Like a psychotic docent in the wilderness,
I will not speak in perfect Ciceronian cadences.
I draw my voice from a much deeper cistern,
Preferring the jittery synaptic archive,
So sublimely unfiltered, random and profane.
And though I am sequestered now,
Confined within the walls of a gated, golf-coursed,
Over-55 lunatic asylum (for Active Seniors I am told),
I remain oddly puerile,
Remarkably refreshed and unfettered.  
My institutionalization self-imposed,
Purposed for my own serenity, and also the safety of others.
Yet I abide, surprisingly emancipated and frisky.
I may not have found the peace I seek,
But the quiet has mercifully come at last.

The nexus of inner and outer space is context for my story.
I was born either in Brooklyn, New York or Shungopavi, Arizona,
More of intervention divine than census data.
Shungopavi: a designated place for tribal statistical purposes.
Shungopavi: an ovine abbatoir and shaman’s cloister.
The Hopi: my mother’s people, a state of mind and grace,
Deftly landlocked, so cunningly circumscribed,
By both interior and outer Navajo boundaries.
The Navajo: a coyote trickster people; a nation of sheep thieves,
Hornswoggled and landlocked themselves,
Subsumed within three of the so-called Four Corners:
A 3/4ths compromise and covenant,
Pickled in firewater, swaddled in fine print,
A veritable swindle concocted back when the USA
Had Manifest Destiny & mayhem on its mind.

The United States: once a pubescent synthesis of blood and thunder,
A bold caboodle of trooper spit and polish, unwashed brawlers, Scouts and      
Pathfinders, mountain men, numb-nut ne'er-do-wells,
Buffalo Bills & big-balled individualists, infected, insane with greed.
According to the Gospel of His Holiness Saint Zinn,
A People’s’ History of the United States: essentially state-sponsored terrorism,
A LAND RUSH grabocracy, orchestrated, blessed and anointed,
By a succession of Potomac sharks, Great White Fascist Fathers,
Far-Away-on-the Bay, the Bay we call The Chesapeake.
All demented national patriarchs craving lebensraum for God and country.
The USA: a 50-state Leviathan today, a nation jury-rigged,
Out of railroad ties, steel rails and baling wire,
Forged by a litany of lies, rapaciousness and ******,
And jaw-torn chunks of terra firma,
Bites both large and small out of our well-****** Native American ***.

Or culo, as in va’a fare in culo (literally "go do it in the ***")
Which Italian Americans pronounce as fongool.
The language center of my brain,
My sub-cortical Broca’s region,
So fraught with such semantic misfires,
And autonomic linguistic seizures,
Compel acknowledgement of a father’s contribution,
To both the gene pool and the genocide.
Columbus Day:  a conspicuously absent holiday out here in Indian Country.
No festivals or Fifth Avenue parades.
No excuse for ethnic hoopla. No guinea feast. No cannoli. No tarantella.
No excuse to not get drunk and not **** your sister-in-law.
Emphatically a day for prayer and contemplation,
A day of infamy like Pearl Harbor and 9/11,
October 12, 1492: not a discovery; an invasion.

Growing up in Brooklyn, things were always different for me,
Different in some sort of redskin/****/****--
Choose Your Favorite Ethnic Slur-sort of way.
The American Way: dehumanization for fun and profit.
Melting *** anonymity and denial of complicity with evil.
But this is no time to bring up America’s sordid past,
Or, a personal pet peeve: Indian Sovereignty.
For Uncle Sam and his minions, an ever-widening, conveniently flexible concept,
Not a commandment or law,
Not really a treaty or a compact,
Or even a business deal.  Let’s get real:
It was not even much in the way of a guideline.
Just some kind of an advisory, a bulletin or newsletter,
Could it merely have been a free-floating suggestion?
Yes, that’s it exactly: a suggestion.

Over and under halcyon American skies,
Over and around those majestic purple mountain peaks,
Those trapped in poetic amber waves of wheat and oats,
Corn and barley, wheat shredded and puffed,
Corn flaked and milled, Wheat Chex and Wheaties, oats that are little Os;
Kix and Trix, Fiber One, and Kashi-Go-Lean, Lucky Charms and matso *****,
Kreplach and kishka,
Polenta and risotto.
Our cantaloupe and squash patch,
Our fruited prairie plain, our delicate ecological Eden,
In balance and harmony with nature, as Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce instructs:
“These white devils are not going to,
Stop ****** and killing, cheating and eating us,
Until they have the whole ******* enchilada.
I’m talking about ‘from sea to shining sea.’”

“I fight no more forever,” Babaloo.
So I must steer this clunky keelboat of discovery,
Back to the main channel of my sad and starry demented river.
My warpath is personal but not historical.
It is my brain’s own convoluted cognitive process I cannot saavy.
Whatever biochemical or—as I suspect more each day—
Whatever bio-mechanical protocols govern my identity,
My weltanschauung: my world-view, as sprechen by proto-Nazis;
Putz philosophers of the 17th, 18th & 19th century.
The German intelligentsia: what a cavalcade of maniacal *******!
Why is this Jew unsurprised these Zarathustra-fueled Übermenschen . . .
Be it the Kaiser--Caesar in Deutsch--Bismarck, ******, or,
Even that Euro-*****,  Angela Merkel . . . Why am I not surprised these Huns,
Get global grab-*** on the sauerbraten cabeza every few generations?
To be, or not to be the ***** bullgoose loony: GOTT.

Biomechanical protocols govern my identity and are implanted while I sleep.
My brain--my weak and weary CPU--is replenished, my discs defragmented.
A suite of magnetic and optical white rooms, cleansed free of contaminants,
Gun mounts & lifeboat stations manned and ready,
Standing at attention and saluting British snap-style,
Snap-to and heel click, ramrod straight and cheerful: “Ready for duty, Sir.”
My mind is ravenous, lusting for something, anything to process.
Any memory or image, lyric or construct,
Be they short-term dailies or deeply imprinted.
Fixations archived one and all in deep storage time and space.
Memories, some subconscious, most vaporous;
Others--the scary ones—eidetic: frighteningly detailed and extraordinarily vivid.
Precise cognitive transcripts; recollected so richly rife and fresh.
Visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, and olfactory reloads:
Queued up and increasingly re-experienced.

The bio-data of six decades: it’s all there.
People, countless, places and things cataloged.
Every event, joy and trauma enveloped from within or,
Accessed externally from biomechanical storage devices.
The random access memory of a lifetime,
Read and recollected from cerebral repositories and vaults,
All the while the entire greedy process overseen,
Over-driven by that all-subservient British bat-man,
Rummaging through the data in batches small and large,
Internal and external drives working in seamless syncopation,
Self-referential, at times paradoxical or infinitely looped.
“Cogito ergo sum."
Descartes stripped it down to the basics but there’s more to the story:
Thinking about thinking.
A curse and minefield for the cerebral:  metacognition.

No, it is not the fact that thought exists,
Or even the thoughts themselves.
But the information technology of thought that baffles me,
As adaptive and profound as any evolution posited by Darwin,
Beyond the wetware in my skull, an entirely new operating system.
My mental and cultural landscape are becoming one.
Machines are connecting the two.
It’s what I am and what I am becoming.
Once more for emphasis:
It is the information technology of who I am.
It is the operating system of my mental and cultural landscape.
It is the machinery connecting the two.
This is the central point of this narrative:
Metacognition--your superego’s yenta Cassandra,
Screaming, screaming in your psychic ear, your good ear:

“LISTEN:  The machines are taking over, taking you over.
Your identity and train of thought are repeatedly hijacked,
Switched off the main line onto spurs and tangents,
Only marginally connected or not at all.
(Incoming TEXT from my editor: “Lighten Up, Giuseppi!”)
Reminding me again that most in my audience,
Rarely get past the comic page. All righty then: think Calvin & Hobbes.
John Calvin, a precocious and adventurous six-year old boy,
Subject to flights of 16th Century French theological fancy.
Thomas Hobbes, a sardonic anthropomorphic tiger from 17th Century England,
Mumbling about life being “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
Taken together--their antics and shenanigans--their relationship to each other,
Remind us of our dual nature; explore for us broad issues like public education;
The economy, environmentalism & the Global ****** Thermometer;
Not to mention the numerous flaws of opinion polls.



And again my editor TEXTS me, reminds me again: “LIGHTEN UP!”
Consoling me:  “Even Shakespeare had to play to the groundlings.”
The groundlings, AKA: The Rabble.
Yes. Even the ******* Bard, even Willie the Shake,
Had to contend with a decidedly lowbrow copse of carrion.
Oh yes, the groundlings, a carrion herd, a flying flock of carrion seagulls,
Carrion crow, carrion-feeders one and all,
And let’s throw Sheryl Crow into the mix while we’re at it:
“Hit it! This ain't no disco. And it ain't no country club either, this is L.A.”  

                  Send "All I Wanna Do" Ringtone to your Cell              

Once more, I digress.
The Rabble:  an amorphous, gelatinous Jabba the Hutt of commonality.
The Rabble: drunk, debauched & lawless.
Too *****-delicious to stop Bill & Hilary from thinking about tomorrow;
Too Paul McCartney My Love Does it Good to think twice.

The Roman Saturnalia: a weeklong **** fest.
The Saturnalia: originally a pagan kink-fest in honor of the deity Saturn.
Dovetailing nicely with the advent of the Christian era,
With a project started by Il Capo di Tutti Capi,
One of the early popes, co-opting the Roman calendar between 17 and 25 December,
Putting the finishing touches on the Jesus myth.
For Brooklyn Hopi-***-Jew baby boomers like me,
Saturnalia manifested itself as Disco Fever,
Unpleasant years of electrolysis, scrunched ***** in tight polyester
For Roman plebeians, for the great unwashed citizenry of Rome,
Saturnalia was just a great big Italian wedding:
A true family blowout and once-in-a-lifetime ego-trip for Dad,
The father of the bride, Vito Corleone, Don for A Day:
“Some think the world is made for fun and frolic,
And so do I! Funicula, Funiculi!”

America: love it or leave it; my country right or wrong.
Sure, we were citizens of Rome,
But any Joe Josephus spending the night under a Tiber bridge,
Or sleeping off a three day drunk some afternoon,
Up in the Coliseum bleachers, the cheap seats, out beyond the monuments,
The original three monuments in the old stadium,
Standing out in fair territory out in center field,
Those three stone slabs honoring Gehrig, Huggins, and Babe.
Yes, in the house that Ruth built--Home of the Bronx Bombers--***?
Any Joe Josephus knows:  Roman citizenship doesn’t do too much for you,
Except get you paxed, taxed & drafted into the Legion.
For us the Roman lifestyle was HIND-*** humble.
We plebeians drew our grandeur by association with Empire.
Very few Romans and certainly only those of the patrician class lived high,
High on the hog, enjoying a worldly extravaganza, like—whom do we both know?

Okay, let’s say Laurence Olivier as Crassus in Spartacus.
Come on, you saw Spartacus fifteen ******* times.
Remember Crassus?
Crassus: that ***** twisted **** trying to get his freak on with,
Tony Curtis in a sunken marble tub?
We plebes led lives of quiet *****-scratching desperation,
A bunch of would-be legionnaires, diseased half the time,
Paid in salt tablets or baccala, salted codfish soaked yellow in olive oil.
Stiffs we used to call them on New Year’s Eve in Brooklyn.
Let’s face it: we were hyenas eating someone else’s ****,
Stage-door jackals, Juvenal-come-late-lies, a mob of moronic mook boneheads
Bought off with bread & circuses and Reality TV.
Each night, dished up a wide variety of lowbrow Elizabethan-era entertainments.  
We contemplate an evening on the town, downtown—
(cue Petula Clark/Send "Downtown" Ringtone to your Cell)

On any given London night, to wit:  mummers, jugglers, bear & bull baiters.
How about dog & **** fighters, quoits & skittles, alehouses & brothels?
In short, somewhere, anywhere else,
Anywhere other than down along the Thames,
At Bankside in Southwark, down in the Globe Theater mosh pit,
Slugging it out with the groundlings whose only interest,
In the performance is the choreography of swordplay and stale ****** puns.
Meanwhile, Hugh Fennyman--probably a fellow Jew,
An English Renaissance Bugsy Siegel or Mickey Cohen—
Meanwhile Fennyman, the local mob boss is getting his ya-yas,
Roasting the feet of my text-messaging editor, Philip Henslowe.
Poor and pathetic Henslowe, works on commission, always scrounging,
But a true patron of my craft, a gentleman of infinite jest and patience,
Spiritual subsistence, and every now and then a good meal at some,
Sawdust joint with oyster shells, and a Prufrockian silk purse of T.S. Eliot gold.

Poor, pathetic Henslowe, trussed up by Fennyman,
His editorial feet in what looks like a Japanese hibachi.
Henslowe’s feet to the fire--feet to the fire—get it?
A catchy phrase whose derivation conjures up,
A grotesque yet vivid image of torture,
An exquisite insight into how such phrases ingress the idiom,
Not to mention a scene once witnessed at a secret Romanian CIA prison,
I’d been ordered to Bucharest not long after 9/11,
Handling the rendition and torture of Habib Ghazzawy,

An entirely innocent falafel maker from Steinway Street, Astoria, Queens.
Shock the Monkey: it’s what we do. GOTO:
Peter Gabriel - Shock the Monkey/
(HQ music video) - YouTube//
www.youtube.com/
Poor, pathetic, ******-on Henslowe.


Fennyman :  (his avarice is whet by something Philly screams out about a new script)  "A play takes time. Find actors; Rehearsals. Let's say open in three weeks. That's--what--five hundred groundlings at tuppence each, in addition four hundred groundlings tuppence each, in addition four hundred backsides at three pence--a penny extra for a cushion, call it two hundred cushions, say two performances for safety how much is that Mr. Frees?"
Jacobean Tweet, John (1580-1684) Webster:  “I saw him kissing her bubbies.”

It’s Geoffrey Rush, channeling Henslowe again,
My editor, a singed smoking madman now,
Feet in an ice bucket, instructing me once more:
“Lighten things up, you know . . .
Comedy, love and a bit with a dog.”
I digress again and return to Hopi Land, back to my shaman-monastic abattoir,
That Zen Center in downtown Shungopavi.
At the Tribal Enrolment Office I make my case for a Certificate of Indian Blood,
Called a CIB by the Natives and the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs.
The BIA:  representing gold & uranium miners, cattle and sheep ranchers,
Sodbusters & homesteaders; railroaders and dam builders since 1824.
Just in time for Andrew Jackson, another false friend of Native America,
Just before Old Hickory, one of many Democratic Party hypocrites and scoundrels,
Gives the FONGOOL, up the CULO go ahead.
Hey Andy, I’ve got your Jacksonian democracy: Hanging!
The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) mission is to:   "… enhance the quality of life, to promote economic opportunity, and to carry out the responsibility to protect and improve the trust assets of American Indians, Indian tribes, and Alaska Natives. What’s that in the fine print?  Uncle Sammy holds “the trust assets of American Indians.”

Here’s a ******* tip, Geronimo: if he trusted you,
It would ALL belong to you.
To you and The People.
But it’s all fork-tongued white *******.
If true, Indian sovereignty would cease to be a sick one-liner,
Cease to be a blunt force punch line, more of,
King Leopold’s 19th Century stand-up comedy schtick,
Leo Presents: The **** of the Congo.
La Belgique mission civilisatrice—
That’s what French speakers called Uncle Leo’s imperial public policy,
Bringing the gift of civilization to central Africa.
Like Manifest Destiny in America, it had a nice colonial ring to it.
“Our manifest destiny [is] to overspread the continent,
Allotted by Providence for the free development,
Of our yearly multiplying millions.”  John L. O'Sullivan, 1845

Our civilizing mission or manifest destiny:
Either/or, a catchy turn of phrase;
Not unlike another ironic euphemism and semantic subterfuge:
The Pacification of the West; Pacification?
Hardly: decidedly not too peaceful for Cochise & Tonto.
Meanwhile, Madonna is cash rich but disrespected Evita poor,
To wit: A ****** on the Rocks (throwing in a byte or 2 of Da Vinci Code).
Meanwhile, Miss Ciccone denied her golden totem *****.
They snubbed that little guinea ****, didn’t they?
Snubbed her, robbed her rotten.
Evita, her magnum opus, right up there with . . .
Her SNL Wayne’s World skit:
“Get a load of the unit on that guy.”
Or, that infamous MTV Music Video Awards stunt,
That classic ***** Lip-Lock with Britney Spears.

How could I not see that Oscar snubola as prime evidence?
It was just another stunning case of American anti-Italian racial animus.
Anyone familiar with Noam Chomsky would see it,
Must view it in the same context as the Sacco & Vanzetti case,
Or, that arbitrary lynching of 9 Italian-Americans in New Orleans in 1891,
To cite just two instances of anti-Italian judicial reach & mob violence,
Much like what happened to my cousin Dominic,
Gang-***** by the Harlem Globetrotters, in their locker room during halftime,
While he working for Abe Saperstein back in 1952.
Dom was doing advance for Abe, supporting creation of The Washington Generals:
A permanent stable of hoop dream patsies and foils,
Named for the ever freewheeling, glad-handing, backslapping,
Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force (SCAEF), himself,
Namely General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the man they liked,
And called IKE: quite possibly a crypto Jew from Abilene.

Of course, Harry Truman was my first Great White Fascist Father,
Back in 1946, when I first opened my eyes, hung up there,
High above, looking down from the adobe wall.
Surveying the entire circular kiva,
I had the best seat in the house.
Don’t let it be said my Spider Grandmother or Hopi Corn Mother,
Did not want me looking around at things,
Discovering what made me special.
Didn’t divine intervention play a significant part of my creation?
Knowing Mamma Mia and Nonna were Deities,
Gave me an edge later on the streets of Brooklyn.
The Cradleboard: was there ever a more divinely inspired gift to human curiosity? The Cradleboard: a perfect vantage point, an infant’s early grasp,
Of life harmonious, suspended between Mother Earth and Father Sky.
Simply put: the Hopi should be running our ******* public schools.

But it was IKE with whom I first associated,
Associated with the concept 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
I liked IKE. Who didn’t?
What was not to like?
He won the ******* war, didn’t he?
And he wasn’t one of those crazy **** John Birchers,
Way out there, on the far right lunatic Republican fringe,
Was he? (It seems odd and nearly impossible to believe in 2013,
That there was once a time in our Boomer lives,
When the extreme right wing of the Republican Party
Was viewed by the FBI as an actual threat to American democracy.)
Understand: it was at a time when The FBI,
Had little ideological baggage,
But a great appetite for secrets,
The insuppressible Jay Edgar doing his thang.

IKE: of whom we grew so, oh-so Fifties fond.
Good old reliable, Nathan Shaking IKE:
He’d been fixed, hadn’t he? Had had the psychic snip.
Snipped as a West Point cadet & parade ground martinet.
Which made IKE a good man to have in a pinch,
Especially when crucial policy direction was way above his pay grade.
Cousin Dom was Saperstein’s bagman, bribing out the opposition,
Which came mainly from religious and patriotic organizations,
Viewing the bogus white sports franchise as obscene.
The Washington Generals, Saperstein’s new team would have but one opponent,
And one sole mission: to serve as the **** of endless jokes and sight gags for—
Negroes.  To play the chronic fools of--
Negroes.  To be chronically humiliated and insulted by—
Negroes.  To run up and down the boards all night, being outran by—
Negroes.  Not to mention having to wear baggy silk shorts.



Meadowlark Lemon:  “Yeah, Charlie, we ***** that grease-ball Dominic; we shagged his guinea mouth and culo rotten.”  

(interviewed in his Scottsdale, AZ winter residence in 2003 by former ESPN commentator Charlie Steiner, Malverne High School, Class of ’67.)
                                                        
  ­                                                                 ­                 
IKE, briefed on the issue by higher-ups, quickly got behind the idea.
The Harlem Globetrotters were to exist, and continue to exist,
Are sustained financially by Illuminati sponsors,
For one reason and one reason only:
To serve elite interests that the ***** be kept down and subservient,
That the minstrel show be perpetuated,
A policy surviving the elaborate window dressing of the civil rights movement, Affirmative action, and our first Uncle Tom president.
Case in point:  Charles Barkley, Dennis Rodman & Metta World Peace Artest.
Cha-cha-cha changing again:  I am Robert Allen Zimmermann,
A whiny, skinny Jew, ****** and rolling in from Minnesota,
Arrested, obviously a vagrant, caught strolling around his tony Jersey enclave,
Having moved on up the list, the A-list, a special invitation-only,
Yom Kippur Passover Seder:  Next Year in Jerusalem, Babaloo!

I take ownership of all my autonomic and conditioned reflexes;
Each personal neural arc and pathway,
All shenanigans & shellackings,
Or blunt force cognitive traumas.
It’s all percolating nicely now, thank you,
In kitchen counter earthen crockery:
Random access memory: a slow-cook crockpot,
Bubbling through my psychic sieve.
My memories seem only remotely familiar,
Distant and vague, at times unreal:
An alien hybrid databank accessed accidently on purpose;
Flaky science sustains and monitors my nervous system.
And leads us to an overwhelming question:
Is it true that John Dillinger’s ******* is in the Smithsonian Museum?
Enquiring minds want to know, Kemosabe!

“Any last words, *******?” TWEETS Adam Smith.
Postmortem cyber-graffiti, an epitaph carved in space;
Last words, so singular and simple,
Across the universal great divide,
Frisbee-d, like a Pleistocene Kubrick bone,
Tossed randomly into space,
Morphing into a gyroscopic space station.
Mr. Smith, a calypso capitalist, and me,
Me, the Poet Laureate of the United States and Adam;
Who, I didn’t know from Adam.
But we tripped the light fantastic,
We boogied the Protestant Work Ethic,
To the tune of that old Scotch-Presbyterian favorite,
Variations of a 5-point Calvinist theme: Total Depravity; Election; Particular Redemption; Irresistible Grace; & Perseverance of the Saints.

Mr. Smith, the author of An Inquiry into the Nature
& Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776),
One of the best-known, intellectual rationales for:
Free trade, capitalism, and libertarianism,
The latter term a euphemism for Social Darwinism.
Prior to 1764, Calvinists in France were called Huguenots,
A persecuted religious majority . . . is that possible?
A persecuted majority of Edict of Nantes repute.
Adam Smith, likely of French Huguenot Jewish ancestry himself,
Reminds me that it is my principal plus interest giving me my daily gluten.
And don’t think the irony escapes me now,
A realization that it has taken me nearly all my life to see again,
What I once saw so vividly as a child, way back when.
Before I put away childish things, including the following sentiment:
“All I need is the air that I breathe.”

  Send "The Air That I Breathe" Ringtone to your Cell  

The Hippies were right, of course.
The Hollies had it all figured out.
With the answer, as usual, right there in the lyrics.
But you were lucky if you were listening.
There was a time before I embraced,
The other “legendary” economists:
The inexorable Marx,
The savage society of Veblen,
The heresies we know so well of Keynes.
I was a child.
And when I was a child, I spake as a child—
Grazie mille, King James—
I understood as a child; I thought as a child.
But when I became a man I jumped on the bus with the band,
Hopped on the irresistible bandwagon of Adam Smith.

Smith:  “Any last words, *******?”
Okay, you were right: man is rationally self-interested.
Grazie tanto, Scotch Enlightenment,
An intellectual movement driven by,
An alliance of Calvinists and Illuminati,
Freemasons and Johnny Walker Black.
Talk about an irresistible bandwagon:
Smith, the gloomy Malthus, and David Ricardo,
Another Jew boy born in London, England,
Third of 17 children of a Sephardic family of Portuguese origin,
Who had recently relocated from the Dutch Republic.
******* Jews!
Like everything shrewd, sane and practical in this world,
WE also invented the concept:  FOLLOW THE MONEY.

The lyrics: if you were really listening, you’d get it:
Respiration keeps one sufficiently busy,
Just breathing free can be a full-time job,
Especially when--borrowing a phrase from British cricketers—,
One contemplates the sorry state of the wicket.
Now that I am gainfully superannuated,
Pensioned off the employment radar screen.
Oft I go there into the wild ebon yonder,
Wandering the brain cloud at will.
My journey indulges curiosity, creativity and deceit.
I free range the sticky wicket,
I have no particular place to go.
Snagging some random fact or factoid,
A stop & go rural postal route,
Jumping on and off the brain cloud.

Just sampling really,
But every now and then, gorging myself,
At some information super smorgasbord,
At a Good Samaritan Rest Stop,
I ponder my own frazzled neurology,
When I was a child—
Before I learned the grim economic facts of life and Judaism,
Before I learned Hebrew,
Before my laissez-faire Bar Mitzvah lessons,
Under the rabbinical tutelage of Rebbe Kahane--
I knew what every clever child knows about life:
The surfing itself is the destination.
Accessing RAM--random access memory—
On a strictly need to know basis.
RAM:  a pretty good name for consciousness these days.

If I were an Asimov or Sir Arthur (Sri Lankabhimanya) Clarke,
I’d get freaky now, riffing on Terminators, Time Travel and Cyborgs.
But this is truth not science fiction.
Nevertheless, someone had better,
Come up with another name for cyborg.
Some other name for a critter,
Composed of both biological and artificial parts?
Parts-is-parts--be they electronic, mechanical or robotic.
But after a lifetime of science fiction media,
After a steady media diet, rife with dystopian technology nightmares,
Is anyone likely to admit to being a cyborg?
Since I always give credit where credit is due,
I acknowledge that cyborg was a term coined in 1960,
By Manfred Clynes & Nathan S. Kline and,
Used to identify a self-regulating human-machine system in outer space.

Five years later D. S. Halacy's: Cyborg: Evolution of the Superman,
Featured an introduction, which spoke of:  “… a new frontier, that was not,
Merely space, but more profoundly, the relationship between inner space,
And outer space; a bridge, i.e., between mind and matter.”
So, by definition, a cyborg defined is an organism with,
Technology-enhanced abilities: an antenna array,
Replacing what was once sentient and human.
My glands, once in control of metabolism and emotions,
Have been replaced by several servomechanisms.
I am biomechanical and gluttonous.
Soaking up and breathing out the atmosphere,
My Baby Boom experience of six decades,
Homogenized and homespun, feedback looped,
Endlessly networked through predigested mass media,
Culture as demographically targeted content.

This must have something to do with my own metamorphosis.
I think of Gregor Samsa, a Kafkaesque character if there ever was one.
And though we share common traits,
My evolutionary progress surpasses and transcends his.
Samsa--Phylum and Class--was, after all, an insect.
Nonetheless, I remain a changeling.
Have I not seen many stages of growth?
Each a painful metamorphic cycle,
From exquisite first egg,
Through caterpillar’s appetite & squirm.
To phlegmatic bliss and pupa quietude,
I unfold my wings in a rush of Van Gogh palette,
Color, texture, movement and grace, lift off, flapping in flight.
My eyes have witnessed wondrous transformations,
My experience, nouveau riche and distinctly self-referential;
For the most part unspecific & longitudinally pedestrian.

Yes, something has happened to me along the way.
I am no longer certain of my identity as a human being.
Time and technology has altered my basic wiring diagram.
I suspect the sophisticated gadgets and tools,
I’ve been using to shape & make sense of my environment,
Have reared up and turned around on me.
My tools have reshaped my brain & central nervous system.
Remaking me as something simultaneously more and less human.
The electronic toys and tools I once so lovingly embraced,
Have turned unpredictable and rabid,
Their bite penetrating my skin and septic now, a cluster of implanted sensors,
Content: currency made increasingly more valuable as time passes,
Served up by and serving the interests of a pervasively predatory 1%.
And the rest of us: the so-called 99%?
No longer human; simply put by both Howards--Beale & Zinn--

Humanoid.

This constant presence of you.
It's been a year or more.
You've seen the ugly bits,
The confused frayed edges.

All my lies and hedges,
a time to sit and ponder
On whispers of who I am to people.
Your sweet ****, my sweet heart.

That old whickering tremble
How did I get this lucky?
Bundled up in sweet cliches
Characters of my inner dialogue come to life

May I return to being an individual?
Once I find where I buried my Trust.
All the games and masks?
To conduct a minefield exposition.

My thoughts are so clean and linear
with you, I'm afraid you're synthetic.
A dog bites, it's tail
No one loves a lurker.

There'll come a time
when you'll have to stop hiding,
lay down your mask,
and come face me.

Soldiers dancing in a minefield
Why aren't there any protest songs
Doesn't matter how their minds feel
As long as they can't sing along

History has shown us the rhyme
Taking again our Khygar Pass
One more ****** foot at a time
Praying to God that it's the last

r  13Jan14

To those who speak against being 'rude': you are not a friend of truth or understanding.
You coddle yourself in a somnambulant daze,
Where the harshest realities lay deep in your soul,
And you walk away, as far from this dormant minefield you've lain,
Leaving the active bombs for others to stumble upon.
And they suffer because of your laziness,
Avoiding your task of diffusing these bombs that only you understand,
And you still aren't sure where the schematics are,
So the damage continues,
And you have become a despot,
Watching people die from your pointless violence.

Every waking hour I tread with great care
Not wanting to disturb the calm
The calm that lasts only seconds at a time.

In the past I used to walk this field
Walking without a care
I felt safe and secure, placing my feet wherever
That was a mistake I'll always regret.

One day, the sky as blue as the sea
I walked down the familiar path
Until my foot stepped on something unknown.

I heard the click.

Fire and dust engulfed me
I blew up into a million pieces
Never to be whole again.

I learned the hard way what your words are like
How they blew up my heart, my soul
Never to be regained-

But I still love you
Even though being with you
Is like walking in a minefield.

Every place I turn
I can't unsee the horrors I've known
I can't say I have had it the worst
Not by a long shot
But it hasn't been butterflies

No three year old wants to see
Random men in their house with
Their mama when their daddy's not home
And no six year old should have to see
Parents so enraged
And divorcing
Nor should their best friend's parents
Feel a need to adopt them
Even temporarily

No seven year old should
Feel they need to be twenty-seven
And like they aren't allowed to cry
No ten year old should be forced
To choose which parent they like best
Under any circumstances

No twelve year old should feel
Any desire to harm themselves
And watch blood swell on their arms
No fourteen year old should think they're
Wrong because they believed in love
Nor should they feel jaded

No fifteen year old should contemplate suicide
At all
Especially not so thought out
With a grand scheme and everything
Just two months before their sweet sixteen
No sixteen year old should feel betrayed
And forgotten
Or unworthy of any kind of love

Every step I take I am reminded
That life is a widening gyre
Mr. Yeats, you were right
But I can't accept that to be
The only plausible possibility
Which leads me to believe
That with every step I take
Though my heart is torn to bits
By this minefield called life
I get a little bit
Stronger

I would like to think that by the age of 6, i would have turned deaf, from the hands being placed on my ears to escape bullets of words. Shattering around me, i wished to grow up. By the age of 8, i knew my place and, my place knew me. I lived in a minefield, during a war i had not realised was going on. I had unbroken bones which bled from the inside, my mind was torn in to a million pieces and at 10, i didn't know what childhood was, and wished i was alone.

By 16, I fell into a man, a man who's hand it took 2 years to gain from his mother, as she sat there smoking and drinking hot water with lemon to be diet thin. Trimmed the fat a bit when we both left the country, and he got a girl pregnant in India, with twins, which she later aborted; I was in Canada, and 18 when i wished i was blind.

I followed through, travelled the world, til i was 21, became a university student, a best friend, a lesbian, and went to a foreign country were you are forced to use your goodness to be a force of good, which no-one sees as good, but as a hand out, and i lost good friends and saw bad men lose theirs, at 21, I saw the world and i was i was emotionally devoid in a climate of acclaimed peace.

By 26 i was a mother, uncontrollable love and grief flowed through me, like rain is dissolved by the streams in the hills. I picked up my smiling, beautiful child, which had became my night, noon, morning and day, and i wished i could repair the tear within my soul, to encompass all the love i had for my son; and the tear remained patched up with sellotape; I wished I had been a better child.

I lost all consciousness from 27 til 28, love turned to hate, i lost my love, and picked up a young one, if only she was to physically show me what my ex had not been telling me all along; what my ex boyfriends mother made me feel for 2 years, and the way my father left, whilst my mother was pulling me up the stairs, by my hair. At 28 I realised i had made the wrong decision.

From 28, here on out the wind blew, and it blew down to the valleys, and there i found the love of my life. We found and created an indestructible friendship and love, the first only and ever to support me and our goals, she helped me stand up to my father; who then ended our own father/daughter relationship. And not 3 months shy later, when myself and my son mouthed our love and said goodbye. We returned to an empty house. I sacrificed my grief for a small boy who cried for a non-existent person. At 29 my heart was destroyed in a slow burning bonfire.

I replaced the love with the lost, and gladly filled up my tank with lost souls of lost girls, who had lost their souls from some other lost soul, and so the cycle becomes fully reborn. I became someone i knew not of. I had a best friend, who i solely loved because she was the vat of hope i desperately needed in the darkest hour, my biggest cheerleader and my ***** compadre. I remember at 29 celebrating a birthday with 2 friends, and looking at the stars and thinking, is this the meaning of my existence? I remember feeling like the winds were about to change.

30. I had moved house, abandoned my son and old life, for a new job, for new money. I sunk like the titanic who did not see the epic gigantic proportion of iceberg that was about hit the ******* fan. I lost the best friend. Slowly through another relationship did i gleam a sensation of love. It was love, but it was demanding and childish, and i pushed her away before she even asked me to be hers;  in i might add one of the most romantic pursuits ever. She became my sons best friend, my dancing partner, she loved me so very very much, and i hated her for it, i hated her so much for loving me, because i was rightly wrong and she was wrongly right. I just turned 31, and she walked out over an argument over bike helmet. I realised, i was a product of my over endless pursuit of love perfect.

At 32, i am single, broke my back at work, i was then dismissed by that work, moved house, began recovery, had a car accident and here i am beginning again. Yet i am in love now with a man, something i have struggled with for a year, i am at my most humble, deep, profound, sense of being in love, without reciprocation than i have even been, and why........?

Well....

When i was 16 i wanted to be 30, i wanted my life to be over. I wanted the dead years to pass. I wanted the hard work to be gone and done. Not because i didn't want to live, but because i had lived so hard before i was 16, that anything else seemed to exhausting for words to even begin to create.

Except i lived it.
I learnt that love is not words, love is words.
Love is the words of your favourite song, emblazoned on a 8ft wall, that you come home to, and see as a surprise.
Love is someone letting you read your book.
Love is not the voice, the meaning, the tone, the perception or allegorical meaning.
Love is not the abuse, the abuser, their demons, their guilt or their silence.
Love is the unspoken word, the deep stare, the knowing glance, a tender reassurance, that this is ok.
Love is your hand holding mine. N.B Handholding is underrated.
Love is not possession, greed, want or desire. They are not yours, you are not theirs.
Love is invisible, yes it is, red balloons don't mean **** on one day a year.
Love is not perfect, but imperfect.
Love is ruthless, and cut-throat.
Love will burn you to the very last core of your being because you cannot contain its power.
Love is not lies, deceit, untruths, stories told to the naieve because you cannot be a lover and have to be a storyteller.
Love is truth, truth that so bitterly hurts, that you want to be porcelain and break into a million pieces, from the chest .
Love is walking, talking, and laughing, always laughing; love is a smile on a face.
Love is hard, and intolerable, it is passionate, and persistent and it is consistent. It does not break, it is not flimsly like a kite in a storm.
Love does not take offence to personal battles and rebukes of deadly warfare.
Love does not change its mind, be unsure, lack responsbility, or drinks you dry, til you are dried out and up.
Love is not ***, love is not lust, lust is not 'go on, you know you want to', love is not sorry in the morning.
Love is not the ***** all night *** sessions that keep the neighbours awake, but it is in the glory of two bodies where love can be found.
Love condemns. Love is a silent recommendation from Disney, Cathy and Heathcliffe, and Ring of BrightWater.
Love is a minefield and a forbidden playground; it is a secret garden and a theme park.
Love is not alone, and it is not together; it is not your children, or your childrens, children; It is within them and without them.
Love is not to be found on the praying may, in the clouds, in a the pew, or in the incense.
Love cries, love wails, love beats at your very chest, love is in death, love is in the birth.
Love.
Love.
Aaah, hmmm, Love, is an indeterminable force, by which, because of its very nature, no-one can define by logic, except that they will, because, what they cannot understand, they use perception of their blinded sight, deaf ears, and lost senses to put into words, something their heart cannot.
You have everything and you have no-one.
You have reason and you have none to be afraid of.
You are your past, and unfortunately, you are not.
You are your damage, your hurt and your pain, and hardest, your own responsibility.
You are worthy, and you are worthless, you have been shamed and you have been glorified.
You are your own future, your own today, and the yesterday.
And despite all the crap ******* memes,
Love is you, and you are love.

By 32, i had learnt to love myself. Inbetween the grieving, there is a silent knowledge, that by 32 i am in love, with myself.

*I wrote this as a very open outpouring of grief i am currently going through, and also an open realisation of the love within and for myself. It is one of my most open and explicit short stories of my life, and even within that there is lots that has not been recognised, because it has been shortened and reconsidered somewhere else. Thank you

You're a little like a shipwreck and I think you lost your heart amidst all the piles of rust and dust and I tried to help you by looking for it but everything was so dark and I couldn't find a light, so I tried looking in your eyes but there was nothing there.
You lost your mind a few years ago and I don't think you've ever really been the same. Your eyes used to hold an eternity of light, but now they're darker than the darkest of nights.
You treat your body like a canvas and it looks like you're trying to draw a map, I always knew you were lost but I couldn't figure out where you were, maybe you're lost inside yourself, and I don't know where your map is planning to take you but I hope you get out okay and I hope it's nicer than where you are now.
You look like you're made out of paper and you are so fragile I can't remember the last time I touched you because everything I touch seems to break and I couldn't do that to you.
You have power lines surging through your veins but you're breaking them one by one, so I guess you're not happy with them anymore. You leave cracks all along them and let the energy leak out.
You're like a minefield and I honestly don't know how to work my way around you anymore. I've had years of practice but you suddenly switched and now everything is different and I can't navigate you in the dark.
You started to do things that I do a few months back. Now you stand by me while I light things on fire, because I guess it's better than lighting myself on fire.
You stand by me while I stand on the edges of cliffs, my arms open and my head back, staring at the sky and wondering if I could make myself fly. I don't really want to, I just want to jump. But if I stepped off the edge, I would want you to fly.
And I don't really know which is worse, the look on your face when you know I'm not really there, or the look on your face when you suddenly realised you weren't either.
I'm still looking for your heart, but I think it has been swept away, I'm sorry, but never mind, you took mine anyway.

This great acre of love, this minefield,
This warm ballooning of affection, this dark swelling,
This gentle melody, this thud against the floor,
This sweet nectar to swallow, this poisoned vein.
His voice is soft on my neck.
His cries are sharp on the phone.
I am sick in the head.
I feel worse than alone.

Have you ever been to Nairobi?
What did you see there?
Buildings, people and vehicles?
Uhmmm! Let me share with you my case
Hence I was there yesterday,
And I saw wonders of life;
Jubilant politicians clashing for tyranny,
At the Nairobi parliament,
Making anti-human laws,
Under faked canopy of de-terrorization,
With no tincture of surrender to open truth,
That; in juvenile states like Kenya,
Corruption is a minefield of terrorism,
Corrupt management of state organs;
The policemen and state spies,
Hired on full back-up of corruption,
Gives leeway to thriving of terrorism,
As a security agent hired nepotistic-ally,
Will never fight terrorism with a knack,
Leave police work to policemen with passion,
Not to your kinsmen and loyalists in politics,


I saw jubilant politicians high on nerves,
Excited like a swine on ****** heat,
Or they were possessed by the evil spirit,
Or crushed by the African cult of dictatorship,
Where humanity derives pleasure from political pains,
Scornfully viewing humane governance,
As dictatorship will fortunately give a bloom,
Of swift doors and windows of corruption,
Primitive accumulation of filthy wealth,
And apotheosification of the worthless self,
Into a lull of blind self-made god-ship

I saw a jubilant politician going pugnacious,
Forcefully restoring dark days of Toroitich arap Moi,
Making a law which a monkey cannot make,
Hitting a fellow politicians,
With all might and knack of a devil,
Shredding into laces the trouser of a colleague,
Exposing red lingerie of the fellow colleague,
Partially exposing the tools of child making,
Only to the positive chagrin of us all,
On discovery of the circumcised *****,

I saw jubilant dictator-maniac politicians,
Passing a law of shooting to death,
Him the police feels may be a terrorist,
Or detain at pleasure, without trial
Him that looks ugly like a terrorist,
A suspect is a snake to be crushed the head on sight,
But not all snakes are poisonous Mr. Politico-Jubilant,
Some are ornamental and others poisonously harmless,
Even snakes need fair trial,
Just like suspect of genocide,
Before the international criminal court,
Before a blow of hammer crushes their heads,
Let me ask you my dear reader,
A foolish question as usual;
What are snakes to the jubilant politics of Nairobi?
A political non loyalist who perhaps can chide,
The powers that be from their gusto of power,

I saw jubilant politicians in full gear of idiosyncrancies,
Passing the law to gag friends of the poor,
The NGO’s; the poor man’s uni-source of hope,
They have been relieving the poor man of Kenya,
From horrendous traditions of   epidemics,
In Turkana, Budalangi and marginalized Mandera,
Helping men and women of these areas to be free,
From tyranny of perennially missing basic needs,
This freedom is now thwarted,
Lest it gives these poor men right of speech,
Thwarted artfully in the **** of NGO’S,
Through false label of the time,
That they play *** with terrorist groups,
What a big a lie?

By
Alexander Khamala  Opicho,
Eldoret,Kenya

Cascades were dripping outside of this moving vehicle
White noise, patternless and arrhythmic
like magnified sounds of nails on a concrete wall,
made by souls desperate to cleave their way to dryness

This public utility vehicle holds spirits successful in finding this temporary heaven
Weathered, soaked and almost drowned
like panting dogs that managed to swim ashore from a shipwreck
caused by the iceberg that is the eye of the storm

This safe haven holds champions in a world of misshapen men

A woman clutches tightly on a bag of lime and her ever waning youth
Tired, but not eager to face Death
still closing her windows to his cat burglars
that come faster than the downpour of Typhon's tears

A homeless child comfortably sleeps on the far end of this ride
His innocence tested by fate
Too experienced for someone his age
instead of just playing in the streets he calls home

The jeepney driver has eyes on the road painted by Van Gogh
Unabashed, industrious and assiduous
determined to serve,
provide for a family whose stomachs hunger not but they hunger for his return

This other dimension nurtures alien thoughts and parallel thinking among beat down men

I do not know them but I can hear the cries of their emotions,
their longing to be felt and empathized with
Their voiceless cries are guns with a silenced nozzle
shooting at anyone ignorant who curiously stare at this minefield of a passenger jeep

That sparkle,
that immeasurably forgiving joy and affection is gone,
but the sound of your voice is just familiar enough to make me remember it.

What we're doing here is necrophilia.
It's gross, but we're ******* something that's dead and we both know it.
I think we thought we could bring it back to life with our selfish demands,
but this coffin isn't as comforting as we'd hoped it would be.

We've never talked about the time between,
that period of time when we never talked.
We should have talked.
Without words, you had nowhere to be angry so you swallowed your truths and they turned into blame.

I can feel it when you look at me,
I don't sparkle anymore.
Well, neither do you.

When we talk we say the least, yet every word has a barb.
Too jaded for affection we bob and weave through a minefield of unacknowledged truths.
Our words rot in our bellies while we sew each others mouths shut.
We never wanted this sort of intimacy.

We let the poison out with play, the kind that's done with knives.
So here we are, playing with knives in a minefield,
the only sound is our own hollow laughter.

Behind every "never mind" and "just kidding",
behind the scoreboard of our interactions and every slap of my *** are two shadows;
one covered in armor from breast to backbone,
and one purging a river of poison.

We're chasing a past we know we can't have back,
and the echoes of our old feelings make the silence so much louder than it was
when we didn't talk.

We were beautiful this summer, helplessly alive.
We had such good intentions but the silence and the miles and the fear have made this thing pale,
dead looking.

We try hard to be sorry.

Every kindness hurts because it tastes like the past,
so now instead we barter in bed.
Turns out *** without affection falls under Services Rendered,
but the shape of you so near to me makes me miss you more than I can bare and if you call me tonight, I'll probably answer.  

I guess sometimes the only way to make sure something's not still alive is to poke it with a stick a few times.

Summer.

Summer of losing control. Summer of giving up words because my foggy despair has been too much for thinking or writing about the bursting maple leaves or flush of clouds overhead or the thunder of loving and being loved. Summer of hunger. Summer of scrutiny in front of every mirror, deadened while simultaneously feeling like a stripped nerve held to flame. Summer of running from. Summer of going in circles and circles, looking for the unlocked door and finding none, just stoic plaster and echoing vibrations of sadness. Summer of playing both puppet master and marionette, dominating my own strings with an unforgiving hand [we control microcosms when we cannot control larger things; we count and obsess and ritualize because the reality we can't face will devour us if we don’t, and this reality is that life can be as unexpected and gut-wrenching as a small child stepping innocently onto a minefield while We the spectators look on, aghast]. Summer of doubt. Summer of wondering whether or not anyone has any love left for me, and if so, why? Why such an infinite reserve for my struggling tangle of inelegance and repeated failure? Summer of breaking the surface not for myself but for anybody who has ever felt like this, for anyone who has woken up with a hook through their gills and a throat twisted airless by invisible fists, for anybody who’s flexed their jaws in spite of it and let their tongues dance, for anyone brave. Summer of tremendous beauty witnessed from the wrong side of the glass. Summer of sunset and moonrise and daisies, daisies, daisies, so exquisite yet so far away from where I’ve been living; this morgue of nuclear silence and absent pulse. Summer of polarity. Summer of numbness swooping into ecstasy then dipping into bottomless rage with no middle ground, just explosions of zeal and explosions of ache, but always, always explosions. Summer of lightning. Summer of determination. Summer of humidity between two hands holding. Summer of finality and chin lift and aftermath, of rubble as my foundation and destruction as my momentum, and I, rising like a balloon, unstoppable. Summer of transformation. Summer of trying on selves like vintage gowns, rejecting one after the next with the growing panic that accompanies the fact that this is who I am—endlessly, inexorably, relentlessly—that I can try to run from her or shape her into someone else, but she will always return, this girl of hardness and softness, this woman of perseverant fire, this funny little garden of mishap and epiphany, that there is nowhere left to hide, just this room where I stand cornered, forced finally to turn and embrace myself with a fury of welcome.

the air was thick and heavy
the sun was heating up the sky
And somewhere in the jungle
more men were gonna die

The streets were full of people
Feral dogs were running free
The haze was thick and murky
The sun you couldn't see

It's a Saigon Sunday Morning
Ten more men were going home
To  a flag tri-corner folded
And a marker of white stone

The men were all assembled
To load them up with care
It was a Saigon Sunday Morning
with ten men no longer there

The jungle was a minefield
The trees were blocking out the light
It was ***** trapped like crazy
And it seemed like it was night

A patrol went hunting "Charlie"
But, they were found out first
It only took twelve seconds
And it turned out for the worst

The city never noticed
The 'copters flying overhead
Whether bringing in supplies
Or taking out the dead

It was a Saigon Sunday Morning
It never changed one little bit
The air was always heavy
And the alleys smelled like ****

Back home the news delivered
The families destroyed
They were waiting for their loved ones
A short time were deployed

Ribbons tied around the Oak Tree
to support those coming back
On a Saigon Sunday Morning
With twenty bullets in their back

A transport with the bodies
Drops fifty more to play the game
It's a vicious, endless, circle
The procedure's all the same

It's a Saigon Sunday Morning
Ten more men were going home
To a flag tri-corner folded
And a marker of white stone

what was once a galaxy
has become a minefield
of massive black holes,
and all our rocket ships
have crash landed
without taking us home.

lost dreams of flying,
mechanical wings,
intergalactic suffocation,
stars in glass jars
as souvenirs
just in case we got close
to the moon.

we took off as one,
our faulty parts disintegrating
upon reaching the exosphere.
turbulence, then nothingness,
a lack of closure,
and gravity
working in reverse.

day's almost over
Sun's almost gone
an entire star hidden in the shadow cast by a speck of rock

high on caffeine
while falling asleep
trying to push myself past a mindful minefield of lyrical cynicism

scraping around bottom
goring the core
make a wish upon our shadow star to be a whimsical poet-to-be

flimsy words arise
then fall away
and the head's emptied again from nothing worth remembering

could be better
could be worse
not qualified to judge due to never passing the bar set for myself

eye-ing the time
passing me by
feeling the throb of decay in fingers' muscle memories of home row

finally the night
and darkened peace
stopping to let the words sink in, refresh the mind, and rest the eyes a minute

just resting my eyes

Although we were told
that casualties would be high,
still we rose up,
answering the officer's whistle-
moving our legs through the muck-
cutting our way through
the barbed wire of doubt-

We charged across Love's minefield
driving the foe before us
at this, Love's Passchendaele.

I've recently fallen into an elite group of individuals: youth diagnosed with depression by their mothers.

I can't argue with her; she is licensed.

But I can't help but feel that my case is different, minor in comparison. I'd like to call it loneliness but it's more developed than that.

It's like a cancer that started in my fingertips when they realized there was nothing to hold on to, and has since spread to my heart or my brain, whichever is responsible for the distribution of numbness to my bones and vital organs.. I'll call it 3rd stage loneliness. I'm saving calling it the 4th stage for when it starts to feel terminal.

"Lonely" is kind of a **** of a word, like "love," or "beautiful." I think people like to use "lonely" like teens use cigarettes. It taste good when it falls off the tongue. And by my observation, they both cause cancer.

Everyone wants to be "lonely" but no one wants to be alone.
So I've put it upon myself to separate loneliness into subcategories, based on mortality rate.

If you're wondering why I'm lonely, don't bother. I'm wondering the same. I have friends a family that loves me, and the rest of the chemo-esque **** that's suppose to nurture you back to health. But
I've still got that tumor buried under my skin where no one cares to look.

I ain't got many friends I can talk to.

I've concocted a list of side effects of 3rd stage loneliness, if you're interested:
1.) Insomnia - the inability to completely shut the third eye on your skull because it persists on looking to the future.
2.) Selective Hearing - the inability to listen to supposedly happy music and instead sulk with the sounds of Bon Iver or Bright Eyes ricocheting through the canals of your brain. Music your friends "probably haven't heard of"
3.) Loss of Appetite - Don't worry, you still crave food and other survival necessities. You simply lose the appetite to expand through the universe. Loss of Ambition, as the form would say.
4.) Improved Acting Skills - You'll eventually learn to manipulate the stringy muscles in your face to pull up the corners of your lips when you feel you are expected to. Not all side effects are bad.


I am not one of those darkly dressing teenagers that complains with visible angst about being misunderstood. But I do have the hair for it.

I am not suicidal. Maybe I would be, but I seem to have been struck particularly hard by Side Effect #3.

But at first mention of depression you can see their faces squirm and contort to resemble a clumsy soldier tap-dancing through a minefield, while simultaneously conducting open-heart surgery on himself.

5.) Exaggeration.

This poem is not meant to sadden, to depress. It is simply for the public awareness of 3rd stage loneliness. If you know someone suffering from this disease, please call this hotline:

1-800-462-5663
(1-800-IMA-LONE)


The more you know...

Frenchie. there's a lot that i'll probably never tell you. either in fear that it will drive you away, in spite of the numerous times that you've told me you won't leave or run because the chance of something scaring you off is slim. or simply because it slips my mind. trauma, am i right? you say a lot, and i mean this in the best way.  you can talk, and you can tell me as many things as you want, and i'll never properly believe them because i've learned that words are ****. then again all we have are words, smiles, and through-the-phone, air-blown, crush-induced kisses that bring back memories, and yet rewrites them as something entirely new and, of course, much much better. something ours. i hope it's never given to another person, this sweet kiss of life, the final kiss of death, an angel brings me to heaven, enter whatever aesthetically pleasing line you want but it will never be as good as, "and so the lion fell for the lamb." haha. it's 11:16 pm, August 9th. and i'm laying in bed. for reasons i'll try to explain in a second, i'm tearing up, as i have been for a while. i think i first started tearing up the first time we called, which isn't so much a bad thing as it is a surprising thing. because it was a sad happy cry. it's similar to breaking a piece of jewelry that you really enjoyed, but then buying something much better. you loved that plastic, feeble, oversized, first love bracelet, but now you have a moonstone or (enter favorite gem) filled, perfectly fitted, wifey-made promise ring. you'll keep the bracelet somewhere, forget about it, find it again, and again, and again. discovering it under blankets, and pillows, and promises that we've tossed around ourselves. it will peek from inside my black coffee, in the dirt i praise, in the trees, in the music we'll listen to together. in the color brown, Frenchie, that's where you'll see, i'll see, we will see, that piece of plastic. dark brown, the colors of his eyes. my favorite color for the longest time. i don't want it to mean him, so it doesn't. but that's where it comes from. i'll find it, we'll find it, up until you get tired of seeing it, of seeing me see it, and take my hand, begging to throw it out. but, my to be discovered favorite gem filled, wifey-made perfectly fitted promise ring, it might take a while, with me quietly begging for your help, to get rid of him. not because i want to wear it, but because i horde emotions the way i horde stuffed animals. it's a labrinth to find the bracelet, we have no map and somehow we have to get from this forever smile to the closed-off corners of my mind, where even i, as it's supposed owner, struggle to collect, and comprehend, and conquer my horrid thoughts. but Frenchie, we laughed. and it was the first time in so long that i've been able to laugh with someone like that, and not worry, and not expect, and not be afraid. except, since we're here it's already obvious, that ended up making me afraid anyways. Random, but there's this song in my head right now. "make me behave like an animal." Sir Chloe's Animal, everything by Sir Chloe is absolutely incredible. but, let's continue. you may not believe me when i say this, but i'm scared out of my mind so entirely that every second between our conversations is an hour added to my inevitable future breakdown. how weak, and pathetic, and disgusting, i know. i have told you so many times that i can't like people, that it's so hard for me to connect to someone new, and yet it's day three and i'm imagining that i'll be happy if only you'd hold me, as if that's what you want to do, as if that will heal me, as if that should happen. as if i'm taking things slow the way i want to, and yet don't want to. if i could properly explain in words, i'd tell you with lengthy descriptions, both vastly and vaguely, calmly and excitedly, slowly and quickly covering deep hidden and obvious and in-between meaning, proving how desperately i want to be with you, be yours and you be mine, and how, ****, how i hope you don't **** me up. because all i can think when we talk is "****." you breathe, and, between each of your heartbeats, i figure out that i like you more, and more, and ****! the way your face looks so angelic when you sleep makes me just think "god, she's going to really hurt me. she's gonna **** me up, and chances are i'll thank her for it." to be hurt by you? that would be a blessing, and yet i'm shaking. what a interesting concept. i'm sure this is proof that i'm ****** up already. i keep bringing up the time. three days, Frenchie. Three. and that's it. that is literally it. that's all we've been. so explain, please, why the first few words you said had me ranting to my friends. please, tell me, how within a day, everytime your name popped up on my screen i would giggle like a child. please, explain to me, why everytime i talk about you, my cheeks hurt so much from smiling. i'm crazy, absolutely crazy, and i know my friends have to be thinking so too, because it's been. three. *******. days. but why? as in, why is that so bad? three days, what's so wrong with that? why does liking someone have to have a time? let me explain something that i've been thinking about. two years, on and off, thirteen breakups. that was Justin and I. roughly six months after the final one, i met you. "cause everytime you hurt me, the less that i cry." i'm way too good at goodbye's. i never particularly got that song the way i do now. had we stayed apart the first to the maybe fifth time we broke up, i would have took longer to heal. but it was time thirteen, so it was all expected, hurtful of course, but expected and so, it was almost boring. almost. it would have been if it didn't rip my heart out. i rebounded. hard. many times. many people. zero regrets. but this connection to you, sometimes i catch myself fearing i'm picking up where Justin and I left off. which, yes, is really toxic. but then i remind myself, this is how a good portion of relationships start. if i like you, i'll act like it. if i want to be with you, regardless if we just met, i should act like that. right? right, that's what normal people do. but we already explained i'm not normal. i'm ****** up, and i overthink. i'm ******* up. so ******* up that i can't hold eyecontact with you because i was "trained" not to, because i'm not used to, because it makes me nervous, because i hate the way my eyes look and i believe that you shouldn't have to look at something so disgusting. god here we go, i'm talking about him again. blaming him with my "trained not to" rather than blaming myself for letting it  happen. i let myself feel like that, i let myself bow down. that's on me, that was my weakness. admittedly so, yes. i'm scared of looking in your eyes. maybe out of submission. or maybe i'm afraid of seeing what i once saw in his. but truth be told, i think i'm scared of looking into anyone's. maybe i'm once again overthinking things and it's just regular anxiety. "regular anxiety," what an interesting statement that even I can't properly explain. and by the way, i never want to compare you to him, not even the good things. (just realized this entire thing is bipolar and has been written and rewritten to a point where the overdramatic stuff became simple conversation). but why not the good things? because i don't want you to be like him in any way, and i don't want to be with someone like him again. i realize that i will eventually, and might have already without properly realizing it, compared you to him. but, as i like to say, if i don't look at it, it isn't there. so we're not going to pay this any mind. there's so many things that i can say behind all of  this but my mind is going too fast, and it also just realized that most of this is literally so ******* stupid that i should shut up about, i was truly overreacting. maybe if i remember, i'll retype this until it sounds less crazy and obsessive. good thing i edit before i show, so yes i was planning on showing someone. but probably not a lot. only a few trusted people. but now that i read and reread i might just keep this to myself. not that it will matter if i explain, seeing as i might never show this to you, but it's nice to give this to a ghost of you, although it leaves my imagination running wild trying to figure out how you would respond. everytime i type something i want to rewrite it, and i have been rewriting it by the way, because there's no way in hell this captures a fraction of a fraction of the surface of how i'm hurting, even though i've been typing for almost two hours trying to find better words and longer sentences. this all sounds so meek and weak and pathetic in comparrison to the metaphoric erruptions and hurricanes and other natural disasters. haha. this doesn't feel natural. it's like i'm begging for attention, or manipulating you more. fun fact, he called me overdramatic, and manipulative, and tons of other things i won't get into, so i often use the words on myself. because it was and is accurate. i keep making myself out to be a victim and he said i always did that too, that i always victimized myself. he said it a lot. let me explain: i panic so much, i get sad over the smallest things. for example, he was mourning over the death of his mother and started yelling at me and wouldn't tell me that he loved me back, which i shouldn't have gotten mad over but i did. he told me "jesus, i can't even ******* miss my mom without having to make sure you're not having one of your episodes." of course i apologized, and tried to fix my issues myself when he got tired of me or in general and hung up. literally, believe me. i'm so ******* sensitive and it's annoying and i'm annoying, i'll never understand how i got the amazing friends that i do. Apollo knows that i don't deserve them. and please ******* please, i just want to stop crying because it hurts so bad. but after writing it down i feel so much  better. i stopped crying, this is part of my editting by the way, and i feel much better writing to you, ghost Frenchie. but really. it. hurts. so. bad. so bad to a point where my heart seemingly stops, i'm left breathless and NOT in the best of ways. and then said heart explodes. over. and over. and over. in milliseconds, again and again and again, all while the usual me laughs and tries to make my eyes look lively, you might get this but there's so many hours of the day where i hope no one can see the pain i'm in. because i literally have zero ******* clue how to explain the way that i feel. eeehhhh, how edgy. i'm sooooo misunderstood haha. when it hurts, my jaw clenches, i'm no longer in control of my breathing, my head hurts, my brain becomes helium and all i can think is "fuuuuuuck." but ****, as well, because. "i don't wanna be your friend, i wanna kiss your lips." i just want to touch you, and lay on top of you, legs around your waist, snuggled into your neck, breathing in your scent and finding shelter in it, listening to you sing whatever song you put in the background, the smell of **** and cigarettes and us. and beg you please, between each kiss, each time my hand finds yours. please, promise ring, please, please. please. learn how to love me. love me, please. heal me. please fix me. please make me okay. because i'm not. and i haven't been. and i don't know if i ever will and, ****, i swear i'm calm now. but knowing that, knowing that i will never be okay? that hurts worse. because it's proof that i'm aware i'm nowhere near good enough for you. i added on to Justin's issues. I don't want to add on to yours. "But J, remember, I told you that making sure you're okay is giving me something to take off of my life." but you need to focus on you, i can't just take all of your attention. i know that seems like i'm wanting you to tell me "i want you to have it," but that is literally the way i feel, please don't tell me that. i want you to drink water, and eat, and call me. god i feel awful for not calling you today, holy absolute wow. Frenchie, you're hurting on your own without my added everything. You deal with so much, you've dealt with so much, from your birth to the girls and boys of your past, and **** it. ****. we're talking and i should make the most of it, but i really just want to make you okay. i lied to you, y'know. you asked me about my best quality. i told you that i gave good advice, but truth is i probably don't. i think that my best quality is that i make jokes out of everything, i try to make people laugh all the time. that's not always a good thing. last time i texted, i said something about holding you and giving you a watermelon to make you happy. that might have ****** you off. truth is, i doubt there's something only seen as good in me. there's always a second face to everything that i am, i'm a two faced, four faced- no no. twenty faced *****, and not even like a bad ***** i mean like. little ***** baby type faces. and i know for a **** fact that your life has been worse than mine, Frenchie, my issues are literally nothing compared to yours. so, once again, i can't let you add my issues to your own, and yet here i am pouring myself out and begging ghost you to fix me. i mean what you don't read can't hurt you, but something tells me that i want to give it to you. everytime i think about showing you this, i cringe. because jesus three days, man, and i'm writing this absolute *******? and yet i can't just stop. i can't just leave. i'm too selfish for either of those. i have **** to say, and call it growth but i'm gonna ******' say it! y'know? someone's gonna read it eventually. half of me hopes that they send it to you without my permission, but the fact that i'm writing this out proves that it's more than half of me that hopes. and yet the thought of you reading this makes me wanna swallow rat poison. i can't just let you free, y'know? give you the chance to run without wanting to grab you by your legs, pull you back, breakdown and just ******' scream that you're mine, MINE MINE MINE, until you feel sorry for my hoarse voice from crying, scared because now you know, now you ******' know, Frenchie. the opening to run, the ability, it's here, it always has been. but you won't take it, you won't, will you? will you? no, i don't think so. because you've been through worse, because you want to convince me i'm not as bad as i make myself out to be, because you're not afraid, because "it takes a lot more than this" to scare you. don't you see? i'm manipulating you into liking me, Frenchie, i am. i know what to say, how to say it, i read people, i get under their skin, and then i play victim when they flee my spiders web. and i love it and hate myself, haha! ******* ****, please, ****, oh, please, like me. oh, Artemis. please. i want to try, and i will, but, seriously, don't. do not trust me. don't love me. don't like me. run. please. please. you shouldn't, i'm not good, i'm really not. and no one gets that. i'm the Jerry of the world, people are attracted because they feel sorry for me. that's my magnet's secret. pity. **** it. listen, i'm proud and upset at the fact that i'm doing this to you. i've admitted it, dearest Ghost Frenchie, and yet continue. because in the ways that i want to show you my crazy, use it as a "please help me" and keep you here, i do actually want to try for you. read that as many times as you want, I want this. I want to try, but this is my warning that maybe no one will read. this is an entire universe of new things and old things i haven't or thought i couldn't feel. i've thought about it, and i've almost done it, but i can't block you, save you, and leave it at that. because i actually want to try and be good enough. i had cried to my friends saying that you would hurt me, but i wonder if i'd end up being like your exes and just be more proof that you don't need that this world is ****** up. oh wow, there i go again with my manipulation. just. ****. i want to be with you, even though i don't deserve it, even though i have no right to, even though i know that you, lovely butterfly, have a life ahead of you. though small, i'm still a spider. this has been on my mind for so many hours that i've spent typing this, but i should have said so much more to you when you told me that you were having a bad night. you admitted that you were too stressed to even eat and that you didn't want to take it out on me, calling wouldn't be a good idea because you didn't want to snap at me. can i please just say that, good Aphrodite, the fact that you're humane enough to say that, to warn me, means so much. you don't want to take it out on me, you didn't know for sure if it would happen but you wouldn't even let it happen because? ****, because you're, ****,  you're a good person. you care about me already, and that's so ******* heartbreaking and heartlifting at the same time because, AH! ****, she LIKES me? likes, me? likes. me. Frenchie. likes. J? and at the same time. why? Frenchie seriously likes J? Haven't they warned her? i almost didn't text you, i almost just left you on open, just so you could come to me when you wanted to. i don't know why, but i responded. sort of like a puppy, y'know, that's just been yelled at. or, rather since you have cats, a kitten literally just purring and rubbing themselves along you even though they clawed your wall and you screamed. i was hesitant, but i knew that you'd try to be nice, i think? truly, i don't know my reasoning behind that, but you responded anyways. and maybe i'm wrong, but you sounded so soft and it made me smile. because you were trying, and it's dumb that i have to say that but, relationship wise, it's been so long since anyone has TRIED. when you leave me on opened or when you don't respond, my heart drops. which isn't to make you feel bad, because i know you're either frustrated, or busy, or it's a habit, but it scares me. because, again, three days??? and yet you leaving for a little just freaks me out. also, allow me to admit this. while we called, i have reasons for why i'd wake up everytime you moved. i was scared that i'd wake up and you'd be gone. not to be creepy, this is supposed to be romantic, but at least twice i remember waking up, and you were asleep, and i looked at you. god, you're literally so beautiful, Frenchie. you're literally so unbelievably gorgeous that the sun pales in comparison to your radiance. can i say more depressing, Justin related things? i shouldn't, because him being mentioned is literally making me look worse, but i never really feel up to talking about it with anyone besides, well, you. talking about exes with you, it's just, comforting. you telling me you were having a bad night gave me these wretched flashbacks and- oh, ****! this isn't meaning never tell me, like, please, please, always tell me, just, uh, let me explain cause, uh, ****, oh, Hades, it hurts. it's dreadful, really. he, uh,  he would get upset about something, or really anything that he could think of, and uhm. just, haha, stop talking. for uh, for literal hours.. and hours. and hours. out of nowhere. i wouldn't know why, so i'd blame myself and then i'd spam him, thinking that would make him want to answer and begin my whole, "please, don't leave, please, Justin, please, i'm sorry, i love you, don't leave, you're supposed to be my daddy, please, you're supposed to be mine," skit. i mean, see? proof. he couldn't deal with his own issues because i needed attention and reassurance. all. the. ******. time. i won't give excuses, he really just needed space. but space felt like a break, which sometimes he made for. but, right, for me, Justin was famous for his "just leave me alone's" and then the "i don't want this anymore" or "i'm really tired of you" haha. or it was the whole, "you're just not what i need in my life." or i mean "there's someone else" or, of course, haha, the, uh, last one, my personal favorite "we're just not compatible." like, oh, really? i mean, yesterday you hit me and told me that i was a ****, like? we're not? we? we aren't? compatible? wow, like, really? so, no future together? like, uh, oh! c'mon Mistah J!  ouch that hurt to say, but please laugh because haha, TRAUMA, am I right? but, wait? does that count as trauma? hm, i mean some of it was traumatic, right? wait hang on, yes. wait. being beat- ? well, not beat! i mean, like, i could still, y'know, move-? jesus **** what is wrong with me. i don't want to call it traumatic cause victimizing. haha, ****- but uh anyway. i'd be left trying to off myself in some petty way. because i felt like if he couldn't love me, if he, Justin Ryder, the long-legged **** who knew me better than anyone, couldn't love me, honestly, who would? "But, J like. you have friends!" yeah, i do, and i did then, too. but these lovely, amazing friends didn't come to mind the way they sometimes do now. sometimes. i mean, why do i feel like it has to be romantic for "i love you" to count. i say "i love you" to my friends all the time, honestly, because they need to hear it and i've lost so many people without telling them, y'know? but anyhow, right, no one came to mind. just him, and his lack of love for me. i mean, he was God. he was MY God. he was my world, everything, my reason to breathe, the reason i existed. i loved him. more than i've ever loved someone in my entire life. and, i mean, that's why i let him come back so many times, with open arms and apologies from me that should have slithered from his own serpent lips, the reptile. they rained from mine, eagerly, harshly, on repeat, no questions asked. he hit me, i apologized. he made a mistake, i said "i'll never do it again." i blamed myself for a lot of things that he did to me, gave excuses for him, too. y'know, the cliche "you don't know him like i do." god, i mean, i was right about that. no one knows Justin Ryder the way that i do. i hope no one ever does. Frenchie, dearest promise ring i keep referring to for poetic purposes, you asked me if i was over him. i am. i don't want him back. but if he ever texted or called, i'd break down, lose myself, hysterical hurricane J. not because i miss him, just because of the **** that i went through with him, Frenchie. it's small, y'know, compared to what others have went through. but it really, i mean, REALLY, made a huge impression. i don't want him. i keep saying that, everytime i do it becomes less believable but please understand that it isn't him, it's what he did. but **** there i go putting the blame on him again. Frenchie, are you over her? see, the fact that someone came to your mind means that sometimes you question it. unless you really just thought to yourself, "who, am i over who J?" maybe i'll never know. but you should know this. desperately, quite desperately, i want to tell you that your smile makes me feel safe. and i haven't been able to feel so safe from such a small thing in months, almost a year. because how could i trust his smile, y'know? even before the very end, in the middle, in the first time, how could i ever trust his soul-stealing smile? especially when i saw him making it at whatever girl he chose next or, funny thing, even during our time together. i want to explain to you, Frenchie, that i know you need space, and that, even though i realize that, i'm so terrified of ******* up the way i did with him. when i'm upset, i need to be smothered. not everyone is like that, i have to cope with it. haha, wow what a *****, i have to cope with your ways of coping, god i annoy myself. but. regardless of the amount of friends i have who assure me that, "J it wasn't your fault, Justin was the issue, J you weren't the toxic one" i can't believe it. i refuse to think that it was just him. another lyric so a song i enjoy "it takes two to toxic," i keep thinking of songs, but i think you understand that, too, my adhd love. i should have, could have, done better as a person for him. not saying that i regret not, but the fact that i could and i didn't? maybe i should have shut up, maybe i should have said more. everything was beyond the severity of walking on eggshells, which he said often that he had to do around me because, i mean, i've explained that. it's just more proof, you see, that i was too sensitive, proof that i should have been tougher, said less, comforted more. but didn't he know how he made me feel? that i was trying, truly trying my hardest? didn't he know that i loved him so entirely that i gave up my best friends so he'd look at me. didn't he know? didn't he? honestly, how could he have not. i worshipped the literal ground he walked on, didn't i? did i? or am i exaggerating again? should i have ran? yes, no. yes. maybe, or maybe he should have? i don't know. **** me, this? this really, this isn't about him. but it is. because he made my head all ******, the time with him anyways, cause once again it was me, too, and everything is like, oh, ****, a minefield or something. and i don't want you to think that i'm not over him. because i am. him, as himself, i'm over. but the way he made me feel, the experience, the way he changed me? i don't know. did i change for the better or the worst? i wish you could have known me before, maybe you would be able to tell me if the me that i am that now is better. but maybe if i knew you before, my time with him never would have happened. but i hate myself for it. "it" as in everything from the time i got with him to now, every word i've now spent almost three hours revising and rewritting, i hate myself for. that's what's ******, i don't even hate him for it or this, i literally just hate myself. i sound like such a ******* idiot for all of this,  but i'm not, Frenchie. i'm not. well, hang on, i mean i am. i'm a literal ******* *******. haha. but this is how i'm trying to explain to you, and if you ever read this maybe you'll get it. but, i want to make you happy. me. i want to make you smile more and laugh like you did, like WE did. and i know that i got attached so ****** quickly so my whole "it's hard to love people" thing seems fake. but it isn't. i can't. i literally can't tell you how hard it is. and this right here, this is hard, too. because i'm fighting with the "oh, J!! this is different" side of me and the "**** her, *******, everyone is the same" side. i'm pretty sure i told you this, but i broke up with my last girlfriend because she actually gave a **** about me. and it made me want to puke. when i did, when i left, she told me that she was in love with me. and i ran to the bathroom. and proceeded to cry, getting rid of my lunch and dinner, and almost just ended it right there because i thought, "****. if someone can love me, can say those three sacred words, to me? TO ME? i must be hiding so much from them." i just want to scream. yknow? to the world, to my friends, my family, you, that "i'm ****** UP IM ****** UP IM ****** UP PLEASE LEAVE" but "oh, gods, don't leave." please, ******* ****, if you're not ready, if you don't want me, please, tell me. if i'm too much, especially after all of this, holy ******* ****, please, tell me. because i can't take it. i can't. tell me now, these three days in where i'm confessing i want to be with you, that you can't. because i wouldn't be able to handle it much longer than from here. oh, **** yeah, it's going to hurt so much. i kept saying that i didn't want to like you. but everything draws me in, dearest Edward, and it ******* *****. it. *****. because i'm beyond aware of possibilities of the failure. and, yet, i couldn't be happier. in the middle of my frequent breakdowns, i'm so entirely full of joy. my mother tells me that i'm glowing from how entirely, like, happy i am. you're miles away, Frenchie, and yet you make me happier than i've been in a long, long, LONG time, dancing and singing around my room like an absolute idiot because i'm thinking, y'know, MAYBE. MAYBE THIS IS THE ONE. "J MAYBE YOU CAN BE LOVED, AGAIN. MAYBE SHE'LL LOVE YOU, MAYBE YOU AREN'T AS BAD AS YOU MAKE YOURSELF OUT TO BE." and everything looks so ******* amazing with you in the picture. and, still, i always ask myself, is this too fast? am i still not ready, still taking things too fast, should i shut up, am i hiding too much, doesn't she get my bipolarness and bpd? you do right, you do? oh ******* ****- **** all that, those last few questions are entire other things, and it's now 2:07 in the morning and i'm ******' done. the end done, I won't write anything else. except this. Frenchie, I know you love being called that, but there's something so entirely personal about being called by your name. sometimes I catch myself slipping on typing. maybe it was a mistake to tell me your real name.
frenchie.
sydney
a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet

remember the melding
of gilmore and bing
the springfield gates
and desmond ring

remember the trojans
and fools in the pack
sea fair jeans
and corkscrew flat

remember the cabin
and *****’s garage
the gary point dunes
and moncton mirage

remember the warehouse
the water logged seats
tin foil caps
and simple retreats

remember the cave
and turn on the cut
emery’s mini
and hamilton’s hut

remember the burger
and shake in the air
bubs in the back
with little despair

remember the valley
and 66 ford
burgundy lips
and samworth’s chord

remember the plainsman
a 7 inch log
the ***** old frenchmen
and bore-*** hog

remember the javelin
and mushay’s wheels
beaumont’s baggie
and jennifer beals

remember tough charlie
tossing brad rand
the belyae roundhouse
and beer in the sand

remember park polo
and scaling of firs
sleeping in rafters
at 8 bucks per

remember the mayflower
and brothers von grant
the max air follies
and chivalrous rant

remember the flipper
the floyd and the clap
banana boat sunday
and pemberton trap

remember the purples
the rasp in the street
the oliver jokers
and shady retreat

remember the gators
and brick house café
a flash in the pan
and crib cult stay

remember the church
and talbs on the bridge
goofy’s memoirs
and cypress ridge

remember smaldino
whom perry cut short
***** and a ****
and moria’s port

remember the zuker
and gilligan’s isle
the pep chew bust
and 8 tooth smile

remember the action
at blundell and one
the nauseous fumes
and pump house run

remember the canyon
and rock on the cliff
a tourniquet bind
that kept us adrift

remember lake skaha
and jvc tunes
the j bain query
and peach fest goons

remember the irons
and broad entry beads
the alexander boys
we must pay heed

remember the gates
the 12 hole stare
the hospital bed
and ky affair

remember the farmhouse
an open air deck
the john deere tractor
and cowboy neck

remember the wheat field
and jimmy crack corn
the burlington plaza
and fraser street ****

remember the pincers
and wee ***** white
the concubine fractures
and strong overbite

remember the carving
portrayed at the scene
the billy goat battles
a young man’s dream

remember lord brezhnev
and moby the ****
the second beach sun
and paper bag trick

remember the screening
the silver light show
banshee boots
and phipps’s throw

remember the epic
and baby oil block
trash can brassieres
and window rock

remember the law
jack rabbit in may
an 8 track mix
on alpine way

remember the dunes
a pig on the spit
the underarm hair
and corn bull-****

remember old frankie
and bursey head post
the koa leaves
and tiki shore host

remember b taupin
the lyrics he left
cold muddy waters
an odd treble clef

remember street regent
the trips in the night
the trailer park cap
and lightheart fight

remember kits causeway
mortimer and beaks
jk's cabin
and muscle bound freaks

remember glen cheesy
and billy the less
the frozen puke patties
and borkum mess

remember the catfish
and pickerel rock
the emerald meadows
and rainbow dock

remember port dover
with fish on a stick
wayne in a bunker
holding his ****

remember the ironside
limes in a tree
the usc campus
came with a fee

remember the duster
an arrow in heart
the frog man bug
that would not start

remember the zimmer
the ram air hood
a family wagon
with panels of wood

remember peace portal
the 33 back
the power built drive
and dangerous tack

remember the reds
the blues and the greens
the furry point island
and country book scene

remember the springs
and i 95
a lone state trooper
with blood in his eye

remember may’s cabin
and stuff in between
the frame and the picture
and morning snow scene

remember the boss
with a 302 scoop
the diamond tuft console
and back seat coupe

remember ioco
the **** and the spit
the skid road race
and hurst floor kit

remember the shore
and tents in the park
a campfire roast
and kerosene bark

remember the hooger’s
kit kat club
the colvin’s and setter’s
a man called bub

remember the creature
with silk strand hair
and afternoon flask
with little despair

remember quilchena
and robbie the mac
the rice stead box
and tap on the back

remember miss williams
a pilgrim’s salute
the fairmont sister
with all of her loot

remember port ludlow
a scotman on dock
the everett street bridge
and single leg sock

remember the masters
and all of the roar
the faldo follies
at norman’s door

remember jeff samson
tied in a tree
the robertson fastback
with white leather seats

remember the balance
and pulling of 4's
the moncton warehouse
and hollywood ******

remember the hospice
with carter in wear
the power of gospel
and magic in prayer

remember the mini
counting the crows
aberdeen villa
where all of it grows

remember the ballroom
the battle of bands
the buccaneer bikers
and front row stands

remember the steely
and 50 odd pulls
the crook in the cranny
and pilsner bulls

remember the mustang
tb paul
the ****** shack sergeant
was missing a ball

remember dear kevin
head first in the pool
a sheik in a minefield
and ****** gas fool

remember the rumble
and bats in the night
an old lady screaming
to a young man’s delight

remember cliff olsen
that sick little ****
who will be in shackles
on lucifer’s truck

remember the bumpers
and cutting in line
the mice on the ****
and bo in the pine

remember the law
stabbing the corn
a bucket of ammo
and mekong horn

remember s boras
the piercing of yes
the color line paper
sikosie at rest

remember the pinto
and seven road plants
mother’s fine pizza
a trial lawyer’s rant

remember the kennedys
with ***** painted black
a pond in the shadows
where monty looked back

remember von husen
the sea to sky test
a farm hands daughter
was one of the best

remember mr pither
and mao sae tung
helena the cougar
and egg foo young

remember the cinder
and frances road bake
***** the whitehead
would make no mistake

remember the quan
and mental mix
the java hut sister
with pixy sticks

remember j rosie
banging his head
in a moment of dr
we thought he was dead

remember the hammer
discussions caught short
siddrich and roger
and monty’s abort

remember 6 nations
and KOA
the pool hall fight
when everyone stayed

remember the skinners
and tommy the med
the lost tough china
and bubs in the shed

remember the doobies
zeppelin and cars
floyd and the *****
and shankar’s sitar

remember old dustys
the blue and red chair
the cypress hill caves
and mullet cut hair

remember the promise
and vows that we made
on the 2 road stairs
in goodman’s brigade

remember those moments
and handle with care
for the garamond stamp
will always be there…

Sometimes it feels like you're walking around on tiptoe as not to disturb the glass beneath your feet
Broken edges, sharp shards of memories and the life that once was
Shoes mask the familiar feel of the ground, confuse your feet, and throw them off path
Barefoot and
Not so free
Hobble around, try to regain your balance whilst staying upright
Don't look down, feel around for the soft areas
A blind man, navigating through a minefield
What are the chances of getting through safely?
When it rains more glass you grab at your threadbare sweatshirt that is trying so hard to protect you
Your innocent, now scarred white flesh glistens against the storm of needles that ***** your skin
At what point do you decide to stop caring?
At what point do you take off the jacket that's not been doing much for you anyways and just give yourself to the battle?
Sacrificial living or
Sacrificial dying
Sacrificial being
At what point do you blow up?
I'm trying to understand this way of walking
But I stomp around on heavy feet
My feet are calloused and sore
I'm barefoot and free
I've blown off my limbs but what's a little blood to stop the war?
My scars have faded
I gave myself to the storm
Yet I'm still breathing
I've not died though I've walked many a mile on
Tiptoe back when I thought it was wise
To walk on shattered glass

and what lucie is what you get
or so a new voice, charmingly said
Puns profoundly... playful direct
pull me toward this new subject

less than a year is all I've got,
to see from such new eyes
absorbing all which might be taught
when my memory's a minefield...

I get so far ahead of myself
I wonder why I write
without the longing, without the lost,
how can we know how deep the cost?
to feel or not- Its a choice now-

& it's as it's always been
Ours to give,
and to receive.

A sea of slime and sludge
crawls into our boots
and slithers into our socks
gangrene swarms at our feet

Hands frigid and frostbitten
bodies burred beneath the earth
worms and maggots feast upon rotten flesh

The wounded weep,
bloodshot eyes stare at the darkness of the sky
the cannons crash and the bullets rain
as lighting and thunder rip through the sky

The rats scurry out of their burrows
and feast upon our cheese and bread
our food runs scarce

Blood dries on the bayonets
the soil is our graveyard....

“It’s fraught,” he said.
BOOM! Wrong pronoun
They would disapprove

“We should…”
BOOM! Not us…
BOOM! Not me!

They them us
He she we
I myself me

Redefined reassign
People can change
In an instant or a lifetime

Language evolves
Evolution is slow
Give it time to grow

The clouds hid the red sky that day
Amid the wind and rain
No red sky meant no sailors warning
The waves broke high and hard
They passed the breakers and the kegs
They missed the red sky morning

The ships out on the water
From the shore to the Grand Banks
Were helpless in the coming storm
No choice to turn and run
The best bet was stay put
There was no port to get warm

The skies were filled with nothingness
the clouds like a sharks eye
Shades of black were all they saw
The icy waves of winter
Broke the calm of the early morn
For red sky in the morning is an unwritten sailors law

The Captain closed the bar down
On the Digby ferry crossing
The doors were being opened by each wave
They couldn't see the white caps
Only sky and see was all
And the souls he had to save

There were fifteen boats in transit
When the storm came bearing down
Most were halfway home or so
Now they all were stranded
In the journey between heaven and hell
Which direction they were headed only God would know

Turn sideways and you'd flip it
Just sit still and you were dead
You had to ride the water hellish ride
Hatches all were battened
Windows sealed and doors shut tight
Sailors tried to stay inside

Water spouts were forming
Off the stern and then the port
Navigate the safest spot and keep low
The door to Davy Jones' locker
Was opened and ready to accept
Any boat who made the choice to venture down below

On shore the coast guard were all scrambled
Planes were sent out just in case
More to recover than to save
Families awaited word by radio
The lines from all the ships were down
Some lost to a watery grave

Each year the ocean opens up
Mother Nature takes some back
It's just the circle of life at sea
Prayers are said at the Mariners Hall
Bells are rung for the dead
The sailors soul belongs to the water and it never can be free

Are you one that lives on water?
You know one day your luck will end
You knew this fact from the start
Sailors know the sea's a minefield
It's a war with God each day
You have to fight with all your heart

"Walk my eggshells?" I drool like a dog,
something you're eager to **** with
and dispose of.
I should walk your eggshells
like a minefield in first
world countries?
Mold on your fruits of love or labor,
yet I eat like ******* swine,
aftermath; no hope or sense of self,
**** my sense of identity senseless,
since September still yet towards
another fake continent or mass
of fictional places.
Stuffed back into a box and strangled,
slept next to the coffin he was buried in.
Didn't find it poignant until eight
weeks later washing dishes
for a Latverian dictator.
Google took the teeth out of the search,
and the hand that fed was gummed.
You love the rain till you're stuck in it.
You love escape till you have no home.
You love what you can abuse
and still take home;
Violet on your skin,
Violet on my mind,
Violet for a dream,
Violet for a name,
Violet in my blood,
Violet on my toes,
Violet as a drug,
Violet as an insect
you eat in private,
Violet as violet as violet
as a tautology,
or addictive prescription.
Once I had the leash on you,
now the sores have come back,
my knees and palms make
sick ******* with earth
I cough.

Burning books and crumbling buildings

The dead sit in piles.....

flesh, rotting from the bone
blood leaks from open skulls
as bullets enter the brain

The dead sit in piles....

Smoke and smog clog the lungs
they blind the eyes, and burn the nose

Locomotives, filled to the brim
with broken bones and blink eyes

The frigid shower-heads spit out smoke
naked bodies collapse on the cold, concrete tiles
The skies rain bone and ash

The dead sit in piles....