except when I force myself
to enjoy their company
once or twice
in a year

why
I am easily talked over
my words drowned out
ignored
like background noise
my input
apbrubtly halted
as others drive over it
making it no more
than the dust
their tires kick up
why I let them
talk over me
rather than raise my voice

why I would rather
read in solitude
than go to a party
or play a video game
rather than socialize
why
would I choose
to ponder existence
over
existing with others

extroverted
means I get my energy
from external events
rather than the internal

I am not a synonym
for gregariousness

You know that saying,
"Misery loves company."?

Well, I disagree.
I think misery loves to isolate.
It loves to tell you that you're only meant to be alone.

Because when your misery is made known,
That is when others' love for you is shone.

And misery cannot dwell in a place that love now owns.
Because love mends the brokenness that misery had once sewn.

Suzanne was an only child, adopted at only a few weeks old. This was no secret, she always knew from the time she was a small child. Her mom would tell her beautiful stories, while she sat in her bed, of how she and daddy waited so long to get her, and how special she was.
She used to feel special, but that was a long time ago. Things were simpler back then, when she was four or five. Mom and Dad seemed happy, and Suzanne did not feel any different being adopted. She was the one kid in the small neighborhood that was an only child. Every other house had five, six, seven kids. Suzanne never knew what it was like to live in a house with other siblings. She was happy with the way things were.

Then the storms in the house began. By the age of five things started falling apart at home. Dad was always sick it seemed. Mom was always upset, crying or yelling or both. It seemed to always be toward Dad, a quiet man. He never fought back, he just sat and took it. She was never be sure what came first, her dad’s sickness or her mother’s madness. She just knew things were not right.

Her mother’s anger and frustration caused her to lash out at out at Suzanne as well. She was filled with fear and embarrassment at a young age. Her relationship with her mom was strained to say the least. From being “special” she suddenly could do nothing right, always being compared to a cousin or the neighbors’ kids.

Now 10 years old she hid in her room a lot, it seemed safer there. But she could not stop the sounds from downstairs. Her mother’s voice booming throughout the neighborhood. How embarrassing! She has to face her friends, doesn’t her mother realize everyone can hear her?
Her father became very ill. He was drinking a lot, falling down and passing out, sometimes on the front lawn. Embarrassment was something Suzanne was becoming very familiar with. He was a gentle man, there was no fear of abuse. But her mother’s emotional abuse was far worse. She was always screaming and crying. There were the nights he didn’t come home for hours, and Suzanne and her mother would wait, hoping he would be coming home, alive.
At 12 years old, her father went away to a hospital, a mental ward of some kind. Shock treatments, pills and therapy. He was always making leather belts while he was there, and that continued long after he got home.

Her father was gone for months. Suzanne stayed with her Grandmother very often. She was an old Italian woman who spoke broken English and always had a tale of woe. Her mother would come get her after a visit to the “hospital”. There wasn’t much time for Suzanne then, the focus was on her father. She drifted through the Catholic school system easily. She was a bright girl, but had to grow up fast, too fast.

What does she tell her friends? Mom said don’t tell anyone anything, ever. No personal information! That’s when she learned how to lie. Over the years she became very very good at it. Hiding things and lying, that’s what you were supposed to do, right?
Her father finally came home, a new man. He had stopped drinking and seemed stronger than ever. Her mother’s ranting and raving did not seem to bother him a bit. He just shrugged it off and went on with what he was doing. But Suzanne could not shrug it off, it killed her spirit a little more every day.

Suzanne was no beauty growing up. She was the ugly duckling among the swans. And she was very aware of it. "Pleasing plump" her mom would say, as she made the big, heavy, fat laden dinners every night. Donuts and crumb cake were breakfast. Always on one diet or another, but nothing worked. Food was an escape for her, and all too available.

She was the fat girl, crazy hair that her mother cut, glasses, buck teeth, which eventually turned her mouth into a sore, metal mess, and of course the Catholic uniform she wore day after day. The other girls her age were all thin and pretty pre-teens. Suzanne was none of that. She went through childhood embarrassed over her family and her looks. Friends were few for her back then. It wouldn't be until much later, when the braces came off, the contacts went in, and the weight became somewhat normal, that her beauty started to shine through. But that didn't matter in Suzanne's mind, she was still the fat ugly kid inside. She would carry that with her for years.
The time for graduation from Catholic School finally came. Instead of joy, all she could feel was fear - fear of embarrassment. Would her father show up drunk? God only knew what would happen. But the night came and went. Dad was on his best behavior, mom was quiet for a change. No carrying on tonight, no-no, she had to put an act on for everyone. No one could ever know how dysfunctional our family was. So the show went on, the good Catholic family, happily ever after. Suzanne was just glad to get out of there without a scene. But now what?
The thought of High School was as scary to Suzanne as a trip to Mars! She was sheltered in Catholic School for eight years, uniforms and nuns, no dating, smoking or drugs. Was she in for a surprise! It started the summer before High School, when she met some kids that went to a “real” middle school. They were no stranger to smoking, boys or drugs. They seemed so grown up, and they went out with boys! Suzanne was going to be just like them.

The first day waiting at the school bus, Suzanne was more nervous than she had ever been in her life. She felt awkward; the clothes her mother picked out were just horrible. After years of uniforms, she had no sense of style, and her mother bought clothes that looked like they came from a thrift shop. It was too late to do anything about it, the bus was coming and she had to get on.

She didn't know that first step on the bus would change her forever. The next four years would steal her innocence, opening up a different world which years later would only be a blur.
She floated through the first year only slightly touched by the devil. Cigarettes were her only vice. Not yet an addiction, just a way to fit in. Her art of lying served her well. She was good at hiding things from her parents. They were too wrapped up in their own misery to notice her. She escaped in her room and dreamed. Her dreams were of being part of them, the cool kids. Whatever it took, she would do. And so it began....
Four years flew by, much of it a blur for Suzanne. By sophomore year she was becoming a pro. A pro at being “cool”, smoking joints, drinking a keg in the woods with the older kids, dabbling with a pill here and there. The few times she threw up in a shoebox in her room didn’t stop her, but makes her cringe now. Her parents never caught on. Even the days she came home tripping on acid. Were they that stupid or that uninterested in her life? It didn’t matter, she lied good and did what she wanted. Including boys.

She met him at 16, he was a bit older, had his own house and grew his own ****. Doesn’t get cooler than that! And ***** galore. Of course there was ***, but that wasn’t the relationship, the party was. Always looking for the next party, the next drink, the next joint, the next line of coke. So of course they got married! She had to get out of her parent’s house, what better way? Say “I do” just to get away, and the party could really take off. And it did, for years….
Suzanne couldn’t take the coke anymore, or the ***, or the drugs. It was too much for her, so she gave it up, one by one. But not the alcohol. That was her thing, and she wasn’t gonna stop, not for a few more years. So she drank and drank every night. Maintaining a job but hating her life. She realized at 25 that her husband was her best friend, party buddy, but not a lover. The thought of divorce was too scary. Nobody got divorced, right?

So at 25 she quit drinking, only to become obsessed with running and working out. That was the new addiction. She became distant from her husband even more. She worked out and he partied it up. She couldn’t be around it, or him. She just didn’t love him that way…. Hell, she didn’t even know what real love was. Would she every find out? She was determined to try. On to the divorce…

It was pretty painless, once her husband got over the realization that it was going to happen. They parted friends. He fell in love right away, and married again within a couple years. Suzanne wanted to have some fun, not ready to settle down. She never had the experience of dating before, or being wanted by different men. If there was any flirting during her marriage, she couldn’t act on it. So act on it she did! What a wild ride, three years and countless guys later, she started to play with the wine again…

It started slow, a glass here and there, months would go by without. Drinking wasn’t a problem, right? Oh how wrong she was. She’ll eventually find out later on, after much pain, self-hate and heartache. For now, it was easy to pretend everything was just great. Life was great, although lonely. She was worried about finding a man now. She was 30 for God sake, she should be married again. Well, be careful what you wish for! At 31 she met her next ex-husband.
It was a whirlwind romance, took off fast and ran fast. He drank, so she drank more. Still, not a problem. Everybody blacks out, right? He didn’t mind, he was just as bad at that time. Together they could not be stopped. They were the “good looking” couple, the entertainers, the hosts of every party and holiday. And Suzanne continued to drink, more and more. Always looking for the next party.

She worked hard, moved up in her career and did very well for herself, despite the drinking every night. She was young enough to handle it, but that would all change. She had a son, and didn’t drink while pregnant, a glass of wine here and there, nothing crazy. But the flood gates opened again after the baby was born. No sooner was she back from the hospital than the wine cork popped.

The next several years would be somewhat of a blur. The drinking was still manageable for a while, but soon the chaos would begin. Divorce, DUI’s, blackouts, bad men, drugs… Life was definitely unmanageable now. Things were out of control. The drinking became an everyday thing now, weekends were non-existent, only a drunken blur. Something had to be done, before she killed herself. She didn’t want to die, at least she thought not.
Time had somehow stopped one day. There was no day or night, just one long drunk, in and out of consciousness. Her son was older now, the men were gone, she was heartbroken, her only love was the bottles of wine she drank day after day. Without a license, for 10 years, it was easy to isolate. And isolate she did. Suzanne had a driver, who everyday knew to pull into the D&D; liquor store on the way home from work. She would call him on weekends, anytime of day, early morning, afternoon or night, whenever her wine was finished and the liquor store was open. She could never seem to buy enough.

She stated to sink into the dark hole. Was she losing her mind? She didn’t know what day it was or time it was, was it morning or night? Did it matter? As long as the bottle was not empty, it would be ok. But the pills for anxiety weren’t working anymore, she had to take more and more, and still the shaking would not stop. There was not enough ***** or pills for Suzanne to calm her nerves when she wasn’t passed out. She didn’t sleep anymore, it was just a blackout state, over and over again.

One day Suzanne woke up in the emergency room, again, not the first time. She didn’t know what happened, but she knew she had to do something. Her hair was filled with dried blood. How’d she get there? Who called for help? How was she going to go to work? Her mind wandered as she lie there, now awake, wanting to get out!!! They finally released her, 18 stitches in her head, with no coat, no shoes, it was mid-January in Jersey. She got her driver to get her home, with the one stop on the way of course, D&D.; "Really," she thought. "Am I serious???" But Suzanne was very serious. She went back to her tower, her bedroom of isolation. How could she explain this? She couldn’t.

That’s when she picked up the phone, glass of wine in her hand, and made the call. This is where her next journey began….