(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 return to these words that are barely
an architectural promise of a house as a mere:
rummaging squatter,
that this will eventually become
scrutinised by eyes beside my own...
well it's not like i rhyme-on-the-cheap...
i've been trying to watch some penny
dreadful episodes:
what would woman do without
the devil; i suppose man tangled with
god is nothing but an obnoxious brat...
the devil of emotions
and their plethora; this belittling god
fiddling with stones and creases
in york oak stand-alones...
                          then it came like
an itch: poached-taming-(of a)-toe...
just a tatty... a humble:
i am pretty sure i saw the letters
prefix a toad somewhere: po-ta-to(e):
ah... there! poached tame toad...
a sputniks for a brainz...
in penny dreadful: john claire
the name of victor frankenstein's monster:
oh dear old god: this continued
exasperation with poetry:
one must live a most unsatisfying life
to cross the rubricon of
old testament anemia:
            i think i admired wordsworth too... -

playing house with robert duncan -
especially now:
when the house is in complete disarray
and what was once cluttered:
is more an upheaval...

- i used to write while listening
to music - no i write for the scraps
of this yawning silence
and all of its blisters of interludes -
yes:
i want a noun to turn
into a verb: not a mere:
metaphorical "transgression"
of how it's impossible
for the wine to be blood
for the bread to be flesh:
this poetry of: cannibalism?

i pry open the adventures with
cats:
i own two... my house doesn't
give off whiffs of ****:
god... i know the horrid stench
of either **** or ****
that isn't my own:
solipsistic in that...
       it's not a field of strawberries...

it's acidic to the nose:
it's beyond anything i'd ever
want to ingest: and i have once...
giggled... ******* into a glass
of wine to: punk up
the sacrament -
then again: i also ****** on my leg
when standing in a shower
cubicle and i attest to disagree:
there's something...

unconsciously prodding:
the advent prior to... learning to stress
that bladder into a muscle
and keeping it in...
that i can counter the will
of keeping it in...
that i can unwill the sensible
lesson and: it's like... anything
aqua focused -
a shower is a baptism
jumping into a pool is a rebirth:
or an invitation to
beside oneself with: start-agains...

it's very much unlike
drinking... whether it's a coffee
or a whiskey sour...
the ingestion of liquid is less
starry-eyed gluttonous freeze...
having ate nothing but hot air
or...
the whole body needs immersion
or... the ******* on a leg
prior to: then taking a shower...
hell... even mixing one's own
**** with a glass of the goat's blood
is also... "something" / something-...

to pray for sensible things is
to mumble or there's that devil's
dozen of oysters:
12 by feeding:
the 13th in the form of a ****
by nibble lick and spoon
of the tongue and lips' acrobatics...

i'm playing house with robert duncan...
i'm not a householder -
a term as ancient as: librarian
by my account -
              but the house is in disarray:
the kitchen is being subjected
to a 24 / 7  dehumidifier drone
army... i can hear the machines
working their insomnia down
below:
i have custard feet and i feel like
sinking: not falling...
when i stand to these machines:
hellish-jelly-feet...
   when i turn on the stove
and make an omelette -

     the living room (civil room,
a joke from my youth i conjured -
a room where we learn civility)...
is also a makeshift kitchen...
i'm currently playing chess from time
to time with: the memory of:
where did i put these spices...
this spoon this plate...
       it's not chess but the game is
irreversible -
it's also time consuming and it's
not that i don't keep attention to detail:
but i'm gladly not thinking forward...
i'm strategizing in reverse -

but such is the game...
robert duncan - poet and householder -
a chance reading of a moth:
but this is what makes all of this
so enjoyable: it's a niche a cul de sac
of decisions: an expansion
of time that doesn't make it to the annals
of: better to... burn... than to fade away...
either make it in your youth:
nice and proper...
or... what's the game then:
last man standing?
the list of contemporaries
drawing thin, short?

playing house... that i had a youth
i remembered when i'd too play with dolls with
my neighbour's daughter -
clearly ken and barbie had a problem
with their missing parts -
eunuchs of the sun's blind spots...
unlike when we were allowed
to take a bath together as:
not siblings but as strange dialectical opposites
to this duality: that wouldn't encompass
my somehow yet to be owned:
me good & evil...

    me tamer - me: 19th century's frankenstein:
dr. Jekyll etc.
     a rule for life: apparently...
is to pet a cat when you see one
in the street...
it's not exactly an easy task...
i guess first a show of mutual
assurance (and respect) -
this black tubby - with a bandana
for where a leash-leftover could
have been (collar) -
he starts walking anti-clockwise...
i turn aside and start walking
clockwise to pass him...
then we shuffle our approach...
like... i would always want
to pass a pigeon strutting
senseless on the pavement
with enough space so that it doesn't
have to find it necessary to fly off...

luckily for me i managed to "pet"
a stranger's cat...
my luck that it was black
but then again it was that sort
of hour
that's always a presumption
of a lazy gotten afternoon...
rule of life: pet a cat on a street...
it's not exactly a ******* given:
an "oops"... done that... tick...
self-help guru sold this trick...
                    
a selfie contra the days...
when the camera was used and...
other people would take pictures
of you... or of you and:
when there was an "us" - together...
shorthand of the limbos of life -
magnum opus words
constipated into this: makeshift
of a hopeful paragraph...

no, this couldn't be a simple meditation:
confined to...
robert duncan's household -
and my predicament of... playing memory
chess: well it's not exactly clutter:
the kitchen cannot be used
so there's a makeshift refugee camp
version of it in the living room yadda yadda...

which is a commentary on...
my distrust for the h'american literary movement
of the 20th century teasing an abandonment
with the "old ways"...
buddhism, odd... mostly...
   fair enough:
              ezra pound abhorred the taoists...
my one lesson from tao...
the best way you can aid the world:
is for the world to forget you
and for you to forget the world...
which is probably a plagiarism
of epicurus or vice versa...

              i can't imagine the demands
of pop philosophy:
pop culture on the other hand is much
easier to stomach: it's even enjoyable -
but the pop philosophy of nihilism -
which is: a pop philosophy...
it's not even required reading -
unless: you're rereading your own?
thrown into the river -
i am becoming a being of more becoming...
change is the only perpetual: blah...
if it's not my own rummagings it's
probably someone else's:
which has probably become diluted /
filtered down and is a cubism's monstrosity...

books sell for two reasons:
(1) they are genuinely read by a zeitgeist youth...
which invokes social pressures of
the collected experience - in ref. to:
something that can be talked about...
(2) they are read by "propagandists" -
by a small majority who pressure others to...
but the pressure only lasts for
airs - for a mere ownership of a book
should one be met with a scrutiny of
not owning it - reading it is beside the point...

and here in the land of "leftovers":
the middle of the road the people:
who of their own volition write and read...
that i was never ****** into
a cult of stephen king...
i was born too late to be:
but i was: ****** into a postmortem
oeuvre deity picking almost
anything by william burroughs...
i: reader: dear reader: clicked...

- i can't objectify this house -
i am subject to it: coerced by it...
made by bias upon bias
whether there's clutter or there isn't...
whether the kitchen is functionable
or not: that some people have
a kitchen but prefer to eat out:
to be seen: eating...
             i check the gradations of
punctuations and i know: still...
i will not recite these words not
out of gestures for bombast -
or pride - but for some sinister
urge to not abuse this sacred silence:
******* taught man
to manouvre... manouvre...
manouvre... maneouvre...
        man-oeuvre...
                   drop the hyphen boyo:
manoeuvre... wow!
"too many" consonants
in ****** words... how about a
magic trick? how many *******
vowels are in: man-oovr'eh?
phonetics king of the anti-spelling:
but then...
the synonym sounds
with aliases...
towing two different meanings:
too hot to count two
          ooh ooze - zizzez...
              zyzzes...
                     i can bring this anglo-slack-son
to kneel but only for a while:
before the architectural scholarly-
  takes over and the phonetic becomes:
lost, crude... based feral...

- a robert duncan is not a...
it's not mediocre is not necessary to be:
gee-whizz of frank o'hara's
cosmopolitan...
it's flesh of the h'american tongue
it's: sensibly accurate to provide
the best outlet:
for those of us still born in that
century - of what remained of us:
or rather of what remained
of the innocence of the 1990s...

that i am not nostalgic is: no proof...
that i write hardly any word of fiction:
one spaniard, once... commented
on my shoes:
i think he played a miniature version
of a flute: it looked like a reed...
the "spanish" superstition
concerning: a comment on one's shoes...
he admired... my shoes...
what's that saying:
about shoes: to best walk in one's
own before wishing to fill the shoes
of others...
a verb as simple as: there's no
presence of "run": when coupled
to: i am running: i ran...
it's raining...
i run i ruin fun... concentrated
"rhyming": literally linear: no staccato...

******* me over "jenga"...
this microcosm of sounds -
yet to draw deep leverage from
a meaning: it comes back as a mere
sound: worse a... mimic -
an aeon of only hearing
the heaving of a crow's crackling
croak... like a breaking of a tongue:
or... the lost trill of the R in
either fwench or: english...

exemplified R: with a diacritical mark
to make emphasis of the trill...

yes... this democratic oath of poets..
well: we're not going to tend to
the republic of the wizened goats
ex athens... are we?
the democratic oath of poets -
unlike the hippocratic loaf...
            which is a spectacular failure
since i have seen what
little ambitions can do:
when... the boat is not being
rocked: yet someone is still willing
to throw someone... overboard...
now that the boat is rocking:
i see nooses instead of paddles...
the seas are still rife with calm...

playing house with robert duncan -
especially now:
when the house is in complete disarray
and what was once cluttered:
is more an upheaval...

- i used to write while listening
to music - no i write for the scraps
of this yawning silence
and all of its blisters of interludes -
yes:
i want a noun to turn
into a verb: not a mere:
metaphorical "transgression"
of how it's impossible
for the wine to be blood
for the bread to be flesh:
this poetry of: cannibalism?

i pry open the adventures with
cats:
i own two... my house doesn't
give off whiffs of ****:
god... i know the horrid stench
of either **** or ****
that isn't my own:
solipsistic in that...
       it's not a field of strawberries...

it's acidic to the nose:
it's beyond anything i'd ever
want to ingest: and i have once...
giggled... ******* into a glass
of wine to: punk up
the sacrament -
then again: i also ****** on my leg
when standing in a shower
cubicle and i attest to disagree:
there's something...

unconsciously prodding:
the advent prior to... learning to stress
that bladder into a muscle
and keeping it in...
that i can counter the will
of keeping it in...
that i can unwill the sensible
lesson and: it's like... anything
aqua focused -
a shower is a baptism
jumping into a pool is a rebirth:
or an invitation to
beside oneself with: start-agains...

it's very much unlike
drinking... whether it's a coffee
or a whiskey sour...
the ingestion of liquid is less
starry-eyed gluttonous freeze...
having ate nothing but hot air
or...
the whole body needs immersion
or... the ******* on a leg
prior to: then taking a shower...
hell... even mixing one's own
**** with a glass of the goat's blood
is also... "something" / something-...

to pray for sensible things is
to mumble or there's that devil's
dozen of oysters:
12 by feeding:
the 13th in the form of a ****
by nibble lick and spoon
of the tongue and lips' acrobatics...

i'm playing house with robert duncan...
i'm not a householder -
a term as ancient as: librarian
by my account -
              but the house is in disarray:
the kitchen is being subjected
to a 24 / 7  dehumidifier drone
army... i can hear the machines
working their insomnia down
below:
i have custard feet and i feel like
sinking: not falling...
when i stand to these machines:
hellish-jelly-feet...
   when i turn on the stove
and make an omelette -

     the living room (civil room,
a joke from my youth i conjured -
a room where we learn civility)...
is also a makeshift kitchen...
i'm currently playing chess from time
to time with: the memory of:
where did i put these spices...
this spoon this plate...
       it's not chess but the game is
irreversible -
it's also time consuming and it's
not that i don't keep attention to detail:
but i'm gladly not thinking forward...
i'm strategizing in reverse -

but such is the game...
robert duncan - poet and householder -
a chance reading of a moth:
but this is what makes all of this
so enjoyable: it's a niche a cul de sac
of decisions: an expansion
of time that doesn't make it to the annals
of: better to... burn... than to fade away...
either make it in your youth:
nice and proper...
or... what's the game then:
last man standing?
the list of contemporaries
drawing thin, short?

playing house... that i had a youth
i remembered when i'd too play with dolls with
my neighbour's daughter -
clearly ken and barbie had a problem
with their missing parts -
eunuchs of the sun's blind spots...
unlike when we were allowed
to take a bath together as:
not siblings but as strange dialectical opposites
to this duality: that wouldn't encompass
my somehow yet to be owned:
me good & evil...

    me tamer - me: 19th century's frankenstein:
dr. Jekyll etc.
     a rule for life: apparently...
is to pet a cat when you see one
in the street...
it's not exactly an easy task...
i guess first a show of mutual
assurance (and respect) -
this black tubby - with a bandana
for where a leash-leftover could
have been (collar) -
he starts walking anti-clockwise...
i turn aside and start walking
clockwise to pass him...
then we shuffle our approach...
like... i would always want
to pass a pigeon strutting
senseless on the pavement
with enough space so that it doesn't
have to find it necessary to fly off...

luckily for me i managed to "pet"
a stranger's cat...
my luck that it was black
but then again it was that sort
of hour
that's always a presumption
of a lazy gotten afternoon...
rule of life: pet a cat on a street...
it's not exactly a ******* given:
an "oops"... done that... tick...
self-help guru sold this trick...
                    
a selfie contra the days...
when the camera was used and...
other people would take pictures
of you... or of you and:
when there was an "us" - together...
shorthand of the limbos of life -
magnum opus words
constipated into this: makeshift
of a hopeful paragraph...

no, this couldn't be a simple meditation:
confined to...
robert duncan's household -
and my predicament of... playing memory
chess: well it's not exactly clutter:
the kitchen cannot be used
so there's a makeshift refugee camp
version of it in the living room yadda yadda...

which is a commentary on...
my distrust for the h'american literary movement
of the 20th century teasing an abandonment
with the "old ways"...
buddhism, odd... mostly...
   fair enough:
              ezra pound abhorred the taoists...
my one lesson from tao...
the best way you can aid the world:
is for the world to forget you
and for you to forget the world...
which is probably a plagiarism
of epicurus or vice versa...

              i can't imagine the demands
of pop philosophy:
pop culture on the other hand is much
easier to stomach: it's even enjoyable -
but the pop philosophy of nihilism -
which is: a pop philosophy...
it's not even required reading -
unless: you're rereading your own?
thrown into the river -
i am becoming a being of more becoming...
change is the only perpetual: blah...
if it's not my own rummagings it's
probably someone else's:
which has probably become diluted /
filtered down and is a cubism's monstrosity...

books sell for two reasons:
(1) they are genuinely read by a zeitgeist youth...
which invokes social pressures of
the collected experience - in ref. to:
something that can be talked about...
(2) they are read by "propagandists" -
by a small majority who pressure others to...
but the pressure only lasts for
airs - for a mere ownership of a book
should one be met with a scrutiny of
not owning it - reading it is beside the point...

and here in the land of "leftovers":
the middle of the road the people:
who of their own volition write and read...
that i was never ****** into
a cult of stephen king...
i was born too late to be:
but i was: ****** into a postmortem
oeuvre deity picking almost
anything by william burroughs...
i: reader: dear reader: clicked...

- i can't objectify this house -
i am subject to it: coerced by it...
made by bias upon bias
whether there's clutter or there isn't...
whether the kitchen is functionable
or not: that some people have
a kitchen but prefer to eat out:
to be seen: eating...
             i check the gradations of
punctuations and i know: still...
i will not recite these words not
out of gestures for bombast -
or pride - but for some sinister
urge to not abuse this sacred silence:
******* taught man
to manouvre... manouvre...
manouvre... maneouvre...
        man-oeuvre...
                   drop the hyphen boyo:
manoeuvre... wow!
"too many" consonants
in ****** words... how about a
magic trick? how many *******
vowels are in: man-oovr'eh?
phonetics king of the anti-spelling:
but then...
the synonym sounds
with aliases...
towing two different meanings:
too hot to count two
          ooh ooze - zizzez...
              zyzzes...
                     i can bring this anglo-slack-son
to kneel but only for a while:
before the architectural scholarly-
  takes over and the phonetic becomes:
lost, crude... based feral...

- a robert duncan is not a...
it's not mediocre is not necessary to be:
gee-whizz of frank o'hara's
cosmopolitan...
it's flesh of the h'american tongue
it's: sensibly accurate to provide
the best outlet:
for those of us still born in that
century - of what remained of us:
or rather of what remained
of the innocence of the 1990s...

that i am not nostalgic is: no proof...
that i write hardly any word of fiction:
one spaniard, once... commented
on my shoes:
i think he played a miniature version
of a flute: it looked like a reed...
the "spanish" superstition
concerning: a comment on one's shoes...
he admired... my shoes...
what's that saying:
about shoes: to best walk in one's
own before wishing to fill the shoes
of others...
a verb as simple as: there's no
presence of "run": when coupled
to: i am running: i ran...
it's raining...
i run i ruin fun... concentrated
"rhyming": literally linear: no staccato...

******* me over "jenga"...
this microcosm of sounds -
yet to draw deep leverage from
a meaning: it comes back as a mere
sound: worse a... mimic -
an aeon of only hearing
the heaving of a crow's crackling
croak... like a breaking of a tongue:
or... the lost trill of the R in
either fwench or: english...

exemplified R: with a diacritical mark
to make emphasis of the trill...
i will not heed to market emphasis...
(Ꝛ if you might ask:
there's no leg to stand on...
the "R" falls into a turddle -
a tumble: a trill)...

ꝛ - a missing hammer: it would seem...
a sickle my dreading of apparents...

yes... this democratic oath of poets..
well: we're not going to tend to
the republic of the wizened goats
ex athens... are we?
the democratic oath of poets -
unlike the hippocratic loaf...
            which is a spectacular failure
since i have seen what
little ambitions can do:
when... the boat is not being
rocked: yet someone is still willing
to throw someone... overboard...
now that the boat is rocking:
i see nooses instead of paddles...
the seas are still rife with calm...

clamour for the subjective experince...
none of this: hammer to a nail
sort of "magic" that leaves
one... sensibly "ostententious":

a semi-decent poem contra:
a good night's sleep...
always the latter...
   but unlike today:
6am wake... giving blood for
scrutiny - subsequently...
a broad need for 4 hours in...
a makeshift wilderness...
from Hainault Forest
to Havering County Park...

                        i would clearly have
to start all over again...
should i mind reading back into Tironian
notes and what i had expected to find...
it will suffice to mind...
the characters of empress wu...

         國 (guo)

beginning: coming back to bite some back
from a beijing pork belly:
where you'd first have to make caramel
from the sugar dissolved in oil:
before all the wine would care to glisten...

             𤯔 (ren)...

                              in reverse:
ren-guo - people (of) nation...
                      walking past this field:
impromptu: please keep off of field...
that's what i read...
      this was exclusive -
there was not need to denote further...

and this funny oddity:
saying good-morning or a hello
in an environment that's beside...
walking down the street with a stable
hound of anonymity surrounding
crisp grey blockage of: the amass!
yet people are so expecting
a common courtesy to brief you
on a morning: good...
is it? incessantly so! apparently!
switch them to the torment of the cements
and the back-to-basics apathetic crew
is on the counter...
ghost faces...
  but push them far enough to be alone
and into nature:
they pass a stranger and apparently
demand a prompt: hello!

i go into a depth of nature like
i have *** with prostitutes in a brothel:
i want to have as little to do with talking
that i'd loan: smothering someone
to shut up...
i came for the crows the knee-high-hallubaloos
of nonsense that...
i will extract myself to break
fasting to give blood by foraging
some blackberries...

i still prefer the lesser democratic voices...
it's not that robert duncan was going
to be a stand-alone show akin
to gibsberg...
but... my house is currently in disarray...
i'm playing chess by having
a makeshift kitchen in my living room...
i don't even know where the spices
are! but i'll manage
to bake a **** fine moroccan kobhz!

- this little but current focus for a genetic
"protection": half of me,
then a quarter, an eight, a sixteenth,
a 32-and-a-third... jump toward
64... 128... and... from all these fractions:
half and half:
beauty is no longer viable:
i imagine love as being a prized
bull kept for nothing except
for ******* the gene pool silly...

that's "love" from a darwin from
a materialism: breeding racing horses
or... both the submissive
and the contentious workers -
pay up! but i am not looking
for the generic beauty of
the plateau of the women
employed as surrogates
in this darwinistic harem...
            
isn't it obvious? it would have been
better have be allowed ourselves
to be dead: aborted...
but then: critter load: make-up...
i actually offend my own existence
by affording these dorian gray
parades to take hope in puruing
norms...
i like the scaps i like the wounds
i even like nibbling on the shellfish!

****-****** literature is my achilles
heel...
better a heel than trodding along
with faking a ******* knee...
robert duncan... jack spicer...
i like reading eyes by (metaphorically)
licking up the ****...
and it's not like i might give good head...
i employ a growth of
***** hair to convert my chin
to a niqab like i might: perhaps blink...

then again: face-masks and fashion?
is... this... somehow...
a "thing"?
            well it must be new:
it's nothing from the sort
of the elders i might care to remember...
i walked the scenic route...
blackberries and horseshit...
everything is baking in a procrastination
of: tickle the rats' nibbling...
scrutiny of the lesser of the food
hierarchy: omnivore that i am...

yes... that i like petting criters
that find themselves adamant in their
superiority...
but who have yet to see me:
teasing myself with
a: what if...
                 hours match-up to
not keeping count: there's a fog of them
that goes way back to...
out of the womb... then abandoned
by the scholastic detail that
allows them to float: limbless...
and then return to earth: degenerate...
and less than amiable...

        douglas murray is probably
a hot topic... i too sometimes bewilder myself:
it would have been best to have
allowed the pendulum to swing both ways...
but he (ol' doug) speaks very well:
his writing is... beside the generic...
salt of grain: akin to my own...
for a cubic's worth of water...

    i don't want this tongue to be somewhow
exasperated with concerns for this / an "art"...
or that it can belittle a scientific bone...
thrown to the politics and red herring marches...
spins the doctor: no plates...
forever the new lies
kept in the same old... rhetorical: quirk-and-quickness
of the quilled-tongue...
a knock-knock stone cold: generic...
must: mediocre...
tired of living tongue of poetry
that has to become tired:
truth has to tire so easily...
so that politics: and the freshness
of lies and the no-niche-audience-allowance
can cast their:
"vote"... their... archaic... illiterate "X"..

i will not poetry for rhymes for
exasperations - fooled i: to you: to pursue
that paragraph of fiction - either...
but as freely as this will not:
become an exercise in myopic-claustrophobia...
so it will not rhyme:
perhaps: to advent a coming of my
prescribed punctuation:
but more: your own, your "post-nationalistic"
canadian:
something the people of India or
China will not share with you...
because:
they are still of the mindset: China...
India... hell! Russian is towing suitor!
individualism collapses nations...
whether with a homogeneity of ethnicity
or the heterogeneity of liberalism...

           a wonderful collage of stories...
from the 20th century:
agony aunt israel bewildering
to either confront or defend...
            2000 years have somehow passed
and: europe is no new: "anew"...
it's the same old bland palette
of readily ethno-primed availability
of spices...
hurrah for thyme! and rosemary! mint!

from some mythical above
to this drudge of the pressurised castor -
there was something about robert duncan
that might always have:
made me... diverge from...
it could have been expected...
stash a tonne of bricks by day...
weave in an escapism posit of cinema
come sabbath...
now... escapism into... where?!
critical reignition of marxism:
that sort of marxism my parents escaped
from from under the old soviet
yolk of the satellite state
of poland: thank **** i too am an
immigrant:
but i see no repatriation politics
either...
               go back to a state of
the littlest of all bald envy necropolis
Impoleons?

            no among my native people:
among the natives of these isles...
a thespian: knee deep in ****...
           faking best predicts a survival
rate of this uncoiling...
it's a nation full of: self-
pre-determina...
                  automated prefixation that
can never allow itself to:
make sensible coagulations
of the odd sociable pint...

this atom world this atom's worth
of man...
best life lived as designated
to a harem...
  my and my leftover "blues"...
this world of god and the adventures
of...
no longer available...
thus this one "reality" presented:
playing by man's rules
for the purpose of man's eventual:
transcendence...
a dwarf riding a hunchback
        toward a goal that's a talking donkey!

what's otherwise best?
this has to be an: exercise in futility -
that it had to come from somewhere like:
borrowed prior -
that it could only be borrowed prior:
this tongue had to be inherited:
it could never be acquired -
that a native speaker is...
of a higher status to a bilingual -
because the earth breathes rights...

i forget: i am not equipped
with the desirable physiognomy -
problem being:
when i might find black males
attractive like i might lions: distinct...
i have this ****** on my brain
that says to me...
  well... well...
     i'm not gay.. but i'm certainly
not heterosexual:
even if Flaubert might ask the question:
blondes, brunetters - afro-beauties:
ivory envy?
  what can i do? fest on a hard-on
chemical "oops" / short-cut?
i can't possibly have... a beijing fetish?
a mongol fetish?
i can't? there's only one variation
of interracial mixing...
i guess... so...

     it would be so much easier
to just be gay and leave this world
with a ******* massive **** salvo
of: not coming back!
               to **** a black girl:
not enough...
to not **** a black girl: doubly knot...
******* a lemon while
staring at the sun:
the sado-masochism of
all the post-colonial empires...
and me: whittle ol' resurrected
******... or searching:
the elder prus - the new estonians...
some little european *******...
i imagine...
going to Kenya and running
for parliament:
to concern myself for the voices
of the: minority!

it's... fiddling with the already
prescribed narrative:
trying to make a lee evans jokes
out of it... but...
it's not ******* happening woe-o'-sunshine...
is it?!
it's not like i'm strapped
to a northern monkey
reservation... while still retaining
my: immigrant southern fairy:
commuter hell "debate":
this is not devonshire...
this is not bristol: i'd love to scoop
up a life of a decade's worth
up in Bangor... but it's not even that...
pay by way to:
a collective identity crisis of:
zee vest...
            
if it's anger: perhaps...
it's more a seance in glorifying confusion:
it was once perhaps a little
bit... naive...
but then... who's naive enough
to repeat two-folds of yesterday
within the confines of a day:
to- / to- are not future even
if subjected to incremental changes...
fx/dx changes that might
spawn alternate realities...

        the breaking of a donkey's dollars
worth: i do fishing in the indian sea...
with some... somali pirates...
it's not like i'll ever wake up from
this guilt... the guilt that might
riddle a people that inherited...
i inherited exile from my fathers...
i inherited: no...
the ****** aristocracy didn't tend
to their garden... there was no Eton...
no rugby no football...
there was only a partitioning...
to look toward the past is
an agony that i wish to only hide
in the english countryside...
after all, i thought: who would't want...
make a feast of conquest of this land...
but in a way that was norman:
that the anglo-saxon debauchery could
be... delianted
and brought to a celtic-esque heel...
with a dash of neo-paganism:
a york-up sort o' pie...

without disturbing this dilligent
people of: a most fervent... attention to detail...
it's an island... it's devoid
of any continental squabble...
no mongol ever... no ottoman ever...
it break my heart...
it reminds me: although it shouldn't
remind me...
the aristocratic class (they deem themselves
as much, so why deny them?)
of this country are like the ******
aristocracy
of the three partition "era"...
as napoleon was celebrated "elsewhere"...
with the resurrection
of the duchy of warsaw...
and... england made a beef from
a wellington...
and how the confederacy of germans
repaid the english during the first:
thirst for war...

                   a shogun's pride:
no one would invade japan:
given the persistence of pressure
from a civility of: glamour creases...
it's still the ******* canon rolling
the pawns and pins...

i have but this little interlude in time
to entertain: a history i have learned...
beside citing the obvious apple
hanging on a tree...
who? the burning vietnamese monk?
that's who i am going to... erase...
2000 (circa) years of history with?
this is how i play: conquistador-catch-up?!
this is my whittle muhammad
stage-fright?!

these new surgical masks are
not imitations of the niqab...
the arabs are not drying up their dinosaur
marrow reserves and are not
scouting for willing sodomite freshers
to their gargantuan wealth-soiling
of "morals"?
no? this is all... a pauper's conspiracy
theory... god!
i try to imagine the conspiracy
theory of kings!
it must invite a realisation of
a god or gods...
and at least a quarter of an abstaining
pademomium!

the poets and the sceptics
living under: the... gates are open...
a republic under "scrutiny"...
the philosophers and the
geocentrists - have allowed
for nothing more... than this...
thespian "bureucracy" of
shadow "fiddling"... tail with now:
tail best quite...

attention spanning the glorifications
of non-replica, generic
Solomon comes to the furore
front: then a mismatch
when the brain: swiss cheese project:
is treated at the Avignon
pontiff...
the harem and debauchery shifts
focus...
there's that "we're" and...
dumb-lasso-dumber than you'd
pay the libido of a camel with: for...

i have to always imagine myself
petting cats... or dogs...
to have to dissociate myself from having
perfect: the needs for either halal or
kosher demands of leather...
i best prefer the pipsqueak of
a meow to... an actual oink
in the litany of cogs and perhaps:
clogging up the machinery of
"jurisprudence"... as some Jain might...

borrow from... export very little to...
come the omnivorse of the east
and all succumb to:
boy-scout avenues of:
yes ss'ir...
most loathsome ss'ir...
                     i have to interrogate
the dead man as i am:
the best example of a cul de sac
of dreams: the...
pedestrian could mind not thinking:
imagine: imagine the corpus deity
of: unimaginable thought...
or one which has
an alias: unthinkable imagiation...

memory freelance architect prior
to noon...
is somewhat justified with...
a boredom of a cat come
5pm... but by then...
no cat is ever really bored...
and i have no need to concern
myself with dogs... or leashes...
or desires to: address a
workability of legs...
          to: give scrutiny when all
other examples are wheelchair bound...

he held a piece of paper:
between his hands... like my shadow might:
hold a butterfly...
exasperation:
that philosophers of ancient greece
said: poets begone!
no wonder this...
currency... of wanting to imitate
a petting of animals...
and... this thespian autocracy
that no elders could abide by...
it can still be excused:
the role of actors:
the role of shadow-thieves...

it can still be salvaged...
some of us are still the same rummaging:
in ruinous...
wordsmiths or... best...
plumbers... not some aspirtation
beckons for youth...
it must rhyme:
it must come down to: 2 + 2 = 4
sort of: flimsy poetics...

i'd must prefer to be a
homosexual plumber these days
that my very own mediocre leftover...
thank god i do not encompass
a courtship of a woman:
then imagine!
what did i do with my time:
that i do so much!
having made... so little money!
ghosts can't spend: ****!
i did with my time that
would not allow woman
to turn time into money!
thus i turned money into monkey's
play on elephant and
called tha pennies: p'p'eh-nuts!

  the old man dies:
the youth of man was never
supposed to be born;

god... this was supposed
to be profound?
with this idiosyncratic lost...
spontaneity of punctuation...
i take this reading as
a leverage for making
image: of an anchor dropped:
that would sink the ship.

Barbiturate is one of the few drugs capable of killing you painlessly, so of course the state has banned it. Instead we get paracetamol, a ****** over-the-counter painkiller that leaves you in pain for up to five days while your liver and kidneys shut down. Suicide prevention is a ******* joke. Secular appropriations of Christian values that assume life is worthwhile, whether you desire it or not. It’s long been known that rates of suicide rose dramatically with the birth of modernity—techno-scientific paradise for the middle-class which stresses efficiency over existence. New forms of automation, the human body disciplined into repetitious acts, the partitioning of workspaces so that no single worker could operate the whole—so that any worker could be fired and replaced with the minimum amount of training necessary for capital to continue circulating. The body is individualised, scrutinised, and punished by rich kids playing panopticon, so that any mass agitation is coerced into silence through the threat of destitution.

Slitting your wrists barely succeeds and more likely than not leaves you with tendon and muscle damage. Catalytic converters in cars now convert carbon monoxide into harmless CO2 and H2O. Drowning is one of the most painful ways to die. You cannot escape. The state places helpline numbers around suicide spots to treat life after the fact, rather than at the source of suffering. Vocal band-aids, ****** ******* aphorisms that seek to revert you back into a happy state-serving commodity. Things will get better. Life is worth living. Think positive. Alienation is omnipresent. Neoliberal discourse requires you to be subservient to the greater system of capital and the easiest way towards this is the instilment of comfort, of pleasant nullity, the circumscription of emotional capacity and reflectivity. Suicidal thoughts are abnormal, because life is worth living. Eat your packaged food item and watch Netflix.

For a drop into water to be fatal, it has to be 250 feet. Try to aim for your head to maximise brain injury. The most prominent suicide spot around here has a drop of 100 feet. They cordoned it off anyway. Your life doesn’t belong to you. The first time I tried to suicide my mother asked ‘why would you do that?’ as if it was the dumbest thing in the world. The second time, the doctor looked at me in an exasperated manner and prescribed me lots of drugs. Geettt bettterrrr. Nobody cares about you, they simply want you to return to normal. Normality as in serving your parents, serving your friends, serving the state, and serving the market. Normality as in not questioning social norms and institutions. Normality as in get a stable job (i.e. compete against other workers in an exploitative, undemocratic system that values and inculcates self-serving desires), get married (preferably to someone of the opposite *** who is middle-class and imbibes European culture), get pregnant/get someone pregnant (but only once or twice, because anyone who has more children than that is backwards), invest in housing (those students and lower-class families need to learn how the world works; really, it’s a benefit to take their money), watch sports (to instil national pride in your children; no son, we didn’t colonise the Pacific Islands, keep watching the man with the wooden stick hit *****), eat out every week (preferably exotic restaurants), go see the world (preferably exotic locations, so you can be served by exotic people, take in exotic sights, then leave without considering where any of your money has gone to, whether any of it has reached the slums, whether the beach you lay on is accessible to the people living there, or whether it has been privatised by the tourist firm so that only rich tourists like yourself can lie on it), join a club (those capitalists were innocent, it was the indigenous folk that were making a ruckus over the new golf course; it’s not like we’ve been colonising their land and culture for the past three centuries), donate to charity (but never any charity desiring systemic change; that’s crazy), consume, always consume (keeps the economy going; why question the desire for infinite growth in a world with limited land, resources and markets?), replace your phone every year (those poor workers in Asia need our help), repeat to the point of nausea.

The most successful method to suicide is a shotgun to the head; high calibre, slug rounds. Of course, with all these methods, the chance of failing may leave you disfigured, paralysed, mentally disabled or physically crippled (spinal damage, broken limbs, failed organs), with no guarantee that your family, or even your state, will allow for euthanasia. After all, the popular discourse paints suicide as selfish—an irony, considering liberalism places the self first and society second. It is viewed as sinful regardless of context—deontologically detached from anomie, alienation, material deprivation, social pressures, psychological affectations, any cause or structure. Life is worth living. This ignores that the subject is situated in existence. The subject moves through existence to live. Life, then, is the totality of the subject’s interactions. It cannot be universalised into a single state or judgement that merges all subjectivities into a catch-all worthiness. Worth is dependent of the subject.

I don’t know why I’m writing this. Maybe I just want everyone to **** themselves, because the world is ****** and the majority of people are ******* it worse. Most people think being nice makes them good. They turn blind to the systems of oppression they partake in. A while ago my mother was asking if I’d heard about the mass suicides happening at Foxconn, the largest electronics manufacturer in the world. This year she showed me her new iPhone. I don’t ******* understand. I don’t understand how people can be outraged at humanity abuses, yet do ******* nothing to help or change their ways. Yes, market solutions are ******* ****, but these commodities are still coming from somewhere, and while capitalism is in place, our money is still flowing back. I don’t understand how people can be concerned about ecological issues, then pour dishwashing liquid down the sink every night, dissolving the gills, eyes, and organs of fish in rivers and oceans. I don’t understand a ******* thing. I feel physically sick most days. I can barely function outside of university, because engaging with real people, in real systems, just reminds me of how careless, worthless, and disgusting they are. When I first turned vegan, my dad simply said plants are living too. Well no ******* **** dad, why didn’t you ask me my reason for turning vegan, rather than simply repeating the dumb **** everyone else says? If you were stuck on a desert island. Well I’m ******* not. I’m stuck on this **** world filled with nice people who don’t give a **** about anything. I’m stuck every week walking the same roads, to the same university, where I become more and more distanced from reality through abstract philosophical theories that no one else cares about. I’m stuck walking through the supermarket every week, to purchase overpriced commodities produced by transnational corporations I don’t support, but nonetheless have to buy to survive. What alternatives I buy are mocked because it's so funny being ethical in our day and age. Because it’s so much more normal eating pies, and drinking beer, and treating women like objects, and affirming nationalistic sentiments of white supremacy, and making fun of ethnic minorities while they’re incarcerated, and beaten, and killed. All lives matter, the liberal conservatives cry out, while doing ******* nothing to help any cause. I don’t understand this world, and I have no desire to be in it if this is all there is.

A clock
is not a thing
that shows us the passage of time;

a clock
is a primitive device that moves
at a fixed rate while time passes all around it.

Time
was drawn and quartered
by the clock. It used to be an endless horizon in all directions,

but it was violently
partitioned into a grid system
in order to make it easier for those with power

to control
those without power. Clocks are
perverse. Clocks are capitalism. Clocks

**** nature
without nature’s consent. We rightly complain
about the partitioning and deforestation of wild lands,

of the Amazon,
and yet we are not outraged
at the partitioning and deforestation of time. There is

a reason
why one feels out of sync
with the natural Earth. There is a reason why one

cannot sleep
through the night. There is
a reason why the years feel like they are

slipping away
from us. Time is not
sand in an hourglass. Nor is it an etching demarcating

the position
of a shadow cast by a cone. Nor is it
the rate at which an electrified quartz crystal oscillates.

Rather,
time moves at the speed
of experience. There is simply nothing more

to it:

A morning fog lifts.
A bird lands on a dying tree on the far side of a river.

A frog leaps from a rock and disappears with a quiet splash.
A child dozes off while reading.

The world becomes dark.
A white-hot meteor streaks across a frozen winter sky.

“Mistakes were made.”
I quote at least three recent former U.S. Presidents,
Who wrote or spoke infamously in the passive voice.
Here’s a bit of history:
The words spoken by automated phone systems,
Were code written by computer programmers.
Computer geeks, revered for their cold logic and impartiality;
Like scientists taught to maintain objectivity,
When studying fascinating subjects like Base-2 Binary Codes,
Disk partitioning and hard drive defragmentation.
Impersonal, the passive voice avoids sentiment,
Steers clear of pesky opinions unfounded on certainty or proof.
Unsurprisingly, the passive voice seeped quickly,
Into the language of politicians,
Our beloved rogues and rapscallions,
Hiding truth, avoiding accountability and culpability.
Practitioners of political science,
They bob and weave and spin.
Yes, mistakes were made.

remember me never
and forget me always

please
just please

let my memories fade away
faint as the distance stars and planets
let us say our goodbyes to Jupiter

the daybreak comes in fast
quickly to separate the satellites
partitioning off the stars from the horizon

please
just please fade away

clouds roll in,  obstructing my view
and the haze of the sun veils my eyes
it sets a fog over our melancholy scenery

please
just please let me fade away
and here I take my leave

He wanted to drown
Not in liquid, but in sound
Raucous rapture bellowing beneath
Hands too heavy to hold his own
Heartbreak.
These lions labeled ladies
Making ****** hearts sing.
The candid caucus of cartographers
With eyes too cold to cry
Mapping and marring,
Partitioning paradox with every stroke
Witless wizardry without
Love and longing.
In a circus tent he found
That circuitous catharsis
Amid tremulous trapeze swinging
Watched by the sloughed skin of sinners
Vice and virtue muddied by malice.
Exploratory tongues
Giving preface to loneliness
Too tranquil to be twisted
Too torpid to be tangible
Romance recondite,
Sold to us by our world
Leaving us with nothing but
Fantasy and
Broken bones

etymology extract: as was said, they'd read my poetry
on the front, among the billions, a few might tread,
from everyday Monday through to Sabbath,
thus said, archaeologically bound: Egypt, Josephus,
the nativity play, xylophone, and too much
indoctrination acquired to walk like a peacock,
and indeed more strut likening to a crow;
for indeed the waterfall of skulls, the dead sea
which reaches depths higher than peaks of architectural
adventure in man levelling mountains,
exploring sea depths and excavating depths
of the prized orbits: such restlessness never once
but countless times before; so soon forgotten
among the revision of partitioning, that nearer
Israel's resurrection on a foreign continent
than a neighbour's resurrected breath on the continent
concerned... leave unto Persia that book,
and unto Africa the judgement over Egypt...
but so your toying in global affairs is gluttonous in
sugars of hoped for sweeteners in applicability,
paying remnants of the economic enrichment i too remember,
20 to a room... 20 to a room... with baked beans soup
and white bread to send breadcrumbs home...
oh but my scottish compatriots haven't felt the full
**** of immigration, they haven't!*

why not talk of Kazimierz Prószyński
like you do concerning Auguste and Louis Lumière?
oh, i get it, ******* in the hood...
Europe is really foreign accepting the existence
of the once famed commonwealth,
as the present time, with the resurgence of
Israel, which can't be split equally, fathered
and equally brothered among the constituents
from the Baltic to the Black Sea...
from the median to the red...
best keep the sea lions bopping along with dear tourism
in the over-salted sea,
should the dead sea attract more sacrifice than the
touristy hill outside Jerusalem.

Booting Up with or with out you . . .

Retrieving my Life . . .

Relinquish Bad Sectors . . .

Formatting Hatred . . .

Partitioning Space and Time . . .

Installing New System . . .

Restarting System failures . . .

Loading my Pieces together. . .

Starting new Stupidity . . .

Waiting for another Connection . . .

Synchronize with another System. . .

Error Starting to Fail System . . .

SYSTEM INFECTED . . .

SYSTEM CORRUPTION . . .

. . .

THEN THE CYCLE REPEATS . . .

Until Found a SYSTEM Called...

L.O.V.E...


-----------------------------------------­-
Norfhel V. Ramirez
February 21 2011 / 4:42PM

concrete flinging monkey that i am:
albeit albino -
tinged with himalayan salt hues...
   well this little detail of my working
limbs: concrete -
3 parts of sand 1 part  magic dust:
some water -
here's a dead-earth dough -
it's not a pizza it's not a pizza dipped
in caramel to be subsequently
deep-fried: it's not a scottish ingenuity
project for a heart-attack:
after all... a mars bar battered is missing...
oh my little edinburgh...
one of those nights and mornings:
having finished watching the matrix
trilogy and expanding on:
joys of 5am: being awake prior to
the cockerels shooting out their salutes
to the ***** of white noise and fat
on leaves glistening in: an abyss of a yawn -
the crags and st. arthur's seat:
big ******* volcano sleeping
in the middle of the town...
          such crispness of urban life...
the streets so devoid of noons and...
  buying that carton of cornflakes
      and some milk and enjoying a double
variation of crispness...
well concrete flinging monkey as i
were today: doodling my slow
in the garden... digging a trench for g.i. joe
soldiers in my take on world war I...
so the weeds (morning glory esp.) would
take to teasing its presence from my
neighbour's backyard...
  obviously there was a spider: a glutton
of a eye-fest... whether it was just finishing
its delight or...
           the moth: i guess it was a moth
had a missing head...
  so grand slurp champion was *******
all the details...
   i nudged it once, i nudged it twice...
that bulb of: bottomless pit torso that
probably arrives at secreting a web...
i nudged it once more...
nothing...
no nervous scuttling or having to parachute
onto a sponge of its exoskeleton...
i arrived at the posit: my little world
and my inquisitive lense of the microscope...
apparently a spider will not mind
being nudged by "the hand of god"
should it be eating a moth...
    hardly a lazy sod:
                  what's there to admire the a priori
argument:
   it's not like a spider learns
to become the architect of a web -
it's not like dogs learn to swim...
                     throw a dog in the deep end
and watch the gruff ruffian tread!
duck beast...
                    no... apparently you can try
and try to agitate a spider in the middle
of his meal... even after...
after the meal? the spider had to eat
up some cotton...
    like a bear might prior to undertaking
hibernation... to clog up the ****...
the spider started nibbling on some
of the web...
    and i guess they do that...
go hunting with a web:
                  at the opportune moment...
a day's worth at best to pass the time...
once the meal is over
they figured out to clog up the nutrients
with some of the web...
   can spiders take a ****...
but unlike agitating a hungry spider...
which will scuttle the moment it
is brushed with a tip of any sort...
this well fed specimen took things... lightly...
i could have... done...
the extension of "scrutiny":
buried the ubiquitous bulldozer of fangs
that concentrated on the guillotined
head of a moth in a dollop
of my concrete...
                       i just find it impossible
to **** moths... hell... some night
i'd a proud caricature of man in what
become a nursery -
            come sunrise i don't know whether
i am the graveyard
my mouth the last "search" for these...
        "refugees" from the torment of the night...
conversational overtones in this:
"poetry": it's not something to
make memory architecture of rhyme...
rhyme alone is not enough...
lyricism - i am not gorging on wishing
for a Keats replica...
that it might rhyme and be better
ingrained: a burning coal of fluid ink...
or that horrible alternative of: the haiku...
mash up: i write for the sake of not being
able to afford the paint the canvas
the brushes or the superstitious agony
of what's already preemptive in such
an undertaking...
                     but it's better tested:
      from this day's depth and its
eyes made most pertinent -
      (this shouldn't be hard...
all i have to look for is a -ent suffix
to match)
           toward some forever incessant...
my own limbo toying with body:
to later succumb to an anybody...
                lazily rhymed -
    lazily staged: for all the gold
of the leprechauns... k k k k koch:
                                  chasm and a miasma...
by god's sexless and the devil's
**** and furry *****...
   i want to rhymes...
i wants to rhymez...
               rhymez likes ping-pongs...
in another tongue:
the plural of echo: is not ecce for a cappuccino:
etch 'ere...
         crescendo bother: blues...
i forget there's painting involved...
no crisp solidified sounds:
   a tongue lapsing up a lisp and a labrador
cow-traffic of moo: st'...
                        from colour to a sound...
an alphabet ring-a-ding-ding...
in another tongue the plural of echo:
              ech...
                     not... m'eh... or eh... for an E...
which is first sung and later cited: eeee (longating)
e-ha!-o...
              not e.e.k.o.
                             prune juice fermenting
from drinking: god this brain this sponge...
spiders and spiders...
        spiders and spiders...
first inconvenience is also a staggering
remedy: failure on my part...
hangover from a love that lasted...
well... from april through to september...
           obviously impossible as i couldn't
just see the need to "pet" tarantulas...
           me and my fickle arachnophobia...
it's sometimes there: it's sometimes not there...
and "there"...
hell... if a louis zukofsky can play
the tender part of aristocratic verbiage:
here i come towing a guilty expansion
project: under the proposed guidelines
of: democracy... had i a tongue with
a sidewinding penny to boot...
that i might lisp or spit point blank
an empty fill: and... there would be an
academic career waiting for someone
as i might: provide... postmortem...
                 it's not an agony of
the overlooked...
it's just an agony of agony...
   for some per se pressure to peruse one's
own lack of detail...
to have to complicate the demands
of an audience as a...
  "back-up plan": B-project...
                         in seeking redemption:
or gravity -
   all i know is that i'm not a narrative
architect - i'm too poor to paint...
or rather: i have a photographic memory
and i'd rather make food that cezanne
wouldn't want to paint:
or debase by eating...
          could you paint still life
these days: no... not very: not really...
but i am not a journalist... either...
primarily so...
             i am a democrat on the level that
i would be happy to live
outside of plato's republic:
it's not like plato ever convinced that
figurehead of Syracuse...
                  so... spoilt eggs...
chicken strutting flamingos...
     red's an oopsie come blue and purple
is born...
that's not true...
green and yellow will yield blue...
fair enough...
               but as sure as death: i am...
big credit to punctuation as a revision
of: not anti-rhyme: but certainly not pro- it...
    because i'm constipated on this
type of exertion...
i want as much of the holy fire of lyricism
to burn a mark on the cinema of
memory...
   but... alas: here's my 2nd best take
on this not being tabloid journalism...
               - so how come everyone started
to write: cute?
i mean: if not a cute rhyme then...
some variation of the exasperated haiku?
  - sputnik...
           in sight a digression rubric...
it's the same idea:
   - sputnik
   - moon shards
    - elevations of comparisons
   to match up to a meteor crater with
a slice of apple crumble...
    - sound is most certainly not colour...
- could i call nouns primes:
  or numbers? odd... even...
             red elepahant 1 G
              blue sky 0 K
              horrible hat 9 pro
circus envy... esp. clown envy...
                        this couldn't possibly be...
tabloid journalism...
or "poetry"... it's how far democracy
allows itself the pursuit of: ideals
with a hint of veto... for the pardon
of the status quo hierarchy...
                 concrete flinging monkey...
- robert duncan: nee san francisco -
i write by eyes alone -
i neuter the sounds employed
to challenge like neither *** -
best unscripted and that...
       metaphor of metaphysics
                collage of misnomers -
at best...
                     having to sit with
a slab of lard on your head at noon -
       this least grammar this last exasperation...
a furniture of a "poem"...
an earthworm's guide / guise of the tongue...
wriggling away at the benign...
        postcards and a slick licking of
postage stamps...
                 i forget to pause: i pause...
i paint with this bothersome blood of ink...
the crisis at the revisited crux...
stale europe dying h'america...
                i have yet to read anything
i have written aloud...
   i have yet to read anything i have written
aloud...
i have yet to read anything
i have written aloud:
resonance...
                    revelation 13:5...
          the beast was given a mouth to utter
proud words and blasphemies and
               to exercise its authority
  (for forty-two months)...
time a forgotten space...
or at best: a concentrated suffice of it...
a most bearable 10am in september...
i'd like to think i can't be
exasperated... or i might just:
jest at overt-punctuation...
          - written as pure eyes and
a beethoven towing deaf-        -ness...
    too much of: jack of all trades...
- we once had a "pardon" of handwriting,
in that we once employed a quill
and a detail of ink -
but not now but not now
of this clicking machinery like
chickens' pecking grains or letters...
         spiders and spiders and all those
freelance romantics...
a democracy of language that can
escape a caging formality to the endearing
dear sir, kind regards essay / letter...
language in a tuxedo...
language of escapism...
that one might treat a watermelon
as driftwood... or the crucifix as such...
  - that this can be a language that cannot
be a mechanised slaughter -
  for a throw-away: a 20th century admiration
for some variation of the "up-to-date"...
i am having to diminish
the base of an argued for: carpenter...
by bone... by bone... by each...
carrying of the vowels without:
the pentagram soliloquy -
           that could only be a variation
of rhetoric without an eagering of an audience...
this ingrained son of sam
this glittering blood feud of nights...
a line of an exasperation...
and each and every akin to this "maxim"...
because this is not tabloid journalism...
and it's not because it's
a democratic avenue of would-be squalor...
my niche partitioning
between those literate and those:
hardening a candyfloss of tortures:
       born air: settled in a tomb of fire...
born water: settled in the double sediment
that's once a breathing air comb
into frets of grain...
and earthworm wriggling...
now cement... malicious albino ape jester:
my little evil at the passable concern for
salt and the himalayas...
in that i work on the worth of:
teasing clone i - not in english not in english:
but in english...
  in this... tongue that's a best
butchered body of... a scrutiny that's
almost a... verifying anatomy... best:
   brick by ******* stacked...
a harbour of anathema and dangling
posits of: walking-9-to-5 abortions...
            high cue: but otherwise there's always
a managing of a queue...
that's bottom brass and godhad grey...
with a tease of a concept of hair...
balding snow on tomorrow's mountain...
- that i never hear what i write...
that i see it...
            i see "it" borrowed from somewhere
that has to be revised and revisited and
so-forth backed up renewed into
a ******* Guggenheim... renewing:
          new yorker slang and formalities of
rent... and... shackled up with...
dirtying the shells of oysters with...
prior the lemon and the glug of
the slugging: a word for lessening tourism of
Penzance... or anywhere in south wales:
cornwall...
         i tried loving the russians...
i tried loving the russians...
but then i had a mirage of a girlfriend
that had to tame tarantulas and i was
an arachnophobic tease -
                 - that in poetry the narrator is "somehow"
not the protagonist...
disembodiment via a section by
section - this limit of a candle...
this the kidney... this the heart...
but a "polyphony" of chicken hearts
towed into a broth...
          that poetry doesn't allow
a narrator... that i want to pick out a mask...
and i want tabloid journalism to spew
out of me...
this little detail this grammatical
arithmetic - sound of A...
and the syllable tease of a consonant -
impromptu question:
              asked in between: "in between":
what is a consonant K...
then again: in borrowed rome:
KAY is not the greek kappa...
what is the nurture of over-naming
and what are synonyms?
                      layers upon layers and
this is not a purity of jargon-jesting...
spiders and spiders...
                    - such that i believe in the anonymity
of readers and how i don't expect
a comment section:
   that bukowski made poetry pop
for: a gary snyder admirer...
  
  or - how one hundred arrows were sharpened
on flesh: and were dimmed...
because to crown this crude
metal creed against a stone....
and had to make coagulation of
frothing bloom -
extracting pauses to make a living
with taking wheel:
              burning rubber and burning
kites...
             burning threads and shoelaces...
dissolving sugar into
caramel...             an oyster that became
a tongue.... and a tongue...
its uttermost silence that could be
wrapped up back into a clean
residue of: biting / nibbling
for a piano... because never at a...

           such is the concept of rhyme...
that one can beg for guillotines
to... supposedly... "end".

from latin: a letter i can see...
a word i can: lip-read!
               not this... vanguard
of sanskrit and the glagolitic.

translate the letter to a status of a number...
whole: holes...
from nothing the sieving project.

half empty coffee cups litter the desk
tools of various origin find their place
my bed lacks a duvet and matching skirt
a fish tank glows in the darkness
Each corner presents a new darkness
collared shirts line the floor
lined in such a way to form loose paths
you can still see the floor
but only through crumble ideas
and lost thoughts
The carpet wears thin where I pace
the blinds hardly dim the sun
the carpet lacks partitioning

Peace in a world of chaos.

in the cohort of her hands, a disorder

lost dignity wrapped in the red of need
reckless and arrogant as lilies

an abundance of periphery
wavers at the sea-black hand

of hands of time of hands

rune stones
black granite spattered in stars

a slutter of language
of words of wombs

necrotic we burst
a pause of however

a narcosis of want

meander of limbs
siphoning brine-white tide

colorless-the disorder
marquis of white shadow
on seal slick waves

and the lilies,
petal outward

and in the silence
there were unknown weeks
where the flowers foundered
other bodies

there is a form in the garden
still as clay

we reddened our mouths
and still like clay

slant of a neck untattered
partitioning cerebral sea
arcing back on itself

there was a benign negligence
in the want-of flowers of lilies

vague signs of amplitude
pachyderm and small
in the grooves of lack

malnourished, contrite hands
flushed blooms of pink paper along
pink walls-flush seas of lack

vague symbols of wood and
purulent understanding a

nest of roots
dipping towards the alkaline sea

we didn’t even begin to understand
the range of mourning
becoming us

smooth white shells of elegant
weakened at the hock
distempered by the recent winters
foundering in the vacant space
between us

I mule you
through the tapestries of my desert
and am still, here
where I don’t belong

here I am spread as an excess
as an unfortunate truth
glossed by negligent hands

anxious, with the possible morning
indistinct dwindling winter
curling pink paper
along the walls of black sea
earth-tide

small weakened arrangement of groundcover
jostling in the ferns of truth

we measured the years in numerals
as with skin, ardent and ruddy

palpable lost youth

the rare wood of mistake
loosened from sleep

in the morning we resemble damaged objects
prized for obedience
at odd angles of deformation to time

in the body, a funeral
still warm

skin and stone a slender neck of atonement
for the absence of home

Her muses are rather bazaar
From afar
To an Akbar they are
Saraswati’s sitar
For the river is vivid expressions of life
In a culture as distant
As discordant strife
When the songs are of mango trees
Sweet as can be
And her temples of riches
Are fertile and free
But still poverty seen
Inundating the banks
So much so in fact
That the monkey gods pray
Where the rhinos once drank
And I must bear witness to all the existence
Persistence resisting the suffering tone
For mine is so om that unknown is my home
But the homeless who roam like Dalits in the streets, still need places to sleep
And a harvest to reap
From the zamindar’s farm, could feed all of Uttar
Which is still so bazaar from afar to Akbar
That I wander the Thar as I wonder who are, All the bearers of Blue Star and Amritsar scars
Still polluting and looting
And shooting their brothers
And turning the tears of the Mother the Color
Of coal ash despair from unfair lady lovers
Still Partitioning them against one another

Trading dishes in sinks for less than it feels,
The fingers become too shriveled to bleed if cut.
Partitioning the mind into three distributions:
Voluntary hand- and motor-functions,
Involuntary goal-oriented guidance system,
And forty percent for the rest.
I take up smoking once more
To talk for fifteen minutes
With a sickly dweeb and serious nomad,
Saying nothing of our kicks,
But planning the weekend outloud For the sake of hearing the ambiance
Before the background
Becomes the out front.

We are using the same words. We are saying the same things.
Mark it. The interchangeability of birds resilhouettes the sky.
One grey line drawn overview. A space.
Bare clap sky. You are puncturing yourself.

All that gas, you think. No matter. No matter.

You will be lighter eventually.

Not before the birds blaze, metric of ash and gust
partitioning a pomegranate sky.

You loved pomegranates once.
Now there’s fruit everywhere.

These little seeds stitched into the hemisphere,
the drive, your hand.

The birds have gone mad. They will not eat them.

let's take a second to listen
written alphabetically
with a brand-new addition
spliffing delivering
heat, cat on a hot tin roof
sizzling, Messi, dribbling
spit ill sickening
guest visiting,
lend me your ear, listening
shimmering as he shines bright
twinkling, divide, partitioning
locked up, imprisoning
doodle, scribbling
SA drill
spicing  with flavor
seasoning, using my head
thinking of reasons
to justify reasoning
for dazzling,
as we settle in

round 2 smurfed but
not blue, more a colored
hue, repping cape town
awe bru, wake up
disabling snooze
jesters you fools
visionary when I see
first from the back
they all lose
not a masquerade it's all true
deadline my times due
ask mew 2, pokemon
index, it's perplex
get ash too, over
a cuckoos nest birds flew
seeking asylum hes crazy
still frosty so cool
yu gi it's time to
dddd duel


this the part where spazz out
remove doubt, running circles
on tracks, roundabout,
roundhouse kick to chin and mouth
no handout, grind out
red hot
circular rounded
noise drowned out, not shouting for clout
cant recognize skill,
take this pill, it will break
the spell my tracks stackable
not saying this sarcastical
sarcastically or sarcastic
not applicable, resolve soluble
doubt dissolve i'm liquid cyanide
every track i ****, surgeons
precision with a scalpel
so skilful, I sculpture
syllables in rhyme schemes
unseen to the naked ear
class dismissed school bell

so tell all its not all folks
not ****** toons no jokes
not ****** tunes, with lazy tones
I have lampoons, that ******
death squad platoon
you'll be history lying in ruins
surfing these dunes no fear
seeing things as the series turns
with unclear reasons I'm nuclear

there are all these street references in modern
American poetics as if
anyone would or should give a ****
where Coventry Road, Ilford
or Beehive Lane, Gants Hill
   or Havering Road, Romford ought to or not
ought to be...

mind you: if there's anything i'm in awe of
i'm in awe of modern... post(?)modern
American poetics...
since no other people cry out: democracy!
and then shelter into under a poem
to salvage some realism of:
outside of the ballot box: the truest frenzy
of expressing freedom and individuation
and... what else?

ah yes, capitalised on discovering how
atoms can't be manipulated otherwise
to be used for boo 'n' 'mb...
so no great philosophers' stone unearthed
when the boo 'n' 'mb touched ground
on the keel of Hi'row'sha'mah shamanism
for clouds get "*****" with plum hues
when gathering water losing salt
when it is about to become a draped drenching
like a wrath of god and genghis khan
making coded eye-twitch-signals
because that pile of chalk is bone
and heaped as it was in Baghdad it wasn't
exactly: Pisa leaning...

    stacking bone-heads (bein-köpfe)
is stacking bricks, somewhat not but if pyramids
are concerned:
    Christian "mongols" did the same
to the library of Alexandria:
books were burned and later gold was revalued
at double its worth... since knowledge:
or simply knowing how to hack a faulty plumbing
device was passed down for two generations
sober until a drunk fetish for revelry...

the Baltic sea stinks of herrings...
hear-says i say i hear: sometimes it's not worth
hearing anything but a lover's snoring
with dictation of: i don't mind...

i won't be writing an equivalent of
"for my people" in the vein of Margaret Walker...
to me English is a language of commerce
and some off-shoot locals
like Cockneys befriending Essex groundwork...

i can't dispense my intellect to do
neo-colonial or post-colonial politico lingo jar
jar jargon...
i can actually excuse myself and it seems i must:
i must excuse myself from the concerns of
the English and what the hell they have done
with their "heritage"...
it's all very reminiscent of the 3 partitions of
Poland... one of the few instances
where at least 3 languages congregated
in a communion of a state...
at least ****** Litha and Ukra...

   not that i'm hot on my heels to return to the land
of hobbits and orcs in the middle of
the funnel continent that's Europe...
but if the common Englishman was
"robbed" of his laziness then
his laziness is a robbery in and of itself...
sure: to make life so expensive that it does
require the import of foreign labour for menial
tasks...

ask Leibniz: the librarian...
i'm a security guard at large events
and it's almost a simile in terms of how deviant
ambition can be(come)...
the concerns of the English are no concern for me...
notably?
  ah... this lovely chestnut...
why is Whitechapel spelled in Bengali
on the station entrance?

       হোয়াইটচ্যাপেল

palagi wordsmith... that's samoan for:
people from heaven donning cloth sheets to capture
the winds...
my concerns are not the concerns of the English...
i think "my" people have kept intact
European concerns...
Russia is sort of off limits as is Romania
Poland Lithuania, Bulgaria,
well: beyond touristy English no one is going
to live out a lingocide...

veit-shapel?!

            but i feel not allegiance to the "threats"
of what the natives speak of...
given the natives are still most intact
as the Welsh and the Gaels and the Scots
even though: beside the notable Welsh linguistic presence
the Scots reduced themselves to
scribbling phonetically
rather than linguistically...
so the theory off of Darwinism emerged just
as much with the advent of:
crazy idea European stranglehold
on the universality of the use of fork and hammer
and toilet... beside the brickwall of chopsticks
stone head and ******* and ******* into
the sea...

        lingo vs. phono

                 splits two brains into one and revels
in two tongues blinding one eye
with one ear honing to the sound of the migration
of bees...

i remember my origins in this land
and i am clearly peeved that what CONSERVATIVE
once meant... also meant:
deportation... also meant my father and mother
being handcuffed while i punched the wall...
so banana boat ahoy
so banana boats ahoy...
i'm still a furious pro-recyclist
in that i like to keep this island clean...
but i defer when there's a complaint:
oh illegal this one, not illegal that, one...
comes with orientating oneself
when there's clearly an ethnic nepotism...

how else was mass illegal immigration
into England made feasible if not by ethnic nepotism?
those already here
ensured they could prosper even more
by importing cheaper labour and pay them
droplets and breadcrumbs
while stashing their legal papers while
abodes of the Sheiks' were erected...
seems that smart people are a bad judge of liars...
because liars get freebies of innocent tickles...

i reimagine myself starting again
on the islands of Hawaii
concerning myself with: i'm not American...
and you ******* came all the way from: Taiwan!
sure... no horses like the Mongols
to transverse the plains of Siberia...
row row, row your boat...
   admirable... truly...
England is saturated so that i can't make excuses
for it making excuses being strapped
to either a straitjacket...
or rather... who invented the first straitjacket
if not Odysseus when encountering
the mermaids' song?

i can't be moved since i too am an arrival...
when applying for a job at Fulham's Craven Cottage:
being all hard-on for diversity and inclusivity
i put down my ethnicity as:
ANGLO-SLAVIC...
well in school i was taught about the Anglo-Saxons...
that's Anglo: Welsh, Irish, Scots... and the Saxons...
anything wrong with my assumption?
out of all the football clubs they pay the best...
am i not an Anglo-Slav?
well... i wouldn't put it down as a British-Blackpolack
because it just doesn't sound right...

all together... since the referendum
a marked disinterest from "my" people to settle or live
among: the Romanians fit just ever so slightly
better with the Asian demographic,
almost indistinguishable...
so after the referendum eastern europeans ******
off back home and
now we have confused locals siding with
political marches pro-Philistines
like it really matters, not...

                            shock-troops of the right
are still only yobs and psychiatric clues to the wonk
of anything worth being debated...

but as i dropped my mother off at Stratford
and was coming home...
well... so much for loving this piece of land...
and the language...
i can't get all fired up about heritage...

bo i tak mogę pisać po Polsku...
bo i tak: mogę myśleć po Polsku...
oddly enough, not really...
i don't need to be involved in an "culture war"...
which is? less a war and more:
a cultural exhaustion...
       an exhaustion of and a lack of expression of:
since everything has become a microcosm
of politics... a shifting zeitgeist rots
like a Lovecraftian anti-deity...
even the summations of borrowing Darwinism
for simpler explanations of:
not everyone is getting laid blah blah...
the war bride answer to why oh why...
blah blah...

            i can actually step back and refrain
from any panic... mingling with the Muslims
and the Hindus like this island was for partitioning:
clearly it's not...
but i'm just somewhat suspicious...
the whole world is here...
with the odd two dialects missing...
and? nothing spectacular is happening:
there's no Beatlemania...
there's no Britpop reinvention revolution...
it almost seems that someone has taken
the reins and said: whoa whoa whoa...
shh... slow down... let's find gravity again...

that's the plus side of being an immigrant among
immigrants and faking it being English...
only yesterday i had a revelation of:
but... i was faking being English, all along?
i couldn't learn the Essex accent...
so the London cosmopolitan educated type had to do...
but still...
mind you: before the current wave of immigration
there was that one little pocket
of resistance: no. 302 and no. 303 Polish fighter
divisions in the RAF...
less spectacular when the plumbers came:
i gather...

            but if i had to bend over backwards
and walk like a cryptic anti-toddler
in a circus' act of gymnastics: or some freak accident
in a horror movie... just to be supposedly
"anti-racist"...
  make more fetishes and unrealities of
individuation and self-sovereignty:

up to a point... until i'm a passenger in a bus
and i require a bus driver...
or a baker... or a shoesmith...
for ****'s sake... nice theory:
put into practice: leeches of the monetary dynamic
akin to usury and then thrown back
into the reality of 7 billion people and
we have tasks... individuated tasks:
specific tasks... yet such frank opent bluntness of
these people and their money...
yet somehow lacking the skills to perform
open heart surgery on themselves! hmm!
odd... why not?! divinity atom-ego?!
you get whiffs of their lack of schematic of politeness
on the basis that money touches anything
and ergo it transforms is done
by the magic of materialism of:
but money per se is not materialism per se...

money is like water, it is transactional...
it is not a stone...
         enough accumulation of it is a bit like...
a limp ****... it's the ******'s fetishism...
of ghost *****...
    ******'s 1% club... or rather...
the impotence of riches...
                 a strange kind of hunger is born thus...

microcosm at the end of the garden,
micro-dosing whiskey and a joints:
tobacco and green anger
the one to subdue in the pockets
of anxiety attacks -
that can be channeled into a focus -
all those people on chemo anxiety blockers
at least with the green anger
and the fire water managed to intellectualise
in focus - equivalent to:
painting - if done by solo venture of scribble
scrabble 'n' 'sum                  ... threat of violins
falling and slicing in the rain (demonic)
slicing water and sound and the sound of
water and the sound of fire
and the sound of air and the sound of the hearth...
nights
days
nights
days i spent listening to the four orchestras
of the elements: water had waves
of the sea and the skies of the seas falling
as rain... the grand kidney of god that is this earth
god is filtering equivalent to men censoring
each other other...
      Edie will love another, Edyta will love another
but the whole legality business visas
H-1B plenty of unskilled security men out there
so 1 - 0 to the locals...
          marriage visa? now thanks to Martin's judgement
i will sooner inherit my grandmother's apartment
with a glorious view of a cemetery....
from the balcony... and then this house in essex
this little island of abode brooding...
in exchange for a life on Kauai?
her doubts her words her disqualification of self
that she's 18 years apart in bodies...
we are 18 bodies apart... aparts... a partitioning of sigma
the splitting of the soul not by ******
but under the guise of the many loving expressions...
i have lived a life since September 2023
when i traveled to the island of Kauai to meet
a girl for the first time since i talked to her mother...
i was also looking for a transcendental father...
a father of transcendentalism: no, so no, not my mythological
father - yes: because i am currently living
with my biological father and mother and by extension
the Elephant Phantom Martin and my grandmother...
so elaborate:
from September 2023 on a writing hiatus...
brought them back Edie and Reyla to London and Reyla
****** me off for not wanting to go and see
the Phantom of the Opera...
now in the background a Hanz Zimmer crescendo from
the Dune soundtrack...
                mini puncture and now by marriage...
to say: by the duty of the wedded this monstrous wound
of tongues licking eyes and gently using like worms into
their last state of being veins of the sclera...
                  a text from my nigerian next door neighbor...
lived for 3 years like that like
no woman no cry
                             like that 3 years known to me casual
formal...
only a few days earlier
been smoking and drinking on the roof overlooking
the garden
talking poetry and not talking poetry Ayo Ayo Ayo texting
me now... i waffled back to him that he cought
me in the middle of this composition this new groove established
in infected and mushroom cancer in the brain
we are born with a brain fungus
a dormant brain fungus
what is a parasite a cancer on a tree if not the evergreen mistletoe
dormant fungus... brain... typing listening to music
text from next door neighbor thinking that Edie
will love again can love again loved in the past
we are 18 bodies apart
                                  and so so just a one sided communication
a barrier... the butterfly to caterpillar transition
of... none other expected than a St and a Martin
the ghoul the phantom the missing...
             the ego in the ego the self without self
the id so...
                                  primitive man of pre-haunt of death
most apparent to self and the shadow upon the curtain...
a talk with self most relevant now:
re-imagining what a good chromebook keyboard would
feel like so protruding like an old nokia
and the burners
and what my poetry would be like without Edie and to find
resolve i will have to reply: do you want me to stop writing
forever? because that's what you would have
to destroy... my mother could think that you killed her brother
because you came and i didn't go to visit martin
when grandmother was slowly killing him
you heard me you saw me over the phone
you heard when you heard me hear the message...
could you have said? can you come with me to Poland
blah blah...
i don't know... but blood is blood and blood is blood
and what's bothering me is family
but in the end my mother blames my grandmother
but i also thought about being blamed
and who isn't to blame but Martin himself and i wonder
how happy he is now that he has gone toward
the ******* land of la li lo le ole and lulu or lullaby
because i'm thinking about alcoholism as a zombie taboo
crawling and ******* and frolicking in open wounded
vowels like o cut up to u
or i used for a hyphen and a dot to punctuate better
to say a being stitched up to e to make
the Adam and Eve monstrosity of Eden
found in the Latin script... dated: some literary ******
just remembered that he used to write and so does...
there were nights filled with fire
there were nights filled with thoughts of women
there were nights filled with fuckless women nights
there were nights within nights
there was chaos in order and order in chaos
there was a dualism and a schizophrenia
there was certainly god and madness
and i was so almost killed by a friend of mine from
high school a Samir... in Canterbury...
try this other than **** spice
this Chilean spice...
SALVIA will make you see elephants
and you riding elephants quickened hallucinations
so smoked **** then toked the miracle...
turns out my face slid to one side and i slouched
into a dying fetal position...
them giggling... until seriousness took over and they
realized that i was not going to die...
my impressions of a death party...
death parties exist... i suppose in dark web lingo
a death party involves
at least 3 people...
           2 people plan a ****** of someone by poisoning
subtle: not like the case of brianna ****...
scarlett jenkinson and eddie ratcliffe organised a death
party... samir and mr jivandoo organised a death
party by poisoning...
              to their horror and my own i am alive aged 38
should have been dead aged 21
should have...
there were years in my calendar when writing
that i would drink a liter of whiskey a night...
i would drink a liter of whiskey a night
i would drink a liter of whiskey a night i would drink a liter of whiskey a night i would drink a liter of whiskey a night i would drink a liter of whiskey a night i would drink a liter of whiskey a night i would drink a liter of whiskey a night i would drink a liter of whiskey a night i would drink a liter of whiskey a night i would drink a liter of whiskey a night i would drink a liter of whiskey a night i would drink a liter of whiskey a night i would drink a liter of whiskey a night i would drink a liter of whiskey a night i would drink a liter of whiskey a night i would drink a liter of whiskey a night i would drink a liter of whiskey a night i would drink a liter of whiskey a night i would drink a liter of whiskey a night i would drink a liter of whiskey a night i would drink a liter of whiskey a night i would drink a liter of whiskey a night i would drink a liter of whiskey a night i would drink a liter of whiskey a night i would drink a liter of whiskey a night i would drink a liter of whiskey a night i would drink a liter of whiskey a night i would drink a liter of whiskey a night i would drink a liter of whiskey a night i would drink a liter of whiskey a night i would drink a liter of whiskey a night i would drink a liter of whiskey a night i would drink a liter of whiskey a night

what killed martin a bad death of still being alive?
beer... manslaughter by grandmother?
is it in her to be able to **** both husband and son
because they were alcoholics?
genuine questions... interlude for a cigarette and
an auf wiedersehen (oꟻF vderzeen)

ꟻ: ah... remember to find Adam and Eve
in the letters... diphthong... doip doip doup dupe dulla loop
oop                              poo             sssssss
                                                        s­ss
                                                   ssss
                                                        ssss­s
                                                     ss

    s
   s  s                        5S5S5S5S5S5S
       did numbers really originate from the Raj and
thanks be to the Arabs for our modern numbers?!
b6b6b6
                  1I1I1I
                       ­                                3E3E3E
9P9P9P
                                       O0O0O0
             7 Γ7 Γ7 Γ
                                     B8B8B8
          2Z2Z2Z
                                         ­        4G4G4GQ

Q! Q! Q1 Q1 not G... i.e. 4Q

                    (    )               (     )

                                 A

                       ___


(&)                    (&)

               L

      __

  the Doppelganger Series of Portraits
noses will be letters
the mouth will always be the flat-line of expression
status poker quo

            ($)                    ($)

                    ­      I

                  __

         (£                                 hmm...

no... I looks good...

              (#)                   (#)

                           Y

                   __

                              (Beelzebub... hashtag eyes)....
song switched to type o negative's
christian woman... but i quickly have to switch
to the recent taylor swift song i heard today...
tortured poets department...
typewriter?
                    like a tattooed labrador...
lebrador labradoor
chelsea hoes?
                            labaradorable...
              ­           no ******* body ooh what a sweet
sing along...
  smoke and bears and chocolate bars
smoking and golden retriever?
                                           cyclone of dehydration(s)
this mouth this wake up 8am with summer...

indeed... the poem has exhausted itself
         with god-flow of needing to take a **** -
switching to the memory of Jemminah
and homemade wine and foster the people six next to me...
or this is this is...
                    this is a slowly pealed grape...
                                       this is a reflection on slowly peeling
a single grape...
the unusual request to return to a former writing habit
or habit of the mind to spend an hour
elsewhere... with one's own to one's own sense of self...
and all the Wembley folks in security were hush hush
and bothered about the Netflix documentary
thinking there would be a story against the security teams
if any...
       or rather to hear first rate accounts journalists would swarm
the site post Euro Finals 2021 and ask us about any details
well the film itself became more a documentary for
anti racism...
                     it was the most comprehensive and positive
lesson in  adhering to an anti racism focus...
         i was expecting that...
the security personnel were actually praised... and there was
a sense of empathy....
   i recognized one face in the documentary:
Lee, the son of the owner of Achilleus Security who's
name is not Ralph not Romeo but probably Ricci...
           Italian connections if i were not mistaken...
                       ooze.... hit the snooze before bed
go down smoke dip mouth in some whiskers and beddie beddie
bye bye.

by now i know i'm not really
adding much to the narrative -
nothing to: quench the zeitgeist
thrill or: pneumonia...

i cannot offer either an escape
plan or some comforting
trickle of wisdom -
       all the better:
    there's no blatant sentiment
on my part for an escapism -
as there's no fixation
on transcendence -

           same old two variations...
but when i smoke
a cigarette...
and listen to purple people eater -
cockfight...
and there's some bourbon
too...
    well... i bring gravity
to entertain the function
of feet: one minute perched
on a windowsill (clenched
buttocks sitting on a folded
foot... the other dangling) -

with an interlude:
i guess that's how i dance
with gravity -
a centipede on nicotine:
quasi-numbing arithmetic
of: pairs... infinite pairs
of legs...

then sitting in a chair:
crouched like a crow like a priest...
no... not really...
nothing more from me
to sustain this narrative:
elsewhere...
    dasein doesn't even work
on me:
    oh sure... big concern for
big h'america...
         the soviets never made
it: somehow the chinese
played the long-game and
that shitaki hallucinogenic
was brought in on the sly
with a very subtle broth...

       that's all i have... running
dry on prospects for concern...
out of sight: out of mind...

i very much like the idea (and
experience) of being the last
person in the house to deserve
a bed and find sleep...

i am also very thankful that
i am not old...
             and young enough
to not feed into a vanity:
     but when someone might
suggest: this is only a
"word salad"...
           such friendships...
       i guess we were both
competing... ahem... "competing"
"artists"...
   if he could only have said
something more...
last time i checked though...
there was no constructive
criticism...
   nor did he mention any
famous poets...
              we apparently wrote
poetry...
how i might have wanted
to talk to him about some verse...

a fwendship that ended
with: you should title your work...
that psychiatric put-down
the toothless Doug...
             thank god this friendship
didn't end because of money...
or a woman...
instead over a disputed
informality - tact -
          something this trivial:
making the friendship trivial
to begin with...

                 such that be the current
wrath that feeds a speeding up
the death of nostalgia...
          there can be no nostalgia
in rewriting of history:

grandiosity of blistering words...
otherwise it wouldn't be neu-history
would it: something done
by way of arbitrary:
            from the atheist collective
tsunami back to sq. 1 of
the resurgence of the individual:

like, somehow...
the mind is an exclusivity of
genius imposing the rule of thumb...
sometimes though:
it's not even a genius...
   at best it's a veneer masquerade...
teasing tautology...

a beast at the froth...
               base insignia: it's hardly
a black-*******...
it's hardly a glimmering
hammer & sickle...
   it's a greyish stone and scythe...
but it's otherwise: the RED...
primer... and guard...
there was once talk
of the white russians and
the red russians...

       i guess the french will
be forever bleu...
  the cardinals are red...
the bishops don ***** purple...
how for all the meticulous
additions to... "understood"?
we revert back to...
poet of amber poet of red
poet of green...

     ha! amber: reconsider!
waver!
red! full-stop!
    green: which is not blue:
green is also envy...
blue is high values...
   but you'd never... associate
blue with: keep going...
don't stop... even though...
the river is blue: blue as
water in a glass is "blue"...
well... or that the sea is blue...
enough area and depth
and enough of the sun...
the sky is blue...
   the earth is tinged with
green outlets...
otherwise...
cinnamon lives matter?
arabs don't matter...
test of "conscience"...
        
             the flag of estonia...
blue black and white...
the flag of lithuania: yellow,
green and red...
   that prominent arab
countries borrowed
the white red and black
borrowed from the empire prior
to weimar republicanism...

otherwise the ordeal of man-made
laws: one year the vogue -
the next a limping outcast:
a ***** colony starts from
a whipping of jurisprudence...
some said: a new normal...

edward the confessor,
the normans and the anglo-saxon
antithesis horde counter
to: how i find underage girls
unappealing...
how you can only tell:
a girl is not procrastinating
her media influenced ***
when... walking next to her...
is a boy... and he's gaff...
or he's riddling a concept
of a bicycle...
                  but you sort of have
to pair them up...

if i were my old 21 year old self...
and the hormonal fog had
my mind in an iron maiden...
and i was dating locally...
without a plethora of geographical
locations: one girlfriend from
russia... one from australia...
one from france...
some spanish one-night-stand...
a whole bunch of romanian / bulgarian
advert friendly *****...

       colt bite the buck and bucket...
to think of *** like a swan:
settling down... giving her a brand
new kitchen...
a pair of cats to pet...
a very unreasonable son to try to
shake off like a fizz in a drink:
to open a can of coca-cola...
if only later to drink some acid
trip of stale: same partie...

     couldn't the fate of yugoslavia
come face to face with america?
couldn't there be a sedation of states...
if the polish lithuanian commonwealth
could be nibbled out of existence...
by 1, 2, tic-tac-toe partitioning...
if mr gorbachev could fathom:
peacefully: (a) ukraine...
estonia... lithuania... the kazakh bazar...

couldn't... the great american
juggernaut leave room for interpretation
as to how there might have to
be sedition states?
solo texas...
the north east coast could
write a constitution of the states
of sedation...
it's not like america could ever
become: wholesome... rye glamours...
and remain intact: that it could!
it could! for the desires of
nostalgic posterity...
   unlike the grinding blunder...
some minor concept of:
"nation"-        or    -"state"...

    past the calorie mark...
ingesting the liquidrice like maple like
crude moon-shim-shimminy-sheen:
glued teeth together and:
breaks the bone...
having to crease the pain...
and differentiate...
otherwise:
a flamboyant: tibia...
walked a dog on a leash
that was also (once) a hangman's noose...
and he barked and jazzed a rhapsody
of barking like there's no analogy for
tomorrow!

no clue in on the game of:
statutes... law...
      or synonyms...
           discretion of proofs -
             cold core concept of...
that there was an idea of
sniffing *******:
when in fact... Kiev youths
boast of sniffing glue...
              
        because i couldn't possibly...
leverage an act...
if i were 34 and she was 21...
and... oh... right...
the fetish of the forbidden is missing...
esp. in the digital medium:
because when flesh is imposed
upon flesh: and there's no...
hormonal aurora...
           the kids keep their bias...
jokes work best...
              some fake some russian
trucker...
and some parents who sought
justice: **** and club of metal over
the head...
               thus?! pristine and
spaghetti retro-flex...
spinning and spasms extra...

          that man achieved poetry
and nuance of language:
that some words don't aid... vectors...
that the ego is no ******* compass...
copernican "west"?
in the geocentric dimension...
which is still somehow needed...
otherwise? dream-big!
heliocentrism and science-fiction!

- to sort of tinker with a layer of man's
laws... and there's gravity...
and then to ***** oneself with
a constellation:
because the united could
never be as united as the yugoslav
project: post-scriptum
of the ottoman barber shop...

   spooked bosnians: best beloved
little europe avenue
gashing with pauper blood
of aristocrats of burgundy...
the biggest shame came...
when the blood was gushing
from the guillotine:
no one held an adventure into
the jesus christ metaphor...
no one sparked a drunkard ****
of wine gurgling...

to read the law:
somehow to read the thesaurus...
balance bonkers of the synonym nuance...

or that other myopic extreme:
some john dillinger,
some greater extremity of new yorker
blues:
new york is like anything
beside this standard of new amsterdam...

shooting dogs that aimed
at skipping: three legged...
unless that debilitating quote from
mary shelley...
and how the monster:
proteus or caliban...
          in name alone...
was to cite...
                           tectonic urges...
that there was a mr. caliban
and a mrs. caliban...
          but that there's also
a neuter lobster: ****-frenzy...

           right now: to want to live in
america... to want the custard...
the fudge and marshmallow...
to rewrite new york
like: a bunch of people who
love to eat in: who can cook...
and the restaurant is...
    an overcooked platter of veggies...

the edible gurgling of
post ad hoc lawyers...
               postmodernism of:
that / this disused hammer without
layers and tiers of nails born
toward tables and stables...

no new bogus prospect:
twisting original narratives:
some cite dementia prone
quid pro quo(tas)...
                      this ordeal of...
heaping together limbo:
EISENHOWER:
            no ad lib. / verbatim:
        we will not churn out
tea-leaves made into chewing gum...
then we will!
find! the lost avenue!
of! digest-able chewy-chow-some!

- then we bring in the saxons-anglicised...
and treat them to some disney...
we'll subsequently huddle
imitating hebrews:
like the briton mongrels
we are... we probably are a people
of polyglots and polymaths...
but under the present guise of
history:
we are celts and we are britons...
there was the saxon invasion...
there were the viking raids...
there was the norman revision...

            we the people...
of the afghanistan of the north: minding
arthur and "king"...
we're not celts... unless having lived
in scotland:
one might tell the difference
when someone accents the Gaelic theta:
as a surd H... **** a t'ought...
    apostrophe (') = surd...

         edinburgh nicknamed
athens of the north...
st. petersburg / amsterdam are both...
venice of the north...
of the former: seat of learning...
i never like david hume's black swans...
and if nietzsche is
to make critique of kant:
i.e. kant being the "philosopher"
of bureocrats....

how does: the will to power end up?
despotic bus drivers...
POWER! with a missing will...
yes... the most ordained with
a silent mind are currently served up
teases of tension...
POWER!
  the bus driver is currently being
served up a placebo amphetamine
cocktail...
he or she... can gesticulate
at a heaven: deus est persona non grata...

the facemask "riddle":
power to the cogs...
leaving the sigma of the machinery
in tatters...
otherwise... a slowing-down mechanism...
POWER!
       nietzsche is more
a power-broker... a philosopher
of daydreams and the overt-exercise
of futility than Kant would ever become...

the bus driver... oh how i wished
to heave a career of... winding clocks...
daydreaming in automaton mode...
but now... POWER!
however futile...
however that's ambitious in
continental thought...
on these shores it has to receive
a new baptism of that...
*******... pragmatism!

           niqab star of david attache...
the surgical face mask:
the will to: what was forever available:
petty power...
limiting hierarchies:
unit... power...
power disguise... power of the drone
chant...
           chatter...
power towing limbo!

  otherwise... kept guilty secret...
50ml of bourbon with some variant "contra"
of butter scotch biscuits...

  but there are the POWER brokers...
what belittling POWER gains...
and oh! god and the devil's
******* and pair of *******...
                                how power can
be exercised by bus drivers
when... commuters are exacted
with face masks...
to stipend them with...
   a nuanced basis for discrimination...

trigger-happy devoid or...
what's the difference
between a bunch of autists...
and sociopaths / psychopaths?

what's the difference
between an autist and a sociopath?
a schizophrenic
sitting in between...

that i am? or merely: bilingual?
america is bilingual ready!
y'um hum hummatie y'ah!

napoleon and the grief of height:
when the dating market evaluation is
strictly: poisoning a borrowing
of feuds: borrowing a friend of a friend of
a friend... and that:
stitching of a cow -
having excavated the stomach
for the ergonomics of a hot-air balloon...

because i had to be the bilingual
the only child freak-oh...
         in the currency of the cited "times"...
this is not a time: this is a space...
a space is congested with such
a people...
but a time... a time would be congested
with: the Pre-Raphaelites...
a time could be congested with such...
but we're talking about a space congestion...
a ****** riddle of a rubber without
skin...
             because there's... science fiction
and... SPACE...
as there's the "will" to POWER...
and there will always be...
the busdriver who doesn't enjoy
driving a bus... because...
there's the forever new rubric of:
keeping up with a best
forgotten attention & span...

         ode to lionel nation -
unlike speaking to my grandfather
strapped to a dementia
riddle cinema of memory:
that there is a cinema of memory...
that there's a concept of:
lukewarm drunk...

that there's a basic of:
yes... i know the best of my life...
memories borrowed from
aeons ago should the collective present
hindering my selfish pursuit
demand as too bourgeoisie:

******* anti-****
primo leisuring...
some old variant some
pseudo Yorick...
         m'ah neu adventure to
somehow tow Fwýday...
that the Vandals never came:
bilingual...

              extensive research
into the communist doctrine
of the: ******-rite of passage:
the omni-
nerve-ending focus of attention
15 minutes to a span....
          
borrowed themes...
the same sort of agriculture...
in the back of my mind:
worship Warsaw...
pursue a sacrificial "lamb":
tease the paedo-dodo project...
of man and king john and...
whatever is a best nuance...

      WE HAVE SUCH FORMAL
TONGUE RIDDLES
TO CHOKE ON...
BSM YOUR WORTH
A LEATHERY-SNIPPET...
i hold sway on "leather"
that's... cow intestines...
trollop...
            a beheaded gorgon
of slippery "details"..
    
   i want to catch the posture
of when english becomes
mongol...
Ukrainian riddled...
           this tongue requires
of itself to be... loaned!
completely!
                 my humble Kiev...
my Ukrainians
born drunk
at the Warsaw West... junction...

looks like the intelligence
of the western world:
can't sell words of Orestes...
implying one might have just read
a nibble...
bo boast!
the dot dot... and farming new!
nuanced: punctuation markers!

the thrill...
of having to ascend...
the morning...
knowing too well...
how the air is scented...
when prior the air was
ravaged by rain...
the details are left in the abstract:
whatever reality is yours!
it's yours...
it your new dead-red
project of... excating Beijing...

bewildering...
how i never settled on
sedating the English
with a blues: Somalian;
   n'est ce pas?

it never rains nor does it shine...
it's never culprit:
it's never simply canadian:
post-nationalistic in europe:
albeit a post-nationalism
of the state-collected...
"europe":
how... the greeks are...
some variations of turkish...

i'm not here: the hagia sophia
is also a...
what is it?
byzantine constipation /
                  leveraging pride
gimmick...
                         esque special
some variant of conundrum...
           mein auch!

                 i'd like to stroke a horse's mane...
like i might...
yet still find "unfathomable"
to leave comparisons with...
a violin detail.

**** me, what a... "predicament"... i'm applying myself to, eh... "cultural relevance": whatever the hell that means, even if enclosed in "misnomer" bracketing... but... of late, hell, more recently than "of late"... i am applying myself to a culture, a people, that's, simply put, a dodo-project... i'm not going to mind my contemporaries, i have three structural dynamics, all three are negations, i.e., since my grandfather died i have: NO peers, NO contemporaries... NO elders... i do have a graveyard of necromancy to deal with, i.e. my own private library, of actual, physical, stinking books... minimalist man and his ******* shortcuts, 'links in the disclaimer' blah blah blah... to write this worth of *******... while surrounded by a culture that, clearly, is hell-bent on... at best: shooting itself in the foot, at worst: committing suicide... because? oh.... universal suffrage... women... the instigators of downfall... women... whatever man built... has to topple, on the whims of a woman... it's not longer: woe to man... woman! it's... woman?! run! hide! save yourself... hunt a, ******* mammoth while you're at it! what the **** happened to romance? that ******, flimsy, whatever it was that was sold to us when growing up nearing the year 2000? gone... ****! in a flash... a droplet of water in a frying pan with a puddle of hot oil... in the meantime the ol' lovely jukebox that was once youtube was hijacked, circa... whatever year prior to 2020. I'm here, sort of waiting for death, death: by that i implore: release... as i also invoke the question: why do crows fly in pairs over England, while  on the continent they flock? huginn! muninn! truly, crows congregate in flocks on the continent... clouds of them... messerschmitt clouds or black, iron, crosses: looming shadows... yet over England... happy to see one sit it out, croaking, some the sunset, bound to find a crow paired... not paired up with a hooded crow, ever see a raven mingle with a magpie?! me neither... ever see crows display ****** attraction in a way that's atypical to pigeons, i.e. the whole routine of courting & subsequent failure? no... i guess crows do their "****" at night, in the forest, donning, for ****'s sake... leather S&M suits, gimp gagging *****, etc., no? no... i'm not writing this because it's pleasant, it's funny as hell (though)... but i'm sort of part of a culture that's dying... it's a dodo-project... this might be seen, if i am allowed, the same status as a mummy can... there was a man alive at the turn of the 21st century and he wrote, this... well... i'm all for hope... slowing down on the intake of alcohol too... i switched from whiskey to cider... her presto! i find myself animated... like cider was mixed up wit amphetamines, or caffeine... i raise my emptied bottle of cider like it might be a horn awaiting / celebrating a procession of a god through an avenue of spectators... i can't possibly here to "save" a culture, that, inevitably (however that might be phrased otherwise) is not willing, is making too many "anschluss" decisions... **** it... let it rot... let Pakistani men run rampant in Rotherham...  i'm just weirdly here, while it happens... Pontius Pilate once didn't say, while washing hi hands: i'll have nothing to do with this... let the dice roll... there's nothing to upkeep, there's nothing to conserve... questions, question: all that ought to be addressed by some supposed variation of an Elder... no elders though, just Alzheimer buggers... unto the youth, strain their shoulders.. perform the Atlas pose... ****'s sake... no! i will not defend this culture, i'll fake being part of it, sure... who wouldn't... thank god i didn't invest in carving replicas of DNA into this schematic... i'm happy not having children... oh i love the children of strangers, esp. toddlers... i can "talk" to them in onomatopoeias... that's fun... i can't disagree... no... beside this... no ******* chance in hell... hell first... my engagement in this world, second... i'm out... convince someone, otherwise, to take a spin, on your current variation of a carousel... what once there was, is no longer more, or for that matter is... sure... i will die childless, but also freed from the looming responsibility of the world in which, i left only words, but not a dire imprint of physicality having mated with someone, producing offspring... oh how glad i have to be! what relief! what release! if the structure of the argument follows its logical conclusion, one less of me, or a Russian.... then the Tutsi, Twa & the Hutu weren't slaughtered by Rwandian militias? my my, almost like the Yugoslav debacle, remnants of the Ottoman Empire... after all... it's not like the macaques staged a war against the baboons... come to "think" of it... i only visited Kenya to, "make-sure"... that the macaques were as boring, as easily spotted, as easily available as... pigeons... not a lot of birds in Africa... plenty of primates... falling asleep outside while those little rascals ravaged the possibilities of existence in the trees... perhaps the croaking of crows at night during winter is, some sort of "compensation"... but, not really...

my next door neighbour "thinks" it's necessary
to start rapping in the dark,
rap, or rhyme, whatever,
what a waste of breath...

there's a passage in Plato's Theaetetus
where Socrates
arrives at something
resembling a Japanese unit of language...
a unit of syllabary...
i.e. consonant + vowel...
why oh why does Japanese
allow for the stand-off with
the five vowels and one consonant (N)...

ΣO... something about knowledge,
so what?

don't ask: i'm grooving to...
Alphaville's Big in Japan...
to be a teenager in the 1980's...
going to the cinema with a sweetheart,
going to the cinema to watch
a horror movie...
hell... what a time to be alive!
Duran Duran, A-Ha... Roxette...
the Cure, Depeche Mode...

we don't have any cultural ref. markers...
Tool? seriously, o.k.,
i can give you that one...
i'm not even going to mention
the Comic Book film adaptations...
Unbreakable... that film consolidates
all the rest of them...
the soundtrack is tantamount too,
more a bonus than anything...

ΔO? do i?
well... ***!
ΔO is more: ΔΩ:

to doo... otherwise, what's that?
DOUGH?
we're baking bread, now?
oh the dreaded return of the facemasks...
muzzles... how near are we to a gallop?
there's no silent H in Greek...
"silent", technically a surd...
no, there's no dow or dough invoked...

i've just spent an hour writing up
a writing assessment for an NVQ qualification,
i find relief in having abandoned
all that formal language...
in the first scenario i was writing
a newsletter for a local volunteer project
concerning a recent vandalism of the park...

in the second scenario i was writing an article
to reply to a nutritionist on campus who
spotted that only takeaway quality of foods /
fizzy foods were available,
so no salads etc.,
she also mentioned that the students
were not getting enough exercise...
i agreed with the hypothetical she on the grounds
of food... but i implored her,
as a nutritionist... to not meddle in affairs
of exercise, was she implying that she's a nutritionist
AND a personal trainer?
everything hypothetically staged, of course...

ugh... this dreary formal language when employed
to examinations...
does my head in... no knowledge of the three dots
as an authentic punctuation mark...
the hanging suspense.

how do the Greeks laugh? if H is the capital
ref. to eta... is eta less prolonged than epsilon?
oh i know that there are obvious similarities
between Omicron and OOmega...

do: pool, do i just pull?
omicron, omega, upsilon...
sounds almost the same,
how the meaning changes when written down...
excesses, "excesses" of the lambda...
pulverise... most certainly not pull-toward-the-averse...

come 2am... all is self-evident...
i can't possibly be an additional chapter in
this culture's self-expression...
it's the end... a culminating perspective of cul de sac....
bring me fire, bring me waves...
even those ethnic minority groups
who have established themselves
in the parameters of this languages
are... pretty much aware that...
they're not safe...
well... their status isn't...

            i might think of myself as an Anglo-Slav...
but... there are plenty that wouldn't ascribe those
words to themselves...
then again... most Polacks are staying put...
blah blah, one confusion after another...
here's to planning a ***** colony in
Botswana!
me, you... let's hire a dingy!
let's cross the Strait of Gibraltar!

we won't worry... we didn't invest in having
children... don't worry...
it's not like the culture we were leaving was
anything but fair to us...
it was willingly dying...
i stopped to bother about it,
when it stopped bothering about itself.

strange... of a people that most espouse this
whole Darwinism tirade...
all ******* theory: very little practice...
the English be ****** for their Darwinism!
seriously!
all their little explanations, their ergonomics,
their ******* sensibilities...
their cricket banalities...
yet when facing an immediate and obvious threat?!
where's the carpet? where's the dust?
the broom! the broom! quick! quick!
******* to Devonshire!
people ought to learn to be heartless...
then again... when was the last time the English
were asked to be heartless,
when was the last time they were subjugated
by a foreign entity, in a historically legal sense of
noting history?

so much for their pompous posturing within
the luxury of historically reading about the greatest
empire that could ever be envisioned...
i wasn't there for the partitioning
of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth...
i'm so sorry that i missed it...
but i'm here for "this"... and boy... do i have a hard-on
for what's to come next...
i'm just waiting for the Welsh & Scottish nationalists
to put in some more momentum!

after all... if you're going to deconstruct Warsaw...
you need to do it: brick by brick...
so that... no brick stands on another brick...
here we go... looking forward...
a future: that wonderful plateau!

Monomania


I don’t wan’t to live in a unipolar world

with a longitudinal equator imposing a

western obscurity on dayspring peoples.


I don’t want to become an eye blocker

partitioning the bad and ugly with a

flickering of my lids.


I don’t wan’t to be a part eyed person

conveniently blinded behind a patch

of privilege.


I don’t want to be a beneficiary of the

divided conquered or partake of their

demise.


I don’t wan’t to have to wear a mask

of approval against my will just to be

recognised by the converted masses.


I don’t want to conceal my philosophy

for the sake of acceptance or fence

my values in their unquestioning pen.


I don’t wan’t an occidental victory in

Ukraine or we will be forever denied

the possibility of a multipolar existence.

I race upon the edge of life

Days once dull now
sliced so fast

The partitioning skin opens up

Draining life's essence
into a cup

So dice another second
off

dare I turn to mourn or scoff ?

Another hour or a day

Do my words matter anyway ?

Step off
teleportation's dock

Who keeps candles hidden in a near by box ?

Forget the matches
that can't catch spark

Steps the mystery  of the unknowingly dark

Not being vaccinated is a lot different than being opposed to being vaccinated.
Soon as one says “ I refuse to take the jab “ that is the threshold of dissension
crossed, one is then a low caste untouchable victimised by those who consented.
This is how apartheid works, a partitioning of people by the people from the people.