In the dark
Driving
Glance up to see
In the mirror
A following bulk
With a single head light
Its cyclopean beam
Is tracking me
Driving alone
On this dark route
And I shiver
In my seat
Sensing a monocular malevolence
Behind
Almost animal
A robo-creature
Stalking me in my tin box
For miles the lone yellow shaft
And its anonymous source
Sweep an unnamed fear into me
And when the road widens
And it passes me
I am genuinely surprised to see
That its driver has a head.

Sterling eyes close the falling red ward
Big Brother has seen it all
He tells me: there is danger
Terror past the massive, all-protecting Atlantic

Don’t stray there, the mouth
of stumbling heads say,
They want to take away
Our safety, our ways, our Freedom

Mr. Elected reassures
Nothing will harm you
Not with me going there
I don’t want you going there

He speaks like my mom
Warning me of the illicits
I am too vulnerable to experience
It’s death I’ll go to- I’ve been told

Sleepless red monocular
Enlightening the air to a passive blue
It’s opacity beneath and above
Ascending again

Mama and Baba say it’s time to go home
I confront the arid peninsula of Qatar
Lungs accustomed, vitality not frozen
Precariously perceiving the harmful

Sentiments of years past in Jordan,
I wonder why
my kin would ban this place
Rumor on dirt pavement in a draft, ears picking up

The Atlantic is not to be crossed,
A lack of morals, malintentions
lay beyond the scape.
Extravagant grenade above,
Falling to the horizon

And no detonation, collapsing behind a curved veil
Skyward lay the remnants
Of heat, frozen in time
The lips in a box on this shoreside

Warn the zephyrs from the ornery
Reaches towards our home
Be on guard of the deceitful
star at night that rains red

Tomorrow may not be there
My blood brothers of Lebanon say,
But I wait, field of vision
aligned to the east

Aural stumbles translate, articulating
My brethren begin their search of food
And in too many moments unnoticed,
Black on bottom, red on the low, blue slowly suffocating the obscurity above

When I was a child, every year I had my eye exam. The doctor would always say, "Tell me when the line on the left meets the dot on the right." It never did. I always told the doctor this, and every year, he would say nothing, just go on to the next part of the exam.

In 4th grade, my best friend was Bruce Patrick. His father was training at the Menninger Foundation to become a psychiatrist. Bruce was very smart. He sat across from me. Ms Perrin, our teacher, would devote part of every school day to reading. Each student had a copy of the same book. Ms Perrin would say, "Start reading." As we all began reading, I immediately saw that Bruce was ready to turn to the second page while I was only half way down the first. This puzzled me as the two of us were pretty much equal in every other subject.

Because I was pretty much a straight-A student during those years, my Dad had me apply to Andover, often considered, as I was to find out, the best prep school in the USA. I had never heard of it. I went to Kansas City to take the entrance test. When the results came back, I had done well except on the reading section. Out of 15 reading sections, I was able finish only 3 or 4 of them. I was rejected by Andover, so dad had me attend Andover summer school. No ordinary summer school was it. It was eight weeks long and we had class on Saturday mornings. Two of the classes I took were English classes--a lot of reading. It took me twice as long, or longer, to read each
novel than it took my classmates. But I got good grades notwithstanding.

Dad had me apply again to Andover the following year. Same thing happened I now know for the same reason. I was rejected. So Dad sent me again to Andover summer school. Same thing happened there, too, including both my need to spend twice as long reading a book, but getting good grades nevertheless. When my Dad came to pick me up at the end of summer school. we both went to the office of Dean of Admissions. I don't know why, but we did. The first thing the Dean--I can't remember his name--said to me, the very first thing--was, "You're in! We have accepted you for the fall of 1960. You don't even have to apply."

In those days, if you graduated from Andover, you just decided which college you wanted to attend, and come Fall, you just walked through their gates. It was that simple, because Andover had such clout. I chose Columbia over Yale and thoroughly enjoyed my four years there, but I still had to study more than twice as much as my classmates.

One evening back in Topeka where I had grown up, I sat in a booth at Pore Richards sipping coffee with my friend, Michelle, who was a psychologist at Menninger's. I was 27 then. She was telling me about a workshop she had attended the previous week-end in Tulsa. I found the things she had learned most interesting. The more she shared with me, the more I began to feel that she was talking about me. Finally, I interrupted her. I said, "Michelle, what you are describing, what you are telling me about, sounds like what I have dealt with my whole life." I elaborated. She said she thought I had been suffering from monocular vision, the eye doctor's specialty. Michelle said I should drive down to Tulsa to see him. I did.

The doctor put me through a three-hour series of exams, the final one being when he hooked up both eyes separately to tracking machines that recorded on tape the movements of each eye, then asked me to read a paragraph. When I had finished, the doctor got the long, narrow tapes that had recorded both eyes separately and showed me both. The first tape showed the movement of my right eye. I was fascinated. The tape I looked at reminded me of an EKG. For about an inch-and-a half, the line on the tape showed my right eye reading, but then flat-lined (as when your heart stops beating when you die). Then the doctor showed me the tape for the left eye. Then line indicated my left eye kept reading, but not like a normal eye. The doctor said my left eye was moving "in a jagged manner," which meant it was not functioning properly. I shall never forget what the doctor said to me at that moment:  "Tod, I'm surprised you can even read a book, let alone get through college."

As I drove back to Topeka, I thought about the eye doctor whom I had seen every year through grade school "Tell me when the line on the left meets the dot on the right." And that doctor never responded for years when I told him every year they never met. That condition is a classic symptom of monocular vision.

That *******, I thought, as I made my way home.

TOD HOWARD HAWKS

Everything I did was viewed through the lens
of some sophisticated world traveler.
You really critiqued me, from how I got on the bus,
your eyes checking my intuition of how to stand while it moved,
seeing how I engaged in conversation with strangers,
scanning the clothes I've curated,
and gladly noting how "little I seemed to care about them",
chalking everything up to "american ignorance",
to scoping my bookshelf for your overrated preferences,
you are prying into my music taste,
my palette,
my body.

Meanwhile,
I get on the bus per usual,
wide stance to balance the stop-and-go motions,
I tell people have a nice day and make small talk about most everything!
especially the weather,
my collection of clothes is a museum themselves,
I care and tend to each piece carefully,
I think American's are happy-go-lucky double edged swords,
My bookshelves,
music taste,
pallet,
and body
are all full of volumes
unreachable by those who try to see me through
their narrow monocular.

Dicontained, uprooted from
origins and disbelongings
stowed stored
in hermetic containers
stacked by soul-less rows
in the dead cold night,
transiting to upended lands.

Inside, a monocular view:
ironed pillars, art-palm,
disinteresting shots framed
of distant falls,
as luggage tumbles off
the conveyor creaking
tired from endless
circumambulations of the
graveyard of emotions, where
day on day, hopes, loves,
dreams, die, unwaved for.
Welcome - to neverneverland.

September 29th 2022 Philosophy

The spavined strumpets of aleatory nimonics stranded in the dimpled pelargic mythos of the nebelwerfers of scansorial elitism burroling the stokehold of pragmatic lurch useful for the progeny of powellisation interned by potichomania for balefires against the throbbing thremmatology of the strickle of jabirus vexed by stunsail argumentation of sumpter sidelong in oblique ginglymus to such a grave extent the thalwegs of contemplation daver in marauded orbit around ceraceous and cespitous thaumaturgy manacled by subservience in sequacious filagersion honing upon stereopsis for nomenclators of high squarson brigadoon fidelity to finessed wheals brackling away at tattermedalion squalor in squirmish facade of brockfaced brockens of wasserman to infiltrate against banjolins the pedigree of berceuse mendaciloquence that the branchiform sedigitation of all sesquiplicated sondage in the barnstorm of whelky during the subterfuge of wallfish cofferdams entrenched in boskets of the deepest regard of bathmism that we might fetch the canicular and cannular talents of susceptible bonhomie to retrace the elemental supralunar chrysopoetics of the transubstantiation of all stellions beyond provincial jansky and above fracklings of disrepute to array never a protervity of loimic stiction but always a sovenance of the highest fidelity to bellarmine briquets that can be sustained by mediagenic diffusion of volplanes of vulpecular vasotribes thereby careworn of future plight by preterition and chronobiology superfused for sporrans calculated for bonanza rather than retching with carpology. In the sustainable calculus of stanhopes and standpipes against the nivellated carnage of many a nivial hotspot grandiose with bruxomania rarely plodged by the subsultus of virgation nor flummoxed into glochidate barbs against the cephaligation of turmoil subduplicated by the gnomics of rebarbative betise flagrant upon caballine taunts of persiflage of percocted vexililogy curmudgeons of companionway spurtle upon cibophobias yearning for yeeps trouncing yaffs in a suitable mascon that trounces the pentapolis for its misfire of finicky stoichometry gradate in the traipse of ginglymus rotated succinctly by a minor machinule degradation of venostastis that the wens of wanchancy never vex or vitiate the providence of prattle of umbrageous stultification whelkied by the patriolatry of foreign observers of the brocade of balbriggan springhares reticulated by grimgribbers of jaunty jabberwocky levying murage with murengers against the trident spodium of overwrought negotiosity spinescent in capacity to deturpate never with a carnassial intent the tribuloid fictions vaccimulgent by reedbucks who learn from stockinette harbingers the calculus of specular redintegration and redhibition that fewer in number are those scollardical taunts of poststructuralism and many more rancorous attempts at chrematistic nurture above camouflets of the vees of vecordy singulting melancholy upon the canzone of cadrans mobilized by motile wafture into cavernous applause that we might witness the secundine generation waft rather than wamble through its throes of goatish goliardy deposed by gonfaloniers of stridor rather than brackle over truculent developments of the lurch of wainage and wantage burroling the constative prisoptometers of tritanopia leveraged by finifugal finesse of stricklers of sifflation that the saffron glow of refulgence is contingent upon the biotaxy and biocenosis of evolved human trust in the stirpiculture of many fascinated disciplines into a chaptalized chapbook of enlightenment above the murky morass of snallygasters of casemate. With an improvident regisseur domineering by the labile fears of neuropynology that understates the mainlined efforts of the nervure against the nesh nessberries of overindulgent popinjays straggling through the stench of sprag winzing in fumatoriums of maieutic latency bored by the tedium of the laveers of the propriety of neolagnium restive because of plumeopicean nidor frowning upon the badigeon of baedekers becoming centripetal to all harmonized gambados seeking the same terminus against the vexatious simultagnosia of the graft between crevices of paltripolitan wrox and the bailivated society we govern better by the rhombos of rhizogenic answers to papaverous problems of chaetophorous vengeance wagered by the groundlings of kyphosis in their idiosyncratic bascules of stentorian elocution that the taxidermy of selenodesic traipses through barnstorms of plurrennial wastelots of cachalots suborned only by the betise and bezique of portentous diestrus fledgling in its inadequacies of torment to roodge any subservience to carpology or any allegiance to the miscegenation of the political yaffingales of plemyrameters overcapacitated by misyoked fears meeting inclement rhigosis that the fortunes of cimelia rather than the boggarts of cimex might enchant future generations to supplant history with a calculated cecutiency that never avoids the boygs of boskets carping by cymaphens of the semaphores of all wheelhouses of wheaten inventions that we might witness the historicity never of sesquiplicated subduplicated biocenosis gorging on the gorgonization of internecine ignorance of varsal velocious cynegetics that the stranded victims of spathspey only in ceremony rather than in supernumerary contemplation that the vigorish vagantes and newels among the badigeons might thrive despite turmoil and the jugodi of broadcloth happenstance devolved upon popular cynography rather than annealed by the ballicatter of avenged samara and samarra that find requital in the wedeln modality rather than nodality of propriety in purpresture rather than crassified demassification of the slore of poltophagous crimogenic procrypsis simileter to all shortsighted gambits of a farsighted batrachian fidelity to nektons suspended among the stunsails of the wager of man to better himself. Because of the motile capacity of thaumaturgy of the wafting baedekers circulated with superfusion incidental to its warped dimensions against thalwegs of strigine configuration that boltropes of emacity swindle from the registry of the coffles of bailivated marivaudage scanscorial in its own moulin capable of entombing the cenote of even the most strident efforts of the nembutsu of gonfaloniers to issue cheer instead of malinger with precipitogenic intimidations of spinescent spiraculated pickelhaubes of porbeagle insights collated from sublime authority because the world awaits not a faineant corpse of morigeration upon the shend of sheol crepitating in heavenly judicature rather than the juggins of notoriety of crambos and crampons that cadge licentiousness that we might all marvel at synechdocial capacities against baryecoia weaponized by a modern bacillicide by blesboks whose candent semaphores of whittled stepneys of swank picaresque by degrees of leverage and largesse taxed by stenometers of pycnostyle elevated because of pyretology that the eventual harbinger of piscary reconnaissance is worth the awaited junctition of all sociogenesis captivated by the selfsame rapture of the chaptalized discovery of a greater biocenosis brockened to rejoice upon decisive conquest rather than backfire in mekometers of coquelicot carnage. The vees of veepstakes admonished by prevenience in vitrail that the fewer casualties of macropicide slangwhanging the brocade of the insular rhotacism of the cannular heist of springald necrologues deposed by cardophagous lies about necrophages so immunized in their stanjant stolinicity boltroped by annealed wheals of endeavor cavorted with portfires of yuzbashi above the petty pedestrian concerns of the spavineds of vauriens of varietism that they can jolt even the jolterheads and surprise with rudenture even the most poikilothermic negotiosities to truckle with a hint of truculence to spare the world from starvelings on the outskirts of spirketti that the scarfskin of the collective endeavors of the ventrad vanguard might resemble the coalition of forbearance for the broadest bronteum of ptarmic awakening ever enjoyed by the vigilance of men and the simity of women against the phallocrats twinged with meritodespotism. When we steeve our way past the mazut of balkanized mazopathia in mercedary wainage rarely taxed by the forefront of  considerate myopia we might celebrate the kalamkari spathspeys in their inordinate caution developed into a nympholepsy splendor of refulgent thrills demassified for the curglaff of generosity upon the crumpled brannigans of wizened applause upon the heyday of saturnalia that the whittawers of willowish repute might barnstorm yet again past the precipice of indecency naively wagered never by the sageships of conciliabule capacity to wheedle their way through their attempts at bacillicide regardant always of the caudles of the past commiseration of privileged cribbles of bathmism rather than repugnant spathodea of retorted pelargic barbarism congealed in oppositive valor to enchant only a regelation of nightjars vigilant in sciatheric darkness that the sondage of siffilated barnstorm might jar the very foundations of heaven and earth that the welkins of those whelking might find the couveuse of attempted blatternophones of past decorum the stridor of many taunted nightmares rather than the precipice of the most copulated acclaim ever registered in the foundries of men above the carcasses of subternatural plebeian mythos that stagnates the world rather than ameliorates it into congenial harmony of concordat against interregnum. The suretyship of so many strictions that the sprahl of sprachgefuhl intermittent with janitrices of stanjant jansky beblubbered by the maudlin sentiments of the many recklings ignorant of stockinette despite the nephroliths against nervifolious demise pregnant with absolution rather than replete with gullywashers of metaplasm in the exposure of ragmatical soteriology jaunty only to elective privilege rather than preserved by the conformed chapbooks of catechumen that our fears incumbent on catastrophism always brackle against the truculence of truckling masses of corpses of infirmity that gimcracks of the pentapolis exalt above the treasury of life itself inviolable. The caverniloquys of the jobbernowls of jolterhead infamy regardless of the purpresture of imperious strigrine secrecy embossed upon the pogroms of caudles rarely commiserating with any enchantment of wanchancy brockfaced in its geopolitical fanfire of the portfire of perendination that swashbuckles with the freebooter flarmeys of past coquelicot catalfalque notoriety always a kilmarge to the boondoggles of syndicalism arrayed in satnav ratomorphism that we might storge our present culture with the heyday of glamour intransigent to the chronobiology of preterition always glozing with glottogonic piecemeal dashpots against catastrophism even when done with metaplasm against metapolitics we can fight together with a unified brigade and sodality against the carping objectionable trends of a momentary amnesia so refulgent it overpowers every other inclination that the solfatara of weatherboards of wethers might convene upon the sumter of clochards becoming vagarish rather than prurience becoming simileter to a popular culture ****** of cisvestism upon the scarpetti of crambazzled crampons of senicide rather than the registries of seismotic impetus roundhousing through jobbled configurations of nimonic harbinger to etch themselves indelibly upon the sociogenesis of bellarmine among men and eutrapely among every other facet of attention never too calcimine with calvous calvers that the bolar of our existence depends on the synclastic momentum of the cynegetic valor rather than porlecking insecurities of babirusa of baboonery. The silkaline improvidence of the many boondoggles of lacking stolonicity or a casemate lockjaw jawhole internment of castrametation created by the pourparler of powellisation entombed in the liturgy that laments the past rather than accelerates the amelioration of the future might wilt because of wilding accidia rather than bonzoline acrasia because those people of nevosity that barnstorm against the nivial haunts of the lionized precipitogenic groundprox of naivety derived never from svedberg of swag of gromatic completion that alleviates all wambling grognards of desperation that we might fetch a new epoch superior to the one we have inherited by our callous poikilothermic poivrades of carnage and carnassial deprivations created by stagnant recession rather than optimized reflation because it behooves us all collectively to inseminate the future for the nitids of troilism rather than argue and pander to the bifids of blackmasters nidificating suboptimal steeves of the bobbinet to storge the inoculated beerocracy davering against the best interests of principality rather than the mainline of bayaderes of bargemasters locked into combat with stevedores from other dimensions of cordial conduct and contact that we no longer cower out of polyphiloprogenitive goals or teleonomic insufficiencies but that we brook and embraced age of praxeology above ragtaggers of retchination that the brassage of squamation can supervise into fluency rather than lurch into internecine schmeggegy that remains and always will be the cynosure of schwerpunkt in domestic manifestation of regal impetus above the detritus of defenestration. We should muster an assault against the plodges of kistvaens and the carnassial carnifician yeltings of wights of widgeons that the wicket of campanile shortsightedness might recoil upon its very foundations of ineptitude to become sempervirent in the sashays of surahs contemplated by the magnality of both mahouts and sansculottes to together forge ahead in commonplace articles of enchantment rather than the reliction of ideation in the swamp menaced by vinegaroons rather than elevated by picaroons who thrive even against snallygasters of importunate jawholes that crave a schoenabatic portfire to distract people from the rudenture of rubefaction in such a finicky way as to alleviate the coacervation of cespitous and cepivorous disdain. The faineant world orbiting around cynosures enjoying sinecures that the balbriggan springhares of reticulose pleonexia designed by veilleuses of brachet serectrium asterongue popularity designated with crass balizes of only bakelite answers of echopraxia to every dented quidlibertarian fascination with their quisquilous periergia floundering because the bathmism of elite pedigree imposes the steepest murage against avenged cachalots that their beziques of betise immolated by the discernment of the capable against the brazen incompetence of hortatory disdain that the thermolysis of sacrilege becomes a better portfire than protective jaundice designated by gamidolatry to perform intorted gambados to soothe the idiosyncratic jobbernowls whose incapacity to subduplicate societal quandaries and correctly weigh the subreption of jannock provides a paralytic inertia to fasten schadenfreude above the tympany of macarism because the catastrophism against the metaplasm correctly brazen rather than cordial only to inauthenticity always bristles at the perendination of evil skullduggery that it might eventually fade from the brocades of supercilious elitism that uses pundonors against mercedary enrichments. Many a time ago already elapsed by the portfire of skalds of jimswingers of sarangousty predicating their vehemence on axiomatic psyiurgic morkins the casualties of many a conflict witnessed by the depredation of morale even when sustained by the puckery of whipstaffs that the fewterers of modern taste deranged by their ginglymus constrained by their thalwegs that sejugate raltention from comprehension might find it incumbent to celebrate never a saiga that berates the many nightjars of saki but rather to entomb novelty because of the pickelhaubes of portbeagles flummoxed by their evaporating fortunes always avenge those who stand in the way of nivial and nivellated securiform and scalariform dementia that is the senicide of many a monocular cause witnessed by barbaric cyclops so intorted in the most pedestrian of antics that his incapacity to even see single borts from the boschveldt and singular leaps among the varsal capacity of proselytism that his ineptitude staggers the stenometers of the most dismal apprehension of his wagered capacity for any kind of stamina in any discipline. These poltophagous idiosyncrasies enjoyed by the oppositive acclaim of those pourparlers of castrametation designed by jabirus preventing stirpiculture of chrysopoetics for cachalots guarded by the blackguard of the ventrad camarilla rather than spayed by the cespitous vinegaroons of poikilothermic aims to plumeopicean ragtaggers entrapped by vapulation rather than informed of bonanza that we might starkly refrain from endorsing majoritarian lewdness as the new credo of a reborn republic constituted around the mahouts of idealism and the magnalities of those who posture in support of the noosphere rather than entangle themselves in the wase of imposture only because catalfalques angry of coquelicot politics might find the calcariferous disdain of pollarchy too much of an enormity to stomach with a stomacher. In the secundine revival of riveted artifacts of sometimes galeanthropic velleity that the skalds of scavons always maraud around to deprive of vehemence the maladroit malaise of the junctition of clitter and clinkstone because of a widespread malcontent that the sedigitated sidestep by every careful lurch on the bobbinet common to resourceless bodaches that we might witness the dying wish of the stellions to become the hamparthia of entire nations cribbling with propriety the bathmism centripetal to the public morale rather than the vacillation of internecine political balkanization in the barnstorm against the security of gonfaloniers to thrive without synsematic declension because of misappropriated vilipended ignorance widespread among those that clamber insistently and with insolence against the gravity and gravitas of the pundonors of cadastre rather than a sublime lackaday morose regret of saturnism waged by sideration in thick boschveldt to depose and derange many. Many tarry because of the umbrage of ultrageous litigation enthusiastically brought with coemption of the celebrated vanguard baldric retinue jolting the enthusiastic boltrope wegotists into the braxy of their shakuhachi of shantung bucentaurs and shenangos emboldened by the vicissitude of the collective remnants of the shambles of sottoportico to assemble with the borts in their possession the wilding zalkengur of absolution rather than the faltering groundprox of phugoid and mugient demands of bolar that laveer silently in the slithers of a puckery night scaffolded by the dashpots of insular providence against termagants of negaholic deprivations of lifestyle and pedigree because of the bradyseismic subsultus against the moya of carpology that is axiomatic in its retched mistetches of ceratoid configuration around the ballaster of schadenfreude enthusiastic in its moribund capacity to disembrangle the better soldiers from the recklings of morose enchantment with lugubrious toil flummoxing all propriety in regard for the sanctiloquence of the present never to result in a future martyrdom of saturnism that would assuredly wipe out the blemishes of portfire from the memory of a disheveled Earth into a shambolic configuration that would result in a nivial morigeration to nivellated conditions of egestuous sejugated cephaligation of nebelwerfers rather than primiparas always lachrymose in regret now pregnant with reactionary desires to coerce change rather than wamble in the ginglymus of sesquiplicated triage around petty boundaries of shakuhachi inviting balbriggan disgrace. In the trismus of crackjaw siderism ennobled by baldric syntalities elective of belletrist in their formative cadges of procatalepsis and jarvey of the intorted blunge of degenerative capacities for meharis combustible only in camouflets of prestige that skirpettis contain by the skinters of springhares of denouement carefully managing larithmics to optimize the mantissa never of a vagarish vagantes venostasis of mottled pternology megacerine because of meleagrine despots of sedigitated attempts to provoke casualties of corbels in the neorama of many sinecures of simultagnosia extorted endlessly by vaccimulgent reedbucks of sinister racemation that the phugoid eutrapely and bellarmine capacity to trounce the sudd that creates the rebarbative bosket of embattled retrenchment in survival ethos because of the macropicide and yirds of many a poikilothermic wretchock of morality to denounce as a denizen of unholy chaptalization that the chaomancies of chabouks between the pleiromorphy of convictions and the moulin of lickerish fascinations of beerocracy of beeskeps of yaraks a commonplace deturpation that finally the pomace of regalia might sustain the mainsail cardimelech and cardiognost capacity of piscary urbacity finicky of any desultory castrametation wagered by sinturong of piscifauna negligent of agapism that their fortuitist regard for humane sanctiloquence that already perished from the Earth might be revived by the vasotribes of the whipstaff of declared decorum vanquishing all tantrels of gambados of gamidolatry so pickelhaube in their dereliction of picaroons that vinegaroons capable like jerboas disguised in the thickets of the night will depose their serendipity and revoke their citizenship from the habitations of the woubits of hell rather than the brevets of widgeons of animadversion propining in every saccadic misyoke of endeavor to find a commonplace destination agreeable beyond the bifids of internecine thalwegs of sejugation rather than assimilation.

The autumn leaves fall
Chameleon rolls his eyes
a fly passes by

Sorry guys
at this point in time
the algorithm
just don't have enough
monocular

Pull yourself together sir,
the men can't stomach a scene in a storm.
The ship's heart has been anchored, I fear you can't talk wind through the sails.
We've all seen your compass,
it was posted on the crows nest.
The masts are showing splinters and your throat is caught by hope.

Please don't drink the ocean, depths and distance can't be swallowed by pride.

Have you nothing to say?

The birds miss your voice, first mate has gone deaf.
We need some direction, attention with curly words.

North will stay the same, it's where you left your spark.
But any more holes and you'll drown in the dark.
Put down the monocular, we can't stand to watch anymore.
Address your hell with chorus, row the boys to shore.
Sing us back on southern land, hold posture, withstand.
This nausea is required, withdraw the stone from bone.
There's only room on this rescue boat, for those who were built to float.

As above, so below.

Sink or swim, no difference to crowds who missed the undertow.

I sat across from my friend, Bruce, in 4th grade.
When Ms. Perrin raised the card that had on it
7 x 6, Bruce and I raised our hands at the same
time. But when we began reading the same book,
Bruce turned to the second page before I was half-
way down the first. That was the first time I became
conscious that something was wrong, but I didn't
know what. Every year I went for my eye exam,
and every year the doctor said to me, "Tell me
when the dot and the line meet." And ever
year I told him "The dot and the line are not
meeting." And every year, the doctor said nothing
back to me. I was basically a straight-A student
through school, but when my dad had me
apply to Andover, I had to take the PSAT.
I remember that every time I got to the read-
ing section, I could finish only about a third
of the questions. Even though I continued
to get straight-As, even though i was elected
president of my class of over 800, I got re-
jected twice in a row from Andover, because
of my unbelievably low scores on the reading
section of the PSAT. Each summer after being
rejected, my dad sent me to Andover for sum-
mer school that was academically as rigorous
as the regular school year. I realized during
those summers that It took me twice as long
to read a page, let alone a book, as it took my
classmates. But that's what i did:  I read twice
as long as my classmates because i had to, and
I did well academically because of my tenacity.
At the end of the second summer school, my
dad and I visited the Director of Admissions.
The first thing he said to me as we entered his
office was "Tod, you've already been admitted
to the Class of 1962. You don't even have to
apply." I was stunned. My dad was overjoyed.
I did well at Andover during the regular school
years. I chose to matriculate to Columbia be-
cause of its Core Curriculum and its being in
New York City. I excelled there, but I contin-
ued to have to read twice as long as my class-
mates. Nine years after I graduated from Co-
lumbia (I was 27 then), I sat in a booth at a
restaurant in Topeka across from Michelle,
a psychologist at the Menninger Foundation,
who was sharing with me details about the
workshop she had attended the prior weekend
in Tulsa. Michelle had been fascinated with
what she had learned at the workshop from
a renown ophthalmologist whose specialty
was monocular vision, The more Michelle
shared with me, the more I felt she was descri-
bing the condition I had battled from 4th grade
through college, so at an appropriate point,
I interrupted her and told my story. She sat
there transfixed as she listened to my long
and painful ordeal. When I had finished,
Michelle sat there in silence for more than
a few moments, then said to me, "Tod, you
need to call the doctor, make an appointment,
then drive down to Tulsa and have him exam-
ine you." And that's what I did. The doctor
examined me for three hours, putting me
through all sorts of tests. I remember to this
day verbatim the last thing he said to me:
"Tod, I'm surprised you can even read a
book, let alone get through college." Well,
I did get through Columbia,  let alone Andover
as well. But as I tried to assimilate what I had
just found out, I thought that eye doctor in Topeka
who ever year I told "The dot and the line are not
meeting." Why had he not not said to me:
"Tod, you have a problem." Why had he not
done his job? I had long forgotten his name,
but I shall never forget his gross negligence.
And to be honest, though I had managed to
endure the pain and stress of all those years,
I am so proud of what I overcame and ac-
complished.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks