by John Greenleaf Whittier  (1807 – 1892)

“As the Spirits of Darkness be stronger in the dark, so Good Spirits which be Angels of Light are augmented not only by the Divine Light of the Sun, but also by our common Wood fire: and as the celestial Fire drives away dark spirits, so also this our Fire of Wood doth the same.”

        COR. AGRIPPA,
           Occult Philosophy, Book I. chap. v.

“Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow; and, driving o’er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight; the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river and the heaven,
And veils the farm-house at the garden’s end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.”

                                       EMERSON

The sun that brief December day
Rose cheerless over hills of gray,
And, darkly circled, gave at noon
A sadder light than waning moon.
Slow tracing down the thickening sky
Its mute and ominous prophecy,
A portent seeming less than threat,
It sank from sight before it set.
A chill no coat, however stout,
Of homespun stuff could quite shut out,
A hard, dull bitterness of cold,
That checked, mid-vein, the circling race
Of life-blood in the sharpened face,
The coming of the snow-storm told.
The wind blew east; we heard the roar
Of Ocean on his wintry shore,
And felt the strong pulse throbbing there
Beat with low rhythm our inland air.

Meanwhile we did our nightly chores, —
Brought in the wood from out of doors,
Littered the stalls, and from the mows
Raked down the herd’s-grass for the cows;
Heard the horse whinnying for his corn;
And, sharply clashing horn on horn,
Impatient down the stanchion rows
The cattle shake their walnut bows;
While, peering from his early perch
Upon the scaffold’s pole of birch,
The **** his crested helmet bent
And down his querulous challenge sent.

Unwarmed by any sunset light
The gray day darkened into night,
A night made hoary with the swarm
And whirl-dance of the blinding storm,
As zigzag, wavering to and fro,
Crossed and recrossed the wingàd snow:
And ere the early bedtime came
The white drift piled the window-frame,
And through the glass the clothes-line posts
Looked in like tall and sheeted ghosts.

So all night long the storm roared on:
The morning broke without a sun;
In tiny spherule traced with lines
Of Nature’s geometric signs,
And, when the second morning shone,
We looked upon a world unknown,
On nothing we could call our own.
Around the glistening wonder bent
The blue walls of the firmament,
No cloud above, no earth below, —
A universe of sky and snow!
The old familiar sights of ours
Took marvellous shapes; strange domes and towers
Rose up where sty or corn-crib stood,
Or garden-wall, or belt of wood;
A smooth white mound the brush-pile showed,
A fenceless drift what once was road;
The bridle-post an old man sat
With loose-flung coat and high cocked hat;
The well-curb had a Chinese roof;
And even the long sweep, high aloof,
In its slant spendor, seemed to tell
Of Pisa’s leaning miracle.

A prompt, decisive man, no breath
Our father wasted: “Boys, a path!”
Well pleased, (for when did farmer boy
Count such a summons less than joy?)
Our buskins on our feet we drew;
With mittened hands, and caps drawn low,
To guard our necks and ears from snow,
We cut the solid whiteness through.
And, where the drift was deepest, made
A tunnel walled and overlaid
With dazzling crystal: we had read
Of rare Aladdin’s wondrous cave,
And to our own his name we gave,
With many a wish the luck were ours
To test his lamp’s supernal powers.
We reached the barn with merry din,
And roused the prisoned brutes within.
The old horse ****** his long head out,
And grave with wonder gazed about;
The **** his ***** greeting said,
And forth his speckled harem led;
The oxen lashed their tails, and hooked,
And mild reproach of hunger looked;
The hornëd patriarch of the sheep,
Like Egypt’s Amun roused from sleep,
Shook his sage head with gesture mute,
And emphasized with stamp of foot.

All day the gusty north-wind bore
The loosening drift its breath before;
Low circling round its southern zone,
The sun through dazzling snow-mist shone.
No church-bell lent its Christian tone
To the savage air, no social smoke
Curled over woods of snow-hung oak.
A solitude made more intense
By dreary-voicëd elements,
The shrieking of the mindless wind,
The moaning tree-boughs swaying blind,
And on the glass the unmeaning beat
Of ghostly finger-tips of sleet.
Beyond the circle of our hearth
No welcome sound of toil or mirth
Unbound the spell, and testified
Of human life and thought outside.
We minded that the sharpest ear
The buried brooklet could not hear,
The music of whose liquid lip
Had been to us companionship,
And, in our lonely life, had grown
To have an almost human tone.

As night drew on, and, from the crest
Of wooded knolls that ridged the west,
The sun, a snow-blown traveller, sank
From sight beneath the smothering bank,
We piled, with care, our nightly stack
Of wood against the chimney-back, —
The oaken log, green, huge, and thick,
And on its top the stout back-stick;
The knotty forestick laid apart,
And filled between with curious art

The ragged brush; then, hovering near,
We watched the first red blaze appear,
Heard the sharp crackle, caught the gleam
On whitewashed wall and sagging beam,
Until the old, rude-furnished room
Burst, flower-like, into rosy bloom;
While radiant with a mimic flame
Outside the sparkling drift became,
And through the bare-boughed lilac-tree
Our own warm hearth seemed blazing free.
The crane and pendent trammels showed,
The Turks’ heads on the andirons glowed;
While childish fancy, prompt to tell
The meaning of the miracle,
Whispered the old rhyme: “Under the tree,
When fire outdoors burns merrily,
There the witches are making tea.”

The moon above the eastern wood
Shone at its full; the hill-range stood
Transfigured in the silver flood,
Its blown snows flashing cold and keen,
Dead white, save where some sharp ravine
Took shadow, or the sombre green
Of hemlocks turned to pitchy black
Against the whiteness at their back.
For such a world and such a night
Most fitting that unwarming light,
Which only seemed where’er it fell
To make the coldness visible.

Shut in from all the world without,
We sat the clean-winged hearth about,
Content to let the north-wind roar
In baffled rage at pane and door,
While the red logs before us beat
The frost-line back with tropic heat;
And ever, when a louder blast
Shook beam and rafter as it passed,
The merrier up its roaring draught
The great throat of the chimney laughed;
The house-dog on his paws outspread
Laid to the fire his drowsy head,
The cat’s dark silhouette on the wall
A couchant tiger’s seemed to fall;
And, for the winter fireside meet,
Between the andirons’ straddling feet,
The mug of cider simmered slow,
The apples sputtered in a row,
And, close at hand, the basket stood
With nuts from brown October’s wood.

What matter how the night behaved?
What matter how the north-wind raved?
Blow high, blow low, not all its snow
Could quench our hearth-fire’s ruddy glow.
O Time and Change! — with hair as gray
As was my sire’s that winter day,
How strange it seems, with so much gone
Of life and love, to still live on!
Ah, brother! only I and thou
Are left of all that circle now, —
The dear home faces whereupon
That fitful firelight paled and shone.
Henceforward, listen as we will,
The voices of that hearth are still;
Look where we may, the wide earth o’er,
Those lighted faces smile no more.

We tread the paths their feet have worn,
We sit beneath their orchard trees,
We hear, like them, the hum of bees
And rustle of the bladed corn;
We turn the pages that they read,
Their written words we linger o’er,
But in the sun they cast no shade,
No voice is heard, no sign is made,
No step is on the conscious floor!
Yet Love will dream, and Faith will trust,
(Since He who knows our need is just,)
That somehow, somewhere, meet we must.
Alas for him who never sees
The stars shine through his cypress-trees!
Who, hopeless, lays his dead away,
Nor looks to see the breaking day
Across the mournful marbles play!
Who hath not learned, in hours of faith,
The truth to flesh and sense unknown,
That Life is ever lord of Death,
And Love can never lose its own!

We sped the time with stories old,
Wrought puzzles out, and riddles told,
Or stammered from our school-book lore
“The Chief of Gambia’s golden shore.”
How often since, when all the land
Was clay in Slavery’s shaping hand,
As if a far-blown trumpet stirred
Dame Mercy Warren’s rousing word:
“Does not the voice of reason cry,
Claim the first right which Nature gave,
From the red scourge of ******* to fly,
Nor deign to live a burdened slave!”
Our father rode again his ride
On Memphremagog’s wooded side;
Sat down again to moose and samp
In trapper’s hut and Indian camp;
Lived o’er the old idyllic ease
Beneath St. François’ hemlock-trees;
Again for him the moonlight shone
On Norman cap and bodiced zone;
Again he heard the violin play
Which led the village dance away.
And mingled in its merry whirl
The grandam and the laughing girl.
Or, nearer home, our steps he led
Where Salisbury’s level marshes spread
Mile-wide as flies the laden bee;
Where merry mowers, hale and strong,
Swept, scythe on scythe, their swaths along
The low green prairies of the sea.
We shared the fishing off Boar’s Head,
And round the rocky Isles of Shoals
The hake-broil on the drift-wood coals;
The chowder on the sand-beach made,
Dipped by the hungry, steaming hot,
With spoons of clam-shell from the ***.
We heard the tales of witchcraft old,
And dream and sign and marvel told
To sleepy listeners as they lay
Stretched idly on the salted hay,
Adrift along the winding shores,
When favoring breezes deigned to blow
The square sail of the gundelow
And idle lay the useless oars.

Our mother, while she turned her wheel
Or run the new-knit stocking-heel,
Told how the Indian hordes came down
At midnight on Concheco town,
And how her own great-uncle bore
His cruel scalp-mark to fourscore.
Recalling, in her fitting phrase,
So rich and picturesque and free
(The common unrhymed poetry
Of simple life and country ways,)
The story of her early days, —
She made us welcome to her home;
Old hearths grew wide to give us room;
We stole with her a frightened look
At the gray wizard’s conjuring-book,
The fame whereof went far and wide
Through all the simple country side;
We heard the hawks at twilight play,
The boat-horn on Piscataqua,
The loon’s weird laughter far away;
We fished her little trout-brook, knew
What flowers in wood and meadow grew,
What sunny hillsides autumn-brown
She climbed to shake the ripe nuts down,
Saw where in sheltered cove and bay,
The ducks’ black squadron anchored lay,
And heard the wild-geese calling loud
Beneath the gray November cloud.
Then, haply, with a look more grave,
And soberer tone, some tale she gave
From painful Sewel’s ancient tome,
Beloved in every Quaker home,
Of faith fire-winged by martyrdom,
Or Chalkley’s Journal, old and quaint, —
Gentlest of skippers, rare sea-saint! —
Who, when the dreary calms prevailed,
And water-**** and bread-cask failed,
And cruel, hungry eyes pursued
His portly presence mad for food,
With dark hints muttered under breath
Of casting lots for life or death,

Offered, if Heaven withheld supplies,
To be himself the sacrifice.
Then, suddenly, as if to save
The good man from his living grave,
A ripple on the water grew,
A school of porpoise flashed in view.
“Take, eat,” he said, “and be content;
These fishes in my stead are sent
By Him who gave the tangled ram
To spare the child of Abraham.”
Our uncle, innocent of books,
Was rich in lore of fields and brooks,
The ancient teachers never dumb
Of Nature’s unhoused lyceum.
In moons and tides and weather wise,
He read the clouds as prophecies,
And foul or fair could well divine,
By many an occult hint and sign,
Holding the cunning-warded keys
To all the woodcraft mysteries;
Himself to Nature’s heart so near
v That all her voices in his ear
Of beast or bird had meanings clear,
Like Apollonius of old,
Who knew the tales the sparrows told,
Or Hermes, who interpreted
What the sage cranes of Nilus said;
A simple, guileless, childlike man,
Content to live where life began;
Strong only on his native grounds,
The little world of sights and sounds
Whose girdle was the parish bounds,
Whereof his fondly partial pride
The common features magnified,
As Surrey hills to mountains grew
In White of Selborne’s loving view, —
He told how teal and loon he shot,
And how the eagle’s eggs he got,
The feats on pond and river done,
The prodigies of rod and gun;
Till, warming with the tales he told,
Forgotten was the outside cold,
The bitter wind unheeded blew,
From ripening corn the pigeons flew,
The partridge drummed i’ the wood, the mink
Went fishing down the river-brink.
In fields with bean or clover gay,
The woodchuck, like a hermit gray,
Peered from the doorway of his cell;
The muskrat plied the mason’s trade,
And tier by tier his mud-walls laid;
And from the shagbark overhead
The grizzled squirrel dropped his shell.

Next, the dear aunt, whose smile of cheer
And voice in dreams I see and hear, —
The sweetest woman ever Fate
Perverse denied a household mate,
Who, lonely, homeless, not the less
Found peace in love’s unselfishness,
And welcome wheresoe’er she went,
A calm and gracious element,
Whose presence seemed the sweet income
And womanly atmosphere of home, —
Called up her girlhood memories,
The huskings and the apple-bees,
The sleigh-rides and the summer sails,
Weaving through all the poor details
And homespun warp of circumstance
A golden woof-thread of romance.
For well she kept her genial mood
And simple faith of maidenhood;
Before her still a cloud-land lay,
The mirage loomed across her way;
The morning dew, that dries so soon
With others, glistened at her noon;
Through years of toil and soil and care,
From glossy tress to thin gray hair,
All unprofaned she held apart
The ****** fancies of the heart.
Be shame to him of woman born
Who hath for such but thought of scorn.
There, too, our elder sister plied
Her evening task the stand beside;
A full, rich nature, free to trust,
Truthful and almost sternly just,
Impulsive, earnest, prompt to act,
And make her generous thought a fact,
Keeping with many a light disguise
The secret of self-sacrifice.

O heart sore-tried! thou hast the best
That Heaven itself could give thee, — rest,
Rest from all bitter thoughts and things!
How many a poor one’s blessing went
With thee beneath the low green tent
Whose curtain never outward swings!

As one who held herself a part
Of all she saw, and let her heart
Against the household ***** lean,
Upon the motley-braided mat
Our youngest and our dearest sat,
Lifting her large, sweet, asking eyes,
Now bathed in the unfading green
And holy peace of Paradise.
Oh, looking from some heavenly hill,
Or from the shade of saintly palms,
Or silver reach of river calms,
Do those large eyes behold me still?
With me one little year ago: —
The chill weight of the winter snow
For months upon her grave has lain;
And now, when summer south-winds blow
And brier and harebell bloom again,
I tread the pleasant paths we trod,
I see the violet-sprinkled sod
Whereon she leaned, too frail and weak
The hillside flowers she loved to seek,
Yet following me where’er I went
With dark eyes full of love’s content.
The birds are glad; the brier-rose fills
The air with sweetness; all the hills
Stretch green to June’s unclouded sky;
But still I wait with ear and eye
For something gone which should be nigh,
A loss in all familiar things,
In flower that blooms, and bird that sings.
And yet, dear heart! remembering thee,
Am I not richer than of old?
Safe in thy immortality,
What change can reach the wealth I hold?
What chance can mar the pearl and gold
Thy love hath left in trust with me?
And while in life’s late afternoon,
Where cool and long the shadows grow,
I walk to meet the night that soon
Shall shape and shadow overflow,
I cannot feel that thou art far,
Since near at need the angels are;
And when the sunset gates unbar,
Shall I not see thee waiting stand,
And, white against the evening star,
The welcome of thy beckoning hand?

Brisk wielder of the birch and rule,
The master of the district school
Held at the fire his favored place,
Its warm glow lit a laughing face
Fresh-hued and fair, where scarce appeared
The uncertain prophecy of beard.
He teased the mitten-blinded cat,
Played cross-pins on my uncle’s hat,
Sang songs, and told us what befalls
In classic Dartmouth’s college halls.
Born the wild Northern hills among,
From whence his yeoman father wrung
By patient toil subsistence scant,
Not competence and yet not want,
He early gained the power to pay
His cheerful, self-reliant way;
Could doff at ease his scholar’s gown
To peddle wares from town to town;
Or through the long vacation’s reach
In lonely lowland districts teach,
Where all the droll experience found
At stranger hearths in boarding round,
The moonlit skater’s keen delight,
The sleigh-drive through the frosty night,
The rustic party, with its rough
Accompaniment of blind-man’s-buff,
And whirling-plate, and forfeits paid,
His winter task a pastime made.
Happy the snow-locked homes wherein
He tuned his merry violin,

Or played the athlete in the barn,
Or held the good dame’s winding-yarn,
Or mirth-provoking versions told
Of classic legends rare and old,
Wherein the scenes of Greece and Rome
Had all the commonplace of home,
And little seemed at best the odds
‘Twixt Yankee pedlers and old gods;
Where Pindus-born Arachthus took
The guise of any grist-mill brook,
And dread Olympus at his will
Became a huckleberry hill.

A careless boy that night he seemed;
But at his desk he had the look
And air of one who wisely schemed,
And hostage from the future took
In trainëd thought and lore of book.
Large-brained, clear-eyed, of such as he
Shall Freedom’s young apostles be,
Who, following in War’s ****** trail,
Shall every lingering wrong assail;
All chains from limb and spirit strike,
Uplift the black and white alike;
Scatter before their swift advance
The darkness and the ignorance,
The pride, the lust, the squalid sloth,
Which nurtured Treason’s monstrous growth,
Made ****** pastime, and the hell
Of prison-torture possible;
The cruel lie of caste refute,
Old forms remould, and substitute
For Slavery’s lash the freeman’s will,
For blind routine, wise-handed skill;
A school-house plant on every hill,
Stretching in radiate nerve-lines thence
The quick wires of intelligence;
Till North and South together brought
Shall own the same electric thought,
In peace a common flag salute,
And, side by side in labor’s free
And unresentful rivalry,
Harvest the fields wherein they fought.

Another guest that winter night
Flashed back from lustrous eyes the light.
Unmarked by time, and yet not young,
The honeyed music of her tongue
And words of meekness scarcely told
A nature passionate and bold,

Strong, self-concentred, spurning guide,
Its milder features dwarfed beside
Her unbent will’s majestic pride.
She sat among us, at the best,
A not unfeared, half-welcome guest,
Rebuking with her cultured phrase
Our homeliness of words and ways.
A certain pard-like, treacherous grace
Swayed the lithe limbs and drooped the lash,
Lent the white teeth their dazzling flash;
And under low brows, black with night,
Rayed out at times a dangerous light;
The sharp heat-lightnings of her face
Presaging ill to him whom Fate
Condemned to share her love or hate.
A woman tropical, intense
In thought and act, in soul and sense,
She blended in a like degree
The ***** and the devotee,
Revealing with each freak or feint
The temper of Petruchio’s Kate,
The raptures of Siena’s saint.
Her tapering hand and rounded wrist
Had facile power to form a fist;
The warm, dark languish of her eyes
Was never safe from wrath’s surprise.
Brows saintly calm and lips devout
Knew every change of scowl and pout;
And the sweet voice had notes more high
And shrill for social battle-cry.

Since then what old cathedral town
Has missed her pilgrim staff and gown,
What convent-gate has held its lock
Against the challenge of her knock!
Through Smyrna’s plague-hushed thoroughfares,
Up sea-set Malta’s rocky stairs,
Gray olive slopes of hills that hem
Thy tombs and shrines, Jerusalem,
Or startling on her desert throne
The crazy Queen of Lebanon
With claims fantastic as her own,
Her tireless feet have held their way;
And still, unrestful, bowed, and gray,
She watches under Eastern skies,
With hope each day renewed and fresh,
The Lord’s quick coming in the flesh,
Whereof she dreams and prophesies!
Where’er her troubled path may be,
The Lord’s sweet pity with her go!
The outward wayward life we see,
The hidden springs we may not know.
Nor is it given us to discern
What threads the fatal sisters spun,
Through what ancestral years has run
The sorrow with the woman born,
What forged her cruel chain of moods,
What set her feet in solitudes,
And held the love within her mute,
What mingled madness in the blood,
A life-long discord and annoy,
Water of tears with oil of joy,
And hid within the folded bud
Perversities of flower and fruit.
It is not ours to separate
The tangled skein of will and fate,
To show what metes and bounds should stand
Upon the soul’s debatable land,
And between choice and Providence
Divide the circle of events;
But He who knows our frame is just,
Merciful and compassionate,
And full of sweet assurances
And hope for all the language is,
That He remembereth we are dust!

At last the great logs, crumbling low,
Sent out a dull and duller glow,
The bull’s-eye watch that hung in view,
Ticking its weary circuit through,
Pointed with mutely warning sign
Its black hand to the hour of nine.
That sign the pleasant circle broke:
My uncle ceased his pipe to smoke,
Knocked from its bowl the refuse gray,
And laid it tenderly away;
Then roused himself to safely cover
The dull red brands with ashes over.
And while, with care, our mother laid
The work aside, her steps she stayed
One moment, seeking to express
Her grateful sense of happiness
For food and shelter, warmth and health,
And love’s contentment more than wealth,
With simple wishes (not the weak,
Vain prayers which no fulfilment seek,
But such as warm the generous heart,
O’er-prompt to do with Heaven its part)
That none might lack, that bitter night,
For bread and clothing, warmth and light.

Within our beds awhile we heard
The wind that round the gables roared,
With now and then a ruder shock,
Which made our very bedsteads rock.
We heard the loosened clapboards tost,
The board-nails snapping in the frost;
And on us, through the unplastered wall,
Felt the light sifted snow-flakes fall.
But sleep stole on, as sleep will do
When hearts are light and life is new;
Faint and more faint the murmurs grew,
Till in the summer-land of dreams
They softened to the sound of streams,
Low stir of leaves, and dip of oars,
And lapsing waves on quiet shores.
Of merry voices high and clear;
And saw the teamsters drawing near
To break the drifted highways out.
Down the long hillside treading slow
We saw the half-buried oxen go,
Shaking the snow from heads uptost,
Their straining nostrils white with frost.
Before our door the straggling train
Drew up, an added team to gain.
The elders threshed their hands a-cold,
Passed, with the cider-mug, their jokes
From lip to lip; the younger folks
Down the loose snow-banks, wrestling, rolled,
Then toiled again the cavalcade
O’er windy hill, through clogged ravine,
And woodland paths that wound between
Low drooping pine-boughs winter-weighed.
From every barn a team afoot,
At every house a new recruit,
Where, drawn by Nature’s subtlest law,
Haply the watchful young men saw
Sweet doorway pictures of the curls
And curious eyes of merry girls,
Lifting their hands in mock defence
Against the snow-ball’s compliments,
And reading in each missive tost
The charm with Eden never lost.
We heard once more the sleigh-bells’ sound;
And, following where the teamsters led,
The wise old Doctor went his round,
Just pausing at our door to say,
In the brief autocratic way
Of one who, prompt at Duty’s call,
Was free to urge her claim on all,
That some poor neighbor sick abed
At night our mother’s aid would need.
For, one in generous thought and deed,
What mattered in the sufferer’s sight
The Quaker matron’s inward light,
The Doctor’s mail of Calvin’s creed?
All hearts confess the saints elect
Who, twain in faith, in love agree,
And melt not in an acid sect
The Christian pearl of charity!

So days went on: a week had passed
Since the great world was heard from last.
The Almanac we studied o’er,
Read and reread our little store
Of books and pamphlets, scarce a score;
One harmless novel, mostly hid
From younger eyes, a book forbid,
And poetry, (or good or bad,
A single book was all we had,)
Where Ellwood’s meek, drab-skirted Muse,
A stranger to the heathen Nine,
Sang, with a somewhat nasal whine,
The wars of David and the Jews.
At last the floundering carrier bore
The village paper to our door.
Lo! broadening outward as we read,
To warmer zones the horizon spread
In panoramic length unrolled
We saw the marvels that it told.
Before us passed the painted Creeks,
A   nd daft McGregor on his raids
In Costa Rica’s everglades.
And up Taygetos winding slow
Rode Ypsilanti’s Mainote Greeks,
A Turk’s head at each saddle-bow!
Welcome to us its week-old news,
Its corner for the rustic Muse,
Its monthly gauge of snow and rain,
Its record, mingling in a breath
The wedding bell and dirge of death:
Jest, anecdote, and love-lorn tale,
The latest culprit sent to jail;
Its hue and cry of stolen and lost,
Its vendue sales and goods at cost,
And traffic calling loud for gain.
We felt the stir of hall and street,
The pulse of life that round us beat;
The chill embargo of the snow
Was melted in the genial glow;
Wide swung again our ice-locked door,
And all the world was ours once more!

Clasp, Angel of the backword look
And folded wings of ashen gray
And voice of echoes far away,
The brazen covers of thy book;
The weird palimpsest old and vast,
Wherein thou hid’st the spectral past;
Where, closely mingling, pale and glow
The characters of joy and woe;
The monographs of outlived years,
Or smile-illumed or dim with tears,
Green hills of life that ***** to death,
And haunts of home, whose vistaed trees
Shade off to mournful cypresses
With the white amaranths underneath.
Even while I look, I can but heed
The restless sands’ incessant fall,
Importunate hours that hours succeed,
Each clamorous with its own sharp need,
And duty keeping pace with all.
Shut down and clasp with heavy lids;
I hear again the voice that bids
The dreamer leave his dream midway
For larger hopes and graver fears:
Life greatens in these later years,
The century’s aloe flowers to-day!

Yet, haply, in some lull of life,
Some Truce of God which breaks its strife,
The worldling’s eyes shall gather dew,
Dreaming in throngful city ways
Of winter joys his boyhood knew;
And dear and early friends — the few
Who yet remain — shall pause to view
These Flemish pictures of old days;
Sit with me by the homestead hearth,
And stretch the hands of memory forth
To warm them at the wood-fire’s blaze!
And thanks untraced to lips unknown
Shall greet me like the odors blown
From unseen meadows newly mown,
Wood-fringed, the wayside gaze beyond;
The traveller owns the grateful sense
Of sweetness near, he knows not whence,
And, pausing, takes with forehead bare
The benediction of the air.

Written in  1865

now i know why i might engage with writing obscene
poems, chauvinism included, but still there
is no burning excuse in my mind with the way
western society actively desires censorship of certain
words, i already attributed censoring obscene
words as worse than what this tactic precipitates into:
the apathetic spread of *******, and violence
in general... it crosses my mind that sparring with violent
language cushions people from violet action...
to utilise violent language with that: pardon my French
attitude does more good than evil on the users...
how many road rage incidents could have been avoided
if people were unable to watch their tongue:
somehow we're making language sterile, by actively
pursuing this sort of censorship: which is not even
remotely politically related / motivated, we're bringing
an anaemic status quo in how fluidly we speak -
we desire to not hear the sometimes funny and the sometimes
awful... but we choose to see the god-fearing horrific...
ask any blind-man about music and he'd say:
well, i can dance to it in a nucleus position, centrally
gravitational pull - but ask the deaf man about
what he has to say when seeing **** written to counter
obscenity, as in cartoon-like: f&%£! it's just plain silly,
pocket-sized expression of psychotic behaviours,
rummaging through them i find only one source of inspiration:
the fact that we're in this blind-man's garden of innocence,
somehow dressed in the camouflage of censorship such
a tiny problem, that it does indeed require 23 mattresses
for the princess to not feel the frozen *** agitating her...
this sort of censorship in its application is under
a false sense of purpose, it really doesn't change people's
behaviour for the better, it doesn't pacify them, in does
the reverse: it infuriates, it makes violence more potent...
i'm still trying to figure out why such words
will make our perceptions saintly... unless of course
that's the reason behind them, as way of invoking an
anaesthetic placebo, a placebo that's actually active rather
than passive - presuming the anaesthetic placebo gives
way to an aesthetic active apathy-inducing ingredient...
meaning we can't bare to hear swear words, but we can
gladly watch 20 hours of 20 : 1 ****... censoring **** ****
**** **** will not escape Newtonian physics...
given our current scenario, Newtonian physics is far
more important than Einstein's relativity, i'd hate to be
in denial about cause & effect... as began with Socrates,
i too abhor moral relativism... of course Newton got
the gravity bit wrong, but i like the simpler version...
plus... there was no Romance with Einstein...
no apple, no tree, no Voltaire... meaning we don't necessarily
write history collectively, with all of us starting from
the big bang or the view from the Galapagos islands...
we don't... we continue writing history not from a
collective consciousness genesis... or from the collective
unconscious genesis - that's Jung with his archetypes
(devil, god, wise man, mother, father etc.) rather than
dreams (Freud) - we can chose were to write the future...
it's not so much ignorance as arm-chair intellectualism,
it's not about the safety of understanding something,
but the comfort of choosing to understand something...
which is pretty much to my excuse for my previous poems...
Heidegger... and that concept of Dasein -
i never bothered to understand it to the point of
reacting subjectively to it, by that i mean an interest
in writing about it, an interpolation of the subject with
alternative variations... i objectified it, i also countered it
when objectifying the concept turned out to be an
everyday object, shortening my quest.
the counter? hiersein, i.e. being here, here denoting a
solipsistic classification of awareness with / in the world -
which is basically me in my room, admiring my library,
my record collection, my torn sneakers, everything that
is classified exclusive to what dasein evolves into
when all its grammatical weaving only express a verb,
i.e. concern... so i thought, given this what can hiersein
(being here / nonchalance) actually show me as
my lack of interest in: "changing the world".
it became obvious yesterday, i had a hard time when i
didn't read the day's copy of the times (more on this later),
instead i had to suffice with construction site media,
you might have heard of this newspaper: the daily star,
at 20 pence a pop, you will see what £1.20 makes to
your psyche... but that's basically it, i objectified Heidegger's
concept and made it into an everyday object, in this
case and as the only case available: a newspaper -
and the trick is? well, with a newspaper like daily star
you don't actually experience dasein - it's completely
missing in this style of media, and that's worrying given
my barbaric poetry of yesterday... it's missing, not there,
such object-for-object chirality is what gives birth to
hiersein (being here); but today i returned to my usual
media diet, a flicked through the times and the natural
balance of personal objects and a fresh impersonal object
coexisted - the newspaper is truly the most adequate
compounded expression of Heidegger's dasein -
which i attribute to the constant need to emphasise an
empathy with others... empathising is a neutral form
of sympathising, since sympathy is sourced in shared
experiences: **** victims (e.g.) - therefore empathy is
something that in the ontological structuring of dasein,
which opposes the ontological structuring of hiersein,
which is structured by apathy; there is nothing else for
me to write, apart from the compendium proof
of the disparity of sources, i.e. headlines and subheadings:

- prior compendium -

i will never understand the point of autobiographies,
the majority of autobiographies are written
on a p.s. basis, after the facts / actions,
never immediately, concerning ideas /
solidified thoughts, thoughts condensed into idea
that allow thinking / cognitive narration to
continue regardless with what's being achieved...
i haven't anything autobiographical dissimilar
with something biographical...
Plato wrote that wonderful biography like
Shakespearean theatre, but i guess his critics felt
the claustrophobic tug & pull of mermaids...
still the problem ascends heights unparalleled -
even with ghost writers doing the leg-work...
cheap-buggers never learned to write, let alone read,
and here they are writing biographies...
ah, **** it... they're only sketches... whether biographic
or autobiographic... they're still mere sketches...
if this was the art world the revenue would come
posthumously, when it comes to literacy
nothing really distinguishes poets from
those prescribing pedestrian signs...
the Olympians can moan at the vacant stadium...
that there's a hierarchy in sports,
with the favoured monochrome idealisation
of where the bunny money is in the whirlpool
of the rabbit hole investment: football, volleyball...
but the literary events are the same...
people love to lie that they read the bestseller to
its full extent... but treat books like chairs and tables...
inertia prone half finished, sat on for 2 weeks of
the entire year... the Olympians are very much
like poets, and i care to distance myself from either
demand for more interest being invoked...
i like esoteric sports, i like esoteric writing...
but that's how it stand: poets are Olympians where
novelists are footballers, who retire at 30 and
then think about what to do with their wages
that are 10x higher than the everyday labourer...
start a restaurant, buy a strip of houses in Liverpool
like Michael Owen? good guess, here's to exploiting
youth disgracefully... that's what they're getting,
and these are the dilemma points to consider...
they're the equivalent gladiators of our time,
Rome was just a sleeper before it awoke once more...
but i'll never understand why these
people decided to exploit literature for gain...
all these academics with their pristine purity of discovery
are pacified when dictating print,
what poet, has a chance in hell, to appear gladly
excavated from Plato's cave of television?
about none.
i too was focusing on 20th century literature,
before 21st literature came about...
and i thought, oh god: they're really going to create
a totalitarian democracy, every artist will be
strip-searched for adding cinnamon and chilli to their
writing to bounce away from conformist
sober and sane extraction of alter wordings...
this 21st scene will become polarised...
we'll have the extinction of One Direction over a joint,
while the Rolling Stones drank a keg of whiskey
and pulled off a show... we'll have moralisation
of the fans to subdue the artists, which will mean
no artist will ably create a zeitgeist to rebel... everyone
will suddenly experience a weird sort of communism...
the worst kind... it will mean having
all the mental freedoms without the ability to
economise a coup... basically an inertia, an immediate
fatality... we can't economise a coup...
which boils down to why so many autobiographies
aren't really biographic, but rather consolidating,
by the meaning: autobiographic i intended to relate
the everyday... the most secretive account of life:
the everyday... this is stressing Proust,
even though i preferred Joyce over Proust i keep
the everyday the prime ideal: the only detail,
so that an autobiography can make sense,
automation of writing, like breathing or sneezing...
not some monetary-spinning device 20 years after
the facts... 20 years later you're pretty much writing
fiction... i am all for the biosphere of expanding
Alveoli... but when did you ever read an autobiography
that mentioned the taste of weak coffee
from the Friday of 20th of August 2016? never;
you read autobiographies
like you read self-help books...  waiting for
all that experience regurgitating motivational talk
about reaching a plateau of comparative success...
i can understand autobiographies written by the elders,
i understand biographies written about people
posthumously - but the tragedy is, given the spinning
wheel of money? we're getting "auto" biographies
written toward their 3rd volume renditions of
people aged 30... let alone 40... so much for
western society having the upper hand on political matters...
just saying: sort your own **** before trying
to sort other people's problems...
i could understand if these autobiographies were written
as described: automaton solo... but they're not...
before the compendium it's this everlasting presence
of a desired body of power being depicted:
prior the monopoly of knowledge, there was a monopoly
of literacy... given that 99% of us are literate, it
actually doesn't mean a third donkey's *******
whether we can read, or write, we got shelved in controlling
this once priestly vanity, we got taught bureaucracy alongside...
but the monopoly of literacy is way past us,
we're being convened in the ability to monopolise knowledge,
(oh please, don't let the paranoia seep in,
remember yourself when reading me, once in a while,
i don't drag you to phantasmagorical heights, even if i could,
i'd prefer you being agile in learning how to be bored
than letting your repel the same boredom i too share,
well... but **** me if you want to be the next Lenin) -
and the easiest way to monopolise knowledge? the media...
you basically need a lot of facts, and an evolved version
of dialectics, dialectics being the prime enemy of democracy
(it's not an alternative political model like despotism as
we are held to believe, it's actually dialectics,
suppressing other forms of collectivisation is the one
sure method of suppressing the attempt at dialectics
(individualism) - by making people overly opinionated,
ergo: the inability to engage with opinions, blind-alleys
throughout all plausible attempts to do so) -
so once you have enough facts to fiddle with the Rubik's cube
of juxtaposition, you end up with the ultra-scientific
form of dialectics... the matter of opinion in relation
to truth without a relative uniformity that prescribes
the status quo stasis is a debate about how accurate
we all are: i.e., is that true to the closest centimetre,
or the closest millimetre? it's a bit like watching a Zeno
paradox:
                 10.1                           and 10.01
      which one's tortoise and which is Achilles?
well, you know; ah ****! the compendium of the two
newspapers which got me slightly depressed...

- the compendium -

a. daily star

- B. BRO SAM'S SECRET 'NERVOUS BREAKDOWN'
- Laura & Jason's baby joy
- Robbie (Williams) £1.6M a night!
- BREXIT BOOST ON JOB FRONT
- ANGE DAD BACKS TRUMP
- JR'S wife Linda set to Holly
- Edd's no Beverly Hills flop
(Lana among cow *******)
- LAURA: OUR TINY TROTTS WILL BE WORLD-BEATERS
- FURY AT BAD LOSERS' SLURS
- 'Jealous sis' jibes
- MAKE YOUR KID AN OLYMPICS ACE
- Peaty: I want to be a rapper
- TV girl really ill
- **** SAM, 'ON THE BRINK OF BREAKDOWN'
- COSTA ***** HELL
- CAGING ANJEM WILL INSPIRE NEW JIHADIS
- POG'S LOADED AGENT BUYS CAPONE'S LAIR
- I'll make Kylie a pop star
- JEZ DOESN'T KNOW ANT FROM HIS DEC
- GUILTY OF DEMONIC SAVAGERY
- Great British Rake In
- Britain is *******
- BAYWATCH U.K.
- Va Va Vroom
- JUST JANE: My lover snubs plea to get wed
- HART: I'LL DECIDE WHEN TO GO.

b. the times

- Boy victim becomes a symbol of Assad's war
- US Olympics swimmers invented robbery tale, say Rio police
- Make us sell healthy food, supermarkets implore May (P.M.)
- Lost weekend of the lying best man
- fears over free speech delay law to silence hate preacher
- Met's 'commuter cops' live in France
- Husbands happiest when they earn half as much as wives
- Socialists plot to drive Britain left
- Fake human sacrifice filmed at European high altar of physics
- Officers investigated over ex-footballer's Taser death
- Number of pupils taking languages at record low
   (Mandarin @ 2,849 - % decrease of 8.1,
    alarmingly religious studies 27,032 up by 4.9%
    and psychology of status 59,469 up by 4.3%....
    meaning the mad will soon be diagnosing the sane
   as mad, just because the curriculum said so)
- Top grades add up to 100% at the school for maths prodigies
- Deprived sixth formers thrive on competition
- European students rush to get into British universities
- DVLA earns £10m selling driver's details
- Mystery over Kenyan death of aristocrat
- Journalist who voted twice reported to police for
  'fraud'
- Tomato tax threatens European trade war
- Love story of the Pantomime
- Homeless conmen fleeced widow, 81
- Brownlee brothers at the Olympics...
- Hopeful shoppers give sales a lift after Brexit vote
- MoD guard could be stood down despite terrot threat
- Owners spit mansion after failing to sell
- The job with international appeal: saving our hedgehogs
- Finch warns unborn chicks if weather gets warm
- Migrant violence rises after decline in policing around Jungle
- Longest road tunnel promises a relaxing ride under Pennines
- Mothers step up to drive Tube trains through night
(rowdy teens ageing exponentially on a Saturday night
when not getting a lift, ******...)
-MP's deal with bookmaker to be investigated
- Ebola nurse 'hid high temperature'
- Shoesmith's ex-huspand kept child *******
- Morpurgo war tale springs into life
- Supergran fights off teenage muggers
- IVF is more successful for white women
OPINION SECTION
- Great political fiction is good for democracy
- the BBC is leaving its audiences in the dark
- airline food? just pass me the gin and tonic
- Modern Olympics began on the fields of Rugby
/ greasy polls, holding firm, tongue tied,
  call for compulsory targets to tackle obesity,
second in line, mindfulness course, cost of planning,
puffins v. ship rats.... and all future letters to the editor /
- Moscow presses Turkey for access to US airbases
- Hundreds killed each month in Assad's jails
- Putin bans celebration of defeated KGB coup
(another James Bond movie on the cards,
i'm assured, and with a moral carte blanche) -
Hollande clams Carla Bruni spied concerning his
use of diapers...
- Euthanasia tourists flock Belgian A & E from France,
  where a revival of ****** made people dress shark-fin
  sharp on the catwalk...
- Mosquito pesticide linkage application = intersex /
   East German women
- Haiti cholera linked to Nepalese **** and ***** via
  the

i would like to write a cute little poem so i can post it on facebook
and have everyone tell me how adorable i am
how good at mediocre poetry i am
have them repost and like and comment
on my mediocrity
but every time i sit down to try
the word "****" pops out
and "****"
and
"*******"
and "cutting"
and "help me"
and "go to hell".

and no one on facebook would like that
they'd unfriend me
not that i ******* care
just that i have a hard time being adorable
no matter how many times people comment on my cute face
i am not a cute person
i'd cut you,
*****
forreal.

i almost wish i could be like my little sister
the prodigy
but **** prodigies, man

It is worse for a tulip to live again and be renewed
than for the tulip to die and be dead.
“What happens when you die?”
I asked several romantic partners over the course of my adolescence.
“You’re dead,” they answered.

It is worse for the tulip to be born again,
dust to dust, dirt to dirt, true god from true god,
in a process that spiritual peers define as, reincarnation.
No tulip is an individual (that is clear), but a process.
A perfecting oneness.

I can’t admit or bend to any resounding belief that every tulip is the same.
That FernGully was a farce and Pocahontas, a phony.
That is just not going to fly.
Maybe it is the environmentalist inside me speaking,
or maybe it is God.

I refuse to believe the prodigies and professors of renewal and rejuvenation.
I can not discount individuation, even in tulips!
Tulips are victims of suburbia, they have been relegated to the lawn, to the mulch bed,
but inside of them there are remnants of humanity.

I couldn’t believe it, ever.
Not ever, even if you convinced me or bribed me or seduced me.
No chance.

The second light of sunrise filters
through the blinds of a broken transom window, gliding the kitchen.
There’s an instant
in which bottomless jars, worn out dishes
and a headless Mickey magnet that has fallen off the fridge
Seem to levitate in a sea of dusty honey.

I haven’t witnessed the scene.

I think about all the other ordinary prodigies
That must be happening somewhere.
A trembling chrysanthemum blossoms in the frosty gardens of Nagoya.
Six grey wolves fail to hunt down a white deerling.
A middle aged man whispers into a hollowed stonebrick, then covers his secret with mud.
Two  giraffes disappear in the middle of a starlit Colosseum, to the astonishment of a roman dilettante.
Twenty years of boredom; then an ex con feels the tact of dewy grass under his feet again.
In a balcony over the Seine, two lovers prepare a padlock.
Some skinny kid from La Matanza scores a last minute free kick to win the neighborhood derby.
A pretentious teenager watches The purple rose of Cairo for the first time, and  discovers his true calling.
Days before dying, an old man stops by a bakery and inhales the same caramel fragrance he would inhale in the afternoons of his childhood summers.
An older brother decides to throw a game of Mario Kart to his sibling.
On a deserted reed bed, a blackbird sings the most beautiful tune in the world. There is no one there to listen.
A single mother finishes cooking breakfast for his son, and decides to let him sleep for another five minutes.
A physics grad student solves the meaningless quantum noise model that’s been torturing him for weeks, and stops wondering why he didn't choose to be a lawyer
Two old friends share the same espresso in a hidden Manhattan coffeehouse, perhaps for the last time.  

None of this everyday miracles are
happening to me.

Yea! though I walk through the valley of the
  Shadow.

  ‘Psalm of David’.

Ye who read are still among the living; but I who write
shall have long since gone my way into the region of
shadows. For indeed strange things shall happen, and secret
things be known, and many centuries shall pass away, ere
these memorials be seen of men. And, when seen, there will
be some to disbelieve and some to doubt, and yet a few who
will find much to ponder upon in the characters here graven
with a stylus of iron.

The year had been a year of terror, and of feeling more
intense than terror for which there is no name upon the
earth. For many prodigies and signs had taken place, and far
and wide, over sea and land, the black wings of the
Pestilence were spread abroad. To those, nevertheless,
cunning in the stars, it was not unknown that the heavens
wore an aspect of ill; and to me, the Greek Oinos, among
others, it was evident that now had arrived the alternation
of that seven hundred and ninety-fourth year when, at the
entrance of Aries, the planet Jupiter is enjoined with the
red ring of the terrible Saturnus. The peculiar spirit of
the skies, if I mistake not greatly, made itself manifest,
not only in the physical orb of the earth, but in the souls,
imaginations, and meditations of mankind.

Over some flasks of the red Chian wine, within the walls of
a noble hall, in a dim city called Ptolemais, we sat, at
night, a company of seven. And to our chamber there was no
entrance save by a lofty door of brass: and the door was
fashioned by the artisan Corinnos, and, being of rare
workmanship, was fastened from within. Black draperies,
likewise in the gloomy room, shut out from our view the
moon, the lurid stars, and the peopleless streets—but
the boding and the memory of Evil, they would not be so
excluded. There were things around us and about of which I
can render no distinct account—things material and
spiritual— heaviness in the atmosphere—a sense
of suffocation—anxiety—and, above all, that
terrible state of existence which the nervous experience
when the senses are keenly living and awake, and meanwhile
the powers of thought lie dormant. A dead weight hung upon
us. It hung upon our limbs—upon the household
furniture—upon the goblets from which we drank; and
all things were depressed, and borne down thereby—all
things save only the flames of the seven iron lamps which
illumined our revel. Uprearing themselves in tall slender
lines of light, they thus remained burning all pallid and
motionless; and in the mirror which their lustre formed upon
the round table of ebony at which we sat each of us there
assembled beheld the pallor of his own countenance, and the
unquiet glare in the downcast eyes of his companions. Yet we
laughed and were merry in our proper way—which was
hysterical; and sang the songs of Anacreon—which are
madness; and drank deeply—although the purple wine
reminded us of blood. For there was yet another tenant of
our chamber in the person of young Zoilus. Dead and at full
length he lay, enshrouded;—the genius and the demon of
the scene. Alas! he bore no portion in our mirth, save that
his countenance, distorted with the plague, and his eyes in
which Death had but half extinguished the fire of the
pestilence, seemed to take such an interest in our merriment
as the dead may haply take in the merriment of those who are
to die. But although I, Oinos, felt that the eyes of the
departed were upon me, still I forced myself not to perceive
the bitterness of their expression, and gazing down steadily
into the depths of the ebony mirror, sang with a loud and
sonorous voice the songs of the son of Teos. But gradually
my songs they ceased, and their echoes, rolling afar off
among the sable draperies of the chamber, became weak, and
undistinguishable, and so faded away. And lo! from among
those sable draperies, where the sounds of the song
departed, there came forth a dark and undefiled
shadow—a shadow such as the moon, when low in heaven,
might fashion from the figure of a man: but it was the
shadow neither of man nor of God, nor of any familiar thing.
And quivering awhile among the draperies of the room it at
length rested in full view upon the surface of the door of
brass. But the shadow was vague, and formless, and
indefinite, and was the shadow neither of man nor God—
neither God of Greece, nor God of Chaldaea, nor any Egyptian
God. And the shadow rested upon the brazen doorway, and
under the arch of the entablature of the door and moved not,
nor spoke any word, but there became stationary and
remained. And the door whereupon the shadow rested was, if I
remember aright, over against the feet of the young Zoilus
enshrouded. But we, the seven there assembled, having seen
the shadow as it came out from among the draperies, dared
not steadily behold it, but cast down our eyes, and gazed
continually into the depths of the mirror of ebony. And at
length I, Oinos, speaking some low words, demanded of the
shadow its dwelling and its appellation. And the shadow
answered, “I am SHADOW, and my dwelling is near to the
Catacombs of Ptolemais, and hard by those dim plains of
Helusion which border upon the foul Charonian canal.” And
then did we, the seven, start from our seats in horror, and
stand trembling, and shuddering, and aghast: for the tones
in the voice of the shadow were not the tones of any one
being, but of a multitude of beings, and varying in their
cadences from syllable to syllable, fell duskily upon our
ears in the well remembered and familiar accents of many
thousand departed friends.

The beat, the snare, the drum
Starting in at the floor and flying to my brain
**** all the people who say I’m numb
I’m sane, oh so sane!

My thinking, once a cloudy, congested, coagulate of incoherent thoughts,
Now flows free from its once catastrophically, closed chasm,
Bringing fourth meaningless, mindless motions and movements,
Showing all, that you are who you are, don’t be afraid to fall.

As the smoke clears, the crystallized casts of crushing vocals
Radiate to my ears; all we hear is the hate, the hassle, the hustle
The bustle.  Look beyond what has spawned to see what you find fond.
Blinded we remain; we fight, frightened and furious against this foe.

Conformity hinders our ability to show individuality.  They attack us
With ambidexterity to keep us statues of our own subconscious design,
Yet we continue to follow these wrongly deified prodigies.  They’re using
Us as antibodies to cleanse what are others conformities.

Enlightened I will stay to ensure Elysium for my fellow enthusiasts.
Free from these prodigies, my persistence will not fade
To grey, black, white, withered, wretched wasted thoughts.
My mind is free, my soul deep, this music is the up-beat.

Minerva now put it in Penelope’s mind to make the suitors try
their skill with the bow and with the iron axes, in contest among
themselves, as a means of bringing about their destruction. She went
upstairs and got the store room key, which was made of bronze and
had a handle of ivory; she then went with her maidens into the store
room at the end of the house, where her husband’s treasures of gold,
bronze, and wrought iron were kept, and where was also his bow, and
the quiver full of deadly arrows that had been given him by a friend
whom he had met in Lacedaemon—Iphitus the son of Eurytus. The two
fell in with one another in Messene at the house of Ortilochus,
where Ulysses was staying in order to recover a debt that was owing
from the whole people; for the Messenians had carried off three
hundred sheep from Ithaca, and had sailed away with them and with
their shepherds. In quest of these Ulysses took a long journey while
still quite young, for his father and the other chieftains sent him on
a mission to recover them. Iphitus had gone there also to try and
get back twelve brood mares that he had lost, and the mule foals
that were running with them. These mares were the death of him in
the end, for when he went to the house of Jove’s son, mighty Hercules,
who performed such prodigies of valour, Hercules to his shame killed
him, though he was his guest, for he feared not heaven’s vengeance,
nor yet respected his own table which he had set before Iphitus, but
killed him in spite of everything, and kept the mares himself. It
was when claiming these that Iphitus met Ulysses, and gave him the bow
which mighty Eurytus had been used to carry, and which on his death
had been left by him to his son. Ulysses gave him in return a sword
and a spear, and this was the beginning of a fast friendship, although
they never visited at one another’s houses, for Jove’s son Hercules
killed Iphitus ere they could do so. This bow, then, given him by
Iphitus, had not been taken with him by Ulysses when he sailed for
Troy; he had used it so long as he had been at home, but had left it
behind as having been a keepsake from a valued friend.
  Penelope presently reached the oak threshold of the store room;
the carpenter had planed this duly, and had drawn a line on it so as
to get it quite straight; he had then set the door posts into it and
hung the doors. She loosed the strap from the handle of the door,
put in the key, and drove it straight home to shoot back the bolts
that held the doors; these flew open with a noise like a bull
bellowing in a meadow, and Penelope stepped upon the raised
platform, where the chests stood in which the fair linen and clothes
were laid by along with fragrant herbs: reaching thence, she took down
the bow with its bow case from the peg on which it hung. She sat
down with it on her knees, weeping bitterly as she took the bow out of
its case, and when her tears had relieved her, she went to the
cloister where the suitors were, carrying the bow and the quiver, with
the many deadly arrows that were inside it. Along with her came her
maidens, bearing a chest that contained much iron and bronze which her
husband had won as prizes. When she reached the suitors, she stood
by one of the bearing-posts supporting the roof of the cloister,
holding a veil before her face, and with a maid on either side of her.
Then she said:
  “Listen to me you suitors, who persist in abusing the hospitality of
this house because its owner has been long absent, and without other
pretext than that you want to marry me; this, then, being the prize
that you are contending for, I will bring out the mighty bow of
Ulysses, and whomsoever of you shall string it most easily and send
his arrow through each one of twelve axes, him will I follow and
quit this house of my lawful husband, so goodly, and so abounding in
wealth. But even so I doubt not that I shall remember it in my
dreams.”
  As she spoke, she told Eumaeus to set the bow and the pieces of iron
before the suitors, and Eumaeus wept as he took them to do as she
had bidden him. Hard by, the stockman wept also when he saw his
master’s bow, but Antinous scolded them. “You country louts,” said he,
“silly simpletons; why should you add to the sorrows of your
mistress by crying in this way? She has enough to grieve her in the
loss of her husband; sit still, therefore, and eat your dinners in
silence, or go outside if you want to cry, and leave the bow behind
you. We suitors shall have to contend for it with might and main,
for we shall find it no light matter to string such a bow as this
is. There is not a man of us all who is such another as Ulysses; for I
have seen him and remember him, though I was then only a child.”
  This was what he said, but all the time he was expecting to be
able to string the bow and shoot through the iron, whereas in fact
he was to be the first that should taste of the arrows from the
hands of Ulysses, whom he was dishonouring in his own house—egging
the others on to do so also.
  Then Telemachus spoke. “Great heavens!” he exclaimed, “Jove must
have robbed me of my senses. Here is my dear and excellent mother
saying she will quit this house and marry again, yet I am laughing and
enjoying myself as though there were nothing happening. But,
suitors, as the contest has been agreed upon, let it go forward. It is
for a woman whose peer is not to be found in Pylos, Argos, or
Mycene, nor yet in Ithaca nor on the mainland. You know this as well
as I do; what need have I to speak in praise of my mother? Come on,
then, make no excuses for delay, but let us see whether you can string
the bow or no. I too will make trial of it, for if I can string it and
shoot through the iron, I shall not suffer my mother to quit this
house with a stranger, not if I can win the prizes which my father won
before me.”
  As he spoke he sprang from his seat, threw his crimson cloak from
him, and took his sword from his shoulder. First he set the axes in
a row, in a long groove which he had dug for them, and had Wade
straight by line. Then he stamped the earth tight round them, and
everyone was surprised when they saw him set up so orderly, though
he had never seen anything of the kind before. This done, he went on
to the pavement to make trial of the bow; thrice did he tug at it,
trying with all his might to draw the string, and thrice he had to
leave off, though he had hoped to string the bow and shoot through the
iron. He was trying for the fourth time, and would have strung it
had not Ulysses made a sign to check him in spite of all his
eagerness. So he said:
  “Alas! I shall either be always feeble and of no prowess, or I am
too young, and have not yet reached my full strength so as to be
able to hold my own if any one attacks me. You others, therefore,
who are stronger than I, make trial of the bow and get this contest
settled.”
  On this he put the bow down, letting it lean against the door
[that led into the house] with the arrow standing against the top of
the bow. Then he sat down on the seat from which he had risen, and
Antinous said:
  “Come on each of you in his turn, going towards the right from the
place at which the. cupbearer begins when he is handing round the
wine.”
  The rest agreed, and Leiodes son of OEnops was the first to rise. He
was sacrificial priest to the suitors, and sat in the corner near
the mixing-bowl. He was the only man who hated their evil deeds and
was indignant with the others. He was now the first to take the bow
and arrow, so he went on to the pavement to make his trial, but he
could not string the bow, for his hands were weak and unused to hard
work, they therefore soon grew tired, and he said to the suitors,
“My friends, I cannot string it; let another have it; this bow shall
take the life and soul out of many a chief among us, for it is
better to die than to live after having missed the prize that we
have so long striven for, and which has brought us so long together.
Some one of us is even now hoping and praying that he may marry
Penelope, but when he has seen this bow and tried it, let him woo
and make bridal offerings to some other woman, and let Penelope
marry whoever makes her the best offer and whose lot it is to win
her.”
  On this he put the bow down, letting it lean against the door,
with the arrow standing against the tip of the bow. Then he took his
seat again on the seat from which he had risen; and Antinous rebuked
him saying:
  “Leiodes, what are you talking about? Your words are monstrous and
intolerable; it makes me angry to listen to you. Shall, then, this bow
take the life of many a chief among us, merely because you cannot bend
it yourself? True, you were not born to be an archer, but there are
others who will soon string it.”
  Then he said to Melanthius the goatherd, “Look sharp, light a fire
in the court, and set a seat hard by with a sheep skin on it; bring us
also a large ball of lard, from what they have in the house. Let us
warm the bow and grease it we will then make trial of it again, and
bring the contest to an end.”
  Melanthius lit the fire, and set a seat covered with sheep skins
beside it. He also brought a great ball of lard from what they had
in the house, and the suitors warmed the bow and again made trial of
it, but they were none of them nearly strong enough to string it.
Nevertheless there still remained Antinous and Eurymachus, who were
the ringleaders among the suitors and much the foremost among them
all.
  Then the swineherd and the stockman left the cloisters together, and
Ulysses followed them. When they had got outside the gates and the
outer yard, Ulysses said to them quietly:
  “Stockman, and you swineherd, I have something in my mind which I am
in doubt whether to say or no; but I think I will say it. What
manner of men would you be to stand by Ulysses, if some god should
bring him back here all of a sudden? Say which you are disposed to do-
to side with the suitors, or with Ulysses?”
  “Father Jove,” answered the stockman, “would indeed that you might
so ordain it. If some god were but to bring Ulysses back, you should
see with what might and main I would fight for him.”
  In like words Eumaeus prayed to all the gods that Ulysses might
return; when, therefore, he saw for certain what mind they were of,
Ulysses said, “It is I, Ulysses, who am here. I have suffered much,
but at last, in the twentieth year, I am come back to my own
country. I find that you two alone of all my servants are glad that
I should do so, for I have not heard any of the others praying for
my return. To you two, therefore, will I unfold the truth as it
shall be. If heaven shall deliver the suitors into my hands, I will
find wives for both of you, will give you house and holding close to
my own, and you shall be to me as though you were brothers and friends
of Telemachus. I will now give you convincing proofs that you may know
me and be assured. See, here is the scar from the boar’s tooth that
ripped me when I was out hunting on Mount Parnassus with the sons of
Autolycus.”
  As he spoke he drew his rags aside from the great scar, and when
they had examined it thoroughly, they both of them wept about Ulysses,
threw their arms round him and kissed his head and shoulders, while
Ulysses kissed their hands and faces in return. The sun would have
gone down upon their mourning if Ulysses had not checked them and
said:
  “Cease your weeping, lest some one should come outside and see us,
and tell those who a are within. When you go in, do so separately, not
both together; I will go first, and do you follow afterwards; Let this
moreover be the token between us; the suitors will all of them try
to prevent me from getting hold of the bow and quiver; do you,
therefore, Eumaeus, place it in my hands when you are carrying it
about, and tell the women to close the doors of their apartment. If
they hear any groaning or uproar as of men fighting about the house,
they must not come out; they must keep quiet, and stay where they
are at their work. And I charge you, Philoetius, to make fast the
doors of the outer court, and to bind them securely at once.”
  When he had thus spoken, he went back to the house and took the seat
that he had left. Presently, his two servants followed him inside.
  At this moment the bow was in the hands of Eurymachus, who was
warming it by the fire, but even so he could not string it, and he was
greatly grieved. He heaved a deep sigh and said, “I grieve for
myself and for us all; I grieve that I shall have to forgo the
marriage, but I do not care nearly so much about this, for there are
plenty of other women in Ithaca and elsewhere; what I feel most is the
fact of our being so inferior to Ulysses in strength that we cannot
string his bow. This will disgrace us in the eyes of those who are yet
unborn.”
  “It shall not be so, Eurymachus,” said Antinous, “and you know it
yourself. To-day is the feast of Apollo throughout all the land; who
can string a bow on such a day as this? Put it on one side—as for the
axes they can stay where they are, for no one is likely to come to the
house and take them away: let the cupbearer go round with his cups,
that we may make our drink-offerings and drop this matter of the
bow; we will tell Melanthius to bring us in some goats to-morrow-
the best he has; we can then offer thigh bones to Apollo the mighty
archer, and again make trial of the bow, so as to bring the contest to
an end.”
  The rest approved his words, and thereon men servants poured water
over the hands of the guests, while pages filled the mixing-bowls with
wine and water and handed it round after giving every man his
drink-offering. Then, when they had made their offerings and had drunk
each as much as he desired, Ulysses craftily said:
  “Suitors of the illustrious queen, listen that I may speak even as I
am minded. I appeal more especially to Eurymachus, and to Antinous who
has just spoken with so much reason. Cease shooting for the present
and leave the matter to the gods, but in the morning let heaven give
victory to whom it will. For the moment, however, give me the bow that
I may prove the power of my hands among you all, and see whether I
still have as much strength as I used to have, or whether travel and
neglect have made an end of it.”
  This made them all very angry, for they feared he might string the
bow; Antinous therefore rebuked him fiercely saying, “Wretched
creature, you have not so much as a grain of sense in your whole body;
you ought to think yourself lucky in being allowed to dine unharmed
among your betters, without having any smaller portion served you than
we others have had, and in being allowed to hear our conversation.
No other beggar or stranger has been allowed to hear what we say among
ourselves; the wine must have been doing you a mischief, as it does
with all those drink immoderately. It was wine that inflamed the
Centaur Eurytion when he was staying with Peirithous among the
Lapithae. When the wine had got into his head he went mad and did
ill deeds about the house of Peirithous; this angered the heroes who
were there assembled, so they rushed at him and cut off his ears and
nostrils; then they dragged him through the doorway out of the
house, so he went away crazed, and bore the burden of his crime,
bereft of understanding. Henceforth, therefore, there was war
between mankind and the centaurs, but he brought it upon himself
through his own drunkenness. In like manner I can tell you that it
will go hardly with you if you string the bow: you will find no
mercy from any one here, for we shall at once ship you off to king
Echetus, who kills every one that comes near him: you will never get
away alive, so drink and keep quiet without getting into a quarrel
with men younger than yourself.”
  Penelope then spoke to him. “Antinous,” said she, “it is not right
that you should ill-treat any guest of Telemachus who comes to this
house. If the stranger should prove strong enough to string the mighty
bow of Ulysses, can you suppose that he would take me home with him
and make me his wife? Even the man hi

Who is she but blood of that demise
In fiery passion her own blood consumes?
Like powder waiting for the heat of flame
Whose heat in lonely agony she bathes?
What is it but fire of that demise
Whose sacrificial prodigies be made
To keep him superstitious of the flame?
And in triumph, like fire, they consume.

Consisting of grown, persisting as shown and unknown. Insisting entities, rivalries and sworn enemies! Deformed, forewarned, formed, informed, mourned, performed, reformed and scorned. Dates of great storms! Family tree of hate, horns and thorns. My family tree of gore, horror, more, poor and sore. Perhaps of mishaps galore. Briefly sit

back! I’ll roughly take you back… Heck! Back to a time of attack,
blacks, slacks and whacks. My family tree of practical, tactical, methodical Aztec. Some beckon and reckon in seconds. A family tree of crime, grime and rhyme. A nation of communication, dedication,
dissemination, motivation and procrastination. The splendor of sin

of my corruptive, disruptive kin. They rely more on the color of one’s
skin. My family tree of abuse and misuse that misuses and seduces! Family tree of warfare and welfare legalities, moralities and family-prodigies. Picture this scriptural twist! Some assist on a kiss. I insist
some are idealities in social technicalities. Alcoholics, diabetics,

******, exotic, fantastic, Catholics, eccentric, horrific and poetic. I persist… some gnomes, some roam, some in poems, some with no homes. My family tree of adventuresome, awesome, handsome and troublesome. My family tree of beautiful and bountiful! Some are a
handful some handicap some locally and vocally-rap. Some slap,

gift-wrap and yap! Some are snuggly, pretty, witty or ugly. In my family tree, some crippled, some with pimples, some with freckles
and some that heckle. Some belittle and little, some wrinkled and old. Some are bold and pray to the lord! Some are Frio, meaning cold we
were told. Some I say, are poor with no Amor. Some are here no more, in my family tree of Amor.

My anomalous trip thus far has been dichotomous.
Harbingers motivate my advent: a chorus.
Acceptance of frolic ventures sent: a quest.
My sneakers meet familiar soil at last.

Designed to be a panacea, yet I fall ill.
Sleets of rain impact my soul: a slight chill.
Hazed trance, awashed clean of all acrimony.
A lurid stroll, downhill, parallel, perfunctory.

I, a stoic mercenary, avenging my ties tonight.
Arcane magic flow through my veins, my sight.
Moisture sparkle, glistens through my mental maze.
Resistance, control: I attempt to regain ablaze.

Synaptics fuse, burn, misfire, discombobulate.
Higher functions remain: calculus, formulate.
Veritas! Visual focus be on 2D layer sharp.
Disintegrated data sung with melodious harp.

Laissez-faire slayed by Communist meritocracy.
Mental hierarchy arise from wayward sorcery.
My affection for her nets only melancholia.
The amity cease... yet reborn by spying cornea.

Upon a hill from sea to sea brings forth diplomacy.
Lively lads, enshrouded in black; they be prodigies.
Persons of worth: one stranger joins their ranks.
If my creed offend, beg you pardon pranks.

Silent drizzle softly sings of night and majesty.
Lament under moonlight, behold gray sanctity.
Ne'er shall dreadful turmoil befall our facilities.
Literature conceals such divine secrecy.

Who am I?
Why am I here?
How do I grow?
Where do the words that I utter spring from?
How do my actions unfold to take flight?
What are the roots of my habits both desired and not desired?
When did my character become undesirably ripe?
As defined by Another?

Piously pompous extruding expectations
We both wagged the tail of judgment from our respective roles.
Each casting the wands of incantations, illusions, and lies!
One to change the controlling illusion
Another to maintain it's web and power.

It was handed down from the very first mothers
It was handed down from the very first fathers
It was set into motion from the very first breath of the very first lie.
It created the very first shadow of darkness that fell upon Truth.

Tainted, "It" fell from realms of Light, the realms of Love and Joy.
"It" tumbled and rolled down the family Tree
Branch by branch, twig by twig, and leaf by leaf
Deeper into the darkness, grief, sadness and pain.

We were taught to ignore the dragon of dysfunction
Lying among the branches of our human family tree.
As "It" grew and grew, and grew.
"It" matured and gave birth to expanding prodigies
Who fained deeds of compassion, fained loyalties,
Fained emotions, and fained love

To twist and to alter reality,
Aimed toward total power,  riches, and total control.
Using the swords of Expectations,
Judgments, half truths and lies, they waged war!
With their army of
Every wolf in sheep's clothing
Every entitled the fair-haired child
Every hero - rescuer
Every "I am the victim"
Every fearful guilt burdened peacemaker,
Every misunderstood black sheep,
And all the unaware lost lambs.
The cycle of dysfunction turns
As a companion within the wheel of time.
We are told to never speak of It and deny It's existence.
This is the power that feeds It as It expands.
And we find ourselves beyond the ability to contain "It."

One day our eyes open to awareness
We come face-to-face with "The Choice."
Do we go back to sleep? Or do we get up?
And if we stand up, what is next?
When we see our unveiled past, will we fear and hide?
Or arise as a seeking warrior of Light?
If we choose the Light will Love begin to arise from the darkness
Will Love transform "It" to find It's-self Immortal & Eternal?

Give me understanding of Love!! With Understanding I will seek!!
Standing between the windows of time past, present, and future
With the root of addictive desire, laid upon the alter
Banished! Gone!! Released!!

Will the Darkness  release "It" from the depths of grief, sadness and pain?
Without a word "It" became a He
And He draped the blanket of courage over His shoulders
with the Light of hope in His eyes.
Refusing to never give up
He dawned His Innate strengths
Refusing dire circumstances
Letting go of confusion, ignorance, vises, grief, blame, and all ill desire
He stepped straight and firmly into the Light which expands!
He stood with joy in the Light and looked back

As "It" became a She
And She draped the blanket of courage over Her shoulders
with the Light of hope in Her eyes
Refusing to never give up
She dawned Her Innate strengths
Refusing dire circumstances
Letting go of confusion, ignorance, vise, grief, blame, and all ill desire
She stepped straight and firmly into the Light which expands!

The Light embraced Her and embraced Him
They stood together seeking understanding
Their hearts opened
Each to sing their own song of joy, of love, of peace
Together in harmony
Dancing  in the Light as One.

So with courage, do my actions unfold to take flight!
With joyful Love the words uttered within my heart sprang!
How, I do grow!
I am fully here, awake!
I know who am I, really!
Because  in silence I sat upon the earth
As He sat upon the Earth
As She sat upon the Earth
Looking toward the heavens
She female and He male
Focused in silence, they taught me how to breathe.

Now throughout the generations of Time
We began to breathe as One
Together in Love, in Peace and in Unity.
Reaching and holding each other
Beyond and through the Wheel of Time.

Your interest is piqued
By we the people,
The prosperous poor.
Pacified by things
As simple as passion,
We push,
Pull,
And punch
Our way to the peak.
You're puzzled
By our paedarchy
Where the puerile rule
For they are the prudent.
We are the prosperous poor,
The pauperized children,
Packing our hearts
With dreams of progress
And thoughts of prodigies.
Poor by birth,
Prosperous by personality,
We are the prosperous poor.
We, the children of poverty
Who have been pure only in heart
Will proceed
To prove that the poor
Are prosperous at heart.
The prosperous poor
Are only prosperous
Because they have felt the pain
Of the poor.

the night i found a woodland pigeons roosting
on my guttering, tried to catch it given
the maxim: better a robin in your hand,
than a dove on your roof, but failed, and
to my surprise, felt no feeling of failure,
nothing competitive, and the world needs this
at this moment, the shattering of the clocks,
for a moment, to hold your breath and take
snapshots of the world as if drowning -
with a held breath, and ninja gymnastics
slowly edging toward the pigeon perched
in the guttering... do people understand that
poetry isn't about competing in the Olympics?
you can't laurel crown a poet of ability
among others, just like you can't discourage others
from the freedom to write it, however ridden with
orthodox methodology, or however concerned
with the purity of a narrative...  nor can you
have poetic prodigies - poetry takes time,
it takes fermentation, it's not one of those first
come first served allocations of ability...
it takes years, experience, i'm not talking about
a viola player in an orchestra, reduced to
muscle work, sure, you can be the muscular equivalent
of a viola player in an orchestra in poetry,
that's the easy part, tweak a few things in your
imitation and we're set to go... you'll be known
as pseudo-Plato or some other grand name...
you can't become a prodigious poet, i.e. if your
mother or father was a poet... this is the only
place where Sartre's existence precedes essence
takes form, elsewhere it doesn't,
the most evident i.e. is time flies when you're
having fun - the presupposed essence of time
defines the supposition of having fun and
the non-existence of time - the two together are
what's required of a proposition taking form -
fiddling with the prefix doesn't concern anyone that
much, i.e. a preposition is lodged between
the presupposition (preposition) and supposition -
as i said before, systematisation is a method of
economising vocabulary - a boa constriction, a restraint,
imagine yourself being a pauper while writing out
lavish decking, chairs, marble toilets and gold-gilded
toilet seats, tacky stuff according to the failing
of the concept of money, once gained: to lavish out
on things, to keep the merchant class constantly busy
and adaptable - what with the Koranic procedures
we can be assured that there will be a constant
confidence in producing, selling, exchanging,
or the tonne of food thrown out because it didn't sell.
like growing vegetables, you probably ingest
5 nutritious poems a day, the rest you throw out...
you take a fat poem, a protein poem, whatever,
there's always a variation on what poem fills
the carbohydrate allowance, but the rest is thrown out...
a thinking man's poem is fibrous, that means:
slow on digestion, reminding, an agitating gnat
or mosquito; but it truly is a case of having to be
an entertaining narrator, without character study -
or character concern - in that i lend myself
to the poetic practice of ensō - one smooth stroke
and the narrative is finished - also a culminating point
of worth consideration, name revelation 13 -
and the suggestion: what the contemporary affairs
would also suggest -
it's kinda funny when you think about it...
isn't the beast from the sea Moses and the beast
from the earth Jesus?
early Christianity probably wasn't prone to iconoclasm,
only when it reached popularity this
iconoclasm play a key role...
but what does John actually write?
in our modern tongue? Moses (the dragon) and
Jesus (the beast), as stated in the tale:
the transfiguration, or the shifting of power -
who is able to make war against the beast?
the Antichrist (some words have been kept in
straitjackets, use them, they either think you're
mad, or religiously psychotic, under-use them
and they fall into the wrong hands... bit of a juggle,
but coming from a religious school education,
i'd keep such words categorised in controversy
as euthanasia and abortion); so unto the beast...
a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies
(sermon on the mount), and the deadly wound was
healed (the crown of myrrh, and the resurrection),
and they worshipped the dragon and they
worshipped the beast - many do still preserve
"tact" of kneeling before an icon, esp. in orthodox
tradition... and the blasphemies,
well, i'm not sure Jesus was crucified for nothing...
see how people can make you look silly when you
use parts of their vocabulary? you write Jesus
and immediately you can't think of an Eddie Izzard
sketch... you're trapped with how other people
over-use certain words, keep them "sacred" in order
that they might be treated as sustenance...
some people write the word tomato or potato and
get a meal out of it, others write Jesus and they
win the ******* lottery with their flock of goody-two-shoes
fanning their ***** in packed churches in the Bible Belt.
then there's John doing a bit of Spartacus -
if any man have an ear, let him hear -
by the way hunter s. thompson was keen to study this
book too... he that leads into captivity...
and when did i not felt being captive under Christianity?
they catch you early on, get you educated in *******
and then release you into the world as mince meat;
it's all a fatal exercise in / of metaphor -
i'm not surprised rushed toward the book of Genesis
for a stability of thought, trying to
write an equivalent of Paradise Lost, i.e. Paradise
Regained basing it solely on the book of Revelation
with is complex use of metaphors would drive
anyone mad... so far i'm stumbling, we have
the dragon giving power to the beast of the sea
(Jesus' harem of nuns, water, juiced up *****)
and then we have the beast of the earth -
then there's the many deceptions or "miracles"
that Jesus did - any magician will gladly succumb,
altogether the purposes of any image,
not a statue, but an image, basically a sphinx on paper,
how ancient worship of statues and building them
turned into a worship of oil-on-canvas...
from 3D into 2D... by the time we reach 1D we are
talking the big bang... oh, right... we're talking
about the origins of the universe already...
i'll test you: compose me a Milton-like poem working
from the book of revelation and never touching on
the book of Genesis - let's face it, the only poetically
riddled book of the New Testament is the book
of Revelation... and it truly is a ****-up for any poet
to consider... easier to be a novelist and joke
at the bible being accessible in every motel room
across America... such books are agitators,
they're implants, something you get rid off in your
spare time, bite out the access of such books to your mind
like a dog with rabies... praying:
just so i don't have to wear the Golgotha geometry,
just so i don't have to wear the Golgotha geometry...
in summary? to me the dragon is Moses
(every Greek would side with the Egyptians given
Alexandria and whatnot), armed with all the physics
bending plagues (yes, i think they're true,
Darwinism is no better at their myth of Tarzan,
given we're watching sprinting 100 metres in under
10 seconds, everything starts to look ridiculous given that),
yes, both assumptions are quiet honestly absurd,
it just depends where you want to begin with:
the clash of fur versus tanned buttocks,
or the clash between female genital mutilation
versus male genital mutilation...
i told you, i am circumcised during ***, i roll the *******
back, and hey pesto! a helmet!
i think i better change the concept of enso into
a concept of the waterfall, just for the exotica (but there's
no exotica in globalisation, it's hard keeping
history and learning to get together without
some part of us rebelling to rekindle ancient wrestling),
aha! taki! can you imagine what would have been
if the Egyptians were able to keep their ideograms?
they wouldn't ever have kept them to see them off
on the evolutionary sprint to success, they weren't
using matchsticks like the Chinese were using
and kept on using, waiting for numbers to prop up
and tell you Hong Kong was 1 million light years away
from Beijing... because it was all d'uh to them
and the Mongolian harmonica imitation of the steppe
idiot laughing at a horse taking a **** like
a male dog taking a ****, giddy up on the leg over.
i'm well surprised the Chinese ideogram is alive...
it's a source for many ideas, without me even wanting to
travel there... they built the great wall of China with their
ideograms, the wall itself was unnecessary to protect
the people from Mongolian optometrists...
that's the key in Chinese, using matchsticks the sounds
are pretty much basic: Xi Lung Chi - or Chang Chewy Lo,
pretty crap, isn't it? i agree, their strength comes
best expressed by their proficiency in less matchsticks
included in the Jenga of 1, 2, 3, i mean the bendy bits,
we Europeans have to first remember the aesthetic,
then the dyslexia antidote to get our ideas out and into
the open, for the Chinese every ideogram is
not a letter but another bright new idea... eo or ea-,
whatever... 1 billion of them content with the scraps
of individuation waiting for them... with us it's
about conquering the world, but our **** doesn't sell
in Mongolia... when was the last time
you picked up a newspaper and read news from
Mongolia? the 13th century and Genghis Khan?
probably. god, feels great to unwind without
paying too much attention on the book of revelation,
every time i muster the strength to consider
religious topics i immediately feel i'm claustrophobic
and want to get out...
that book is still but a fatal exercise in metaphor -
it's overly-poetic, the book of Genesis is full of
princely imagery, but the book of Revelation
is not compatible with imagery, a garden and three
characters makes imagining it far more easily
than the three characters in the book of Revelation
on a beach... when i think of a garden i think
of vineyards and pear orchards, i.e. wine and cider -
when i think of the beach i only think of
hot dog selfies of a girl's tanned legs... and that
ain't helping... and why people vacate on beach
resorts but are scared of swimming in the sea,
and only want the sea as a canvas when swimming
in the hotel swimming pool.

“Listen here kid, have a seat.
Let me tell you about
The family.”*

You can choose your friends
But you can’t choose
Your family….

…and apparently you can’t choose
your career either.

This is dedicated to
my brother in crime
The younger brother
With stronger
Morals and values
Than mine.

The family is broken,
And your older brother is broke
And in the eyes of a distant father
You know we are both jokes

We are not prodigies
We are not straight A students
We are small town oddities
And some would say we are ruined

We were born into this life.
We were born into financial comfort
Bathed in upper middle class stability
Taught racism is acceptable as long
As we keep it to ourselves, and laugh
As if we are not serious.

We learned that as we grow up, dreams become schemes

We were raised believing we would succeed.
And success is defined by money.

The monetary system is god.
I will be the doctor
You will be the lawyer
And because the system isn’t flawed
We are.

Money is not good, money is god.
I’ve spent a lot of god on beer.

So when we watch our bloodline bicker
Like bad kids in sandboxes,
When we watch adults undermine
Each other’s “parenting skills”
Remember,

You did not chose this
You were born into this.

And as the age old argument
Of genetic versus environment
Rages on like arguments
Over furniture and kitchenware
Remind yourself
It’s not an argument.
Its your environment.

Today my little brother’s heart was broken
And his dreams were shattered like a
Malicious marriage
Divorced, and separated,
By god.

My little brother will not be an RCMP officer
And if he doesn’t know it yet,
This is the best thing to ever happen to him.

Just because your eyes aren’t apparently good enough
They have never stopped you from seeing right from wrong
They are wrong.
You are more then alright.

Cops are more crooked than the criminals they can’t catch
So whatever you do, don’t catch flack
For not having a backup plan
You turn 17 tomorrow, man…
Kid.
Be one.
For a kid can be anything.

You can race san dunes in the desert.
You can rebuild muscle cars and motorbikes.
You can make unique one of a kind furniture.
You can open a restaurant, even a bar.
You can be the next big sensation in Country music, or rap.
Or both.
You will live. You will smile
And you will make other do the same.

Brother, we can do anything.
Hell, when our parents die,
Miserable and alone,
We will inherit their throne
all of their god.

And we can take their god,
Design ourselves some superhero outfits
Break laws in order to fix them
We can grow and sell dope by donation
And make the difference
That neither our parents
Or the police
Are able to do.

I’m proud to share blood with you.
We are superheroes.
We are gods.
We are brothers in crime.

I have seen the boy tear at the stitches his shadow sowed,
You are an old man who I have neither a need, nor a want of anything,
I have seen lungs gasp for air while the stupid ******* drowned you,
Hidden in the Old Mill, left to drink Complan and ***** nightmares,
I have seen your mother dying whilst she was making the children sandwiches from her bed,
The Lost Boys forgot, grew old and had Lost Boys of their own,
I have seen you try to fly from the world which is now on your shoulders, whilst the eagle circles in the sky you dreamt of,
The storm of madness continually crashes against our walls of concrete and imagination,
I have seen failure after successive failure wave to me from those eyes,
A father and a husband locks himself alone when the sentiment kicks his guts,
I have seen a head wrenched back to the barrage of pills and pain by wretched Ephialtes and his like,
Running from the hospital because they want more blood,
I have seen you scared, naked and drinking toilet water,
Everything went blue and time slowed down in riotous Belfast,
I have seen ****** and *****

We nursed our bruised bodies and mutinous minds from themselves,
I have seen late night talks of tears but freeing none whilst brooding on Dundee benches,
You misunderstand my intentions but I do not blame you,
I have seen petrified thoughts begging for company, abandoned to fight the lonely nights,
In dark rooms full of empty Coke cans and never-to-be-used condoms,
I have seen the miscarried baby and the aborted foetus and I have wept in secret over dreams of their lamented birthdays,
Prodigies of stardust and walking infinity,
I have seen a baby boy born into dyslexia, depression and death,
Reflections meander on the television with maddened eyes and religious fists,
I have seen the bite marks on my own arms as Fenrir knaws at his chains,
Graveyard whispers cry of Elliott Smith and James Dean,
I have seen the suicide note torn into pieces, but put aside ready to be glued back,
My brothers Icarus, Atlas and Prometheus all shake their heads in dismay,

I have seen friends and strangers and imagined all lives unlived,
Felt every tear I have not cried, cried every tear I have not felt,
I have seen the life that will never be and thereby choose not to live,
Sing a requiem for futures lived,
In the present now passed into the past,
I have seen prison bars,
I have seen closing doors without handles, hinges or keyholes,
I have seen the invisible voice,
I have seen beaten tracks leading nowhere,
I have seen blue eyes stare back from the abyss,
As soon as see me, gone,
I have seen forests of my mind burning,
I have seen the scorched mattress,
I have seen a lifeline on your wrist dying to live,
I have seen Ragnarok,
I have seen too much and felt not enough,
Though I could bear no more

Holy Trinity of death, divorce and debt,
Haunt the adult-minded children,
Manifest the shroud of sorrow around you,
As if a shield of darkness unto all light,
My legs are not yet buckled but do sink with every blinded step,
I have seen words upon pages but not felt the anguished breath slap me as you scream them in my face,
I have seen everything and nothing, that which has and has not,
I have seen things never to have been, be,
I have seen things never to have happened, happen,
I have seen a woman **** for feelings that never come,
I have seen her undress me with her stare and then blink,
I have seen a forgotten man escape his crazed mind by losing it,
I have seen him in love with ghosts that are not dead,
I have seen children fading from photographs that do not exist,
I have seen them lost in a Neverland that never was,
I have seen; now please let me see no more, not ever,
Now I am lost,
Now I have seen enough,
Please no more, not ever,
I have seen enough.
I have seen enough.

solitude and shadows are one
the sound of the sun
as it falls towards the horizon
lift up your eyes to the sky
for it reminds me of why i love you

burn up these memories
allow dreams to disagree
for if we are truly meant to be
then we’ll surely see each other again

ferment the leaves in jars
our lives may lead to scars
but if we allow our hearts to guide us
we may find that there
has always been a star inside us

blinded by beauty’s face
the secrets you have kept safe
its time to let them out
the knowledge of the soul
removes all doubts as it unfolds
all is one forever, without
all is one forever, we shout

blessed are we
lovers and angels
blessed are we
thousands of faithful
blessed are Thee, light’s prodigies
for lovers and thieves are all equal

I aimlessly drifted in teenage years,
From subtle scion to zaftig plebe.
Seen phony glory, vanquished fears,
And the stench of a wicked glebe.

From below, saw the stars up high,
Igniting horizons with callow wonder.
Beheld colossal beauty with mine inner eye,
Begged for chained thoughts asunder.

Amidst the serene flock to be slain,
Oft' a titan, seldom a vacant savant.
Known sorrow, elation, gain, vain, pain,
This mortal hour, hear joyful lament.

How quick we are to bid farewell,
How slow for friendship to pierce the cloth.
The rhythmic ache of that darkened knell,
The sobbing whimpers for a lover's warmth.

Nix for reciprocated amity, yet!
My seat of affection thrives in twilight.
Herein discipline is adamantly set,
Whence shall this ****** ire take flight?

Into the night that covers my soul,
Unleash that verdant star I see.
The divine abyss have taken its toll,
I pray the shadow is only me.

Note the ease to neglect one's clan,
Yet savored glee of reunions by blood.
Fury cease my elder ties, an infant plan,
By filial ardor, I still kneel in mud.

Star-shine ablaze onto vivid blooms,
Arise the stench of broiling debris.
Beauteous summer-tide metronomes,
The sinking scythe follow gales of peace.

Labor come sweat yield sweet fruition,
Tis annual come the bronze harvest.
Wrongful vengeance seek humble redemption,
Autumn under siege of well-fed zest.

Stormy vista rime graying meadows,
Entrench the sepsis by the ice age.
Taste weeping woe of guilty widows,
Lest their beloved hunger in cage.

Arise young lilac out of barren frosts,
Touch the vital aura to begin anew.
Altruists gladly pay auric costs,
To stalk vile leviathan into dew.

May stones bear indistinct distinction,
So my stride shall stumble and falter.
Peace paint heroes of sluggish fiction,
Chaos rouse prodigies from quiet slumber.

I went to a party on Saturday night,
one of those inane get-togethers
for so-and-so who came back from
that place that they went.
Though of course,
it's only an excuse to get drunk since
someone scored some cheap, ******
beer from an older sibling or whoever.

I spent about 45 minutes leaning
against some sticky couch before
I saw you standing in a corner, stupidly
close to the speakers and you were
wearing a hessian scarf that had to be
scraping your blemished neck, but
you didn't seem fazed by it at all.

It's probably the new trend like last
week it was platform sneakers that only
the Flinders Street Steps would ever
wear. Sometimes I imagine a conversation
with one of those kids, though it never
gets past them glaring at me.

I nodded, you nodded
(this means we're now friends)
and passed you a cup of some
****-beer that I'm sure you didn't want but
you probably just took it to avoid saying
no and making this more awkward.

I asked you what school you went to and
you replied with some made-up name
that was probably indigenous or something
since a bunch of old, white preachers
didn't want to offend anyone.

You shrugged.

You asked me a question and I countered
it until it became some kind of 20
questions tennis, minus the ***** secrets
but still adequately laced with teenage
awkward. You told me you wrote poetry
and I laughed saying, "Doesn't everybody?"

I realise now that I'm a little hypocritical.

Prodigies, poets, peacemakers:
These are the names we were given before
Avery or Jaxson or Ahlivea
(because ***** the traditional names).
Why couldn't Ruth or Peter or Hester
fulfil these standards for us? I asked you this.

You just shrugged again.

I looked around the stupidly cramped room,
watched some girls pull down their skirts
(for decency, of course),
watched some boys light up their spliffs and
fall over their post-pubescent yeti feet.
I pointed this out; you just nodded and drank.

I noticed the school captain from last year
passed out on the sticky couch.
We talked about him for a little and you said
he got into law at that fancy university in the city
but he shows up to all of his classes completely
hammered. He still manages to hold a 3.5 GPA.

Eventually, we descended into silence
and turned to our phones,
as is the apparent course of action and the
easiest out to a conversation with someone,

Since none of us know better.

Faith's a gift even as prodigies are gifted
But whereas prodigies are put on a pedestal
Truth's a stranger, exiled from the womb
And life's a harlotry in a foreign land

Underneath our masks
we paint our faces too pale;
Fraudulent smiles
Only must we wear in this play?
Tragedy makes the inks run

Audience sobs too,
yet we are too numb to vex;
Merely convincing
Plot: ignore true emotion
Please enjoy our props

Sensationalist
amusement at its finest;
Ready made to sell
Come one, come all and feel
Masques and poems enhance the play

Scripts all written by
poets, Saints and Prodigies;
Artless art makers
Publish our dear Mother Earth
Her manuscript grows everyday

Their realities
denied with good intentions;
So that we may live
A life of meaning and play
In a world of vast settings

They tell us of places and theories
speak of the radicalness of our flesh
say that we must take responsibility of ourselves
as they sit behind their hard earned desks

they speak of their authority
and empowerment through words to the point that I wish to acquire such audacity

isn't that what our liberation is all about?
Recreating patterns of oppression
reach elitist capacities
sound … well structured and become one of the prodigies they can throw in their collection of so called advancement

I no longer seek validation of my processes through your bureaucratic systems
my knowledge does not emanate from intellectually justified sources but from las historias passed down to me by my fore-mothers

keep your favors, sympathy and unreasonable accommodations

yes, I will move on
but con un nuevo entendimiento:
de que ustedes no dictan las bases del feminismo
ni la capacidad de mi criterio

resisto sus juicios
y no acepto sus terminos
no firmo
por que mi educacion
no tiene fecha de expiracion
ni es un producto o contrato
al mejor postor.

I’m sorry I had to leave so suddenly that night.
And even more sorry to know that you had the shock
of finding my ’not wanted on the voyage’ body.
The useless carcass I left behind.
That shouldn’t happen to anyone,
to find your lifeless partner by your side…
That’s how you’d see it anyway.

But me? I’m off now into the wide blue yonder,
never to return. Not as you knew me anyway.
These are the rules I’m afraid.
Apparently some people do come back.
****** Spiritualists & Clairvoyants… They make us all,
up here - seem like part timers.
Not that I wouldn’t… But it’s complicated.

There’s a kind of apprenticeship,
a protocol to follow…There are still rules
even in death. There has to be a trade off.
No pain… no anguish…
And, you can just dip in and out of your old
family’s life - PAs… Personal Appearances.
That’s what 'Head Office' calls ‘em

Pacifies the loved ones that you are settled.
In the dying mode of things that is.
Really what you’re doing… as a soul,
is waiting for a suitable donor body
then you're born into a new family!
That's the way it goes!

To end on a lighter note… Kind of makes you wonder
why there aren’t more child prodigies around…
Maybe only the smartest ones make it back! Who knows?

All that knowledge gone to waste… Just saying!

I sought you in heartbreak
I sought you behind doors
I even sought you alone
in the dark where my
candle light shone

I sought you in my hell
I sought in my heaven
I even sought you
when I mentally traveled

I sought you for therapy
I sought you for peace
I sought you when no drugs
could bring any ease

I sought you in times of anger
I sought you in times of love
I sought you when battles twisted
my tongue with wars
that were not worth of

I sought you in my sleep
I sought you in dreams
I sought you with pens and pencils
aching to fabricate futures
that exist in my mind
where they fixture

I sought you drunk
oh, I did
I created love stories
fantasies, tragedies too
even some ***** thoughts
that my mind could not endure

I sought you in confusion
hoping as stanzas flow
so will the solutions too

I sought you in prayer
on paper, on walls
on my palms too
so that when I lay my hand on my chest
my heart could read them
and beat in rest ...

I sought you in others
prodigies and peasants
I sought you in twisted art
and wordy inspirations

I sought you boring afternoons
and rowdy dancing
I sought you in my memory
hoping you'd stay
and make it to my paper

I sought you in song
I sought you in blank papers
I sought in 4 am's
when my mind is diluted with chemicals
that danced with every idea
every thought
before it flees with dawn

I sought you in him and her
I sought you in messy bedsheets
and crisp bright dawns
when my skin crawled
with goosebumps
reminiscing about
yesternight’s
escapades