She said, ‘You are funny, the way you set yourself up the moment we arrive. You look into every room to see if it’s suitable as a place to work. Is there a table? Where are the plugs? Is there a good chair at the right height? If there isn’t, are there cushions to make it so? You are funny.’
 
He countered this, but his excuse didn’t sound very convincing. He knew exactly what she meant, but it hurt him a little that she should think it ‘funny’. There’s nothing funny about trying to compose music, he thought. It’s not ‘radio in the head’ you know – this was a favourite expression he’d once heard an American composer use. You don’t just turn a switch and the music’s playing, waiting for you to write it down. You have to find it – though he believed it was usually there, somewhere, waiting to be found. But it’s elusive. You have to work hard to detect what might be there, there in the silence of your imagination.
 
Later over their first meal in this large cottage she said, ‘How do you stop hearing all those settings of the Mass that you must have heard or sung since childhood?’ She’d been rehearsing Verdi’s Requiem recently and was full of snippets of this stirring piece. He was a) writing a Mass to celebrate a cathedral’s reordering after a year as a building site, and b) he’d been a boy chorister and the form and order of the Mass was deeply engrained in his aural memory. He only had to hear the plainsong introduction Gloria in Excelsis Deo to be back in the Queen’s chapel singing Palestrina, or Byrd or Poulenc.
 
His ‘found’ corner was in the living room. The table wasn’t a table but a long cabinet she’d kindly covered with a tablecloth. You couldn’t get your feet under the thing, but with his little portable drawing board there was space to sit properly because the board jutted out beyond the cabinet’s top. It was the right length and its depth was OK, enough space for the board and, next to it, his laptop computer. On the floor beside his chair he placed a few of his reference scores and a box of necessary ‘bits’.
 
The room had two large sofas, an equally large television, some unexplainable and instantly dismissible items of decoration, a standard lamp, and a wood burning stove. The stove was wonderful, and on their second evening in the cottage, when clear skies and a stiff breeze promised a cold night, she’d lit it and, as the evening progressed, they basked in its warmth, she filling envelopes with her cards, he struggling with sleep over a book.
 
Despite and because this was a new, though temporary, location he had got up at 5.0am. This is a usual time for composers who need their daily fix of absolute quiet. And here, in this cottage set amidst autumn fields, within sight of a river estuary, under vast, panoramic uninterrupted skies, there was the distinct possibility of silence – all day. The double-glazing made doubly sure of that.
 
He had sat with a mug of tea at 5.10 and contemplated the silence, or rather what infiltrated the stillness of the cottage as sound. In the kitchen the clock ticked, the refrigerator seemed to need a period of machine noise once its door had been opened. At 6.0am the central heating fired up for a while. Outside, the small fruit trees in the garden moved vigorously in the wind, but he couldn’t hear either the wind or a rustle of leaves.  A car droned past on the nearby road. The clear sky began to lighten promising a fine day. This would certainly do for silence.
 
His thoughts returned to her question of the previous evening, and his answer. He was about to face up to his explanation. ‘I empty myself of all musical sound’, he’d said, ‘I imagine an empty space into which I might bring a single note, a long held drone of a note, a ‘d’ above middle ‘c’ on a chamber ***** (seeing it’s a Mass I’m writing).  Harrison Birtwistle always starts on an ‘e’. A ‘d’ to me seems older and kinder. An ‘e’ is too modern and progressive, slightly brash and noisy.’
 
He can see she is quizzical with this anecdotal stuff. Is he having me on? But no, he is not having her on. Such choices are important. Without them progress would be difficult when the thinking and planning has to stop and the composing has to begin. His notebook, sitting on his drawing board with some first sketches, plays testament to that. In this book glimpses of music appear in rhythmic abstracts, though rarely any pitches, and there are pages of written description. He likes to imagine what a new work is, and what it is not. This he writes down. Composer Paul Hindemith reckoned you had first to address the ‘conditions of performance’. That meant thinking about the performers, the location, above all the context. A Mass can be, for a composer, so many things. There were certainly requirements and constraints. The commission had to fulfil a number of criteria, some imposed by circumstance, some self-imposed by desire. All this goes into the melting ***, or rather the notebook. And after the notebook, he takes a large piece of A3 paper and clarifies this thinking and planning onto (if possible) a single sheet.
 
And so, to the task in hand. His objective, he had decided, is to focus on the whole rather than the particular. Don’t think about the Kyrie on its own, but consider how it lies with the Gloria. And so with the Sanctus & Benedictus. How do they connect to the Agnus Dei. He begins on the A3 sheet of plain paper ‘making a map of connections’. Kyrie to Gloria, Gloria to Credo and so on. Then what about Agnus Dei and the Gloria? Is there going to be any commonality – in rhythm, pace and tempo (we’ll leave melody and harmony for now)? Steady, he finds himself saying, aren’t we going back over old ground? His notebook has pages of attempts at rhythmizing the text. There are just so many ways to do this. Each rhythmic solution begets a different slant of meaning.
 
This is to be a congregational Mass, but one that has a role for a 4-part choir and ***** and a ‘jazz instrument’. Impatient to see notes on paper, he composes a new introduction to a Kyrie as a rhythmic sketch, then, experimentally, adds pitches. He scores it fully, just 10 bars or so, but it is barely finished before his critical inner voice says, ‘What’s this for? Do you all need this? This is showing off.’ So the filled-out sketch drops to the floor and he examines this element of ‘beginning’ the incipit.
 
He remembers how a meditation on that word inhabits the opening chapter of George Steiner’s great book Grammars of Creation. He sees in his mind’s eye the complex, colourful and ornate letter that begins the Lindesfarne Gospels. His beginnings for each movement, he decides, might be two chords, one overlaying the other: two ‘simple’ diatonic chords when sounded separately, but complex and with a measure of mystery when played together. The Mass is often described as a mystery. It is that ritual of a meal undertaken by a community of people who in the breaking of bread and wine wish to bring God’s presence amongst them. So it is a mystery. And so, he tells himself, his music will aim to hold something of mystery. It should not be a comment on that mystery, but be a mystery itself. It should not be homely and comfortable; it should be as minimal and sparing of musical commentary as possible.
 
When, as a teenager, he first began to set words to music he quickly experienced the need (it seemed) to fashion accompaniments that were commentaries on the text the voice was singing. These accompaniments did not underpin the words so much as add a commentary upon them. What lay beneath the words was his reaction, indeed imaginative extension of the words. He eschewed then both melisma and repetition. He sought an extreme independence between word and music, even though the word became the scenario of the music. Any musical setting was derived from the composition of the vocal line.  It was all about finding the ‘key’ to a song, what unlocked the door to the room of life it occupied. The music was the room where the poem’s utterance lived.
 
With a Mass you were in trouble for the outset. There was a poetry of sorts, but poetry that, in the countless versions of the vernacular, had lost (perhaps had never had) the resonance of the Latin. He thought suddenly of the supposed words of William Byrd, ‘He who sings prays twice’. Yes, such commonplace words are intercessional, but when sung become more than they are. But he knew he had to be careful here.
 
Why do we sing the words of the Mass he asks himself? Do we need to sing these words of the Mass? Are they the words that Christ spoke as he broke bread and poured wine to his friends and disciples at his last supper? The answer is no. Certainly these words of the Mass we usually sing surround the most intimate words of that final meal, words only the priest in Christ’s name may articulate.
 
Write out the words of the Mass that represent its collective worship and what do you have? Rather non-descript poetry? A kind of formula for collective incantation during worship? Can we read these words and not hear a surrounding music? He thinks for a moment of being asked to put new music to words of The Beatles. All you need is love. Yesterday all my troubles seemed so far away. Oh bla dee oh bla da life goes on. Now, now this is silliness, his Critical Voice complains. And yet it’s not. When you compose a popular song the gap between some words scribbled on the back of an envelope and the hook of chords and melody developed in an accidental moment (that becomes a way of clothing such words) is often minimal. Apart, words and music seem like orphans in a storm. Together they are home and dry.
 
He realises, and not for the first time, that he is seeking a total musical solution to the whole of the setting of those words collectively given voice to by those participating in the Mass.
 
And so: to the task in hand. His objective: to focus on the whole rather than the particular.  Where had he heard that thought before? - when he had sat down at his drawing board an hour and half previously. He’d gone in a circle of thought, and with his sketch on the floor at his feet, nothing to show for all that effort.
 
Meanwhile the sun had risen. He could hear her moving about in the bathroom. He went to the kitchen and laid out what they would need to breakfast together. As he poured milk into a jug, primed the toaster, filled the kettle, the business of what might constitute a whole solution to this setting of the Mass followed him around the kitchen and breakfast room like a demanding child. He knew all about demanding children. How often had he come home from his studio to prepare breakfast and see small people to school? - more often than he cared to remember. And when he remembered he became sad that it was no more.  His children had so often provided a welcome buffer from sessions of intense thought and activity. He loved the walk to school, the first quarter of a mile through the park, a long avenue of chestnut trees. It was always the end of April and pink and white blossoms were appearing, or it was September and there were conkers everywhere. It was under these trees his daughter would skip and even his sons would hold hands with him; he would feel their warmth, their livingness.
 
But now, preparing breakfast, his Critical Voice was that demanding child and he realised when she appeared in the kitchen he spoke to her with a voice of an artist in conversation with his critics, not the voice of the man who had the previous night lost himself to joy in her dear embrace. And he was ashamed it was so.
 
How he loved her gentle manner as she negotiated his ‘coming too’ after those two hours of concentration and inner dialogue. Gradually, by the second cup of coffee he felt a right person, and the hours ahead did not seem too impossible.
 
When she’d gone off to her work, silence reasserted itself. He played his viola for half an hour, just scales and exercises and a few folk songs he was learning by heart. This gathering habit was, he would say if asked, to reassert his musicianship, the link between his body and making sound musically. That the viola seemed to resonate throughout his whole body gave him pleasure. He liked the ****** movement required to produce a flowing sequence of bow strokes. The trick at the end of this daily practice was to put the instrument in its case and move immediately to his desk. No pause to check email – that blight on a morning’s work. No pause to look at today’s list. Back to the work in hand: the Mass.
 
But instead his mind and intention seemed to slip sideways and almost unconsciously he found himself sketching (on the few remaining staves of a vocal experiment) what appeared to be a piano piece. The rhythmic flow of it seemed to dance across the page to be halted only when the few empty staves were filled. He knew this was one of those pieces that addressed the pianist, not the listener. He sat back in his chair and imagined a scenario of a pianist opening this music and after a few minutes’ reflection and reading through allowing her hands to move very slowly and silently a few millimetres over the keys.  Such imagining led him to hear possible harmonic simultaneities, dynamics and articulations, though he knew such things would probably be lost or reinvented on a second imagined ‘performance’. No matter. Now his make-believe pianist sounded the first bar out. It had a depth and a richness that surprised him – it was a fine piano. He was touched by its affect. He felt the possibilities of extending what he’d written. So he did. And for the next half an hour lived in the pastures of good continuation, those rich luxuriant meadows reached by a rickerty rackerty bridge and guarded by a troll who today was nowhere to be seen.
 
It was a curious piece. It came to a halt on an enigmatic, go-nowhere / go-anywhere chord after what seemed a short declamatory coda (he later added the marking deliberamente). Then, after a few minutes reflection he wrote a rising arpeggio, a broken chord in which the consonant elements gradually acquired a rising sequence of dissonance pitches until halted by a repetition. As he wrote this ending he realised that the repeated note, an ‘a’ flat, was a kind of fulcrum around which the whole of the music moved. It held an enigmatic presence in the harmony, being sometimes a g# sometimes an ‘a’ flat, and its function often different. It made the music take on a wistful quality.
 
At that point he thought of her little artists’ book series she had titled Tide Marks. Many of these were made of a concertina of folded pages revealing - as your eyes moved through its pages - something akin to the tide’s longitudinal mark. This centred on the page and spread away both upwards and downwards, just like those mirror images of coloured glass seen in a child’s kaleidoscope. No moment of view was ever quite the same, but there were commonalities born of the conditions of a certain day and time.  His ‘Tide Mark’ was just like that. He’d followed a mark made in his imagination from one point to another point a little distant. The musical working out also had a reflection mechanism: what started in one hand became mirrored in the other. He had unexpectedly supplied an ending, this arpegiated gesture of finality that wasn’t properly final but faded away. When he thought further about the role of the ending, he added a few more notes to the arpeggio, but notes that were not be sounded but ghosted, the player miming a press of the keys.
 
He looked at the clock. Nearly five o’clock. The afternoon had all but disappeared. Time had retreated into glorious silence . There had been three whole hours of it. How wonderful that was after months of battling with the incessant and draining turbulence of sound that was ever present in his city life. To be here in this quiet cottage he could now get thoroughly lost – in silence. Even when she was here he could be a few rooms apart, and find silence.
 
A week more of this, a fortnight even . . . but he knew he might only manage a few days before visitors arrived and his long day would be squeezed into the early morning hours and occasional uncertain periods when people were out and about.
 
When she returned, very soon now, she would make tea and cut cake, and they’d sit (like old people they wer

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There was a moment when he knew he had to make a decision.

He had left London that February evening on the ****** Velo Train to the South West. As the two hour journey got underway darkness had descended quickly; it was soon only his reflected face he could see in the window. He’d been rehearsing most of the afternoon so it was only now he could take out the manuscript book, its pages full of working notes on the piece he was to play the following afternoon. His I-Mind implant could have stored these but he chose to circumvent this thought-transcribing technology; there was still the physical trace on the cream-coloured paper with his mother’s propelling pencil that forever conjured up his journey from the teenage composer to the jazz musician he now was. This thought surrounded him with a certain warmth on this Friday evening train full of those returning to their country homes and distant families.

It was a difficulty he had sensed from the moment he perceived a distant gap in the flow of information streaming onto the mind page

At the outset the Mind Notation project had seemed harmless, playful in fact. He allowed himself to enter into the early experiments because he knew and trusted the research team. He got paid handsomely for his time, and later for his performance work.  It was a valuable complement to his ill-paid day-to-day work as a jazz pianist constantly touring the clubs, making occasional festival appearances with is quintet, hawking his recordings around small labels, and always ‘being available’. Mind Notation was something quite outside that traditional scene. In short periods it would have a relentless intensity about it, but it was hard to dismiss because he soon realised he had been hard-wired to different persona. Over a period of several years he was now dealing with four separate I-Mind folders, four distinct musical identities.

Tomorrow he would pull out the latest manifestation of a composer whose creative mind he had known for 10 years, playing the experimental edge of his music whilst still at college. There had been others since, but J was different, and so consistent. J never interfered; there were never decisive interventions, only an explicit confidence in his ability to interpret J’s music. There had been occasional discussion, but always loose; over coffee, a walk to a restaurant; never in the lab or at rehearsals.

In performance (and particularly when J was present) J’s own mind-thought was so rich, so wide-ranging it could have been drug-induced. Every musical inference was surrounded by such intensity and power he had had to learn to ride on it as he imagined a surfer would ride on a powerful wave. She was always there - embedded in everything J seemed to think about, everything J projected. He wondered how J could live with what seemed to him to be an obsession. Perhaps this was love, and so what he played was love like a wilderness river flowing endlessly across the mind-page.

J seemed careful when he was with her. J tried hard not to let his attentiveness, this gaze of love, allow others to enter the public folders of his I-Mind space (so full of images of her and the sounds of her light, entrancing voice). But he knew, he knew when he glanced at them together in darkened concert halls, her hand on J’s left arm stroking, gently stroking, that J’s most brilliant and affecting music flowed from this source.

He could feel the pattern of his breathing change, he shifted himself in his chair, the keyboard swam under his gaze, he was playing fast and light, playing arpeggios like falling water, a waterfall of notes, cascades of extended tonalities falling into the darkness beyond his left hand, but there it was, in twenty seconds he would have to*

It had begun quite accidentally with a lab experiment. J had for some years been researching the telematics of composing and performing by encapsulating the physical musical score onto a computer screen. The ‘moist media’ of telematics offered the performer different views of a composition, and not just the end result but the journey taken to obtain that result. From there to an interest in neuroscience had been a small step. J persuaded him to visit the lab to experience playing a duet with his own brain waves.

Wearing a sensor cap he had allowed his brainwaves to be transmitted through a BCMI to a synthesiser – as he played the piano. After a few hours he realised he could control the resultant sounds. In fact, he could control them very well. He had played with computer interaction before, but there was always a preparatory stage, hours of designing and programming, then the inevitable critical feedback of the recording or glitch in performance. He soon realised he had no patience for it and so relied on a programmer, a sonic artist as assistant, as collaborator when circumstances required it.

When J’s colleagues developed an ‘app’ for the I-Mind it meant he could receive J’s instant thoughts, but thoughts translated into virtual ‘active’ music notation, a notation that flowed across the screen of his inner eye. It was astonishing; more astonishing because J didn’t have to be physically there for it to happen: he could record I-Mind files of his thought compositions.

The reference pre-score at the top of the mind page was gradually enlarging to a point where pitches were just visible and this gap, a gap with no stave, a gap of silence, a gap with no action, a gap with repeat signs was probably 30 seconds away

In the early days (was it really just 10 years ago?) the music was delivered to him embedded in a network of experiences, locations, spiritual and philosophical ideas. J had found ways to extend the idea of the notated score to allow the performer to explore the very thoughts and techniques that made each piece – usually complete hidden from the performer. He would assemble groups of miniatures lasting no more than a couple of minutes each, each miniature carrying, as J had once told him, ‘one thought and one thought only’.  But this description only referred to the musical material because each piece was loaded with a web of associations. From the outset the music employed scales and tonalities so far away from the conventions of jazz that when he played and then extended the pieces it seemed like he was visiting a different universe; though surprisingly he had little trouble working these new and different patterns of pitches into his fingers. It was uncanny the ‘fit’.

Along with the music there was always rich, often startling images she conjured up for J’s compositions. At the beginning of their association J initiated these. He had been long been seeking ways to integrate the visual image with musical discourse. After toying with the idea of devising his own images for music he conceived the notion of computer animation of textile layers. J had discovered and then encouraged the work and vision of a young woman on the brink of what was to become recognised as a major talent. When he could he supported her artistically, revelling in the keenness of her observation of the natural world and her ability to complement what J conceived. He became her lover and she his muse; he remodelled his life and his work around her, her life and her work.

When performing the most complex of music it always seemed to him that the relative time of music and the clock time of reality met in strange conjunctions of stasis. Quite suddenly clock time became suspended and musical time enveloped reality. He found he could be thinking something quite differently from what he was playing.

Further projects followed, and as they did he realised a change had begun to occur in J’s creative rationale. He seemed to adopt different personae. Outwardly he was J. Inside his musical thought he began to invent other composers, musical avatars, complete minds with different musical and personal histories that he imagined making new work.

J had manipulated him into working on a new project that had appeared to be by a composer completely unknown to him. L was Canadian, a composer who had conceived a score that adhered to the DOGME movie production manifesto, but translated into music. The composition, the visuals, the text, the technological environment and the performance had to be conceived in realtime and in one location. A live performance meant a live ‘making’, and this meant he became involved in all aspects of the production. It became a popular and celebrated festival event with each production captured in its entirety and presented in multi-dimensional strands on the web. The viewer / listener became an editor able to move between the simultaneous creative activity, weaving his or her own ‘cut’ like some art house computer game. L never appeared in person at these ‘remakings’, but via a computer link. It was only after half a dozen performances that the thought entered his mind that L was possibly not a 24-year-old woman from Toronto complete with a lively Facebook persona.

Then, with the I-Mind, he woke up to the fact that J had already prepared musical scenarios that could take immediate advantage of this technology. A BBC Promenade Concert commission for a work for piano and orchestra provided an opportunity. J somehow persuaded Tom Service the Proms supremo to programme this new work as a collaborative composition by a team created specially for the premiere. J hid inside this team and devised a fresh persona. He also hid his new I-Mind technology from public view. The orchestra was to be self-directed but featured section leaders who, as established colleagues of J’s had already experienced his work and, sworn to secrecy, agreed to the I-Mind implant.

After the premiere there were rumours about how the extraordinary synchronicities in the play of musical sections had been achieved and there was much critical debate. J immediately withdrew the score to the BBC’s consternation. A minion in the contracts department had a most uncomfortable meeting with Mr Service and the Controller of Radio 3.

With the end of this phrase he would hit the gap  . . . what was he to do? Simply lift his hands from the keyboard? Wait for some sign from the I-Mind system to intervene? His audience might applaud thinking the piece finished? Would the immersive visuals with its  18.1 Surround Sound continue on the five screens or simply disappear?

His hands left the keyboard. The screens went white except for the two repeats signs in red facing one another. Then in the blank bar letter-by-letter this short text appeared . . .


Here Silence gathers
thoughts of you

Letters shall never
spell your grace

No melody could
describe your face

No rhythm dance
the way you move

Only Silence can
express my love

ever yours ever
yours ever yours


He then realised what the date was . . . and slowly let his hands fall to his lap.

Her hair was long, brown, and wavy, like homemade brownies.
Her eyes were different shaped blues, lighter than sapphires.
Whenever she blinks, I look forward to seeing those sapphires again.
Her teeth are perfect imperfections, retainer and all.
Her bite is one of love but packs a punch.
Her nostrils flare when angry but remain miniscule.
Her mouth a light pink, like Starburst, my favorite by far.
Her smile brings me back from the darkness every. Single. Time.
Her tongue is exotic and playful, and I long for it.
I have never heard her whistle, but I know it like the back of my hand.
Her laugh is intoxicating and contagious; I find myself acting the fool just to hear it.
Then she coughed and I patted her baby back.
Whenever those pesky headaches come, we lie still, thus foreshadowing what will come.
Our arguments are stupid, but they happen nonetheless.
Her neck is thin and ripe for the taking.
Her *******, much like Goldilocks: not too big, not too small, but just right.
Her spaghetti arms flail about when I act the fool, and then that precious laugh again.
Her elbows are full of cream, and you will never find them itchy like mine.
Her wrists are disproportionately large for her size, which makes her all the more unique.
Her handshakes are delicate. Ladylike.
Her long and skinny fingers were weird to me once, but they have contracted and fit perfectly between mine.
Her palms tell the future, and she has great things in store for her.
Her thumbs have no story to tell, positive or negative.
Her shadow is smaller than hers, but no shadow can overcome her.
Her cats keep her company, but luckily we found each other.
Her heart is as big as her brain, and thankfully they mutually agree on most occasions.
Her ******* are stumpy and droopy; this is no Snow White fairytale.
Her shoulder blades are tense but minute.
Her belly button (an innie, not an outie, not an Audi) never collects ****.
Her private parts pulse like her heart above with passion.
Her backside is small and smooth. She has no hourglass figure, yet she does, too.
She has no stretchmarks in my mind, but I have enough for the both of us, anyways.
Her whole system is that of a heavyweight fighter; she’s a little spitfire.
Her legs are perfect and skinny; she has “the gap”, not that it matters.
Her knees buckle and wobble in my presence. I should know: mine do when she is near, too.
Her ligaments reinforce her, much like her willpower.
She has the calves of a dancer, but she has not trained in years.
The ***** of her feet are poised, ready to spring into action to tap tap tap away.
Her toes curl against mine, in an attempt to hold hands.
I have never seen her footprints, and I have no intention of ever seeing them. Ever.
Her promises elate me since I know she is good for her word.
Her one-liners are worse than mine, and I laugh all the harder for it.
Her grin, or rather her smirk, warms my heart like a furnace in the winter.
The last time we spoke, it was mumbled in bed, a hushed goodbye for that awful biology class.

She is my rock, ever leaning forwards
with nothing but my Dunder-Mifflin shirt to keep her warm for the foreseeable future.

I told her, Te amo,
well before she was ready to say that inane phrase back in English.
Inane since words do not do it justice.

But then she broke my heart.

My hair was tearing at the roots, unable to stay attached.
My eyes were set ablaze with passion anger, if it weren’t for my sorrow to drown it out.
Whenever I blink, I see a snapshot of what it was, what it cannot be, what it will never be again.
My teeth were her favorite: buck-toothed and all, but that was when I smiled. They hide from you.
My bite isn’t nearly as big as my bark, but do not tempt me.
My nostrils have hair creeping out; it’s hard to keep clean after something like that.
My mouth is louder than all my thoughts combined, but I still can’t find the right words to say.
And my smile would be what brought her back from the darkness every. Single. Time.
My tongue, like my private parts, is limp and dead; phallicly flaccid, there is no passion here.
I have never whistled, but why should I learn now? I keep quiet to quell the roar.
My laugh is contagious, or so they tell me. It’s high pitched. Effeminate.
I cough. I get stares. My cough makes you uncomfortable. Your infidelity makes me uncomfortable.
Whenever those pesky headaches come, I lie still, and for a minute, just a minute, I die. I’m at peace.
Our arguments were stupid, but now there’s nothing left to talk about.
My neck is fat and swollen. **** my thyroid. This vitamin D deficiency is taking its toll.
My ******* are fat, but a momma’s boy would be: too much in the trunk, not enough under the hood.
My arms are as big as her thighs. We measured. Maybe it gave her peace knowing she was small.
She tells me I have a black woman’s ***, and elbows, to boot. Not enough cream. Not enough carrots.
My wrists are the cankles of my life.
My handshake is firm, but is it firm enough?
My short and stubby fingers claw upwards, desperate for air. Her hands are nowhere to be seen.
My palms have no future, and I worry I’ll follow suit.
My thumbs tell all the best stories when joysticks are underneath them.
My shadow eclipses me. It’s not how you feel, it’s how you function.
I’ve never owned a pet. Maybe that’s why I don’t feel possessive.
My heart was full of love, but the love spilled out when you broke it on Friday, December 6th – Saturday, December 7th, 2013, 5:00 AM.
My ******* are tiny and ***** from the cold. I feel the cold indoors, too.
My shoulder blades are dull and sagging with the weight of my world on my shoulders.
My belly button (an innie, not an outie, not an Audi) collects all of the ****.
My private parts, like my tongue, are limp and dead; phallicly flaccid, there is no passion here.
My backside is large and rough. Are you getting the point?
I have all of the stretchmarks, for I am her antithesis.
My whole system is that of down and out former has been; I’m all out of gas.
My legs are thick and fat; I suffer friction with my tree tunks.
My knees buckle and wobble in her presence; I’m weak around her because I’m weak.
My ligaments are partially torn, which perfectly exemplifies me: hanging by a thread.
I have the calves of a soccer player out of shape. Hashtag truth.
The ***** of my feet sting -- unable to carry two hundred plus pounds of failure.
I have finally seen footprints; I’m just glad they were mine.
Her promises mean nothing. My trust is shattered. My faith withdrawn from this or any other world.
My one-liners make everyone laugh but me; I know I mask the pain. Do they?
My grin was effectively wiped off my face when you told me.
The last time we spoke, it was on good terms. But how good are those terms with this double size?

I was comfortable, lazy, ever dependent on her
with everything in my life, especially that which she didn’t need to deal with.

I told her, You deserve to be dumped.
She nodded slowly, crying, and whispered back, I know. My hate described by inane words.
Inane since words do not do it justice.

Then, it hit me.

Our hair is fairly short together, not unlike our time apart since the incident.
Our eyes well up, and the only drowning I hope we get is of love.
Whenever we blink, I want to make sure that I am in front of you, and you in front of me.
Our teeth, much like our personalities, are disparate, and that’s okay.
Our bite is one of teamwork: you can’t bite with one row of teeth.
Our nostrils could use some work. Hair and flare rhyme, but neither fits in our time.
Our mouths chat chat chatter away. We have nothing to talk about. We have so much to talk about.
Our smiles are the reason why people find us cute, and they’re the reason why they were shocked. Let’s give them another reason.
Our tongues dance across language barriers. Mi español no puede vivir sin tu ingles.
We have never whistled. Finally! Some common ground (opposites attract).
We’ve been told that our laughs are nearly identical, like a choir singing in different pitches. Sing.
We cough together, because we know we can take care of each other.
Whenever those pesky headaches come, we take a deep breath, hold on tight, and move forward.
Our arguments ARE stupid. But I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Our necks are like the Happy Meal and the Super Size Me. I love to see us smile.
Our ******* are life; I don’t know what mine do, but I know yours will come in handy someday.
Our arms have their “things”; you have that birthmark, and I have unseemly hair growing everywhere.
Our elbows could be a rom-com: one smooth, one rough, but they can’t get enough.
Our wrists make sure our hands can keep us afloat.
Our handshakes are delicate but firm.
Our fingers latch onto each other, like a bear trap.
Our palms SMACK together when you high five me. Goofball.
Our thumbs are bound to get sore if we keep caressing our hands while holding onto each other. Raw.
Our shadows slink away when they see us shine so bright.
I hope to God that Rosie the pug is as derpy as your heart can take.
Our hearts have duct-tape all over them…it’s a work in progress, but bones get stronger when broken.
Our ******* are disproportionate. There, I said it.
Our shoulder blades dance across each other when we lie back to back.
Our belly buttons (innies, not outies, not Audis) keep us close to our moms; you’ll agree someday.
Our private parts tingle as we move in motion and rhythm. It’s been too long, mi amor.
Our backsides are like Venn diagrams: yours could easily fit in mine.
I have all the stretchmarks, but I hope you get them after birth someday. We share everything else.
Our systems are the underdog rising up, straight to the top; it took its time, and its chances.
Your legs could fit in one of my own. Please refer to the stretchmarks line.
Our knees buckle and wobble. Please refer to the private parts line.
Our ligaments have taken a beating, but somehow, there’s a strand holding us together.
We have calves of different passions, but we both know what the sweet sting of success feels like.
The ***** of our feet touch down as we’re back to reality. The honeymoon stage is over. Cloud 9.
Unfortunately, we’ve seen footprints, but I think they’re circling back around to meet up again.
This promise should be the last until the most important one comes up. This is it.
Our one-liners keep us close to our dorky sides. Honestly, something is probably wrong with us.
Our grins (or smirks) show that we can’t really stay mad at each other for TOO long.
The last time we spoke, it was yesterday night (or was it earlier today?), but I’m sure you woke up.

We ******* up. Admittedly you more than me,
but I digress: one mistake is not enough to throw away two years of work.

I forgave you.
You were elated. Let’s try this once more, with feeling!
I’ll inanely tell her again, *Te amo.

Think of an imagined orchestra. But there is no resonance hereabouts, so the imagination gives next to nothing for your efforts, and even in surround-sound there’s so little to reflect the dimensions of the space your walking inhabits. Sea hardly counts, having its constant companionship with wind, and sand hills absorb the footfall. A shout dies here before the breath has left the lungs.

Listen, there is a vague twittering of wading birds flocked far out on the sand. The sea rolls and breaks a rhythmic swell into surf. There’s a little wind to rustle the ammophila and only the slight undefined noise of our bodies moving in this strip between land and sea. Nowhere here can sound be enclosed except within the self. There’s a kind of breathing going on, and much like our own, it has to be listened for with a keen attention.

There is such a confusion of shapes making detail difficult to gather in, even to focus upon, and to attempt an imagined orchestration – impossible. We’ll have to wait for the camera’s catch, its cargo to be brought to the back-lit screen. Once there it seems hardly a glimmer of what we thought we saw, what we ‘snapped’ in an instant. It’s too detached, too flat. So thankfully you sketch, and I feel the pen draw shapes into your fingers and their moving, willing hand. On your sketchbook’s page the image breathes and lives.

You can’t sketch music this way because the mark made buries itself in a network that seems to defy with its complexity any image set before you. Time’s like that. You end up with a long low pitch, pulsating; a grumbling sound rich in sliding harmonics. You see, landscape does not beget melody or even structure and form, only tiny, pebbled pockets of random sound. Here, there is no belonging of music. Only the built space can adequately house music’s home. We might ****** a few seconds of the sea’s turn and wash, a bird’s cry, the rub and clatter of boot on stone, and later bring it back to a timeline of digital audio and be ‘musical’ with it, or not.

Where we hold music to landscape is something we are told just happens to be so; it is the interpretation’s (and the interpreter’s) will and whim. It is an illusion. The Lark Ascends in a Norfolk field. We hear, but rarely see, this almost stationary bird high in the morning air. We can only imagine the lark’s eye view, but we know the story, the poem, the context, so our imagination learns to supply the rest.

What is taken then to be taken back? On this November beach, on this mild, windless afternoon,. Am I collecting, preparing, and easing the mind, un-complicating mental space, or unravelling past thoughts and former plans? I can then imagine sitting at a table, a table before a window, a window before a garden, and beyond the garden (through the window) there’s a distant vista of the sea where the sun glistens (it is early morning), and there too in the bright sky remains a vestige of a night’s drama of clouds. But today we shall not put music to picture from a camera’s contents, from any flat and lifeless image.

Instead there seem to be present thoughts alive in this ancient coastline, abandoned here the necessary industry of living, the once ceaseless business of daily life. Instead of the hand to mouth existence governed by the herring, the course strip farming below the castle, the herds of dark cattle, the possible pigs, some wandering sheep, seabirds and their eggs for the ***, the gathering of seaweed, the foraging for fuel: there is a closing down for winter because the visitors are few. We need the rest they say, to regroup, paint the ceilings, freshen up the shop, strengthen the fences, have time away from the relentlessness of accommodating and being accommodating. Only the smell of smoking the herring remains from the distant past – but now such kippering is for Fortnums.

We step out across and down and up the coastal strip: an afternoon and its following morning;  a few miles walking, nothing serious, but moving here and there, taking it in, as much as we can. We fill ourselves to the brim with what’s here and now. The past is never far away: in just living memory there was a subsistence life of the herring fishers and the itinerant fisher folk who followed the herring from Aberdeen to Plymouth. Now there are empty holiday lets, retirement properties and most who live here service the visitors. Prime cattle graze, birds are reserved, caravans park next to a floodlit hotel and its gourmet restaurant. There’s even a poet here somewhere - sitting on a rock like a siren with a lovely smile.

Colours: dull greens now, wind-washed-out browns, out and above the sea confusions of grey and black stone, floating skeins of orange sands and the haunting, restless skies. Far distant into the west hills are sculpted by low-flying clouds resting in the mild air. Wind turbines step out across the middle distance, but today their sails are stationary. As the bay curves a settlement of wooden huts, painted chalets then the grey steep roofed houses of stone, grey and hard against the sea.

Does music come out of all this? What appears? What sounds? What is sounding in me? There is nothing stationary here to hang on to because even on this mild day there is constant change. Look up, around, adjust the viewpoint. There’s another highlight from the sky’s palette reflecting in the estuary water, always too various and complex to remember.

Music comes out of nothing but what you build it upon. It holds the potential for going beyond arrangements of notes. Pieces become buildings, layers in thought. My only landscape music to date begins with a formal processional, a march, and a gradually broadening out of tonality the close-knit chromatic to the open-eared pentatonic. There’s a steady stream of pitches that do not repeat or recur or return on themselves, as so much music needs to do to appease our memory.

In this landscape there seem only sharp points of dissonance. I hear lonely, disembodied pitches, uncomfortable sounds that are pinned to the past. The land, its topography as a score grasping the exterior, lies in multi-dimensional space, sound in being, a joining of points where there is no correlation. There’s a map and directions and a flow of time: it starts here and ends there, and so little remains for the memory.

Yet, this location remains. We walked it and saw it fortunately for a brief time in an uninhabited state. We were alone with it. We looked at this land as it meets the sea, and I saw it as a map on which to place complexes of sound, intensities even,. But how to meet the musical utterance that claims connection? It is a layering of complexes between silences, between the steady step, the stop and view. There is perhaps a hierarchy of landscape objects: the curve of the bay, the sandhills’ sweep, the layerings of sand, and in the pools and channels of this slight river that divides this beach flocks of birds.

Music is such an intense structure, so bound together, invested with proportions so exact and yet weighed down by tone, the sounding, vibrating string, the column of air broken by the valve and key, the attack and release of the hammered string. But there is also the voice, and voices are able to sound and carry their own resonance . . .

. . . and he realised that was where these long drawn out thoughts, this short diary of reflection, had been leading. He would sit quietly in contemplation of it all and work towards a web of words. He would let their rhythms and sounds come together in a map, as a map of their precious, shared time moving between the land and the sea, the sea and the land.

An X-ray  of ******* love

They were so soft.
The hands that took control and made the pace
Of the heart that race
Within the mess of a chest
That bravado expels

It was so open.
That mind that reduced his fears Induced tears
Used to indulged his idol chatter
Hitting my wordy pitches
Like a home run "Hey Batter Batter!!"

It felt so right
The places that exposed his **** faces
Things that spread, squeezed, and joy in **** tasting
An inserted pleasure burrowed deep from throat to waisted
Passed out drunk on love lust and **** filled vases

The peak was so brilliant
Joy ride till they collide out of control out of their minds
Writing vandalism like an equations broadside
"E=U & I" , could hate you in this day and time
But starve till withered away the day she ever said goodbye

The splash was so divine
Touched by her personal heaven
An angel as lucky like the # 11
He could never pretend or fake being insatiable.
The main source of his complexity

The view was so vast
A world of flat boring land waiting to be filled
Brought to life by their skills and the pursuit of a thrill
Would feel beheaded if ever they stood still
Feeding their frenzy and bending alls will (to their own)

The potency was such a rush
Too much oh so much, but oh so desired
Craving how much she'd  say " it's you I admire"
Toiling with brow to his navel, igniting the fire
The long kiss goodnight, made the morning quench of the sun a joy to the heart like her sweet face and loving
The monument by which praise and parade of her exploited flesh bare the quill to write paradise that he is inspired

The dream is much too real
While they watch the world turn and the masses conform
We struggle against the tide and tread the waves of the pass they morn
A lottery, marathon, playground, where many have entered her but only one can win the title of "Adored"

The now is not so much of then
They were them sometimes Every now and again engaged in moments when
Them they see and believe "you and me can be...."

But time sprints, and they limp, slower every aging step
Till times out of view and they're  out of breath
Bed bound but not the expected intent
For one is most attentive while the other lay mostly spent
But embraced they lay unchanged in any way
Still in love and still insane
Crazy for each others bane
Awake for the moon, and snooze through the rain
Gentle dreams of forbidden entry, daily flirt but never stray
Away, stay, away, plead for a day. Agreed then rinse, repeat
A treat for the sweet thoughts of the "use to be" but enjoyable right here, right now, someday is today

-Xin-

I came only to watch one person eyes open and peeled.
The Blonde Bombshell was her name and O, what power did she wield!
One look and the explosion of her beauty could soften any heart of steel.
I knew nothing of softball besides the name,
but the blonde pitcher inspired me to change my game.
As I watched she seemed nervous on the softball mound.
Her first few pitches practically never left the ground.
The game continued and she pitched better in each inning.
Each throw as beautiful as she was and secured her team in winning.
She looked more confident as she began to smile.
Sending each batter back to the bench crying like a child.
As I prepared to leave I waved my farewell.
To a blonde beauty who looked and pitched exceptionally and gracefully well.

Written by

Wandisa Zwane  


April 16, 2015



INT.  APT 3101 - THE BEDROOM  

It's 02:31 am and I find myself laying silently on my bed scrolling through Instagram...Twitter...Tumblr....and Snapchat. I find myself struggling to go to sleep.  I wasn't even able to sleep for an hour or two. It's not normal as its way past my curfew. I receive a text message. I'm confused because it's
still too early for anyone to be texting me, and I know everyone nearby is fast asleep because we have school. So who could be texting me?

CUT TO: PHONE SCREEN

HER ( via text )

I'm struggling with the math homework, help ? Are you up ?

ME ( via text )

I am actually. FaceTime, call or text?

20 minutes later my phone starts ringing. She was FaceTiming me. I stare at her name for about 5 seconds trying to put myself together.

ME

Hello, Ellie

I wasn't focused on the math. I was hoping that we could forget about the math and just talk about us and the futility of life. For some stupid reason I really thought you were gonna say something cheesy like I can't get you out of my head but can we just talk until we fall in love? But no it never happened as we had an hour long conversation about math.

CUE " MATH CONVERSATION"

The futility in that conversation was cosmic to the point where I began questioning existence. But when the call finally ended I was disappointed.

CUT TO: VARSITY

It's 8am and I'm at sitting in English tired and drained. Still contemplating about the futility of life.

HER

Hey, Tyler thanks for helping me with the math homework.

ME

Uhm Ellie do you want to come over too my apartment over the weekend and chill ?

CUT TO: APARTMENT 3101

It's 12am and the apartment is really untidy. I jump out of bed and clean the entire apartment in a record time of 12 minutes and 44 seconds. I'm going crazy over here as I'm trying to remember if I gave her the correct directions. Thank god I gave her the correct directions as I see the uber pulling up in front of the apartment complex. I start sweating and shaking and I'm fearful that I'm going to have a nervous breakdown. I start cringing.
I open the door the door and it's her standing directly in front of me. I can't breathe. I'm overwhelmed by an awe of emotions. Literally - she's beautiful

ME

I mumbled - Hey Ellie it's so good to see you ( the hug was very awkward because I was nervous - it was one of those hugs where both people don't know how to hug each which makes things really awkward)

HER

Hi


ME

So glad you could make it. How was the drive ( note to self: I should stop making things awkward ) I'm so irritated at myself.

CUT TO:  APARTMENT 3101 - LIVING ROOM

She's sitting on the couch. And I'm sitting right next to her. Okay let's just say there was a 30cm gap between the both of us. I was really nervous. I found myself drinking gallons of water. I forgot to offer her anything. I was nervous to the point where I couldn't even make eye contact. I just stared at her forehead and her lips.

ME

Aren't you exhausted I mean that drive was really long ( she lived like 3 blocks away from me )

HER

Not really , I'm just really stressed about varsity and stuff I guess.

We actually start conversing with one another for 5 hours straight.We smoke about 3 cigarettes and have the most fruitful conversation ever about female energy and the power of the the heart. She's really enlightened - I thought she was really basic. We both can't go to sleep because we're actually  enjoying the presence of one another. It was cathartic and refreshing actually.

ME

Want go up to the roof and look at the universe?

HER

I'd love too.

CUT TO : COMPLEX ROOF

I brought a blanket up to the roof cause I thought it was cold. It wasn't but we just layed down underneath the open night sky and gazed into the stars. We connected with the universe/ourselves/each other. It was bliss. We ended up falling asleep on top of the roof. To my amazement we were silently wrapped around each other.

CUT TO: APARTMENT 3101 - THE KITCHEN

HER

( chuckling )
How'd you sleep

ME

( Smiling )
I slept pretty well.

ME

Do you have any plans for today?

HER

YES actually...

SEVERAL HOURS LATER: APARTMENT 3101 - KITCHEN/BEDROOM AND LIVING ROOM

The sun is setting and she still hasn't packed her bags.

ME

When are you leaving?

She said she was leaving on Sunday

HER

In 30.

ME

(I tried to not crack in front of her)
Cool.


APARTMENT 3101

About 2 weeks later she surprisingly pitches at my door with her luggage.

HER
I'm moving in with you!

I was excited at the fact that she was moving in with me but I obviously tried acting cool and composed.

CUT TO: WOLVES CAFE

As they're sitting there talking to each other about their families, Osho and meditation over a cup of tea.

ME

I was adopted.

HER

WOW - That's a huge plot twist.

She sat there speechless for about 2 minutes trying to fathom the knowledge I just presented to her.

HER

So do you ever think about your real parents?

ME

All the time - they both died in a car accident when I was 3.

HER

I'm so sorry.

ME

It's okay - I mean I know they're somewhere out there in the universe checking up on me. I speak to them when I feel lonely.

Enough about my tragic past..How are your parents?

I've never told any other soul about my parents before. She was the first person I ever told .

HER

I never knew my dad but my mom has been living with a brain tumour for like 2 years now.

ME

Wow. That's must've been so tough for you when you found out about it.

HER

It was. I went through the most vicious cycle of depression for an entire year. But I'm trying to make most of the time I have left with her.

ME

How much time do you have left to see her her and stuff ?

HER

(She starts tearing up)
3 months

CUT TO: APARTMENT 3101 - LIVING ROOM

I'm still fascinated by the fact that she's into Osho, existentialism, metaphysics and epistemology. But I also felt like our relationship had escalated so quickly. We're we rushing things? The relationship felt like it was moving at the speed of light.

ME

Do you feel like we're moving too fast ?

HER

There's no such thing, if it's meant to be it will be, whether fast or slow as long as it's true, it will last as long as you want it to.

I was momentarily tongue-tied as I was trying to digest the words she just said.

ME

......

(Still voiceless)

She still had a lot more to say after that

CUES : "rants"

But in that entire rant she said something that echoed within me.

HER

YOU KNOW I MAKE YOU HAPPY

After she said this I felt like fainting. So not only did she make me voiceless I was overwhelmed by an ocean of indescribable emotions- wow

DAYS LATER: APARTMENT 3101 - KITCHEN

I'd finally recovered from those powerful words she preached to me. So I found myself sitting in the kitchen trying to write a letter to her about how I really felt. I wasn't the best at expressing my emotions through writing but I gave it a shot.

ME

Love is the unforetold explanation for creation. Love is life. It's the merger of minds. The marriage of minds. It transcends through time, it's timeless. It takes you into a dimension filled with possibilities and opportunities. It helps you understand you are that you are not worthless. Every time I am with you I understand we are here for a reason. And every time I stare into your eyes. I realise that you are mine.  

I sealed it an envelope and put it on the kitchen counter.

LATER ON THAT DAY:

She opens the letter and starts crying.

CUT TO: THE TREEHOUSE

I introduce her to some of the guys in the treehouse. They welcomed her to the treehouse with open arms.

HER

So what do you guys do in the treehouse?

PAUL : (one of the guys part of the treehouse)

Well in the treehouse we just try to expand. We write, make music, poetry, nothing much really.

MCDONALDS DRIVE- THRU

She was to lazy to go home and cook supper she was s bit hypocritical cause she said we should stop buying junk food. So we decided to go to McDonald's. We were down to our last packet of 2 minute noodles anyway.


CUT TO: HOSPITAL

We went to visit her mother. She introduced me but there was no warmth in the hug we shared. I could feel her shrill body disintegrating. She was really cold. You could see she was dying.

HER

How've you been mom ?

MOM

She couldn't even speak properly. It was sad but when she eventually managed to responded to Ellie's question.

MOM

I'm still fighting but I don't know if I can do this for much longer.

HER

No mum you can't leave me.

MOM

I don't want to make you empty promises my child.

Who's this handsome young man Ellie?

HER

(Smiling heavily)
It's Tyler, my boyfriend

She just called me her boyfriend in front of her mom. She just put a label on our relationship. I thought it was completely platonic.

ME

Afternoon Mam. It's a pleasure to finally meet you.

I knew her name ( Stacy )  but in that moment I felt like a child in primary school - so I decided to be respectful and call her mam. I wasn't sure whether or not I should call her "Ellie's mom" or Stacy. It was just a tricky situation. So I opted for mam.

MOM

( smiling )
The pleasure is all mine Tyler.

She told me to come closer to her cause she wanted to whisper something into my ear.

MOM

Tyler I'm clearly dying as you can see. So I'm leaving with you an important task of ensuring that's my daughter remains happy at all times.Take care of her for me - please

ME

I'll take care of her - she's in safe hands.

MOM

That's the spirit Tyler. Can you give us a moment please Tyler.

HER

Just go down to the kiosk and get me a bottle of distilled water. Please.

(Tyler leaves the room)

MOM

I remember the first time you wrapped your tiny hand around my index finger , you had my soul laying on 3 cms of palm.

( Ellie interrupts )

HER

Mom don't do this , prolonging life is pure idiocy.

(she smiles as a tear rolls down her cheek )

Die so your soul can have its summer ,don't worry about my pain cause I'm really happy for you, your soul can finally taste true liberation, see my tears as autumn leaves falling from trees , I'm naked and all I can show you is the truest forms of love.

MOM

You're so beautiful because you're so true. Our connection has no equation my daughter, as I leave my body just know that my time with you transcends forever.

HER

Mother it's time for you to leave. Take a piece of my happiness, it's futile anyway and I have it in abundance but I shall be lost without you in body, I shall be found when I'm with you in soul.

MOM

Clarity comes with the last breath, as hatred and love become nothing, you are nothing and everything all at once, I'm happy for you have given it to me, tomorrow and yesterday no longer matter

(her heart stops beating and her souls goes home - heart rate monitor indicates her mom has just flat lined)

Ellie starts screaming. The nurses and doctors come sprinting in.


DOCTOR

NUURSE HAND ME THE DEFIBRILLATOR !!

HER

(in agonising pain and disbelief that her mother is dead she starts screaming)

SAVE MY MUM, PLEASE SHE CANT LEAVE ME !! YOU CANT LET HER DIE.

DOCTOR

Nurse get her out of here.

She's kicking and shoving the other nurses as she is being escorted out the room.

NURSE

Don't worry the doctors are doing all they can to save her.

Tyler comes back from the kiosk with the distilled water to find Ellie on the floor crying.

ME

What's wrong?

HER

( Her face goes pale )
She's gone ....

2 DAYS LATER: BACK AT 3101

Ellie has locked herself in my/our room. We haven't spoken to each other for like 2 weeks.

She finally decides to come out of the room.

HER

(Breaks down, again  )
It's her birthday today.

I've never seen her so broken and disfigured before. She's in pieces - distorted.

NARRATOR

Death is the door between two lives; one is left behind, one is waiting ahead. Death is the ultimate experience of this life - Osho

“Birth leads to death, death precedes birth. So if you want to see life as it really is, it is rounded on both the sides by death. Death is the beginning and death is again the end, and life is just the illusion in between. You feel alive between two deaths; the passage joining one death to another you call life. Buddha says this is not life. This life is dukkha – misery. This life is death"

HER

I WONT CRUMBLE - IM A BIG GIRL NOW. MOMMA RAISED ME TO BE A STRONG WOMAN SO IM GONNA DO THAT.

She put up this facade as if nothing ever happened. She didn't allow herself to mourn the death of her mother. She was apathetic for the next 2 weeks.

This  was a tricky phase because she either woke up angry or sad. She just rampaged through the house, didn't attend lectures - she just left a trail of destruction wherever she went. I even have the scars to prove it.

A FEW WEEKS LATER: THE DEATH ORDEAL IS FINALLY OVER

She gained about 5 kilograms in that entire period. She just kept on stuffing her face with ice cream and chocolates

HER

Tyler thanks for being there in my moment of absolute depression.

ME

I thought you were never going to be able to get yourself out of that dark abyss you were trapped in.

AT THE BEACH

The sun is setting and the couple is walking along the sand enjoying each other's company.

ME

I've got something for you Ellie

( I hope she likes it )

HER

Yes?

ME

Close your eyes

(Takes out a heart shaped pediment from back pocket  and places it around her neck )

You can open your eyes now.

HER

(Smiling)
It's lovely, thank you

ME

(Smiling back)
I'm giving you my heart but not my soul.

HER

(Blushes)

ME

(In my head)
I'm giving her my heart she better not break it.

Have you ever had that feeling before in a relationship where you think you love the other person more than they love you. To the point where you'd even get their names tattooed onto your chest. Cause that's how I feel right now.

IN THE CAR:


I'm driving Ellie to the airport. OR Tambo in fact. I'm playing some Jamie ** but I quickly change it and play my favourite song Female Energy.

CUE "FEMALE ENERGY"

ME

You excited?

HER

Yes I'm really really excited for this.

ME

I'm really gonna miss you

HER

Me too.

Ellie was completing her mothers bucket list - so she had had to travel all the way to Tibet and learn Buddhism. Nothing much really she was leaving  for 2 months.


But little did Tyler know that this was going to be the last time he sees Ellie because her plane never landed in Tibet - the plane crashed and it sunk with no no one  surviving.

STILL IN THE CAR:

Ellie hands Tyler a letter

HER

Tyler please don't open this until you get home.

ME

(Smiling)
I'll try my best.


Car parks at drop and go zone at the airport. Tyler takes out Ellie's bag from the boot.

They hug and kiss

Ellie cries.

CUT TO : "APT 3101 - LIVING ROOM "

Tyler opens the letter.

CUE "ELLIES VOICE AND ON OUR SWEATERS "


It's funny how for someone who has been so used to being lonely, the second I grip onto something that seems real, my biggest fear is losing that grip - even though for the longest time ever I've become immune to the feeling of loneliness. The same way people become dependent on other beings, people can become dependent on loneliness too - you become immune to self reassurance, your insecurities, your vulnerability and after a while it seems ideal and okay, but only because it's all you've got. You allow yourself to be consumed by this self indulgent energy making you think you don't need anybody because how else do you get by when you know that you have nobody. So when someone comes creeping in through the front door, with nothing but good intentions - you shut them out because you've lost sight of the difference in the realness of someone coming through the front door and the fakeness of someone coming through the backdoor. I struggle to fathom your presence because I didn't see you coming, through any door, you were just always there in plain sight. I don't know how to describe what I feel when I'm around you because I have never felt anything like it. All I know is that it leaves me in a place

A perfect Anchor will hug you on calm seas as you travel and explore.
When the winds blow and the sea pitches, the same
Anchor will dig in and hold you steady!
It is always in the background, it is strong and understands its role!

When winds at night on windows roar
wax runs out dies candle's flame
you would hear a knock upon door
a familiar voice calling your name.

Don't respond nor open the eyes
the voice is keen over winds' howl
grows it louder its pitches rise
scaring even the brave barn owl.

Pull the blanket up your head
you are safe so long you hide
lie dead quiet not move on bed
with mom asleep by your side.

Between the pause your fears mount
if is a chance to be found out
one two three the calls you count
but count it right leave no doubt.

Three times the voice would call your name
for it has no power to do any more
but move onto where dies a candle's flame
and a child is awake behind closed door.

My name is Zhou Yuanten, but call me Eddie. I am a doctoral student at Xinjiang University –in the far, far west, but at Brunel to study this year. My English is good. I lived in Boston, Massachusetts for undergraduate years. I majored in piano at the New England C and then discovered I wanted to compose rather than play. So I go to MIT and soon I discover the English do it so differently, so I apply to Brunel. And at Brunel they then say of this place ‘you have to go.’ So here I am.

So surprising to be greeted in Chinese! And not just Nin Hao, we have a conversation! His accent is Northern Mandarin. He is writing a novel, he explains, about poets Zuo-Fen and Zuo-Si. We have 15 minutes conversation every day and I help him with his characters. Strange, to most of the class he is nobody, but to foreign students here we know him through his website and his software. I have even played his colours piece, The Goethe Triangle.

It is joy to be respected by a teacher and his sessions are like no other I’ve had here, and here I mean the UK. Oh, so laid-back, so lazy so many teachers. People lack energy here. They are dreamers and only think of themselves. He is full of energy and talks often about this Imogen of whom I never hear. Her father a great composer and she copied his music from when she was a girl – such beautiful calligraphy. Her father loved India and learned Sanskrit. He should have learned Mandarin; at least that is a living language. ‘Imo’, he says, ‘is my heroine, my mentor, the musician I most revere.’ He showed us her library and what was her studio in one of the old buildings here. He gives me this little book about her ten years in this place. A strange looking lady; there’s a photograph of her conducting Bach in the Great Hall. She looks like she is dancing.

This morning some are not here, but there are little notes on the desk with apologies perhaps. He leaves them untouched and we make chords again, and scales and arpeggios and Slonimsky’s famous melodic patterns. We write and write. He sings, we sing too. There is a horn and a cello with us today. They play and make jokes. They show us harmonics and tunings and bend our ears in new directions we do not expect. Those who complain about this course not being ‘advanced’ will eat their words; only I think some of those are not here.

As Chinese we hear sound in a different way I think. In our language tone is so important. To each word there are four tones that make meaning quite different. Chinese uses only about 400 syllables, compared to 4000 in English. So there are lots of syllables, like ****, that have multiple meanings. I tell him the story of the Lion-eating Poet, which he does not know!! I am writing this out for him, all 92 characters. Just one word **** but with four meanings – lion, ten, to make, to be. The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den is the story of a poet (****) named **** who loves to eat lions (**** ****) goes to market (****) to buy ten (****) of them, takes them home to eat (****) and discovers they are made (****) of stone (****).

So I have no trouble hearing what others struggle to hear. We make pieces that are all about tone, and on a single note. Mark, the cellist, plays the opening of Lutoslawski’s Concerto – forty-two repetitions of a tenor ‘D’ a second apart. I had never heard this – a cadenza at the beginning of a concerto. Now we write a duo, on just one note. We write; they play. We are like many Mozarts trying to write only what we have already heard, making only one copy. I use the four tones and must teach the players the signs. I demonstrate and he says of the 1st tone – ‘Going to the Dentist, the 2nd – Climbing a ladder, the 3rd – ‘The Rollercoaster’, the 4th –‘Stepping on a pin’. We all do it!

And there are all these microtones. We listen to a moment of Ravel’s Bolero and pieces by Thomas Ades and Julian Anderson, then in detail (and with the score) to part of Duet for piano and orchestra by George Benjamin. This is spectral music. He is daring to introduce this – very difficult subject - this idea that a sound could be mimicked (? Is that the word – to impersonate?) by analysing it for the frequencies that make it up, and then getting instruments with similar acoustic properties to play the frequencies as pitches. So the need for microtones – goodbye equal temperament! Great in theory, difficult in practice.

This afternoon we are to study spectral composing using our computers. Until now we use our computers or smart phones to listen to extracts. He has this page of web links on his website for each session. Instead of listening through hi-fi we listen through our headphones. Better of course by far, no birds sounds or instruments playing next door. We can hear it again anytime. So there is software to download, Fourier analysis I suppose, he tries hard not to use any science or maths because there are some here who object, but they are fools. Even Bach knew of acoustics – designing the organs he played.

We finish this morning studying harmonic rhythm and this word tonality nobody seems quite able to describe. To him even the chromatic scale is tonality, and he shows in a duet for horn and cello how our ears take in tonality change. This is not about keys, but about groupings of pitches – anywhere – so a tonality can be spread across several octaves. So often, he says, composers are not aware of the tonalities they create, they don’t hear harmonic rhythm. They’re missing an opportunity! Sound can be coloured by awareness of what makes up a tonality. So understanding spectral music must help towards this. It is very liberating all this. If we take sound as a starting point rather than a system we can go anywhere.

Yesterday he asked me about a book he is reading. Did I know it? A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo. Of course I know this very funny book. He said he liked to think of music in the same way the character of the Chinese girl Z thinks about love.

“Love,” this English word: like other English words it has a tense. “Loved”, or “will love”, or “have loved.” All these specific tenses mean Love is time-limited thing. Not infinite. It only exists in particular period of time. In Chinese, Love is ài in pinyin. It has no tense. No past and future. Love in Chinese means a being, a situation, a circumstance. Love is existence, holding past and future.

And so it is with music. Music is a being, a situation, a circumstance. It holds past and future. It is wondrous, just like love.

It's June, 1967.
Nature, still lying through
Parsley green teeth,
Breathes the last of spring,
Hints early summer warmth,
Pre-July's cicada whine,
August's heat and wind.

Crops, still tender green
Quiver beneath a humid sky,
Under a glowing sun.

Bicycles amuse our early lust
To soar untraveled ground,
Entering lazy summer's ennui,
We scan a hawk riding drafts
On the edge of our hill.

Dust, drifting up the graveled road,
Five miles below us,
Piques our interest,
Causes the dog to raise his head.
He ***** an ear
Toward a sound we cannot hear.

We hear gravel slapping rocker panels
Before the traveler's roof rises into view,
Catch our breath as the engine slows,
Start running for the house.

A stranger's arrived,
A traveling salesman,
Better than an aunt
Only stopping in for tea
And woman talk.

Dad keeps his welding helmet down,
Repairing broken things.
The hired man inhales his cigarette,
Acts disinterested.

My memories linger on the past....

Salesmen brought the latest farming gadgets:
Additives for fuel and oil,
Battery life extenders,
Grain elevators and fencing tools,
Produce and livestock products,
Lightning rods and roofing,
Chrome-edged cultivator shovels,
Insurance for everything:
Fire, water, wind, hail.

Pitches came without exception:

"Top o' the morning! Looks like you're busy.
Don't want to take your time."

"Looks like you could use some welding rod,
And I have something new for you to try."

"Have you used chromium additive in you livestock salt?
Guaranteed to put on weight and protect from bovine
Tuberculosis!"

"Say, have you heard about the effectiveness of a new
Insecticide called DDT? I've got a sample gallon here
For you to try. Works better than Malathion!"

Dad, eventually intrigued, began the slow dance
Of dickering, haggling over this thing or that.
Most salesmen, closing in for a ****,
Hadn't grappled with my father.

At noon, deals still in the air,
My mother called the men,
And we all trudged in to wash,
Waiting in line at the tub,
Scrubbing with powdered Tide
To remove the grime and grease,
Drying on the darkening towel,
Finding a seat at the table.

The salesmen expected the meal
As though it were their right,
A standing invitation:
Stop in at noon,
Make your pitch,
Sit at table,
Close the deal after.

We boys sat and listened
To man talk.
Eyes wide, we marveled
At gadgets,
Wondered at Dad's parleying,
Winced at the deals he drove,
Commiserated with squirming salesmen
Surely made destitute by Dad's hard bargaining.

In retrospect,
I know the game was played
On two sides,
That the battery additives
Bought for five dollars a packet,
Even with the two Dad finagled free,
Cost about five dollars for everything,
Returned forty-five and change
To the smirking, full-bellied salesman
Who left a cloud of dust on his way
To supper a few miles down the road.

Today has been a difficult day he thought, as there on his desk, finally, lay some evidence of his struggle with the music he was writing. Since early this morning he’d been backtracking, remembering the steps that had enabled him to write the entirely successful first movement. He was going over the traces, examining the clues that were there (somewhere) in his sketches and diary jottings. They always seem so disorganised these marks and words and graphics, but eventually a little clarity was revealed and he could hear and see the music for what it was. But what was it to become? He had a firm idea, but he didn’t know how to go about getting it onto the page. The second slow movement seemed as elusive today as ever it had been.

There was something intrinsically difficult about slow music, particularly slow music for strings. The instruments’ ability to sustain and make pitches and chords flow seamlessly into one another magnified every inconsistency of his part-writing technique and harmonic justification. Faster music, music that constantly moved and changed, was just so much easier. The errors disappeared before the ear could catch them.

Writing music that was slow in tempo, whose harmonic rhythm was measured and took its time, required a level of sustained thought that only silence and intense concentration made properly possible. His studio was far from silent (outside the traffic spat and roared) and today his concentration seemed at a particularly low ebb. He was modelling this music on a Vivaldi Concerto, No.6 from L’Estro Armonico. That collective title meant Harmonic Inspiration, and inspiring this collection of 12 concerti for strings certainly was. Bach reworked six of these concertos in a variety of ways.

He could imagine the affect of this music from that magical city of the sea, Venice, La Serenissima, appearing as a warm but fresh wind of harmony and invention across those early, usually handwritten scores. Bach’s predecessors, Schutz and Schein had travelled to Venice and studied under the Gabrielis and later the maestro himself, Claudio Monteverdi. But for Bach the limitations of his situation, without such patronage enjoyed by earlier generations, made such journeying impossible. At twenty he did travel on foot from Arnstadt to Lubeck, some 250 miles, to experience the ***** improvisations of Dietriche Buxtehude, and stayed some three months to copy Buxtehude’s scores, managing to avoid the temptation of his daughter who, it was said, ‘went with the post’ on the Kapelmeister’s retirement. Handel’s visit to Buxtehude lasted twenty-four hours. To go to Italy? No. For Bach it was not to be.

But for this present day composer he had been to Italy, and his piece was to be his memory of Venice in the dark, sea-damp days of November when the acqua alta pursued its inhabitants (and all those tourists) about the city calles. No matter if the weather had been bad, it had been an arresting experience, and he enjoyed recovering the differing qualities of it in unguarded moments, usually when walking, because in Venice one walked, because that was how the city revealed itself despite the advice of John Ruskin and later Jan Morris who reckoned you had to have your own boat to properly experience this almost floating city.

As he chipped away at this unforgiving rock of a second movement he suddenly recalled that today was the first day of Epiphany, and in Venice the peculiar festival of La Befana. A strange tale this, where according to the legend, the night before the Wise Men arrived at the manger they stopped at the shack of an old woman to ask directions. They invited her to come along but she replied that she was too busy. Then a shepherd asked her to join him but again she refused. Later that night, she saw a great light in the sky and decided to join the Wise Men and the shepherd bearing gifts that had belonged to her child who had died. She got lost and never found the manger. Now La Befana flies around on her broomstick each year on the 11th night, bringing gifts to children in hopes that she might find the Baby Jesus. Children hang their stockings on the evening of January 5 awaiting the visit of La Befana. Hmm, he thought, and today the gondoliers take part in a race dressed as old women, and with a broomstick stuck vertically as a mast from each boat. Ah, L’Epiphania.

Here in this English Cathedral city where our composer lived Epiphany was celebrated only by the presence of a crib of contemporary sculptured forms that for many years had never ceased to beguile him, had made him stop and wonder. And this morning on his way out from Morning Office he had stopped and knelt by the figures he had so often meditated upon, and noticed three gifts, a golden box, a glass dish of incense and a tiny carved cabinet of myrrh,  laid in front of the Christ Child.

Yes, he would think of his second movement as ‘L’Epiphania’. It would be full of quiet  and slow wonder, but like the tale of La Befana a searching piece with no conclusion except a seque into the final fast and spirited conclusion to the piece. His second movement would be a night piece, an interlude that spoke of the mystery of the Incarnation, of God becoming Man. That seemed rather ambitious, but he felt it was a worthy ambition nevertheless.

An emerald glare
Lit up the sky in the distance.

The line of sand
Alternately
Appeared and disappeared.

The drum beats
Different pitches.
The ocean was breathing,
Hiding a wrath.

II
'I don’t want to
Go out in the rain’
Said the girl in ‘English.’

The hair might
Fell out in today’s rain.
III

Yellowish mist
Hangs over earth.

No desire to go out.
A ghastly silence
Sets in the dusk.

Frogs splash in the puddles
Letting out strange grunts.

But yet to see one.

IV

The shadow of decay
Lies on everything.
Art supporting
The dying dream.
Cynicism shocks
The senile brains.

Nature leaves last chance.
We do not believe in Nature.
What is our chance?

V

The landscape flying by
In the windows of the carriage.

Everything is fictional,
A deception.

In the end
Settle down quietly
In the desert.

Deny it; it makes no difference:
the American government pitches its deceitful realtor-reality to the world:
flaunting our flag as the banner of the free, but avoiding
our faults and failures as a country.
“Oh yes! We’re rollin’ in the (borrowed) bucks!
We’re a proud superpower capable of chaos; calamity!”
Well, kudos on your catastrophes: we all know it’s a hollow show.

See, we’re slaves to China, bound by China’s chains
to billions of dollars, the deficit deepening daily.
And who’s to blame?
“Not I!” says the Democrat.
“Not I!” says the Republican.
“Not I” say I, but we
weaved our financial woes together.
It’s not stupidity; if we could see into the future, we’d be shakin’ our money makers.
But have you seen the current fiscal guillotine
whose blade looms low and approaching our throats?
Oh, irony of ironies: the American government isn’t free.
Oh mah gee.
Freak out!
Calm down...
Forbes informs me that federal spending spurs private sector growth.
But when fifty-four thousand buckaroos from you
and you
and you
and me too is just enough
to cover Congress’ **** until the dimwits there do another... (insert something dumb),
it’s time to draw the line.

And time to erase lines previously drawn:
George Washington warned us once before:
“...the common and continual mischiefs of [political] parties are sufficient to make it the... duty of a wise people to discourage... it.”
Yet here we are: the media’s reporting majority wars
that serve only to sail us further offshore from Pristine America
and a time when things really seemed to matter, especially when they did.
Deny it; it doesn’t matter; it doesn’t change
our chances of escaping another Cuban
Missile
Crisis. If we waged World
                               War
                                            Three, what would we
                                                       do?
                                                               One
thing: debate, procrastinate, our fate
a fragile plaything fought over
by infantile, full-grown fanatics who never quite phased out of high school debate.
They never learned to lose, and so they play the inane blame game,
I say quite frankly: gurl. Dat cray-cray.

Dear Democracy, when will my words hold water?
When will the weight of a rainbow OREO or a
monogamous monotone monotheistic chicken sandwich
on my guilty conscience be lifted?
Must I muster a hungry lackluster life in the land of opportunity
to oppose tyranny
and uphold justice? I turned eighteen last December,
but for as long as I can remember
I’ve been voting with the dollar bill, my ballot
traveling through the bloodstream, fueling the body of big business, who fuel the daring charities, who fuel their bills in congress.

Democracy, do you know me?

For this faux-democratic nation where the population waits for the government to lay itself to waste, the Founding Fathers sob, disgraced.
                                                       Oh, God Bless America!
the nation where when faced with any
[man, woman, child, intersex, genderqueer, etc.] who dares defile the status quo,
accept the stigma like a crown of thorns, on top of all the scorn
                                                                    We The People
donate millions to “charities” who dare to speak for
Jesus,
the meek and mild. John chapter eight, verses one through eight:
he drew a
fine line in the
sand, man:
it’s where your rights end and mine begin. Irony, irony: they are as good as
mine.
For this faux-democratic nation where the population waits for the government to lay itself to waste, the Founding Fathers sob, disgraced.

Iridium fastball pitches
from Zuni serpent mound,
bottom of the 9th walk-off homerun
over 30ft diving moai.

Slide to home base in volcanic lava
to congratulatory ***** Gatorade bath
from Kubla Kahn forefathers,
chanting psychedelic clubhouse anthems.

Levitate from home plate
and land atop Pyramid of Cholula for victory dinner;
for since we’re all artists in our dreams,
true dreams never come true.

.
        Flying, flying
        Away and dying
Across the night air is the cackling of witches.
        Flying, flying
        Away and crying
    Are children abducted for wickedest fun.
        Flying, flying
        Away and sighing
Are night winds that murmur in ominous pitches.
        Flying, flying
        Away and nighing
    Their lair, the witches have only begun.

O.O

My sister is a quarterback
I rarely catch a pass
and she can run a marathon
I soon run out of gas
she pitches for her baseball team
I pop up on her curve
and she's an ace at tennis
I can't return her serve
My sister dunks the basketball
I dribble like a mule
she swims like a torpedo
I flounder in the pool
she's accurate at archery
I hardly ever score
She wrestles and she boxers
I wind up on the floor
My sister catches lots of fish
I haven't had any luck
she's captain of her hockey team
I can't control the puck
her bowling's are unbelievable
I bowl like a buffoon
she says someday I'll start to win...
I hope someday is soon

London fashion designer ­Carmina De Young is bringing her first ready-to-wear collection to market with the support of two local fashion mavens, wardrobe and image consultant Susan Jacobs, and business mentor Gloria Dona.

De Young’s Spring/Summer 2016 collection is now available by appointment at the Pop with Purpose studio,

The studio recently held an informal fashion show featuring De Young’s collection.

De Young was born and raised in Puebla, Mexico and discovered her passion as a young child, taking inspiration from her mother’s creative flair for fashion and design.

A graduate of Fanshawe College’s Fashion Design program, De Young’s clothing has been showcased locally and on national platforms, including at Vancouver Fashion Week and at the Caisa Fashion Show at Western University.

De Young started her own label in 2012 and now has a 25-piece ready-to-wear collection ranging from office to casual activities to a night on the town.

Each piece is available in size XS to XL with prices ranging from $79 to $259.

Instead of trying to break into the notoriously-difficult retail market, Dona and Jacobs offered to bring the De Young collection directly to London women through the Pop with Purpose studio.

“We love that we can offer women locally designed and manufactured clothing where they know the designer and know that they are helping make dreams come true,” says Jacobs. “There’s power in that. It’s incredible.”

Topspin scoops award

London-based Topspin Technologies Ltd., has been awarded the Synapse Life Sciences award for innovation in health. Their product, the Topspin360, beat out more than 60 invited applicants for products that demonstrate an innovation in health in Ontario.

This award follows the London-based Techalliance “Techcellence” award the company won earlier this year.

The Topspin360 is the first patented training device that helps improve neck muscles to reduce concussion risk.

Theo Versteegh, who earned his PhD in physiotherapy from Western University in 2016, developed the device after watching the Sidney Crosby hit in 2011 that caused his concussion.

Versteegh found that many sports concussions are the result of the whiplash effect.

The Topspin can be used in all sports, especially those at high risk for concussion, and also in military applications.

Northerner joins Fortune

David Ramsay, a former cabinet minister in the government of the Northwest Territories, has joined the board of directors of London-based Fortune Minerals .

Ramsay has more than 20 years of elected public office experience in the Northwest Territories. His cabinet portfolios included industry, justice, transportation and public utilities.

Fortune is working with three levels of government on infrastructure projects important to the success of the company’s NICO gold-cobalt-bismuth-copper project in the Northwest Territories.

One project is a 94-kilometre all-season highway to the community of Whati, northwest of Yellowknife.

The road is supported by the Tlicho Government, a Dene First nation and would reduce the cost of living and improve the quality of life in the outlying Tlicho communities and promote economic activity. Fortune has already received environmental assessment approval to build a spur road from Whati to the NICO mine.

Delta hosts bridal show

The London Wedding Professionals will hold their second Bridal Showcase at the Delta London Armouries on April 30.

The event offers a smaller, more intimate experience for brides to meet local wedding industry experts, ask questions, and get inspired for their wedding day.

The show features products and services from professionals including gowns, photography, florists, venues, DJs, hair and makeup and wedding planners.

The showcase also puts a focus on inspiring brides with Vignettes throughout the space showcasing different themes or colour palettes.

The show runs from 11 a.m-3 p.m. and admission is free.

Student makes his pitch

Sean Cornelius from St. André Bessette Catholic secondary school in London is one of 20 teenage entrepreneurs heading to Toronto May 8–10 to compete in this year’s edition of the Young Entrepreneurs, Make Your Pitch competition

Selected from the 204 two-minute video pitches entered, Cornelius earned the right to participate in a Dragon’s Den-style pitch contest at Discovery, Ontario Centres of Excellence’s annual innovation-to-commercialization conference, to be held on May 9 at Metro Toronto Convention Centre.

Hamilton Road looks ahead

Business people in the Hamilton Road will hold an information meeting Wednesday about the creation of the Community Improvement Plan that could lead to the creation of the Hamilton Road Business Improvement Area. The meeting will be held at 7 p.m. at the BMO Sports Centre on Rectory St. and guest speakers include Mayor Matt Brown and MPP Teresa Armstrong.Read more at:www.marieaustralia.com/****-formal-dresses | www.marieaustralia.com/vintage-formal-dresses

The band was loud, but in the other room and the bar was jammed.
He set his drink down a little too hard and it over-sloshed a bit.

“Run away with me,” he said, spreading his arms wide, “I’m done with school!”
“Well.. you graduated - that’s why you’re done,” she said, somewhat amused.
“We share a gravity, you and I - we’re.. we’re like aligned suns,” he romanticized.
“You should’ve majored in sales.” she said, sipping her own beer.
“Our love is so real, so raw - it's pure and yet - so street.”
“We have ‘love cred’?” She asked doubtfully.
“Wherever we go, we'll navigate that urban maze, hand in hand, we’ll OWN those concrete streets, we’ll paint our own graffiti!
“Have you snorted something?’
“No matter what life throws at us, we’ll face those challenges head-on and we'll stay united.”
“Have you been practicing this?” She asked
“We’ll swagger,” he said, “our love will be timeless..”
“And rhymeless,” she interjected hopefully.
“Together, we’ll be urban legends..” he continued.
“Like Bonnie and Clyde?” she asked, making a yuck face.
“We’ll be living art,” he said dreamily.
“Sounds dope.” She admitted.
“Then you’ll DO it?” He asked.
“Until Monday,” she said, nodding in assent, “classes start on Monday,” she shrugged.
“It was worth a shot.” he said stoically, after a moment.
“It was a good pitch,’” she said, taking his hand in hers.
“I didn’t oversell - I wasn’t too pushy?”
“No, you were right there,” she assured him.
“Maybe next time,” he said.
“Yeah, maybe next time”
They kissed.

Dedicated to John and Bob

From first flesh we move down widening halls
That lead to lives of wondrous walls.

Our spidered fingers gripped walls of brick,
Cruets, cups and candle sticks.
Incense clouded open graves
When we too believed we too were saved.

Between Annex walls we learned our phonics,
On tin-roofed walls we lived our comics.
Garage walls scaled showed different views,
Kitchen walls steamed with soups and stews.
Our school yard walls tallied pitches
That marked our summers of youth and wishes.

Now lift memory's pane and go back
To the white-framed walls of a secret shack.
There, in confusion we would cling
To the unknown wonders girls would bring.
These young boys' walls we both outgrew;
Now new walls sprang, as we did too.

Coffee House walls offered something new.
Wet kisses lingered near shadowy walls,
We heard poetry read in a backroom stall.
Recreationals made our new skin crawl.

Cliff walls were breached by stairs of clay,
Carved by Incas on a turquoise day.
Tent walls echoed with impish fray,
Green walls beckoned at the end of day.
These walls gave rise to hot desires,
Like Vikings planning funeral pyres.
New music, cheers and weekend guests
Stood us ***** to pound our chests.

Those walls no longer ring our shores;
Time swept us forward with worldly lures.
We doffed our coats of suede and frills,
And donned new clothes and workday skills.
The walls of work are a rocky climb,
Stones laid by us, for yours and mine.
Such towers & turrets of heart & hearth
Guard all we know of any worth.

I see distant walls on cliffs, in fields;
Where do they lead? What will they yield?
Yet, there three friends climb one more hill,
Climb one more wall. Then all is still.

Dad’s passing spans 18 months beginning with lung cancer surgeon removes left lung  for 6 weeks he receives radiation treatments Dad gains strength everyone gives thumbs up within several months doctors discover cancer spread to tumor in brain head shaved tumor removed skull resembles stitched baseball Dad lapses into twilight state body shrinks everyone knows his life is ending doctors and family wait for cancer to attack vital ***** only matter of time in january 1991 iraqi scud missiles launch at israel Odysseus in lobby of movie theater when he hears news calls Mom from telephone booth she asks if he is ok nothing could prepare him for horror he feels witnessing Dad slowly die Mom Penelope Odysseus quite vulnerable during this time dependent on trained intensive-care nurse to watch over Dad at home administer drugs monitor condition nurse able-bodied to guide or carry Dad to bathroom assist in his goings cleaning him Mom hires several nurses who each borrow money from her and Penelope Sean each nurse never repays loan and steals jewelry from Mom other belongings from house once a week Odysseus takes Dad out to lunch accompanied by nurse Odysseus places cap with bulls insignia on Dad’s bald stitched-up head Dad nods gives high-five Odysseus talks about feats michael jordan and entire team perform Dad avid fan Odysseus drives Dad nurse in toyota to favorite lunch spots Dad has no appetite no words but manages frail smile in august 1991 Odysseus has first one-man show at prestigious gallery run by Keith ******* Keith published Odysseus in college literary magazine decade earlier 17 large color field scapes hang on two long walls Dad too ill to attend opening never sees show in film documentary shot at gallery by Sean Odysseus explains “the work is about opening up possibilities clean slates for new worlds rawest moment of narrative very beginning of story all we are presented with is stage i’m scared of story right now suspicious of story don’t even want to deal with story once story starts then everything gets messed up all these things happen at this point in story it’s just this exciting stage full of possibilities full of potential the very beginning and you don’t know what is presented yet” near end of Dad’s struggle in late summer Odysseus asks Mom and Penelope to allow him to visit father alone in hospital they reluctantly consent Dad lying semiconscious in bed Odysseus holds back tears looks at withered father Dad breathes inconsistent occasional fluttering eyelids Odysseus begins to talk aloud about their lives together wonders if Dad reached his goals? does he feel fulfilled with life? is he prepared for death? Dad is 71 years old does he feel cheated of time? did Odysseus disgrace Dad or make him proud? Odysseus feels guilt suspects he may have embarrassed even shamed Dad wonders if Dad deep in his heart believes Odysseus is sad disappointment? he forces words out of his mouth “Dad can you hear me? Dad i love you Dad forgive me please for not becoming what you wanted me to be Dad” phone rings suddenly who could be calling at solemn moment? Odysseus lets it ring but ringing will not stop unwillingly he answers “hello?” “Odysseus don’t do it! Don’t hurt Dad!” it is Penelope calling worried he might commit some murderous act Odysseus and Penelope snap at each other for moment he hangs up thinks what a tragic breach of trust realizes no one not Penelope Mom Chris anyone in family honestly trusts him he wonders if Dad overheard angered remarks with Penelope what a sad way to die hearing your own children quarreling Dad dies august 31 1991 same date cousin Chris’s son Maynard celebrates 3rd birthday Mom’s brother Karl comes from california to help family discovers Dad took out undisclosed $15,000. loan to offset lack of earnings Dad typically overextended himself Karl pitches in to compensate for borrowed money after Dad dies Schwartzpilgrim house falls apart Mom weeps for many months they were married more than 50 years Odysseus feels sorry for Mom all alone in big house she invites family for dinner but it is never same Odysseus’s inheritance is old toyota with 80 thousand miles Dad said he wanted to buy Odysseus new volvo Odysseus is grateful for car which allows him to drive Farina to lake in dream Dad is sitting in back seat bandages wrap around his head same way doctors dressed him after brain tumor surgery Odysseus driving toyota looking for parking space there are none to be found they drive around block several times Dad suggests “try driving around the block one more time maybe parking space will open up” Odysseus answers “no i think we need to go few blocks further” Dad says “Odysseus you’re in drivers’ seat now but try my way one last time” they drive around block find parking space right in front of house Odysseus wakes up confused asks aloud “Dad is dead right?” it is not easy losing a father forgiving forgetting

UNDERDOG RAP

We are a population which is
Awaiting loaves and the fishes
And other unfulfilled wishes;
No chance to know what rich is,
While graduates are digging ditches
Immigrant PhDs are doing dishes.
Never quite knowing which is
Snake oil salesmen pitches.
Politicians too big for their britches.

Fools don’t know where the hitch is
Whatever the larcenous pitch is;
Reacting with kneejerk twitches
Due to governmental glitches.
And creeps like that guy Mitch is
Are rapacious sons of *******
Hunting for Democratic witches
In all the freedom fighting niches
With hearts as black as pitch is.

And the rich have a wish list
In which they scratch their itches
Regardless of what our ***** is
By wallowing in stolen riches
Punishing watchdogs snitches.
Politicians too big for their britches.
We are a population which is
Awaiting loaves and the fishes
And other unfulfilled wishes.
No chance to know what rich is.

Brent Kincaid

March 19, 2015

Life is a melody
      You can listen to only once.

    The first thirty seconds, you find the groove,
         it's appealing
    A harmonious rhythm hereto unwritten
                    
       This could be your favorite.


 
             It is.
       For the next three minutes, you settle in.
               The chorus comes around.

          *You'll be here again.
                  It's fresh, it's catchy
You're enraptured by these certain pitches and the words rhyme perfectly.
   One line flowing into the next, the ends justifying the means.
       Another verse, another chorus. This one feels more weathered
          Routine, maybe. You still feel that groove but your perspective of it has been altered by the change in tempo and direction during the last verse.
               

           You realize you have fifteen seconds left.
         This was your song. What did you do with it?


       *As you think back, a gentle blanket of white noise embraces everything that ever was, and your song fades

How many poetry books = 1 Nissan Pathfinder exhaust
      system.
How many bluebirds? Money is how we thank people for
      what makes them special
How we express our love and gratitude.

Weight and moods, up and down, with weather and outcome
      of meetings.
I am so sick of humanity, people. Wouldn't I prefer
      chickadees?
Then I get home, that is the comfortable tree hole I've been
      longing for.

Aaron pitches and plays piano. Zach likes lacrosse and math.
The mound was soft, sand, with a hole big enough for an urn
      or to hide a plover
But Aaron pitched carefully anyway, slow strikes and the
      opposing team scored.

What would God's work be? Meaningless question. Today's
      schedule:
Write fund raising letters, conserve small farms. Local food,
      local jobs. Don't transport food coast to coast. Save fuel,
      less CO2.
In my opinion the dislocations resulting from climate change
      and global warming will be within man's adaptive capacity.
      On the other hand.
Also, green industry will open a vast employment market, a
      job for every grackle, crow.

The good life, unsustainable, we're poisoning our children
      although my children are not so poisoned. They're bald.
      Unusually bald. Good looking bald. Future of man bald.
      Happy bald.
Bald eagle. Nesting, mating near Karen Sheldon's, a
      conservationist, philanthropist, on the river, whose
      husband recently died. During romantic dinner on a
      second honeymoon in Paris, so I've heard.
That's Jake's spirit come home as an eagle, Karen said. Isn't
      that great, I said, and the she-eagle he's nesting with!
--I'm gonna **** that *****.

Compare Captain Carpenter and In a Prominent Bar in
      Secaucus One Day. In each case the hero's (heroine's)
      body declining
Under life's duress. Anything located in Secaucus, NJ could
      not be considered prominent, could it?
In the end, clack clack takes all. Hard to end a poem better
      than that. Clack clack the crow's beak, upper and lower
      mandibles meeting. From hunger, or it just does. Crows
      clack clack to communicate.
Whitman's greatest poem is Out of the Cradle . . . also
      involving communicating birds, in what is initially an
      embarrassingly emotional display. All that italicized
      moaning and yearning. Get away.
Then, clack clack, he turns on you. Death lisping, straight into
      your eyes. Suddenly you realize you should have taken
      him seriously, been paying attention.

In the meantime, traffic, corn, new exhaust system, ask for
      money, save farms, poor people, sun on garden, whole
      wide world, wars, stars.
I gave up long ago on a quiet world. Now going deaf. Then it
      will be quiet, too quiet.
No more birding by ear. "No more *******." I mean really . . .
      I was moved as anyone by Hall's honest poem about Jane
      dying and I guess ******* can be music to someone's
      melody, stand for living, but not me.
No more birding would have had more meaning. I'd rather
      bird than ****. No more *******, no more worry, no more
      war.

Which is why I'm gonna **** that ***** is so funny, such a
      life-affirming comeback.
At first I worried Karen really believed the eagle is her
      husband. Maybe she does,
But that punch line makes her the kind of woman I want to
      know.

slowly  carefully
as i might an ancient diary
still full of young dreams
and even  perhaps
the salt of young love

it hurts
to carry adolescent obstacles
given my age
and all those hateful skeptics
it hurts how they gleefully profane

yet settled dust is yet dust
i sit willing to love
amid my dust
i sit in ever deeper vasts of love
in existential sacrum wag
kindled crown and fullness breath of all the scents of varied forms of love

lighthouse toes inspire seas ancestors swam
lyric feet to message myth of travels won
my calves and shins  knees and thighs
  crawling climbing walking running jumping kicking at the start
physiologies of courage ****** ahead
as future unmade moulds invite
caress the bodied length intent provides

singing fingers scale my world in chords of gliding love
tips of arcing sensate dawns
diverse as nightsky suns

my palms divine an ever giving gift
no futures could unveil--
the toucher's touching touched
aligning novel insights  wordless as the womb of time:
perhaps a symbol flare could squint
and grant a vision of horizon's end--
another pleasure game
a bonsai love to soften age
another twisting meditation's emptiness in form
as motion stillness spaces words
to perfect pitches  tempos   sound
though all of which will never meet
and never meeting meet
as one

I glanced fancily upward, taking quick notice at the 5 bladed ceiling fan that had always resembled the most crooked demeanor. Dust had been caking on her old worn blades for decades, building towers of particles of all sorts on the oak finish wood she was given at the factory she was produced in. Without the slightest mince of doubt, I would confirm China to plead the fifth. Shaking, this fan has never shook it had not been used since last summer. I heard ear splitting low toned roars as if boulders were forming an army only to be dropped from high jacks in the clouds. As I figure, these trains that run through this nearly vacant ghost town were shifting from one track, to one of the other six sets. Young, lying amongst my spring filled bed, the roars should have terrified most kids, but for me that signified life in a lifeless, sub-cultured society. Those roars had put me soundly to sleep.

My dark brown, small gritty eyes received a bit of that ceiling in them on the average August day of trains and mirages down the road. Determined to productively put this tired body of mine to good use I begin to scramble around the house for handy-man looking objects. Hammers, wrenches, nails, these things are hard to come by with two females under one roof alone. A ******* child I am, but ever long have accepted that. Luck had struck my view as I finally found myself in the parasitic garage infested with cobwebs, and every insect relevant to Kingdom Animalia. Running with all of these essentials may not have been the smartest decision, but hesitantly, in abrupt nature, I stopped. The roaring had been a continuous cycle of low blows against the hot sona air. It seemed like pendulums gaining momentum the closer it rose. I thought so keenly at the fact that a single human pair of ear drums should not rightfully pick up such low, non chromatic scale frequencies without crouching helplessly in fetal position.

Running to the front gate, mounted and bound by wires and steel, setting foot on the end of the premises of my humble abode, I felt utter desperation for everyone around me. The neighbors, sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, all our town’s elders that had been scornfully slothful over the years, were shifting about frantically. Leaping in panic-like modes into there vehicles. Into other neighbors vehicles. My mother, that had been off working four towns west, away from the commotion, makes the predicament that I will do just the same. But I boycott her judgment…as always.

The day had come. Finally, a vacant ghost town of my very own for merely minutes seemed like the longest, most eventful lifetime I had fulfilled. How badly the urge set upon my mind to grab wooden spoons and the biggest stew *** in the pantry I could possibly find. Just to gain and take name of my own sound while the calm was at its most content. For that piece in time, I would cherish every second. To warn no living thing, just me and the atmosphere, that I am here. I am the only one here. I am every characterized town in one. I am the law, I am the doctor, I am the city inspector. I blink as I erase my silhouette from this illusion. The roars are now visible. I can see how white and violent there pitches are. I see every color in the nearing explosions because the whitened bomb bends and blends them all together, and holds them firm. They begin to paint the sky gracefully on its pale blue canvas on the mid-august summer day.

I grab my essentials of handy-man objects that I almost lost feel of. Slowly returning to the home I know best, I intended on removing that dust covered fan and I did. Without ever knowing any father figure I would give him that fan, the only token of my existence he would submerge over. I own up to the simplicity and humorous thought of doing everything without him.

Reminiscing back to when I was young, lying amongst my spring filled bed, just as I am now. I thought, the roars should have terrified me like the town, but for me that signified life in a lifeless, sub-cultured society. The roars had put me soundly to sleep.

so much music and there are clouds outside coloring the sky grey (or is it gray no I'm not British) and the green trees contrast against it like black notes on a sheet of pale white music.

music is pale white and thick black but more color is drawn from it than from anything else on earth.  grey skies are like sheets of music and I find more color in them than in the sunshine.  clearly I am eager to please eager to learn but perfection is hard is humanly impossible and music is all about perfection.

SO MANY BE VERBS

my violin professor smells like green naked juice and something sweet and over-chewed mint gum while his short nailed fingers tiptoe accurately onto pitches I awkwardly slide into. my fingers are shuffling like an introvert dancing to the YMCA in public for the first time.  I am deeply humiliated by my incompetence.  sometimes I want to cry when his pitches mock mine but somehow I remain placid which is rare for me.

baile baile baile black dots and rain drops
crescendos and silver painted toes
sad eyes and arpeggio tries

someone said music is the most intricate concept in the world.  it connects the whole brain and captivates controls enthralls the movements of the body so frustrating I want to pull my hair out.  

extraordinary be extraordinary be EXTRAORDINARY they all scream into my bleeding ears and I crumble because carrying that responsibility is impossibly euphoric and tragic

proof proof I demand proof that I am alive

Some people think I make rash decisions
Like I'm not aware
They tell me I should be more careful
I shouldn't assume such positions
That I should use more precision

But am I the only one aware of the time we have here
And how important it is to live without limitations
I don't want to be old and look back in regret and fear
I don't know the repercussions of what I may do
And who I may hurt, may end up hating me too
But sometimes I'd rather have that than never knew

And it's sad, really sad to look back
And see all of your mistakes piling up in stack
And saying hey, things would be different if I hadn't have ****** up so bad
But sometimes funny things happen in life, and can lead you to the right people
And if that's the case than maybe the others were wrong

Maybe life is more than just a sad song
When everybody's all bent from the throng
The song can take a variety of pitches and tones
It's the sound of opportunity that I'm trying to hone

It's hard to keep a clean slate when you're all caught up brunettes and blondes
And alcohol in the name of the yesteryear
All caught up in love and song and you can't seem to grasp the time like it's sifting through an hourglass
Just trying to enjoy my time here, so please don't hold my decisions too seriously

MANY ingenious lovely things are gone
That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude,
protected from the circle of the moon
That pitches common things about.  There stood
Amid the ornamental bronze and stone
An ancient image made of olive wood --
And gone are phidias' famous ivories
And all the golden grasshoppers and bees.
We too had many pretty toys when young:
A law indifferent to blame or praise,
To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong
Melt down, as it were wax in the sun's rays;
Public opinion ripening for so long
We thought it would outlive all future days.
O what fine thought we had because we thought
That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.
All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned,
And a great army but a showy thing;
What matter that no cannon had been turned
Into a ploughshare? Parliament and king
Thought that unless a little powder burned
The trumpeters might burst with trumpeting
And yet it lack all glory; and perchance
The guardsmen's drowsy chargers would not prance.
Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep:  a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;
The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.
He who can read the signs nor sink unmanned
Into the half-deceit of some intoxicant
From shallow wits; who knows no work can stand,
Whether health, wealth or peace of mind were spent
On master-work of intellect or hand,
No honour leave its mighty monument,
Has but one comfort left:  all triumph would
But break upon his ghostly solitude.
But is there any comfort to be found?
Man is in love and loves what vanishes,
What more is there to say? That country round
None dared admit, if Such a thought were his,
Incendiary or bigot could be found
To burn that stump on the Acropolis,
Or break in bits the famous ivories
Or traffic in the grasshoppers or bees.
When Loie Fuller's Chinese dancers enwound
A shining web, a floating ribbon of cloth,
It seemed that a dragon of air
Had fallen among dancers, had whirled them round
Or hurried them off on its own furious path;
So the platonic Year
Whirls out new right and wrong,
Whirls in the old instead;
All men are dancers and their tread
Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong.
III
Some moralist or mythological poet
Compares the solitary soul to a swan;
I am satisfied with that,
Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it,
Before that brief gleam of its life be gone,
An image of its state;
The wings half spread for flight,
The breast ****** out in pride
Whether to play, or to ride
Those winds that clamour of approaching night.
A man in his own secret meditation
Is lost amid the labyrinth that he has made
In art or politics;
Some platonist affirms that in the station
Where we should cast off body and trade
The ancient habit sticks,
And that if our works could
But vanish with our breath
That were a lucky death,
For triumph can but mar our solitude.
The swan has leaped into the desolate heaven:
That image can bring wildness, bring a rage
To end all things, to end
What my laborious life imagined, even
The half-imagined, the half-written page;
O but we dreamed to mend
Whatever mischief seemed
To afflict mankind, but now
That winds of winter blow
Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.
We, who seven yeats ago
Talked of honour and of truth,
Shriek with pleasure if we show
The weasel's twist, the weasel's tooth.
Come let us mock at the great
That had such burdens on the mind
And toiled so hard and late
To leave some monument behind,
Nor thought of the levelling wind.
Come let us mock at the wise;
With all those calendars whereon
They fixed old aching eyes,
They never saw how seasons run,
And now but gape at the sun.
Come let us mock at the good
That fancied goodness might be gay,
And sick of solitude
Might proclaim a holiday:
Wind shrieked -- and where are they?
Mock mockers after that
That would not lift a hand maybe
To help good, wise or great
To bar that foul storm out, for we
Traffic in mockery.
Violence upon the roads:  violence of horses;
Some few have handsome riders, are garlanded
On delicate sensitive ear or tossing mane,
But wearied running round and round in their courses
All break and vanish, and evil gathers head:
Herodias' daughters have returned again,
A sudden blast of dusty wind and after
Thunder of feet, tumult of images,
Their purpose in the labyrinth of the wind;
And should some crazy hand dare touch a daughter
All turn with amorous cries, or angry cries,
According to the wind, for all are blind.
But now wind drops, dust settles; thereupon
There lurches past, his great eyes without thought
Under the shadow of stupid straw-pale locks,
That insolent fiend Robert Artisson
To whom the love-lorn Lady Kyteler brought
Bronzed peacock feathers, red combs of her *****.

FISHTHOUGHTBLOOD                                                                                                            JON BOLDUC

When I was a boy,
Father taught me to ice-fish.
Here’s a memory;

Father drills a hole,
the auger bounces, vibrates, roars,
shaving ice– soon
the  blade connects with winter water,
           –the engine fades off.
I fish  floating ice chunks from the hole with a skimmer
while
Father sets the trap, ties the sinker, and hooks the minnow
thru its side.
He lowers the line
gently into the fishhole; the bait plunges to the lakebed.
Father reels up the slack, pitches the three legged trap
above the exposed black water
and we wait for a trout, or a snarled toothed pickerel.

Father,
I have learned

to fish for thoughts
with an ice–trap. When the flag
springs up, I reel
slippery ideas up from deep darkness.
As they flop, I pull the hook out from their lips,
knock them in the head,
throw them in a pail; gut them, I spill fishthoughtblood on the white snow.

After the low sun sets,
My friends and I fry caught fishthoughts
in my dim cabin.

Hughes,  Plath, Ginsberg, and Eliot
talk around the fireplace
as the pan sizzles, as the oil jumps. Soon
we feast on flakey poemfillets;
we talk about the  dark english rain,
the crowded zoos, electroshock therapy, bald mediocrity.

After we have eaten
and finished the wine,
and all my friends have gone home
I look down at empty plates

and somehow,
“the page is printed.”

My favorite music is imperfection
the little breaks
the husky
inaudible screams
the short breaths
the ahs
the un-understandable pronunciation
mispronunciations
the weird rise and fall
and awkward syllabication.

Like a cd that's got just enough for one last spin
rough
scratchy
perfection of imperfection

My favorite music is imperfection
off key harmony
and drunk, smoked-up throats
the hard breathing
the sharp little pitches
the accents
the sudden switch from singing to speech
the guitar that's just a little too loud
the drums that are a little too fast
the back up singer that forgets the lines
or the lead singer too drunk to remember what his own hands wrote
prolonged Ssssss....
off time beats
and ****** up base lines

Imperfection's my favorite music.

Does the night appeal or is it day,
Does staying close or going far away,
taste better, take your time to digest,
oh this isn't a poll.
just let the answers roll
from the tip of your nib
to the lined paper,
what causes you to fear and what, feels safe,
which is worse homeless man or war-torn waif?
do you prefer white or red,
beer in a bottle or in a glass,
milk chocolate or dark (only 5.7 grams per day)
are you a survivalist or an escapist,
do you drink too much water or not enough,
I can ask a million questions,
okay I exaggerate this stuff.

think for the moment if each choice was only between two,
would there be a pattern, or would you be able to undo,
decisions made that let your cards show before they
were played?

My life keeps me humble,
                        as I jumble,
through my day
                     and mumble,
to myself,
not in jest,
not in play,
I am not certain,
who I am, who am I?
                         I bumble
about the place
as busy as a bee,
do not stop to
look in a mirror
       at my face.

There is a chance I won't recognize me.
I walk quickly so as
to appear not to stumble,
      my stomach rumbles,
and squeals at
different pitches,
bring on the whale
song, sing along
if you know the
words.

This what the pace of life does
leaves me jumbled, I dabble in
dark chocolate, too many times
a day, I love the taste of red,
just a glass or it may go to
                                my head,
I get my heart
pounding in my chest,
wish it was from
working out and not
be stressed.

Enough of me and how are you?
You look good, time pays you
a compliment, love what you
have done with your hair, excuse
me for a moment incoming jumble.

I walk my dog, or does the dog walk me,
fix a leaky hose or just turn off the tap,
the roof creaks over head, are there
rodents in the attic, even in this heat?
The clouds that hang in the sky tonight,
will bring rain to jack up the humidity,
some one some where in their stupidity,
will be flying a kite, Ben Franklin style.
I hope he does not suffer for his enlightenment

So down the Hydro easement in a "house known
to police" something exploded and burns of the
second degree caused trauma and the air ambulance
came in low over our kitchen, shaking the walls
and dog, both have recovered nicely thanks

So they took the burn victim to the hospital
to get fixed up, wherein I ask is there a cure for
stupidity,
humidity, getting in my head,
if I did not have a portable AC
by my bed, not very green of me, eh?
Ooops now you know I am Canadian,
sorry, confirmed, I will just jumble my way
off to bed, I will let you get back to more
important stuff instead...



©DWE072013