(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

Hearts another beat a second
A+ made the grade rare meat
Why is everything told to
us in a heartbeat
This is getting way too sweet
"Lips took Beeswax" bittersweet

Someone got stung B-
Strong sound muffler
Joyride Owl Hoot clever
Sweet and sourpuss
honey babe

Her mustard lips of custard
Hot temperature rising
The spicy lady opening
up new horizon gate

Too many sad rides
empty plates last joyride
Gas empty blame the county
Why did we call this joyride
without knowing
your fate

The others are more noticed
Fashionably they came late
Dine and the Wine joyride
romanced money upfront
advanced

Lips like jewels left their stale
You were the chosen one taken
for a ride from
a crooked male

Like bushel big loot basket
Rock the Kasbah rocket
Golden joyride ticket the
pickpocket
Getting away with ******
****** lips in the gasket

The joyride so beat looked
disheveled new love
unraveled
So messy but **** neat
looking, Lexus,
She looks mighty fine like
Venus, I beg you to zoom

And the love after all the treats
Sherlocked in his room
The devil made me do it
All flushed and deep red
Hearing his joyride of beats
What was really going
through her head
Hard rock ambient
painter deviant

The holiday like racing hot rod
Harvest Halloween of a joyride
Two peas in dark maze pod
Igniting a hot fire
Her lips need to decide
Who was underneath the
fumes of his fire

The coffee taste accelerating
Do we feel the pulsing beat
What a high anxiety peak
High intense flavor
You waiting for his joyride
Christmas and Hannukah
Tree to decide that's easier
But wait for true love above all
the gifts to deliver
Like bedrock meeting
Monster ride plant-eating Bug
More slugs my chinch
Inchworm of books at Joyride
College Dorm horn alarm
Manifestation enjoying
her joyride
What a conniver
Greece with my niece
vacation
Basil New rival tea
Pomegranate Cherry-bomb
Blonde Bombshell
Culture novelty joyride
Ring my servant bell
Met their sanity tomb

Her hand's dainty they shine
and sparkle
Her lips know how to jingle
Arace for hearts of stories
and memories
Always the death hand takes
a ride to the winding road of
the cemeteries
Just stay for the moment
think about the
Joyride forth of July
Our firecrackers went off at
the same time
Brie cheese favorite time
English tea and crackers
Like two lips sublime read
her diaries in his designer dockers

Going to the end of the earth lips
light up New York City galleries

Needing the fresh corner
Sunset taking lowrider Boulevard
Hollywood Oh! No world
Wildly satanic or the carefree type
Her joy smile he's sold on skype
Benevolent triad remembering
The mad magazine
MLM Maserati longevity Master
Of the joyride gun blaster
"Lips build like a Pyramid"
Becoming irresistible
Not to humble

Lips race Joyride to gamble
Nothing weakens to crumble
Baking a crumb cake its
doable stays together but
things unnamed not like
a marriage

We get blamed joyride
got damaged
We become gullible
What becomes of the broken heart
someone isn't reliable
Lips are not responsible
Leadership has you cornered  
To stumble upon her lips
Rendered steamboat surrender
How he tumbles
Mr. Grey Poupon Mustard seed
He plants her like his
only joyride
In need
We are all Jupiter the moon
joy to the world
All the boys and girls being
taken for joyrides

The Beach boy's video games
Spy lips whose to blame
Phillip screwdriver
But they take a ride
All you could pick a hot buffet
feasting she is still wearing
hot lipstick
Men have their choice of
they're next
Joyride Bride about the money
Wall-Street cars of hobbies
investing
Yeah right?

Your backseat,
that backward pickpocket,
that schemer taking cell phones and jackets and wallets
the pilfered seeds sewn, like lighthouses when they sprout
guiding me back again
back to you
back to that ******* backseat

THE Government--I heard about the Government and
I went out to find it. I said I would look closely at
it when I saw it.
Then I saw a policeman dragging a drunken man to
the callaboose. It was the Government in action.
I saw a ward alderman slip into an office one morning
and talk with a judge. Later in the day the judge
dismissed a case against a pickpocket who was a
live ward worker for the alderman. Again I saw
this was the Government, doing things.
I saw militiamen level their rifles at a crowd of work-
ingmen who were trying to get other workingmen
to stay away from a shop where there was a strike
on. Government in action.

Everywhere I saw that Government is a thing made of
men, that Government has blood and bones, it is
many mouths whispering into many ears, sending
telegrams, aiming rifles, writing orders, saying
"yes" and "no."

Government dies as the men who form it die and are laid
away in their graves and the new Government that
comes after is human, made of heartbeats of blood,
ambitions, lusts, and money running through it all,
money paid and money taken, and money covered
up and spoken of with hushed voices.
A Government is just as secret and mysterious and sensi-
tive as any human sinner carrying a load of germs,
traditions and corpuscles handed down from
fathers and mothers away back.

The wallet where the hidden secrets are to be believed

The boy, a lap climber of some renown,
Age, could have been six or seven,
Had a favorite cliffside to ascend and ride,
When done, down to earth, slide.

Up he would go, on a treasure hunt,
A game to play, called pickpocket,
On a forest of a man of coffee smells and a tickly goatee,
Hamburg born, a man who actually wore
a homburg hat on his head.

First the glass case, the snappy kind,
From the snap, crackle and Pop days.
Inside a cloth, good for emergency cleaning of
Runny noses when it was crying time.

Into the crevices and pockets, he dug and delved,
Jangly keys guaranteed to somehow disappear,
A silver and gold fancy pen and pencil set,
A money clip, folded papers he didn't understand.

But the bonanza, the jackpot was the wallet,
Finding pictures of himself, asking the goatee,
Slyly, smiley, all grown up likely, kiddingly
Who's that?

Between the pictures of him and his sisters,
Was a weird discovery, five twenty dollar bills.
His money was in a clip, so these twenties
Had no earthly purpose being there.

There is nothing more unstoppable than the curiosity
Of children under the age of ten,
So a grand inquisition of nagging began,
Centering on the age old torture tool,
Why?

Goatee said someday you will see men,
Lying on the street, some with hands outstretched,
Some, hands beneath, hidden neath their legs.  
They won't smell as good as you,
They may even be a tiny bit *****,
with no bathtub to play in.
When you should see such a man,
If he asks or not, our job is to give him
One of those special notes.
When its your turn to have wallet,
You will understand better.

Dissatisfied was the explorer,
The words did not fully explain,
Why this money was different from all others?
Upon these five bills, were hand written bold
Three words, which he could read.

God Bless You!

Goatee smiled and hugged me that hug,
Where you can't breathe and its a-ok,
But please be quiet now young one...

This poem a total fantasy.

Someday Izzy and Alex will be forward scouts,
Investigators and detectives with prying frying fingertips.

If they get to Poppy's wallet,
Between the pictures of them and the West Coast team,
There just maybe, five folded twenties,
Magic marker signed, but not by a Treasury official,
With words of a similar ilk.

If they should inquire what's the point,
Poppy might answer them with one particular
Poem.

For I did not come here in hopes of a hello

Of a simple stroll down our village

Or an acknowledgement of my existence

I came here because I care

I care

I see in your eyes the difference

Cover up with words soothing to the ear

But actions onset on hindrance

I did not come for a duet

Or a memory that we’d never regret

A heart to heart throughout the night

I did not come for my own benefit

I come because I care

I care
I worry, in fact

That you do not realize

How much you are
Who you are

Or your worth


Because the things you do show otherwise
But see in my eyes, and the eyes of others

Too concerned while we watch the beautiful eagle continue to believe he’s just a worm

You’re too distraught by the blindfold in front of yours

To realize the cries for help

Drowned out with insanity

Because the world is stealing your flame

While you continue to be baffled by the pickpocket’s show

"Do not take it!" I scream

“Do not let it take you!”
but those eyes

So precious, full and alive

are 

still

blindfolded.

The procession goes on while the main attraction continues to burp out synthetic love and false hopes

Temporary 
enjoyment

And you have become the fool of the show

With that blindfold 

Darned, pestering blindfold.

I will still scream for its demise!

I will still plead for the final scene!

I will rip away the curtains held up with burgundy lies!

I will still care.

The show must eventually stop!

For actors must be given a break and plays must be forgotten

To not be cliche

There will be a time when there are no more encores

An end to the grand show

scattered flowers on the first row

And utter silence in an empty space

A dangerously

Dark

Desolate 

Stage

But I will still be there


Holding a match for a new flame




And a warmer smile

For I care

I truly care

I’m ashamed to say I’ve become a bit of a thief;
A pickpocket of sorts.

It started out small.
A few roses from our neighbors’ garden, every now and then.
I knew it was wrong to take something that wasn’t mine,
But I fell in love with the way your eyes lit up
when I held out those little bits of stolen life, stolen joy.

It soon escalated after that.
I saw the way you gazed lovingly up at the moon,
and I became determined to make it yours.
Unfortunately, no matter how hard I tried,
The moon remained unattainable.
(There is only one, after all.)
I figured I’d aim for the next best thing, so
I hope you like the stars I stole for you.

I was there
when they built the cathedrals
I was there
and I watched them stand tall
I was there
for the villagers' upheaval
I was there
and I answered their call

I was there
when they fought in ancient Rome
I was there
and I watched poor men die far from home
I was there
when we ate just like kings
I was there
and I fed you a grape
I was there
when they sold you into slavery
I was there
and I helped you escape

I was there
when ****** built an army
I was there
when Stalin rose to fame
I was there
in the Jewish death camps
I was there
and I forgot my own name

I was there
I was a pickpocket in London
I was there
when Dickens wrote the Twist
I was there
when it happened, all the sudden
I was there
and I raised up my fist

I was there
with Daniel and the lions
I was there
when he went down to that cave
It had
nothing to do with a God up in heaven
It had
something to do with the knowledge he craved.

Just as
close as
your heartbeat
as
the thoughts
inside
your head
I'm watching
and
I'm listening
to you breathe
and
I'll discover
every weakness -
shake all
your demons'
hands -
then
I'll
let you
know me
and
trust me
with your soul -
the moment
when that
happens
I'll  turn
you on
yourself

or, the pickpocket

voted
most likely
to be chosen
from a nudist
foster care

by christian
couples

“London calling to the faraway towns…”*
[The Clash]

God man, trinket man, fake leather wallet man,
Drugs man, drumming man,  dancing on the street man
Antique man, eel man, bus man, trades man
Boots man, bagel man, feed me I am hungry man,
Fit man, gay man, straight man, trans man,
Chinese man, white man, "oi-back-to-where-you came from" man
Business man, rugger man, beautiful wife and kids man
Eco man, hipster man, shouting man, shaking man,
Scowling man, scumbag man, shuffling don’t come near me man
War man, drunk man, cruising near the bushes man
Watching man, medal man, pickpocket poor man
Box man, sleeping man,think he might be dead man,
Lost man, lonely man,
Looking from the ledge man

She sits on the chair
her wavy hair
still neatly in place
putting on her stockings

as he stands
with his back
to the window
gazing at her

she pauses
her fingers holding
the stocking tops
and looks at him

and says
in her sluttish French
do you want me
back tomorrow?

there is a draught
from the window
touching his naked back
sending a shiver

along his spine
sure
he says
but make it a little later

the wife’s got
a show to see
and she doesn’t leave
till just after 8

ok
she says
pulling up
the stocking

and fixing it
to the clip
shall I bring anything
with me?

no just yourself
he says
and maybe wear
that tight skirt

and creamy blouse
and those black stockings
she stands
and pulls down

her slip
to cover
her underwear
and looks around

for her dress
look
he says beware
of the concierge

she’s a nosey old biddy?
she asks
biddy what is that?
just be careful of her

he says
don’t let her
see you leave
or she’ll tell

the wife
oh I see
sure I will be careful
of the biddy

she says
picking up her dress
from the chair
by the bed

and as she turns away
he studies
her neat ***
the way she climbs

into the dress
her hands so quick
in movement
the finger so precise

like those of a pickpocket
and he sees her leg rise
the stockinged leg
the fineness of the thigh

then she turns toward him
and she smiles
and she starts
on the other leg

and he wonders
what his wife would say
if she came in now
how’d she’d look

then it’s over
the dame’s dressed
puts on her coat
and picks up her bag

and takes the money
he’d put on the desk
and shoves it
into the bag

and sighs
and leaves
and as she goes out
the door

waggling her ***
he knows
he wants her back
some more.

i met you once
in a dream.
married for years
the pickpocket and
the traveling salesman.

fish rained down on our wedding day
and our friends released doves.
my dress was a million rose petals
and your tux dripped ink on the church's carpet.

we laughed and loved each other
chewing beeswax and
painting silly faces on our knees.
it was a lovely dream
drinking in the deepest love
and swimming through the cool waters
behind our little green house.

you told me you were afraid of the waking
i couldn't lie so i said
so do i.
we ran
but the alarm and the bright morning found us
i woke and you
were just a dream again.
no closer then a cloud.
a wish whose cologne
clings to my hair.

Didn’t I mean it?
Or wasn’t I serious just a bit
When I warned of the gruesome pit
Ahead and soon they would hit
Was I performing a funny skit?
The day they refused to admit
That joining would bring no benefit
Just pain and no profit
The best option was to quit
But they wanted to wait
And see as they are used as bait
I can do nothing now but sit
Because I told them.

They are now quiet
Full of reckoning and regret
Wishing they listened I bet
That to stop a fired bullet
You must require a metal jacket;
Before you meet a pickpocket
Your wallet is not stolen yet
My words they needed not interpret
Either that they did not get
Or they simply chose to forget
When I blew a warning trumpet
I know that am not a prophet
Just a pen-and-paper poet
But I told them.

take money out of the equation, and sack all the waiters and return to tribalism, the former statement of non-intellectual socialism, the sort of inherent: in us there is a togetherness, no more service from strangers in the hierarchy of enriching a piece of metal or a wavy rectangle of paper with “necessary” symbolism of authority of the status quo... but that’s not going to happen... the pickpocket picts are no more... the normalising normans glared at the hastings pinnacle and integrated with the saxon women... the saracens became surnames in poland... actually that last one is very true... a branch of my family has the surname saracen.*

so i’m reading this article
and i’m hardly debasing myself,
it’s not that i’m referring
to sartre’s negation of certain things
whether animate and essential or
inanimate and existential... in that formula:
i deny therefore i am... because i can’t deny my existence...
and 2000 years down the line i’ll be pitchfork
argument in an atheist’s mouth anyway (nothing is certain in the realm of cognition, hence the cartesian invocation of doubt),
it's not like i'm referring to inappropriate pronoun usage...
so **** a doodle do... twang the strings on the mandolin...
i’m referring to this classical reference of the shy literary figure
unable to spark conversation with strangers...
god, i really love strangers, and talking to them!
why? there is no personal history, there’s no past,
there are no reference points... it’s just the moment and nothing else,
the perfect anonymity project...
not the matrix philosophy (easily invoked because
it has a flimsy plot-line and loads of images...
just what the doctor ordered for the english speaking masses
with a very naked orthography - i.e. if it’s on the internet
it’s not “real life...” as is this computer i’m using
it’s not even here!)
of using the deep web to join the rats and etc.;
i love talking to strangers, i can forget myself
and enter the realm of discretion about how within randomisation
of eggshell, yoke and cockroach there’s also the randomisation
of the interactants to balance out the need for a theological unit, god...
it’s great... it’s like... it’s like... life.
defining the genre of biography proper? never backtrack...
always sidetrack... i can’t be bothered living a life with cocktail parties
and romps and romantic comedies to look forward to
once all the animalism becomes domesticated and a
gym-session complaints column in a newspaper.

everyone you meet takes something away from you
let it be a smile
or a helping hand
or a lesson
or your wallet or car keys
but please don't let it be your self esteem
we put our most valuable possessions in the hands of strangers
you don't have to pickpocket a ribcage to take the beating heart inside, it is wide open
yours for the taking
please handle it gently
please don't let me
reach in and take you out
you are worth so much more than a whistle as you walk down the street
you are worth so much more than the robbery you are about to meet
please
give up your purse
or your credit cards
or your social security number
give away time and space and energy
give away love and wisdom and patience
give away the best you have to offer
but don't give yourself away
don't hinder to what anyone has to say
lock your ribcage and hide the key,
do not give it to anybody
only unlock it to check that it still beats
unlock yourself to others only on your own territory
give away your house
your jewelry
your computer
you cell phone
give away everything else
but keep yourself

they poke and ****
destroy your pride
pickpocket your perception
throw you aside
(they are plotting your demise.)

Poem a day, day 2*

It's all fun and games
Until someone loses a heart.
Take it from me.
Well, he did.

Great fun, good times
Next thing you know...
You turn around and
Someone's stolen your heart.

I only took my eyes
Off of it for a minute
And it was gone.
Possession is 9 tenths of the law.

The law of attraction.
I liked him,
I love him.
**** didn't see that coming.

Or maybe I did.
I couldn't have stopped it if I had.
Pickpocket skill level 100
Item: 1 heart.

And she called me a lover you know

In a fitful sleep she told me...


How it wasn't worth it
How I shouldn't do it

How I would regret it

But I packed up my demons and her with them and left 



You know if love is like the wind unpredictable and free

Then
Hate is like a blind man with a gun to your head

Or a old lady pickpocket

Or a pastor cursing god on a Wednesday

Or her when she smiled at me that smile that didn't reach her eyes and told me the stories of her life that never happened, or how she forgot or how she remembered or how she told me she loved me and the sting of the words made me bleed more than the feel of her gold ring on my soft skin. 



Oh god oh god oh god.


And she called me a dreamer you know

Long before I knew what dreams where

And
Long before I woke up.

what you got in your pockets?

Reveal yourself with an object,
let the subtext talk in a million ways.
What you got hiding,
and what does it say?

What you
keep
close,
exposes
emotion.

Your devotion to the object chosen,
is outspoken in a delicate gaze.

Theres a million ways you can spend that minimum wage,
Or a rainy day,
is just a rain
drop away.

And you could save me from the cold with your ignorance.

And i could pickpocket your soul in the holes of  indifference.

But,
What’s the difference anyway.
Keep safe on your daily ways
keep safes, keeps the evil away;

I’ll keep you in my pocket until laundry day,
forget about you'
watching the world go round in bubbles and soap screens.

We got the same jeans (genes),
baby,
We got the same dreams,
baby.

Blake has written it all and written it
in perfect clarity and beauty
and Baudelaire topped it
with decadence and forbidden pleasures
and  Kerouac took it on the road
and gave it a beat
and Bukowski redefined and simplified
and told all its ugly truths
and got it drunk on beer and women

yet still we sit here poor men and women
and boys and girls
scratching away in our journals
and typing at our refurbished vintage typewriters
and cheap plastic keyboards
attached to overpriced laptops
made of fruit and ego

trying to add to the vast pile of treasure
left behind by Coleridge and Thoreau and Whitman
and Mother Maya Angelou
trying to write ourselves in and out
of the corners of solitude and madness
following in the echos of Plath and Dickinson and Poe

we pickpocket dead myths
and dig up their bones
and dance in the fields of their deaths
and claim their prayers as our own
and play the part of god
as we invent new ways to sin
and feel shame for walking naked
in our own bodies
and daring to enjoy lust
and desire and love

it’s all worthless garbage
and it’s all priceless time well spent
shouting into the void of our meaningless existence
and all the vast emptiness of space takes no notice
no matter who loudly we bash our pans
and pound our fists
and ******* our overinflated sense of self worth

we are helplessly alone
stuffed in overcrowded tin containers
packed tightly in our human misery
willing to sleep with one another
but afraid to look each other in the eye
and see who it really is
we’re sharing our beds with
because we would rather
just imagine it really is love
and not find out if its the truth of love
we’re trying to define
within the fragility of our hearts

we wait till our beds are empty
and our hands are cold
and then we pick up our pens
and strike our keyboards
and lay down lies over the truth
we are afraid to uncover
and we treat it poorly
by doing this again and again

yet it defies us still with its volume and weight
and no matter how many times
are how many ways
we re-write the same poem
over and over and over
the heart stays the same
no matter what color we paint it
red or black or bruised sky blue
what tear lost in the ocean
or ocean trapped in a tear
it remains within the grasp
of the same endless heart beat
coming from the same eternal heart

no matter how many times
a new giant or new lord or new king
or new queen or fool are crowned
and wether they type streams of garbage
or write on leafs inlaid with gold
we will always be connected
by the necessity
of the painful beauty of poetry

LONDON TIME

Sprawls across the skyline.
Ancient and newly alike.
Busy wheels and politics.
Backstreets of culture with pickpocket vultures.
Stations and bankers,
And other posh tankers,
Otherwise known as rich classy wan**rs.
Sea museums and see museums
Plague victims under common land lay.
Sleeping for years.
And time changes.
Smiles very cutely, as he makes the suggestion.
Let's go sight seeing "dear lady"
Come along and see my life.
I'll hold your hand forever, but you will never be my wife.
He will never be your husband, as he knows not how.
The man who stopped time in London town.
(c) Livvi

the below is a tentatively titled and finished companion piece to my recent chapbook, infant cinema (**** Press, dinkpress.com, April 2016)

infant cinema can be purchased here: http://www.dinkpress.com/store/infant-cinema-by-barton-smock



shut-eye (in the land of the sacred commoner)

~
poetry and god share the same quick death.

I’m on what you’re on;
the eighth day of the world.

~
it’s all in your head. the newborn we had on a mountaintop. the word it knew from memory. its hand that stuck to everything but the dog our dog ate. the cold our dog died from. the tent we called aquarium. that we filled with diapers. that was never full.

~
existence is the wrong inquiry.

I was destroyed by an angel

for having
taste buds.

/ a pinkness

went on
without me.

~
if touch is all it can manage

the hand is poor.

I am the new face
of baby
doorstep.

when lightning
has emptiness
to burn

feed
the fasting
doll.

~
I am old and nothing brings me joy.

I did
good things
but I
was asked.

drunk
outside
of a dog
shelter
I am likely
to remember
a library
pyros
love.

my uncle
he is probably
still
west of me
able

to open
a bottle
with the mouth
of a living
frog.

~
and what
would forgiveness
do?

my kids were never born. yours
they hide
from the number
of people
god
made.

when dead, I was not
a bird
yet
my mother
asks
what kind.

I can’t tell
by looking
if he’s seen
the future
or seen
the future
again. I strip

when my stomach
hurts.

~
it puts me on my stomach

this grief
you have
for the switched
at death

–

god’s color has returned

–

the male
animals
in the grey
barn

knew

–

first

~
I want to say it is yes yes

puberty’s
painted
egg, the island

clock, the genitalia

of alarm…

I want to say it is orange

like bees
like
not all

the hymns
not all

condoms…

~
he says we are men
not because a raccoon
chased a bone
into the factory
of shadows.

he says it’s me
or the bag
of trash
and gives me
a knife.

he says before I was borned
we took
the same
bullet. he says mouth.

I kick
he says
in my sleep
and it puts
a belly button
on a bird
one
bird.

he says them animals
ain’t so wild
as a dog
in drag

and your mother
is the outside
world.

~
the robot is a ******.

the baby
it goes
from baby
to baby
with no
message.

–

I want your work to matter.

~
subtitles, ghost
pollen / I sit

facing
my father

he strokes
a large
bumblebee…

~
eating behind the mirror’s back
it was all
hick lore
to me

a scratch
in scar’s
nakedness, a loss

of infancy
awarded
only
to the deaf
who dug up
the ears
of god
for nothing
more
than the sound

of depression
going blind
in the garden
of the hairdresser’s

hair

~
death
my way
of saying
goodbye
to god

–

had you lived
or enjoyed
amnesia…

~
when asked
I say
I see
on the floor
of a mudhut
a *** toy
having
a seizure.

I kiss the feet
you’re the future
of.

~
not
for devouring
the mannequin
but for eating
the seeds, it was

(in a coloring
book
for cigarettes)

beaten

by a baby
a baby
could love

~
I go with dove to high

dives / I am on

the pill
the swimmer’s
pill / for nine

months
I’ve hidden
a rabbit
from no one’s

hormonal
christ

~
it was for healing the hand of the plain hand
that I
was touched / well blood

on a bread
crumb
massage me
a brainwashed
worm / well comb

all you want
the eyesight
of god / swallow

a hair
in the house
birth
built…

–

can’t
this once
a thing
die
in the sanctuary
of its double

~
hell is a book.

she reads it
in a room
that’s alive.

attic or no, I want
to miss
my father.

~
nakedness,

give it time
to recover

~
into something from his childhood
a man
is born. never

far off
what crawls
her way.

~
she reaches into the same hat for the rabbit he’s made disappear.

I sleep and the dark takes me for the bone

lightning
straightens.

~
church of intermission. church of the rolled-away church my fever follows. church of it ain’t a baby until it spits. church of the lawnmower left running. of the space you give the grieving horse. church of you when you die in my sleep. of musical suicides. church of the disinfected high chair. of the false bruise. of how to become a balloon in the church of touch.

~
in the library’s dream, the abortion clinic is no bigger than a fingerprint.

~
this is me
praying
for a photo
of my father’s
last meal.

me

praying
to have
the allergic
reaction
my mother
faked.

for proof
of animal
suicide.

a mirror for my toys. dirt for my brother.

~
and we touch to abridge doom in the bed of a headless man. and we struggle to hear a father verbatim. and we ask in a fierce wind a phone booth to please be a fireplace. and a starfish consoles a handprint.

~
/ I was spotted covering my eyes by a dentist whose childhood had stopped disappearing. how big is your family and who wears the mouth? is it true your dad sold to a city gargoyle a spray-can of ****? that your mom had no baby tired of being born? that their suicides filled a madhouse with cubist maids?

/ year nine: your birthday spider is put on film for biting. your sister takes one look at my brain and remembers what to feed and how to clean a cricket.

/ year eight:

~
my son doesn’t want the circle he’s drawing to touch the circle he’s drawing.

the dog
is a heartbroken
wolf.

~
she checks her teeth in the door glass of the oven.

the egg is dropped
and the owl
******.

~
when
did your caterpillar
become
a syringe?

I want to hide the clothes I’m wearing.

something touched
is something
mourned.

~
the woman had the suicidal absence of a man who’d just broken to his body that his blood was not the rooster patience devoured. if I peeled a potato, I did so in egg’s hell.

~
praise headgear, worship eyewear.

adore nostalgia, forgive

memorial’s
constant
vigil.

say god
three times, then

say mirror.

~
this is what you mean, kiddo

what you mean
to a bomb

/ it doesn’t help god

that god
is awake

~
for what
does the torso
pray?

the cocoon is music
to the mannequin’s
ear.

sister
she ain’t
been calm.

~
when grief
was password
and not
codename

when gift
horse
was horse
fly

when baby
little baby
shorthand
went all
stork-****

(on who)

to remember
god

~
outside the dream, I had written the most heartbreakingly clear poem about brotherhood. inside

was this boy
was discovering
god’s thumb
is never
clean. a boy whose mouth

was never
here. all those I’ve met

I’ve left
alone.

~
asleep in the pickpocket’s bed, the baby is a mirage.

I’m so fat
I’m fat
in the dark. I compose

at my lowest
a crucifixion
story

from the basements
my father
wired.

~
putting the meat
back together
in an unfilled
pool

we yawned
at the same
time / brief

painless
the unmothered

between

~
as overcome as I was to be gifted a hospital gown, I had nothing on the angel whose brain / for visiting the eye / was banished…

we are the dead
we’re here
to return

~
by death I mean nothing was beautiful for a very long time.

that, and when did you know.

Tall grass not yet touched by
dew observe.
Longing to reach the unforbidden.
To glide between atmospheres without
stopping to breathe.
As if that breath will steal what
cannot be stolen.

Hoping their presence will not
break the silence they find absolute.

Pickpocket the sky they will like a field
mouse with a crumb of
salted *******.

They shall not judge
what cannot be touched.
Just praise and absorb.

For what cannot be touched by
lavender hands can be felt by a rose soul.

Pickpocketed

each pocket has a purpose
church bells shatter through the surface

the worthless circus sunday service
a procession past the pickled mirthless

dispersions of persons pass pews
hoping He accepts the time served, in lieu

and thus this pocket is purposed for you



At the masqurade parade all day
That preys on insecurity

youre sure to see a bargain,
sharking, armed with curiosity

but the cost is often hidden, lost
in a forest of desire, in a silk lined pocket

and this is where they keep your wallet



search for solace in a sound structure
then ruptured synapses, flayed fluster

rebuild it all, regard life's lustre
meander melancholy with what you can muster

place them in a pocket, each respective,
one for your lessons and one for perspective

as the pickpocket of fear plays with the reasoning detective

15% off all print books and free mail shipping at Lulu today with coupon code of MAYMAIL15

~

some poems:

~

[raise god]

it’s a nice enough baby with an inability to emit. the adult world worries but no more than than it does for the television’s volume during bouts of ceasefire. parents divorce or parents agree on the same support group. siblings form a circle around a one trick pony. some believe the jack-in-the-box is broken while others believe it’s patient.

[taunts]

death is never early. take the first bite of every meal in front of a mirror. chase the kid while pulling a plastic bag over your head. invent a sibling schoolmates blind. know poverty, know moon. shampoo the elderly from a distance. baby no one. they have looked like hell since before you were born.

[pathos]

our fighting
determines
which of us
is more
sonsick.  

relic child, town crier.

I take what I’m given, beating.

cerecloth, snow
on snow
before and after

it buries.

me of course
as I position
myself
to hum

above
a basket.

me as I marry homeward
and kick

ball, stone, stiff
bird

stiff bird in death
doubling as
the rat
of an angel

yes
kick
for reasons known
to another’s

pet cobra

skin to skin
in an unmarked
life.

[costume]

we’re here to ****** the head of the boy who put a clown’s red nose on the girl playing jesus for stopped traffic. if I spoke your language, I would tell you.

[poor lighting]

a plastic doll with a human right hand distracts us from the parrot’s empty cage. we have been writing in unison instead of eating. our poverty is so advanced it keeps a fake diary and a real diary but hides them in the same spot. we are dying in two of our mother’s arms. our mother is elsewhere repeating after the man who does our stunts.

[collapse]

how
on a clear day  
my father
is the face
of absence.

how what I mean
cuts the finger

my mother
sips.

how porch blood
is not the same blood
the body
faints with.

how copperhead, how rattlesnake, how lisp

says I myth
my sister
who is still

vanishing
to shoplift
god

from the thunderstorm
we gave her.

[southern treehouse]

as my sister
inspects
her *******
in the white
piece of paper
we both
refer to
as the one
and only
ghost
mirror

I fry
god’s egg
in the plastic
shovel
I took
from a sandbox
shaped
like a coffin

and shiver
like the psychic
who with
the controllable
sobbing
of her hands
gave our seizures

to animals

[bait]

I didn’t see it
like some kids
saw it-

pain
as clay.

a swat here or there
to the back
of a mother’s
mind.

a man who took a bowling ball
into a closed garage
had no sadness
I could pray
over.

...Santa smoked on the roof
of my father’s house
while I
with a noiseless
stomach

touched
that hunger.

[how to live in the country dark]

toss frogs
into a fire
your father made.

find a woman
who’s abandoned herself
to being led
by a stick

let her blind mongrel
lick your palm.

bury a handful
of gravel
call it
the moon’s
grave.

hide in houses
hidden
from road.

make at least one friend
whose night vision
is a glass of milk.

double your body
by walking
drunk.

[outside the body it is always procession]

I may have lied about being pregnant but I know my ******* kid.

her father quells *******.

ants are quiet.

-

his teeth make sense.

our yell is I’m gonna shoot you in the blood.

-

elsewhere
is a light dusting
of downfall.  sleepily

legal

are the sunbathing sad.

[crown]

i.

a hand towel
over the lid
of any
stubborn
jar-

a mother to a father
or less frequently
a father to a mother
I don’t know why this is
but either way
a gentle admittance

to couple

as if passing beneath
the singing voice
of statue…

ii.

that stage
where a baby
is all
head

[mendicant]

this doorbell
is for the inside
of your house

-

to some
you’re the giant
you’re not

-

hearing isn’t for everyone  

-

a fog-softened man
with a baby
might experience
a sense
of boat
loss…

-

hurt

what you know

[crystal]

a foster boy using an alias teaches my son to shoot.

it’s the tooth fairy on a sad day finds
under my pillow
a handgun.

you know your father
is a night owl.

[dog years]

the longer
I grieve

the more

~

below is an unpublished companion piece {shuteye in the land of the sacred commoner} to my recent chapbook, infant*cinema (**** Press, April 2016)  

as such:

~~~~~

[shut-eye in the land of the sacred commoner]

~
poetry and god share the same quick death.

I’m on what you’re on;
the eighth day of the world.



~
it’s all in your head.  the newborn we had on a mountaintop.  the word it knew from memory.  its hand that stuck to everything but the dog our dog ate.  the cold our dog died from.  the tent we called aquarium. that we filled with diapers.  that was never full.



~
existence is the wrong inquiry.  

I was destroyed by an angel

for having
taste buds.  

/ a pinkness

went on
without me.



~
if touch is all it can manage

the hand is poor.

I am the new face
of baby
doorstep.

when lightning
has emptiness
to burn

feed
the fasting
doll.



~
I am old and nothing brings me joy.

I did
good things
but I
was asked.

drunk
outside
of a dog
shelter
I am likely
to remember
a library
pyros
love.

my uncle
he is probably
still
west of me
able

to open
a bottle
with the mouth
of a living
frog.



~
and what
would forgiveness
do?  

my kids were never born.  yours
they hide
from the number
of people
god
made.

when dead, I was not
a bird
yet
my mother
asks
what kind.

I can’t tell
by looking
if he’s seen
the future
or seen
the future
again.  I strip

when my stomach
hurts.



~
it puts me on my stomach

this grief
you have
for the switched
at death

-

god’s color has returned

-

the male
animals
in the grey
barn

knew

-

first



~
I want to say it is yes yes

puberty’s
painted
egg, the island

clock, the genitalia

of alarm…

I want to say it is orange

like bees
like
not all

the hymns
not all

condoms…



~
he says we are men
not because a raccoon
chased a bone
into the factory
of shadows.

he says it’s me
or the bag
of trash
and gives me
a knife.

he says before I was borned
we took
the same
bullet.  he says mouth.

I kick
he says
in my sleep
and it puts
a belly button
on a bird
one
bird.

he says them animals
ain’t so wild
as a dog
in drag

and your mother
is the outside
world.



~
the robot is a ******.

the baby
it goes
from baby
to baby
with no
message.

-

I want your work to matter.



~
subtitles, ghost
pollen / I sit

facing
my father

he strokes
a large
bumblebee…



~
eating behind the mirror’s back
it was all
hick lore
to me

a scratch
in scar’s
nakedness, a loss

of infancy
awarded
only
to the deaf
who dug up
the ears
of god
for nothing
more
than the sound

of depression
going blind
in the garden
of the hairdresser’s

hair



~
death
my way
of saying
goodbye
to god

-

had you lived
or enjoyed
amnesia...



~
when asked
I say
I see
on the floor
of a mudhut
a *** toy
having
a seizure.

I kiss the feet
you’re the future
of.



~
not
for devouring
the mannequin
but for eating
the seeds, it was

(in a coloring
  book
  for cigarettes)

beaten

by a baby
a baby
could love



~
I go with dove to high

dives / I am on

the pill
the swimmer’s
pill / for nine

months
I’ve hidden
a rabbit
from no one’s

hormonal
christ



~
it was for healing the hand of the plain hand
that I
was touched / well blood

on a bread
crumb
massage me
a brainwashed
worm / well comb

all you want
the eyesight
of god / swallow

a hair
in the house
birth
built…

-

can’t
this once
a thing
die
in the sanctuary
of its double




~
hell is a book.

she reads it
in a room
that’s alive.

attic or no, I want
to miss
my father.



~
nakedness,

give it time
to recover



~
into something from his childhood
a man
is born.  never

far off
what crawls
her way.



~
she reaches into the same hat for the rabbit he’s made disappear.

I sleep and the dark takes me for the bone

lightning
straightens.



~
church of intermission.  church of the rolled-away church my fever follows.  church of it ain’t a baby until it spits.  church of the lawnmower left running.  of the space you give the grieving horse.  church of you when you die in my sleep.  of musical suicides.  church of the disinfected high chair.  of the false bruise.  of how to become a balloon in the church of touch.



~
in the library’s dream, the abortion clinic is no bigger than a fingerprint.



~
this is me
praying
for a photo
of my father’s
last meal.

me

praying
to have
the allergic
reaction
my mother
faked.

for proof
of animal
suicide.

a mirror for my toys.  dirt for my brother.



~
and we touch to abridge doom in the bed of a headless man.  and we struggle to hear a father verbatim.  and we ask in a fierce wind a phone booth to please be a fireplace.  and a starfish consoles a handprint.



~
/ I was spotted covering my eyes by a dentist whose childhood had stopped disappearing.  how big is your family and who wears the mouth?  is it true your dad sold to a city gargoyle a spray-can of ****?  that your mom had no baby tired of being born?  that their suicides filled a madhouse with cubist maids?  

/ year nine:  your birthday spider is put on film for biting.  your sister takes one look at my brain and remembers what to feed and how to clean a cricket.

/ year eight:



~
my son doesn’t want the circle he’s drawing to touch the circle he’s drawing.

the dog
is a heartbroken
wolf.



~
she checks her teeth in the door glass of the oven.

the egg is dropped
and the owl
******.



~
when
did your caterpillar
become
a syringe?

I want to hide the clothes I’m wearing.

something touched
is something
mourned.



~
the woman had the suicidal absence of a man who’d just broken to his body that his blood was not the rooster patience devoured. if I peeled a potato, I did so in egg’s hell.



~
praise headgear, worship eyewear.

adore nostalgia, forgive

memorial’s
constant
vigil.

say god
three times, then

say mirror.



~
this is what you mean, kiddo

what you mean
to a bomb

/ it doesn’t help god

that god
is awake



~
for what
does the torso
pray?

the cocoon is music
to the mannequin’s
ear.

sister
she ain’t
been calm.



~
when grief
was password
and not
codename

when gift
horse
was horse
fly

when baby
little baby
shorthand
went all
stork-****

(on who)

to remember
god



~
outside the dream, I had written the most heartbreakingly clear poem about brotherhood.  inside

was this boy
was discovering
god’s thumb
is never
clean.  a boy whose mouth

was never
here.  all those I’ve met

I’ve left
alone.



~
asleep in the pickpocket’s bed, the baby is a mirage.  

I’m so fat
I’m fat
in the dark.  I compose

at my lowest
a crucifixion
story

from the basements
my father
wired.



~
putting the meat
back together
in an unfilled
pool

we yawned
at the same
time / brief

painless
the unmothered

between



~
as overcome as I was to be gifted a hospital gown, I had nothing on the angel whose brain / for visiting the eye / was banished…

we are the dead
we’re here
to return



~
by death I mean nothing was beautiful for a very long time.

that, and when did you know.

To get a fresh air
A night stroll would be fair,
I thought
And switching the TV
I got up from my chair.

On the pavement
Of a nearby apartment
A lovely girl by accident
I  met,
Who looks timid and decent.

On my part a wink
On hers a response quick
Lovers soon we begin to click
And engaged in a kissing spree
On the street
Our arms locked behind
Our waist
To passers by
Completely indifferent.

"My dear
Your lips
Are meant non-stop
To kiss!"

"I was willing except
For time constraint.
You see, home
I have to report!"

Thus we were forced to part
Fixing an appointment.

Resulting in a great sorrow
It dawned on me on the morrow
She was a pickpocket
When I couldn't get the wallet,
I shoved into my back pocket!

From that day on wards
At night whenever I meet girls
And exchange greetings
I check my hands
For fear even
A finger could run amiss.

Found in the churchyard of St Botolph's, Aldgate,
one distant lunchtime sixty years ago,
and saved perhaps from second burial
less ceremonial than its first had been,
would Hamlet have mused on this? A finger-bone,
less striking than a skull but just as dead.

I keep it now and wonder  
what skill he had possessed, the one who owned it.
Was he a tailor or a silversmith?
a carpenter? a weaver? or (none of those)
a lowly labourer, or a sly pickpocket?
Was it a woman's finger, a high-born lady?
or housewife (working her fingers to the bone)?

Did that hand long ago once guide a pen,
inscribe long lines of figures in heavy ledgers,
telling the tale of profit or of loss?
Did it write sonnets? messages of love?
or thoughts to pass on to an unknown future?
I cannot know, but still this humble bone,
the nameless relic of a city's past,
may have some little life, if only for me.

prefer to express myself metaphorically. let me stress metaphorically not symbolically.My Poetry's all over me like maggots on garbage, just because I interfered with a pickpocket the other day.

Once a flower is picked it immediately begins to die. see hope is the crystal **** of emotions. It hooks you fast and kills you hard. The loneliest people are the kindest. The saddest people smile the brightest. The most damaged people are the wisest.

See my Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.If Music is a Place then Jazz is the City, Folk is the Wilderness, Rock is the Road, Classical is a Temple.

See Love is a piano dropped from a four story window and you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark. #JidosReality #Poetry #Amazing

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/l8njruxa73yee9b0jzmhd/The-Ultimate-Unabridged-Guide-to-Esoteric-Working-English-2.docx?­­rlkey=kunoar7ghpfkb7fjk5xkdgx95&st=i84ornny&dl=0

2521-vaalhaai: South African Shark
2522-vaaljapie: inferior wine or acid
2523 vaccimulgence: cow milking
2524: reedbuck: antelope frequenting reeds; lucriferous learning by smart animals
2525 reeve: to pass a rope through a ring (the wedlock of an anarchist with an opportunist celebrity)
2526 reflectography: method of revealing hidden drawning lines beneath paintings the cryptadia of top secret Qart
2527. reflet: iridiscent or metallic lustre
2528 refulgent: casting a ray of light; radiant and beaming (something so rapid it blurs space and time or provides extravagant thrills)
2529 regardant:in profile and looking to the rear (hindsight)
2530 reginal: of, like or pertaining to a prom queen (relating to the women at a given college or high school vying to become the most popular students at the school or relating to really popular women in a given corporate culture)
2531 regisseur: stage manager of the Truman Show
2532 regolith: layer of loose rock overlaying solid rock (the lessor music of bands that have a few good songs but many mediocre one)
2533 regrate: to buy and sell again in the same market (larceny)
2534. relict: left behind and surviving on the moon
2535 relction: recession of sea leaving bare land (a view of a distant alien civilization where tidal flows are extreme and much land is uncovered)
2536 remanet: postponed case or parliamentary bill
2537 remeant: returning; combing back (characteristic of a person immured in a comatose state convalescing into consciousness/ a person undergoing a hypnotic influence while being told many secrets as in Seattle 12/16/2009)
2538 remigate-to row or cause a row (a motile miracle that causes a domestic dispute among atheists or agnostics/ an argument between psychiatry and scientology)
2539 remotion: separation, removal or removal of a person from office for disreputable malversation
2540 repousse: raised in relief by hammering from behind or within (a deft ****** encounter with a hot girl where she ******* from *******)
2541 reprobate: reprehensible or immoral person
2542 reprography: reproduction of graphic or typeset material (Joseph Smith)
2543 reredos: screen behind altar (covert homosexuality in the confines of a church or heterosexuality in confession booths)
2544 reremouse: a bat (a vigilante that pretends to be a superhero for street cred or a supervillain for street cred)
2545 rescript: answer of the pope or empower to any legal question edict or declaration
2546 resection: cutting away a part of a work or movie especially the end (stretchgraves)
2547 resipiscence: recognition of error; change to better frame of mind
2548 respondentia: loan on ship’s cargo payable on safe arrival
2549retiary: of nets: using nets as a weapon; catching insects in webs
2550 reticulose- of the nature of a network or plexure (of ornately interconnected brains that fetch the most farsighted even when finifugal insights to later refine themselves/ someone with a very protean mind)
2551 retinaculum: connecting band and means of retention (the ornate intertesselations and neuronal concatenations of people with very high IQ’s in their temporal-parietal juncture and the prefrontal cortex)
2552 retrenchment: cutting down on; reduction in the amount of
2553 retroject: to throw backwards a lateral
2554 retropulsion: pushign backwards
2555 revanche: revenge for policies directed towards recovery of territory
2556 revendicate: to try and retrieve a lost good or prospect
2557 revirescent: growing young or strong again because of a lifestyle change or change in medication
2558 revolute: rolled back at the edges of frayed modernity (a statement of pandering by a popular culture figure that tries to cadge people away from modern climates in exchange for the heyday of his convenience)
2559 rhadamanthine: like a stern judge or a steerage avizandum
2560 rheography: measurement of blood flow or the migration of kin in consanguinity to patriarchs of history
2561 rheology: science of the deformation or flow of matter into decadence rather than qualms
2562rheophile: living or thriving in running water (someone who thrives because of widespread sin)
2563 rheotaxis: direction of movement by water (movement of sinners around the world in terms of where they move the most often)
2564 rhexis: rupture of blood vessel (injury to your children especially in a frivverscrabble
2565 rhigosis: a sensation of cold: the ability to feel cold (the fear of your bank account being frozen because you too widely share insider information about the military or the financial landscape to too many loose lipped people)
2566 rhinotillexomania: compulsive nose picking or mining for depleted resources out of deprivation even in frustraneous endeavors
2567 rhopography: painting in still life (mercurial pictures of underminnow)
2568 rhotacism: hubris of Aryan Asians (the hubris of all people that claim racial supremacy)
2569 rhubarb: nonsense; actors’ nonsense background chatter (secretive speeches mistaken)
2570 rhyparography: genre of still-life pictures of sordid subjects (the trauma of working in a job that requires you to view disturbing autopsy photos or exposure to extremely distressing post-traumatic stress because of a major event in one’s life)
2571rhythmometer: instrument for measuring speed of circadian rhythms (instrument for measuring how widely spread drug abuse is in a given community)
2572 ribibe: an old crone, past the age of ****** appeal (an elite older woman that thrives because of agerasia)
2573 ridibund: easily moved to laughter (the terrorism of coarse jokes never meant to offend because of jannock)
2574 ridotto: social gathering with music and dancing(a monumental moment in human history that spares many people from suffering or harm/ a lucky marriage between soulmates)
2575 rifacimento: recasting of a literary or musical work (breaking up a band)
2576 rigescent: becoming numb or stiff (to have a random ******* when not thinking about any ****** thoughts)
2577 rimose: covered with cracks; full of chynx (a city deeply divided over drug issues)
2578 ringent: the audacious pursuit of married  women by guys who are extremely jaded by their *** life with their girlfriend or wife who cheat to much damage to their personal acclaim
2579 rinkomania: obsession with skating or hockey (of an attempt to injure some rival so they cannot compete with you on a professional level)
2580 ripieno: supplementary or reinforcing music that becomes a mainsail for collective motivation
2581 rittmaster: captain of a troop or horse (owner of a football team)
2582 **rivage: shore or bank (an astute bank that survives all financial triage by having a great balance sheet and liquidity)
2583 rivulation: irregular marks of color (the act of hiding one’s celebrity to roam around the world incognito especially when cloyed by fame)
2584 *rodomontade: bluster; boasting or bragging speech
2585 roentgenography: imagery or examination using x-rays(of or pertaining to absurd attempts at humor)
2586 rostrum: platform for public speaking (the demegoric tendency at campaign stumps for wide audiences that demarcates the elevation of pycnostyle to ensure the broadest audience possible understands it)
2587 rotocracy: government by those controlling rotten boroughs a graveyard for simpletons and groundlings a corrupt violent jail
2588 rubefaction: reddening (to turn an independent or blue-leaning region into a conservative territory either because of migration or because of oppositive support for provincial issues)
2589 rudenture: architecture that promotes ciplinarian molds that support liberty (the collective acts by the mafia to enhance their power base in the least violent way possible for public relations concerns)
2590 rugible: capable of roaring or becoming famous for subpar music
2591 rumbustious: boisterous about absolutely every sporting event that can be screened (a compulsive gambler on sporting events that always wagers a ridiculous amount in proportion to his net worth)
2592 rumchunder: fine silk (the most refined people of Asian countries that are known as holistically gifted, photogenic and generous either locally known or nationally known; an Asian paragon)
2593 rumfustian: a hot alcoholic drink made from pirated drugs off the dark web
2594 rupellary: a momentum of tsunami and the rise of an underdog hero because of musical talent or athletic prowess
2595 rupestrian: composed of rock; inscribed on rock (relating to the knowledge gained by analyzing the Rosetta Stone or the ability to learn new languages thereby/ the capacity of someone who doesn’t understand a language to figure it out by using subtitles)
2596 rurigenous: living or born in the country or backwater (of a famous celebrity from humble beginnings that climbs from a less elite family or region into international stardom)
2597 vacive: empty
2598 vacuefy: to produce a vacuum or help fugitives escape
2599 vacuist: someone that beliefs that an absolute vacuum is possible in nature (someone who believes in quantum events)
2600 *vacillate: to fluctuate in opinion or resolution
2601 vadable: able to be crossed, forded or folded
2602 vadimony: bond or pledge given before a judge
2603 vagantes: wandering monk scholars (elite people that travel often that are tight-lipped about the secrets they learn from other countries)
2604 vagarian: a whimsical person who always goes on adventures on the spot even when they are churlish or out of the way
2605 vagarish: of the eyes tending to roam or tending to focus on the Roman Catholic Church when watching *******
2606 vagient: crying like a baby (especially among adults that are thermolabile because of domestic disputes especially when peacefully resolved)
2607 vagile: having the ability to move about (as in prisoners or people widely hated by certain urbacities)
2608 valienton: bullies that brag because their old boodle is now useless so instead of vaunting heroism they become breedbates of catarrhine pandering
2609 vallidom: worth, value (as of a person or moment in history the salience of a prayer measured on a quantitative scale)
2610 valse: dance in triple time or waltz to elegant music
2611 valuta: comparative value of a currency or the price of a rumor because of “Knights”
2612 vandyke: to cut deep angeled indentations into (to inculcate bricolages of dumose masonry)
2613 vanitarianism: the pursuit of vain things (obsession with self-referential music)
2614. vapography effect of physical emanations on photographic plates (Cryptaesthesia by aliens)
2615 vapulate: to flog, to be flogged (especially when you know too many damning secrets about Middle-Eastern countries and they fake the charges so that no one knows they are flogged for treason)
2616 vaporetto: to motorboat a hot ***** in Las Vegas (a Wedding Crashers affair with a desperate girl in an elite family trying to philander with people from other elite families)
2617 varan: monitor lizard (Alien 33rd)
2618 vardle: the bottom hinge of a gate (the deepest underground computer protected by cryptadia)
2619 vardo: gypsy caravan a bus trying to extort people by using ****** Doo hijinx and other covert technology
2620 varietist: unorthodox person that becomes unorthodox because of indifferentism being too widely shared or euhemerism seeming too plausible
2621 varimax: method of statistical factor analysis that taxes advanced stochastic mathematics to analyze the financial sector
2622 variphone: use of many sounds used interchangeably by ausehetoria
2623 varsal: whole; entire; universal panorama
2624 vas: a hollow ***** or tube that conveys liquid within the body or sells secrets because of market liquidity
2625 vasotribe: instrument used to stop bleeding or prevent rioting a demarche
2626 vastation: purification by destroying evil elements
2627 vastidity: a vast extent
2628 vau: the sixth letter of the Hebrew alphabet
2629vauntlay: in hunting, release of a lead set of hounds before following them to catch fowl (A wedding crashers gambit to injure your friend)
2630 vaurien: a good-for-nothing; worthless person who is now worthless because of valienton and thereby inert in capacity for coverthrow or vangermyte succedaneum
2631vecordy: madness or folly because of crapulence and ravenous emacity among desperate people naive enough to believe that this is already the highest heaven that don’t believe in the afterlife ignorantly
2632 vectigal: of like or pertaining to the paying of tribute or rent (the act of the mafia collecting money for protection measures and thereby earning a handsome fortune for community organization that is parlayed into many charitable endeavors historically rather than currently)
2633 vedro: Russian unit of liquid measure equal to 2.7 gallons
2634 vees: soft earth in a crack or mining fissure (secret hiding place of nuclear combustible fissile materials in the Middle East)
2635 veepstakes: campaign to become vice president of any country
2636 veilleuse: shaded night lamp in red light districts ( a covert ******* or drug dealer)
2637 *velleity: lowest degree of volition; slight wish without any impulse to action
2638 *vellicative: causing twitching (an overdose on a noxious illegal drug)
2639 velocious: with great speed in any endeavor (high on amphetamines)
2640 venatic: of like or pertaining to hunting or Good Will Hunting
2641 vendible: capable of being sold (especially of or relating to secrets about the future or the past but relevant secrets)
2642 vendicate: to claim for yourself (arrogate)
2643 vendange: grape harvest (DXM Overdose)
2644venery: pursuit of ****** gratification
2645 venireman: juror smart enough to jurymast an entire gathering of galere into finding a man innocent rather than guilty that gets angry when prejudiced people don’t have the reninjasque capacity to see that a person is telling the truth (someone who believes authentic people rather than fake ones)
2646 venoclysis: introduction of liquid into the body by an intravenous drip (an attempt to sabotage a ****** encounter by providing medication that results in Erectile Dysfunction)
2647 venostasis: reduction in flow of blood to a part of the body paralyzing geographic regions because elite families don’t feel safe in famigeration or cabotage
2648ventana: window (a primordial operating system that is still in use today by some recalcitrant companies or government institutions abroad)
2649 ventifact:stone polished by wind-blown sand (advanced architecture built by aliens using slave labor)
2650ventrilabral: pertaining to fans or fanatacism (crimes or charities supported by professional sports teams in any country)
2651ventrad: towards the front of a crowd of people (the successful act of clambering towards a teleonomic goal)
2652 verbalism: undue attention to words alone even when synsematic
2653 verbile: one whose mental attraction to women is primed by words rather than scopophilia
2654 verderer: officer in charge of royal forests or elite national parks or the novalia of alien territory
2655 verglas: film of ice on rock (a show about drug dealers or natural disasters)
2656 verificationism: doctrine that emphasizes empirical verification of theoretical principles (the documentation of visible miracles that validates God’s existence)
2657 vernalization: to artificially chill seeds to hasten flowering in spring (to time a birthday by trying to conceive at the right time or using in vitro to time a pregnancy)
2658 vernicle: cloth with image of Christ’s face impressed upon it
2659 vernier: small movable scale for finely adjusting divisions of a measuring instrument (portable scale used by drug dealers)
2660 versability: aptness to be turned around
2661 versemonger: a writer of mediocre poetry (someone who relies on ChatGPT too often because he is extremely lazy when he does his homework that thereby suffers from academic struggles in English especially when ChatGPT becomes too advanced)
2662 versiform: changing in form
2663verticillated: whorled
2664vespertiolionize: to turn into batman by traumatizing a kid (the act of subacting someone you don’t like which molds their persona in a way that they become very jaundiced about racial groups or cliques because of repeated obganiation of bullying)
2665vesuvian: smoker’s slow-burning match
2666 Veneniferous: carrying poison
2667 vesta: wax-stemmed match (Mailbox Arson)
2668vexillology: study of flags
2669 vicariant:involving species or varieties that evolved in discrete habitats from one another (apagoge of fortuitism)
2670 vicenary: based on the number twenty
2671. Whorl: spiral or move in a twisted and convolted fashion or a pattern of spirals or concentric circles
2672 vigia: danger warning on a chart (especially when relating to hurricanes and other dangerous weather by people that circumambulate even when they aren’t japan)
2673vigorish: percentage of gambler’s winnings taken by a bookkeeper
2674 vilipend: to despsie; to make light of; to disparage mockingly expecially by people given to using praxinoscopes that feel immune from widespread persecution
2675villeggiatura: to stay in a rustic region to hide from urbacity (witness protection)
2676 vindictivolence: desire to take revenge
2677 vinegaroon: a large scorpion that emits foul vinegar-like secretion (a menacing alien that scares everybody)
2678 virgation: system of geological faults branching out like twigs (an international urban region taunted and tarnished by frequent Earthquakes especially when their buildings on constructed on liquefaction-prone soil)
2679 viripotent: fit for a husband in the Victorian era
2680 virtualism: doctrine that Christ is virtually present in the Eucharist
2681vis: force or power of a person or an event to shape the course of history
2682 viscid: semi-fluid; sticky; glutinous viscosity
2683 vitative: concerned with the preservation of life
2684vitrail: stained glass windows in an elite church (cryptic warnings about future catastrophes that are recognized intuitively as portentous as in a theophany by God warning the world about nuclear powers waging war against each other)
2685 vivat: long-lived macrobian doing anything in its power to forestall death
2686 volplane: to guide through the air without using any combustible fuel or material
2687 voltinism: breeding rhythm; brood frequency of a pullulated species of animal
2688vorticist: painter who expresses complexity of machinery through art or the complex social dynamics of astute moments in time better left to megalography than exact description (a covert anti-war protest by an artist or politician masquerading as a visual artist)
2689 vraisemblance: verisimilitude (a specious theory about somebody that is ergotall in the wrong direction that proves rotten and false)
2690 vug: small cavity; small cavity in a rock (a protrusion of a rock lyric that is too big of a hallswallop that it might cause people to become panicked or concerned about its spread)
2691 vulpecular: of or pertaining to a young fox or the media in its heyday before it became corrugated with corruption
2692 galeanthropy: belief that one is a cat (someone froward who pretends to be tralleyripped even when ugly demanding attention from men that don’t really care about them)
2693galere: group of undesirable people; unpleasant situation
2694 galericulate: topped by a hat-like covering (manacled by manhattan)
2695 galimatias: nonsense; confused mixture of unrelated things
2696 gambado: bound or spring of a horse; a fantastic dance move or athletic feat of prowess
2697 gamidolatry: worship of the gay agenda despite all the carnage and aceldama they caused
2698* gasconade: to brag or boast
2699 gavage: force-feeding of poultry
2700 gavelkind: land inheritance by all sons in equal proportions (naive theory that all countries deserve territorial bilateral considerations based on GDP)
2701gegenschein: glow of zodiacal light seen opposite the sun
2702geitonogamy: pollination of a flower by another flower (people that mix ***** and ****)
2703 geocarpy: the production of ripening of fruit underground (black market drug trade or the preservation of alien life underground)
2704 gemmate: to deck with gems
2705 geogony: study of the formation of the Earth
2706geomorphogeny: study of the origins of land forms
2707 geophone: device for detecting sound waves underground or finding the best house music
2708 geophyte:plant that grows only on the Earth
2709 geoselenic: pertaining to both the Earth and the moon
2710 gerascophobia: fear of growing old
2711 geoscopy: examination or analysis of soil (analysis of habitable conditions on exoplanets sustainable for population expansion or migration of alien species that seek novantique)
2712 gerenuk: a long-necked antelope with large eyes (characteristic of friendly aliens that you always remembered fondly)
2713gerocomy: study of old age
2714geromorphism: appearing to be older than one’s actual age
2715 gerontology: study of the elderly or the doyenne of knowledge
2716 ghawazi: Egyptian dancing girls (an elite DJ that always plays cryptic music at events even when it is grobbery)
2717.gid: Brain Disease Suffered by Sheep
2718gilbert: unit of magnetomotive force
2719gimbals: arrangement of rings allowing free motion of supported objects
2720ginglymus: a joint that permits movement in one plane only
2721glaciology:study of ice ages and glaciation (study of economic stagnation)
2722gleed: hot coal; burning ember
2723 glissade: moving on snow without skis
2724glochidate: bristled or barbed insults against people that know too much information for their own good
2725glomerate: packed or bunched together (especially to protect everyone in the camorra’s safety)
2726glottogonic: of, like or pertaining to the origins of language
2727 glozing: flattery or deceit
2728* gnomology: collection of aphorisms, proverbs and short poems.
2729 gnosiology: study of knowledge; philosophy of knowledge
2730 gnotobiology:study of life in germ-free conditions (biased study of a life manacled by the Regisseur or other similar conditions/biased life study of someone in a psychological experiment with many confederates)
2731goliard: wandering student (someone stranded by advanced intellectualism that is widely bullied at average schools)
2732goatish: lustful or foolish especially in becoming homonormative because of wednongues
2733gomphiasis: looseness of the teeth (the widely spread hallswallop of the bruits about qwartion)
2734gonfalonier: a standard-bearer (someone who holds the torch of liberty or power as a symbolic stance to preserve future generations or the current one)
2735 goniometer: instrument for measuring angles between faces (the capacity of internet websites to find your propinquities to taste and coterie and understand the bionomics of your reactions for lucriferous power)
2736 gonoph: pickpocket; thief (especially a shoplifter in an urban region during a time of chaos or in a susceptible location)
2737gorgonize: to turn into stone (to make something permanently remembered) or to paralyze with one’s gaze
2738gossypine:cottony of or like a slave because quidnuncs obsess about every underminnow in history on purpose because they feel intense jealousy or personal hatred
2739gowk: a cuckoo or a fool known for antisocial behavior and cisvestism that is beyond idiosyncratic
2740 grampus: a blunt nosed dolphin a trucidation of animals seeking revenge against their owners (the collective operations of Japan in studying marine biology or their attempts to irradiate the entire ocean)
2741 graphemics: study of systems of representing speech in writing
2742graphospasm: writer’s cramps
2743gravimetrical: of or like or pertaining to measuring by weight in choosing ****** partners
2744greaves: tallow waste (the people that become irradiated by your presence and thereby alienate themselves from you. Flaky friendships that dissolve into nothing)
2745 grillage: framework of timber (the secret shibboleths of a region known for geopolitical obscurity that hides many secrets in a useful way rarely known by the majority of the population)
2746 grimgribber: learned gibberish; legal jargon
2747 groggery: low public house (poor house music that is annoying)
2748grognard: old or veteran soldier of an extremely traumatizing conflict or terrorist attack
2749 gromatic: of or pertaining to surveys or surveillance
2750 groundprox: altitude warning system in an aircraft or  a warning about the degringolade of the stock market
2751 groupuscule:small clique or faction
2752growlery:a retreat for times of ill-humor
2753 grum: morose; surly especially when contemplating thanatopsis
2754guff: nonsense; empty talk about vain things done by celebrities to pander to common consideration
2755 guichet: a ticket window or a similar small opening into esoteric contemplation offered by synquests
2756 guignol: something intended to horrify people
2757guilloche: to decorate with intersecting curved lines (to find amplivagant metaphor in gradgrind mathematics of alkender and albenture)
2758gymnure: a hairy-hedgehog (a guarded stock market secret by sharks of bilkey)
2759 gynaecomania: abnormal *** addiction with women
2760 gyniolatry: deep respect or devotion for women
2761 xanthippe:ill-tempered woman
2762xanthocomic-yellow-haired
2763xenagogue: guide; someone who conducts strangers
2764xenial:of or concerning hospitality towards guests
2765 xenocracy: a government by foreigners
2766 xenodocheinology: a love of hotels because you aggregate information about different elite hotspots by staying in the best rooms and visiting the most obscure locations
2767 xenogamy: cross-fertilization
2768 xenolalia: a persons knowledge of a language never studied
2769xerophobous-unable to survive drought
2770 xerophytic:able to withstand drought
2771xilinous: of like or pertaining to cotton pickers
2772xiphosuran: horseshoe crab ( a lying idiot celebrity that cozies up to power and commits many cardinal sins because he wants to be remembered in history for the fake plaudits of gamidolatry)
2773xoanon:primitive wooden statute overlaid with ivory and gold
2774xography: photographic process for producing three-dimensional figures
2775 xylophage:some girl that loves *******
2776 tabatiere: *****-box of ambeer
2777tabloidese: roorbacks about big celebrities in attempted femicide
2778tachyphrasia: abnormally rapid speech
2779tachytelic: evolution at a faster than normal rate among humans and other species than a normal group: a high grayscale
2780taffrail:rail around the stern of the ship because of protean steerage (a jail for poor people that is extremely beneficent because the people inhabiting the jail are all non-violent offenders and they enjoy luxuries rarely shared in other prisons)
2781tamaraw: a water buffalo a catadromous instinctive hunted species of vinsky in wertong vogue that has great albenture because it has been depredated by klangquant elitism
2782tamburitza: a guitar, lyric or other instrument used by musicians of the wrepolis to balkanize society into fractured splinters of the fragmentary
2783 tangoreceptor: a yulliver coerced into aberrant naivety by finding gezellig only among the outcasts of the frontier of any given society
2784tantieme:share of profits or royalties especially among people responsible for the trucage and manufacture of memorable megalography
2785 tapinosis: use of degrading or diminutive diction regarding a topic
2786tautomerism: possession of one or more structure by a substantial claque coterie or entity
2787 taws: a thong used for punishment
2788taxis:movement of a whole organism
2789 technomania: craze for technology
2790 tectosphere: part of the earth that moves during plate tectonic activity
2791 tediferous: bearing a torch to protect a nave from depredation
2792 teichopsia:visual blurring and colours associated with migraines (a highlight reel of a miraculous game or battle in a major war)
2793teinoscope:a device that can predict the future by bending light or a gammon by pavonine gammerstangs to inculcate depravity among young impressionable gamines and gamins
2794telarian: a creature that spins a web or a machine that uses the world wide web to discover how to make itself a spider
2795 telegnosis:telaesthesia
2796 telematics:transmission of computerized data over long distances
2797teleonomy:characteristic of being governed by an overall purpose
2798tenebrific: producing darkness as in childhood indoctrination into evil sadistic beliefs of phobanthropy or diablerism
2799 tenendum: clause in a deed defining land tenure
2800 tenderometer: a fake device used by earwigs of chantage to misquantulate the capacity of any frethorned human being to be cadged into wanton lewdness demarcated by the conditions of primposition
2801 tephra: ash and debris ejected by volcano or the dumb things said in an anteric argument between paramours
2802teratogenic:producing monsters or abnormal growth by providing performance enhancing drugs
2803 terotechnology: use of various skills to extend the life of equipment or the perdurability of commercial products to withstand planned obsolescence
2804terramara:kind of earthly fertilizer designed to mutilate with brawndo rather than provide water (an alien gambit to pollute the Earth’s water supply to shorten life expectancy, reduce ***** count or a preventative measure to prevent the Scarecrow from Batman Begins)
2805terrella:magnetic model of the Earth
2806 terrisonant:having a terrible sound
2807 terry: piled fabric consisting of uncut loops (extremely repetitive electronic music especially if it is cheesy)
2808 tessellate: to form with mosaic
2809testudo: wheeled shelter used for protection from all above attacks (a mobile fortress designed to protect VIPs/ Air Force One)
2810tetramerous:having four parts
2811 Teutomania: obsession with German things, words or ideologies
2812 thalassiarchy:sovereignty of the seas or control of the world’s moral compass
2813 thalassography: science of the proper ecclesiastical balance between eumoireity and eudaemonism
2814 thalerophagous: feeding on fresh vegetable matter (xenucography)
2815 thalweg: middle of navigable waterway used as boundary line
2816 thanatognomonic: indicating or characteristic of death or the purpresture of the fears of death by nihilists who prepossess themselves over Alzheimer’s research
2817theatromania: obessions with *******, Rabelaisian humor, or a craze for going to operas or plays
2818 theocentrism: belief that God is central fact of existence
2819 theodolite: surveying instrument for measuring angles the docimasy of illuminated freemasons to discover true ranks in freemasonry
2820 theophilanthropism: love of both God and humanity
2821 theophile: one who loves or is loved by God
2822theotechny: use of the gods as a primary impetus behind movie scripts, plays, songs and stretchgraves of tempcoverage because it glorifies the kingdom of heaven on Earth and Heaven above with the parallax of wonder
2823therblig: unit of work for quantifying industrial operations by efficiency measures complicated in streamlined geotechnic study
2824thermantidote: apparatus for cooling air or calming regions of walming urbacity into docile peace
2825 thermophilous: preferring to be around hot women rather than ugly ones
2826 thersitical: scurrilous violent in manner of speech
2827 thewe: pillory for women
2828 thigmotaxis: movement of plant towards or away (the skittish actions by sketchy drug dealers who realize they are in a purlieu that is too radically monitored by traffic and in their paranoia they steer away to a remoter location to conduct affairs especially when done with high felony amounts of a hard drug)
2829thixotropy: temporary reduction in viscidity when shaken or stirred (lacking confidence and zeal in the face of intimidating spies)
2830 thnetopsychism: belief that the soul dies with the body only to be reborn on the day of judgment
2831thoughtography: supposed technique for transferring mental images onto photographs or movies
2832 thrasonical: boastful or bragging about the fortunes of a family because of williwaws of personal repute (bragging about your *** life)
2834 thremmatology: science of breeding domestic animals and plants (the science of genetic engineering people of different races with compatible genes or inserting in vitro ***** with the best chance of thriving)
2833throttlebottom: harmless incompetent holding public office deliberately because he is a wagtail pickthank faineant that serves a role to switch the seat of house to a different party
2835tocodynamometer: instrument for measuring uterine contractions during childbirth
2836 titubate: to stagger or stumble
2837toft: a small hill (an obstacle that is minor to the broader objectives of a military unit trying to sack a major important camp or refuge for bastions of armigerous security)
2838tolerationism: doctrine of toleration of religious differences
2839 tolypeutine: of, like or pertaining to armadillos (of or relating to the process of extended hibernation whether in theory or in fact)
2840 tombola: lottery in which each entrant must win a prize (the geopolitics of professional sports to reward underserved urbacities with championship opportunities)
2841 tomophobia/mania: irrational propensity for performing surgery
2842tootle:nonsensical writing or speech about feminist gammerstang topics that is often reiterative and cliched
2843topgallant: second in command in a country with a constitutional monarchy among the porphyrogenitic class
2844 toponomastic: of, like or pertaining to place names
2845 torchier:floor lamp with bowl for reflecting light upwards (A UFO)
2846 tornote: having blunt extremities (people with unseemly quoniam or other pelvic features)
2847 torpid: numb;lethargic; having lost the power to act
2848torpillage:electric shock therapy (the intensive process of destroying someone’s brain even when elite that relies on deliberately making an incision in the prefrontal cortex to ensure that they have zero personality whatsoever and cannot think)
2849torporific: causing numbness or dullness
2850totidem verbis: in so many words
2851tourbillon: swirl; vortex, whirlwind (a complex vicissitude that entangles many elements of the underworld in either unity or balkanization that creates a crime spree either internecine or wagered against an effete enemy)
2852tournure: a contour characteristic of a turn of line grace or poise because of exterior enrichments of circumstance
2853tow: to smoke **** too habitually to learn anything especially if attempting to be a poetaster or epigone
2854 toxophily: love of archery or spies
2855 trachynphonia: roughness of voice; gruff
2856 tragelaph: mythical crossbreed of a goat and stage (an athlete that is talented at both acting and sports)
2857 tragomaschalia:smelly armpits an old spice fanatic (characteristic of a bodybuilder whose arrogance derives from petty achievements in the weightroom if not also acclaim from professional contests)
2858 traulism: stammering in depaysed anxiety especially in front of a corporate board or in front of the police or a judge
2859 transpontine: from the other side of the river: melodramatic because of an anteric argument always done deliberately to make a relationship more exciting between men and women
2860 trave: crossbeam or space between crossbeams ( a space of time or dimension of spaced warped by antigravity technology that is so advanced it remains a cryptadia
2861 tresayle: great-great grandfather (a stupid remark about your family lineage that endangers the security of your family legacy/ a parody of self-importance)
2862 triboluminescence: emission of light caused by friction
2863 tribuloid: yielding prickly fruit (questions that raise discrimination rather than egalitarianism in the subsultus of the superstructure of the substratose civilizations we live in that understates environment and overstates cognitive nativism)
2864 trichosis: arrangement, distribution or disorder of hair (characteristic of an inoperable robot fashioned today or in the future which fails in many respects to operate with bionomic continuity with the ecosystem they are placed within)
2865 trichotomy: division or arrangement into three distinct parts (a movie trilogy widely celebrated)
2866 tricotee: lively old dance or dancing to old pop music that is already outmoded by newer popular music
2867 trifarious: facing three ways (multiple polypsychic virtualisis with more than two people simultaneously inhabiting the same consciousness
2868 triforium: a gallery or arcade over an aisle; a gallery over a nave and a choir that displays images of transmogrified supervolation of superlative gooods
2869 trigamy: being married to three spouses with no husbands
2870 triphibious: taking place on land, water and in air descriptive of the navy seals or the us marine corps in a symbolic way
2871 triplopia: triple vision
2872 tritanopia: inability to find merit in democratic ideals because of an imperseverant belief in republican values by agitprop and flipcreeks of commerstargal
2873. racemation: cluster or bundle of grapes or any other thing
2874. rachidian: of or concerning the spine
2875. rachitogenic: something causing rickets or rickety things
2876 radappertization: treatment of food with ionized radiation to **** bacteria
2877radiesthesia: sensitivity to radiation from any source
2879 radiogenic: produced by radioactive disintegration
2880 radular: coarse scraping and raspy (as in music)
2881 raglan: having sleeves going all the way to the neck (the act of connecting someone to the Matrix)
2882 rappel: calling to arms by the beating of the drum
2883 raptorial: predacious; of, like or pertaining to a bird of prety
2884 raster: pattern of parallel lines on grid used in certain scanners
2885ratheripe: early ripe person who is coerced into villainy by evil purlieus or even more evil parents especially when they encourage vile and debased ****** activity
2886recherche: carefully chosen, rare or exotic (especially characteristic of a location, movie or song that is widely overlooked)
2887. ratite-of or pertaining to flightless birds
2888.* rebarbative: repellent, repulsive
2889 rebullition: act of boiling up or effervescing
2890 recaption: reprisal; taking back that which is unlawfully obtained
2891. recipiangle: old instrument with two arms for measuring angles (a masonic elaborative test that guages the proper degree in freemasonry)
2892. recit: narrative tale often told to little children to teach them the kerygma in a secular story
2893 reckling: smallest or weakest of a litter (the most inferior people in a given race or country)
2894 reclame: art or practice by which publicity or notoriety is secured
2895 rectitudinous: manifesting overly obvious moral correctness
2896 rectrix: quill feathers of a bird’s tale (small details about aliens that are extremely rare and rarely spread only among elite families)
2897. recure: to bring people back to health
2898 reddendum: reserving clause in a lease
2899. rede: to counsel or advice
2900. tripudiate: to dance for joy; to exult to stamp or stampede
2901 triquetra: a triangle-shaped object or UFO
2902 trismus: lockjaw a hard word to pronounce or a savage beating in prison
2903 trogoldytine: like or pertaining to wrens or cave-dwelling animals or aliens
2904 troilism: ****** activity (Heterosexual) between three persons one man and two women
2905 tromometer: instrument for measuring slight earthquake shocks or the reaction of stock markets to infomania
2906 trophotropism: direction of growth by nutritional factors
2907 tropism: the tendency to react to innuendos or insults in a specific manner
2908 tubifacient: constructing a tubes (of or relating to videos where imposture is delicately preened in order to heighten dramaturgy in the quest for YouTube stardom. Characteristic of the pranks and stunts of people that want to become internet fads or celebrities)
2909 tuant: of writing keen or trenchant (someone who absolutely nails it out of the park with rhetoric because he speaks rapidly with a memorable cadence and strong rhetorical contortions that use residual techniques to emphasize a parallelism in expressing a barnstorm)
2910 trutinate: to weigh using a balance to evaluate mentally especially in the process of figuring a person’s neurotypes and signature beliefs
2911 tufthunter: a sycophant or toady that is wretcheen (someone who is extremely guarded of their daughters in childhood and adolescence about their mobility to date men because they are extremely persnickety and scared of their girls becoming *****)
2912 turbinate: shaped like a top or inverted cone (an extremely taxing mathematical proof that often requires the counsel of the sithcundman professor at any given university even an elite one/ to perform an absurdly hard arithmetic problem in your head without relying on a calculator or memory alone)
2913 turtleback: structure over ship’s bow or stern or the part of the ship that sinks dumb people for low cadasters of moral repute and dismal IQ scores (a device used by Nielsen to figure out how to socially engineer the people of cisvestism into collective political solidarity around oppositively supported gambits of a freewheeling republic)
2914 twire: to peep; to leer (to corrupt an economy by introducing a staggering amount of  debt or inflation that often results in productive revolutions)
2915 twyer: a nozzle for a blast of air especially in a 4DX theater
2917tympany: swelling with pregnancy especially when harboring an idea that is obvious to everyone else but you have the best business angle so you wait patiently for the most opportune moment to pitch it
2916macarize: to be beatific or blessed (to be celebrated as an artifact of the kerygma especially in the modern day/ to herald a preacher or a bishop as a sacerdotal hero for his marksmanship of morality)
2918 macaronic: muddled or mixed up (someone who is out of place at a mafia assembly because he is tricked into attending)
2919 macerator: person who fasts and becomes emaciated
2920 machairodont:sabre-toothed as in a tiger or tigerism of Bruce Almighty
2921 machinule:tool by surveyors to obtain a right angle (boodle paid to become the highest degree of illuminati or freemasonry)
2922 mackintosh: lightweight or rubberized waterproof cotton (a perdurable institution of bedrock importance to the formative duress of any person’s life that situates them with the best available resources for success and retaining the dignotions of elitism micromanaged by powerful central figures in government for sleek psyops)
2923 macrocephalic: having an abnormally large head
2924 macrography: viewing an object with the naked eye
2925 macrocosm: a large object considered holistically
2926 macromania: delusion that objects are larger than the natural size (a belief that your hallucinations make you holier than me because you encounter divine beings)
2927 macropicide: killing of kangaroos (or convicts sent to penal colonies in the past in Russia or in the modern united states especially if they are agile and elite)
2928 macropodine: of, like or pertaining to kangaroos
2929 macropterous: having large wings or fins (as in the miraculous butterfly that ambushed me at 3385)
2930 mactation: killing or slaughter of a sacrificial victim belonging to a claque of enmity that is dethroned without carnificine bloodshed
2931 madefy: to make women wet by becoming humorous in dark times needing comic relief
2932 maenadic: furious in bacchanalian revelry because of a flinker
2933 maggotorium: a place where low-ranking freemasons are bred to sell clergymen fake ideas about the future in protervity and dishonesty
2934magistride: the killing of one’s teacher especially if it involves dippoldism
2935 magnality: a wonderful or great thing that once seemed bleak or frustraneous that becomes a magnet for trendsetters on the vanguard to adopt or consume
2936 mahout: one who rides or drives elephants (ideopraxists who inspire people to turn Republican by their hortatory voice of ideation)
2937 maillot: tights worn by a ballet dancer (extremely ***** women that risk their lives to have *** with endangered redstralls because of political motivation for protervity)
2938 mainpernor: one who assures that prisoners appear at their trials or a person in the criminal underworld who ensures that all of the available funds for a transaction are counted for before the triage is dealt
2939 malabathrum: dried leaf used in ancient times to make perfumed ointments (the mummification of the dead using advanced alien technology/ hair gel)
2940 malaxage: softening of clay by kneading it to console old women by using psychotaxis and toonardical deception to remind them of their heydays in life
2941 malgre: in spite of decadent circumstances remaining morally grounded
2942 maltster: one who makes or deals in malt (women in the Victorian era that performed ******* despite the taboo)
2943 malversation: corruption in office; corrupt administration or misconduct
2944 mammock: a broken phone created by subsultus in abreaction
2945 mangonel: ancient egyptian military artifact that belongs in the cryptadia that assisted pyramid building or early motatory mobilism
2946 mantissa: decimal part of a logarithm (the exact prediction of the world’s population and GDP in the distant past to increasing measures of exactitude)
2947manumission: emancipation freedom from slavery
2948marcottage: propagation of trees by stripping rings of bark and covering them with moss (installing an advanced brain chip that can only be performed by opening the skull)
2949 maritodespotism: ruthless ******* by a husband because of high stature and intimidation especially when the women is philandering or the ruthless ******* of a pismirist company over an entire landscape of commodities fearing succedaneum might be cheaper by introducing planned obsolescence
2950 marivaudage: precocity in literary style or expression ( a comedic attempt to bowdlerize true romance by inserting pernicious elements of dacoitage in mythopoeic hatred to try and convince people using flowery epithets that a person is too alienavesced to bond)
2951 marry: an expression of surprised agreement between political rivals that convene usually in a deloped scuffle that usually leads to a trustworthy bipartisan partnership especially if the vaunted politicians are from different nations
2952*martinet: a strict disciplinarian; one who adheres to rules
2953martingale: strap between horse’s forelegs to keep its head down (a maneuver by Colorado to keep everyone in the dark about estoppage because of corporate motivation)
2954 martryology: the study of martyrs especially political ones that risk their own safety to promote God rather than peace
2955 mascaron: a grotesque face on a door knocker (a lie by an elite band to cadge people into lewd dominions of chantage and sloganeering a widely held flargentum travesty)
2956 mascon: concentration of a dense mass beneath the moons surface (a tightly agglomerated race of humans in synoecy with aliens that are very smart and sympatric in their fidelity to human society especially when the aliens are incorrugable in their demands of Earth)
2957 masterate: degree or title of only the true master masons above 33rd degree or the highest ranking of the illuminati
2958 matachin: a sword dance by gypsies to intimidate people about voodoo because they know about squash courts and fencing and the ESP of the cryptadia (a rogue agent that betrays his home country by finding a paramour from another country that he cares more about than his patriotic valor)
2959materteral: of or resembling an aunt
2960 mathematicism: the belief that everything is expressible in mathematical terms and that every human and alien problem with eventually be solved by advanced technology and deliberate larithmics
2961 mariherital: of, like, or pertaining to inheritance along the female line
2962. matelasse: having a quilted ornamentation a fabric with a raised pattern as if quilted (a sheet of LSD)
2963 matutinal: happening early in the morning (a seductive ogle by an attractive man trying to court a hot girl to bed by using candelit vigils as an excuse especially when religious and pytherian)
2964 maugre: in spite of; notwithstanding
2965 maximalism: uncompromising adherence to extreme demands especially when they resort to underminnows of sabotage to winnow evil people from the earth’s population by chantage
2966 mazzebah: ancient Jewish sacred stone pillar (the arc of the covenant)
2967 mazopathia: any disease of the placenta caused by being to illuminated to have children
2968 mazut: petroleum residue after distillation (the people that survive an internecine situation of civil strife between rival factions in a seedy country plagued by poverty or in any other civil disturbance involving combatants from rich nations)
2969 mechanomorphic: having the form of a machine (lacking much of a persona that makes you look dull and insipid especially in the corporate world where you seem hackneyed and toady)
2970 mechanolatry: worship of machines (a strong priority by a large corporation to streamline all operations even at the cost of accosted labor frenzies of dearth)
2971 meconology: study of or treatise concerning ***** or shanghaied people in San Francisco abducted by the Chinese to aid the figurative Last Samurai
2972 meditabund: absorbed in meditation/tigrism
2973megacerine: extinct giant deer or a stone-aged lie that tried to coerce the clergy into hemophiliac distortions of taste
2974 megameter: instrument for determining the best place for an elite celebrity to live by observing the stars constellated in that community and their effects at hallswallop
2975megistotherm: plant or industry requiring very high temperatures to coerce into serfdom or panic
2976mehari: camel used for racing (a ploy by toxicity to own a systematic downfall of provincial econometrics of genesiology depaysed an excuse or invitation for a rhipidate love (a carefully guarded ploy to introduce carcinogens among susceptible minority populations)
2977 mekometer: range-finder (someone who patrols a guarded regional ballaster of mainlined economic instruments or armigerous cyanotypes or arms that always remains vigilant from the purpresture of those that attempt to infiltrate the region or building/ a collective troop of security guards guarding a less obvious bulwark of regional and national importance)
2978 meldometer: instrument for measuring melting points of substances (testing how thermolabile elite mafiosos are by thrusting them into precarious peril)
2979 meleagrine: of, like or pertaining to turkeys or explicit *******
2980 *meliorism: the belief the world tends to become better
2981 melodikon: keyboard instrument (element of a time machine) that brings tuning forks in contact with a rotating to cone to deliberately chose the point of junction with the future reaching the past by pretended serendipity
2982 melopepon: any of various kinds of squash (especially the best soundracketeers)
2983 mensuration: measuring to find the dimensions of things (pataphysical examinations of time travel by mathematicism and speculative knowledge that is accursed because it is so farsighted)
2984 menticide: reduction of the mind by psychological pressure (the capacity of the mediagenic hyperbole to brainwash suscepts of surquedry a unique synsematic idiosyncrasy in definition)
2985 mercedary: pertaining to the giving or reception of wages (the fair allotment of wages not by pismirists but by people that follow through on their promises especially done in negotiosity where an excellent outcome rewards more than a mediocre one out of incentive)
2986 meromorphic: fractional office space corporate engineering
2987mesalliance: unsuitable marriage because of whiskerandas and whiskerandos or divided political motivations
2988mesochroic: having skin colour intermediate between light and dark (a political independent that belongs to a racial minority in any country)
2989 mesozeugma: a placement of a word to contradict a counterphobic innuendo so that people don’t misinterpet anything
2990 messianism: belief in a single messiah or saviour
2991 metachronism: the error of dating an event too late
2992 metallogenic: metal occuring as an ore as opposed to in rocks (the radiohoo of rap music even when less melismatic becoming more secretive than euphoric gourdinance in rock music or house)
2993metaplasm: alteration in spelling of a word by adding, removing or transposing letters the survival of political earwigs who expose deep secrets by pandering to the ruling party
2994 metapolitics: study of politics in theory or abstract (believing the cloveryield of exuberant and absurd political beliefs might be optimized with drastic draconian reforms in free autarky believing that  the world will eventually submit to communism)
2995 metastrophe: mutual exchange of information Minus of the Bear style
2996 metayage: system of agricultural labour with share of produce as wages

Up with the sun, his mind razor-keen,
he hikes up his trousers and starts his machine.
Though barrels of funk feed their reek to the dawn,
he pays them no heed; the trashman rolls on.
Up alleys, down thruways, past storefronts and stands,
he guides his behemoth with rock-steady hands.
Though big rigs and small fry speed hither and yon,
he sticks to his creed; the trashman rolls on.
Down **** to Impostor, past each stinking bin,
he makes for the junkies and merchants of sin.
Though winos raise eyelids, though punks point and grin,
he straightens his shoulders and thrusts forth his chin.
******* and derelicts lurch from their sties.
Pimps and their harlots flash Jacksons and strut.
“Hey, you in the truck,” a pickpocket cries,
“What are you, buddy, some kinda nut?”
With hands on the levers, and brightly lit eyes,
The big driver leans out and coolly replies:
“No, sir. I’m the trashman.”
And down comes the fork, and up goes the muck.
The gears maul the lowlifes, the fork rocks the truck.
Though hollers and screams shake his steel mastodon,
he longs to proceed; the trashman rolls on.
The truck passes perverts, creeps churned in its bile,
up Felon to Pusher, down Vicious to Vile,
where block upon block, where mile upon mile,
the hookers regale him with smile upon smile.
Near-naked floozies exhibit their wares.
But this man just glares while they trumpet in pique.
“Hey, you in the truck,” a drunk strumpet cries,
“What are you, mister, some kinda freak?”
His hands on the levers, with brightly lit eyes,
the big driver leans out and gently replies:
“No, ma’am. I’m the trashman.”
And down comes the fork, and up goes the slime.
The gears maul the contents to streetwalker chyme.
Though hollers and screams are distressing and drawn,
his heart fails to bleed; the trashman rolls on.
Pining for virtue, he clatters along,
up Bully to Bigot, down Trollop to Spawn,
past Conman and Cutthroat to Thirteenth and Greed.
He steadies, caresses, and readies his steed. Virtue, indeed.
The trashman rolls on.



Okay. NOW CUT AND PASTE THE LINK BELOW TO READ HERO, A SPRAWLING, GROUNDBREAKING FANTASY FOR GROWNUPS IN TWO PARTS. (BUT YOU MUST CLICK ON THE PROVIDED LINK AT THE CONCLUSION OF PART ONE TO ACCESS PART TWO! THAT’S WHERE THIS TALE’S AMAZING RESOLUTION LIES. But please...intelligent, soulful readers only!)
NOW HERE’S THAT LINK:

https://allpoetry.com/poem/14922744-Hero---Part-One-by-Ron-Sanders


Copyright 2020 by Ron Sanders.

contact:
ronsandersartofprose@yahoo.com

asleep in the pickpocket’s bed, the baby is a mirage.  

I’m so fat
I’m fat
in the dark.  I compose

at my lowest
a crucifixion
story

from the basements
my father
wired.