I was three , no bigger than a west Texas tumbleweed . . . just three .

My mother hung the wash out on the line
and wiped the sweat off her brow with her hand .
Half an hour later the clothes were frozen .
Blue Norther . . . you can see them coming
a hundred miles away .
Wichita Falls , Texas . . . on the Wichita river .

Moses sat on a mountaintop gazing at the promised land but it was out of his hands now .
Leaning on his staff , the one that ate the Pharoh's two serpents . . . sssssssilently a single tear falls to the ground .

No fence could hold me . . . I was over or under in seconds .
A terror at three , a potential runaway .
The police knew me by first name  . . . just three .
The plains of North Texas , jackrabbits , coyotes , rattlesnakes and all . . . were home .

Forty years of desert wilderness ,
till the last man , woman , and child of Egyptian connection had died ,
. . . . . . was such a sacrifice made . . . . . .
Moses was the last to fall .
On a mountaintop of no consequences .

      "Run Rabbit Run"

Empty swings.
Playground left behind.
No children playing or running.
No people here laughing.
Or just talking.
Just a mother alone with her mind.
All the happiness gone.
Blown away by the cold northern wind.
The same wind that chilled you.
Killed you.
Took you away.
My sweet child.
And now I am here.
Just me.
A childless mother and her mind.
Standin by the empty swings.
At an empty playground.
Left behind.
I just stand there.
Mourning your untimely death.
Missing your beautiful smile.
Your warm laugh.
Oh my sweet child.
Every day I mourn your death.
Curse the cold norther wind that took you away.
The wind that took a mother's child.
The most precious thing.
Oh my beautiful child.
And every day.
I come back.
To watch the empty swings.
And look back at the past.
To mourn your untimely death.
And every day I watch this empty swings.
The swings you used to play on.
Till this cold northern wind took you away.
Now a mother comes to the empty swings.
Every day.
Crying for the lost of her son.
A childless mother at an empty playground.
All  happyness long forgotten.
There by the empty swings.

the land here is so beautiful one can forgive all kinds of bad behavior.*

see rabbit knock into a pail, then knock it again, so it is upright.  

see the later mother believe ghost and for that in the thirst of ghost.

see angel, being seen, pained by a bell that aforesaid rings.

see the hand of god once thought to sweep, sleep.

see slow the jeopardy of dog ticks.  see bullets in a wall  

or track them their holes; some in a line and some stepped out.

see a film, the south in it.  your lips with your teeth.

She resides on the street outside my office,
from sleepy mornings to crowded nights.
Apparently we share the same working hours.
The hands of Norther has begun to claw
through coats and bones with greediness.
And I worry that she might catch the cold.
Her patient resilience and humble posture,
head bowed down, hand stretched out
constricts my heart in terrified recognition.
She looks like a queen dethroned.
Where was her kingdom before this street?
She seems ageless but infinitely ancient.

I wonder...

What’s it like to watch legs pass you by,
briskly stomping away in annoyance.
How dare she remind us about the flaws of life.
That we are less human than we admit
behind our busy faces and comfortable shoes.
What’s it like begging for plated coins,
when you’ve sacrificed everything
in a foreign country digging for gold?
Humiliation convolutes my heart
every time the ignorant titter of the young
and the turned away faces of the old
depreciate her existence.

Despite my fidgeting just minutes ago
I slowed down by the corner,
searching an answer in her fathomless eyes,
The story of sacrifice is clasped in her hands,
a framed picture of a boy and a girl.
The scribble on it says: ”Please help,
me and my children are starving.”
I knelt beside her,
shyly stroking her weathered hand
before placing the hot Chai by her side
and laying down my tribute in her paper cup.
Her hand held warmth,
when grasping mine, lifting it to her lips.
The kiss and gentle blessing startled me.

Rising to my feet again and heading back
to my comfortable office...
...it started to rain.

when does mythology end,
and history begin?

          i fear that the current state
of journalism,
we can begin to forget about
this stated conundrum...

where only poetics is bound
to obey the transition period...

like Virgil...
   the gateway between the pagan
and the Christian centuries...
born in 70BC,
dying in 19BC, the poem
(the Aeneid) unfinished,
8 year prior after the republican
government of old Rome
gave place to the rule of emperors,
and only a few years before
the Christian era started...

mythology is the sort of history
that, seemingly, one poets
demand to convey or rather,
upkeep...
                
      and readily misguided as
pure fancy, imagination
and other burdensome
nuances of metaphor...

of course i think that mythology
is real, but it is real only
in the poetic realm,
where language enjoys nuance...
ambiguity...
the tendency to over-hype
unexplored territories and states
of consciousness...

before rigid science gave birth
to journalistic endeavors...
did you know that the Teutonic
order having launched
the norther crusades against
the Baltic lands had the most
effective postal service?

mythology is not real?
     erm... given modern journalism?
hyper-inflated, seemingly
omnipresent, 24 / 7?
             3.42857142857 -
what's the golden ratio?
     1.61803398875...

         whatever comes out...
could be observed, or... another failed
dead end...

    but i've been given three alternative
time-scales to orientate myself
in this current, space,

the dinosaur period...
starting with a monkey...
  and then the big bang...

  if mortality could ever be crushed
by these restrictive proposals...
i can't complain...
but it's just a drag being reminded...
to be forced to believe something
i'm not going to either doubt or deny...
it's like the secular variant of
Islam... the non-believers who
joke about a theory, a theory...

mythology is the cut-off point
from history... it's still history,
but in a poetic variant...
after all... you shouldn't expect
empirical language from people
who knew that: only the poetic
expression mattered...
   at said circa...

            but mythology?
well... the stampeding journalism
treats history like an ill-informed
****** ******* (
late in the news, Manchester...
a woman with an IQ of ~50 was
abused)...
               if journalism can do
that to history, of... say...
only the past 100 years?

what can poetry do to mythology?
explore it, not deny it...
    if poetry kills of mythology
then...
              then poets are no better
than the journalists that have
killed off history...
  
          my Socratic observation
has been made simpler in the realm
of modern times...
i seem to know so much,
but the constant barrage of information,
the journalistic insomnia...
i know nothing...

                      again... not because of
liberal democracies of the western world
that history has ended...
   this 2nd wave of the journalistic endeavor...
you really think
that journalism means as much
as it did, at the time of
the film all the president's men?
hardly...
  that was journalism,
                what's deemed journalism
these days?
                           can i get back to you on
that one...
        i'm about to dive into mythology...
given you've already bypassed
most of history...
   and settled on dinosaurs,
       the magic ape
with a fungus parasite robbing it
off its free will and the big bang.

Crime Scene
(Flint, Michigan)

Yellow cordon tape hums
low in a stiff breeze off
Saginaw Bay
a norther that scatters
empty evidence markers
up and down Miller Road
eddies on Dupont Street
uncapped and droning.
Tennyson, Bishop and Frost
lost for words
this morning working
my way through a pallet of water
dead poets urgent
as blue sky box kites
specks above a crime scene
easing the truck past
houses of the common
abandoned down Whitman
transcendence, surely
for those forbearing souls
over on Emerson.

As the tide wash over frostbitten shores
in the soon forsaken kingdom of Jack Frost.
I found my moment of solitude finally,
wrapped inside the cold breath of the norther.
The desolate requiem of terns in flight
disrupting the stillness of my mind.
Conjuring the uncalled ache of you
from my safe of forbidden memories.

As the years move everything we know
and we grow old both in heart and soul.
These memories will still be so easily stirred,
wailing for attention, just as the needy terns,
slowly moving sideways across the burning horizon.
And I will cast a spell for the wind to carry,
far across the ocean, crossing everything between us.
To finally reach you in the winter of our age
with the gentlest kiss, a forlorn whisper
telling you what went missing in our past...

...my love

we write about numbers,

yet neither of us

remember 21.



we could use correspondence

cards, sold in packs of 6,

with a little logo at the top.



we email, she is norther now.

yesterday went quietly,

we walked to arthur’s stone, saw the wren,

then, came back again.

sbm

At sunrise a little girl calls
Uncle and he comes to
her and past, down the pier
to reel in the blue *****.
Everyone is crossing
the river where it meets the bay
to exchange pleasantries and
to tear off the legs.
So by mid morning: north
up the winding road past
foggy construction zones.
Everyone is crossing
the lake in canoes while she
is catching salamanders,
throwing news in campfires
and tripping over her shoes.
She takes her paddle to the water
and then the sun right above:
time to move.
A couple hundred exits passed,
a couple hundred exits past
noon. A little northwest
this time, a little late
for lab. Everyone is cross-
ing campus like they mean it.
She climbs and counts
and it's actually one hundred sixty-
two steps up the clock tower--
you have to count again--and what
a view. Jumping isn't the way,
you can't go down when you're
on top. She follows the water
norther, wester, you have
to count again, have to see
something new before dark

"onkle adolf... einige sagen es war anrede: ave maria", besagt fräulein elisabeth.*

we have all lived through a countenance
of inspecting the: actor -
even if we were less obliged,
we deemed it, necessary,
to suggest an opaqueness -
thus let us celebrate:
          opaque rhetoric!
               countered with french
existentialism...
                        we are to deliver what is of
most interest...
       funny to find large
families at providing virtue,
when they in fact also provide
world wars, akin to the first....
                        families, given
******, see, hardly the hard end consequence...
with family being the last:
defended artefact...
        question is:
how sooner the ******
          may collapse?
            dearest claim to crown & king?
i fiddle my fingers pretending they
are apt for a violin, dearest,
           the unearthed tongue
from the graveyard ridden,
if not welcomed by crows and hyenas,...
              the crackling cackle
and the labouring laugh makes due
surfacing against the monarchic
  the orb, the hammer,
  the sceptre, the sickle,
  and donned, the crown,
what is a will of the people...
how humbled the queen must be:
shedding lost airs and the evermore
senses of jane austen sensibilities...
poor thing...
   i'd be the most richest of men,
merely experienced this: "travesty"...
   a famed queen cushioned,
lying, on a bed of rocks...
                    how will i ever
dare to, manage?!
                             at least the russians learnt
what a peasant was...
             the english?
i find that the english didn't learn
the same lesson..
  i feel they obliterated it with the jewish
conception of Kazakh...
            the enbglish only seemed
to learn what a peasant was among
the peasants...
but the english queen learned? hardly.
  the monarchy has just emerged
as solipsistic...
        that's quasi-autistic may i add...
the reason her majesty's people didn't
learn what a peasant was is because:
the english peasant always required
an under-peasant...
                yet you must remember:
the norther english are still
                     usurpers...
                you will not find couriers of
nationhood among the northen counts of slap...
the first wold war was not a world war,
it was merely a family feud...
one family... just one,
that cost so many others a cherished
endeavour into being solidified
with old age... ******?! ****** is the evil?!
vile, ****** concubines of ******!
                cousins versus cousins!
you actually have the goud
to press your measures?!
                 the orb and the hammer,
the sceptre and the sickle,
the crown and: the will of the people...
              to your bidding no bidding be
worth un-bidding or made said as:
an bidding undone?
            with that sort of assumption...
as queen, and country,
you have no honour to stand before
a god, save yourself the grace,
and simply stand before: the common man;
take no to a confession,
  but abide by a compliment of:
having made confession in a confinement
of a sheltered privacy,
  whereupon the public might be
congratulating in what you know to be
the most aghast lesion of truth,
which is obviously a mere,
simpleton of the bereft royal auction of:
said lie, kept beyond hidden -
   by mere exfoliation as recompense:
          riddled.

i really came late to this party...
                                                    honest to god,
youtube was my h.m.v.,
   my field of strawberries,
a few bushes filled with berries,
i had to become a cultural
forager - nay, a ******* burrower!
a mole aiming blank
into new music...
         but then a recommendation...
hmm...
   what's this?
******* are in full swing!
   they're already moved into bitchiness...
never argue with a drunk woman
when you're drinking a pint
with an heavily autistic-man...
or offering a cigarette to a homeless
person you've met before,
sitting down on the pavement
with him, asking him: you doing o.k.?
ooh noo noo... not in a irish pub
do you get to argue with a drunk
irish woman...
you just wave you hand and say:
i'm not going to argue with you
like some ******* jedi mind trick
with a stormtrooper...
why bother the hassle?
   i don't even know how to haggle
to buy something at a cheaper price!
ooh, but blood's boiling...
it concerns two "characters"
millenial woes contra sargon of akkad...
and this is the ****** bit
that probably annoys everyone...
really? numbers?
    (i'm siding with the former):
these mundane egoists really care
about numbers?
    how about giving them
an auschwitz tattoo? cover them at
the end of each month, with how many
new subscribers entered their ranks...
that'd be fun...
  what?! we're number-centric...
   numbers tell us unfathomable
secrets of those in the minority of
a few...
    oh yeah... i really see a lot of views
concerning heidegger...
           nietzsche?
       i think he's been *****-slapped
and dipped in wax and set alight by
the mob... basically over-quoted...
  basically senile, basically less the case
for pondering, and more of
shock-value: provocation teacher tactician:
yes yes... teacher of tactical provocation.
          i'm trying to keep the lowest
imaginable profile at this party...
  i missed the s
yeah... the scots always seemed the most
continental in their approach to "things"...
    of all the tribes on these isles...
   the scots are probably the most prone
to engaging with continental thought...
   the english? head up uncle sam's ***...
welsh? head up uncle jack's ***...
                 irish? head up uncle sam's ***...
norther irish? dunno...
           peter neeps & mary tatties
    on the quest for the holy four leaf clover?
     don't ask me...
but like i said... i really, really came late
to this party... thank god it has distintegrated
into an **** of brutus et al. - i.e.
back stabbing and *******...
           'cos' conversation... sorta dried, up!