When I was just a child I went searching for my world,
one of sunlit days, adventure and beauty left unfurled.
Though these days were made to be the a key to set me free
I couldn’t have foreseen the cost that all of this would be.

As I look back on these memories I hoped to have it all,
I believed that love would listen and come answering my call.
I was certain love would find me as I filled my life with song.
Now I’d turn in all these moments for just the promise to belong.

At Oktoberfest with beer halls and the sound of German songs.
The mix of beer and smells of nuts floating through the noisy throngs.
Climbing  on the Untersberg up on Alpines mystic peaks
and attending cocktail parties with Gemany’s elite.

Climbing falls in Ocho Rios with some old and new found friends,
drinking coffee, eating lobster, and enjoying without end.
Driving through the darkened backroads from a day at Negril’s beach,
in a cab with songs of love and Marley counting down the beat.  

In Cancun lagoons were vivid and alive with swarming life,
seas of sergeant majors, parrotfish, and barracuda thrive.
in the Caymans packs of stingrays had become our closest friends,
as we played among them in  a world where the beauty never ends.

The fireworks over Sydney lit the bicentennial sky
while I look upon that moment now with disbelieving eyes.
Waves from the Prince of England as he sat by princess Di
when I left the land down under, well I felt like I would die.

As I watched the sun go down over Uluru’s gold peak,
and the sun rise over Daintree as we picked our morning feast.
digging oysters off the rocks by Nelligan’s foreshores,
I was certain with my best friend that I couldn’t want for more.

Remembering the ocean as I snorkeled though it brief,
in Queensland off the shore on Australia’s barrier reef.
The beauty in Belize nearly took my breath away,
and it seemed to me that God had made this gorgeous land to play.

Camping in the South Pacific beneath the skies and palms.
In the hills of South Dakota we went panning in the calm.
With the Eiffel tower, Louvre and Twilleries rounding out another day
And the visit to the gardens of Monet just made me cry.

It’s surreal to think of all the things I’ve done throughout this life,
and the blessings that I’ve gotten seem enough to make things right.
But the simplest adventure and the one I longed for most
was a man that I could count on and would love and hold me close.

I can't wait until I get off at six
So I can head to Covington to get my Oktoberfest fix
To sit in Goebel Park's courtyard and listen to a German band;
with the German style Pied Piper Bell tower; the view is grand
At the Goose Girl Fountain, a walking German band can be found
I guess my heritage is ingrained but I like that sound
Brats with sauerkraut, roasted nuts and some German beer
Come on six o'clock I want to be there!

Blessed are we all to live in a time
when the love of Craft beer exceeds that for wine.
Hops, malt and barley all now rule the day
When brewed up together in a nice I.P.A.
Who cares if some hipsters choose to babble away
about hints of oak in some obscure Chardonnay.
We are no longer limited to our father’s Budweiser.
The vast choice of beers would astound those old timers!
Cherry Wheat, pumpkin, and Oktoberfest
You’ll fall down on your face ere you’ve tried all the rest.
As Ben Franklin stated wittily and succinctly”
“Beer is the proof God meant man to be happy.”

Last Friday night was one for the books
All of the misplaced soul mates
Found their way home from college confines
We cried in the face of Iron
And drank victory Wine as a welcome to an amber Autumn morning
He filled his front pocket
With our smoked out cigarettes  

Caramel hops in the spilled beer
Glued our voices together
Remembering
Past deaths and all those other kids who left
Are we the survivors?
Finally free to laugh among our best friends
Ink is stabbed into our aging skin
To place a memory on this night
To place a memory in the shape of our swaying bodies
To place a memory in our minds of orange bottle caps and a love stretched too far across the map

I have loved this time of year since the moment of my birth;
Its panoply of colored leaves that flutter down to earth.
I’ve loved the cool and bracing breeze, the fruits of harvest grown,
the sight of geese in Vee formation winging their way home.
My treks out to the cider mill for a warm mug or glass.
The times I’ve spent reflecting upon this year just passed.
I raise the collar of my coat against a sudden chill.
I feel cold winter’s icy breath drawing nearer still.
Please delay the Christmas tunes another week or two.
Oktoberfest is barely done, so sit and have a brew.
****** me not with chestnuts roasting on an open fire.
Winter just means shoveling, the snow piled ever higher.
Its days: short, dark, and dreary. Its nights are long and cold.
So I mourn Autumn’s passing with its gifts of red and gold.

It hatched, the egg
Last time I was left
With a yokey substance
That only landed me
A hangover worse than
Ever imagined
Last week, though
Oktoberfest
Best idea ever
As the ***** wore off
The notion rose
To a higher plan
Whenever I am drunk again
I should remember
To never
Get out of bed
In the morning

Ordinarily approximately sixteen days
of barley, hops and malt brew
to ale any even those who cannot chew
the cud subsequently most foods I eschew
courtesy maxiofacial malady
or lack of teeth perhaps even a few
that goot yanked out

after misshapen choppers grew
from uncommon body sites,
and I declare constituted hue
man dental dilemma –
somewhat dire oral issue,
yet now tis time to party
and imbibe whether gentile or Jew

in this 210th anniversary,
sans revelry nobody knew
boot beer brouhaha
actually named from German locale loo
cull hamlet that now sports
more’n 6 million stein ways that moo
after getting punch drunk

to rejoice at German reunification
October 3, 1990, hence new
reasonable rhyme referred
to occasion as unity day
held in an area Theresienwiese – phew
what a mouthful field, or meadow,
of Therese), where carousers queue.

Often called Wiesn for short,
located near Munich's center to gorge
on a wide variety of traditional food such
as Hendl (chicken), Schweinebraten (roast pork),
Schweinshaxe (grilled ham hock),
Steckerlfisch (grilled fish on a stick),
Würstl (sausages) along with Brezeln (Pretzel),

Knödel (potato or bread dumplings),
Käsespätzle (cheese noodles),
Reiberdatschi (potato pancakes),
Sauerkraut or Rotkohl/Blaukraut (red cabbage)
along with such Bavarian delicacies as Obatzda
(a spiced cheese-butter spread)
and Weisswurst (a white sausage).

in the end there are only two genres
in literature -

type 1:

a navy seal retires,
has lived his life and what not,
retires,
and then writes a book
about his life -

the sort of book that would
encourage you to live
the life he's lived...

   which is not going to happen -
no matter your literary drive -
the life isn't there -
and it's not exactly high-brow
literary ambitions that
is missing -
   it's simply that the life is
there,
   the Blitzkrieg selling rates
of such books,
people, "oddly" enough like
an authentically lived
experience to prop up the
dry narrative of:
what probably constitutes
ghost writers...
  a Casanova type of books,
autobiographies...

but wait...
what happened to the autobiography
genre?
    last time i checked,
all these reality t.v. celebs have
about 5 "autobiographies"
to boot...
   and they're what... licking 40
a.m. (our mortal god's years
of the fidgety limbs?) -
what's up with that?

    so it's not an autobiography per se...
memory loss, premature dementia?
i was misdiagnosed with that...
schizophrenia...
     that's fun...
what is?
   a misdiagnosis...
whenever i watch t.v. i play a game
of spotting a familiar face...
i'm usually right...
                photographic memory...
i can recognize a face...

        kind of a requirement living
in the labyrinth of outer
English suburbia...
    ******* ferris wheel quasi confusion:
but always speeding up...

type 1 books?
   a summary of a well lived life:
joined the army,
  traveled the world,
  learned Brazilian martial arts,
****** a lot of women...
began the day by jogging
at 3am with the milkman...
   books you should read in your youth
and be fed the desire to live
a symbiosis of it, imitate it...

funny... cloning is not a scientific
concept, physically...
sure... that much is true...
  but cloning a mind...
converting someone to pray five
times a day on a Persian rug?
   religion...
    religion was the first instigator
of cloning, prior to science,
cloning is such an old concept,
it predates the scientific breakthroughs...
how else?
you have to clone and replicate
the mind, before the body is
investigated as being enclosed in
the equivalent capacity for,
said, "conversion"...

            i guess for the elites
clones are much effective than what's being
fed for the bourgeoisie...
  look... the rich care more about
the poor than the middle class...
   because they know that the poor
can only pass on genes...
   which muddles the bourgeoisie, a lot...
it feeds them passing on
memes -
              less genes - more memes -
the rich can father replicas by passing on
both: genes... & memes...
the poor can only pass on their genes...
the bourgeoisie?
    they can't do both...
       and since they can't pass both...
they have concentrated on passing memes
rather than genes...

  and you know where that leaves them?
evidently sexless -
  or at least with a 0.5% rate
of population replenishment....
     not a nice place...

but that's only type 1 of literature...

type 2:
  the sort of antithesis of an autobiography,
someone that is on-going...
    gravitating toward an expansion
of a personal vocabulary...
   the sort of book, you can't write,
and never will,
   because it depicts a life:
            YOU DON'T WANT TO LIVE.
**** me, it would be grand to
live the type 1 literature,
settling in some comfy armchair aged
70, and reminiscing...
             you have that last *******
watching memory cinema,
you can lie, juxtapose through the fabric
of oncoming dementia
memory loss...
   life is dandy...
          but type 2 literature?
ever notice the ongoing onslaught with
wordings and linguistic observations?
those supposedly inorganic aspects of
language -
words acting as inanimate objects?
oh but they breath -
sure, they fall in and out of fashion -
but a flesh eating body of flesh
still managed to utter them,
somehow, never mind the etymological
genesis -
            only when there is
the complete slaughter of encoded language
will there be talk of an "etymological"
exodus...
   but that's beside the point...
this type 2 of writing?
    no magical life formula...
no joining the army,
or ******* a lot of women...
the whole sha-sha-bang!
                  
    in the end i hold dear to the fact that i'm
not a fiction escape-artist...
i hate escapism -
    esp. of a fictive nature,
well, fictive "nature" per se...
give me a philosophy book or
some obscure poem and i'll
turn a cognitive labyrinth into
a Pamplona bull charge...
    
as i also wanted to travel to Munich for
the Oktoberfest...
but never did...

   guess it's true:
   you can never get what you want,
might as well do with
what you have and must like it...
i.e. if you don't have what you
like: like what you have.

very few people write type 2 literature...
most write type 1...
       let's face it...
there's type 2A and type 2B...
     type 2A is fiction...
   escape artistry...
                
****... that's three genres then...
             type 2B has one motto:
my life is so ******* boring, that...
i decided to write...
                     well... "bored"...
rather... predictable...
                  but i can't imagine the horror
of having lived such a challenging
and exciting life of type 1...
and then reducing it to farting into
an armchair...
   and getting a ghost-writer to
script my open mic monologue...

             ah...
                  i'm sure that few people will
write a type 2B...
            too few people have
lost their "necessity" to dream while sleeping...
i stopped dreaming per se,
even if i do conjure up a dream...
it's so much *******,
so Jackson ******* that
     even Freud couldn't get
a cucumber or an oyster metaphor
out of it.

Autumn to me is most beautiful;
A season that's unique and graceful.

Most greenery have changed color
To crimson, purple, golden and amber.

Autumn sings the melody of harvest,
Brings seasonal brews and Oktoberfest.

Apples, pears, gourds and pumpkins are in plenty;
Mums, heath asters or golden rods add extra beauty.

Autumn also imparts an important lesson;
You will hear, when you intend to listen :

Gather the courage to let go,
Discard what is outdated or so.

Then open up and let new ideas flow.
Truth is, this is the only way to grow.