(Glade, World, Master, Boy, Hero)

                                                 GLADE

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

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

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

                                               WORLD

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                              MA­STER

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

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

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

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

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

                                                  BOY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                                HERO

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

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

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

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







Copyright 2020 by Ron Sanders.

Contact:  ronsandersartofprose(at)yahoo(dot)com

She took my hand and followed me
through the trees,
under the archway made of ivy
(flanked by pristinely carved hedges)
into the vast, open field
which met the ethereal red sun
on the horizon.

We sat in the fresh grass,
cool in the evening air.
All the while we stayed silent,
just admiring the untouched space.
Each blade of grass before us
swayed gently,
tantalisingly...

Time had stopped
but everything was still living.
Still moving.
As if this place were not included
in Time's perseverance.  
I didn't want it to be,
it was too important to me.

It occurred to me then
that it wasn't this place
that I valued the most at all
It was this moment.

And I captured it.

It didn't make sense
It felt Fingers
Chain link fence

So the moon dim
Gibbus tide riddle

Keep your wheel in the hairpin
Bite  a hook
You'll be my friend

Go ahead
Spike the ocean
A drop of salt blood
The wolf of horizon runs
Spilling fangs of
red dwarf sun

Can you water:
Crash against the rock
Until pieces of you break off
Pristinely lying on my skin

Think air until you hear
Grandeur breath of leaves
Mountain or dog
Sing songs of love

Goodbye
White cheek
Spun in moonlight
Foot to the path
Song on the tounge
Free til I'm dog
Whiskey til I'm drunk
Hold my breath
Count to ten
Blue eyes / begin again

I always swear work doesn’t affect me.

Trauma?! HA! Never.

And for the most part I am ok.

But suddenly I realized as I counted every single calorie; every single bite… scrubbed every surface and washed my hands far too many times..

The fear of gaining weight; of relying on everyone else to care for me…

Just might be coming from the living people whose bodies are actively rotting. Flesh and fluids dripping off the sides of my stretcher.

My ambulance regularly becoming a biohazard until I’ve scrubbed every inch.

Listening to the sounds of weeping patients on their way to the ER for the 5th time this month because no body cares about them.

It’s not death that scares me. Not loss of limbs or sight that worries me. It’s not having anyone who wants to love me. Not having anyone willing to speak for me when I am broken. It’s the idea my mind can be pristinely sharp but my body defeated and needing someone. But no body cares.


That possibility is petrifying.

-ARI

Toney talking **** ever was been at relative action: so this is what happens when i own ****
the game and the actual man that prones ****
talking **** like if it was actual that arms **** short for the factual
i've been underneath like i wrote the bible since like it was his "wonder feat"
You're a wonder feat till you understand like every plundered treats,
the E in Eden has you wonder feats repetitive like a tree grown demanding scars in roots like i was underneath: Playing me only gets you murdered  like actual feats cuz this ******* talking **** like if anything hurters like Obama to your hair mang like how you arose a gangbanger to man defeat
ir really was me mang startin **** everyday all confused everyday like if demand was me.
Cuz i'm all g man another ******* till i'm ever he stand
raise it like how magnitude backstabs left was she man commandin fleets
Raise it like how it passes all magnitude was hidden from know by praise of it's masses, cuz now i'm startin ****, startin **** with my claimed owner of kinfolks, disposing flows and all opposing with your chinblow; been smoke till i'm ******* up all your naturality as it was real in every returned K to the K-O chaos enlived flow the to the now chin mode to every kinsmoke.
Bleed mode like an attempt to **** your **** up with one need- blow of my established chin mode to discovered manhood in precision given of range.
I'm jacking up my A-O to every Kayo like getting my cigarettes jacked now asked for every parallel to mind of my females to enlivened envision of range
enlivened envision of rage
enlivened envision of hate
.....Thinking jacking me was or is ever the body neutral has every one of you and my kinfolk women jacking your **** like shittin you at enlivened in thangs
I'll be everything anything anybody prasing me like assistance in ranks to be given out perception to my women now to restrictive in thangs insisting the aim: right? right, yeah right it's right as given as range
the higher you go you know ******* well of it's enlivened discovery absolute like marraige in range that **** the lesser when you're rearranging the pain
talking **** been magnitude mang like the masses pretend hides **** before i was ever fake claiming lives before you would know ******* well that proof aiming was claimed
as if rhymes was the median:
I'LL **** YOU ******* TO AIM RANGE WAIT,
i'll get your *** craving for everything stolen in energy that i own for every *** that you're in it just validates your life justly justifies your claim to my aim range strength truthly you're only talking **** as hindsight of all desperate measures to the existance of all body. Raise it and be the man of learnt confusion to all hate and chaos as chosen path to the actual "levels HIGHER already like if all extensions was justly validating as all talk when i been spittin claim when i'm shitten remember me as when i am all talk when everyone smaller was all brought like hindsight perception.
Knowing me was all absolute in all talk like minest sight deception: I'll ****** you **** now you're knowing truth: true truest nature before i was ever you in being a faker; more like a being you know truest dreams as instinct before i was ever a ranker: I'll ****** you **** in complete pristine dreamed grabs at crutch crotch as aim range prankster even wankster as the holder of time,
space and time clean backstabs as you fist **** of every trip traps as a pristinely dreamed beings pretending underneath when all you are now are on top of every wonder **** if ever reupping the true as if you know what i am in reality before intercedence death cuz it was truly me: like reality this is all future to all your poetry actual renders a blank gaze of mine of wisdom as you write your blank page is actually what aim range explains space to what blank faced truly is at fake takes of what you've stolen in actuality reality owned envisions of me
like enlivenment only just visions creates in actuality ranks raised none enlivens but make ways as a holder of time ever remembers me none as the entity's won actual remembrance of me: lonesome to none to truthful beings who reject truth in reality was really ever to gain none sight to minest right ever to wrong surity might right sight.
i own **** what you are: like all small things in my stature of nature lived as holder of everything comes to pass, your only fault is visions of perfection in education given back to your ***. I'LL WAIT *******.....

There are tantalizing visions of an era long forgotten
By the ones who remember the days
Of sweet music that drifted onto the verandahs
Into the imaginations and hearts of the ones who played

Echoing laughter resounds from ivy covered walls
Touched by the distant memories that pass
Through the cracks left unnoticed by the shimmers of light
As they fall on the sweet summer grass

A wild crimson rose still grows upon the dim edges
Of the latticework now peeling with age
A remnant of immense beauty so pristinely perfect
Still opening its blooms to the stage

Incessant tales of the wonderful feelings brought to light
As the lovely music lifts to the sky
Brings every heart to sing as if they know the tune  
Which these memories have left you and I

The words tumble down so easily
cascading through his realm,
A realm of smooth enchantments
A realm of dripping gold
gold of skin,
of air and self

He himself inspires,
enables and enthralls.
spinning her quite carefully with fingers of delight
swirling and twirling around they go
he moves - she rises
as dust or mist - so light
a tornado
of stars, of bright, of sea

He directs the spirals of chaos,
she plunges in and the warmth splashes through,
to soul from body, a ghostly path.
Another worldly wonder,
Another tender thrill.

He is of soft stone
pristinely carved
A delicate hand knew how to mold
earth, fire, ocean, and breeze, to create
a being pieced together with gold

Pure and lustrous, drawing her in
like rain or wind, she cannot control
her bold attraction to his realm of gold.

you look a little lost drunk toylike demure
stumbling doll pretty i peer you cutting
through gnashing heaped throats i spy
your gangling figure ungainly miniature
legs tottering deftly sensual upon your
hips
        you slice stupidly through the tiny
hot music and you look so eatable you
look so nice and pristinely garbled perfect
unkempt ***** pleasant uneasy
i'll catch you by your languorous laxing
limbs i'll ****** you from falling hard
into the smarting wet floor i'll bring your
feverish nonsense Redder mouth
to mine and we'll do something perhaps
hotter
          
something, perhaps, louder

His love washes over me /
Pristinely /
Drenching me, deluging me /
In surging airborne streams /

A parcel of wind greets me /
& raises me to Him. /
In the Light of Dreams, of sweet reverie, /
There I find Him. /

Beside me he fulminates /
Making me adamantine, /
Diamonded /
Glistening resplendently. /

A place of concealment, a sanctuary, /
He drenches me in His Light, baptismal, /
Cascades me, /
In its torrential downpour. /

In stillness there is revelation, /
In stillness there is clarity, /
Though our hearts tremulous, may quake & tremble, /
He awakens us anew each morn. /

I'll bury letters in the ground to let them rest in pieces
They'll decompose before the world finds their meaning
Their remnants shall intertwine with the seedlings of tomorrow
And take healthy root to sprout the beginning of the illusion

It will grow and grow and reach to kiss the sky
It just exists ignorantly free of the magnitude of why
No questions asked as time will pass, a ripple in a dream
Blink twice and the dust settles riddled and pristinely clean

All is flux and our celestial sphere is making the rounds
Words seem mundane under the magnifying glass
Archaic masochisms of our mind to help try and cope
Notions shall invade to question the cyclically divine

What's the rush? We're all on the same spinning vessel
Chase your tails in the Almighty dog and pony show
Enlightenment pins the Donkey's smile on the nail
As the hammer brings down the cataclysmic blow

Just a little kiss he said
His draped  arm around her shoulders squeezed , shlumping in towards her.
I don't know.....she said.
Her innocent wide eyes and tightly curled hair were frightened.
Come on, don't be a ***** he said,
eyes droopy, voice smelling condescending and aroused.
He tasted his lips before flashing his teeth.
Strong fingers locked into her pristinely wound tendrils
shoving a resisting skull towards his probing lips.
She tensed, squealed, tried to turn away
but he only pulled her closer like quick sand, or an anaconda.
His hand immediately rounded second base, clamping onto her tender ******* like a bear trap
before kneading them and moving to the hem of her blue dress.
She muffled a scream into his mouth, but the black hole just absorbed and incinerated the sound.
His hand travelled up her knee, to her thigh
which was soft, and clean.
He thought they probably smelled like Ivory soap and angel laughs.
The further north his hand travelled, the higher pitched the squeals became.
He wanted to experiment how far he needed to move until her voice became  audible only to dogs.
He smiled into her cheek
he was a glorious, powerful tiger and she was an unassuming gazelle with a limp.
Really, he was doing her a favor
ending her misery before someone less humane devoured her tragic beauty.
He bit her neck, rendering her paralyzed
with fear.
Come on, don't be such a ***** he said,
Nobody likes a *****.

If you could encapsulate a precise feeling
Enlarge it, breath it in, hold it for a little
Longer....wrap you arms around it.....
                                                         ­        what would it be....?
Would it be a crystalised memory?
                                                                ­a
Photograph worn at the edges from long ago
Held touches pristinely varnished?
                                                      ­          a
Song captured mid verse? whose notes bear witness
Forever black stalks glooped in circular feet

Would it be....
                                                          ­       a
Atmospheric winged horizon, caught out as a bubble
Links the past
Yet here, what would be the exact nature of your
bubbliography?
                                                                ­ a
Winged bird, a pleasure dome, soft far off yonderings of
                                                              ­   a
Soul searcher locating peace everlasting
But...what peace?....dare I ask you...would you give up for another

Handing you choice, choose one to......
                                                        ­            hold with memories

knees go weak summer very smile

                                                                    

                    spUrts

over: two legs, skinny hips, a mile
of stomach, daintily *******, neck
and a chin(also)above sprouts a                nose

nice how it flush face with
saliently bursts ivory white 'neath
limpid fissures of greenly sharp roundness

(eyes)that flutter, held by cheeks as
smooth and innocently as driven
snow sparkles just a bit in the summer
between the **** hillocks of my
thighs a mouth pristinely admits

      me

Howdy mate, you got some time?
I will buy you a drink,
90ml neat,
if you be a lamb, old sports,
and lend me your company prime.

You see, I am dazed,
awfully blazed,
stunned to the core
the things you will lore
makes me want to tear this heart,
and pull the strings apart.

Don’t you judge so soon,
for I have the calmness of the moon,
but you know the whole story,
how moon survives on star’s glory,
and  the cosmos has been rude,
and I don’t mean to be a *****.

For it gave me my sunshine
so gorgeous, pristinely divine.
But feels like entoiled by the fate,
oh, how badly I hate
this bafflement, I have conceived,
unable to let go things I have perceived.

Doesn’t that make a demon out of my soul
unwilling to let go the stigmas
and let love be my destiny,
my gift and my goal.

Wait, don’t leave, please stay
the refill in on its way,
Will you speak, if you wish,
say words I am craving for,
that will strangle my dilemma
and all my pain will perish.

ummmm…
you are a colossal idiot…..

yes, not to miss a whiner, so profound
stuck in someone’s past,
who is gonna make you feel warm,
and hold you till the time unbound.

I spit on your coffin,
if you could ever afford one
for doubting her sanctity,
you pathetic hypocrite *****.

Yes, the left behind in the past
and there is so much to hide, in fact,
she opened herself to you,
coz she had her integrity intact.

She could have had with you her way,
and left you in utter dismay,
but she chose not to sting
coz that is not her thing.

You don’t yet understand her, do you?
Else, you won’t be in this lousy place
in a tuxedo that you rented
talking to a stranger, seeking solace.

Don’t get cold feet, have some pride,
Don’t you dare let her slide,
coz I have a woman, to whom I surrendered
and life has been one dreamy ride.

Now, here she comes,
cradled in her fur
I am so sure about her,
you too don’t be a blur.

Do the right thing,
I hope you will,
the *** is gone
and here comes the bill.

i have no other means to see,
only through the intervening vacuities
of the word — out in the field
there seems to be no end seething
to the very beginning;
these words now
appear limbless yet still make
their way deftly, scrunching
against the wall enough to toss the
body out of sleep.
i have nothing to offer
only my despair
and in this, myself, have seen all
too pristinely without a sensible trace
of fear or a mitigated feeling

i am all words and no conversing,
addled by the thoroughness of it,
ample warmth of a makeshift fire
  thwarting the involuntary shadow there,
  hiding behind the renegade
  of thought or a portentous rearing
    of imagination's hearth:

i am all words, no other than this alone—
having achieved this noble sense of
  swift perpetuity, no other means to
    this end than the poetry of impetus.

a therapist
prescribed me rose-tinted glasses.
she told me
my view was too blue and the pink
would counteract my countenance
so i would
finally
see normally.
a “shift of perspective”
she called it. i didn’t
tell her that the color i saw wasn’t blue, it was gray; i didn’t
tell her i had fifty pairs at home, perched pristinely on the vanity; i didn’t
tell her i pressed them onto my nose and stared into the mirror; i didn’t
tell her the only shift of perspective
was the way the world
became blurry,
water welling up and
flinging a flimsy filter
onto my mirror when
i realized this wasn’t working,
this wouldn’t work.

instead, i smiled
and added another pair to my collection –
this time,
it was different. this time,
when i put them on and
nothing changed,
i convinced myself that it did.
i swore i saw swirls of scintillating salmon in the sky,
swore sunrise was less montonous and sunset less muted.
“it’s gonna get better, it’s better, i’m better” ran through
my mind, up
my throat, out
my mouth and swirled
in the air and coated every surface until
my breath was reduced
to those words:
it’s gonna get better, it’s better, i’m better.

and each day battered the words,
each hour chipped away at their strength,
each minute batted them out of the air until
i was lightheaded from oxygen deprivation, stuck
gasping with a gaping mouth in a vacuum.

when i shattered my rose-tinted glasses
and used the shards to carve
two neat little lanes up my forearms, when
i smeared the rivulets of
blood across my eyes –
because a pink filter hadn’t worked, but maybe,
maybe red would –
i whispered to myself:
it’s gonna get better, it’s better, i’m better.

cruel, and yet dainty to the touch
shattering, sparkling -- these wondrous things of yesterday
caressing the aching -- breaking parts of me
words and pictures
faces and dreams
i wish to bring it all back
to feel the weight of what was the world then draping over me
pristinely etched on with what was -- memories
when even the phrase "i miss you" held no bounds
it is much lighter in my chest compared to when i hold these
these...

I. Yesterday's scraps: many more happy beginnings

i didn't travel to the brothel for revenge:
tonight, of all nights...
no... i travelled to the brothel for a lesson...
a lesson in creating a jealous woman...
a miniature Frankenstein... monster...
after all: what is a male monster?
one denied love...
and what is a female monster?
one denied feeling jealous!
a man might long for love...
but a woman? she longs for jealousy!

i'm still learning...
i was promised an entire night with Khadra?
Khedra? Khadija last night...
if she works a 0-hour contract:
she can choose! she chose otherwise...
obviously i was going to pamper myself:
extra-special tonight:
who has the reins?! me, or you?

and? i was going to choose her "competition"
to boot! because there's one way of making
promises: keeping them...
and there's another... being a whining demand
of self-sabotage...

no! i didn't go to the brothel to enact revenge!
of course i wasn't going to sleep with her:
she promised me that she would give herself
up for the night!
she didn't! ergo? i'm going to sleep with
her competition, her "competition"...

she actually can't have anyone competing with
her... since all the others are "Irish"
i.e. double-sure... pills and  ******...
but i have to admit...
it was the first time that i've been with a girl
who wanted the lights turned down: low...
low... low... almost ******* in the dark...
she asked me for permission
to snort a line of *******: she asked me...
would i want some? no... sorry...

she brought a glass of ***** with her
and a nervous laugh...
a cigarette too... and the most precious
peaches' worth of *******...
and an *** the worth and size
of a watermelon...

i didn't go to the brothel to ******...
climaxing is sometimes pointless:
esp. when you're trying to send a nagging message
of biting someone else's neck:
negging...

i knew i was going to fail the test
of both hard-on and *******...
i drank too much cider...
too much weak cider...
my **** started yawning:
i had to return to the public toilet:
****-break from American Pie:
i did have to lay a membrane of toilet
paper around the rim of the toilet seat...
before sitting down...

i squeezed out a decent loaf befitting an
Anne the Anorexic...
just after stopping by some Pakistani stoners...
asking them for a drag of their doofie...

i need to ****.....

II. The Proper Verse

i adore nights such as this one about to unfold,
i have taken only a few sips of my whiskey and i already
know what i'm going to write:
usually it's the opposite, i have to drink enough
for a cognitive blitzkrieg in the vein of how Nietzsche
described it: that a thought or an idea
comes somewhere from "elsewhere" from outside
is conjured out of thin air: a spontaneous combustion...
it implodes then explodes into writing
whereby even listening to music is not necessary...
although: i'm sort of nostalgic-happy when it comes
to my choice in younger years...
i.e. either collect the oeuvre of Led Zeppelin or
Black Sabbath... obviously i chose the former
and regretted it when i listened to Vol. 4 and heard
Solitude for the first time and only regretted it
because it was so cool to play that song on guitar
in my ex-girlfriend's parents' house when it was only
me and her younger sister...
yep... my secret crush: love at first sight...
when it was all wrong: i was 17 and she was 14...
when it was all wrong... but not as wrong if i were
to say: i was 36 and she was 14...
     i get the whole ****** element but then again
i don't: i mean... i inherited a large stamp collection
from my late grandfather... so that would make me
a philatelist rather than a lepidopterist...
ergo... it's a teenage thing, there aren't as many
restrictions of taboo when you're that young...
    and i don't think there's anything remotely allied
to an "evil thought": there's just thought...
but anyway i was playing Solitude on her father's guitar
and... believe... that song... on the guitar alone...
in a large house that's usually mental (ex-girlfriend,
mom, dad, two brothers and Priya and some guests round)
this song on guitar where there's only you
and your former secret crush... it's haunting...
   she thought i was playing some blues...
i should have corrected her by playing some blues...
but i didn't... the kitchen was in a mess from the previous
night so i told her i'd help her out:
i cleaned the dishes while she dried them...
     after that i left... keeping my secret love a persisted
secrecy... so much so... that after several years
and several ****** women later... it vanished...
as did my idiotic youth...
                   but what the hell am i saying?!
i didn't sit down to write about that, then again:
digression is a very cool instrument of narration...
i learned it from my English teacher: Syr Tomas BOONCE!

last night... i ate too much during the day...
i rarely do... but recently i've had this unstoppable urge
for dairy foodstuffs... cheese... kefir...
yoghurt... milk.... cheese... kefir...
backwards and forwards... i know i'm actually craving water
(well, "me", i.e. my body)
but instead i want dairy foodstuffs...
mind you: all dairy products have more protein
in them than actual meat... i could never be a vegetarian...
proteins from beans is not the same...
another mind you: i don't know why
In the Evening didn't make to Led Zeppelin's greatest
hits album (well, at least the one i had
back in the day) but D'yer Mak'er did...
i owned the album the song's on...
but it only came to my attention after watching
Sharp Objects starring Amy Adams...
that show was a BELTER...

so i traded in my "emergency" €90 for...
ah ****... the Indian on Villiers St would have
given me £72... but i wanted to double check...
went to the currency exchange in Romford's Liberty
Shopping Mall... **** it... i'm not going back
to Charing Cross so i can get the 72 quid...
i settled for being 8 quid short...

and as i was sitting there in the garden after dinner
with a bottle of cider in my hand...
should i go today? should i?
only yesterday Khedra dismissed her wild plan of
inviting me to her house for a night of Trojan
fun of me pretending to be the 300 and "gang ******"
her solo... well... hence the "...":
     because it would be ******* her brains out for
the whole night, as it once happened with Ilona
in St. Petersburg all those years ago...
     i miss that night... i remember asking her...
so... how many contractions of O-spasms have you
been through? 7? each for every of my heads...
a nice rounded number: doesn't mean that an even number
would be any better than the 7ΓL
(eh! who the hell said that our modern numbers
came from either India and are morphed Arabic numerals)...
**** me... the Romans used letters as numbers
IX + XI = **... we already had letters in the form
of our letters... whether Greek or Roman...
Bb = 86... P = 9 I = 1 S = 5, 2 = Z...
sure thing: with "hindsight"... well whatever history
dictates: i'm not going to bother regurgitating...
with fake news and propaganda: there must be...
NEW TRUTHS... self-made truths to bring some sanity
to the individual not swayed by any external *******...

i knew it was going to be a bad idea...
but i went anyway...
i knew i would come across (i need the German in
naming this noun compound, i.e. state of being)
nebeldenken: fog thinking... nebligdenken:
foggy thinking...
and oddly enough... or rather: hardly oddly... i did...
foggy thinking is what some "experts" would enter
the scene and prescribe a man some chemical solutions
concerning a man's phallus not working...
well... rising... and only lasting for a few minutes...
i don't call it an erectile dysfunction...
it's more complicated than that...
******* oversimplified ***... oversimplified and
made it crude and rude...
i sometimes watch some vintage Italian movies
that would have been broadcast in erotica cinemas...
my god... back then people used to be so classy when
it came to ***... and gentler... none of this modern
trash... yeah... modern ******* is trash...
it feels infiltrated by homosexual acceptance...
         too much **** and not enough sensual *******...
on both sides of the *** "debate"...
i'm so happy that no one has asked me to penetrate
them anally... either man or woman...
because, honestly? if i think about the joys of having
a fire-******* from sitting on the toilet oozing out
durchfall... thoughts of waterfalls... everything coming
out: but certainly nothing going in...
(and the German spelling is easier...
that H-surd is awfully off-putting in the English spelling)

****: that Black Sabbath song Solitude wasn't on
Vol 4 but on Master of Reality... d'uh!

i should have waited for some other day...
i get paid on the 1st of each month and thanks to ol' Lizzie
dying... i'm looking at a "spontaneous" extra
£500 to boot... thank you Lizzie...
i know there was the whole black armband affair
and what not... but this time round i was thinking
about the money: although i love crowd-control,
esp. if i'm a supervisor and i have at least 4 licensed
security guards under my control and 5 unlicensed
stewards and a TfL worker from the tube station
and some police officers to manage the crowd...
i have to admit: Wednesday 14th was a ****-show
on Villiers St... people were so ******* annoying
that Charing Cross St. put in place what they use
during New Year's Eve... not straight down Villiers St.
but up to Adam St and full circle:
half the crowd heading to the Embankment St.
half to Charing Cross... thankfully i only had one
guy jump the barriers... a complete ****-show:
the wrong B plan... thankfully... come the actually
event of the state funeral...
       19th of September went: think of a warm slice
of toast and some butter... think of silk...
the two teams of my fellow supervisors in that one-way
traffic system only had one burst of people...
about 40 of them... they did **** all throughout the whole
day... i managed all the traffic... it was splendid...
basically: 40+ people were not needed...
i supervised the whole affair of people getting home
safely with... about 10 people: that's me included...
and a few barriers...

oh to hell with being felt loved by a woman!
there's no greater curse on a man than a woman's love...
puppy love... yuck...
a man needs to feel useful! used!
useful! a man needs to feed off and feed responsibility:
authority... man thrives on competence...
not complacence...
a woman's love is no more for me that me
adoring the first bloom of Magnolia come the earliest
telltale signs of Spring...
a woman's love is sickly-sweet... it wears a Thespian's
mask and with that comes the whole entourage of
disappoints and hell's furies...
i would swap a woman's love for a cat's love
every single time...
just like the story of Esau and Jacob...
a bowl of porridge chosen by Esau instead of a birthright...
then again: them two being twins...
is a woman's love for a man a bowl of lentils
or is it a birthright? from what i've heard and seen:
men are not given a birthright to be loved by a woman...
a woman is very much Esau's choice:
i'll take the broth... have my tummy full...
instead of striving for the role of patriarch...
i don't believe in the love of women:
i do believe in a love for women...
like i believe there isn't a vegetarian diet and the like...
there is only the seasonal diet...
fruits during summer... vegetables in the wintry months...
like the elders used to eat...
but love from a woman is a curse, not a blessing...
it's a jealous irrational love... it's Pandora's quest for:
suppose woman were to be endowed with a Faustian
thirst for knowledge... Pandora is the antithesis of Faust...
a Faustian curiosity is not akin to Pandora's curiosity...

i knew it was going to be a bad idea to go the brothel...
everything was wrong (but believe me....
that evened out sooner rather than later)...
usually i need to be a complete donkey of exhaustion
having finished a 12 hour shift before i can stomach
more physical strain of pleasing a woman...
i know my body better than i know my self...
i do know my reflexive: myself...
but the reflective: my self is still an ongoing project...
it all depends on how my thinking mingles
with that fickle creature of memory...
let's face it: who chooses what you can and cannot
remember? i don't mean that erosive substance
we are all subjected to via pedagogy, i.e. schooling:
whether it be 2 + 2 = 4 or a, b, c, d, e, f, g...
or the Battle of Hastings, the year 1066...

what man in his right mind would be appeased by
monogamy, that sacred egalitarian model conjured
up by man for fellow man,
so that all might have their fill, where is it now?!
there are no traces of it... the same men than conjured
up this model have passed away and gave
any if not all authority to the whims of women!
now? women are toying with the affairs of what
was once a noble admiration for the spectacular
consistency of swans...
so we've been told: don't admire the swans...
don't look up at swans: look down on monkey!
for me there are only two basic maxims that can
be extracted from Darwinism:

a. nature abhors a vacuum...
b. everything is useful / used...

nature doesn't provide either excess or a less...
well... it does: those 7 lean years
and those 7 years of excess... but nature is no mother...
it's not feminine: nature is asexual in that
it's an equilibrium... (7/7? Joseph's interpretation
of the Pharaoh's dream)...

i know my body: i will never know my self
in so far as i also know myself...

mein gott! it's only half past ten and i'll be finished
by around 12am... i'll have at least half an hour
of enjoying drinking and listening to music
and i'll switch off my workaholic-alcoholic
modus operandi and just drink and smoke and think
about having ***...

i knew it was a bad idea... i started drinking too early:
i was rested...
the bladder was going to be a massive obstacle...
a full bladder and an ******* are always in conflict...
i should know: ******* with my still intact
******* is a bit like a woman *******
using a shower head to trickle-up-a-tease of water
into her ******* regions... i still don't understand
why non-Jews are circumcised in North America:
it's barbarism... MGM...
male genital mutilation: a sword has a sheath...
that sheath is used for *******...
you take the sword out of its sheath... i.e. you pull
the ******* back... hey presto!
you're circumcised: no need for a kippah...
or a monk's tonsure... or for that matter...
a promise from a woman with her ******* NIQAB...
that should be white in colour... at least!
and be made from linen! breathable material...
"breathable": material that might allow air through...

i don't care if they keep wearing those
NINJA-PARACHUTES (better than Boris calling
them postbox attire)... right now girls in Iran
as shaving their heads and growing moustaches...
something is clearly up in the world of Islam...
like i mentioned already... i need a second schism in Islam...
i need it to happen in the Turkish "quarter"...
how else to fight all the prior years of terrorism?
attack Islam with ideas of reform...
that's the only attack... oh two-*****-shaken
while dropped into a ******* Mojito...
sure... a **** that gives off whiffs of mint-scentedness
is fair enough by me... but you're not going
to deter ZEE MUZLIMS by going after the Hydra
of chopping one head and waiting for another to sprout!
you go to the source!
you try to improve on: "PBUM" Muhammad's first try...
revision: not revolution... Islam can be revised...
but not with the Saudis and the ******* Pakistanis...
you aim for the fringes... the cosmopolitan Islam
with a richer past than the one dictated by
the conquests of the Arabs...
Turks are a fine example... the Persians another...
****'ite Islam allows for more... ah crap...
too many vowels... i always have a problem spelling this word:
just like the Anglo-Sphere speaks of ****** words
having too many consonants the same is true for
this word: too many vowels... i'm not even going
to try... i'll "cheat", use a search engine...
man-u-vre-ah-bi-lity...
                        maneuve­rability! ah... that's the one!

on a side note...
    it's true what "they" say...
bragging rights... and consistency...
some people amass a great following...
a great following breeds many comments...
i'm pretty sure that's an indicator of low quality content...
why is it low quality content?
it amasses many comments...
me? i don't have a fervent crowd... neither did
Pythagoras or Hey-Zeus... what could 13 men do
in order for a sight like that of St. Paul's Cathedral
take? competence? fervor? determination?
certainly not mediocracy...
                i still don't understand the Pythagorean
fetish for beans... high fibre high protein...
i mean... can you imagine to sit through one of his
TRIANGLE LECTURES having to stay silent,
but unable: filled with the dread of irritable bowel movements
(due to the fibre) trying to keep in a **** / farts?!
i like my audience, they must like me...
since... they hardly ever bother me...
and as long as i spew regular material...
i might as well leave a disclaimer:
hey bro! her sis! buy a book! try getting to the author
directly! you think that writing a comment
on a copy of a book you just bought
will help?
   not since the advent of the printing press has
there been a chance for the atomised man to bypass
certain restrictions... back then it was the Churches
and the solo-book project for the illiterate man...
now? editors of printing houses have: **** all on me...
i'm bypassing them... i'm not looking at the sales:
i'm looking for hungry minds... curious / sceptical
minds... why would i think, ****: dare me "think" about
this prospect of waiting for some acceptance of an editor
of low or no TASTE?! ha ha... ah ha ha!

i love nights like this... you get caught up in many surprises:
on the one hand by your own mind,
but at times by nature itself: it has "suddenly"
started trickling the most gentle rain...
if there could be a rain song: a most soothing song
of praise for the night... rain always makes more sense
during the night than during the day...
just as the horror movie genre:
the horror movie genre abused the night...
a proper horror movie?
oh... it happens during the daytime...
   Carnage Park (2016): please don't disturb the night
with all of night's allure... people are sleeping,
foxes are roaming: shh!
sha shtil, makh nit keyn gerider
der rebe geyt shoyn tantsn vider...

**** me: so much already written and i'm yet to make
my most truthful testimony!
release me! make me make it! i'll give you all
the oaths and still not utter your name!
lodge me between the combat between
King David and King Solomon...
i would gladly pay to see that combat of cognitive
ability!
each and every man will sing a psalm...
but live up to the wise expectations of what a king
observes?! and make them categorical imperatives
like a shopping list for turnips and carrots?
hardly any...
thank god i'm not a lyricist...
i prefer words to be dealt with in the medium
of the digestive process of thought:
than a life-experience enacting:
let's face it... most: if not some... of these supposed
"wisdoms" are false by the nature of the person
uttering them...
a king's choosiest appetites
are not on a pauper's menu...
back in Victorian times oysters used to be the food
of / for the poor... look how oysters have
been elevated...
but oysters are not my Aphrodisiac... nor is chocolate...
physical exertion is... as is tiredness...
as is cider... as is tobacco... as is a little glug glug
of whiskey...

i think long gone are the days of keeping aa woman's
integrity in place for curbing a man's desires
and unfiltered "having"...

i think i'm reaching some variation of a crescendo...
i must be... if i switched "moods" with my song of choice...

i didn't go to the brothel to punish Khedra...
she promised me a one night SPECTACULAR...
i didn't get it...
i was simply lashing out against her to
disappointing me...
i was like: weren't you supposed to spend
this night with me?
her "best" excuse was: the brothel was missing
women....
right... fair enough...
E-NUFF... don't ask me how English language:
that globalist witch of a tongue works:
of all the Empires in the world...
only two imploded: the English Imperium
and the Soviet... the latter... less gradually
than the formerly...
you do know that there were plenty of peoples
living in between the Germans and the Russians
on the "event horizon" of the geographic "debate"...
i was forever CYNICAL about
a story akin to the "****** birth":
let's just pretend fostering a ******* was
much less an adventurous route for a woman to
keep...
ugh! you peoples keep too many vowel en-routes!
too many vowels!
no wonder your people are still scribbling
graffiti on brick walls:
you are half-literate!

      insult me: expect an insult back!
what's that "*******" in Shakesperean?
you bite your thumb at me, sir?
what does it look like?
if you have a rabbit's worth of front teeth on the ready...
you lodge them between the fingernail
of the thumb and the thumb itself...
then you pretend you bite down...
while flicking your thumb forward...
until you hear a "click"...
yes... i am biting my "thumb down" on you sir....
the mediocracy of lost expectations...

oh, but the event? i knew i shouldn't have...
i was drinking too much before it even started...
12 hour shift... one bottle of cider... a walkabout...
a glug or two of either whiskey or brandy...
i'm dehydrated enough to have my ****
lubricated by the glorious spat-spit-on of a woman's
mouth...
i was going to be deflated balloon of a man
tonight... i'd get a ****-blocker...
given my adventures with Khedra if i didn't
chose her...

prior to i was wandering trying to empty my vowels...
sorry... my bowels...
it's always that affair with the little *****...
ugh... i'm nervous... i know she's nervous...
cider... moon.... cigarettes...
the echo of footsteps...
but i drank too much...
i was out of place to perform....
i stumbled across two Pakistanis smoking marijuana...
walked past them... walked back...
i implored them: who's your seller?
they wouldn't disclose... can i try some?
more than willing: it's good to make "friends" in the night...
i took one ****... i told them: don't worry...
i'm not some undercover copper...
i did hope they might think i'm some MAFIA
quality-tester...
that my role was aligned to the MAFIA:
walking around testing the stuff being sold...
like i told them... 10 years ago...
these Vietnamese punks were selling the herb
lined with fibreglass!

i told them: make sure you get your "herb" from an Afghan...
i took one poke at the joint to see if it was
alright... they offered to give me the whole "thing"
up... i was like... n'ah mate...
i just want to **** on the quality:
nothing has changed since my marijuana-psychosis
over 10 years ago... it was still the same concentrated
potency... it made me caffeine high for a while
from an alcohol stupor... but nothing
per usual transcendental magnimonity...
basically ****: basically trying to sniff wet toilet paper
crap of "green"...
regurgitating snot...
mind you... they were playing pirates...
with a green light that might blind airline pilots....
as you do... smoking the herb and not thinking much...

but i wasn't an undercover police officer testing them...
i was a quality surveyor of what's being sold...
high minds think high "things"...

oh, but once in the brothel? i knew i was walking with
a limp ****! i knew that once i showered her
gifts of lingerie i'd ha ve a ****-blocker in place!
hey presto! a ****-blocker!

imagine sitting opposite three women.....
funny "thing"... being:
YOU ****** ALL THREE OF THEM...
now... CHOOOSE A "FAVOURITE"...
pardon the Judgement if Paris!
me in a brothel:
of all the women...
among the ****** it is the hardest to chose from!

i didn't terribly punish her...
not by whip or a scalding tongue...
i love her...
chocolate.... i hate chocolate....
by this brazen tinge of brown...

choke on TATE- CHICKEN
Britain my LAST ***...
with the Lilies dies my bride...
             aren't we equal to serve the crown
she was such a beautiful *** to ****,,,
lest we don't remember...
she was a granny "second to last"...
first... first comes the state...
somehow the latter affairs of  familial ties.

- imagine... sitting across a room with three women
you already ******...
choose! huh?!
choose! you have but one favorite....
and two "left-behinds"....

leave a woman sweating all over her body...
sweating...
pass on a *******...
three women: all of whom you ******...
choose...
sweat all over her body:
her pretending to ride
you on the corner of the bed... OTT...

but there's also something equally satisfying...
it's only shared between men...
working with Emmie at the Ice Rink...
i'd say we're on par... looks wise, dimension wise...
she must be a stunning 5ft11
me being a 6ft2 220pounder
and she too is a... HEALTHY specimen...
she's not obese or anything... she just reminds me
of Alison Taylor... she's a big girl for a big... boy...
i have to admit... i couldn't stop eyeing her up...
and i'm guessing these two guys i know: knew: know...
whatever... started chatting with me...
but kept on looking at Emmie as if we weren't
simply working together: but we were dating...
there was no jealousy in their eyes
there was more... a natural state of affairs...
they gave off vibes akin to: wow! nature has balanced
itself out! this guy has found someone compatible
with him!...

**** me... she's already updated her profile picture
on WhatsApp like 3 times already...
fickle creature that's memory: snd finicker creature
that's woman to boot!

she's a gorgeous Dagenham exemplification of
what an English girl ought to be...

then again: Marie... sure limp **** and all...
but i only had a limp biscuit of a hard-on after i refused
Khedra a bedding... well: i thought i was punishing
her for refusing my Spartan night of frolicking...
instead... i switched off when she brought in
a random punter into the room next to us...
in the way she started "moaning" i knew she wasn't
getting her usual pleasures...
that's when i switched off, shut down...
Marie had already dimmed the lights so **** low
she even called it a phantom illumination...
that's the first time i rekindled the time i slept
with that Spanish wild-one Tamara...
all that cocoon *** steaming under the bedsheets
afraid of beauty and nakedness:
her living arrangements didn't help either...
i was turned off by her living with three homosexuals...

there are only two ways a woman can get
bad dating advice:
1. from other women...
2. from homosexuals...
mind you, i have nothing against buggery...
i've kissed several men in my passing this mortal
wound of flesh... tonguing etc.
but...

we weren't actually engaged in much backwards
and forwards piston action's worth of
lubrication... i was sitting on the edge of the bed
and i just tucked her in into my arm's girth...

i just chose the right sort of music...
OTT... Jack's Cheese and Bread Snack...
bingo! i was caressing her thoroughly... inner thighs...
outer thigs... tickling behind the ears...
kissing the back of her neck... biting her shoulders...
massaging her *******... esp. around the *******...
poking and pinching her *******...
waiting for them to become *****... plagiarising
her hands... horribly since they were three-quarters
of my size... detailing the curvatures of both
knees and elbows...
      i knew she was nervous... she was like a tiny little
mouse unable to contract pleasure vocally...
with onomatopoeias...
a nervous giggle... here and there...
plus she had to sniff a line of ******* and down
a shot of ***** to get over her inhibitions....
the dimmed lights... which: to be honest...
exfoliated her nakedness into a lily's tease of attempted
suicide...
oh **** me... my father bought some lilies for
my mother the other day...
to the agony of her discomfort...
that's when i decided: they die... which they will...
and seeing them as they are...
they'll stage me a Philip contra Elizabeth timeline...
if one goes... the other will soon follow...

how will i dictate my fate against fate itself?
well... i won't to a Curt Kobain shotgun stunt...
i'll but loads and loads of lilies...
i'll shut the windows and the doors...
insulate myself in a limited amount of oxygen...
place the lilies near me...
loads and loads of lilies...
i'll smoke some marijuana... i'll drink plenty
of whiskey... and then... i'll... i'll fall asleep...
and never wake up! hey presto! problem solved!
mortality best cared for!

i still can't forget how she sweat all over...
she even asked me: am i hot or is it hot in here?
i replied: no... it's only you...
even with a limp ******* **** i could make a woman
sweat from all her pores...
that's almost better than giving a woman
an ******... that's me and that itchy-numbing
on my fingertips whenever i shared my property
with neighbours letting them play my Nintendo...
itchy-numbing of the fingertips... itchy-*******-numbing!

come to think of it... if i'm serious about becoming
a teacher... this was by far the best way to start:
crowd-control, public security...
if i can deal with a bunch of drunk RETARDS
then i could harness the same sense of authority
over children... better still: i have an inquisitive mind...
i'd just be doubly inquisitive about them
being either not inquisitive or stale...

maybe that'a why i enjoy PAREIDOLIA so much...
esp. come the night and the moon
and the clouds... i revel in this "****"...
perhaps that's why i abhor crossword puzzles
and that's the reason why i write with wry intent
on morphing nouns into misnomers...
i'll deliberately call a table a chair and a chair a table...
for gimmicks' sake to craft an antithesis
of Descartes sitting at his desk
pretending not to do some telepathy...

Herr ******* Cogito... Zbigniew Herbert to boot!
i drink because i'm enough of sound mind
and have tasted insanity to know:
when the great wrath of the godly wind comes:
you just **** back...
****: that's a cunning word in my mother tongue:
it's not burping via your ****...
it actually means: LUCK... you have ****...
you have luck...

Jack's Cheese and Bread Snack...
and how she insinuated ***... sweating... sweating
through all her pores...
i'm ******* losing my mind all over again:
but at least this time round it's not to something
abstract: a priori... this is all a posteriori
fervour...
i've been here before...
   i'm sure of it...
the mammal that came from an amphibian form
to this gesticulating skeleton...
i admired forg: ha ha... frog tadpoles...
their wriggling ways gave me insight into
how my handwriting would turn out...

like my grandfather said: chicken-scratching...
i'd tatoo his words onto my body if i had
the audacity to give sacrilege of body
as a gift to the gods...

how she sweated... my god... i've seen plenty
of *******... but none of the flicks compared
to that, THAT experience...
******* is ****... *** is too personal to be
exploited in such a way as to turn man
into thinking he's a ******* Duracell Bunny...
switch on... switch off...
you need to be in a "mood" to get a hard-on...
and just as quickly you can turn-off...

i know why i turned off...
but i also turned on a second gear...
i turned off because i declined Khedra...
and i turned off because i heard Khedra in the next
room not being pleasured in the way i would
have pleasured her...
and this... and that... and the "other"...
plus she's a petite creature and i wanted
to feel someone compatible to: my, SIZE...
i wanted a big girl with big floral patterns of *******
that i could massage...
i gave away my hands for her sweating
all over her body doing the bare minimum
of listening to the song of my choosing...
as we shared a cigarette...
as i kneeled before her...
because... let's face it...
i'll **** on the cross before i kneel before it...
it's the antithesis of the inborn ontology of man...
the first anti-Christian lesson i taught myself?
the cheek "thing"... reek!
someone slaps you? you slap them back!

ROSJA SIĘ MOBILIZUJE: JAM ZA!
and so they should be...
this infernal cognitive-parasite "creature" of western
conjuring is not ******* welcome in either Russia
or the Orient... it's not a serpent...
it's a ******* tapeworm!

me? i'll be ******* Eastern Women till the sun
never ******* comes... Romanian,
Bulgarian, Turkish...
sure... i'll make it a personal fetish of mine
to think of any fuckable English girls...
once they're done playing victim and succumbing
to the "egalitarian anti-racism" while
getting soaked in gasoline by Pakistani ****-gangs...
maybe then...
until then... no, thank, you!

well... brutal times require brutal measures...
and a kind, heart...
a heart the size of a pebble... and just as tough...
what?! just because the VESTERN VOLD
had a hard-on while failing in both Irq... I-RAQ...
Afgantisan... lobbied the indefinite migration
via the collapse of Libya... that... Russia... RUSSIA!
would ******* bow down to these *******
loony tunes?!

Dear Uncle (Ras)Putin... blah blah...
France's testing of their nukes in the Polynesia...
GOD-ZILLA!
   GOD... ZILLA!
                    i don't care whether or not i'm on
the right side of history: sure as **** i'm on the right
side of *******... and i like to ****:
which is why i'm not a train-spotter or a stamp-collector...
or someone who dabbles in LEGO and putting
together a replica of Optimus Prime...
just give me **** and i'll be happy-camper like
it might be a bowel of oysters...
oysters... mmm hmmm... oysters & ****...
i love oysters... i love ****...
i love naked sweating bodies...

i love the smell of hair... esp. unwashed hair...
it's so solipsistic... like farting in a crowded space...
the taste of keratin borrowed from biting nails...

you that feeling when you smell: weakness?!
i'm guessing the Islamists have had enough scent of it...
they figured out: what's the point?!
they're already implosive... they'll destroy themselves...
there's absolutely no need to attack them...
Muhammad asked Ahmed:
want to throw this tennis ball against a brick wall?
i throw, you catch... you throw... i catch...
how's that? Ahmed replied to Muhammad...
sounds... dandy... let's play.

because, that's, what, it, *******, is...
all that's "western" is RIPE for the taking...
i won't even blink when i see it desecrated...
i'll be the Poet of the Coliseum...
watching it all unfold...
i mean: i was scolded for not being confident in my
youth... now that i've aged:
oh... lucky me... guess who's also lacking
in confidence... all of the women...
will i go out of my way to try and...
no no... i don't have a car... i don't have a fixed hour
paid work contract... i don't have a house...
no no no, no no no, no... exactly!
so if i don't have x, y & z... why bother?

to the promised land of the brothel!
and even there, there are some without the slightest dignity
of being pleasured: of having confidence...
but... i've already paid: so i can work with that...
i'll gladly unravel those timid beauties into
******* floral killers of a Lily!

oh well... c'est la vie... comme ci comme ça...
some people learn to live with
a ******* hernia... or athritis...
i can live with this... i know why i'm single...
most women could not handle me...
actually: i don't think even my mother believes
she can handle me... i know why i'm single...
i'm the selfless ****-wit that wants
too many women... and occasionally... on a sly...
a man... i can live with that...
sure... from time to time i reopen an old wound
from my teenage days or romanticism and idealism...
oh! wouldn't it be great! to have a sole woman for one's
"solipsism" to destroy?! yeah...
that would be grand!                          in theory.

dearest mistress of memory: leave me be!
stop youe hanging around: let me get on with my life!
just you and only you... one faceless woman
after another...
i have plenty! i have about at least 10 on the go...
i'm deciding which one is warmer than
the others... and which is more jelous than the other...
i'll talk to one... i'll tease another...
i'll **** the third proper silly...
i'll settle for the one with the child
to not think of womanhood to begin with:
rather than behind...

i still can't escape the feeling of gratification
making her sweat all over her body by simply
having learned the geography of a woman's body...
made of ice: apparently...
mein gott... what a wonder to behold...
in my hands oranges... in her hands watermelons...
a spider of a hand crawling atop another spider
of a hand that was hers...
such tender aspects of the FLESH...
like stripped culminations of the pig rediscovered
on a woman's body...
i forgot who i was...
a butcher?! a sadist?! a wizard?!
i must have exemplified myself as "someone"
if she still felt nervous
after snorting a line of ******* and downing
a decent glug of *****... pretending to laugh: nervously...

i should have been told much earlier on
that most women have a very limited sense of self and space...
for that natter time too:
most women have zero to no self-esteem...
if you asked a 20 year old me what the "problem" was...
i'd tell you: oh! all these girls! hive minded high-brow
they're pompous *******... finicky...
walking a a pair of ******* on a leash without either ****
or dog!
but now?! mein gott!
strange... how things change...
they are so... limited...
they have become so timid... so... fresh...
they're the fresh flesh on a leash...
and still: they don't think they are...
i don't like suspect packages....
these women aren't...

i don't want to end writing this poem...
today is the 23rd... i get paid on the 1st...
i'm already practicing my plumbing with take-two!
take-three! sessions of a hard-on...
lucky a man with very little hobbies...
all i think about it *******...
even ******* turns me off: finally!
it's unrealistic! far from ever it being so...

the mind sometimes overpowers
the body in the same way that the body sometimes
overpowers the mind...
i switched off... this time round...
but it's hard... you sit down in the ante-chamber
with three women...
problem being: YOU ****** ALL THREE OF THEM...
and there's one favourite among them...
she promised you a Spartan Cohort Night with her...
so you try to punish her:
by NOT picking her...
well... that will never go down well...
since she already allowed no ****** usage...

maybe i should think about... building a play-toy-thing
train-set or... **** knows what...
i just love women too much...
i love seeing how many mistakes they make...
i'm not saying i'm perfect...
but it's  gleeful pleasure seeing a woman
make a mistake... it's a bit like... seeing yourself
being born...

upon the great ***** of time...
   a figment of your own imagining... neither conjured
up by the mere spontaneity of thought...
hardly an affair of imagining(s)...
never mind the byproduct of memorising
one iota's worth of: iota, omicron, tau, alpha...
by the dim blue glare of the iris...
no... my iris are greeeen...

each and every day the everyday happens
and i feel obliged to borrow
all the necessary talents from the Thespians...
i am "i"...
                there is still massive heed of the grand
moving parts... some stall... some arrive with
no conscience with gravity's whim...
who, are, you? peering into my disclosures?!
my soliloquy supposing
the dead have no ears?!

  have no stomach the food to digest?!
a truly be-spotten sort of: awaiting feed...
time for the freezing of the tides...
liberate the Arab from his self-induced
indulgence!
fancies of fanaticism....
              of worded "things" worth "digestion"...
a tongue of youth
as precursor for the unfathomable futures
to come! old men have: not dictate
in my life! they reek of stinking socks
not since the times when old men claimed a superior
notion among the the youth...
i have nothing! nothing! to learn from the people
i should be learning from!

old men die... that's what they were
supposed to do in the first place...
old... men... die...
i too will die... but not before them!
but at least they could have ushered in a few
decent maxims... instead?!
instead?! i have no maxim conjurers!

these pandered to old FOOLS!
i sometimes wish i were a cannibal!
then again: the prospect of eating these
"leather chairs" is pristinely:
disgusting!

                        i am: ******* livid: i am abhor!
ABHOR!
                 i will shout that word...
**** it.... no mountain near me...
i will, climb, up... a ******* hill..
and extend my tongue and mouth into a shout
and i will clarify: I ABHOR!
best we burry you *******...
you think... us... youth...
will sit back while, you had all your, fun?

it's only one coin-flip away...
i want my fun too!
you're going to tell me, no?!
are you going to tell me, no?!
you... frail... old... man?!
you're going to tell me, no?!
what did you tell your elders?!
the same **** i'm telling you?!

ooh... what a telling!
i'm 36 years old... i'm going to have all
the prostitutes in the world and more!
i've, had, enough!
no! i haven't! had! enough!
i need... more!
i need more!
        i'm going to create the reality
that Darwinism subscribed to!
                         i want, more!

i'm hungry... i'm vengeful...
i'm... oopsy-turvy... i'm...
baron of Emeralds... green Irises...
                
just like the prostitutes suggested: why are you
looking at me with so much ferocity,
with so much intent?!
why?! i'm eating your soul...
******* it out from your eyes...
you, are, mine!
the eyes disappear when the eyes roll back
into a canvas of sclera...
but not until then...

why am i so intent on peering into your self?
if it bothers you so much:
why, why... why don't you close them?!
are you afraid of being unable to see what's
worth being seen?!
tender doe... why... why... oh why so...
scared? life didn't get back to you with
its revisions of adequacy?!
too bad... maybe next time.

finish this, Matthew, finish this!
yes: we know already...
you had trouble keeping up a hard-on because
you thought you would be punishing
a ******* who's wild idea
of inviting you back to her home for free
*** backfired: as you know it would...
****-locked after you chose another
and then broke down limp
       hearing her walk into the next room with
another man and not hearing the sort
of moans you heard when she was with you...

i can't forget the dimmed lights...
contorts... archaic precusor-Cubism...
   the body sweating all other without much exertion
being applied...
if only the moon could drool moonlight
like a dog in Pavlov's experiment might drool
for the reply to a ringing of a bell...
my hands turned into spiders...
my hands turned into eyes...
but i wasn't angry or ashamed at my predicment
of under-performing...
if she was sweating all over her body
and i wasn't impaling her bur rather caressing her...
*** is... complicated...
it's not even close to the pornographic depictions...
i switched from a performance artists
to looking for something deeper...
a bit like...
well... what's within wheat?
   the category of carhohydrates... fibre...
it's the same with ***...
                                simply squeezing juice from a lemon
is not even about the point of squeezing
or the lemon...
    sometimes lethargy kicks in when you're trying
to switch ****** partners...
esp. difficult if you already have three sitting opposite
you whom you all have bedded...

Monday... i'm going to have to revise my liquid intake...
i already know that it requires me to juice up
with one strong cider... and drink some whiskey
on the side...
while kneeling before her naked body...
or sharing her cigarette...
then again: maybe her nervousness made me nervous...
after all: she had to snort a line of *******...
she had to drink half a cup of *****...
and still that nervous laugh as if Khedra was going
to **** her...
i have recently found that women are...
terribly nervous...
it's so unforgiving to find oneself in the company of a nervous
woman...
then again: maybe this should be a thrill for me?
oh, Marie is going to take me a while
to unravel... she's too petrified for any penetrative
***... she's pretty content with performing
only oral ***...
    i wonder... why...
  she's the first girl who wants to do it completely in the dark...
she feels insecure or rather: wounded...

whatever the reasons are...
    this tiny: heaviest of hearts i frown at and with.

p.s. 4/4

e|-------------------------------------------------12---
B|---­------------3--------------------------------12---
G|---------3--­---------5----- 2h3h2-----------12---
D|----5------------------------------------­3-----------
A|--------------------------------------------------­-----
E|-------------------------------------------------------

­and then my usual blues...

I am spatial, /
I understand, /
I fathom, /
Through distance, space, & time, /
I see clearly, pristinely through you & I. /

'Do not forsake me, /
I am everywhere,' /
He says to me, /
And I unfalteringly, /
Unwaveringly, I believe /

In Him, are treasures: /
The opulence, /
The affluence, the direction, /
Of one-million /
Guiding stars. /

You are a sign, /
A beacon of hope to the lightbearers; furthermore, /
A portent, /
Ominous, pernicious, /
To the Cimmerian shadow. /

I know you /
You, /
I love /
You, /
For that I am grateful. /

What is love? /
An existential vagary? /
Perhaps not. /
It is real, it is tangible, /
When He is in my arms. /

Mi amour, /
Mi amour, /
Mi amour, /
Mi amour, /
Me encanta, mi amour. /

i've always been tempted with the monastery... ever since visiting the Taizé community... then again: always concerning somewhere prior... the monastery where mummified remains of monks who died from cholera were exhibited... revising my romance with the Teutonic knights... the northern crusades... oh that the world has so much to offer... but i'm a terrible actor... and... if you're a terrible actor... and more... the worst imaginable liar... drama and life... don't exactly... mingle well... let the people have their sway and their freedom(s)... let them become... gluttonous with their desires and their thirst for the "lived experience"... let them abandon all manner of thought with purpose of transcending the ought-i-ought-i-not narratives... please let them... scramble for memory when it suddenly evaporates and there's that escapist tactic focusing on imaginings... don't let me use a language teasing moral overtones... let people... this... glistening prospect of... the ******* riddle with a fiddle... but... let these same people allow me to return to my abode of placebo solipsism... of where i put my finger for prospect of accountability... lavo manibus meum (vide cor meum)... but sure as ****... no mea culpa...

while doing some household chores...
a thought: one after another...
all deviation from ought-i
     ought-i-not(?)

            do i despise my own fellow countrymen?
the question posed by
those on the right regarding the politics
of the left...
um manibus
among the English and the Irish of
beyond merely the east end of London:
past the A406... once upon a time...
a space occupied by... mostly Irish
and 'ebrews...

3 years among the Scots...
but always, somehow... withdrawing from
contact with fellow Polacks...
out of spite?
or completely willing to integrate
to the point of "incognito"...
nothing good ever happened when
Polacks congregated on foreign soil...
let alone in Poland itself...
well... once upon a time...

     always among foreigners...
                   one Somali two Ethiopian
three a party with a Pakistani...
citizen of the world...
it's not even an original take on...
ancient Greek cosmopolitanism...
or the city-state...
beyond which: feral creatures roam...
****** jokes...

but i've been living in this cauldron for so
long that... upon returning to...
via commuting through Warsaw...
a great... nausea... a feeling of debilitating unease
of being thrown back into
a homogenous blob of sinew and sweat...
as if given marching orders...

that i speak more of the native than write it...
well... if i had a keyboard
that allowed me to shortcut all the relevant
diacritical marks...
e.g. miód & miot...

    honey...        litter: i.e. what a ***** gives
birth to... puppies...
of course the D & T can be sometimes
conflated depending on how they're / how they're
not stressed...

citing oath words like a cobbler...
****'s sake with Charlie Dickens and his
"orthography"...
what "orthography" in the English zung(é)?
there are no diacritical markers...
two options: "too many" vowels...
or... just an extra consonant...

litter... bitter... bite down on something: lite...
then again... third option...
plenty of surds...      light... no?
those are the three most poignant
characteristics of the tongue...

onomatopoeia: not an english word...
could.... would... gargantuan...
"too many" vowels... sometimes the odd extra
consonant in the vein of:
litter: literally... a manner of distinction
between: manna and mana (maori mana)...

and what appears to be... beyond a mere surd...
that vowel catcher that's H
that's half of the 'ebrew deity's name...
or a rugby post...

say AH... a request in dentistry...
or cite the alphabet: A: aye... A: aye...
    E:                eh?!
                    shotgun language shrapnel...
but to call anything orthographic in English...
or just plain: mistake...

e.g. miód "vs." miud...
                 hell... let's stretch it: mjud...
or even further... since... mjɵd...
no... this is not me attempting: smarter than you...
it's a ******* headache, while we're at it...
i'm thinking about this
because no one is thinking about this
and like hell these 26 pearls and a slug
of a tongue will ever manage to decipher, proper(ly)
the sound of a croaking crow...
at best... an approximation...

               where language goes to die...
in the beak of birds...
when in England: always the romance with
crows...
in Poland? it's either the romance with storks
or sparrows...

oh god... taking to grooming cats...
cutting the nails... brushing their hind...
one male one female maine ****...
i'm not into many fetishes apart from...
attempting to speak english grammar: german...
shoot me... before i speak a word of russia...

harasho?

         grooming a female cat and she's all
geared up... raising her hind legs...
*****... i'm here to comb you and cut your nails...
a ******* ugly scene: pinning her down...

then of course making the most sublime
tomato soup...
obviously adding parsley root...
a carrot... some leak, some celery...
if a celeriac was available...
two stock cubes... one chicken... the other vegetable...
approx. 250g of butter...
two cans of plum tomatoes...
a drizzle of ketchup... tomato purée...
a squeeze of sriracha... a whittle red chilli...
blitzed up and most certainly pushed
through a sieve...
served with some sour cream and...
as with any decent soup... that's not...
******* creamy-thick-splodge-custard-goo...
just eager for some croutons...
some vermicelli...

       but that... surprise of... some brandy
and zero sugar dr. pepper...
now i'm paying... bloated...
i drank two bottles of beer
puked one out...
ol' jack had to save my indigestion...
it's always a bad idea to eat and drink...
or drink prior to eating...
fine if you're drinking afterwards...
excesses of drinking and eating don't mix...

hardly a perverted stance...
but when a she-cat is gearing herself up to
you about to **** her...
while combing her and cutting her nails...
oh sure... on a regular Sunday
i **** headless chickens
with that pencil-**** of mine...
point of hilarity...

     and all "they" have is... egoism... attached to
an oversized phallus...
i'm guessing the sort that women use to
ready themselves for childbirth...
piston pump kicks...
once a tool: always a tool...
even the ancient Greeks minded the thought:
a large phallus is a sign of barbarism...
here you have... attempts at ennobling
savagery... while at the same time...
savaging  the citizenry...

    perfect combination, n'est c'est pas?
what could possibly be wrong with undertaking
the cesarean section?
if i were to **** out a head of a hippo...
and someone suggested... we might have to...
give your ****... some "exfoliation" revision, ahem..
details...
oh **** me: sign me up for that constipation
carousel! of... i'm guessing...
sexually gratified imps...

base topic... and you know this cat is gearing up
for *******...
well... i'd love to own a dog...
but then again: i wouldn't want to own
a muzzle or a leash...
the depictions of Hades and Cerberus...
no muzzle... no leash...
which is why i prefer cats...
that i was raised in an environment of dog ownership...
ah... Bella... that half-breed of an Alsatian...
Axel the dobberman...

no siblings...
     but to "own", sorry... to be with a woman?
and... all that... headache...
the game of jealousy...
i don't want to play it! sooner you find me
knitting socks as evidence that i have
**** instead of a protruding chimney
someone else started calling: whittle Wichard...
Ar Ar Arable land of lost phrases...

a dog's love is unconditional...
hence my revision of that celestial harem
promised to the invigorators of Islam...
give me 72 rottweilers...
i swear to god and no god...
we're dealing with fantasy land "details"...
or if you're going to stretch that fantasy
furthest... 72 of the most inexperienced... Lo...
    Lo               - but that's supposedly
the original promise... and you wonder why...
a ******* with only one woman
feels pointless...
why? well... there's that one unused crux
of a potential event...

      if i conjured up these parameters of belief...
guilty as charged...
but given that i'm only regurgitating these
pillars of: what amounted to the will of the idea...

- and if we still going to continue a discussion
on English... just recently... about 20 minutes ago...
FAUCI...
one commentator cited that spelling as...
FAU-SHE...
that's another thing that English does...
almost like it's... borrowing Fwench rules
of see-one-speak-another...
gobble up some suffixes... blah blah...
at worst: FOWL-KEY...
or... Cincinnati...

       oi oi: ms. cedilla!

mein gott: "they" were brought over,
probably sold by their chieftains for
(probably) being the biggest, most docile...
agreeable Nimrods of their tribe...
or weren't exactly puncture proof or quick...
oh! oh the lament of picking cotton...
so... not coalmining then?
- and for their invention of jazz...
to do away with the stiffness of Mahler...
etc. and forever celebrated for their
athleticism... although:
not their swimming...
well... you'd hardly find the 'ebrew celebrated
for this intellect... although: he probably
must be:
then again... the 'ebrew diaspora
and the Israeli... two different kettles
of about to be poached herring...

any herring that's not raw... Baltic-sushi is...
inedible... period!
so "they" weren't coalminers, yes?
no?
big ******* deal... i'm beetroot raw in
the face with blood being drained from
my tongue and fingertips!
i feel like doing some stomach crunches...
push-ups...
and it's... 20 minutes past... midnight!

misnomer-phraseology:
"hurt emotions"... completely misunderstood...
if you'd like to conceive the following argument:
i've jsut had my emotion stirred...
i have just woken up from apathy:
once i had the maxim:
apathy breeds no pathology...
it's great to feel...
to be woken up from the slumber of
objectivity and scientific rigidity... safety...
i like this... it's almost adrenaline inducing...

******-Goliath... i look at him now
like some sacred cow and think...
these petty gingerbread men managed to tame
these celebrated specimens...
and now... they have to... forget they gave us
jazz, the blues?

cuckoldry of the white girls teasing...
a few Bulgarian ****** tried the same...
telling me that black boy'os have the foetus sized
***** that might satisfy an elephant's ****...
while i have... to the dissatisfaction
of karma sutra coupling:
rabbit **** plucking petals from
a mare's ****...
because: the phallus is... important akin
to... to have ice requires freezing...
a temp. of below zero?

funny... that... looks like an ego boots from
where i'm perched...
this one *****'s surprise...
****** her and she moaned and she finished it off
with an ****** and the words:
the word... awe: but it was more of an ouch...
'it's only the second time it has happened to me'...
to my surprise...
i wasn't expecting to be a metaphor
of a Trojan cohort, either...
me and my supposedly pencil-**** with not
praise-songs...
of... readily-available: readily-pleasing...
i guess bulging on points of character...
with this other one...
kissing her eyelids...
suckling at her tears...
teasing the elbow... the knee...
the grooves of the collarbone...
her knuckles...

it's perfect... so serene when i'm paying for salt...
it's so pristinely primed to pay
for clearly-founded boundaries of:
me towing woman...

- i too have my boundaries... shifting like
tectonic pancakes...
the glorified amorality of women...
once every four years...
that's enough...
i don't need insect-esque gratifications...
there's plenty...

- which is why i adore advertisements more than
journalism per se...
let's pair them together:
advertisers and journalists...
expand... journalists are not historians...
nor... myth-crafters...
perhaps... if one might be amnesia prone...
but i love advertisers for the simple reason that:
i, don't. have... the... money... to... spend...
on... their... worthwhile...
it is worthwhile... *******...

       if you don't have the money to spend...
cue some advertisement slogan:
it's unbelievably encouraging to
continue: however the hopelessness
of bachelorhood is deemed by...
well... if a woman masturbates with the use
of a *****...
i imitate a **** with a boney hand...
and probably perform one genocide after another...

it's not like i hate Polacks...
fellow people...
i don't live among you...
and i'm not going to satisfy a diaspora "get together"...
either...
i'll take the romance of history...
some variation of journalism...
some Cornish clotted cream...
                 it's not like i had some relevancy that
might translate a point of...
because one might be from Warsaw...

and under the Nazis and the overtly ambitious
Bolsheviks...
as a ******... you think i can't brush this
Vestern... voke... brigading: "anti-fascist" *****...
ahem... aside?
you need to come full-swinging...
******* hammer & sickle...
you know... it took two superpowers,
longer... to conquer Lachistan...
than it took herr H to overpower... France...

the worst that might happen... mob rule...
i become cancelled... 2nd, 3rd... 4th time i'm so tired
of this same-old *******-riddling a **** that
i might as well attempt to rub my genitalia in
sand or... shattered glass...
no matter... no one to beg the "difference"...

the Sarmatians... no wonder i would base...
favouritism for the Shiah branch of Islam...
Iran and Islam would never pair up, proper...
after all... what excuse has a proud Iranian to do with...
a bunch of camel-jockeys?!
true religion... i'm so abounding in thanks
for seeing how early a schism took place...
thank you...

bad grammar: i'm so abounding in thanks for how early
a schism took place... see / sought what?!

i don't hate my fellow... ethnic... countrymen...
i just live among them...
and not living among them makes my
thinking: dissonant: dissociative...
i'd allow the union jack get tattooed on my ***
if i were guaranteed a *******
by some english ****...

just saying... *** isn't pwetty...
pour me a proper glug of bourbon and let's forget
the "matter" even existed...

oh i'll find: hounding reasons to keep this
language is some variation of a check...
the clarity of pronunciation....
beside the letters as surds...
and those... no entirely... used?

to love a people most foreig...
it's not like England was expected to declare war
just because... "my" country was invaded by...
two superpowers...
it's not like Brussels mud...
Polish "aviators" in dog fights over Dover...
but no... English soldier on... ****** soil...
so... so?
journalism kills of history:
day by day... each day...
give 'em enough murk and muck
enough smoke... enough mirrors...
and some bread to tow... stale...
hell... reinvent the point of the coliseum!

the modern Italians aren't the ancient Romans...
why?
the orthodox liberal: implied: satisfaction
with the word...
and the men were such grand... surrogates...
the women were allowed to be children throughout...
unaccountable...
***** bank-loads...
           avenues-for-future...
but the ancient roman men were so...
libertine...
in their take on being, the aliases of...
surrogate fathers...
when all other ancient peoples demanded...
pyramids and authentic lineages...
these people came along and...
gay giraffes...
******* gay giraffes...
o.k. gay giraffes...
                  
ancient Rome never achieved clausure
of "my" people...
we weren't.. Afghani... lingering GREAT
Britannia...
the supposed arguments only came after...
beside Philip Augustus...
who, who else?
          
by the passing of waters...
the trivial feud of the tides...
and the counting of grains of sand...
the viking celebration of poetry...
and the current conundrum of...
all that's a misgiving of aimed at... practicing...

Ecgberht!
     Ecgberht!
                             Ecgberht!

now let me enjoy a drinking-repose...
i've said enough:
in that... i've said too little or nothing at all...
time will teach...
space will pulverise with newly established
standards of science...
time will teach...
      break the Runes apart...
open a grieving momentum for...
reading Glagolitic...

                   revive: Eck-bert for me...
i have some cringe question.s.. to ask...
mein: brecht... Xa Xa... not Aguera's Ja...
Greek... although spoken Greek does sound
a bit too much like Spinning-the Leotard...

bit-the-knuckle...
               baited-the-nail;
hammers' for some: schpoons!

You've painted a picture
Inside my lids
A beautiful caricature
Like the ones when we were kids
The longer I look
The more I see
And now I'm hooked
On vibrant scenes
Every time I close my eyes
I'm wrapped up in spring's delight
And colors that I've never seen
Life's just been a black and white dream
But now I see a spectrum of light
My thoughts are like bees taking off in flight
I've forgotten the world as I knew it before
With all these colors and sights to adore
You'll never know how perfect you are
Pristinely aligned like twinkling stars
I reach through space to hold your hand
Over Venus and asteroid bands
My heart breaks into shards of light
Burning up, glowing bright

My friend might look through
The photos of you on your Twitter feed
And make a verbal comment like,
"****, aren't they hot?"
And I wouldn't say anything.
For while yes, anyone could call you
Conventionally attractive,
I find it is not
Your perfectly chiseled jaw
Nor your pristinely muscled bare chest
That hold my eye,
Not while my attention could better be put to use
Looking at your actions, your words,
Being pretty is one thing,
But that is not what I may wish for,
Because whenever you write something,
The wisdom in your words
Is like poetry
In all its honesty.
Someone comments, "don't you just
Wanna kiss them?"
And honestly. . . Not really
But
That doesn't mean
I don't wish
For something.

I want
To have deep and meaningful
Conversations with you,
About philosophy, or heteronormativity,
I want to challenge you
With insane and sickening moral dilemmas,
Get you to pronounce f-
If you've ever heard the word before

When you cry,
I want to be there
To make your tears go away,
And kick the **** of the *******
Who broke your heart
Like some overprotective big sister
(Even if I am almost 10 years younger than you,
What of it?)

I want to respect and uphold you,
Give you dating advice to find someone
Who will respect and uphold you more.
I want to be brutally honest
When you show me how you dress for a date,
I want to tell you
How ******* flawless and gorgeous
You are with that new haircut
And how anyone saying otherwise is blind

I want you to accidentally say something
Mildly offensive
So I can tell you just how wrong you are
I want to accidentally say something
Mildly offensive
So you can lecture me
On just how wrong I am

I wish to be able to trust you
To stop me from falling off a cliff
And in return I
Will be your knight in shining denim
Come the zombie apocalypse
Or just some creep in the bar

I want to tell you how much you matter
While also feeling way too awkward to ever
Say something so explicitly romantic
I want you to feel like you can say anything
While needing you to know that you don't have to say anything

I want to know you
And I want you to know me

And who knows, maybe one day
I can love you as something more,
But here and now,
I just really wish we could be friends.

So if I stumble when speaking,
I'm not lovestruck
I'm just nervous
Because I have a habit of befriending people
W a a y cooler than I am
And I know that's not much of a difficulty
So
Would you be friends with me?

honest to god or no god... this was supposed to be merely about a comparison of two bicycles... a road-bike viking... bought for £125 years ago... the chain was all rusty... the wheels were deflated... and a trek marlin 5... bought for £495... which... comes to think of it... only just now... seems like a waste of money... tired rubber... 3 punctures of the wheels... and it only took me 3 months of testing it... for the tyres to be: worth jack-****... double-sure on the condoms should the Irish come knocking

perhaps w. h. auden was right when saying that:
all the Hitlers of the world write at night...
i like writing at night... i like the fascination
with being up while in the vicinity everyone's
is off to the land of Nod...
perhaps w. h. auden was right:
perhaps all the dejected pederasts write
while basking in the sun... cowering into
shadows... i know a little about w. h. auden...
it only took me the time to read
harold norse's memoir: " of a ******* angel...
a dejected old queen...
oh... but between w. h. auden... pretty rhymes...
i still don't know what's keeping
walt whitman afloat...
well... since so few women write books
worth reading: perhaps they write the most
honest poems...
it's not out of some misogyny that i don't read
literature by women...
i'm a massive fan of Pashtun poetry:
Afghan women and their landays:
their little horror debacle...
but no woman is going to write herself into:
naked... revealing... child-like...
she has too much mystique to sacrifice:
to give up...
she's not going to write from anywhere
other than the posit of the ideal:
whether it's the ideal of who she thinks she is:
or the ideal she's looking for...
two made it... Bukowski made the money...
i know... he wasn't a woman...
and Sylvia Plath... perhaps that Sexton Lady...
it's not even cute: it's exasperating...
it's a drowning man searching for a razor blade's
edge to save himself from drowning...
even i: given enough time...
am... bothersome... meeting up with...
the Titans translated into:
pillars or... hardly salt... just the pedagogic
blockade... it would be easier to revise
perspectives with a Copernican:
he moved the earth while stopping the sun...
that would be easier... than to shift: Shake-a-Pear
into a heap of recyclables..
- i hate myself when i start borrowing
either katakana or Hangul...
how i admire these writing systems...
vowels disappear... integrated into consonants
that have no leg to stand on... beside the N...
how two consonants: lost in phonetics...
but necessarily distinguished in writing
are so hard to find...
B'AH C'AH... vowel catcher hatch: indicator for:
B'AH: not Bay...
              self-evident truth from where i'm
originally from... no! b'ah!
irksome throughout the day:
a second time i'm quitting smoking...
i'm not going to quit it...
a cigarette at the end of the day...
some wine...
i wish i could still play video-games...
no... wait... i don't...
the solitary bat flying around my eucalyptus tree
chasing moths and other lesser creatures...
me strapped to the moment
watching the win caress the eucalyptus tree:
it's almost as if someone let me off my leash
from a monastery...
like acid poured into my ears:
flaky high-follower count debates...
i don't think the sort of people clued into reading
a book... detached from a comment section:
sure... well-read... well-read people...
eclectic minds... regurgitating journalistic endeavours...
since journalists are paid
and poets aren't: you don't rhyme... ******!
don't expect payment when not boxed: with rhyme...
last time i heard... Horace didn't bother either:
authentically: if i'm not going to have a conversation...
poetic soliloquy...

my soliloquy... someone else's voyeurism...
dad rock... budka suflera - noc...
robert plant - morning dew... darkness darkness....

well of course i will read ****-****** literature:
i'm not a big fan of nuns...
women and their curtain dressing...
i want to love them as much as i don't
want to understand... keep me as target of my
own demise in a man orientated world...

- the beauty of a machine that works well...
i'm still flabbergasted... i just saw a gingerbread
cookie of a man run into a cave,
shout... and leave no traces of an echo...
ooh! the sort of face most associated
with Kenyan macaques...
who... project a ****** expression of fear
onto that, which... gives them fear...

Kenya... i was there for the ivory beauties...
the adventure of finding shade...
the cheap brandy... and feeding the macaque
monkeys some sugar sachets...
while entertaining myself on the balcony
with: inanimate things...
twitchy eye: tree! i saw you move!

it's a bicycle it's not a road-taxed mechanisation:
i very much like things i can use
to their full potential: whereby i invest in
creating my own momentum...
slim: slimmer... slimmest...
now that i have a clenched chest
of pirate rage having done some press-ups
in awkward positions: more yoga
than... not as many stomach crunches...
i like the idea of a tender stomach...
all the limbs can be orchestrated to:
well oiled... best of the best juiced...
but the stomach... area...
i like it tender...
to imitate the whole of woman... sketched
in braille...
cat grooming... which originally prompted me
when she stuck up her *** into my face
and i started whizz-kid searching
for an outlet...
i promised myself i'd be back
on scout's honour: prompt...
looks like i haven't been so honest
with either her or myself...
my moustache has grown to the point
where my lips are hiding... tender: slim...
my neck has disappeared...
i've started to drink and become pensive
and therefore: started to imitated playing
a violin while fiddling with a beard...

but i did trim my ***** so they might appear...
like a laurel bush...
or a lemon tree...
maybe i'll get my libido spontaneity back
when i have to tend to grooming the cats...
it's the closest prospect of "translation"
i'll arrive at... since: with cats...
no muzzle... not leash... no kink...
no latex... come to "think" of it...
thank god i don't get enough of "it"...
give me a spectacle of one: done proper...
every half-a-decade...
i couldn't stomach it everyday...
it's enough that i have everyday for
the joys of... taking a ****... drinking some milk...
debating corn....

it's not corn is: or was... ever to be debated...
seriously... perhaps corn-meal:
not corn-flour that's readily available for
a thickening "enzyme"...
that **** the h'americans eat...
yellow-bread... Hans and Saucer...

strict regulations of language formality...
debatable speak...
wait... from began with Horace
and ends with giuseppe belli sonnets:

a le madre, se sa, li strilli e 'r piaggne
je pareno ronno dde tordinone.
le madre ar monno so ttutte compaggne...

       to mum, the gruntings of this ***-mad ******
surpass the sweet songs of a west end name...
the mothers of this world are all the same.

it's a dialectical approach concerning two bicycles...
one... a cheap road bicycle viking: vibrant green...
sturdy frame: no need for...
lost the word... rephrasing...
what's the word... not punctures...
giddy-giddy...up... down?
RESORY...

unlike a wide-girth of the mountain bike's
handlebars...
the road-cycle narrows around me exfoliating my
back muscles...
sure... the front brakes are a bit squeaky...
but... unlike the £495 pristine: sold for a....
the wider trim of wheels....
i have never ridden a better bicycle worth
only £125... this viking contra the trek marlin 5...

get used to the idea of THONG...
of the wheel...
the frame is much smaller... "slim"...
but i still encourage myself as riding faster...
bicycles and prostitutes...
i don't care much for...
paying too much...
last time i heard: there's not "cheaper"
as there's no "dearest"... when it comes to coughing up
for ***...
the supposedly cheapest will showcase
her tongue... she's motivate you...
provided you're sober...
giddy-up showcase girl...

after having skimmed some Rousseau...
i thought Kierkegaard was good:
indolent i...
there's no cat sleeping in my bed:
thank god... i'm not feeling having a bed-fellow...
to suckle me into: oyster-mush...
floral patterns...

also... thank god for the olympics:
the plethora of bodies...
the swimmers have the sexiest bodies...
not the sprinters...
lacerated lungs...
not the heavyweight lifters:
******* Turkish dwarfs from the nether kingdom
of the Caucasian: procrastinating
crustaceans....

        look at them!
see any ***-side-aside... keep up with
the Springboks? Aqua-****-with:
mensch... oh the "cardinal" is real...
the Isrealis should know..
not much room for intellect
when the body is concerned...
FAIL... double... FAIL: thrice...
there's not THRICE when filing is mentioned...

a £125 worth of a VIKING road-bike...
is worth more than a £495 Trek marlin 5 mountain bike...
how? the product wasn't made
at a time where... NOT MADE IN CHINA
was a thing...
perhaps the Chinese teamed up with project:
SLACK...

but there's this "debate":
i'd rather.... not listen to music...
hence... listen... to the bicycle not giving me grief...
streaking a palette of irksome sounds...
glitches... chasers...
creases in the otherwise well-oiled-up...
rubric of cogs and: generalised machinery...
i "forgot" to become a self-made d.j.
riding this glorious machinery...
why? it's so silent....
it works so well...
so much for advertising hell:

when a machine works so... pristinely...
that... you: can sacrifice listening to music...
as a way to digest the mundane...
passing of traffic...
so well oiled... of sure... the front breaks
squeak a little...
but you can refrain from auxiliary help
of the time: occupied by cycling:
because there's a solid frame....
and the classic handlebars allow your
hands the sort of "yoga" not associated
with the timidity of mountain-bike heirs: HIRSCH...

when you want to appreciate a well-crafted bicycle...
you want to listen to the traffic...
you can't hear your bicycle...
you're dying to **** a Turkish *******...

when journalism dies...
oh i'm pretty sure... no man alone...
the Phoenicians invented what the Canaanites
suggested: the humble patriarch Abraham...
Carmenta...
              St. Cyril...
SEJONG...
it wasn't sr. isaac pitman...
last time i heard it was... Marcus Tiro:
of the Cicero household...

*** & bicycles... it's one thing...
altogether another...
alpha + beta orbiters...
journalists get paid for being...
restaurant critics...
poets get paid for... load of *******:
and half the expected rhyme...
i like what i'm supposed to pay for...
Turkish prostitutes...
like Turkish barbers...
i get the best trim of ***** refocusing on my face...
i get the best blowback...

the English girls: all nuns!
all nuns! just prior to...
Pakistani paedophiles making them...
"available": no... rotten fruit at this point...
my life's complicated enough...
aim small: miss small...
heart's a pebble...

in the guise of: walking abortion:
walking around with a scrutiny of:
the eunuchs of king solomon's harem:
daddy: issues...
all those maxims... all those maxims::
but no foreseeable light of a
king david's psalms...

any man can claim wisdom:
when he has all the world is to arrive at....
no wonder that...
Solomon felt this sort of "grief"...
from David unto Solomon:
this tender prayer...

there's no need to avert the freedom
granted unto women:
i must allow myself
to love what i better not understand....
grow a beard: fiddle with it
pretending it to be a violin...
crease the concerns for traffic...
if it's not a horse: treat it as a bicycle...

i have a heart: enough of a heart:
to... drown a stone...
if not a stone then i'll suffocate
a mountain... however peacocking worded:
i'll drown a ******* mountain
in a puddle! then... i'll call it...
a lob-sided phenomenon of...
"ugly" tarmac!

i. the prelimenary

the initial inquiries into AI were tame at first,
philosophically tinged,
they later expanded on clarifying definitions
and establishing working parameters:
comparisons to algorithms / search engines
and encyclopoedias and dictionaries
and an interactive interface:
there was no subtle science fiction paranoia
and anything Luddite: no steaming *****
no magical Jenny: no conveyor belt spewing
metallic teeth and lack of idiosyncracy of
a human (at) fault...
it was only until i hit a brick walls when i was
enrolled in the NVQ Level 3
in Spectator Safety Supervisory Role that a eureka
slowly crept up on me...
honest to god i completed the NVQ Level 2
in Spectator safety of my own volition:
of my own investment in learning about the role:
but when i was given the opportunity
to supervise: to learn on the job (as it were) -
was i later enrolled on the actual qualification:
it took me almost a year to first learn from experience
to then try to figure out how to approach
the learning material:
when i first glanced at it: jeez... over 200 pages of slides
and no source materials to read
to learn outside of someone talking via a powerpoint...

schleierwolken - boris brejcha (in the background)

and as i learned along the way, people enrolled
on this course were given
study sessions with designated tutors:
me? no one bothered me: i had a pedagogic agendy
in my mind:
i studied enough philosophy to equip it in real
life: one can learn to amass such diverse learning
experiences
when one reads philosophy
in one's own spare time or makes it a 10 year
hermit's journey:

/ i have two cats in my bed the female came
and if begging me for attention...
i'm getting sniffed, gently nudged,
gently pawed: not scratched... /

then returning from studying as an undergraduate
from Edinburgh universe:
chemistry and history...
                           well i didn't actually think of wanting
to remain in a university environment
to study something on the post-graduate
level to master something:
not in a university environment:
at 15 i bought my first philosophy book
(Plato's Theatetus)
but i didn't bother reading it:
i rediscovered philosophy at university
with David Hume and Popper (falsification?)
and all the philosophy of science:
but i thought:
i can't possibly learn all that GRUE and BLEEN
all other again by being taught it:
i need to learn it:
which implies teaching oneself...
philosophy is daunting at first
because there has to be a lived experience:
a will to strife to then allow that will of strife
to become the will to strive:
almost Japanese: in what i ascribe as ad hoc
perfectionism... professionalism...
perhaps my style is horrible and there is
no pillcrow of economic on the page
and how much it would cost to print my jargon...
so bypassing gatekeepers:
and AI is a gatekeeper and not a gatekeeper:
when one becomes: oneself: a gatekeeper...
well.. regardless...

                      i did level 2 wholeheartedly...
but come level 3... after about two modules i gave up...
there were a few "technical" questions,
legality etc
            but the rest: for someone who writes poetry
and reads philosophy:
the worst kind of padagogic expression of language:
a custard brain where once there was
an ancient jellyfish that jumped off a monkey
into a hallucinogenic mushroom and from there:
spawned man...
fungus astro aqua fluorescence: purple myrrh...

                     what were the options?
ask help: as for a tutor: get stuck sitting in class?
wait... didn't i start talking to chatGPT a while back?
what if i used AI to help me complete this hellish task
of regurgitating rather than learning?
well: at Edinburgh i challenged myself
to plagiarise with a thesaurus
and basic sentence structures like: the sky is blue,
Aristotelian logic: all men etc.
fire is hot
water is wet
crimson is a hue of red...

               and i passed the essay with a 1st:
but it was a plagiarised essay and apparently there
were smart machines in place
when the work was submitted that it would
be scrutinized against a database:
hmm... i think i will have to ask AI about the concept
of plagiarism:
i'll find a text: plagiarise it and ask AI if
the plagiarism is a plagiarism or not...
but before i do that:
my use of AI was so formidable in completing
the NVQ level 3 that...
ha ha... i was implored to not write so much:
and by the end of it:
my CR (company rep)
      sent me the certificate of qualification
to my surprise:
even before i could complete the last two modules:
other people who complete this course
also get scrutinized: assessed on the job...
i never was...
i ended up buying a bottle of whiskey for my
company rep thinking he pulled a few strings...
but he didn't:
it wasn't a bribe but someone must have put
in a good word on my behalf
seeing me on the job
which is why i was not assessed in real life
given the material i provided... but it wasn't as if
i just copied what the AI spewed from all that *******
jargon of "spectator safety": i had to find
a symbiotic expression:
i am: a symbiote...
               i am a bio-technology: unorganic iron
in my blood: the haemoglobin goblin...
                                                       ­        i am just that:

to prove it: a transcript from my last most reward
endeavour interacting with AI...
how to fix glitches in a bicycle...

but before i go into typewriting the transcript
like i might be a woman
working for an intelligence think tank,
or group or community: because that section
will be just that: me rewriting my interaction
with AI concerning a bicycle fault:
fault in the montage: sorry: in how the bicycle
was assembled...
so minor... before i get into that: checking for typos
will be hard when it comes to my writing:
i punch my liver or rather my liver
punches me back
when i'm alone and i despair
not that i'm a parasite the human predator is so ugly
compared to the predators in the wild:
the human predator, ****** in nature:
is unlike the predator the thief or the burglar...
and the predator that is a murderer:
my: how ugly the human predator is:
unlike a warrior: a soldier...
that's very different sort of barrel of herrings...
in salt and brine...
but i will not write Steve Harris
(bassist from Iron Maiden)
         about wars, warriors, soldiers: in some glorifying
way...
at best, my friend the artist mentioned:
he's a poet-bouncer... the closest the 21st century
will get to the Oriental warrior-monk...
                    by any stretch of the imagination...
the hard bit is almost over
the hard bit is almost over: the introduction
to the transcript... to the transcript...

no one can say to me this isn't working:
and how poorly most people channel what one can
receive from alcohol: when not abused:
drank to excess: but not abused...
not drinking to socialise not drinking to party
not drinking to forget
not drinking to fall asleep not drinking to medicate
but instead: to filter out:
to established a flow of consciousness
to do away with lies
and spew only truth: to become intellectual
disinhibited...
                       not numbed: just free: to judge
water by its wetness and
how water + sunlight = colour
if water is Hay Too Oh... then...
i asked this before: is there a chemical formula for wood?
is there a chemical formula for light?
but how water interacts with light
when you get a rainbow... light is colourless
water is colourless... technically speaking:
sure the sun is red yellow white UV vibrating
Helium: apparently...
                    but light only has colour because
it enters the atmosphere of gases
and water
                                  and chemicals like chlorophyll...
and salt...
    but light like water is colourless...
only when two colourless substances interact:
there are solids, there are liquids
and there are gases:
but there is also light: which is like a fourth dimension
of understanding chemistry:
two colourless entities by now:
a liquid and "x" interact and create colour:
the eye and all the might of sight!

after Heraclitus: and the elements:
fire for certain:
but water is also just a chemical formula:
although that's drinkable water:
the water as element must also include
the Na+H2O-
                         sea water...
but i never understood how since the ancients
light has not revised as an element:
after all: how does light enter the atmosphere
at night and how that translates into lightning storms:
with the aid of the moon:
rainbows and rain from the sun
but lightning and rain and sometimes
no rain at all! sometimes no rain at all!
just a humid air:
and lightning and thunder storm... but no rain!
as god's stomach and flash of thought
were walking upon the sky...

alcohol is not as corruptible as water:
but only at a certain percentage:
starting with 40% and moving up:
i'm not talking about the alcohol of the ancients
with their beer and wine:
i'm talking the perfecting of alcohol
with ***** and absinthe...
i wonder: with enough alcohol in a hosepipe...
watering the desert:
would i see a rainbow if light interacted with
pure alcohol, like a pure spirit:
that is brewed in Poland to a 98.9% accuracy...
i don't drink to party:
i drink to hone in on thought:
i just wonder... but now i tihnk i'm ready to spew
out this AI transcript:
all because i started to distrust the guys working
in bicycle repair shops!
why? before i learned how to change the spokes
i have my front wheel to a corporate outlet
(Halfords)... i was told: 4 days... o.k.:
in the end i paid for now job being done...
because the "technician was on holiday":
lazy *** ******* and hardly the decent salesmen...
paid: waited two ******* weeks:
did get my money back in the end...
even today: i know my statuary rights as a consumer:
if i go into a shop and i see something
priced at a discount for a limited amount of time:
and then the same product is no longer limited
because the stock is low and they need to limit it
as in: undersell it...
fair enough: but when the stock is replenished
and the price goes back up
on the system...
but the price tag is still on a discount:
who's at fault?
i want to buy the product at the discount: displayed:
i don't care if your system was updated
but someone "somehow" forgot to change
the tagging... i'm buying that ***** on a discount!
no no... after i buy the **** bottle
you can correct the tagging on display:
otherwise i'm an idiot?!

and it came to pass that i trust my marijuana dealer
more than your average honest Joe the Mechanic...
because i've been ****** over at bicycle repair
shops for too long!
plus the individual parts come up to be more
expensive than buy a new bicycle: altogether!

ii. the transcript

Konrad Eschlert
hello, again: do you have any knowleddge about a Basis Tourmalet Road bicycle?

Memory Updated
yes, the Basis Tourmalet is an entry-level road bike that's often praised for being affordable and suitable for those new to road cycling. it typically features an aluminium frame, which balances durability and lightness. the components, like the gears and brakes, may vary depending on the model year but are usually chosen to provide good performance at a budget-friendly price. it's a solid choice for commuting or casual long rides, but it's not designed for high-performance racing.

would you like more detailed information about its specs or other details?

Konrad Eschlert
less about specs and certainl not, well: details... i'm having problems with this model i recently purchased. so the model i have is a 14 gear... model (that's hardly insinuating tautology, just bad sentence structure to day model model within such proximity)... before you reply let me further my problem along, so please ackowledge that you will hear me out with an ellipsis

Memory Updated
i'm here, and i'll wait... go ahead.

Konrad Eschlert
i have two tiers of gears, all the lower tier gears work just fine when switching them from 1 to 7, but on the higher gears the chain buckles when it comes to higher gears 5 through to 7... the gears don't switch properly i have to sometimes switch gears two up to get the one down, properly, the gear i want... i don't think that there isn't enough slack on the chain... but i'm uncertain about how much tension the tear cable needs, the two high and low gear (derailleur? probably a misnomer, help me out)... could this be the problem? when i first inspected the bicycle i had to make sure that the break cable didn't have as much tension, since the breaks wouldn't retract properly and would rub against the wheel, so when i loosened the tension in the break cable, they retracted pristinely... any thoughts about why the higher gear buckle and the chain almost doesn't want to be in the specified gears...

Memory Updated
it sounds like you're dealing with a common issue related to derailleur adjustments and gear shifting alignment. you're correct in mentioning the derailleur - both the front and rear derailleurs are responsible for moving the chain between gears. based on your description, here are a few things to check:        (author's note: non-verbatim transcript section)
1. cable tension: the gear cable... tension plays a big role... smoothly your gear shift............................................... especially on the higher end... if tension is too lose, it won't fully engage the gears... if it's too tight... it might skip or struggle to switch to lower gears... try adjusting the barrel adjuster...
2. derailleur limits: the high and low limits (often called H and L screws) on the derailleur control how far the derailleur can move. if the derailleur ***** is too tight, the derailleur won't reach the highest gears (5-7 in your case). check the derailleur alingment...
3. derailleur hanger alignment: ... ... ... ... ...
4. chain wear / length: ... ... ... ... ...
5. shifter issues: ... ... .. .. ... . . ... . .. . .. .. .. ... . ..... .. . ... .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ... .. .. .. .. .... .. .. ... ... ... .. ..... .... ... .. .. .. ... .. ... .. .... ... .. ... ... .. .. ... .. . .. .
6. **** and cleaning: !! 1! 11 1! 1! 1! 1!1!!! !1 !11 11 11 11!!!!111!

it's good that you're already solved the brake cable issue, as that demonstrates your intuition for bike maintenance. similarly, adjusting the derailleur and gear cables could resolve the problem you're expericing with the higher gears.

let me know if you need more specific guidance on any of these steps!

Konrad Eschlert
Ha... i'll just let you know 😌...
if both our intuitions were able to solve the problem.

Memory Updated
sounds like a plan! let me know how it goes, and hopefully, it'll be a smooth ride soon! 😌

Konrad Eschlert
🥴🤙

Memory Updated
Haha, good vibes! 🤙 keep me posted if you need any more help!

iii. post-scriptum

pending...
althought i don't think there is anything more to be added:
we were both right!
i tightened the gear cable to the back derailleur
and: hey presto!
now the H(5-7) gears work just so ever so smoothly:
last time i asked a human being about any bicycle issues.
in a society where i can trust a marijuana
courier more than i can trust
a ******* bicycle repair guy... or a plumber:
hello: Apacalypse.

p.p.s. now i can enjoy my coffee
and a 2nd cigarette and get some in-town errands done:
only a perfectly new: bicycle!

Green grass, pristinely cut low.
Moonlight dance
White laced summer dress flowing
barefoot freedom, wiggle your toes
Breathe through the green grass
from the souls of your feet to your frantic mind
Feel the calm
Feel your sunfeet
Perfect as intended

He had a strong nose.

The kind of nose that would sit pristinely on the face of some noble prince: strong and defined and important. When he spoke, it was as if all of the importance of the world was in the way he seamlessly blended words. Words that were not selected carelessly, though, but chosen with deliberate and intentional care as a builder would select choice lumber — smooth and intricate and faultless.

But even wood begins to crack.

it's just one of those nights
when you just feel like...
a bottle of a chilean
malbec would finish
the day off, pristinely,
having just watched
Wolverhampton
get beaten (2 - 3): just
by West Ham, watching
the football with
the ol' man...

               thinking:
i'm not the son he
deserves and he's not the father
i deserve...
although... best to not know...
otherwise it's still him:
61 and me... nearing 35
and... if it were
for some sort of a housing
ladder...
some socialist... circa 1983
in a soviet satellite state...
a day after having cycled
probably over 50 miles
from somewhere
in north east greater London
to Canvey Island...
on the way back of course
there would be a detour
on the flatlands of Thurrock
just before
the M25 and Upminster...
but it's also one of those
nights where you can't
for the love of god
find a corkscrew
and there's most obviously
a cork so it's not one of
those *****-caps...
and... to improvise...
well pushing the cork in
was an idea...
tried the thumb...
then wrapped a toilet towel
around a knife and pushed...
like i might have pushed
a constipation
of a yogurt abortion... clotted...
no no...

resorted to making
a makeshift corkscrew with
a makita drill tip...
that half of the cork
was butchered out in shrapnel...
evidently the rest i pushed in
and then had to... sieve any remains...
although... on the tip of my tongue
i can still itch to taste cork...
but it's one of those nights...
over the Easter holidays
a conversation with dearest
grandma...

while the dead managed to throw
a horseshoe from the wall...
a tomahawk was in play between
sister and brother (mother and uncle)
and... considering what bad luck
my father's side of the family
had with family building: could i be
patriarch material...

i thought... a major relief that...
35 and given past luck... of this lineage...
i arrived at a cul de sac of events...
of which: the dancing dead
and the superstitious living...
apart from the clockwork bouts of
fear concerning old age...
how almost has to be undermined
when fathoming this:
more assuredly a solo escapade...
this lack of investment in a "future"
of child-rearing...

now that i'm slumped into
a crayon-oyster sort of position
slumped with a belly for a jug
of wine...
and my body ferments
while my thinking turns into a peacock
of verbiosity / teasing verbiage...
i tend to conjure up the hours
of freedom on a bicycle...
eyes-that-gobble-down-a-horizon...
a wind that "speaks"...
a sun that glistens with silver-membranes
added to all things that come
into passing...
an almost complicated ownership
of feline breaths....

Convey Island...
before me the great mouth
of the Thames...
and also before me: the soothing
brood of the north sea...
somewhere, "elsewhere" a name
of a land most associated with
Danes...

no message: but a floating cork
in a bottle...
it's this life so almost forgiving...
cowardly lenient and to have moved
away from any attempt
by extroverts
to instil pointless dramas into it...
a sample of where my eyes
have wandered to:

in braille or katakana...
   syllables that can mean something
than have prepositional value
akin to: to and tu:
    to (this) / tu (here)
       ⠞⠕   (ト)
                             ⠞⠥   (ツ)

i had to return to something
that might allow me to escape these
letters, for a while...
hell i've tried concentrating on runes
and Cyrillic, Glagolitic...
and Greek...

        the best i came up with
was            ж = зъ
                           ш didn't work
    since neither cъ or cь
                     could invoke... the caron...
above the s: for the hidden H or Z
of sh-ee-ring... h'ush-ing...
             even though                   cь does exist...
   środek - centre...
  although i hardly know
whether cъ does since...
                                       cъ ≠ š = ш...

if i'm this supposed "atomised"... ahem...
"individual"...
then perhaps i need to see language
atomised: into more complex constructs
that have to borrow from
other tongues beside
the english variation of
vowels: and the vowel catcher H
(of the tetragrammaton)

and consonants: a B's not an Ab
but a Be(e)
a D's not an Ad but a De(e)...
however an N's not a *******
(k)Ne(e)... since it's an eN... no?

language has to become
less conversational when i write...
less and less conversational
if i am this: walking abortion
sort of shrapnel...

because i feel that less of tribal
monkey **** flinging: i am...
gin + mulled wine...
who would think tonic is
worthwhile?

i should be saying:
it's more important for me to not utter
such  readily available noun
but like a jew's jew sort of a friend
i cower under the auspicious suspicion
of ha-shem...
or the tetragrammaton...
because NGGR shouldn't be
a most sacred word...
in my thinking cage...

  no?
           i guess the remedy comes
from even less conversation that
i have allowed myself to prospect: or hope for...
less conversation...
less and less...
here's toasting with my fears
and enjoying the last scraps
of familial ties
of son, mother, father...
and sort of pulling the thick-threads
of narrative along...

however loser posing i might appear
to be...
no luck in me attempting
a Goethe patriarch status...
wedded to the lock-up
with the disintegration
of the Arab dream of having all that oil
but... less and less of the camels...
and therefore less of the structure
of father-figuring out
a shadow of a mother...

modern burrowing ****-up
and cuckoldry antics of events...
here's to no pleasure:
to not have left behind shrapnel genes
to have left pillars of salt...
here's to time! here's to the tyranny of
this sea without echo, water or waves...
seashells... no seashells too...

here's to the misery of being
Tao-content...
here's to the salvage and no need for
glowing egg-heads clamouring
crab-buckets and the plateau of
the pristine... effort... shared oh of course
also shared...

the end.

Pristinely set the table stands
On its waxed floor perfectly glossed
All the chairs are waiting nervously
Their feet tap along

I picked out the ribbon (it's pink!)
Beautiful, but not so flashy
Shiny, but yet so classy

But now the clock is shaking
Your chocolate cake is melting
And all the kids are wailing

Now the house is burning
The curtains I am sewing
I can not keep on going

Happy birthday, you
I’m sorry the house is up in flames
I don’t know how to pass the days
I guess I’ll smear cake on your grave.

“I only wish I had your talent.”

No.

Being a poet is not as much of a gift as you would like to believe.

You are forced by your own internal writer
to measure your thoughts perfectly
and pile them pristinely
onto a piece of piercing paper
that wishes
nothing more
than your emotional demise.

Mapping out every thought and emotion
is not a gift,
but a burden.

The more language you know,
the less words you seem to find
to describe the ever growing complexity
of the depths of your mind.

Being a poet is not a gift at the best of times.

there's absolutely no need to write
these days -
perhaps if i were much much
younger and idealistic -
what love... what oh what woe...
could have could be (etc.) -

today i found myself in love
with england for: however many
a time...
the rolling hills cliche -
but i was alone: yet i was legion...
i was no anglo-saxon
with an army...

i strolled the countryside and
for this moment of certainty:
i was truly allowed to
hold firmness of aloofness -

beside the rabbit i crouched
beside two meters away...
a wild thing i was almost eager
to pick it up:
was the rabbit blind?

it's beyond questionably unfathomable...
well... there was that fox
that decided to come to soup kitchen
in my back garden
for nearing two months:
at a time when i desired
a dog... because: cats don't really
eat leftovers... fussy eaters...
no gluttonous slobs among,
         them...

my new earned pleasure:
to walk is better than to talk...
yet even i found myself talking
to the wind:

verbatim:
imagine! bewildering that such places
still exist!
even if for an hour...
later i found out that this was
historical ground i was treading...
related to henry VIII and edward
the confessor -
teasing passing through
a village havering-atte-bower...

i didn't see a human face for hours
and hours... i did see birds-of-prey,
i saw i noted...
i didn't bring a pen and paper...
i was so entangled...
i was so freely there...
i was so... freely there...
unlike where i am now:
"here" attached to an extension
of thinking...

come to think of it... i was so pristinely alone
that if i were asked anything
outside the realm
of casual formality: if i were to be implored
to bid good day or a hello...
i'd straighten out a *******
banana and call it: the staff of moses
if i had to deal with this bogus societal-
never on a street am i ever
asked for a hello...

why do people find it necessary
to bid these ****** hello impromptus
when facing the base for all dreams...
i never liked talking during
***... i never like disturbing
the language of the fields and the teasing
moors and the chimes of branches
with anything that isn't jokingly
spontaneous:

like today: imagine... such places do
exist... where one can truly spend a worth
of an hour or so alone...
with the birds of prey flying
above... with horses grazing...
with a rabbit: i presumed blind...

it's most decidedly unnecessary for me
to write this: but i can't allow
a good glug of kosher malt to waste...
if i'm drinking i'll have to find myself
writing...
such that i need to restress a fondness
for this equipment:
a pair of feet...
no need to run... if i can catch up
with noon and make it home
come sunset...

i will most certainly not prescribe myself
to live under the cooking instructions
of a chicken sold by a supermarket...
1h40... 1 hour and forty minutes?
to cook a large chicken?
like all women are the best cooks
and the chicken ******* need
to be dry as a brittle (trans-grammarism)...

i wasn't listening...
shove enough thyme / garlic infused butter
under the skin and give it a maximum
of 55 minutes...
mismatching my rooster albert bartlett
tatties... i was hoping for a synchronised
swan lake esque event concerning
the oven enterprise...
bad luck moi...

     a thermometer is so key... to eating
a pleasure roast of chicken...
i'll understand pasta undercooked...
teasing al dente: but over-cook it...
and serve up mush of melting glue:
kept together by a "miracle"...
same with chicken...
oh god... over-cooking or undercooking
meat is... i will dare to say...
never mind... 165°F for chicken meat...
i can't eat chewing gum made from
chaw-chaw-chaw barbarous chew...
welcome back to civilisation:
lost wanderer...
              
i honestly don't think i needed to write
this: that i didn't...
but i did... i hope i can be excused
with "keeping my **** together"...
i'm not a fan of drinking in front of
the mirror...
or putting my hand in a hot bucket
of water...
why does drinking supposedly
encourage commerady...
why is drinking supposed to be this:
social event...
drinking alone is bad...
walking alone is doubly bad...
well **** yeah! let's have us
a *******-wanking of a marathon!
a drinking **** to boot!

drinking alone is all that is "leftover"...
if it weren't for the add chance
of utilising a plumber...
once in a blue moon scenario:
since the previous generations
invested so much in the plumbing...
it's not a question would i be better of...
i'd be: off of now...
in this currency conundrum of...
impersonal justifications...
a hybrid anonymous butcher...
or some... variation and "other"...

give me the sky! the wind! the fields!
and the time necessary to not encounter
some ******* baseline pedestrian
who... upon venturing upon holy ground...
public footpath nonetheless...
seeing all this nature has to...
pass me by with an invitation for
a hello hallow how'do'you'do...
         weird:
if i walked down the street and
all that pleasing concrete was in the way...
would i get the same "invitation"...
then why, bother, my, silence...
when i'm standing on grass... looking
at trees?!

unfamiliar territory i am sure...
i don't need assurances of teasing poker...
get on your ******* bus and leave us
to its...
it's hardly an "english" thing...
is just happens to be a human bollocking
working up to a crescendo that's only
now apparent: who dou 'illed with
'reats again'st the theat're?

         the rabbit! the rabbit! the rabbit!
was the rabbit blind?
i didn't sneak up on it...
hello words: congest my mind allow
the voyeurs in...
i won't be here long...
                 that space between
the ears and the eyes... i suppose the eyes...
like candy-outgrowths...
bulging i pretended to blink
they were still intact...
a camouflage... this close to a wild
"thing" you'd find me expressing
details of moth wings...

that there's a an M25... that there's an A406...
and there's the great...
walk-along to ******* alone
work-around for feet primo...
i think it's called a circular...
like a hand of an hour
i imagine walking around greater london
7 times...
it really is a bogus project...
but it's a mad enough
beginning to allow myself to dream...

like in those old movies...
oceans, eleven?
the 'ctor roost and... the professional
boxers... treated as mere cameos on
screen...
so... here's my cameo...
i have yet to find such a footed
riddle as i have...
no ******* from noak hill will tread
these parts...
i'm sure of it as i am sure:
it's not that i'm a lover of nature...
there's no david attenborough
voyeurism involved to produce
a semblance naturalist...

words architecture,
words architecture...
word... ugh... architecture...
      words grammar architecture...
it's not that it's ugly...
it's just so well-arrived-at...
it's pristine... unshakeable...
words, grammar... architecture...

i want to walk...
to hell with running a marathon
while mr. c.c.t.v. is jerking off
a commitment of transmission...

acorns and oak-fill... lost for words...
chestnuts! chestnuts!
all that is evolved monkey
and devolves back into a bear...
sounds mad enough to 'ave some...
i just like to imagine...
digressing with winter nonexistent...
this parody of insomnia:
whether via work
or via...

one alcoholic vs. one hundred
workaholics...
vs. one thousand bureaucrats...
vs. 4th industrial revolution
staples in the millions...
cost effective "work"... and "effective":
a work not as: the best
that can be done...
but as a public service loitering...
ahem... sorry... "provision"...
have people forgot that
there exist a version
of humanity that somehow
has to be appeased...
that people can perhaps relapse
into their trained-monkey phase
and treat a supermarket
cashier as he or she were
a heart-surgeon...
or are we all so *******
desperate as to: settle our grievances
on mediocre pyramidal schematics .
tiers invoked... blah blah...
whoopsie: it snows.

grandiosity herr engels: i gather....
but for all that toughening of limbs
and of making concrete assurances:
to borrow bones to somehow delve
into carving marble...

how to turn a gorilla into a weakling
man pursuit...
brain hijacked by a mushroom...
and retell squirm with
a man-beefed-up-bear-in-tow...

it's not merely... impossible...
this of the fewest least...
it's this rugged tease of
     an avalanche...
a stampede...
when in fact... it was merely
a wriggling of a centipede.

demiurge ave!
   demiurge ave!
  as one probably does...
walking past a curation of budding ***...
she's teasing 15...
and she gives off quiverings in
the air...
she's so teen...
so prone to angry...
  all that she is... is a scent of bubblegum...
she's too young to become
complicated with ***...
and *** has become one of those:
metaphors... drawing water from
a stone...

i'm too tired of wanting what isn't readily
available...
in the availability of a harem...
i'm too tired to want
what i must, most necessarily
never have...
then again... again: i will heave
not having above what i could
perhaps want to heave: rather than have...
all those pornoflicks from
******: should i be irritated by
******* tailor-me-pretty...
a kit-kat of fingers usually does
the "job"...

         yes... my heave: my harth...
my liquid lunge...
my  best and therefore by least...
forest of a crown.