(Glade, World, Master, Boy, Hero)

                                                 GLADE

There is a glacier.
Its blue tongue’s tip just tastes a frozen gorge.
There is a gorge, its walls shattered by cold; a once-green thing that, in dying, birthed a thousand aching fissures. It works its jagged way downhill, round ragged rifts and drifts until it comes upon a little frosted wood.
There is a wood, an island locked in ice.
Within this wood the gorge descends. It wanders and it wends; it brakes and all but ends outside a clearing wet with sun. And there, forking, its bent and broken arms embrace a strange, enchanted glade.

There is a glade.
And in this glade the black bears sleep, though salmon leap fat between falls. Here the field mouse draws no shadow, the eagle seeks no prey; they spend their while caressed by rays, and halcyon days are they. Here rabbit and fawn may linger, no longer need they flee. For in this timeless, taintless space, the Wild has ceased to be. (Outside the glade are shadow and prey, are ice and naked death. There blood may run freely. There the eagle, that thief, is a righteous savage, a noble fiend. But once in the glade he is dove, and has no taste for blood, running freely or otherwise).
And in this glade there nests a pool:  a dazzling, blue-and-silver jewel; profoundly deep, pristinely clear. All who sip find solace here, for this is the Eye of Being. They lap in peace, assuming blear, not knowing it is seeing. And ever thus this pool shall peer:  a silent seer, reflecting on—all that Is, and all Beyond.
(Outside the glade there lies a world where rivers ever run, where ghastly calves in random file revile a bitter sun. East, the day is born in mist. West she dies:  her rest, the deep. And North…North the Earth lies mute. Wind gnaws her hide, wind wracks her dreams. Wind screams like a flute in her white, white sleep).
But in the glade are tall, stately grasses, sunning raptly, spinning lore. Roots render the rhythms, blades bend without breeze, as signals ascend from the glade’s tender floor. (In this wise the glade weaves its word, airs its views. All the glade’s flora are bearers of news). They do not wither with fall, for in the glade there is no fall. They do not bind or wilt or brown—they gesture, spreading the mood, the mind; conveying, indeed, the very soul of the glade. As ever they have, as they shall evermore.
Bees do not hum here; they sing. They fatten the dream. Mellow and round are the timbres they sound, sweet is the music they bring. Birds do not sing here—they play. They carry the theme. Dulcet and warm are the strains they perform. Gifted musicians are they. (All in the glade are virtuosi. They were born to create. Melody, harmony, meter…are innate). Now the performance is lively and bright, now full, now almost still. For, though all in the glade may lean to the light, they must bend to the maestro’s feel.
And yet…there was a day, long ago in a dream, when this ongoing opus was torn. And on that day (so the lullaby goes) the wind brought a scream, and Dissonance was born.
There was a noise.
Moose tensed, their coffee eyes narrowed, their patient brows creased. Bees mauled the tempo, birds lost their place. The grass stood *****, all blades pointing east. There was a crash, and a shriek, and a naked, bleeding beast burst stinking through the fern, fell stumbling on its face.
Moose scattered:  unheard of. Sheep brawled, geese burst out of rhyme. The symphony, forever endeavored to soar sublime, fluttered, plunged, and, for all of a measure, ceased.
The pool was appalled…what manner brute—what kind of monster was this? Furless flank to forelimb, hide obscured by blood. As for its face…it had no face; only a look:  of shock frozen in time, of horror in amber. A deep welling rift ran temple to chin, halving the mask, caving it in. Such a grievous wound…the pool watched it stagger, on two legs and four, thrashing about till it came to a rise. There it labored for air, wiped the blood from its eyes, lashed at illusion, looked wildly round. Beholding the pool, the beast tumbled down.
And there this wretch plunged his thirst, drank his fill, fell back on his haunches.
The pool became still.
The two traded stares.
The glass read his features:  that durable eye pondered the wreckage and probed the debris. Revolted, the pool sought the succor of sky. But that thing remained—that face…in all creation…surely there could be…no other creature so ugly as he.
And he gazed in the glass.
Beneath the surface were…images…swimming in currents of shadow and light. He saw half-shapes and fragments…hideous men, exotic beasts…saw blue worlds of water, saw white worlds of ice…it was all so vague and unreal—yet somehow strangely familiar. Deeper he peered, but, as his mangled face neared, the sun smote the pool and the shapes disappeared. The brute pawed the ground and, dreaming he’d drowned, shook his head sharply and slowly looked round:
There were starlings at arm’s-length, transfixed with suspense, their tail feathers trembling, their dark eyes intense. Fantails and timber wolves, stepping in sync, paused for a sniff, stooped for a drink. Bees, pirouetting, threw light in his eyes. Seizing the moment, the pool pressed its hold.
And the glade revolved.
The freak watched it spin—saw the ferns’ greedy fingers reach round and close in, saw the tall grass rise high in an emerald sheen, swaying to rhythms from somewhere obscene. This place was madness; he struggled to stand, but, weak as he was, keeled over cold.
And the glade heaved a sigh, and the tall grass reclined, in curious patterns once rendered in whim. Far off in thunder the hard world replied, as iced pines exploded and screamed on the breeze. Down bore the sun, a chill just behind. The pool, grown blood-red, fended frost from its rim. Details dissolved in the oncoming tide. The pool dimmed to black. Night seeped through the trees.
Now flora found slumber while, pulsing below, the pool was infused with a soft ruby glow.
Soon birds bearing beech leaves, and needles of pine, laid down a spread and returned to the limb. But breath from the North blew their blanket aside. The wind grew in earnest, the air seemed to freeze.
And the wolf and the she-bear, of contrary mind, abhorring their task approached, looking grim. They sniffed him for measure, then, loathing his hide, growled their displeasure and dropped to their knees.
All night these glum attendants flanked his naked quaking form. The rising moon drew dreams in gray.
In time the man grew warm.

Morning swept through the glade in one broad stroke of the master’s brush, dappling the foliage with amber and rose. The pool was roused by the sweet pass of light. He opened his eye and the glade came alive:  into the whirlpool of life a thousand colors swam, chasing the scattering eddies of night. The magic of morning began.
Bluebird and goldfinch descended in rings, primaries clashing with robin and jay. Dollops of sun, repelled by their wings, spattered anew on the palette of day. Banking as one, the hues struck away.
There was a crowd.
And in this crowd that oddity sat, its chin on its chest, its rear pointing west. Its forepaws lay leaning, upturned and at rest. ***** and blood messed its muzzle and breast. Passed overnight. Or perhaps only dozed…tendril by tendril, claw by claw, the crowd decompressed:  the ring slowly closed.
And the stranger cried out and shifted his seat. His eyes sought his feet—rounding the arches, and topping the toes, the tall grass was questing. The little brute froze.
And the fauna took pause, and the flora went slack. Leaves followed talons, stems followed claws. Hooves tromped on paws as the crowd drifted back.
Not a breath taken. Not a move made. Stillness, like fog, enveloped the glade.
Now the grass tugged his feet, now the sea of jade splayed—left hand and right, the slender shafts reared. Gaining momentum, blade followed blade. The green field was torn till a deep swath appeared. The swath hurtled west, reflecting the sun. A hundred yards distant it died. Once more the grass stood, its tips spreading wide. The swath, born again, repeated its run.
Plain was the message, and clearly conveyed. The newcomer gawked. Confusion ensued.
The tall blades were swayed by the pulse of the glade.
But the swath was not renewed.
Something tiny bounced by. He ventured a peek, barely rolling an eye.
A chocolate sparrow, with pinfeathers black, popped past an ankle and paused to look back. The bird cocked its head, rocked in place, hopped ahead. It fluttered. It freaked. It glared and stopped dead. Vexed to its limit, it burst into flight.
The sitting thing watched till it passed out of sight.
Now a breeze bent his back, picked him half off his stern. The wind, done its best, grew flustered at last. It trailed to the west, thrilling lilies it passed. It wound round the willows and didn’t return.
So the fauna repaired to the live oak’s shade.
A strange kind of stupor fell over the glade.
From deep in the wood came a shape through the trees—a pronghorn, perhaps, or an elk swift and sure. But up limped a moose, a flyport with fur, low in the belly and wide at the knees. Wizened he was, scarcely able to see. Neither vision, nor vigor, nor velvet had he. He hobbled abreast, then groveled or died, his nose facing west, his tail flung aside.
The brute merely glazed.
But the glade was unfazed.
Those long shafts reshuffled. A tense moment passed.
The ominous shadows of badgers were cast. Three left their holes, as if to attack. They pedaled like moles and the stranger jumped back. He stumbled, fell flailing, and, kicking his guide, threw out his arms and tumbled astride. First he stepped on his tail, then he stepped on his pride. The moose bellowed twice and shook side to side while the little pest clung to his high, homely hide.
And the old moose unbent to his knees by degrees. He reeled like a drunk down the path of the breeze. Together they lurched through a break in the trees. And all morning long, and on through the day, both beggar and bearer would buckle and sway. The moose lost his temper, but never his way.
And the wind blew the sun to its deep ruby rest; the scrub, in obeisance, inclined to the west. Their slow taffy shadow in slinking would seem to slip round the rocks like a snake in a dream.
And the sun became a beacon, and the underbrush a stream. The wide Earth took their weight in stride, and the wind named him Hero.

                                               WORLD

When the sun was low the old moose began to stumble, at last limping to a halt beside a swift river lined with stunted pines. He’d half-expected a somewhat graceful dismount, but Hero, dug in like a tick, wasn’t about to let go. The moose knelt until his joints objected, shimmied, bucked, and with a sudden whirl sent the little bother flying.
Hero scraped himself out of the dirt and looked up forlornly. The ancient moose, his good eye gone bad, glared a long minute before hobbling away, his bony **** rocking with dignity, his scraggly tail fighting off imaginary flies.
Hero managed a few steps and dropped, staring in disbelief as the moose disappeared between half-frozen pines. He remained on his knees for the longest time, his jaw hanging, waiting for the moose—waiting for anything to show. At last a ruckus to his left snapped him out of it. His head ratcheted around.
Fifteen feet off the bank, three screaming gulls were dancing on an immense stone outcropping, fighting over a rapids-tossed sockeye. Hero was instantly famished. He wobbled to his feet and stumbled twice wading out, only regaining his balance by leaning against the current while rapidly wheeling his arms. The shrieking gulls reluctantly backed off as he stepped in slow-motion through the rushing water. Hero lunged at the slapping fish, cracked an ankle on the rock, and hopped around howling with both hands holding his shin. One foot was as good as none in the surging water. He went right under. Before he knew it he was being swept downriver.
This was glacial meltwater, so cold he quickly lost all sensation. Hero swallowed a mouthful and surfaced fighting for life; too disoriented to combat the current, too numb to realize his waving arm was striking something solid. That solid something turned out to be a swirling clump of rotted birches tangled up in scrub. He embraced one of these trunks as the mass slammed against isolated rocks, kicked his feet wildly, and somehow hauled himself aboard. The raft ricocheted rock to rock until repeated impacts sent it spinning. Giddy from the whirling and soaking, he clung freezing to the trees, retching continuously while the river roared in his ears. Through spray and tears he made out only cartwheeling fragments of the world.
But then the river was widening, its fury dissipating. The raft was approaching the sea. Hero gasped as the seemingly boundless Pacific swallowed the broad red belly of the sun. And as he spun he was treated to a panoramic, breathtaking spectacle:  the great indigo ocean with its slow traffic of driftwood and ice—voiced-over by the dismal calls of foraging gulls, and broken rhythmically by intermittent glimpses of the river’s rocky banks growing farther and farther apart. Whirling as it went, the dying man’s soul was taken by the sea.

At the 59th Parallel in winter, the Pacific coast plays host to numberless floes and minor bergs orphaned from Alaskan coastal glaciers. Hero cruised into a watery gridlock on a boat of ice-glazed birches, one bit of flotsam among the rest.
The cold wouldn’t let him move, wouldn’t let him breathe, wouldn’t let him think. He lay supine, feet crossed and hands clasped, terrified that to budge was to roll. An ice patina grew over the tangled trees like a white fungus—this growth soon webbed his fingers and toes, speckled his chest and thighs, glazed his hair and face, danced and disintegrated with his breath’s tapering plumes.
Floes and frozen-over debris tended to group with passing collisions; Hero’s married birches bit by bit accrued a mostly-submerged tangle of trunks and branches, all becoming fast in a creeping ice cement. Night came on just as resolutely, until land was only a flat black memory. The raft moved silently over the deep, still accepting the occasional gentle impact. And the floes became thicker and wider in a freezing doldrums; soon the proximate sea was all a broken field of packed ice, bobbing infinitesimally with the planet’s pulse.
Long ghostly strands of fog came striding over the torn ice field. They leaned this way and that, their mourners’ skirts tearing and patching and leaning anew. The ghosts were there to seal it:  their locked fingers and gray diaphanous wings were quickly becoming a wholly opaque descending shroud, its boundaries lost in the soughing wind.
Collisions came less and less. Darkness and silence, breaching some previously impenetrable barrier, began to take up residence in Hero’s chilling marrow. From his very center broke a weak little cry of refusal, of denial, as mind mustered frame in one desperate bid for freedom. His skin, frozen to the raft, peeled right off, and at that his inner brave succumbed. Hero’s smashed head arched back. His face contorted frightfully while the little lamp fluttered and paled within.
A raucous chorus slowly worked its way through the mist. It emerged a few hundred yards off—a tiny, terrified barking, growing in clarity as it grew in volume and urgency. It was a sound beacon. Hero strained eagerly, and when for one excruciating minute the beacon was cut off by a large passing body, was certain death had claimed him. Then it was back, and his heartbeat was quickening. He caught a heaving sound…something was moving his way down a wide tributary between floes. Hero could hear a gasping and snorting, accompanied by a hard slapping and splashing. The sounds vanished. In a moment the raft was rocked from below.
A sputtering muzzle blew salt in his eyes. A cold slimy flipper flapped across his chest and slapped about his face. The fur seal barked directly in his ear. Whiskers raked his dead cheek. The seal barked again.
Back below the surface it slipped. Hero listened anxiously as the splashing sound retreated whence it came.
The seal swam off perhaps a hundred feet and began barking hysterically.
From much farther off came a profusion of answering barks.
The seal swam back to Hero’s raft, circling and calling, circling and calling, while the responders approached en masse.
Now a sallow beam could be seen cutting through the fog. Several more showed vaguely along a plane yawing with some huge, barely discernible object.
A herd of northern fur seals burst into sight, barking madly, beating through the ice. They converged on Hero’s raft, really bellowing now.
Those odd yellow beams came in pursuit, and soon were close enough to eerily illuminate a gigantic wooden vessel parting the ice. The seals barked ferociously. Whenever the vessel leaned away, those nearest Hero’s raft would absolutely howl.
The fog deepened, condensed, crystallized, and then the collective light of a dozen lanterns was playing over a low, listing nightmare. Hero could hear the shouts of many aggressive men, but the waterborne seals, rather than scatter, boarded the ice and redoubled their din, fighting their way onto his quickly mobbed raft.
The sealers hurled serrated spears even as they clambered down rope ladders. When these men reached the ice the seals snapped and gnashed madly, refusing to be dislodged. The sealers lost all composure with the thrill of the hunt:  wielding clubs, spears, and hatchets—sometimes using iron bludgeons or any old utensil handed down—they crushed skulls, dragged carcasses, hooked animals still spurting and bleating. Clinging though he was, Hero was flabbergasted by the way the slipping and scampering men went about their butchery, hacking and smashing more with passion than with precision. But not a single seal attempted to flee—throughout the carnage they barked all the louder, egging on their slayers, carcass by carcass drawing the impassioned sealers to Hero’s ice-locked raft.
It was all so hazy and macabre. Hero’s eyes rolled back, and the next thing he knew he was sitting hunched on the vessel’s sopping deck. Two men were rubbing his limbs while another poured warm water down his back. He looked around in shock. The very notion of a boat containing more than one or two individuals—a sort of floating tribe—was way beyond his ken; so to see it, to have it come looming out of nothingness, was an experience almost supernatural.
He remembered some of those fur-covered men force-feeding him mouthfuls of halibut and seal fat, and he recalled a small group standing around him, shouting words that made no sense at all. After that he had a very vivid memory of their angry little chief repeatedly punching him while hollering one angry little word over and over and over. Hero couldn’t make out his inquisitor’s face, for the large feather-lined hood quite engulfed the man’s head, yet he could see those quick eyes flash as they caught the oil lamps’ light. Finally this man stopped boxing Hero’s ear. He stared hard. In these remaining decades of the tenth century it was fully within his power to administer as he saw fit—he could have ordered Hero’s immediate execution and not a man of his crew would have objected. He hesitated only because there wasn’t a hint of resistance in his prisoner’s pinched and frightened eyes. He leaned forward, studying the wound that all but split Hero’s face in two before grunting, raising his right arm, and yanking down its seal hide sleeve. Attached to the stump of his forearm was a primitive prosthesis consisting of a thick oak cap strapped to the arm with lengths of gut, and, hammered squarely into the center of that cap, a broad, cruelly hooked blade chiseled from a narwhal’s tusk. He held this obscenity in front of Hero’s eyes, traced the face’s deep diagonal rift, and once more demanded his captive’s identity. Hero then vaguely remembered being dragged along a tilting deck and thrown into the ship’s tiny hold. He retained a strong mental image of landing in a place of musty odors and dank projections.
There came a soft scuffling in the darkness, and presently a blind and exceedingly old woman felt her way to his side, mumbling as she approached. Her speech was comprised not of words; it was rather a running gibberish of cooing vowels and clucking consonants. The old woman was as mad as her circumstances; sick with sea and solitude, bedeviled by age and confinement. She sat cross-legged, patting her withered palms up his arm until she came to his face. Her strange mumbling soliloquy rose and fell as her bony fingers daintily explored the newly opened wound. Hero let his head fall back in her lap. A pair of hands like emaciated tarantulas scurried through the filth and tiny bodies until they came upon an old otter’s pelt bag that held her secrets. The woman loosened the bag’s cord and extracted an assortment of herbs, sniffing each in succession. She then scooped a handful of blubber from a bowl made of a previous occupant’s skull, kneaded the selected herbs into the blubber, and commenced gently massaging the wound, clucking and cooing while the black rats watched and waited.
For nine interminable days Hero remained in that cold, stinking compartment, rocking back and forth between life and death. The old woman never gave up on him. She clung to him during his seizures, rubbed his limbs vigorously when his blood pressure fell. She gathered various accumulated skins and, using woven strands of her own long hair, sewed him a multilayered, body-length wraparound with arm sleeves and very deep pockets, working by touch with a needle formed of a cod’s rib. By this same method she was able to fashion a pair of heavily lined snug-fitting moccasins. The old woman made him eat; she masticated the cod and halibut their keepers pitched into the hold, then shoved the results down his throat with a long gnarly forefinger. She called into his screaming nightmares, talking him out of sleep and back into their foul little reality. Together they lowed in the dark, while the keel groaned along and the waves beat time.
At the end of those dark nine days his strength was restored, but not his mind. Once again he was taken on deck.
The vessel had reached a chain of remote wind-swept islands, rocky and treeless, naked except for patchy carpets of hardy grass. These islands stretched far to the west, shrouded in mist. The ship was making for the smallest; just a chip on the sea. When they reached depth for anchorage Hero was hustled into a rowboat and lowered over the side. He looked up, saw two men climbing down by rope. These men positioned themselves at the oars and slowly rowed toward the islet. Seated between them, Hero felt like a man being led to his execution. He snuck a peek. The rowers’ heads were lowered, their features completely obscured by the heavy feathered hoods; they had all the somberness of pallbearers. Not a word passed between them as they rigidly worked their oars:  the only sound was the dip-and-purl of wood in water. Hero looked away. Against his will, he found his eyes drawn to that rocky islet waiting in the fog.
Not a bird, not a sea lion, not a shrub. It was lonesome beyond imagination.
Upon landfall one of the men used a spear’s point to **** Hero ashore. While his companion steadied the boat, he removed a skin sack full of half-frozen halibut, followed by a few armloads of precious tinder. These articles he tossed at Hero’s feet. He resumed his place at the oars and, without looking back, used the blunt end of his spear to shove off.
Hero watched the boat moving away, watched the men climbing their ropes, watched the boat being hauled aboard. As the mysterious vessel receded he saw a number of those silent men standing at the stern, stolidly returning his stare. Their hooded forms grew smaller and smaller, finally becoming indistinct. The vessel was swallowed up in fog.
Hero looked around, at a desolate world of rock and drifting ice. In the sunless pools at his feet a few purplish, flaccid sea anemones were waving in a sickly phosphorescence; along the rocks ran a tattered quilt of wild grass and lichen. It was the end of the world. He began to pace in his anxiety, only to crumple bit by bit inside his furs. At last he just sat with his face in his arms and wept. When he could weep no more he raised his head and opened his red, swollen eyes.
There were gulls all around him, staring like statuary in a madman’s garden. Standing in their midst were auks and puffins and murres, absolutely spellbound, unable to lean away. The silence was broken only by a wild, fitfully pursing wind—a wind that seemed, eerily, on the verge of producing syllables. And on that wind a flock of terns was rising slowly, their beady eyes fixed on the lone sitting man. The terns watched as he trembled, and banked as he swooned.
Then, beating as one, they threw back their wings and blew into the sun.

There was a blaze.
Behind that blaze a pair of black, bug-like eyes met his and immediately withdrew. A man wrapped in caribou hides stood abruptly, drawing angry swarms of sparks.
The Aleut peered queerly into the icy Pacific, his craggy profile merging seamlessly with a jumble of rocks showing just beyond his shoulder. The man was very tall, closer to seven feet than to six, and thin almost to emaciation.
He was also a mute. Soon enough he would display a talent for communication through gutturals, but now his body language spoke louder than words. It told the shivering stranger that he was not only disliked—he was feared.
The islander removed the hides he’d piled on the sleeping man. He produced a bone awl and strategically pierced a caribou hide, draped the hide over the old woman’s handiwork, and ran a cord of tightly woven tendons crosswise through his made holes, knotting it at the bottom to create a kind of cloak. He then killed the fire, heaped wood, fish, and remaining hides into Hero’s arms, and led him to a tiny cove where his long skin canoe lay in the grass. This was not the one-man kayak used by his people for centuries, but an actual canoe modeled on the graceful vessels he’d observed under the control of northern coastal tribesmen. After dragging it into the water he perched Hero in the fore, placed the cargo in the middle, and stepped into the rear like a gaunt furry spider. The Aleut dug out a paddle and began pulling with smooth strokes of surprising muscularity, his black eyes trained on his quiet companion’s back.
So began their long island-hopping journey. They stepped the chain one stone at a time, living off the sea. But much as the islander disliked Hero’s vapid company, it was not in his nature to proceed expeditiously; his people, remote as they were, had learned to count not in days but in generations. Given this, the Aleut took his time. He showed Hero how to build shelters of skin and gut; during bad weather the two would sit on an island in utter silence while rain hammered on their stretched seal-intestine window. And one very clear night he pointed out constellations while attempting to demonstrate, using broad gestures, just how the brighter heavenly bodies were in perfect alignment with the Aleutians. Hero followed his guide’s gestures as a pet follows its master’s movements and, like a pet, soon became bored. The Aleut did not grow flustered. He grew ever more wary:  behind that granite, weather-beaten exterior squirmed a very primitive imagination. Superstitious as he was, the Aleut was almost certain Hero could read his mind. So one time, and one time only, he threw a searing look at the back of Hero’s bowed and listing head. After a long minute of vigorous thought-projection he shifted his gaze aside. The brute appeared to feel this shift, and gently turned his head. And both saw the ocean break rhythm, and watched as otters and sea lions surfaced, noted their progress, and slipped without tremor beneath the waves.
In spring the fogs lifted. The grimness gave way to serenity, a generous sun buttered the dappled sea. On the islands grass grew lushly. Wildflowers leapt on the color-starved eye.
And one day the islander’s nape itched. He turned to see a flock of arctic terns casually tracking them under a gorgeous, white-plumed sky. As the day progressed the terns came drifting high overhead, slowly but surely taking the lead.
The Aleut squinted against the sun. He’d never known these birds to pursue a westerly migratory pattern—the terns were distributing themselves into a rough wedge shape, much like geese on the wing.
For a while he let the flock be his guide. Then, to test his stars, he cunningly steered his canoe north. At once the wedge disintegrated. Not until he’d lowered his eyes and pulled purposefully to the west did the disrupted pattern reassert itself. He peered up timidly. The wedge was now in the shape of a perfect arrowhead.
Just so were the fates of mariners and aviators inextricably entwined. At night, once the Aleut had landed his canoe on the nearest pearl, the terns would light in a quiet circle and remain until sunrise. As the Aleut and Hero took to sea, the flock would quickly form that same authoritative pattern.
In time the Aleut paddled his companion clear to the westernmost islands of the Aleutian chain. His people had dwelt, even here, a thousand years and more, but no contemporary islander knew for certain what lay beyond. Legend told of an enormous land mass forever gripped by cold, where a cruel people waylaid innocent seafarers for barbaric sacrificial rites.
So here the islander paused. But even as he vacillated he noticed the terns were veering south.
If the Aleut had been able to curse aloud he would have been vociferous. He was being compelled to follow an even less desirable course—that of the unknown open ocean. Now he looked upon his passenger’s hunched back not with fear but with loathing. He took a deep breath, rolled his shoulders, and defiantly continued west. The wedge broke up immediately. The terns dive-bombed the canoe, whirled around the windmilling Aleut, tore skyward and hovered determinedly. Something huge broke surface behind them, but the Aleut was way too frayed to turn. He dropped his head, a beaten man, and began paddling south. Little by little the birds returned to formation.
The tiny canoe had no business going up against the mighty Pacific. It would soon have been swallowed and smashed, had not the terns veered in close formation whenever the distant sea appeared too rough. Once he’d lost his bearings the Aleut religiously followed their serpentine course.
The days began to warm.
Now the sea’s bounty all but leapt in the canoe.
It seemed the Aleut was forever catching the finest currents, practically sliding down a corridor entirely free of peril. In this manner he was able to safely navigate waters no such craft had mastered before.
They were proceeding south by southwest, awed children of a plenteous, generous sea. The going became easier by the day, the ocean heavier with cod.
Nights the Aleut drifted comfortably, but a lifetime of wariness made him wake off and on. He’d slowly rise to find Hero sitting quietly under the stars, and soon he’d see, pallid in moonlight, a large body neatly pleating the ocean’s surface. The shape would precede them a while, only to vanish without a ripple.
All this strangeness kept the Aleut’s heart in a whirl, though he took pains to maintain his poise.
To allay his fear he kept a flat black stone planted squarely between them. It was his oldest treasure; an oddity he’d taken off the body of a mauled Tlingit woman when he was a child. Who she was, and how she’d come by the stone, were mysteries far beyond him, for no such piece had ever been known to Aleut or Inuk.
The stone was smooth and had been worked perfectly round. Bright yellow specks were scattered about its dull black face.
Long ago someone had etched a quaint and clumsy rune on that flat black surface—it was the crude, universal symbol for sun:  a broad circle surrounded by several rays. When the stone was rubbed against a pelt it possessed the curious property of growing quite warm and bright in the rune’s grooves, while the surface remained cool and dull.
This stone, both friend and overlord, had always “spoken to him”. It caused him to become restless when it was time to move on, and allowed him to relax when a destination had been reached. In this way he’d come to the familiar islet and discovered the unconscious little man. Just so:  the stone, he was sure, was responsible for making him “feel bad” as he watched the stranger shiver, and “feel better” once he’d built him a life-saving fire from the small pile of tinder he’d found nearby.
By now, however, the Aleut was wholly disenchanted with his stone, and deeply regretted having done its mysterious bidding. Never before had he been so long from sight of land, and never before had he felt so very, very small. The unimagined immensity of the Pacific was really starting to get to him when, after all their while at sea, a gray, seductive haze broke the horizon. They had reached another chain of islands, an Asian chain, the dark and smoky Kurils. Here a cold current kept the climate cool and foggy, and the chill, along with the prevalence of otter and seal, made him feel almost at home.
But this place gave him the creeps; he was a stranger, a trespasser somewhere sacred. There was a looming quality to the island mountains that made him extraordinarily aware of his transience, his pettiness, his puniness. He grew more and more cautious, sure their progress was being monitored—he could have sworn he saw wraiths in the trees, and wolves padding warily in the brush. The big islands looked on breathlessly. All along the rocky cliffs, thousands of auks and puffins followed the canoe in dead silence, their heads turning simultaneously, their countless tiny eyes peering redly through the fog. As the weeks passed, the Aleut’s anxiety was manifested in tics and sighs, and he’d cringe each time the crimson sun sank behind those black volcanic summits. In his imagination the mountains would rise right out of the sea, as though to pluck him. But the islands, in all their dignity, would always refuse to acknowledge so meek a stranger, and return their eyes to sea. The Aleut would hang his head, and timidly paddle by.
Then for days and days he pulled his weary canoe west—through a strait parting two mighty islands not part of the chain, and thence across a sea that was a warm, enticing bath. Spring had come to the East Asian coastal waters, and the Ainu, alone and in groups, were venturing deeper in search of increasing bounty. The Aleut, absorbed in his thoughts of sweet climate and bitter fate, was unaware they’d been spotted.
This first meeting between strangers of different worlds was a brief and awkward one. A lone Ainu fisherman, seeing the Aleut come paddling out of the unknown, dropped his net and turned to stone. The Aleut, for his part, instinctively froze with his body turned half-away to make the leanest target possible. Their stares locked. Never had the Aleut seen a face so heavily bearded, and never hair so fair. The Ainu began banging on his bronze catch pail. Other fishers soon appeared from the north and south, effectively cutting off the canoe. The Aleut caressed his stone and looked to the sky. The wedge had vanished. He put down his head and paddled for all he was worth.
With the word out, uncountable fishing craft appeared out of the blue and broke into hot pursuit, their pilots determined to force the canoe ashore.
Suddenly they were in sight of land, and the sea was absolutely riddled with watercraft. A train of small boats cast off from the mainland, even as a posse of two-man coracle-like tubs began to surround the battered skin canoe, their inhabitants calling back and forth in astonishment at the sight of these dark, savage newcomers. But the pursuing little coastal men, banging excitedly on the sides of their boats, were not Ainu. They had very straight black hair, prominent cheekbones, and strangely slanted eyes. And their speech, oddly marvelous as it was, was a rapid series of coos, chirps, and barks. Their boats formed a tight semi-circle around the canoe, forcing the Aleut to approach the mainland. The little men banged their boats maniacally, with more joining in as the canoe neared shore.
A bit farther south was a natural harbor swarming with fishing vessels of every description. As the canoe was forced into this harbor, people along the rocky coast began banging whatever they could get their hands on, until the air was filled with their lunatic percussion.
Tiny brown men came running along a soft yellow cliff overlooking the harbor, gesturing wildly. The canoe was squeezed between a chain of tubs and the shore, and, as it slowed, the tempo and ferocity of the banging decreased accordingly. When the canoe came to a halt the banging and shouting stopped. Hero creaked to his feet. The first North American to set foot on Asian soil stepped out shakily.
There followed the profoundest silence imaginable.
A second later it was as if a dam had burst.
Hundreds of hysterical, yammering voices erupted from hundreds of hysterical, clinging men and women. Hero was spun around, jostled about, handed along. He stared into their astounded, pinched little faces, and the sun, pulsing between their heads as he was turned, repeatedly stabbed his eyes. There came an excited outburst and frantic splashing which could only have been the Aleut’s violent demise, and then Hero was somehow limping alongside a primitive fishing village, blindly following a narrow dirt path that hugged the yellow cliff’s base. The warm spring sun caught the dust as he shambled. He rounded a bend and stopped.
Half a dozen children stood in his way, too fascinated to run. A chatter and scuffle rose behind him. He looked back to see that he was now in the midst of a small crowd of these children, and that more were running up with cries of amazement.
A stone struck his shoulder. As Hero turned another glanced off his chest.
A moment later he was being pelted from all sides, and the giggles and gasps had become something wildly unreal. He dropped to his knees in a hail of hurled rocks, covered his head with his arms, and slithered up the path on his belly.
A new voice broke in; an older, authoritative voice.
The children scampered off squealing.
Hero, shaken to his feet, found himself face to face with a diminutive, shouting, incomprehensible old man. The old man threw his arm around Hero’s waist and, jabbering all the while, led him to a secondary path cut into the cliff’s face. This path sloped gently upward over the waves. Together they picked their way to a place maybe halfway up, where the cliff’s face was honeycombed with natural alcoves and dug-out caves. Most of these spaces were used as one-man shelters; a few, cut deeper in the earth, as family hives. Strange gabbing people slid out of these holes like worms, reaching, but the little old man, who was evidently a little old man of some stature, embraced his find possessively and shouted them back inside.
The path narrowed as they climbed.
At its summit spread the upscale end of the neighborhood. Hero was led to a hovel nestled amid dozens of similar hovels, all scattered around a dainty stream wending between patches of stunted vegetation.
The old man’s place was basically a one-room hut fashioned of earth and salvaged boat hulls, with a slender side-yard surrounded by dry, dusty hedges. But inside it was clean and tidy, with rice paper partitioning and, built into the far earthen wall, a miniature stone fireplace. The old man sat his guest in the exact center of the room. There he fed him scraps from his bowl, using long sticks to pluck out bits of fish and clumps of tiny, starchy white pellets.
He studied the brute closely, watched him chew, walked round and round him. He poked here. He pinched there.
And that night he lit a fire on his crushed-shell hearth.
Hero curled up on a mat where the gossip of flames could reach him. Nearby, at his delicate wicker table, the old man sat in semi-darkness, illuminated only from the waist down.
But his eyes were alive. They spat and darted as they reflected the fire’s light, and, when at last they’d begun to sputter, his scratchy little voice came pattering out of the dark, muttering something vile and oddly modulated, sometimes in a whisper, sometimes in a gathering snarl.
Hero feigned slumber, unable to ignore those paired ominous flashes. Still, the room was cozy, and the fire warm, and the play of light and shadow kicked sleep in his eyes.

In the morning he woke in the old man’s side-yard, his head pounding, a rusty iron clamp securely fastened around his neck. This clamp was attached to the outermost link of a crude three-foot chain, and the link at the other end to a long stake driven into eight inches of solid rock. The chain and stake, like the clamp, were hammered of local iron. The clamp was too tight for comfortable swallowing, the chain too short to make standing possible. Hero could, however, spread out on his chest and stretch an arm to a low row of hedges. By parting the tangled undergrowth he had a limited view of the fishing village below, and of the harbor beyond. As the days passed he was able to tweak himself a view-space discernible only from his peculiar vantage. He accomplished this by gently breaking small branches strategically, then guiding their interrupted growth with the utmost tenderness. It was his secret garden.
He had no memory—none whatsoever—of being staked here. Obviously the old man hadn’t set this up overnight. Hero’s mind prodded timidly…how many others had been chained to this spot, and why?
But over the subsequent weeks and months he went beyond caring. Each day was the same:  just after dawn the old man would storm into the tiny side-yard swinging his reed whip wildly. The lashings were savage and unremitting. The old man, except for his eyes, would be mute. Only his whip need speak. And the snap of his reed had but one message:  when you see this whip you go down, and you go down immediately.
The naked savage, scarred head to foot, learned to go prostrate on the moment. Even so, the old man couldn’t resist the temptation to indulge in the occasional good old, all-out thrashing. And after each session he would toss the prisoner a vile mess of dead fish and rotting leftovers.
Hero lived like this for many months, lost in a confused world of pain and anticipation. Perversely, he came to look forward to the bite of that whip, for, whether he flogged him in passion or just for sport, the old man was always sure to make it personal. It seemed their relationship might go on forever.
But one day there was a great commotion in the sleepy little fishing village. Hero parted the leaves and beheld a small train of oblong coaches at rest near the harbor. Large oxen yoked in pairs lolled between the carriages, immune to the clamor around them. There were dark shaggy horses and colorfully dressed Bactrian camels. The horses and camels were tethered in the rear, but were occasionally paraded around the carriages by little men wielding long painted bamboo poles. The whole affair was exotic and mesmerizing, eccentric and profane. Hero watched all day in amazement, infected by the hubbub, though he was totally mystified by the crowd’s fascination on the carriages’ far side.
And late that afternoon he saw the old man come walking out of that crowd, talking heatedly with another man. The stranger was shorter and broader than the old man, with long stringy hair and long stringy mustaches. He saw them climbing the path, saw them crawl inside a hole lashing furiously. They were lost from view for a minute, then popped up big as life. Hero glowed and curled up eagerly as they approached.
The old man and stranger came into the narrow side-yard still arguing. The old man grabbed Hero by the hair and twisted until he was facing the newcomer.
The stranger had oily, porous skin, and a round but grave countenance. His highly slanted eyes were bright and restless. He studied Hero’s mutilated face with keen interest before borrowing the old man’s reed. When Hero scraped at his feet he grunted and returned the reed.
The stranger pulled out something shiny and hefted it in his hand. He then raised his other hand while considering Hero, as though weighing him too. The old man’s eyes glinted, and for an instant his expression became grotesquely servile. The stranger and old man, facing, nodded curtly in unison. The stranger dropped the shiny thing onto the old man’s itching palm. The old man whipped Hero frantically before taking a small ax to the chain. A few hard blows split a link, the broken link was bent back by the tool’s shaft, and the prisoner was at last released.
The old man handed the stranger a short hempen rope. The stranger bowed deeply. He then tied an end of the rope through one of the remaining links and began dragging Hero along. Hero’s hands sought the old man, who kicked and cursed him all the way to the path. The three stumbled single-file to the bottom. The old man waved his arms and shouted hysterically, trotting behind until he ran out of breath. But he got in a final kick and, before he came to a gasping halt, managed to lash Hero once for old time’s sake, and to spit on him twice for luck.

There were five carriages; a long one in the center hitched to four oxen, and two smaller coaches in the front and rear with a pair of oxen on each. The carriages were old and battered, built of splitting wood slats and rusted iron braces. Various hides, spare wheels, and a hundred odds and ends were tied to the sides and roofs. Hero’s new master, using him as a ram, shoved him through the crowd to the long carriage. He hauled him up the single wood step and watched the crowd’s reaction. Children hid behind mothers, mothers hissed and jeered, men spat in that smashed, disgusting face.
Satisfied, Hero’s master twisted the rope tighter and dragged him through the hide flap that served as the carriage’s rear wall.
A strange ruckus began at their entrance.
Inside the carriage were bulky shapes and quirky movements, yet the immediate and overwhelming impression was one of unbelievable stench. Hero, instantly covered with flies, was kicked and shoved down a foot-wide aisle. The carriage’s walls were riddled with black flecks of old dried blood, the floor coated with standing *****, a variety of small carcasses, and some clinging, indefinable slime. But the living contents of this hell were so horrifying, and so unexpected, that Hero at once dropped to his knees. Observing this, master grabbed a whip off the wall and lashed him along the floor.
A number of bamboo cages lined either side of the carriage, each four feet high, four feet wide, and three feet deep. In the first cage to their left, a quadruple amputee dangled in a leather harness in a cloud of flies, jealously gnawing a chicken carcass balanced on his belly. The second cage held a man who had been burned over ninety per cent of his body, and the third a middle-aged woman with no eyes or tongue, her head shaved. The next cage housed a fully grown black leopard, its bright eyes fixed on the horrified newcomer. Then an empty cage, and finally a cage containing a demented man whose long yellow nails were busily raking a face deeply scarred and bleeding.
The first cage against the opposite wall held two girls rolling in their own excrement. Siamese twins unable to part, they had developed a unique method of locomotion, and now executed a three-quarters cartwheel in Hero’s direction, their mangled, severely bitten hands attempting to reach him through the bars. In the cage next to theirs a naked dwarf glowered menacingly, his eyes following coldly as Hero’s master shoved him down the narrow aisle, occasionally pausing to lash a cage. The hissing and howling increased as each prisoner beheld the new neighbor.
The third cage held an intensely sick adult Bornean sun bear, so confined it was entirely unable to move. Its hide was a patchwork of scraggly fur and grayish skin, glistening with odd eruptions. It rolled its sunken eyes in Hero’s direction, its muzzle twitching feebly.
The next cage contained a man who was frightfully diseased. Broad fungal patches covered his face and limbs, terminating in waxy folds that dangled like a rooster’s wattles. Welling sores spotted his chest and back. His eyes were bugged and sallow; his lower lip drooped below his chin. He barked wetly at Hero’s passing legs.
The second-to-last cage housed a rare, completely hairless Chinese albino, and the last cage a very tall, skeletal woman. The albino snapped at Hero while repeatedly banging his head against the cage. The woman hissed and coiled like a snake, her spine arching amazingly.
Master hauled Hero to the empty cage on his left, swung its door open with his foot, and forced him to his knees by pushing down with all his weight. He kicked and punched until Hero had been squeezed inside, then shut and secured the wide bamboo door.
Master inched his way back down the carriage, hammering the **** of his whip on each cage as he passed. There was a glimpse of daylight as he lifted the flap.
Once he’d departed, the carriage grew eerily silent.
Hero cautiously turned his head. Less than a foot away, the black leopard was frozen in place, one paw waving hypnotically in his face. The beast’s fangs were bared, its ears straight back, its eyes glistening. Hero turned ever so slowly, until he was looking into the eyes of the demented man in the final cage. The man cocked his head quizzically. A second later he was screaming his lungs out in a bizarre downward spiral.
At once the carriage erupted. The freaks shrieked and scrabbled, the leopard spun in place. Directly across the aisle, the albino hurled himself against the bars of his cage. He batted his face with his fists, threw back his head, and just howled and howled and howled. The snake woman curled even tighter, her long scrawny legs entwined behind her head.
Hero sat with breath held, absolutely silent, absolutely motionless. He very, very slowly closed his eyes.

Later that night the flap was flung high. The menagerie came alive as master, weirdly illuminated by moonlight, slowly made his way down the aisle carrying a skin sack oozing blood. He stopped at each cage to toss in a dying chicken and a handful of smelt.
When he reached Hero’s cage he looked down thoughtfully.
He extracted a quivering chicken and held it above the cage so that blood dripped on the brute’s deeply pleated forehead. Hero lowered his eyes. Master’s face darkened. He smashed the bird against the cage, over and over, a vein throbbing in his temple. Finally he hissed and displayed the limp chicken high over the albino’s head. The albino yelped and kicked, thrusting his hand up between the bars and jerking it back to lick away the blood rolling down his forearm.
Master eyed Hero coldly before pointedly dropping the chicken into the albino’s searching hands.
Master hissed again. He slowly made his way out.
Soon there was a commotion outside. The carriage rocked a bit before settling. Hero, turning in his cage to peek through a rift in the wood, saw horses being urged forward. He could hear men shouting. The carriage rocked again. He looked up and saw the gibbous moon suspended in mist. For just a second something wedge-shaped cut across its soft white face.
But then the oxen were grunting, the wheels had been freed, and the horses drawn abreast. Master’s lash spat left and right, and the show proceeded…west.

                                              MA­STER

She was very round and very small, with very short, very shaggy black hair. Her arms bore the scars of numerous bites from beast and man, and around her neck ran long wheals from a particularly savage owner. Hero, having spent the better part of the morning watching master storm in and out of a strange screaming house, now watched him drag the little round woman through the dirt. For a while he listened to the song of his master’s lash, waiting for the woman to break. But there was never a whimper.
It had been a difficult transaction for master, and an altogether difficult morning. For hours he’d paced up and down the main carriage, alternately murmuring affectionately into, and lashing at, each cage he visited. The sun bear, long dead and stuffed, had been taken outside for barter. It had soon been returned.
Master had lingered over Hero’s cage for a good while, staring critically. He’d begun shouting, and three of his men had burst in through the flap, unlatched the demented man’s cage, and dragged him out by the feet for trade, master personally stomping on his torn and groping hands.
And now master was kicking and shoving the little woman down the aisle as his men restrained her by the hair and throat. Upon master’s command these men stripped her naked and commenced pinching and slapping while making threatening faces and mocking noises. The freaks sat right up in their cages.
The woman looked as though she’d fainted:  her arms were lax, her eyes rolled up. Her whole face seemed to purse, and her body, head to toe, began to run blue. Her fingers quivered, arched, and clawed—the woman was self-asphyxiating. Master fairly leaped with delight while the cages rocked around him. He had the men slap her awake. Once she was fully conscious they stuffed her into the demented man’s old cage next to Hero’s.
Master then looked in eagerly, one to the other, his hands balled into fists. The woman buried her odd round face in her forearms as she squeezed herself into her cage’s deepest corner. Hero gazed indifferently and went back to his peephole.
Master exploded. He smacked and kicked the cages over and over, swore up and down, ran the shaft of his whip back and forth against the heavy bamboo bars. Eventually he calmed somewhat. He stared coldly at Hero, made a ***** smile, and spat right in his eyes. A tense minute passed. Master slowly made his way outside.
Hero automatically relaxed. Across the aisle the albino ****** his face between his cage’s bars to sniff the newcomer. The leopard, bobbing rhythmically, emitted a high-pitched squeal that gradually descended to a steadily throbbing growl.
Hero looked the stranger over. Once she’d lowered her hands he saw that her eyes were crossed, her jaw slack, her face as round as the full moon. He looked closer. There were scars all over her throat and arms:  plainly, the small round woman had been treated very badly. Hero instinctively slid a foot between the bars; the woman cried out and scrunched even deeper. Across the aisle the albino quickly extended an arm. Without knowing why, Hero turned on him. The albino flinched, his eyes tearing into Hero’s. A second later he was stamping his feet and grinning wildly. Hero went back to his peephole.
Next morning master and two of his men dismantled the bamboo walls separating Hero’s and the woman’s cages. They bound the frames with broad leather bands, making a single cage of the two.
A common door was fashioned and secured. Master used his broad blade to shear away Hero’s rags. The men hunched around the long cage expectantly.
The naked couple backed away. Master was instantly exasperated—he shouted, lashed furiously, stamped and screamed, jabbed a broken shaft between the bars with malevolent intent, whirled and hurled the shaft at nothing. The carriage’s inmates went out of their minds. At master’s bellowed command a man scurried outside, returning with a long rope of woven leather strands. Master opened the cage and, applying all his weight, pinned Hero and his new mate in an awkward embrace while his men tied them together.
Again master and his men bent over the long cage to watch.
When Hero realized his predicament he made a desperate attempt to reach his peephole.
The men, misreading his struggles, babbled and cheered, but master threw up his hands. He then, through gesture, ordered his men to drape a number of hides over the long cage. Once these hides were in place he very quietly bent to one knee and placed an ear against the cage. After a while he cursed and rose to his feet. He shook the cage and stormed out, whipping and kicking the howling inmates.
In the semi-darkness the man and woman quit fighting their bonds.
A muffled patter began on the hide-covered roof.
Rain, as always, had a calming effect on the carriage’s occupants, causing the freaks and beasts to slip, one by one, into lethargy or slumber. Under such a spell, the attainment of master’s goal was inevitable.
It was a coupling both innocent and vile, without passion or celebration. Occasionally the freaks would surface, register their excitement by shrieking, shaking their cages, or otherwise clamoring…but very quickly the air would stifle them, weighing their heads and confusing their impulses. The atmosphere grew heavier by the minute. And, when night rolled over the carriages, the rain came down in sheets.

Leaning ******* the woman’s cage, master slipped his gnarly hand between the bars and slowly rubbed her belly in a counter-clockwise motion, his sinister features soft in the candle’s light. And he told, in nonsensical cooing whispers, of a lovingly secure and impossibly prosperous future.
How large and promising that belly had become! And how wise was he, the cunning and aggressive master, in his far-reaching business decisions. He turned his affection to the motionless gaping brute; stroked the battlefield of its face, tossed in another lizard. Master rubbed his palms together. From now on it was extra lizards daily, for both the woman and her mate. He remarked, with only passing interest, his star player’s continuing indifference. They didn’t know each other, didn’t need each other.
There’d been months of shows on the road now, broken only recently by this sensible rejoining of the mates at conception.
Hero’s horrible disfigurement was unquestionably top draw; he was a guaranteed crowd pleaser at every stop. So now master looked him straight in the eyes and smiled. He held the reeking candle high. The carriage was absolutely silent. Master smiled again, rose to his feet, tiptoed away.
Hero watched him retreat until the flap had fallen. He returned to his peephole, saw master round the rear of the carriage and slowly crunch by. For a time he could see nothing but the half-shapes of junipers bathed in starlight. There was a tentative movement to his right and a large shape came to obstruct his view.
The horse stood for a minute in profile. It slowly brought its head to rest against the carriage, applying its eye to the peephole. Hero froze. The two remained fixed, eyeball to eyeball, while a breeze played odd tunes on the outer wall’s hanging paraphernalia. The horse’s big dark eye rolled nervously. A long moment passed. Slowly the horse backed off. It stood uncertainly for a while, staring at the peephole. Then it quietly moved away.

Master kicked the cages one by one, left hand and right, as he slowly made his way down the aisle. Into each cage he delivered a personalized warning in passing—a growl, a hiss, a bark—but he was quickly losing control. Animal electricity hopscotched the carriage, cage to cage, ceiling to floor, front to rear and back again. Master froze. Much more of this excitement, he feared, could seriously agitate the woman—with grave consequences for master.
She was splayed on her back, in labor’s throes, her ankles and wrists bound to the long cage. Hero had been removed to give her room, and now sat hunched atop the snake woman’s cage, two men holding him by the throat and legs.
Master gnashed and snarled, listening to the woman scream, watching her stupid round head bounce up and down and back and forth. He knew it! He’d been suckered, hoodwinked, scammed—ripped off like a common rube. The woman was too ******* to handle even something as natural as childbirth. Still…it was too late to second-guess himself—all these months he’d been patient—he’d been supportive and vigilant and now he would not be denied. He flogged one of the men to alleviate his tension.
The blue lady was very slowly, very dramatically arching her spine. Master wiped the sweat from his eyes. When the bars were pleating her big round belly, her shoulders began drumming on the straw-strewn floor.
Master screamed one very colorful expletive.
A razor silence came over the carriage. Not a body moved or breathed.
At last two men tiptoed around their purpling master and leaned into the cage. One obediently ****** a foot between the bars. He pushed ******* her right knee while using a hand to grip the left knee, spreading her legs wide. The other man drew a broad leather strap between her teeth. After lifting the woman’s head he pulled the strap behind her neck, knotted it to make a gag, and yanked a skin sack over her face. He looked up anxiously. Master licked his lips and nodded. The man made a fist and frantically punched the woman’s face until her muffled screams ceased. She moaned gently throughout her contractions.
Master genuflected, brought a spitting candle in tight, and took a deep breath. As he raised his hand the candle’s light bounced off his knife’s chipped and scored eleven-inch blade. Master swore and reached down carefully. He flicked his wrist twice and the menagerie went mad.

The child was a tremendous disappointment.
Master had eagerly anticipated an infant ******* and deformed; something embracing the best qualities of its parents. He had even designed a special cage that could be expanded by degrees as the spawn developed. There also remained the tantalizing option of a family display, though such an undertaking would require the eventual construction of a structure even larger than the cage its parents now shared. Master anguished over the logistics, knowing it would break his heart to have to cut one of his jewels’ throats just to make room for a growing child. Nights he would slowly pace the carriage with all the possessiveness of a jealous suitor, one hand maneuvering a sputtering candle, the other tenderly rapping his whip’s **** against each visited cage.
But the boy was a flawless specimen; a beautiful, undemanding baby. From the moment master angrily tossed the placenta he felt cheated, even betrayed. He grimaced as it peaceably took to its mother’s breast, despite the surrounding horrors. Master hated it, immediately and entirely. The ****** thing was so docile it was almost charming. He drew his knife and was just reaching down, when an overwhelming sense of dread shook him like a rat in the jaws of a mastiff. Sweat poured down his squat, pig-tailed nape. He knew he would live to regret it, but decided to not cut the child’s throat right away. It was the oddest feeling. His knife hand had trembled for the first time in his life, and he had found himself momentarily contemplating right and wrong at the outset of a perfectly simple and commonplace procedure. That was it, then. His business instincts were letting him know there was a good, albeit unknowable, reason to let the sweet baby live. Master left the carriage anxiously, muttering in his ambivalence.
The boy grew to embody his worst expectations. Not only was it a poorly oriented child, clinging to its father rather than its master almost from the moment of weaning, but it soon proved a lousy draw with the patrons. Those who paid to view the child dangling in its special cage inevitably departed unsatisfied, some vocalizing, strangely, an acute sense of shame. So once again master entered the carriage with his knife hand steady, and once again he exited trembling, his heart in his throat and his soul in a whirl. He whipped the dwarf savagely before leaving. What place conscience in the mind of a businessman?
Soon as the boy could walk, master put him to work fetching and feeding. But the brat was slothful in his chores, preferring to hang around his family’s cage while staring wistfully at his father. For their part, the parents were wholly disinterested. Master would fume while Hero gazed for hours out his peephole—even as the mother lolled, perpetually ill. Sometimes that accursed woman’s condition riled poor master to no end. She could teeter at death’s door for months at a time, her body changing hues to the fascination of customers, only to bounce back with a hardiness that was of interest to no one. But at the peak of her performances the blue lady could really hold a crowd. Master produced an entire outdoors extravaganza around her:  within concentric rings of raging torches his men would slowly strip her naked before wild audiences, then allow the dwarf and albino to take her while the leopard strained against a gaily festooned chain. Master circulated his crew through the crowds to encourage his patrons’ cult-like behavior of breath-holding and fainting. No getting around it:  the customers were crazy about her—village to village, master’s Bactrian vanguard’s colorful robes shouted her approaching fame. And Hero’s popularity continued to soar. Many were the nights when master, pacing the perimeter, wondered just what devilry could have produced the lovely boy.
Overall, Hero remained his master’s favorite conceit and hottest property. Part of the little brute’s appeal was, of course, his exoticness. And certainly the ugliness arising from his deformity was compelling…but there was a detachedness about him that fascinated every soul with a fistful of copper cash coins. Whether they ****** him, cudgeled him, or spat in his face, he remained unflappable, staring only at the aching sky. Though many would leave uneasy, master noted with deep satisfaction that they almost invariably returned.
The boy soon evinced an amazing affinity for animals. No matter how agitated an ox or horse became, the child could pacify it with one hand on a lowered brow. This was a source of endless fascination for the crew. Wagers were made. The boy was pitted against oxen whipped to a frenzy. But they would not harm him; they would rather go prostrate and take the lash. Master tried to work this knack into a viable act, but his patrons just weren’t buying. They wanted freaks.
When the lad was a mere five years old, master had him trained in the peripheral art of the pickpocket. The boy worked well alone, and had all the makings of a fine little flimflam artist. Master sighed, his chronic nightmares a thing of the past. As ever, his business instincts were guiding him well.
Then late one afternoon he found the boy squatting outside his parents’ cage. The boy had done the unthinkable:  he had deposited his day’s pickings at the feet of his father instead of bringing the ***** to master. Master flew into a rage and raised his whip to give the little traitor the lashing he deserved. But before he could deliver a single stroke his other hand shot to his chest and he staggered back against the albino’s cage. He blinked down at the boy, who regarded him steadily while scooping the plunder into a little pile.
From that day on the boy placed whatever he could get his hands on at his father’s feet. As time passed he became ever more adroit at thievery, growing into a youngster both admired and despised by master and his crew; admired because theft was a cinch for him, despised because they were all that much lighter in their possessions.
Now, for eleven long years the strange little train had bounced along, sometimes camping outside villages for months, occasionally pausing on connecting roads. The show traversed the heart of Manchuria, skirted the Gobi in the north, and so eventually crossed almost the entire width of Mongolia before proceeding north to the confluence of the rivers Yenisey and Ob’. Much silver and copper had come to master’s coffer, much fame to his name, but he now sat looking over a vast, unmapped Siberian wilderness. The mostly nomadic characters they’d been encountering spoke in tongues unfamiliar even to his personal valet-translator-accountant, and the tone of these nomads had been unmistakably hostile.
Master huddled surlily under a canopy of sopping hides. Night was falling hard during a merciless rain, the wind was picking up, and his supplies coach was bogged in a growing sea of mud. At that moment he accepted the whole end-of-the-line concept, and knew he wasn’t going anywhere but back. And when he got back he was going to shine! He jumped from the coach.
The earth took his weight for a heartbeat—and he was up to his chin in muck, splashing about on his hands and knees, sliding forward on his palms and toes. He did a belly flop into a rain-filled depression and churned to his feet with the devil in his eyes. Wallowing in mud and bile, master stomped to the supplies coach and kicked wildly at the stuck rear wheels.
Somewhere between kicks he lost it completely.
Master broke for his whip. One minute he was blindly lashing his men, the next he’d succumbed to a mindless ferocity. He thrashed about like a berserker; whipping the beasts, the coach, the very night. His men were scarcely able to move in all that mud, but their dread of his savagery kept them hopping. They gathered as one and shoved the coach recklessly; slipping, splashing, shouting. A minute later, three lay splayed underfoot, but the mired wheel had been freed.
Throughout all this the oxen had swayed nervously, while the horses softly tramped their hooves in place. Master had his men turn the oxen about until the rickety train was pointing dead east. He checked the hitches and personally applied the lash. The oxen didn’t budge. Master swore and wiped the rain from his eyes. He had the horses hitched ahead of the oxen, but they were even less obliging. Master flew into a spectacular rage. His men, fearing for their lives, ran liberally with the lash.
The swaying of oxen picked up until the entire train of carriages was rocking. Yet the oxen could not, would not be compelled, under any amount of prodding, to take an eastward step. Master looked around in exasperation.
The night had gone insane.
Horses were fighting hitches, oxen walking on fire.
Master cursed the rain and mud and lashed all the harder. His men, seeking to please, whipped maniacally until the horses and both lead oxen broke their hitches and bolted west. The men immediately embraced the rear oxen, but the hitches shattered and the beasts stormed off. The remaining horses blew it, kicking at everything and nothing.
Inside the long carriage all was chaos. The albino was neighing and screaming, the aged leopard spinning in its cage. Hero stared out his peephole, amazed at the blur of figures stumbling by in the rain.
A pair of clopping blows rattled the opposite wall. Three slats cracked. A tremendous impact, and a huge section collapsed. A thrashing, hysterical mare burst through the breach in a veil of rain.
The horse went mad, killing the albino and snake woman in a flurry of hooves. She fell ******* the near wall, crushing the cages. The leopard shot into the air like a rocket, slashed at the mare’s throat and vanished in the rain. The horse reared above the family cage. She was just coming down in a wheeling storm of hooves when something made her freeze. Her stare locked with Hero’s, and a second later her eyes were rolling in their sockets. The mare kicked crazily and came down ******* her left flank, smashing the long cage’s side. She whirled upright and leaped outside.
For a tense minute the family sat in the rubble, rain bombarding their eyes. Nothing in their years of captivity had prepared them for such a situation. But by the end of that minute the son had taken full command. He rolled onto his back, braced himself, and kicked his parents across the aisle, through the remnants of the opposing cage, and out of the carriage. They all fell about in the mud and rain. To the west, the mare stared back strangely as she splashed into the night. The boy wedged himself between his parents, threw his arms around them, and pushed with all his might. Their bodies found a common center of gravity. Fumbling drunkenly, the family staggered through the rain in the wake of the mare.

The boy was the natural leader.
Master’s innocent-looking little ex-student could quickly assess and exploit almost any situation. He did the foraging and the figuring, slept with one eye open and one fist ready. He got what he wanted by charm or by stealth, slipping off at nightfall, returning at daybreak with small slaughtered animals and chunks of dark peasant bread. He also pilfered any bauble or oddity he could get his paws on, to be placed reverently at his father’s mangled feet. Breadwinner and watchdog, he faithfully held the family together; a nuclear son. He sewed hardy feather-lined cloaks of reindeer hide, and turned a cache of marmot pelts into a kind of side-slung backpack. He was doting nurse during his mother’s episodes, and unbending apportioner of calories in lean times. Dauntless when it meant crossing mighty rivers, relentless when it came to finding mountain passes. But the endless marching, the unreliable diet, and the countless predators made the three wanderers lean, haggard moving targets. There were times when the little lamp of family was all but extinguished, and long stands in places that seemed absolutely impassable. Still, the boy would work things out. He would stoop to any level to feed Hero, and for a stranger to threaten his father was to summon a psychotic, unyielding monster. He was both spear and shield.
The toughest job of all was maintaining a tight unit, meaning he was forced to become a hard-nosed ******* whenever his father was ready to wander off, which always seemed to be whenever the mother was hurting most. She’d become a tremendous impediment to Hero’s compulsion, and therefore her son’s chief nemesis. It wasn’t a big-picture concern anyway; the writing was on the wall. The blue lady’s attacks were increasing spectacularly on the steppe; her world had always been an enclosure of some kind, and the great horizon was proving just too much. Perhaps these intense affairs served as links to Hero’s suppressed memories, for at the onset of each attack he’d turn and hike, and then only exhaustion could curb him. The boy would press his mother on, dragging, shoving, and smacking—he could be mean when necessary, and though circumstances had made him the nucleus, their worlds unquestionably revolved around Hero. Where he sat, they sat. When he rose, they did the same. In this manner they marched for years across the vast steppes, single-file—father, mother, and son, respectively—unmolested, lacking possessions, always following the sun. Long before they could be measured they had drifted into obscurity.
The woman’s end came quickly and dramatically, in a rocky little depression on a half-frozen field. One moment she was responsive to her son’s prompts, the next she was flat on her back, her eyelids fluttering. That night she leapt from fever to chill, from alertness to stupor. The boy, squatting beside their campfire, watched her face and hands run cadaver-blue to fish belly-pale and back again. While he was staring her eyes popped open and her hands came scrabbling. He sweated through the clawing embrace until he could bear it no longer. He oozed out and ran down to fetch his father.
When they got back Hero watched incuriously for a while. His mate’s face was scrunched up and her skin the color of sapphires. She wasn’t breathing.
His gaze became glassy, his eyes returned to the night. As he rose the boy immediately grabbed an arm. Neither moved for minutes. When the boy at last relinquished, his father casually stumbled off.
Strange things were going on in Hero’s world. Some days he would notice how animals regarded him oddly, in a manner that seemed almost personal. He found, for instance, that particular creatures were recognizable even over great distances. A number of times he would sit with one in a stare-down, waiting patiently, until the animal’s natural disposition caused it to bolt. Though the meaning of these encounters was way over his head, he would watch, and he would listen.
In time he noticed an increasing skittishness in some of these familiar creatures. Something had them spooked. He then observed a number of lean gray wolves moving in and out of the picture with an air of complete indifference:  these wolves weren’t hunting; they were loitering—lounging in the grass, lackadaisically padding to the rear, filing by slowly in the distance. Once in a while a lounger would raise its head, yawn cavernously, and drop back out of sight. So unobtrusive was their behavior that even Hero’s ever-vigilant son began to take them for granted. They paused where the family paused, and halted whenever the woman broke down. Perfectly camouflaged by the gray boulders and dire sky, they were completely forgotten in the drama of her passing.
There were other, far subtler events existing for Hero’s senses alone. He could perceive patterns in everything around him; in the manner vegetation gave way wherever his heart was leading, in the way so many animals appeared to be not merely mirroring, but making his course. And wind, rain, running water:  these phenomena had voices. Yet not for everybody. No one—not his mate, not his son, not another soul on the planet could hear this call, for they were all of a sort. They were static, they were temporal. Hero couldn’t have cared less about the lives of his family, or about the mundane goings-on in the encampments and small tribes they skirted. Such beings lived in a world that was defined by the moment. They shouted, they banged, they clamored.
But west—west was music.
For his boy, once again watching Hero shamble off, the moment of truth had arrived. He looked back down, at his mother’s death mask being remade by the dying light of their campfire. As the flames dwindled he could have sworn he saw shadows creep into the wells of her eyes, while others, crawling up around her jawline, drew her bluing lips like purse strings. He hopped to his feet and ran for another handful of tinder. When their little fire provided enough light he dropped to his knees and looked again.
She was sinking right before his eyes, every aspect of her expression in collapse. The boy watched clinically, fascinated. As the flames began to sputter he thought he could see large purple bruises spreading across her cheeks like the seeping limbs of overflowing pools. He bent closer.
From deep in the night came the longest, the leanest, the saddest wail he’d ever heard. He turned to see the starlit ghost of his father, facing away, staring at a low barren hill. Uncountable stars embroidered the spot. The boy made out a low shape moving along the hilltop, cutting off patches of stars as it passed.
The wolf howled again; a mournful, spiraling cry to nowhere and nothing. Hero’s head notched upward. He began to hike.
Halfway to his feet the boy stopped dead.
It took a minute to sense why he’d frozen in place, and a good while longer for his heart to quit pounding. He was aware of a nervous padding, and, once his vision had adjusted, of a lazy stream of eyes gleaming in the dying campfire’s light. The eyes bobbed around him, glared momentarily, returned to the ground.
A massive gasp, and his mother was tearing at his wrist. He watched her hyperventilating, saw her bulbous yellow eyes sinking in a wide violet pool. With a sizzle and pop the last tongue of flame was taken by the night.
Then her clammy hands were all over him, pulling and demanding, caressing and beseeching. He had to pry them off like leeches, had to place them clasped on her shuddering arched belly.
A silky snarl rose almost in his ear.
With a little squeal he sprang to his feet, even as something nearby jumped back in response.
The boy stood absolutely still while the panting thing padded nearer. They stood very close, smelling each other. He instinctively extended a hand, palm forward. But it was no good; his arm was shaking out of control. The snarl rose again, not so tentatively this time. His mother’s nails tore at his ankle.
The boy gently stepped away, only to find himself surrounded by the shifting silhouettes of half a dozen gray wolves. They approached in a calculated manner:  two from the left, one from the right, another from behind. He was being goaded away from his mother; he could hear her fists beating the ground, and a few seconds later the sounds of a nauseating assault and ravaging.
He shakily raised his other hand. Now both arms were extended, and their message was clearly one of defense rather than control. Two snapping wolves stepped aside, leaving him a gateway into the night. A cold wet nose bumped his wrist.
Screaming like a woman, he took off after his father just as fast as his feet would carry him.

                                                  BOY

Alon­g the great Kazakh Steppe a man could wander a lifetime and never meet another of his kind—especially if his kind happened to be Alaskan Inuk, and if he happened to be the teenaged patriarch of a two-man family going nowhere.
Here history is mostly mute.
Upon this continent-spanning steppe, unnamed communities were scattered and rebuilt, lives blown about by the wind. The only centers of humanity a traveler might encounter, far removed from the Silk Road at the very crack of the new millennium, were temporary encampments of civilization at its rudest—shifting holes of cutthroat commerce existing solely for the barter of silk and spices and hapless souls. Life here was revered far less than merchandise, and the longest-lived men were those who kept their distance.
Hero and his boy hiked over permafrost and tundra for years; their meandering course a drunken mapmaker’s scrawl. Chronological entries along this imaginary line would reveal that they’d stopped, sometimes for months at a time, when the father had grown too weak and disoriented to continue. Hero’s internal compass was long-sprung, and his weight had fallen considerably. He’d sit on his lonesome, scarecrow-scrawny, wistfully scrolling a 360-horizon while his boy scouted and scavenged. Then, for no apparent reason, he’d just up-and hike—sometimes northwest, sometimes along a tangential plane that always threatened to spiral. It was brutal:  winters were frigid, summers, by odd contrast, running steamy to baking. Season by season these marches lost their tenaciousness, and eventually their heart. Hero’s obsession was becoming his demise.
Now, to a hypothetical observer, the ratty pair of woolly camels materializing out of the rising August heat might have been mirages.
These beasts were novelties here, and pioneers, for they were way beyond their normal stomping grounds. They’d tramped for months with a mind-numbing monotonousness, a thousand miles and more; round the Urals to the south, and through the hard territory braced by the Volga and Voronezh, avoiding anything that even smelled of men. They’d been wild camels; ugly, ill-tempered, and unpredictable, until the boy tamed them by touch…but this new pattern was a literal change of pace…for weeks the frail little man and his dark teenaged son rose and fell with the animals’ rhythm, lulled by it, sick of it, dreaming of lands far removed from hoarfrost and peat moss. In this manner they were borne clear to present-day Belarus, whereupon the camels’ stupefying march began to quicken. Mile by mile they put on steam, until one day they reached a broad area distinguishable from its bracing terrain only by its many deep surface cracks. Here the camels’ behavior became erratic; they crouched at an angle while tramping, their long necks oscillating, their noses bobbing along the ground. Eventually they came upon a dingy pool nestled in a pebbly depression. The local brush surrounding this pool was situated like iron filings about a lodestone. The boy hauled back his camel’s neck and laid a hand on its brow. The brute slowed to a halt. The other camel imitated its partner, move for move. Simultaneously the animals dropped to their knees.
The boy jumped off, catching Hero as he fell. The camels stood watching stupidly as son maneuvered father, but after a while grew nervous and began tramping their hooves in time. They slowly stepped to the pool’s rim and knelt woozily, their noses poised just above the surface. Their whiskers danced on the pool’s face, their lids became heavy, their hindquarters quivered as they drank. Their nostrils, having fluttered in unison, remained agape. They appeared to be asleep.
The boy began filling skins.
The water was quite warm; he slurped a palmful and almost immediately felt intoxicated.
He flicked it off his fingers; the water was bad.
Three heads were now mirrored in the pool; the camels’ at ten o’clock and two o’clock, the boy’s at six. He watched their reflections continue to ripple, long after the pool had become still. His face, melting and firming, rapidly fluctuated between extremes of age, and between his own recognizable features and those of some…monstrosity. The effect was hypnotic. He felt his joints stiffen; his eyes became weak, his thoughts muddled…his face was irresistibly drawn to the pool’s surface, and for a moment he was in real peril of drowning. He ****** his head aside and creaked to his feet.
Where the camels had knelt were only the prints of their bellies and knees. In the distance they could be seen galloping all-out for the horizon, right back the way they’d come. The boy watched until they were swallowed by their dust, and when he turned around his father was long gone.
Now he knew it was all just a matter of time.
And sure enough, after eleven more days of feebly staggering along, Hero completely ran out of gas. The boy bundled him up in a shawl, like an old woman.
Sitting there, cradling an unresponsive man weighing less than eighty pounds, he couldn’t help but let his morbid fantasies run wild. He was now old enough to realize his father had at some time suffered severe head trauma, and honest enough to accept that the man was rapidly approaching a vegetative state. This understanding accompanied him like a shadow, and that night he questioned, for the very first time, his own convoluted rationale.
He was just beginning to sense that his will was not his own.
He built a semi-permanent camp west of the Desna and foraged in a tight spiral, always returning in a straight line. Some days he came back feeling uneasy, sensing another presence. Then it was every other day. It bugged him to no end. At last, when it became every day, he hauled his father to his feet and began a resolute march to the west.
Again he became anxious, and after only a dozen yards.
He turned slowly while hunching, certain something bulky had just dropped out of sight. Nothing looked suspicious, everything looked suspicious. He walked Hero some more, occasionally peering back over his shoulder. There was…something.
He whirled:  only masses of rock and high brush. Yet, when he really strained his eyes, he was sure, pretty sure, that he could make out a large crouching body continuous with the rocks. Heart in his throat, he began a slow steady creep, only to pause, positive the bulge, whatever it was, had shifted in response. The boy very gradually raised his arm until it was level with his eyes, faced the palm outward, and extended the arm parallel with the ground. He could almost feel some kind of current passing between his itching palm and…nothing. He walked over to Hero, stopped again. There’d been the subtlest sense of traction. The boy propped up his father in a cloud of flies and waited.
In a minute the bulge drew *****.
Out of the brush strolled a furry gray wild ***, her back inclined from countless weary miles; stretching her neck, pausing to nibble, taking her sweet time. Grungy as she was, she fit right in.
At the boy’s first casual step she immediately hit the dirt and remained flat on her belly, one big dark eye staring between her hooves. Another step, and her **** bunched up. The closer he got, the higher her rear end rose. When he was almost at arm’s length she sprang back and danced away, seeming to bound with delight. But not to the east, as she’d come.
To the northwest.
She backpedaled while the boy came on whistling and cooing, matching him step for step. But the moment he threw up his arms in resignation she spun round as though cued, dropped on her belly, and peered over her shoulder.
The boy was first to blink. This time he approached fractionally, keeping movements to a minimum. She rose just as carefully, sauntering northwest in reverse, and at the first sign of hesitation turned, dropped, and cautiously gazed back. The boy glared at that huge mocking **** and broke into a sprint. She easily danced out of reach, plopped down, and continued to stare.
He began hurling stones, with venom and with accuracy, until she’d scurried into the brush.
But on the way back to his father he could feel her tagging along.
Twenty feet behind she halted, looking bemused.
The boy nodded ironically. He walked Hero over, murmuring baby talk all the way, and firmly placed a palm on the animal’s muzzle once her breath grazed his fingers. She stroked his hand up and down with her whiskers, gave a kind of curtsy, and waited on her knees while he helped his father mount.
At Hero’s touch a shudder ran down her body. She stood up straight. Her eyes became set, her back absolutely stiff. She put down her head and began the long trek northwest, never once breaking stride.
It was an amazing march, an impossible feat. For a little over three days and almost four hundred miles she progressed like an automaton, driving herself without rest, without food or water.
After trotting alongside for an hour the boy climbed on and force-fed his father berries and smoked meat, his dark eyes constantly searching the countryside. Occasionally he’d see a run of red foxes to their left, watching intently, padding cautiously. Sooner or later they’d vanish, only to be replaced by a train of feline or equine pursuers. Packs approached and receded while, high overhead, flocks formed triangular patterns that continually broke up and reformed. There was a peculiar rhythmic quality to this ebb and flow that lulled his senses further. The boy shook his head to clear it, but his exhaustion was deeper than he’d supposed—even the brush appeared to be leaning northwest.
That first day he grew numb with the pace, and that night the relentless pounding of her hooves drew him into a miserable slumber. He wrapped his arms around his sleeping father and lay half atop. When he couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer he tore strips from his skins, then looped his tied wrists round her neck, his ankles round her belly.
On the second day she was breathing hard, but her back was still high and she showed no signs of faltering. Her eyes remained focused on the ground dead ahead. She always sensed the best routes; finding mountain passes, fording wetlands.
But by the third day they could feel her ribs quaking against their legs. Her breath exploded as she marched, blood frothed and caked about her nostrils. Still she pushed herself on, her pace so steady it was almost metronomic.
On the fourth day her legs were gone. She veered and stumbled, shuddering every few paces. The boy hopped off for the umpteenth time and tried to bring her to graze, but she wouldn’t be turned. He ran behind her as she staggered along, unwilling, or unable, to rest.
At last a foreleg gave and she went down hard. Sobbing and snorting, she plowed her muzzle back and forth in the soil, the useless leg repeatedly pounding the ground. After a minute she raised her head and brayed at the sky, her neck muscles taut, her head slowly swinging side to side. Her cry went on and on.
With a tremendous effort she pushed herself upright and butted the boy aside. Every part of her body was shaking. From her depths a low moan grew to a steady bray, and finally to a wild, pulsing howl. She came to a rise, but was too weak to climb without sliding. Stamping in frustration, she managed a few feet, reared feebly, slid some more. The boy got behind her and applied his back; it took all he had to assist her almost to the top. With a desperate lunge she crashed on her belly.
Amazingly, she dragged herself on, her howl now a scream, her head whipping left and right. When she could pull herself no farther she ****** forth her neck to its very limit and, with a shudder that ran from the tip of her nose to the tuft on her tail, shoved her muzzle straight into the dirt and died.
The boy hauled off his father and fell back. The animal’s eyes were fixed upwards, seeming, even in death, to be straining for a glimpse of what lay just beyond the rise. The boy half-dragged Hero the last few yards. They collapsed at the top, and together looked over the cold Baltic Sea.

At water’s edge a haggard fisherman sat on his boat’s ravaged deck, blindly staring out to sea. His was a queer vessel; a family structure built more like an aft-cabined barge than like seacraft typical of that period. The fisherman’s boat, like his mind, had been abused beyond repair.
He’d lost much in his life. Time had taken his dreams, pox his face, hardship his back and shoulders. And, more recently, a brawling band of drunken Baltic pirates had ***** his wife and daughter before butchering them along with his two fine sons, while he sat helplessly bound to the mast. Finally, to further their delight, they’d set the boat aflame and sent it crackling against the sun; knowing he could hear their hoots and howls, knowing he would drift undead, accompanied only by this last unspeakable memory.
But a squall, without prelude, had doused the flames and blown his home ashore.
There he’d remained for a full long day, staring at nothing, his shattered life caught on the rocks. On the second day he’d worked himself free and commenced staggering about in his memories, gathering shards. It was a pathetic claim. He made a pile of all the old bedding and linen and usable cords, and set about sewing a sort of mementos sail. All that third day he had sewn, and on the fourth he had hoisted this sail and been moved to see it billowing in a northwest-blowing breeze. Again he just sat and gaped. And later that day he’d become aware of a commotion taking place on the long grade leading down to the water, where a writhing mass of seagulls was proceeding like a tremendous slow-motion snowball. He’d never seen anything like it. It wasn’t uncommon to find gulls in a group of many dozens or more, but there must have been two, maybe three thousand of the birds now swarming toward his boat. They were making an incredible racket. In the midst of this cloud could be seen a couple of slowly walking figures; as they neared he made out a small man accompanying a boy in his late teens, both dressed in odd skins. When they reached the rocks his eyes were drawn to the small man’s face. It was a foreign face, brutish and dark, with a deep cleft running from above the right temple to the jaw’s left side. Whatever instrument had felled this man had been devastating—everything in its path was smashed, and with permanence. The forehead was caved in. There was no bridge to the nose, the left cheek was completely collapsed, one side of the mouth was a mangled mess. The jaw itself had set improperly, so that it jutted to the side. The general impression, especially from a distance, was of some unforgettable circus freak’s countenance puckering at an angle. It was a face right out of a nightmare. But there was nothing frightening about the eyes. They were the eyes of a child.
Maybe half the gulls hopped screaming on the rocks. The rest circled overhead.
The boy considered the fisherman curiously before placing a foot on the charred deck. His gaze went around the boat, lingered on the makeshift sail, returned to the slumped figure. He passed a hand before the eyes. No response. He then leaned in close and placed his fingers on the man’s forehead. Immediately that bleak expression became fluid, brimming over with horror and heartbreak. Tears rolled down the fisherman’s cheeks as he gasped, shuddered, and backed up the scorched mast to his feet. Thus propped, he squinted at his visitors and was overcome by a wave of homesickness so strong he had to turn away. The feeling bewildered him, for this vessel, and this sea, were all the home he’d ever known. He clung to the mast while the boy helped his father board. Once he’d collected himself, the fisherman tore a heavy crossbeam from the toasted cabin. He and the boy used this as a lever, and together they shoved the boat off the rocks. The wind picked up nicely, and the little craft was swept across the water.
Exploding off the rocks, the gulls shot after the boat as if it were brimming with fish, the loudest and orneriest vying for favored positions directly overhead. The melee attracted additional gulls—they came shrieking in their hundreds from all sides, banking and calling in the oddest manner, until the mass grew so thick as to cast a permanent shadow on the boat. All day long the clamor continued, and all that night. The fisherman rolled with the rudder, listlessly, allowing the sea to control him. Eventually he let go, that the wind might bear them where it would. His sail ballooned but held firm, and the boat fairly zipped across a sea somehow smooth as glass, broken only by the vacillating ripples of bottleneck dolphins and migrating humpback whales. The three tiny sailors sat hunched together, motionless, all throughout the next day, until the black coast of Sweden loomed in the twilight.
As the boat neared land the cloud of gulls broke up, shot to shore, and landed in groups of a thousand and more; a dizzying, wildly uproarious reception committee.
The dung-covered boat slammed into the rocks, shattering the fisherman’s trance. He intuitively walked his **** up the mast and, swaying there, watched the boy draw his father over the side and lead him to a clearing at wood’s edge. There in the dusk he made out what appeared to be a hefty spotted runaway heifer hitched to a rickety wood wagon. He saw the cow gallop up to meet them, saw the boy look around warily, saw him help the little man into the wagon and climb in beside him. The animal immediately began picking through the woods, the large brass bell round her neck clanging forlornly.
The clarity of that bell made him realize just how quiet it had become. He craned his neck:  there wasn’t a gull in sight. He fell back against the shot mast and slid onto his tailbone with a clacking of teeth. His eyes were misting up. In the gathering dark a few sail fragments flew past and were ****** into the woods. The boat rocked and relaxed. After that there was only the sound of the receding bell’s sad, monotonous song being batted about by the wind.

The little cow strode through moonlit woods until she came to a path formed by the rutting of wheels over many years. She followed this broken, serpentine track throughout the night, and by morning was passing farms and, occasionally, crossing broader paths that might realistically be defined as roads. All day long she bore down that ragged track, until she came in late afternoon to a clearing near a village. Here many such tracks converged. And here the boy slipped away while she grazed.
Sometime after dark he returned with a load of straw, a couple of pilfered blankets, and a fat iron kettle. Crammed in this kettle were salt, tubers, cheese, a few loaves of rye, legumes, and a plump foot of lamb sausage. Most of this ***** he’d brought in tied to the bowed back of a huge, puffing, highly amenable black pig which, thus laden, now followed the boy’s every step like a fresh convert tracing the heels of the messiah. The boy built a fire under the stars, filled the kettle with creek water, and commenced simmering their dinner. While waiting, he couldn’t help but note an odd feature of the local flora:  plants, especially trees, all seemed inclined to a northwesterly disposition, though no amount of wind could account for it. He shooed the pig. But rather than run along, it backpedaled in a nervous circle, round and round in reverse, until it lost its balance and fell on its ****. There it remained, a yard behind the wagon. The boy fed his father and lined the wagon with straw. They settled in for the night. The boy must have nodded, might have dreamt, but while he was drifting he became aware of a stirring in the woods. He sat up, saw the pig’s eyes gleaming inches from his nose. And there were a number of animals, some wild, some strayed from farmsteads, arranged in a broad circle around the wagon, their eyes glinting with moonlight. Not a rustle, not a peep, was lifted from the woods.
In the morning he woke to find the pig still staring. The fidgeting heifer, impatient to roll, began her long day’s march while Hero and his boy were yet stretching and scratching, and the ******* pig, galloping heavily, fell in close behind. Each new day this routine was repeated. They banged past farms and small communities until the ruts intersected a broad rocky road wending halfway across the kingdom. The cow addressed this road with vigor. They picked up followers—a goat here, a couple of sheep there—which hurried after the wagon as best they could. The cow stomped on with resolve, mile after mile, day after day, her bell keeping steady time. That bell’s peal attracted foals, lambs, and kids into the wagon’s narrowing wake. Hares hopped between hooves and wheels, boars and blue foxes fell in and withdrew. White falcons, normally solo fliers, whirled into wedge shapes high overhead.
At night the entire train would camp on the road while the boy raided proximate farmsteads, always returning fully laden. And as soon as the fire died the colony grew, creature by creature, and the moment the sun broke the horizon the heifer came to life and moved on, but each day a bit more resolutely, as though straining to meet a deadline. The march took on a sense of real urgency. The cow pressed on with attitude, the clang of her bell more strident with each passing mile. Soon her followers numbered in the hundreds, as animals deserted their farms or crept out of the woods to tag along. Tillers and traders stood dumbfounded, amazed by the bizarre flow.
Once they’d crossed into Norway the frothing cow veered hard to the west. The pace really picked up; no longer were Hero and his boy afforded the luxury of a night’s sleep in one spot. Days blurred into a single variegated flow as the bashed and lopsided wagon continued building its entourage; the riders were surrounded dawn to dusk by a confused and confusing scurry. Word of the flow’s weirdness preceded it clear to the Norwegian coast, so that now plowmen and merchants, wearily gathering their goggling families, found themselves lined in anticipation along the king’s highway. Horsemen went pounding to and fro with news of the procession’s progress and particulars, children ran through the streets banging pots in imitation of the cow’s approaching bell. Livestock wheeled and stamped, fowl leaped and crashed.
The slobbering cow broke into a run.
Bystanders trotted behind, calling back and forth excitedly, while the wagon’s permanent following squealed and squawked between their heels. The cow made a hard turn onto a widening swath in the brush. This swath, seeming to strain against the soil, ran straight down to the crest of a low hill overlooking the Atlantic. On either side a crowd had been studying the phenomenon for some time, but now all eyes swung to the dark and disfigured man and his son, clinging to the disintegrating wagon behind the careening spotted cow.
The trailing people traded views as they ran. Most—at the very outset of the new millennium, with Christianity burgeoning throughout Europe—leaned to the miraculous. Others, just as superstitious but prone to a darker point of view, threw looks of horror at the deformed little man. Yet they ran no less eagerly.
The galloping crowd made for the seaside, where only one local event of any moment was brewing:  on the coast a Greenlander Viking was preparing his longship for the rough voyage home. Impetuous son of the great island’s first permanent European settler, he’d just been baptized in Olaf’s court, and was now eager to sail—but not as a warrior—as a missionary. While his spirit remained in a tug-o’-war between his father Erik’s will and that of gods old and new, his duty was clearly to his king. And Olaf had charged him with the Christianization of pagan Greenland.
Something on the wind now made this destined man turn his head. From behind the gentle hill to his rear came a kind of thunder. Heads popped up, followed by a confused explosion of voices, and seconds later a frantic bug-eyed heifer burst into view, dragging the wheel-less skeleton of a shattered wooden wagon. On the wagon’s splayed frame a man and teenaged boy clung for their lives as the spewing animal made a beeline for his ship.
The new missionary, still egocentric enough to assume his Maker might actually toss him a personal, surreptitiously rolled up his eyes. The sky yawned at his arrogance. At his side a smallish cowled man rose irritably, but the missionary sat him right back down. He then snorted, squared his shoulders, and signaled his men to halt their preparations.
Knowing it was expected, he gathered his hard Nordic pride and coolly made his way into the crowd.

The priest clung to port, gagging above the waves.
After a completely uneventful minute he leaned back and stared through tearing eyes at the distant backdrop of gathering mists. Weeks now…a man of his constitution had no business at sea.
Along, too, were a quirky little man and his fiercely devoted son.
Through his pantomime, the boy had been so persistent in begging their passage that refusal, under the circumstances, would have been unbecoming not only a man of God but a man of the world.
So there it was:  a priest who couldn’t hold his lunch, a witless eyesore who couldn’t sit still, and a surly teenaged protector who snarled at the first hard look. This crossing just had to be some kind of divine test—of mortal patience as well as moral values. Norsemen weren’t made for babysitting.
The mists condensed.
And the shifting shape became a hard familiar coast.
And the longship was mooring, and the crew were jostling and clambering, and the big missionary had booted off the haunted little freak and his hypersensitive son, and was condescendingly half-escorting, half-carrying, the green priest ashore.
And they were home.

Priest in tow, Leif quickly took up the Christianization of Greenland’s Western Settlement, as per Olaf’s command. The mangled little man and his son followed him around like dogs, slept outside his door and annoyed his visitors, ultimately proving far easier to adopt than to shake. Barely tolerable shadows…still, the lad was simply amazing with livestock…and though the youth’s useless father seemed time and again to be just begging for a whooping, his son’s presence bore some ineffable quality that always curbed the missionary’s hand. Several times he’d witnessed the father approached by settlers bent on abuse. Each time the boy had stepped in, and each time the troublemakers were mysteriously repelled. The missionary of course didn’t attribute any kind of celestial intervention to these episodes, and certainly the popular notion of devilry was a natural reaction to the pair’s outrageous exoticness, but…in the son’s company, and even under the sharp eyes of his fellow Norsemen, Leif more than once found himself oddly moved to protect the father. And so the deformed man and his boy day by day blent in—as village idiot and mystic guide. And when in time a ****** brought tales of an unvisited land to the west, it was only natural for the restless Greenlander to buy that ******’s boat and, before stalwart comrades, weary family, and whimsical God Almighty, reluctantly accept the eccentric father and son as sort of seagoing mascots.
Hero was from then on irrepressible. During preparations he would pipe and stammer in his half-mute way, brimming with a confounding anxiety that kept him underfoot and at odds with all. On frigid nights he perched on the westernmost rocks, moaning to the horizon in the strangest fashion while his son stood guard. He positively spooked the locals; they’d gossip, nervously and with bile, of an answering wind that came wailing off the sea like a banshee in labor. The whole island wanted rid of him. And when his champing beneficiary, still clinging to the notion of Christian charity, bundled him aboard with his son and a crew of thirty-five, not a single settler was sorry to see him go.
Almost from the moment they cast off everything went wrong, as all attempts to control the longship were met with some kind of unknowable countermanding force. Vikings were not renowned for passive resistance—they fought, squaresail and steering oar, leaning oarsman to oarsman, until the ship rocked on the waves like a bucking bronco. An erratic weather system pursued them, worsening dramatically at each minute variation in heading. The Norsemen doubled down, and when the clouds finally burst wide, the cowling sea went mad. Dervishes whirled about the hull, crisscrossing winds bedeviled the sail. Patches of kelp belonging to much warmer waters came heaving alongside, fouling the work of the oars, while far to the west a humongous fog bank formed, eradicating the navigable field. The lightning-streaked horizon was a throbbing gray slit.
The longship became locked in a slow westerly current.
Fatigued crewmen complained of headaches and hallucinations, and of a nasty, slightly metallic tang to the air. There were numerous walrus sightings; bobbing flippers and snouts amid drifting ice chunks that came prowling the North Sea like a circling pack of famished white wolves.
Worst of all was the boy’s father—instantly agitated by everything and nothing, prey to some primitive impulse that caused him to periodically incline his head, shudder to his feet, and loop his arms as though embracing the sky. Leif would watch him scrabbling at the prow like a cat at a tree, furs snapping in the wind. He’d watch the boy re-seat him for the hundredth time, and for the hundredth time be filled with an immense contempt. By now he’d acknowledged that it takes a special kind of strength to shoulder charity and tolerance. That brown little freak struck him as an enormous malformed barnacle, slowly working its way back up the prow. Trying so hard to go unnoticed, looking and listening so intently, though there was nothing to see other than the growing shelves of fog, and nothing to hear save the rising, almost hysterical voice of the wind.
Leif sniffed the air, his ******’s instincts nagging him. This was a foul current, and a fool's errand; he took a deep breath and tentatively ordered the longship brought about.
The ship kicked twice, as though an enormous submarine hand had seized and released the hull.
A whirl formed in the water, causing the keeling ship to sweep around like a clock’s second hand. All about them, those drift-ice ghosts cruised dangerously near.
But they’d been liberated from that accursed current. Leif fiercely urged on his rowers, and at last the ship broke free. They made a bead due north.
Night came and the temperature plummeted.
Small sheets of ice converged, drifting between the hunks. The Norsemen, instinctively huddling amidships, passed out one by one in a massive pile of fur and flesh. In the freezing silence the floes bumped and recoiled, bumped and gathered, bumped and bonded. The tiny ship, swallowed whole, was dragged along in a labyrinth of black sea and interlocking slabs of ice.

The Norsemen came to in a surly, foul-smelling heap, lost at sea. While they were still groggy a voice cried out that a darker patch was developing in the fog. The men all fell to port. Under the confusion of their voices could be heard a distant rumble.
At this Hero hauled himself up the high curved prow. A half-light began to penetrate the fog, barely illuminating the irregular faces of drifting ice. The missionary stormed forward and indicated by gestures that if the boy didn’t restrain his father he would have the man tied down.
The longship stopped dead in the water.
The men found themselves regarding a perpetually frozen coastline swathed in bluish veils of mist. Directly before them loomed an immense ice cliff hundreds of feet high. Rising beyond this cliff were endless snow fields, where lean violet shadows seemed to drag about of their own volition. And upon those bleak fields a thin howling wind prowled, kicking up brief white dervishes, leaving a strange zigzagging signature.
Even as they stared, a darker shadow high on the ice cliff’s glistening face began to widen, accompanied by a cracking sound that could be felt before it was heard. With the illusion of slow-motion, a stupendous chunk broke out of the cliff and came screaming toward the sea. It hit the water like a bomb. The thunder of its separation and the explosion of its impact took a moment to reach them. Then, out of a spewing crater of crests and spume, the new calf came lunging, tromping the sea so hard the longship, fully a mile to sea, was swept out and ****** back in like a cork. The floundering mountain of ice bobbed and lilted, generating huge waves which continued to rock the ship long after the monster had settled. In a while the roaring in their ears subsided and there remained only the swirling, nerve-wracking howl of the wind.
The missionary’s eyes swept left and right. Whatever this place was, it sure wasn’t the fair shoreline he’d been promised. Hero again scrambled up the prow, and Leif again yanked him down. This time he made good his threat; he had the little nuisance bound, though he was half-tempted to let him take his chances overboard.
From somewhere deep in the haze grew a soulful, otherworldly call. It went on and on, electrifying the air, bottoming out once the ship had merged with that previously fought westerly flow.
By now Leif’s nerves were shot. He ordered the oars raised.
The longship began to drift. Ship and ice were pulled due west.
The clouds fell far behind as the ship embarked upon an amazingly calm sea—so calm its entire visible surface was featureless except for the faint wakes provided by the ship and its hulking ice companions. To the east a huge fog bank appeared on the horizon, and a while later a smaller bank to the north. Then a very dense one to the south. In time these banks converged, imperceptibly becoming a single mass that closed about the ship, bit by bit creating a slowly heaving dome. Tiny beads of water appeared on beards and eyebrows; in a minute everything was soaked. The only sound was that of the dragging steering oar. The men were now sopping ghosts, speaking only with their eyes.
Directly ahead the fog began to dimple. The dimple became a hollow, the hollow a cave, and then ship and ice were being towed through a low, ever-extending tunnel in fog. The current increased its pull. Ship and drifting ice accelerated through the tunnel.
After a while the missionary quietly stepped forward. He stood with one hand on the prow’s neck, listening to the mist, so motionless he might have been a carved extension of the longship’s aggressive design. Not a man breathed. The tunnel’s dilating and contracting bore was producing an all but seamless series of oscillating, near-phonetic sounds. Leif almost tiptoed back. No god, pagan or Christian, could account for the strangeness of this situation.
They were borne on a course that grew more southerly, and the following day beheld an inhospitable shoreline glazed by dazzling white beaches. Their course held. Two days later they came upon a far pleasanter, thickly wooded coast. Here the current released its hold, and here the missionary untied Hero and personally placed him and his son in a tiny oak faering. He was just as sick of them as he was excited by this promising new land. Once the rowboat had been heaved over the side, he and another man stepped aboard and took up the oars. They began rowing with easy, powerful strokes.
When the boat kissed sand the missionary stood unsteadily.
The first European to set foot on North American soil now placed one hand on his crucifix, the other on his sword’s hilt, and awkwardly plunged his leg into the thigh-deep, ice-cold surf. Before he could take another step the boat lurched as Hero leapt headfirst into the water, followed an instant later by his son. The Greenlanders watched sourly as the two splashed their way into a mad dash for the waiting pines. Leif wished them both good riddance and turned to grin wryly at his fellow Norseman. He must have blacked out for a second, must have been blinded by a shaft of sun, for he found he was staring stupidly at a point midway between his companion and the longship. It felt like he’d been kicked between the eyes.
Everything was dissolving.
He studied the beach and pines closely, but saw nothing of the man or his boy. He turned back, disoriented. With what seemed a superhuman effort he took up his oars. He rowed out sluggishly, in a dream, and the fog rolled in to meet him.

The boy broke into the trees and embraced a trunk, fighting for breath. What happened next happened so fast and so unexpectedly he didn’t have a chance to react.
Three savages stepped from behind the pines and beat him to his knees. They twisted his arms behind his back and hauled him to his feet. He’d barely processed the impression of a wild painted face when something sharp struck him ******* the temple and tore down his cheek to the jaw. Two of the assailants manhandled him into an upright position and held him in place while the third brought his weapon down again and again and again.
All but dead, he watched a nightmare countenance shouting through a shot veil of blood, and behind that image a reeling crimson sun. He lay there gushing while the savages went through his rags. They propped him against a pine and shrieked with triumph, tore the hair and gory scalp from his skull, threw back their heads and screamed at the screaming sky. Tooth and nail, they ripped apart his face and throat and, certain he would die, split what bits of fur were left and let his carcass lie.

                                                HERO

The weeks stretched into months while he fought his way back into the light.
He progressed in stages; only half-conscious, stumbling along in a blood-red stupor punctuated by a slow strobe of frequent blackouts. Days loomed and decayed, nights pounced and were gone; the backlit, swirling gray cosmos collapsed and expanded on every missed beat of his pulse. A thousand times he broke down to die, and a thousand times he clawed to his feet, driven to pursue a tiny, ghost-like figure fluttering in his memory.
Everything conspired to check him.
A bay like an immense landlocked sea was skirted over months or years—it was all the same. Cold locked him in, Hunger drove him afield, that rude ***** Wind lashed him blind, wore him like a shoe, screamed for his skin while he worked his way west.
Somehow he ate, somehow he avoided being eaten; the instincts that had served him halfway around the planet were still vital beneath the abused exterior. His simple burrows became sturdy temporary shelters. He relearned the art of fire, and began to cook what he killed. He manufactured crude snares and weapons and, when his recuperation was complete, paid closer attention to the on-again, off-again trail he’d been following…forever.
Sometimes this trail would call to him like a lover. Other times he stood peering uncertainly, trying to recapture meanings and aims. Then the ground would turn spongy and the sky revolve, and once again he’d be lying all but dead in the woods, while from the face of the sun emerged a vile winged horror, its ugly pale head lashing side to side, its cruelly hooked beak dangling something that glistened in the wild pulsing light…then the fat moon, rising like gas against the icy black night…the feel of the wind:  the slashing of her nails, the chafing of her hem…the sound of things crunching and pausing and sniffing…then the sun, blazing anew. And again that thing, descending, its wide black wings beating slowly, metronomically—but none of that mattered any more. For his mind had quit him, had flown howling into ice and pine to roost with things surreal. In the day his madness might muddle and run, or spend the light stalking, cat-like, watching and waiting. But at night it came creeping from all sides. Sometimes it came in waves. It could gnaw like the devil, or wrap around him like a warm second skin. But none of that mattered either.
The only thing that mattered was the trail—whether it was lost for good, or for only a while. He’d been following it through his episodes, always north, wondering just who and where in the world he was, and trying to shake a ridiculous notion of being led on a wild goose chase.
The cold was unbelievable.
The deeper north he delved, the more confused he became. He grew starved for colors and scents, finding nonexistent patterns in the stark contrast of shadow and snow. He thought he could detect a kind of otherworldly design in the overwhelming number of dead ends he encountered, and, too, in the diabolically frustrating locations of natural obstacles. He seemed to be forever fighting the wind—a hulking, despondent snowman, he hiked face down and focused, while another aspect of his attention floated just behind, disembodied, watching his silent pursuers…leaving no tracks, blending perfectly with the environment in their clever winter coats…not predators, but creatures that normally should have been hightailing it away from him. By the time he could turn, they’d become nothing more menacing than snowdrifts. But they pursued him nevertheless.
And so his paranoia increased…had there ever really been a trail…and when did this miserably cold, miserably anemic crusade begin…his long-term memory was falling apart a chunk at a time. It just got colder and colder and colder until at last, one snippet of a day during one blur of a year, he found himself utterly lost, and clueless as to his history or objective. His mind was a blank, as colorless and featureless as the endless world of ice around him. He’d come this far solely to learn that the only trail he’d been following was his own—and now even that trail was succumbing to ice. On all sides there was nothing to see but an infinite field of glaring whiteness, and nothing to hear but the ululating wail of the tubular polar wind. It was the loneliest, the unholiest, the creepiest sound imaginable. But it wasn’t insanity that made him wheel. It was his self-preservation instinct.
And then he was somehow on his knees in the woods, facing a furious setting sun.
Whole seasons had passed from his memory like chalk from a board. His only recollections were those of a broken, haunted animal:  of being perilously sick, of fearing the unseen, of blindly struggling across a solid-white wilderness. That he’d survived such an ordeal meant nothing to him. And that he had in some indecipherable manner stumbled across the cold-as-stone trail did not fill him with amazement or with thankfulness—there simply wasn’t anything visual or emotional left to draw on. A significant part of his life had been whited out.
But now he could focus entirely on the trail. And before he knew it, the fuzzy area between fantasy and reality found a seam. He began to analyze and plan. He paid attention to hygiene, and kept a kind of running mental journal. Things were sorting out. Yet there were nights when the old sickness would resurface, reestablish its hold, and leave him sweating and uncertain under the stars. Then, paradoxically, his perception would become razor-keen. And so he would see, on a distant hilltop, a pair of scrawny silhouettes, one on four legs and one on two, slowly crossing the faintly pocked face of the setting moon. He would become strangely excited, and thereafter retain crystal-clear images of himself, as if seen from above, hurrying with adroitness through the silent, graveyard-like setting of black and blue night and white-frosted trees. Then the fuzzy area would broaden, and it would be the next morning, and he would be staring at the prints of man and elk in snow. And he would see how the elk’s prints doubled back, and how the man’s prints terminated where he had obviously mounted his guide. An unfathomable glow would bring tears to his eyes. But, even as he gathered himself, a fresh snowfall would wipe out the prints. And once again the world would plummet into white. And the wind would howl as the snow hammered his eyes. And he would ***** on.

A haggard animal sat shivering in a small grove of frozen pines, watching his campfire die. His eyes were fixed. Like the fire, he was running out of warmth, running out of fuel. There wasn’t a whole lot of tinder round his bones, and not much feeling left in his limbs. The slowly heaping downfall was burying him alive, but he was too numb to care.
It had taken him six long years to cross an entire continent, and during that time he’d known only cold and excruciating pain. The pain was leaving him now. The cold was making it right. His eyes glazed over.
Along a narrow plain to the west a herd of caribou filed dreamily through the snow, cutting across a panoramic backdrop of dazzling white mountains. The slow-motion parade was hypnotic. After a while it occurred to the drifting man, in a roundabout way, that he was dying, that he was nonchalantly freezing to death. Concurrent with this notion there rose in his chest a wonderful liquid warmth. His eyes slowly closed and, once shut, began to set fast.
He was jolted from within. It was as if he’d been kicked in the heart.
He ****** to his feet, pounded his fists on his thighs, felt nothing. The breath spurted from his mouth in small white clouds as he stumbled downhill after the slow caribou train. He swam through the snow, hallucinating, imagining that certain individuals in the herd were mocking him by slowing and accelerating, while others glanced back with expressions of contempt.
As he burst into their midst the animals stepped aside indifferently. A few galloped ahead to keep up the herd, but most simply sidestepped while he danced there, stamping his feet and smacking his hands. The herd grew thinner, until only the old and infirm were filing by. The man desperately embraced a hobbling female for warmth, but she cried out and kicked, triggering a panic reaction in the herd. Clinging for his life, the man was dragged along beside her as the herd stormed into a maze of flying ice and snow. His weight caused her to stagger sideways until they slammed against the flank of a sick male. The man instinctively threw an arm over the male and, thus draped between them, was borne across the drifted plain for upwards of a mile, his freezing feet alternately dangling above and dragging through the snow. The herd broke into a hard run, forcing him to assume a broken trot. Soon his legs were stinging. Sensation rushed through his body.
Now the herd, still picking up speed, began to contract, jamming him between his bearers. There was a quick jolt to his right and he was lifted clean off his feet, nearly straddling the bucking female. It had become an all-out stampede. Through hard-flung snow he saw the cause:  just ahead, the caribou had run head-on into a solid wall of galloping wood bison, and both frantic herds had blindly veered to the east; were in fact running side by side down a deep, ragged canyon—were pouring over the canyon’s lip like a cataract. He was approaching, at breakneck pace, that very place where the converged herds so abruptly swerved. The hanging man snarled as he was borne inevitably to the point of deflection.
There came a concussion at his left shoulder, followed by a blast of snow. In an instant the ailing male was tumbling head over heels to the east, ****** into the stampede’s plummeting mass by the fury of its descent. The man and female, rebounding from this impact, were shot to the west in a crazy jumble of flailing legs. The caribou lost her footing, flew nose-first into a snowbank, and came up running. Kicking off, the man used the last of his strength to heave himself astride. At first she fought to shake him, but the spell of the run was too strong. She and half a dozen others went pounding in the opposite direction of the stampede, quickly joined by a number of bison that had likewise splintered from their herd. The riding man could make out their huge hulking shapes thundering by in a blizzard of flying ice, could hear their heavy gasps and explosive grunts. One passed so close he felt its massive flank brush his leg. He peered to his right and saw a black, pig-like eye regarding him excitedly, moving up and down like a piston as the beast ran alongside.
The eye shifted, focusing on the gasping, completely obsessed female. The bull dropped its head and slammed into the caribou’s side, sending her and the man careening down a ***** to the west. The caribou brayed hysterically and her backside went down, but she managed, despite the weight of her rider, to return to all fours and frantically continue along the *****. Again the bull charged, crashing into her shoulder. The man and caribou were launched sideways into the white searing air.
He sat up carefully. The huffing bison was straddling him like a bully laying down the ground rules. Its big wiry beard came right up to brush his chin. The stench of its breath was stupefying.
The bull stamped and snorted, thrusting its stubby horns left and right as the man used his elbows and heels to back away. The bull followed, move for move. When the man collapsed under his own impetus the bull shoved him along with its snout, bellowing furiously. Clear down the ***** they lunged, shoving and lurching, until the man lay sprawled on his back; up to his chin in snow, completely helpless. The ton of a bull butted and kicked, but only glancingly:  those hooves could **** with a blow. At last the man, in one clean sequence, spun on his rear, dropped to his side, and went rolling down the ***** using his elbows for ******.
At the bottom ran a narrow fence of frosted saplings marking an ice cliff’s precipice. He lay face down in the snow, too done in to do anything but **** at an air pocket.
And there came a high-pitched crackling, a sound like the protracted gasp of embers in a dead fire. He turned just as those saplings began leaning to the west, their frozen skins cracking with the strain.
The bison bellowed menacingly.
The sprawled man looked back and saw it still standing with legs spread wide, silhouetted against the sky. In a moment it began huffing downhill, lurching side to side, surfing the snow between lunges.
It chased him through the genuflecting saplings straight into a frozen gully where, protected by a few feet of insurmountable verticality, he was able to slide on the ice between its stomping hooves, downhill out of reach, then downhill out of control—spinning just in time to glimpse a breathtaking vista:
Partly framed by the gully-straddling saplings was a vast crescent of jagged white mountains seemingly huddled round a small stretch of snow-draped pines. The little wood these mountains surrounded was isolated in a broad lake of solid ice. Hundreds of fissures radiated crazily throughout this packed ice field, appearing to issue from somewhere near the frozen wood’s center, which was completely obscured by a ring of rising mist. Above this thumbnail panorama the sun showered gold.
Then the gully dipped radically, and he was skidding headfirst, slamming back and forth against its slick white walls. This uncontrollable plunge had the positive effect of getting his blood flowing. Yet it tore him up. Had the gully concluded in a cul-de-sac, or had further progress required a single calorie of uphill effort, his struggle would certainly have ended here. He would have been too weak to move, and death would have been swift.
But there was a glacier—a great river of ice pouring slowly out of the clouds. The gully, terminating in a little scoop formation near the glacier’s base, spat him flailing onto its gnarly glass hide. He went head over heels, bits of skin and fur flying like chips from a band saw. Somehow he gained his footing, and then he was running against his will, tumbling and recovering and tumbling again.
He didn’t catch much of that crazy run. He half-glimpsed whirling walls of ice, felt a fickle surface underfoot, and broke through an assaultive mist that clung to his ankles and arms. He remembered having the ragged hides torn right off his body, and then being skinned alive. And he remembered reaching the glacier’s base and crawling like an animal; round its sweeping drifts, past its peaked moraines, all the way to a twisting frozen gorge.
And he followed this gorge down; ricocheting wall to wall, delirious, small plumes of thrashed snow marking his descent.
Through a freezing wood he fumbled. In a veil of mist he tumbled down a steep and verdant grade. As cold consumed his closing breath, he fell upon, near-blind, near death, a strange, enchanted glade.

There is a pool.
And in this pool a man lay purged, his broken body half-submerged.
The stumbling man stopped. He knelt to weep, but lost his thread. One hand took a bicep, the other, the head. With a twist and pull the corpse emerged.
That visage…that face—misshapen mask, contorted, bleached; of life’s deposits fully leached. Essence dispatched—a void, sodden wretch.
He let it fall and the glass was breached. All a freak, all a stretch:  upon this act his grip detached.
And the bridge collapsed…one vagabond grasp…what were these feelings; recaptured and trashed…a span elapsed…who was this puckered mass…he hauled it by the waist and thighs…slid it in, watched the pool react:  purse and recover, expand, contract. The glass reformed, now silver-backed…a sudden mirror…the man leaned nearer…saw his reflection, just smashed, remade intact.
The pool grew still.
Within its depth a shadow stirred—visions gathered, some distinct, some obscure. What they meant, and who they were, was much too much to fathom. The glass became blurred.
He closed his eyes, let his heavy head fall, fell back on his haunches, felt the sweat seep and crawl. The air was a pall—as he struggled to rise, a nib crossed his wrist.
He opened his eyes.
Between his fingers the blades poked and crept. Round his knuckles they ventured, up his forearm they stepped:  they seemed to be triggered by prompts from the ground. He shook his head slowly and dully looked round.
There were jays grouped about him, their black eyes aglow. Red hens came running, their fat chicks in tow. Gophers engaged in a weird hide-and-seek. Bluebells and buttercups craned for a peek. Sparrows hopped past and, paying no heed, burst into flight. He watched them recede.
Westward they flew.
Bewildered, he slumped.
Bumped from behind, he jumped to his feet, flabbergasted to find an ancient gray moose near-eclipsing the sky, with grit in his snarl and fire in his eye.
The old moose took aim.
The man turned to flee and stumbled, then tumbled and fell on a palm and a knee.

But there lies a world (so the lullaby goes) where rivers ever run.
Poked from behind, pushed out of his mind, he staggered into sun.







Copyright 2020 by Ron Sanders.

Contact:  ronsandersartofprose(at)yahoo(dot)com

I saw a sticker on a car coming home from work this afternoon.
One of those "international ovals" that used to indicate a foreign country
like France, Switzerland or, if you believe the TV commercials,
Detroit.

Now they stand for everything from the local swim team
to the driver's favorite species of dog
although pinning it on the driver might be unfair
probably better to say the owner.

The sticker I saw today, and it was a sticker not a magnet,
it was stuck on the window,
was OLF and it made me miss mom more than yesterday,
Mother's Day, did.

OLF stands for Our Lady of Fatima, the local Catholic Church
and it was adorning an SUV of appropriate size and sticker price for these parts.
Mom always called Fatima, Saint Olaf's because everyone around here calls it OLF
so it wasn't her fault.

Every time I, or my wife, politely corrected her she'd reply,
"I know" and then promptly call it Olaf's ten minutes later.
So today waiting for the green light on the way home
a little sadness as St. Olaf's SUV reminded me of mom.

and
I laughed.

Nightingale was a hunting lodge
At the time of Baron Blood,
He was holed up there for a month or so
While the Tamar was in flood,
His knights went after a suckling pig
That they brought back to the Hall,
‘We’d best be merry and feast, my Lord,
Or there’ll be no fun at all.’

The waters rose and it cut them off
By the monastery at Bede,
So they made to raid the Monk’s own stocks
And they carried back the mead,
The hounds lay panting around the hearth
And the knights caroused ‘til dawn,
But the waters of the Tamar lay
Close round them every morn.

A cottage lay on the old floodway
By the side of a river wharf,
The waters drove a yeoman out
And his wife, a pretty dwarf,
They made their way to the hunting lodge
And begged that they might come in,
‘I’m Olaf, you are my liege, my Lord
And my wife is Tamerlin.’

‘And what do you bring?’ said Baron Blood,
Who looked for a little sport,
‘We’re all entombed ‘til the waters fall,
‘So what do you bring to court?’
‘I’m simply a yeoman, with one hide
That’s drowned in the river mud,
Along with my only ploughshare…’
‘That’s a pity,’ said Baron Blood.

‘What of the geld you owe to me,
And how do you think you’ll pay?’
‘I throw myself on your mercy, Lord,
To pay you another day.
The river flooded the pasture, and
My crop lies under the mud,’
‘Perhaps your wife has a way to pay,’
Said the musing Baron Blood.

‘You’ll wait at table and serve the mead
And carve the suckling pig,
And feed the hounds at the hearth tonight
While your wife can show a leg,
We’ll have her dancing from dusk to dawn
Each knight can take his turn,
For Tamerlin pays your geld tonight
If she lasts from dusk ‘til dawn.’

Then Olaf looked at his Tamerlin
And he brushed away a tear,
But she looked bold at the Baron Blood,
‘I will stand the test, no fear!’
They helped to set up the feast that night
And they whispered soft and low,
‘If one should harm a hair of your head
I will ****, before I go!’

She put one finger up to her lips
And she whispered, ‘I’ll be true!
I’ll not be whirled off my feet by one
Who is half the man as you.’
She took a skewer and she stuck the pig
Right through to the other side,
‘I may be small but my heart is big
And I’m still your darling bride.’

The sun went down and the mead came out
As he went to feed the hounds,
The Baron called on a lute to play
From a doorway to the grounds,
Then Tamerlin had begun to dance
And sway as she said she would,
Her dress had swished on the earthen floor,
Out where the Baron stood.

The knights were steadily getting drunk
And the Baron stood and swayed,
‘Now hitch that dress to your waist,’ he said,
‘If you want your geld to be paid.’
She dropped her eyes and she blushed, and cried
But she lifted up her dress,
To show the legs that were short, deformed
And the Baron laughed, no less!

The Baron laughed and the knights had laughed
At the legs of Tamerlin,
She dropped the dress and she burst in tears
And she cried, ‘You’ve seen my sin!’
They didn’t ask her to dance again
But they drank until the morn,
Then fell about in a drunken swoon
As she lay apart, forlorn.

A silence fell as the sun came up
When she rose and took a skewer,
Walked to the sleeping Baron, and
She ****** it in his ear,
She ****** it in til it came on out
All blood on the other side,
‘You won’t be laughing again,’ she said,
‘Or shaming Olaf’s bride!’

They took a skewer to every knight
And they did the same to them,
In, and out at the other side,
A Hall of skewered men,
The waters, they were receding as
Her head, in pride upheld,
Remarked, ‘It’s time we were leaving,
We have truly paid the geld!’

Nightingale was a hunting lodge
That sank in a sea of mud,
You’d have to dig right down to find
The body of Baron Blood,
The woods grew up in the pasture fields
And covered the grisly tale,
Where lovers walk and will cease their talk
At the song of a Nightingale.

David Lewis Paget

CLOUDWATCHER
( for David Olaf Carney )

A cloud
gets the ****.

Becomes a camel.

Another **** sees it
transform into a dromedary.

Now a kidney!

Then as on a whim
becomes a Picasso

or some such
thing.

Sometime there's
shape and sense.

Sometimes none.

We make up names
for the one's with none.

Here for instance
stolen

from an old religious tract
THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING.

And here, from the same
"...the cloud of forgetting."

This one
we dub in Ancient Egyptian

"HPRR!"

"rising from....coming into being
itself.:

And this one" "HPR!"
"...to become...to change."

And while our minds run on
the Egyptian thing

why here is Nepthys
Goddess of the Death

that is not
Eternal.

Here Horus
Lord of things to come.

This here cloud
we give the moniker

THE AGENBITE OF INWIT

before it becomes
an Inuit.

Now an anvil and a hammer
in a Black Country summer

"Gie-in’ sum ‘ommer!"

we command it
commanding the skies.

Now here again
a nothing.

Clouds bring forth
not the gentle rain

that falleth from Heaven
but...thought

whatever the mind
imagine.

And here
why here

is a cloud
that is just

a cloud.

Sometimes, I simply think of colours, you know.
The world is so complex, the human brain and the ocean unexplored, wars and marriages are battling with its side effects and a lot of good goes ignored, so sometimes, instead of Newton, I think of colours.
Like black. What if black is just the ink squeezed from a blind man's dreams?
And yellow, the Sun's abominable hot ****?
What if Snow White was just a Snow"man", a 5 year old created
but forgot to add the nose to?
Was it Olaf disguised as Charming who broke the sleeping curse with "true love's kiss"?
You can hit the bandwagon and say "Haha! Then, white is an angel's ****!"
And I could believe you!
I'm a believer!
I'm also a wild guesser! I'm the harlot of semantics, or whatever that is.
I have never met a naive gold digger, except of course, a gullible beggar.
I hate vulnerability, but then I hate strength too,
because I revel in crying and feeling my face wet and pretty
secretly waiting for a stranger's **** to give me sympathy.
Let me tell you something today.
You can give me food, clothing, warmth and a shelter to sleep under, but if you can't give me peace, comfort and acceptance, my world inside my mind and soul is a thunder waiting to erupt once I lose you and never bother to come back.
I would care less for love in fact.
I guess I'll go searching for a Kentucky's to ravish on a chicken leg with my legs up and heave a sigh of having found solace in no bra!
I see a rosary dangling down a fat woman's pious chest and I think of Jesus Christ.
70% of the world's population celebrate the man who died on the cross and topped it off with resurrection
And then again, I think of valiant soldiers who die on the borders trying to protect their nation
Who are grieved and honoured for a day, no, not celebrated no! They are forgotten.
This ******* contrived sense of sacrifice and nationalism is causing to humanity, its suffering and damnation.
Eve offered and Adam ate! Stupid snake! Because, when I didn't know any better I was too scared to *******!
All these esoteric questions and theories and debates and elocutions and apologetics and guesses, what's the ******* point?
The sanctimonious have the God of gaps, the Spaghetti monster for the iconoclastics and then we have the ******* with a  purpose to save the planet from overuse of plastics!
"There's a lot wrong with this world today and we MUST change IT!", asserts a 14 year old onstage in an air conditioned school,
where hundreds have gathered in an international thinktank for "imitating truce".
What is maturity? Tenacity? Or Acuity?
Do you understand subjectivity?
So, just because I'm 20 now, it's hilarious to still watch me drinking milk instead of "adult tea"?
I would rather listen to stories of people who've travelled the planet and lived to tell about it all, than load Stories on Instagram of people who barely make it across the hall.
And I wish I could say "Social media can **** my *****."
Because in this planet of intelligent creatures, one gender accuses, the other waits and muses, so the former forms a movement, hoping for some improvement, but really all this is a sham. All of this? It's just entertainment.
It's not about free will, it's about freedom.
It's not about fear and dogma, it's about reason.
It's about effortless loving with no condition. NO condition.
My mother says all the time "Live and let live", and I believe this is the only greatest gift we can give, to people around us and unto us, also to forget and forgive.
Why seek for mankind's origin and destiny? Why not find the  purpose we need to serve right now?
What can you do now?
And this will never have a proper ending, because I like it that way.
The world will never change, I snigger knowing because there was just one thing the Priest said right, "And we all like sheep have gone astray."

HOW TO MAKE A BREXIT-EXIT PIE

( for David Olaf Carney )

Put in as much
Gove as one can take.

"Not a lot...not a lot noooo
no **** it....that's too much!"

One can make it too toxic!

Sprinkle in enough barmy bumbly
Borisisms

to make one gasplaughchoke
in total disbelief.

Then, come what May...
round up the usual suspected

lies lies and damed lies
enough to fill a "Blunderbus!"

Leave out the petty Pretti one this time out.

Cook on a slow Conservative heat.

Ooops you upped the Auntie
way to high!

Even the lies are becoming
transparent.'

Ouick...more lies more lies more lies!

Oh my good Conservative God they are
becoming see through....what will we do!

Looks a bit burnt about the edges!

Looks decidedly
un-tasty and incredibly inedible.

And when the Pie was open
the liars began to sing!

Oh wasn't that a truly terrible dish
to sit before

the dissed United Kingdom.

Face it - things is looking Grimm!

"The United Kingdom - Le Royaume-Uni
NUL POINTS.....NUL POINTS!"

Josteen Yazzi said the Critic should ask his thought

on the matter of great art and literature

What do you know of art and literature, Uncle?

Nothing, he said, I think about what I do not know.

I do not know why people don't like Norman Rockwell.

Norman Rockwell painted the American Dream,
with Indians in it, some times.

I like Norman Rockwell because I know how he felt.
I saw my people live in a good world that vanished.

Magic or other wise, I remember mine,
the way
when I see
Mr. Rockwell's America as he imagined
he had seen it.

Or maybe he painted
what you should have been able to see,
but for wars and Spanish Flu and cattle barons
and reaping machines and steam and electricity.

Olaf Wieghorst coulda painted America ugly, too.
But he didn't.

Literature. I have nothing left to say, Norman Rockwell, maybe he needed a mentioning for some
reader anchored reason.

We have to deal with that more these days.
People with big old dish antennae out there,
rusting after Direct TV got a satellite to see the res,

Some o'the kids build a radio telescope, outa them three meter models,
so we are connected.

Norman Rockwell painted the Peaceful Kingdom,
just like Mr. Hicks and Mr. Kincaid,

not mr klee or mr picaso, they could image hell.
My ma liked That drippy guy, said she could see the swing of things in he's paintings, What's-isname,

Jackson, damshame, Jackson Pollak right?

but the message is in the medium, that's what my Shicheii yoosto say. Art must sing.
So I can play my drum. And she can dance.
When we think nothing about it.

When we first met, I didn’t think we’d be friends,
but a year later, I couldn’t imagine us being apart.

Sometimes I still wonder if you remember the day we went prom dress shopping together,
in the crisp Florida heat,
and the next night, telling me you’d gotten a new love interest,
a 500 ml purple bottle of Robitussin cough syrup.

I know I’ll still miss you when I take my prom pictures next week,
right in the color you always said made my wavy black hair look best,
or when I keep getting the Google notifications that you signed me up for,
the ones about Olaf and the Frozen cast going to Broadway.

Remember the nights we spent gossiping about the hotties of Pretty Little Liars?
Or the late night sing-a-long pizza parties,
long discussions surrounding your cute Colombian boy,
how you always swore marry in rich to a successful business man.

I don’t know what I was waiting for from you.
After you half-consciously walked out of the room, opened the window to look back in,
just to hurt me, to see the wall that had sprung up between us,
the one you’d always blamed on me, but that we both remember you building yourself.

But from what I’ll always remember,
you were the slippery eel, the leech, in the strength and weakness of my life,
who ****** on my happiness to fill your own open voids and problems,

dragged me away from m life and my friends, to fill your place yourself,
bulldoze me out of my own life, my own home and place.

So, dear eel, continue on.
Swim through and far away,
from the lake, that still yet remains in my memory.

i am the one who makes up my owm axi,
rather than be man, in talk of repast,
and fake, and metaphor, and the need for
sleuth... ordeals and godly stature, but only with
orff's carmina burana, we are to dine?!
oh jew, oh arab... why whiff that stink so far
north? familial affairs? concerns? psychiatrists?!
how about an ode to dates
to break the month of ramadam?!
no, you tell me, at, what, point,
am, i, to, understand, you,
before, i, stop, selling, you,
apples, at, the greengrocers?
you gonna fake it and turn all turk
on me? i kinda hope you did,
the time i mentioned henry viii's wives
in a rhyme: charles the first goit the chop,
charles the second managed a harem
but primarily a poet,
charlie ****** the third?
    probably a plush stuffed bunny...
so i tell this homeless person my rhyme...
****! she runs off screaming...
next time i talk to homeless people
i'm brining a monopoly fake of a house
to surround and let the hounds loose on them...
but it's kinda nice... living in a society
that still believes in monarchy...
  i get to talk silly rhymes, just about names,
wives of henry buffon and...
that brothel disease: syphilis and sisyphus!
and that rhyme about 'enry... the 'andy man...
the one that could put up a shelf...
  yeah, that rhyming Olaf...
could get a homeless woman... running...
to fear rhyme...
    just when Otto was in power in germany,
and there was no vogue concerning baptising
babies with that failed name...
you know women, premonitions about
the zodiac and ****... magic...
          crying about the stone cold heart
of men in labs...
   yep, that story, it's boring,
it's history, tried and tested, proofs in pi...
and take to making up
names.
then again, the turks are prettily civil,
they can allow housewives,
and those housewife soaps.. i.e.
operas... i.e. melodrama that doesn't happen
in real life... the turks can stomach that...
ask an arab to provide the same when women
age... he starts a vanity project akin to
a pyramid that is the dubai glass-glacier...
   i know, and many other people
know where the Everest mountain belongs...
should that glass monstrosity belong where it's
currently placed? i'm looking at it and going all
Loci to say the most perfect joke...
   hyper-*****?
     ask the people that built it, the Bangladeshi...
why ask a ******* ****?
     they're bothered by Hindu...
i will add: -stan -stan, never mind Stanley
and why pole is never bothersome
you valentine crisp day-care centre worth of emotion...
  i don't get bothered whether you smack your
head against a pole, polejump, and polish
a wooden table... ****... get along with it...
english says don't when it says do not...
**** is acronym, ever heard of those?
     -        do i look like a queen Sheeba prediction
of copper skinned waiting for vitamin D
like i might wait for a suntan?!
yeah, i probably do...
but can you grow mushrooms on the tip of everest
from a horse's ****, giving there's so little atmosphere?
can fungi grow in zero oxygen environments?
  next, i'll say: i feel like growing one on my toe...
and be called an athlete...
     hail Olympus! ooh... hail 'eno... z...
    harp and snore... the anti clues given to both
orchestras...
apparently life was so very different back then,
thankfully my nostalgia only goes as far back
as the 1990s (nineteen nine tee offs)...
  before zeitgeist piracy and when your bought music.
i just find it funny how people get offended
by someone's spelling accuracy,
it's like people want people to become dyslexic...
no one seems offended when a triangle isn't
drawn...  ******! draw a triangle!
  a bit like: write something that doesn't require
spell-check!
              i always believed in people and literacy,
evidently people these days don't believe in either...
and yes, the Japanese really did write better cartoons
than the Mc Disney brigade...
they acutally invoked *** in their cartoons...
you know, once you learn english
you learn alice, the "wonderland" and the inherent
joke that the english language can't rub off,
namely paedohpilia...
           *** aware once able to take ***-invoking selfies
and posting them online?
  huh?
          you've been giving the status of a global
sprechen, and it's the internet, so apparently it's not real,
apparently the matrix metaphor can last for
30 more years...
of course the internet isn't real,
what with internet banking, hacking, politics,
the death of 20th century concept of window shopping...
the internet isn't real... what with
online dating... brothel services...
   THE INTERNET IS IN ITS INFANCY,
DO YOU EXPECT PEOPLE TO TELL YOU
ANYTHING APART FROM TRYING TO CALM YOU?!
   i too wished i wasn't the lab rat... evidently
the lab came before i realised i was a rat in it...
          they tell you it isn't real,
they tell you all that *******...
and sure, i buy it...
       it's just one thing,
they tell you the internet isn't real
when they accepted that the phonebook was real...
and yet they do their banking, on, the internet...
  what is and what isn't real... kinda happened...
and is already pointless to talk about.

You can see the magic happen,
In every little way,
From when she makes Olaf,
To when they are skating.

When you smile because of Olaf,
When you start to hate Prince Hans,
When Kristoff and Anna kiss,
When Sven acts like a model.

These are the moments,
Our hearts say aw,
We laugh and enjoy,
Cause life is just going by.

Happiness is the sun shining brightly
on a cold spring day.
It's an Olaf that sings
while skipping away.

It's a child's squeal of delight
when being tickled by their mother.
Happiness is accomplishing a hard task
and receiving a reward like no other.

It's the laughter of close friends
with one person who made a joke.
Happiness is getting a question right
even though no one spoke.

Happiness exists everywhere
especially when most needed.
Many people don't think it
but happiness can be repeated.

I wish everyone could be happy
especially when they're most down.
Less muscles are used to smile
than to make a frown.

well, now you know, the opening sample on the orb's album: the dream, borrows from a prog rock band (Canterbury scene, inc. the soft machine), caravan's winter wine.

i don't want you to think this is a soppy poem,
it's not...
                     it's what defines an autobiographic
oddity, 10 seconds, more or less:
that stretch into infinity and would otherwise be
seen as the atypical tragic event in a person's life;
i had two previous girlfriends
worth noting... that French girl i lost my
virginity to at university is beside the point...
both of these girlfriends were minted...
one was a star in Australia and provided her
dad selling the entertainment business for
a million (she lied about this,
i didn't catch on... should have bagged that girl
into matrimony)... the second, oh boy, the most
memorable was the Russian from
Novosibirsk - with two apartments in St. Petersburg...
dumb me no. 2... should have bagged that girl
to a matrimony also...
she the most memorable, because, thanks to her
i am living as a second self, the twin i never had...
but believe me, this is all based upon supposition,
Ripper Street type investigations (detective work),
and that fact that, like Nietzsche noted:
people aren't telling me anything - so it's based
on guess work... oh how people cradle their
little privacy - and boy, in the realm of:
and he was crucified for our sins... well:
no one mentioned lies... he didn't die for lying...
i have a dual-carriage way of dealing with this:
don't like, and have a **** rather than
getting emotionally attached... that ***** concerning
the person in *** is so ******* ridiculous
i'm about to take out a measuring tape and
measure my genital personality to prove a point...
oh the many white lies that mislead people...
me? i would never want to address people
as Mr. Goldfish, i offensively do believe in
that there are a few intelligent people out there...
two apartments in the centre of St. Petersburg
and studying in England, a Russian?!
you'd have to be minted to do that... so there,
i didn't get reeling in manifesto quickly enough...
but the Russian did try a strategy of entrapment:
faking taking contraceptive pills: darling,
i don't mind the rubber... noop...
the seed already planted, we broke up, i'm
at a different university doing history and part-time
roofing (industrial flat roofs) she calls me up one
night: i'm pregnant...
                                 well this is where a Greek in me
says something about moral relativism...
                she was still a teenager...
  at university,
                              and women have argued about
having the right to do abortions since donkey's years...
i didn't force her, i suggested: maybe that's an option
you would consider? that's how moral relativism works,
it's basically a cauldron, you put
abortion and ****** into it and say it's synonymous,
moral relativism is a case for synonymous judgements...
by the term ****** i envision killing someone:
fully formed, and possessing an inkling into the world...
by abortion i'm envisioning killing something...
       mainly because of the diaper principle:
that thing is mine, it's not fully formed... i'm killing
a part of me: a white tadpole... and in case of the woman:
apologies for ****** that sacred space of your,
i'd be greatly relieved if you got rid of it,
but all of a sudden, contradictory to all the appeals
to the right: she has to have it! what the ****?
that thing is mine in your body, i shove millions
of that existential murk down the toilet when i feel
like it... women just shove empty eggs down the toilet...
but since that's ****** my rights of ever
producing *****... sure... keep it... but you're not
talking about the possibility of the next Beethoven
prior to it gaining **** strength and stop using the
diapers... i thought that teenage pregnancies
were to be avoided, ensuring women are to be educated?
no? back to square one with Abraham and Isaac?
women: perpetually the gimmick of Freud.
oh yeah... wait! **** on me: ever heard of Freudian
geometry? it's the unconscious version of
squares, triangles and circles... everyday objects...
hats... cucumbers... that ****'s for *real.
once again... this part is speculative...
              the part that isn't is what i already said isn't
about soppy invocations...
              exemplified when i told a "supposed" friend
about it... and he came out with the words:
aw... want a hug and play you the violin?
                    i don't mind abuse, i'd probably eat a 100
trolls for breakfast... they might be whipping me...
what ****** me off more than anything is ridicule...
every single poet or writer will tell you that ridicule
is the most abhorring thing to experience...
                 it's worse than saying a woman is a *****...
believe me... i've been to prostitutes and
later i pass them down the street and they say:
                             that's the devil...
must be doing oral on them, *** included: once again:
there's no person involved: only two objects
with or without lubricants.
                          why did i go in the first place?
university... apparently a paradise for getting laid...
well... apparently not.
                                   at least they were human enough
to accept a small payment and make me feel warm
for a little: fake or not fake... the most beautiful compliments
i ever heard were from prostitutes, esp. that
Ukrainian girl in Poland: saintly depiction?
        well, still quiet eager after all that ***** and
tightly embracing and her words: you're a good human being.
           ****, how to relay back to the original intention?
well, of all the days, today i decided to drink three
beers in a churchyard, lazily on a bench,
                  not mystified by not thinking like Buddha
might have been calling it meditation...
                  sedative was on its way...
   9 years and counting where once a soul-like substance
allowed me to daydream and think whatever i wanted,
most notably: with ease...
                                              and have the full capacity
of my body -
                            but now? that ******* television-static
in my brain, like the meshing of alien d.n.a.
                            (but actually just blood)
            around the synapses of my brain - just like
an x-men prologue sequence...
                  and that's after seeing 5 or so psychiatrists
with an obvious problem: staring them into their eyes
and they were conjuring up their own imaginary
symptoms that i didn't seem to exhibit:
a. good eye contact
b. not biting his nails
c. empathy towards others
d. coherent speech
e. knowing everything about current affairs
f. reading Kierkegaard
                       they ****** off inspecting me after i
told them i go into the woods at night and drink
beer... hello the heart of darkness and apocalypse now,
                they really didn't see the obvious problem,
that ****** television-static like pain in my brain...
            mind you, i exploited it,
   it became an exquisite pain, an almost aristocratic pain,
my vocabulary expanded dramatically,
  and i focused on philosophy -
                               because Σoφια is the name of
   ******       on the mouths of every woman who
    encounters a philosopher: ******* kindred of
                              Oedipus and other bachelor lazy-*****...
true story, that.
                             well, what happened happened
9 years ago... it's not soppy, it's rather idiotic...
but after smoking marijuana anyone can be called an
idiot... a happy idiot... but your critique of surrounding
people and things numbs...
                    three people involved,
  in the beautiful city of Canterbury...
                                     being told that i could experience
a smoked version of l.s.d., aged 21, wouldn't you?
the story was false by the way... but the previous night
a fun night to say the least, old friends from school...
partying, drinking, smoking dope (no, not slang as in
cool in using it, we know the technical names,
i.e. Mary and Juan rather than Joseph) -
                    and yes, the church has nothing on me,
i didn't sign up to baptism, hence i didn't sign
up to confirmation and a third name,
i.e. matthew conrad Olaf <surname>...
                             that's called breaking the bureaucracy
with christianity... i'm redeemed...
                            so we were smoking in the morning
and the Amazonian death-**** was given to
me with the promise of a shorter trip than if i were
to ingest l.s.d., oh ***** me... dumbo's coming...
toked... and the show started...
            it's really strange looking someone in the eyes
when they have just attempted to ****** you...
esp. if they're your childhood friend...
you listened to the muse's origin of symmetry together
among other albums, you fell in love with Iron Maiden
and he sand you over the phone (gay), and you
played happy birthday to him on a guitar after only
you and someone else showed up to celebrate it...
   i slid into a vortex... years later i noticed an advert
investing in the public awareness of someone experiencing
a brain haemorrhage... half the face coming off,
slid to one side...
                      well... in terms of a first-person account
what was happening to me on that sofa 9 years
ago didn't exactly register... it's hard looking
  into the eyes of your would be murderer with that sort
of face... but **** me, the burning...
              moments worth an aeon later i was
shaken, quiet like an epilepsy by what i can only
describe as something with a biblical reference:
         jacob wrestling with an angel...
but in this case i was being shaken back to life,
           such was the strength of the interaction...
standing up, i extended my hand and i saw four
clear divisions as if i was pushing four doors open -
         the other person there?
    a nobody... he came to our school when we were
doing our a-levels... didn't really know him...
        the person i knew? the childhood friend...
first of all: i didn't know what was happening...
second of all: well, there's the new me...
          i'm not rich, suing was not an option,
but i'd know what that would have been like -
humanity isn't exactly Einstein when it comes to
          judging correctly...
i let it go...                                 i did something akin
to the Cain affair... let the ****** go...
                            and he's still out there,
after the event, years later, we met up and went to
an American Head Charge gig -
                          when the song just so you know came
on he was hiding in the toilet, i was downing pints
of beer...
                                            oh my god, that band looks
ruined, they've lost a few band members, i remember
them supporting Rammstein when they were
playing ensemble at the London Arena in the Docklands,
got chatting to a dustman about the gig outside,
and a few member of a Greek metal band:
         ever heard of Rotting Christ? great band.
sure, he's still out there... and i'm still here...
    ha ha... he's actually a lawyer by now...
the funny side of all this is that... well: imagine being
a lawyer after an unsuccessful ****** attempt
(you have to admit, it would have been exquisite...
but then i had a chemistry, and the police would
have said

Eyes of a wolf, yellow and lineage of the forest,
Count Olaf eyebrows, white mischievous swoops,
he lays out like a swimming otter, kicks like a black bull.
He’s already six but we call him baby squatch,
Elvis, Franzipan, this arm-filling mouser,
connoisseur of fine earthy smells. He’s a heart leach;
let me be frank. He will stand on your chest
and look down into your lies. Life was so tough
on the streets of LA; he’s too proud to ask for much.
So you end up turning, inside and out, everything you have.

When I was three or four
I asked my mom whether snowflakes are true
Hearing they are not to us
My heart sank in deep sorrow dust

I see on TV snow falls on land
I also watched until I could stand
Waited for Christmas for Santa and snow
But only Santa came and a wind blow

Dreaming to ice skate on an ice
With all my friends hands together, so nice
I wish I could meet a winter bear
Asking are you OK without a fear

I wish Olaf also with me
Giving warm hugs and laugh with me
I'll be Elsa or Anna indeed
Let's play down the winter street

Beginning in 1963,
My Favorite Martian on vintage TVs
Instamatic 50s, capturing instant faces.
Elizabeth Taylor, and James D Hardy
JFK, and Magic Bullet Theory.
Go Away Little Girl,
Our Day Will Come,
Easier Said Than Done.
Surf City.

Remember that day in
St. Joseph, Missouri?
Sitting on the front porch
A boy with his guitar?
Music igniting his fire.
Lincoln Nebraska, to Minneapolis,
Where his story truly begins.

University and Limited Warranty,
Fatherhood, a family man.
Sun Shot Halo
Signal to Noise
Olivine.
Rising with caffeine.
Crispix and Bobby’s World
Little red television set
New Hope kitchenette.
Bedtime routines
Beverley Hillbillies Theme
And of course, The Hobbit!

This is the life he chose,
Chasing those music notes
Daydreaming for daylight.
This is the life he chose
Brew Pubs and Rock N Roll
Well you know, it’s just how it goes.

His hands are calloused,
Weathered, and grown.
Saving vibrations and inspirations
An hour glass inside his bones.
Steady on the Timeline
Moving Things in the right direction
From Coast to Coast.
Columbia coat and winters freeze
One last drag on a Malboro.
Surly-Furious triggering the spark
Sing it loud and let the world hear,
Like a match lighting up the dark.

Coming down to earth now,
There is a little girl
Who he inspired to be all that she could be.
Remember King Olaf?
Thumb controlled airplane rides?
Bedtime PB&J;’s, Don’t forget the crust!
Boy Bands and car rides across the map
Backyard jams and the punk scene
Kids of the black hole, those patched pants!
Mosaic window panes illuminating her soul
Like the Phoenix of Legends
She Said She Could Save the World.

Silhouettes of who she ought to be  
All Along Screaming Save Me.
So many names and faces,
For a moment the chains fell away
Fighting for control,
But he would never let go.
She’s coming back from the hits
Escaping the jail cell that once held,
Her confidence.
Passion ignites from within her bones
Waldorf mind set
Willingness to be selfless.
Social Worker,
Photographer,
Warrior;
His Daughter.

Saturday morning bike rides
Father and Daughter.
The best moments in life
Kept inside picture frames.
Northeast artist scene,
The Matchbox, 331, Dusty’s, and the Slacker
Only in Old Minneapolis.

Throwing stones into the fire,
She knew she had won because
She inherited his heart;
So step out of the blue,
I want you to know
I Love You.

This is the life we chose
Chasing those music notes
Daydreaming for daylight.
This is the life we chose
Brew Pubs and Rock N Roll
Well, you know, it’s just how it goes.

© Jo Tomso

I wake up to your sweet cuddles  and
Your love bites like tiny needles,
but it’s all part of ur love, nonetheless

You meow so sweet and lovingly
as you stretch and reach out out to me..
for a rub and a caress... o how that moves me..

You came into my life at it’s lowest point
I was giving up on joy, life n living- there was no point
But you waltzed in and turned it all around
All my despair to eagerness ...

Eagerness to watch you grow
Eagerness to wake up each day just to love you more
Eagerness to protect you , feed you play with and hold you more

You have no idea how much you saved me
How much you still save me
from my pain
From my despair
From my disdain

You are literally the reason I get out of bed every day..
If I don’t, you attack my feet, hands , nose n lips🤣

Having you in my life has given me a reason to stay alive

You are my right had man, drive buddy,walk buddy, netflix n chill budy.. travel buddy, fight buddy n best of all cuddle buddy..

thank you for saving this soul that was about to give up..

Thank you Olaf..
I love you my Ollie loly limlim baby💕💕💕

Hidden in the shadows bright light
burning red such beauty in sight
Torch-flames in the passionate air
mesmerized by his dancing flare

Darkness fall with scornful thunder
glowing dimly as an ember
caressing heat could still be felt,
making this ice to smile and melt

must not touch the fire they all say
for it could lit a single hay
simply fire and ice can't collide
we could vanish so must abide

Burning coal could slowly go low
could vaporize the winter snow
my passionate fire, holding tight
calming heat with all might

trembling ground of the frozen river
the heart of ice seems to quiver
like olaf said that i adore,
"some people are worth melting for"

B-side

things have changed since the days of progressive rock,
the whole idea of the concept album...
i once owned this copy of a music magazine: MOJO...
when magazines were still in print...
that's the thing with me -

three passions in my life, three great loves in my life...
cycling, music and philosophy:
if i said that i loved poetry i'd be lying...
since i imagine myself as writing it -
with this little beast there's a love-hate relationship -
it's hardly a love: it's a medium where my three loves come together...

but a lot has changed since the progressive rock days of the concept album...
what album topped the MOJO top 50 albums from
the progressive rock genre?
Pink Floyd's dark side of the moon...
who was second? ah...
YES' close to the edge:
personally i preferred the yes album...
Jethro Tull's Aqualung was way down the list...
Radiohead's OK computer wasn't unsurprisingly high...

but i would have topped the list with
King Crimson's in the court of the crimson king...
never mind...
i'd love to start a petition for all
the Red Hot Chilli Pepper albums to be released...
only upon hearing some of the B-sides from By the Way...

then moving to the B-sides of Blood, Sugar, ***, Magik...
i'm not sieving through the B-sides of Californication...
i'd want to start a petition for
all the Red Hot Chilli Pepper albums to be released
like Stadium Arcadium was released...
as a double-album... ****'s sake...
the artistry of this band is inexhaustible!

ALL RED HOT CHILLI PEPPERS' ALBUMS SHOULD BE RELEASED AS DOUBLE-ALBUMS...
that would be ****** innovative:
a natural progression from progressive rock...
all other mentions of progression the spheres of politics and

sociology blah blah ought to begin with... this...
i'm just surprised "they" only figured it out with Stadium Arcadium...

i mean: this B-side of the band is like:
i remember the days when bands would have
INSTRUMENTAL tracks, most notably Iron Maiden and
Metallica... take for example the Teatro Jam...

vocals brought to a bare minimum or nothing at all...
yes... i feel privileged to get a sneak peek into
the potential for the "concept" of the double album...
oh... sly technicalities...

i'm seriously not the type of a Matthew Arnold type...
crying myself to sleep after seeing Liszt play and swoon
the ladies...

i stopped caring about the "lady department" of my life...
that's how the story goes...
Matthew Arnold went to a Liszt concert
and he went back home and cried about how Liszt:
the virtuoso managed to swoon the ladies...
it helped that i was working those two gigs
and i wasn't just a fan...
because watching the women watching
these guys on stage helped with
the required attire of the security services...

perhaps i wasn't jumping up and down...
but i was "secretly" tapping my feet...
i chose the wrong instrument:
like any boy does when he has no band mates...
tried my chances on the guitar...
i should have been a drummer...
envy of the world could not topple what i'm interested
in / with anyway...

my solitary existence is enough
for whatever is not enough for others...
beside the double-album fixation,
i have a more potent "fixation": it's an analogy...
the Matthew Arnold vs.
                 Matthew Conrad (that's me) analogy...

poor M. Arnold went home weeping
at his inadequacies, poets are never favoured by women...
poor sod... how could he cushion himself against
the onslaught of Liszt? he couldn't...
back in the day you went to see a composer play...
you just bought a ticket... even today...
you go to an opera... what can you scavenge?
merely the ******* programme... but moi?
i was working... sure...
but i was probably the only person working
that double shift who ended his shift buying
a T-shirt of the band... that's a nice cushion to have...

it sort of distanced me from envy...
from utter despair... i didn't want to be on the stage...
i didn't want to be those guys...
i was just happy buying the band's T-shirt...
i switched off in that moment...
moments prior i was worried about crowd
safety intrusions into my psyche...
the next... after all was said and sang...
i emerged like i just went and saw my
"new" favorite band for "free": well...
i got paid to see them... that's also crucial...
i was paid to see them overseeing the crowd seeing them...

maybe that's why... my focus was split...
splintered in half...
i was of a conscious akin
to a lightning bolt splitting a tree in half...
i forgot despair... i thought about seeing
them live back in circa 2004 when
the London Arena in the Docklands was still viable...
with Chad Smith pre-warming before the gig...
walking in the crowd seemingly unnoticed
in a cowboy hat... hell...
i was almost an optometrist
when Frank Bruno brushed shoulders
with me coming back from ring-side
at that Tyson fury match-up... patient little me...

i've landed the perfect job...
i remember the days when my former school-friends
would joke about me not having a job...
being misdiagnosed as a "schizophrenic"...
what the **** did they do? oh... right...
one worked in a pub... another worked in Homebase...
this general DIY wholesaler...
i was cycling past where he worked...
it's getting torn down...
i only laugh at things that other people
don't find funny: most notably my own thoughts:
or thereby a lack of them... and to think...

all it took: to be in the position
i'm in now was being "nice" to my next-door neighbour...
the same "******" story: it's not what you know...
it's who you know... no...
i couldn't possibly be the next Matthew Arnold
bemoaning whatever successes Liszt had with women...
i got a Red Hot Chilli Pepper T-shirt...

there is healthy consumerism and
there's unhealthy consumerism...
the healthy type of consumerism is akin to:
             buying a memento...
some sort of memorabilia...
i love that sort of consumerism...
since i was working i couldn't take pictures of the events...
but it has become apparent...
the T-shirt saved me from the agony
akin to Matthew Arnold's agony...
i rather think i know what i'm doing...
it's not exactly ontologically based with a bias...
it's what i've acquired...
of course i'm seeking fame...
but it's not fame associated with being alive...
it's more a fame centered with: when i am gone...

when i satiate all that's mortal about me...
that's why i reject the motives for employing
the tactics of: fake it until you make it i.e. CREDIT...
i work on a debit allowance...
i spend what i earn rather than borrow in order to spend...
sure... i'll miss out on... wait... wait...
what am i going to be missing out on?
i love the company of my coworkers...
sure... i'm not a brain surgeon...
my mother is currently watching this ****** show:

the good doctor... no! that's why doctors are not walking encyclopedias...

that's why they specialize...
no chance in hell is there a "god" in the medical profession... PLATE OF BROWN... sweet instrumental...
progressive instrumental...
bourbon is the sweeter version of whiskey...
probably the greatest "thing" to come out of H'america...
prior to the blues and jazz...
and i get told: white man bad... slavery bad...
sure...

until the original slavery emerged as introducing
the black man to musical instruments that gave
the poor white boy prune an escape from classical music...
i don't see what the "*******" problem is...
talentless people drowning gripping to razor blades...
sure... i'm sort of jealous... but i'm not envious...
i allocated myself a company of Ovid and Horace...
Milton is not going to be replicated...
i want to write something:
i will write something that's properly
resembling the sort of life worth living
at the turn of the 21st century... oh ****...
i forgot to mention my 4th love...

drinking... i mean...
whether it's bourbon or whether it's whiskey...
you can't really love something unless you bring it
to the altar of excesses... and i do just that...
perhaps i have room for a fifth... but?
seeing how my father behaves around my mother?
i hardly "think" that's a viable choice for me... ergo...
i can spare myself the unnecessary details
and go straight after the prostitutes:
i don't mind sharing... after all...
i'm not sharing alimony guilt / no guilt...
i figured out a way to avoid making "profile-contact":
eye-contact i can stomach...
but all this a priori modulations of man...
no wonder dates are so boring: dating...

i don't want to know anything about
another person: PRIOR...
i want to find out... gain knowledge...
but if i'm about to be served something on a:
precursor basis? that's... ******* boring...
no wonder i'm not interested... and never will be...
it like... you either get given a fish...
or you're given a fishing rod... and some maggots...
people have their fiddly bits...
but if people expose their fiddly bits...
the stereotype is that man is the "hunter"...
what the **** am i hunting?

i don't like hunting: i like scouting...
that's the entire problem
with Darwinism mingling with "humanism":
too much is borrowed from the natural world....
and when that happens?
imposing the natural world
on the technical world of man rarely helps anyone...

          by proxy or default... or perhaps by simply
the spiral in control of ad hoc...
i write... after all writing is an extension of thinking...
it's not an invitation to speak...
people complain about their internet access...
leverages of the comment section...
maybe i just figured a way to bypass unwarranted
"attention".... writing that's not to be sung...
lyricism: as much as i love it
i abhor it...
           because i'm not even close to singing it...
i'm also not even close to speaking
it... best left in the vaults of thought...
after all: i'm measuring my steps for a posthumous
fame...

           i couldn't rob an entertainer from his
today: our daily bread...
and there's always one member in the band
that's going to be grounded in:
a focus of creativiy:
grounded in not allowing all the caveats of fame
that come with it (fame):
the crab bucket principle...
me? i was lucky to watch both of their shows
in London...
                  while actually watching the crowd...
Matthew Arnold would have felt so much
better if he managed to get a Liszt T-shirt...
a consumer statement akin to:
i was there...
       i saw them live... look how happy i am
to be alive... i got the mother-******* T-shirt...
who gives a rat's *** about their private lives...
i too have a private life... i write scribbles that do not rhyme
and i'm juggling the idea of counter to
Nietzsche and poet-philosopher... philosophy is in
the background... but it's more a case of poet-journalist...
and i like the forest in the winter at night...
and i adore aloneness... which is a quality of being
that's un-reflective / restrictive of the expressions:
being alone or being lonely...
it's dissociative... not associative...

and i adore writing as a way to create constrains...
constraints...
                           because if i were to jump the fame
bandwagon of: "fame ruined my mortality"...
i'd be making videos... exposing myself to the world
of bad people with even more bad ideas...
**** me: filter in place...
all are welcome who seek to be served...
the rest can snuggle in a crab-bucket elsewhere...
by just consolation:
"being there" will pass me by...
i will have no concern for the world...
instead: the world will have concern for me
having past through it... that's how Heidegger's
idea is inverted:
   i have no concern for the world... for "being there":
i'm already "here"...
           for me the world is: there's being...
i can't pnpoint a "there" and couple it to "being"
to create Heidegger's bad grammar...
there's being: der welt... the world...
but there's also the self-being: selbst-sein...
                as much as there's the selbst-sein-im-der-welt...
there's also the selbst-sein-im-die-sein...
contrast: selbst-sein-im-die-selbst...

ha ha... me and a "girlfriend"? captain complications
"autistic"? no wonder i spend most of my time
around animals... this one time in the supermarket
a boy in a buggy started pointing at me...
see! that's the problem! the creatures that least understand
the complications of language: man can arrive at...
understand me best... we communicate on the focus
of onomatopoeias... syllables... vowels-alone...
finger-pointing: ooh! ooh! beard! tall man! beard!      

mein gott!
the idea of me being married is a bit like thinking
either Nietzsche or Kierkegaard being married...
or for that matter Kant...
i just kept focusing on the voyeurism presented
by pigeons... how many times they get rejected:
Darwinism is a fake:
it's not about the survival of the fittest...
it's about the survival of those who are subdue
about making the most mistakes...
i opted out... i like my comforts...
i'm not a social animal... i'm not a political animal...
ego: non animal-sociale...
   non animal-politica...
       ego-ergo: creatura-ex-solatium!
i'm a creature of comfort...
          
         i don't need complications
of womens' exfoliations...
"expectastions"...
                       bye bye... wave goodbye
the would be sinking Titanic...
       ice is a new hello!
         "women and children first"...
sink the ship... count the *****...
no... because this "****" doesn't end... unless it ends
with the DRILL FABRIC OF A MARCH...

not since it was so easy for the Islamic
Conquistadors to be made so easy
and for us "remainers" to have it made to "hard"...
then again... eh?! keep what?!
leap over what burp of a frog?!
            i'm pretty sure the Slavic world
imploded when they heard about the antics
of the "west"... i'm pretty sure the Russians were
like: before... we reach that summit of insanity...
i... a Russian... will sooner ****-fiddle an Ukrainian
with war... before the cancer spreads...
and so it happened...
                         west: my ungovernable wet ***!
"west"...
                       i might speak the language:
but churning through the outliers i'm ANTI...

  any deficiency in the orthodoxy use of language is:
HERESY...
           i have LIMITS...
**** it... i'm siding with the Russians...
i don't care...
              **** Ukraine: for Chernobyl!
we might as well find our nearest sacrifice...

BUT I KNOW THAT I'M ALREADY DEAD!
i'm just waiting for the "PAUSE" buttonz...

yeah... like that joke...
an Olaf... a Lothar and a Conrad walk into
a bar...
    only Conrad walks out...
why? because he didn't make any Hebrew jokes...
and he drank more whiskey than both
Olaf and Lothar...
i know i'm not funny...
i'm not supposed to be: ******* funny!
i'm supposed to be imitation-cannibal!

A-side

i'm truly lucky to be alive...
at least in my generation...
i was 13 when Californication came out,
i spent one afternoon
with my now estranged uncle
listening to the record while
he was working on his Porsche
eating take-away Kentucky fried
chicken...
                     talking about music and life
and *** and what not...
mostly girls...
            
my sympathy for Ukraine? none...
maybe Ukraine was part of the Soviet
Union maybe not (obviously)
but: yeah... thanks for Chernobyl...
my mother's premature chronic pain...
i might be the last drinker in the family
lineage who takes drinking
seriously: as a way to progress intellectually
but my mother's on opiates...
i was born with a "mark of Cain"...
whatever the hell it was...

it was a ******* nuclear REACTOR...
it wasn't a nuclear BOMB...
a bomb EXPLODES... a reactor IMPLODES...
who know what the ****** difference
is... but give it enough time
and you'll find out...

well... it must be bad... since how many *******
tests did the Americans the Russians
and the French carry out with bombs?
Godzilla blah blah...
       but it only took ONE bad reactor to make
people look all-crazy-at-each-other...
******* KARMA... oh yeah...
it wasn't enough to do both Hiroshima
and Nagasaki... more tests required!

and all those cases of freakish premature
cancers in eastern Europe... hell... elsewhere too...
last time i heard an imploding nuclear
reactor is like detonating 400 Hiroshima type
bombs...
and the effects were immediately apparent
in the botanical kingdom...
effects which even reached the region
where i was born...
   it was a case of Spring-Autumn...
     oh yeah... you had streaks of trees that
were autumn like: perhaps even past autumn...
sort of dead-ish... and streaks of trees
that were: spring-esque...

by then, no one knew...
                             the crescendo of the collapse
of the Soviet union...
a bit like the crescendo of the end of the second
world war and the all great h'american hard-on:

but let's face it... no other culture was so
good as the late 20th century American culture...
the Beatniks,
Charles Olson - the only post-modernist i have
any respect for... if i can call him that...
then again... i'm jumping hoops and conclusions
that that non-verbatim...

and you have to admit...
    no no... it wasn't because i was working both
the shifts for the Red Hot Chilli Peppers gig at
the London stadium: but let me tell you what...
i would have been completely ****** (OFF)
if i didn't buy tickets for both days...

day 1: opened with CAN'T STOP
day 2: opened with ALL AROUND THE WORLD
day 1: played UNDER THE BRIDGE for the encore
day 2: didn't play UNDER THE BRIDGE for the encore...

proper old-school...
that other shift i did where Weezer, Fall Out Boy
and Green Day played...
even the guys i was working with were like:
they (i.e. Green Day) 'these guys don't know when to
shut up'... i was like... oh... right, this song?
they'll finish on that one:
   it's one of those sentimental closure songs...
one of the girls sang that song
in an assembly when we were leaving school:
(have the) time of your life...

i was sure of it... oops... a ******* Dawid Bovie cover!
sure... people are at a gig... we're too,
but we also want to: ******* go home...
and we can't until all these ******* leave first!
ugh!

- thank god (casually expressed, eat dog doog...
yes - intentional, FELA'S **** is the *******
groove party - food)
i'm not one of those people forming a cliche
opinion about whether i'm a fan of the Beatles
or whether the Rolling Stones...
ask me again... James Brown yes...
and Red Hot Chilli Peppers' A-sides
or Red Hot Chilli Peppers' B-sides...

now... that's a tough one...

mind you: what gave birth to the Communist project?
pan-Slavism...
there were plenty of Hebrews living in Russia
and in Poland... i guess those people were
like... sure... let's try...
if we **** up: we'll **** up SPECTACULARILY...
and "we" did... but... the current reiteration
of "communism" in the VEST?
hmm... all this post-grammatical-mystique...
oh look! adjective, verbs, nouns,
the indefinite article and a definite article
are being neglected by the hyper-focus on pronouns...

it's like a second imaginary Chernobyl imploded
and fried people's intellectual capacity
for formal / casual conversation talking
about the weather and buses being late...

i'm only saying that Red Hot Chilli Peppers is
a band of / for my generation because...
i've already come across younglings
that haven't heard of them...
YES!                             and the band too...
but finally! i've reached the cut-off point
where i'm part of a zeitgeist that is reaching its
zenith-nadir...
                       the equilibrium akin to the Olympic
passing of the torch... although:
there's not much of a fire left...
       just an unlit torch... instead of fire: ambers
of a once fire...

but that's what happens... i understand the paranoid
Russians all too well...
back in 2007 they were such welcoming people:
i still don't understand why the western media
narrative about McDonald's being shut down
in Russia suddenly turned into a new fast food
chain under a different name serving the same food...
when i was in Russia: i swear to god...
i didn't see a single McDonald's... so... twinkle toes...
hum hum hmm...

were "my" people paid reparations
for the **** invasions? i know the Hebrews were...
oh yeah: we had that glorious task of being
invaded and then told to stack 'em bricks
for the crematorium CHIMNEYS...
well... it could have been worse...
we could have been told to ***** the NECROPHILIC
architecture of ancient Egypt in the guise
of the pyramids...

and because being under the Soviet yoke
of influence... and then... oh god! they gave "us" a
******* first non-Italian POPE!
one hand washes the other
but neither hand knows what the other hand
is doing... from ultra-atheism to ultra-catholic
conservatism...
"our" capital shouldn't be called Warsaw...
(no jokes about that, unlike Bangkok)
                                it should be called Seesaw...

backwards and forwards... as Norman Davis pointed
out: god's playground...
which it is... mind you: i'm sort of bad tempered
when it comes to being a Siamese-twin with
my Deutsche neighbours...
lucky that some of those Schwabs or Saxons
migrated... settled on some ****** weather island
and mingled with the Velsh and the Picts and
whatever other Celtic remains were left
in Europe...

oh but yesterday... that old man made me lose my
cool... i was already sweating it out for over
an hour and he exclaims in the street like
those manic street Apocalypse preachers:
where are you lights!
if i stopped i would have properly explained
than merely pointing at my rear-light glowing
red and telling to *******...
BUT YOU WOULDN'T SAY JUST AS MUCH
IF IT WAS ONE OF THOSE INDIAN
DELIVEROO ELECTRIC BICYCLE GUYS?!
would you, old man?
mind you: old man... you give a rat's *******
about one cyclist... then tell me...
who does your council employ... shouldn't
the street lights already be switched on?!
    hmm.. already be...
shouldn't the street lights be already switched on?
that sounds... eerie...

shouldn't the street lights already be switched on
shouldn't the street lights be already switched on...
i honestly can't decide upon the correct
grammar... let's be trans-grammatical about that one...
after all... it's all trans-biology anyway...
a bit like Plato telling Sisyphus that the gods
forgot about him and that he can stop his pointless
toiling... or what Plato mentioned about
being punished and being reincarnated
as a woman if one begins as a man...
well: to hell with reincarnation: time's up for
theology now that science speeds things up...

scary world... even scarier people...
THIS DOOR NEEDS HINGES!
bring in the unhinged experts in not-doors!
yesss... we need a house with enough of
BREEZE!
me? i'm just complementing their insanity with
my own special strain that prostitutes call:
GOOD-CRAZY.

All of the movies are the same. Watch this and have your eyes open to both the secret of world and the ending of it.

Every movie is about the stars. That's why every actor is a STAR.
KING OF THE UNDERWORLD-
OSIRIS/SIRI/YOUR EYE PHONE (IRIS). ISIS. HORUS.
THIS IS THE SATANIC TRINITY.

LION KING.
Mufasa/Osiris/ king of everything the Sun/light hits. is set up by his his twin brother Scar/set ruler of elephant graveyard/the dark. Simba/horus goes into hiding/the underworld, who then later returns to **** Scar/Set and take his rightful place as "King".

BATMAN.
Thomas wayne/Osiris is shot and killed by a criminal/set. Bruce wayne/horus goes into hiding. Then comes back and fights the "Joker" Who becomes leader of the criminals. Batman/Horus wins and liberates "New York" as a king would.
Adding. Jokers catch phrase "why so Serious/sirius" with a smiling face, just like the one amazon uses is a hat tip to the solar eclipse and the star sirius. Sirius is connected to Satan worship. It's why they made us feel sympathy for a diabolical character in the movie Joker.  The devil loves SYMPATHY!

EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND. (THE SUN GOD)

TRAILER PARK BOYS.
This show is so occultish you will never believe it.
Characters. (The show also revolves around Ricky/horus)
Ricky/****/horus (the symbol for horus/osiris is an obelisk aka a *****)  his father Ray/osiris. Rickys wife LUCY (Need I say more?)
and Rickys daughter "TRINITY". Notice how his daughter is the Trinity?
This is where you MUST know freemasonry to understand the rest.
Rickys two best friends are the two pillars of freemasonry. Julian/boaz/strength. Throughout the show they even brag about Julians strength all the time. Then Rickys other best friend is Bubbles/Jachin/swift. Bubbles character is known for always driving a go kart. Hence "Swift".

THIS IS THE STORY PLAYING OUT BEFORE YOUR EYES!
If you can figure it out. You know what's coming. This is the secret of freemasonry. Freemasonry is a "CRAFT"... WITCHCRAFT.
The king of freemasonry is Osiris who is Abbadon who is Appollo who's is TRUMP.
17 is the letter Q in the alphabet. And the number 17 is the number of abbadon who brings plagues unto the earth.
His son is Baron/lord/Horus is a GIANT.
Trumps ancestor from his Mother's side is the Viking "Olaf Mcleod" King of man. (Was his title)
The odds are McDonald's is donald trumps. Appollo has a golden bow. McDonald's has the golden arches. MC is 33 is Jewish gematria. McDonald's character is a clown with RED HAIR. And on his chest is the emblem of the golden arch infront of a solid red circle. That red circle is the blood moon donald trump was born on.
The odds are MC stands for Moon Child.
On Donald trumps coat of arms you will see the same golden bow.  Through that bow is a hand holding a spear. That spear is the same spear of destiny. The one that stabbed jesus is the rib cage.  It's prophecy that the antichrist will obtain the spear of destiny. Something ****** failed to do.
Donald Trump also has a gold course in Scotland in "Aberdeen"
Translates to "Mouth of the don".
A-BBAD-DON-ALD

You don't have to believeme. But the end is near. America is babylon. That's why we have "Hollywood". Hollywood is what witches make their wands out of..

And as for t.v.
Never watch it.
TELL-A-VISION. Who's vision you might ask?
The CABALS/CABLES.
You see this is why the call television shows "programs" and you get your programs from channels/channeling "stars" Who are embodiment of the "STARS". SATANIC WORSHIP!

LOVE AND GOD BLESS.
Be vigilant. Your enemy's is waiting in the shadows like a lion to devour you.

High on the cliffs above Lake Lachrimose
Lived a dear old woman taunted by ghosts,
Some of her present and some of her past
Hoping that each episode would hurry by fast.
She could not bring to terms of her dear old Ike
Who died by the leeches, gnawing alike.
He went in the water too soon after eating
and soon became a memory that is any but fleeting.
But now she meets Olaf, spoken in lie
He promises pearls, but soon she'll die
by the same way Ike did, eaten alive.
(Based off of The Wide Window by Lemony Snicket)

As long as you're sure
He's your Kristoff and not your Hans
Who am I to get in your way?

I'll be loyal
I am your Olaf.
Willing to disappear because
"Some people are worth melting for."

*Just as long as he's your Kristoff.

influence can find its way through love and life
writing and power becoming sanctified in a holy box
from you're never going to get anywhere to get on the floor put your hands up
kicked down beaten down with words
somehow between the mix a hero ascended
words and power in fortythree lines
and on and forward (Olaf) sends us into eternity

one day perhaps the words will end
but never can i stop reading them
for if it wasn't for you I would have never started writing poetry
or prose or anything and that's why i need to regard you as a hero
my hero

dear e.e
thank you for creating me anew
i honestly, to any man living or dead, owe my life to you

because I would be nowhere without your words that go on into the Infinite.

re.: a mini-psychotic detour -
it's off the stream! it's off the stream!
it's been catalogued in: latest!
it's off the stream! i'm aiming to reach
1million words and...
it's off the stream... so the word
count will not be incorporated...

oddly enough i still know how
to use a toaster - and a kettle -
i am also fabled with having to perform
week long chemistry experiments...
why i didn't look into the basics
of

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funny that... how ever many of years
in school, then at university...
i was teased with this language...
for half a semester at university...
the rest of the time school was...
a bit like being in prison...
making sure the prison guards had
a job, were paid...
same with school...
the teachers were paid...

did they teach us basic computer language?
no... i'm pretty sure they didn't...
were we all expected to go to the coalmine
first... before being told to...

which isn't so much lazy as...
i can still remember chalk and chalkboard
at school...
and the holy trinity of (
                                    {      [
how many crescent moons - and altering
a piece of: would be paper?

oh my god... e. e. cummings wasn't even
born...
can you imagine if e. e. cummings
was born 20 years ago...
and started smashing out his:

stand-
;still)

i was honestly being technologicaly
paranoid...
about to cite archive numbers
of "missing" / "shadow-banned"
poo'ems...

e.g. 3479319, 3482972, 3485309,
3484258, 3483083, 3480751,
3480555, 3478158 etc.

but how is that even an over-hyped
reaction - when you're only scratching
the bare minimum -
of what's nonetheless, to me:
a 2 dimensional canvas...

and the point of school was to ensure
that we could fathom our naiveness even more so...
nothing of importance...
just passing the time...
it's not like they could have taught
us to code -
school is not some preface for:
all the subsequent self-taught mechanisms
you will ever encounter:
further on life...

why did i go to school?
why is the cult of school and the nostalgia
culture associated with: popular kids,
nerdy kids, bowling for columbine...
the everyday leftover kids -
i don't even remember being
taught grammar: proper...
we were told... as long as you sound
coherent...
nature came - nurture ****** off somewhere...
but nature didn't come
with <basic> or not so </end of>
with this sort of <bracket>
and this sort of (bracket)
and this sort of {bracket}
and this sort of [bracket] -

"back in the day" you'd read some heidegger
and not "bother" to code -
" " implies /misnomer
/metaphor - solo....

as: burgundy < red
     red being the base marker...
     given that rose < red (is also)...
     since burgundy > red
     since: burgundy ≈ purple...

<approx>
     cardinal < crimson
                                           </approx>

a "debate", and another debate -
in a thesaurus entry...
red - cardinal, crimson, burgundy appear
<sim>
           cardinal < burgundy
                                             </sim>

that is... cardinal ~ burgundy
   ergo cardinal > crimson...
or do we call these the prefixes: quasi~
and pseudo≈?

cerise and all that's suddenly expected to turn
into fluorescence of some underwater Florence...
from carmine and maroon -
brown starts to creep in...

     bobby vinton - blue on blue and...
spaghetti westerns -
somehow i wish to be held in the hands
of a coroner -
i should really think about
donating my body to a medical school -
and bobby has another great track:
velvet blue...
sure... he's no sam cook...
all the way riddled with h'american
suburbia psychopathy:
a smile can hide a thousand
little lies...
a smile is something anti-stoic...
because... the shine of the ivory sheen...

and all i can think of...
not even beginning sentences -
esp. not ending them -
the narrative went with the baby
and the bathwater -
the canary had a coalmine -
the budgerigar had a cage...
the sparrow were tattooed
along with swallows onto convicts
bodies in some jean-genet
minor *****-porky-teen-flick...

tender-bits from some Olaf or Oleg...
or better still an Olga...
recitations would also require:
bumblebees and petula clark!

and that one song that surfed right
above my head and started towing
a hoarding of kippahs
and a... my my... all those
abrahamic beards turned into sabbath
bound brooms for the fwench
brides of boredom...

some might say it's:
strawberry alarm clock -
incense and peppermints...

      as Herman's Hermits aged much worse
than a Donovan...
no milk today and the three kingfishers...

welcome citations...
what's more apparent? someone is clogging
up the arteries of time...
the veins are... the veins that stretch as far
back as jazz from the 1920s...
through to the wock and woll of the 50s...
don't get me started on what's the leftover
of the 90s of the 20th century...

new beginnings they will cite...
here's one... if e. e. cummings was to be born...

swing low
sweet ca

rr
y on

(pass the freedoms pappy
or uncle shylock not interested

- notes on finland the elsewhere estonia,
latvia and li... i will not give lithuania up
that easily... the once grand duchy...
married to the crown -
and all my hitorical adventures -
the sensible today...
the modern sensibility the current man!
me and my historical... what did i call them?

no... they're not idiosyncracies...
they're... detours in infantalism...
but if e. e. cummings was born circa...
and he - he would mosty certainly
succumb to code logic poetics...

bracket (a) "bracket" <b> bracket {c} bracket [d]...
!red is blue -
outright negation...
!red isn't red - the "is" is therefore questionable...
for some reason: no, it doesn't have to be:
but it's blue... blue is !red

should a mr. buckling bucktooth still
be introduced?
well: we do need to indroduce a next to nothing
worth nothing new: cipher unit...

a faux pas needs to have an addressee -
namely me - and i need to wallow in infuriated
agony of a petty detail that no life will
require to cherish!

- and that i am to be fond of tomorrow in that
the only promise that awaits me there is:
me baking a four tier cake - literally...

how terrible a faux pas becomes -
a bull so enraged by red that he becomes blinded
and no longer is able to hone onto
the originating crux -

even somehow "somewhere" with a dasein in
tow... intermitten years...
no... not without a T attached...
and even by now as by then:
that's a misnomer...

- apparently tautology is not a logical
fallacy... but something worth
a thesaurus rex and peacock's: "age of discovery"...
how we can all speak a language
of aphorisms and verb conjectures -
as ever: nouns retain their form as being
the most complete category of everyday
toils - a hammer will never become
an iron shrapnel hanging by a hook chin
off the clide edge of a nail's head...

set with time in mind - temporal thinking...
otherwise set with space in mind -
spatial thinking -
otherwise: when thinking was simply
thinking - exploring the moral architecture...
with that moral-theta of 'ought... and i:
probably not...

save me from linguo-savvy h'american
media pundits and their acronyms!
the boss, the bot the bot, the boss...
the bottom liner - the beatnik and the bolshevik
and... some other b- prefixed outlier...

- otherwise: it's pretty **** evil...
for movies to showcase the hygienic act of
washing ones teeth...
washing the teeth...
spitting out the remaining toothpaste
(oh jeez louis! why don't they simply,
swallow it?)...
and then... not rinsing their mouths?
at this point... rinsing the mouth...
after having just washed the teeth using
toothpaste... is probably as much good
as using mouthwash to begin with...
no one; no one rinses their mouths
after brushing their teeth on film?!

i've too many dreams about teeth
to know - i am actually the sole proprietor of
a memory of my great-grandfather...
and how... he would eat 20 sugar cubes
a day... smoke 40...
and have his first tooth pulled out...
aged 62...
myth, history... journalism?
i dream about teeth...
i would have clearly asked for:
and he dreamed about moths...
but then... oh Eden is still in my grasp...
i can see the next forbidden fruit
hanging...
her name is Layla... and she's...
borderline 16 years old...
i see my Eden already...
i see the forbidden fruit...
apparently i never left...
as i was never apparently Adam...

problem is: you already know what
the forbidden fruit is...
and it's bothering you that i know
what the forbidden fruit is, for me...
now comes the juggling act
of me entertaining not making my will
into a resolve... which is to not:
act upon it...
maybe the apple was too complicated...
maybe a Layla circa 16 is...
a more obvious deterrent...

i think it's also called:
the prosecutor's *****...
but... enough gob and enougn dosh...
you can be the new st. andrew of windsor...
even in the taxi driver the ****
is 0... negated...

my my... what sort of language could
even become so casual...
the burning bridges of informality...
strapped to the formal tool of
orientating one's spatial creed of:
for the exchange of goods and services...
long gone the per se
of a school and a playground...

or some do... want to find and rekindle
the brotherhood of childhood...
they'll join the army...
they'll commit themselves to crime...
some men... it's hardly the adventure riddle
first lady's history society of
rhode island's desperate housewife club...
but...
it's hardly a deviation from imagining
how fudge is packed,
or for that matter: sausages...

a major faux pas...
some e. e. cummings... and what would never
become a code(d) poo'em...
but... for what today had to offer:
and what i had to offer today;
it's enough... it's peaches and cream...
a well balanced butterfly of reciprocation...
it's a death... but a death with a promise
of returning: in situ...
although in situ is always a flexible
requirement when reincarnation is fiddled
with.

I went to the wake
For dear passed Olaf
cheers buddy
I lost the filter on my mouth
Within 30 minutes
And it was like
I was myself again
I've never been proper
No need to pretend here

I finally spoke with her
The girl with whom I share an ex
And we avoided the subject
It was like a silent agreement
She was so much nicer
Than I thought!
She roared from laughter
As I swiftly rejected
The poor candidate...
Women are cruel

I walked to South Antwerp
Only to recognize
In-And-Out-Of-Jail-Joessef
I did not see your face
I just knew
But you know, we don't have to
Be friends or anything...
Carry on.

I drunk dialed my sister
Who then drove me
To party in a bumfuck town
And it was kind of fun
stop looking, it isn't going to happen
no matter how much you went to my highschool

But the beer was cheap
And the company was good
I'm starting to like this
Single girl deal
come and go as I please
Life's good.

sitting down at the library
hunkered down where you can't see
buried deep inside another world
nose in a book a second life unfurled
give me a week and I'll come right back
a hundred pages and a midnight snack
it's just enough to get me through the day
between the lines is where I wish I'd stayed

when the world seems torn and frayed
take a long look inside
and read (read read read)

witnessed the fall of House Atreides
saw Olaf's eye etched below his knees
many a friend to meet along the way
each of us have our own dragon's to slay

whether escape or a place to play
just take a long look inside
and read (read read read)

CLOUDWATCHER
( for David Olaf Carney )

A cloud
gets the ****.

Becomes a camel.

Another **** sees it
transform into a dromedary.

Now a kidney!

Then as on a whim
becomes a Picasso

or some such
thing.

Sometime there's
shape and sense.

Sometimes none.

We make up names
for the one's with none.

Here for instance
stolen

from an old religious tract
THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING.

And here, from the same
"...the cloud of forgetting."

This one
we dub in Ancient Egyptian

"HPRR!"

"rising from....coming into being
itself.:

And this one" "HPR!"
"...to become...to change."

And while our minds run on
the Egyptian thing

why here is Nepthys
Goddess of the Death

that is not
Eternal.

Here Horus
Lord of things to come.

This here cloud
we give the moniker

THE AGENBITE OF INWIT

before it becomes
an Inuit.

Now an anvil and a hammer
in a Black Country summer

"Gie-in’ sum ‘ommer!"

we command it
commanding the skies.

Now here again
a nothing.

Clouds bring forth
not the gentle rain

that falleth from Heaven
but...thought

whatever the mind
imagines.

And here
why here

is a cloud
that is just

a cloud.

the dream began long before the sleep overcame
me...
   lazy architect of the clouds:
what was it going to be this time:
per usual: castle, swan... a death mask -
ruminations of the future?

                     a violin quarter op. 17
no. 4... or as i imagined it before
sleep dragged me below the waves
into the deepest caves before it plucked
out my eyes and have me tears
or shed in watercolours...

   something so tender as this poem ought
to break into a thousand pieces...
or however many letters there are to match...

standing on Waterloo Bridge... playing that ******
violin... however crudely...
a pocket of fame so tiny that would
spread until... some other violinist heard
of the antics taking stage...
   a dream... that didn't catch me by surprise...
not lingering like a dream: proper...
which might take up at least the whole
morning of a tomorrow upon waking
and bewilder and amaze...
  
            such that i promised myself:
not a sip of that fine Mount Gay Eclipse
***... never: i hope never again will you drink
"thinking" you might write something:
at worst! tender sips only after something
blessedly sober was started during
the business of a day...

               an alternative to the Italian risotto
or a Spanish paella?
none other! the Biryani!
  oh the spices at my disposal...
a black cardamom pod
4 green cardamom pods
a piece of acacia bark (sorry...
  out of cinnamon!)
   3/4 tsp of fennel seeds...
caraway seeds, cumin seeds...
coriander seeds. black peppercorns...
a star anise...
6 cloves
      a bay leaf...

something from Norwegian poetry?
olaf bull?

og jeg, en levende mand, paa jorden hjemme
and i, a living man, with earth my dwelling...
som jeg, en død mand, paa jorden hjemme (begrenset)...

but i'm not going to learn Norwegian
on these isles...
it would make some sense
to learn Danish for a historical
whim or German...

then again... my bet it on either
Romanian or Turkish...
a today... at the Turkish barbers'
i only instructed him:

keep the length (of beard):
   but tidy the rest up...
tut(mak) uzunluk nın-nin sakal:
ancak temiz...

well i sat down in the waiting line while
the other turkish barber was finishing
off a customer... working with the electric
razor around the stubble...
strange sounds...
i've heard of iron stubble...
the sound of shaving never sounded
so... glass on a chalkboard...
a piano shattering...
something felt odd: like someone
was playing me a Turkish film
with Armenian dubbing...

so he shaved and shaved and i looked
on... does an electric razor mowing
stubble make that sort of, "sound"?!
it was only when my usual barber:
the one i modelled for once
when i came in like a homeless man
and 20kg overweight...
he took photos of before & after:
pointed me toward seat no. 2
did i finally come to grips with the sounds...

ha!
a cage with two budgies - budge-rigours...
budgerigars was placed in the corner...
two jittery little fellows...
i sat back closed my eyes and relaxed...
better than a *******:
ah... with ******* you need to staple your
eyes open to your eyebrows...
but getting your beard trimmed?
nothing to it... like kissing metal...
oddly enough either i was relaxed
or my barber was relaxed...
not a ******* pipsqueak from the two
birds...
a vibrating sense of contentment
a bit like...
when was the only time you saw
a bulldog content?
in the company of another bulldog...

now that's what i call a barber shop...
when he finished i was asked by
the other barber whether i wanted
to a cup of coffee...
my barber offered me a hot towel...
i refused both...
i'm pretty sure this was a way
to make new friends...
or rather: have some backup should
a funeral take place tomorrow...

maybe i have been living in England
for so long that... i might look English:
like the Turkish ******* remarked...
but i feel... neither here... nor there...
if i were to go back to my native birthplace:
i'd be alien too: not engrossed in
the politics in the culture in the everyday:
starting from: "born yesterday":
engrossed in the culture & politics of England...
but hardly "born & bred" as one
former fwend of mine: child of Egyptian /
Iranian immigrants remarked...
i can switch off from all the saturation
and read some Knausgaard in ******...

right now... i've just spent a mad hour cycling
and i'm going to sip some proper whiskey-esque
*** without the stealth assassin / an agitator
of a diluter of spirits... caffeine murderer of
a carbonated caramel ****...
i'll drink it straight over some ice...

an hour well spent...
  for all that's currently music: lyrical constipation:
i need to relearn how to breath:
to even think...
revisiting that dream i never had
that began with Haydn's op. 17 no. 4...
just the violins... no need for drum-tactic rhythm...
we're all "im-der-hier"... in the here...
"im-der-jetzt"... in the now...
but never really: must be lagging...
daydreaming or otherwise wishing it was
otherwise...

would taking the offer of a coffee and a hot
towel made so much of a difference...
or would i just have set there like
a ******* pile-on-steam-of-****?!
i love the smell of manure in the morning...
i love the smell of manure in the foggy morning...
i love the smell of manure when i'm
planting a new tree and it grows to be over
8ft tall after planting the original bonsai plum
some 7 years prior...

even in classical music:
there's the music that's there: played to death
& a second death that's boredom
that's only used to diffuse fame...
Haydn's op. 20 no. 4: that's how
a mousetrap ought to work...

niche listening: there will always be
someone reading something by Stephen King...
otherwise... spend a year on the oeuvre
of some composer...
at least the composers never fail:
produce "too much": then listen to it
being filtered down... sharpened to:
a bugging nugget of praise...

all that's pop is not necessary...
unless: utilised for pedagogic tactics...
breathe the air! there are no percussion instruments!
barricade the doors to your mind
with the wind of violins!

seems only fair that since i've had
my beard trimmed by a Turkish specialist...
speck? ***** & span... no...
speZ... if i am to write someone of my own
i'm drowning in the works of others
and there's 7am to mind...
there's defrosting two fridge-freezers too...
the sensibility of waking up
moderately sober...
all that's day and all that's a masquerade!

trivial things: poetry: porcelain...
but they shouldn't be so easily: quashed...
now that everyone can readily
read: write... somehow... long before
poetics was pushed aside...
of all people... if the Vikings are to be
somehow... envied... emulated...
ingenious thieves that they were...
at least they kept words somehow
sacred...
while they exhausted each limb from limb...
a body wed to the earth
a mind wed to the air...
and all congregating in sun, fire & water...
perhaps some mead some
frost... fog and shadow...

how i envy the almost first men
and their chemical eureka upon eureka of
the first intoxication with beer!
not this intellectual: morose flight of body
anchored down by the more heavier extraction
of run: run: ***-***-**-here-we-go!

let it not be another knock-out night for me
on this tired plank of wood i dare to call
ship: but i'm dried up on what's
language: trapped in conventionalities
of passer-by conversations that are hardly
that...

of course this couldn't be a lament:
i would regret a good conversation
since the *** is almost as good or if not better
than any whiskey...
a good conversation would get me off
my rockers all the more...
but then the fear of sobering up
in the middle of it...
for the proper K.O. i'll wait for the chemicals
to take charge... while i'll play both
mouse & fox & sneak downstairs for
a glass of milk...

architects of dreams: best to appease a
boredom of London by stripping it down to:
far away... Athens... here in quasi-Sparta
on the outskirts... the ******* emblems of
itching at the sky...
the ****** emblems of stadiums for
which football was made to be: ahem... "footed"?

bypass the standards of any language...
the nouns...
then work around the verbs...
and the adjectives that work as substitutes of verbs...
eh... prepositional, pronoun and conjunction
shrapnel...

presto scherzando: of Haydn's op. 20 no. 4:
a sort of violin does a pilgrims farewell
to the folk dance: hey hey hey trance
which reminds me of...
some modern song...
   very, very: modern...
                
it complete silence: or rather... memory
by now has become a drunken orchestra!
on the tip of my tongue...
ah! yes! corvus corax! herr wirt!
hey hey hey... there are accents of it...
littering Haydn's
presto scherzando: of op. 20 no. 4!

- and to think... i could have had a wife!
- and to think... i could have had a son!
- and to think... i could have had a daughter!

an uncle was a disappointment...
half of my grand-parentage i don't know...
beyond estranged...
cousins etc. long gone: still alive...
my maternal grandmother recently
estranged herself
from her grandson and her daughter
choosing a conspiracy of three
attitude with some cousin and her son...
while my grandfather...
there's pain: exhilarating...
quickly done away with you:
with a butcher's pardon on the guillotine...
then there's: pain: numbing...
relapsing... erosive...

well... i hardly imagine having enough time
to... somehow conjure up a connection
between corvus corax's herr wirt
& haydn's presto scherzando: of op. 20 no. 4...
beside the fire of the television:
how lacerating the warmth
how tongue numbing how...
if only this insomnia was
somehow translated into a transparency...
like my melancholy is a perpetual
hard-on...

all that's intelligent while only ending up
being mere posturing...
all that's plain daft while only ending up
being mere arrogance...
the insensible Kafkaesque tribalism
of the urban peoples...
the masculine aspect forgotten?
new: automated new: muscle loss?
the new wheat? juxtapositions around
cat's persistent inquiry whether the window
is somehow open...
or whether the bed is not yet slept in?

throw in a glass of milk come 1am
and... beside all that's to come with the chemical
circus... from now...
docile wolf still itching: bite a harvest...
sliding doors... the quintessential British
film from the 1990s...
it has to be...
that's me... dreaming of Swiss cheese...
cut with a guillotine... not a knife...
better still...
                     how familiar a curry has
become...
but you try and find the proper rice
to make a biryani not look like some phlegm
suckling stuck together grains of rice...
of a risotto or a paella...

I just want to relive those days again,
When I used to smile genuinely,
Instead of giving a fake tight lipped one.
I want to be the child again,
Who used to get happy,
As if given his favorite cotton candy;
I want to be the mischievous one again,
Who used to give a cheeky- smile & puppy eyes,
On being caught for the little mischiefs';

I want to live my utopia,
Where every thing is just so perfect;
Where Cinderellas' have a happily ever after,
Where a knight in shining armor,
Is waiting for his damsel,
Where Augustus and Hazel become a single soul,
Where partings are never too longing.

I miss my old self,
Who used to believe fairy godmothers are real,
And one day she would meet the seven little dwarfs,
Who would be ready to protect her.

I miss the one little kiddo:
Who would instantly look up at a shooting star,
As if wishing for someone to wake her up,
And take her covertly to meet Olaf,
The one whose banter was enjoyed,
The one whose laugh was contagious.

But now it feels like,
It's all in the past...