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Marshal Gebbie Oct 2010
Dedicated to the Steelers who do their hard work so well.

The Pier five superstructure
Looms above the turgid waves,
Gothic cranes do hover close
To service needs of orange knaves
Who swarm to manufacture,
Who work to make complete
This massive bridging edifice,
This mighty engineering feat.

Cathedral like in grey austerity
Freezing zephyrs howl and blow,
Through the maintenance shaft tunnels,
Through the bridge's bowels go.
The catacombs are echoing,
Stark light's reflection deep
In corridors of baleful concrete
Through which angled cause ways sweep.

A forest of reinforcing rods
Stand starkly high and straight,
Atop adjacent pylons
Which arise from deep mud's gate.
Hazard lights are flashing
Amber, green and blue
As north east gales bring pelting rain
To obliterate the view

The tattooed hands of black skinned steeler
Twitch the wire to make the loom,
Lattice works of reinforcing
Blackened mesh of iron entombed.
Hard to fathom steeler's chatter
Bending low to twitch by feel,
Working fast in noisy unison
Twitching reinforcing steel.
Pliers flash in rapid movement
Wrist's convulse in rapid slap
Unintelligible chatter flows
But the job is finished, just like that.

Skill saw screams in echoed silence
Booming blows of hammers pound,
Pipe work's resonance percussion
Tempered by a sad song's sound.
Great concussions pound the air
As towering cranes do drive,
Enormous pylons into mud
And bedrock's solid hide

The mighty form travellers moving
High above cold estuary waves,
Reaching forth for unbuilt mana
It's red extension arm enclaves
Providing for the next poured section,
Providing for the next steel work,
Reaching out for firm embrace
Where Pier four's form travellers lurk.

The pungency of solvents spread
Across the steel plate, made to last;
Barrier to adherence of
The sticky concrete's surface cast.
The form work archway's wooden shell
Adopts a high cathedral stance,
This bride in waiting nervous for
The concrete pumps lithe serpent dance.

An unyielding environment
A hard surfaced place to be
Where materials of venom
Are handled casually.
Where massive superstructures
Unforgiving in their stance
Lead the busy, ant like steelers
In their lofty, hard days prance.

To look across Pier Five's expanse
And view the surface cant,
And visualize the future motorway
With it's headlong traffic rant;
And look again at what is spread
Across it's surface now,
At the jumbled reinforcing steel,
The cables, tools and how,
Organizationally chaotic
The whole affair appears ???
Whilst in actuality, my friends,
This clockwork sequence has no peers.

With the roar of passing traffic
As the headlights flash on by,
And the Pier's massive cantilever
Looms impossibly to sky.
One must praise the skilled designers
And those engineers of skill
Who summount vast odds of nature
To scale this monumental hill.
As this mostrous concrete edifice
Claws inexorably from tide,
To loom in towering sillouhette
Where estuary mists abide.

Marshalg
onsite@Pier5
Manukau Harbour Crossing
29 June 2009
the Sandman Apr 2016
Lack-luster, in dull
Clusters, tall pylons reign with
Gods that look like you.
JR Rhine Oct 2016
Nostalgia
is a poor excuse
for ignorance

yet it pervades
with a tenacity
stemming from fabricated desire
for the smell of ****
we're told
is roses

and it's blasphemous
to question potential "isms"
lurking behind the veil
of Saturday morning cartoons
and black and white family sitcoms.

Yet by the time the sonic *** organs
have lain into us with repressed emotion,
the holy spirit has spilled its ***** in the dirt
to traverse onward floating apparition
out of the room and down the hall
closer towards progress.

and we are left reeling
stumbling into the hallway
buttoning our blouses
and yanking at our zippers

wondering what could cause
such great haste
and we follow blindly
in the wake of the first high

or we turn backwards
and plunge into fading bricolage
as a means to cope
with the rapid and fleeting *******
of the electric eye
in its shape-shifting pylons and appendages
getting smaller in the naked eye
and gargantuan in the mind.

Clutching our *******
in great amorous heaves
of lust
or donning our father's clothes
in a mask of artifice
and enlightened cultural pretension.

Moaning for the days of youth a week ago,
the epoch squeezed in the space between thumbs,
looking for treasures in the trash
craving something tangible
in an increasingly intangible world.

The semblance of touch lost on a generation
who knows only of emotion through hieroglyphics
and never through direct sensation.

So we dig through the toy boxes
and leave Generation X puzzled
as we dig into their records
in Guns n Roses T-shirts
and high waisted jeans.

We're just looking for an immaculate conception of something palpable.
I live this peace like I once lived in pieces,like I once held the lease on the heartbreak hotel.
I wear it quite well but I once wore the gumboots,the glumboots that rooted me in hell.
That was another time,another line and where no signs could guide me,I had Beirut for brains,a war zone as I slept in the carriages on even emptier trains.
Peace is the bonus where the onus is on keeping it,
I do well to remember it when I think that my life is ****.

Keep your religions,your sanctimonious politicians with their maladministration,I take care of my own needs which are few,
I who have nothing,want nothing,it is you that wants affirmation that you're a force to be reckoned with as you praise Gods creation with one eye on the stock exchange floor,
what for?
We shall all end up as bleached bone with the coast as our beach home with no mortgage to pay and every grain of sand will have its day,only the dogs left to **** on us as they play with the bones.
I live this peace but it's fragile and while it lasts
I'll enjoy it.
Hal Loyd Denton May 2012
The Golden Path

From the song I cover the waterfront a perfect place for a young man to blow his trumpet it has the
Power to blast or the sound that travels like a lone walker along the Warf his sight is fast and jumpy
This like working the trumpet buttons up and down with the blow reaching the end of the gold
Lacquered Bell giving it that soft essential quality a longer stream for when he looks away from the
Immediate Items that hang and pertain to activities of the interchange with the sea yes the blow that
Continues as his eyes looks Seward his emotions entangle themselves in the waves the large heavy body
At a Distance then short and fast as they race forward on the sand then crash and then recedes his
Thoughts Caught by the undertow out into deep waters my soul bring it out the depths that you know
Span the Waters make the arch touch San Francisco bay at this end and the other end touch Monterey
Bay let the Trumpeter pays homage to John Denver who died out in the waters out from Pacific Grove
His plane Went in let the horn catch the torches flame that is set burning at this the water’s edge let it
Show the Burning his voice touched and burned those sweet lyrics into our conscious memory how
Fitting the surf Rolls in his words flow into our heart the trumpet notes set the tone of his life it
Configures and shows in the ocean spray the gifts he shared he gave rocky mountain memories do they
Not rise as we continue our vigil where his earthy journey ended but in the endless waves he will always
Be singing his voice Follows the sunset into shadows of sleep with pleasure we attest to the melody that
His soul was conceived in far west on the Hawaiian sandy beaches you can hear the trumpet peeling so
Appealing As the island girls sway in unison with the palms the soul of Polynesia whispers just under the
Glint of That sweet mellow horn they tell of life lived in a natural paradise the horn reaches back to
Those glory days before cement made its hardness felt truly a little grass shack held some times that are
Lost now when you walk city sidewalks that used to be barefoot paths that you slipped down to tell in a
Setting of pineapples papayas coconuts and sea shells of the love you feel as you steal away under the
Prominent shadow of Diamond Head I pledge to you my love and may we always play and live in this
These sweetest strings of pearl islands that is our home that ole horn picks upon the words about home
So it is seen gleaming in the morning light of San Francisco bay it picks up that international flavor it
Seems to play it says come and ride the cable car listen to the ring of its bell feel it sway know the
Feeling of the steel wheels on those shinning rails catch the a fresh breath as the silk from the shops in
China Town listlessly rise and fall you will feel the tie that stretches unbroken all the way to back to
Ancient Cathy the mystery and wonder that holds a culture in a tight pack where ever the peoples may
Live their roots are deep the wisdom of the parables that are themselves as silk colorful meaningful and
Ever so practical the trumpeter catches that feeling in the chilly morning air when the night follows day
He can be found on the dinner boat that plies the bay you can see Ghirardelli square its height its white
Burning name is a must see and feel and then to go by the Golden Gate the pylons the amber lights the
Black Waters a mix of eerie magnificence pervades your mind as he lays deep on his horn the night
Deepens essential qualities that are uniquely California emerges as the sounds of his horn drifts away on
The waves in the golden state of many golden dreams and paths
N R Whyte Mar 2014
as if pulling (on the tab)
prevents the continued closure
of the lunch box
oxen milling brunch
as it unfolds sinewed pasture
green purloining sunlight
oxen munching salami on Thursday morning
mourning the luncheon of Sunday
black black blackberries lugubrious
lubricate brioche freshness
pile of white pile of brown pile of pylons
pile (on the tab)
shots are on me
shots fired no casualties
oxen bagged lunches aren't as fun as pulling punches
the Sandman Apr 2016
I'm
             drowning
                         in light,
                In blinding light:
Lights on cars; and buildings;
and lit up trees lining lit up streets;
             Houses with sills all lined in gold
And diamond; silver glitter glued onto mould;
Street lamps; and laser pointers; and
Towers; neon lights dotted with flowers
Of plastic sun; hoardings and billboards,
With bright teeth and skin and red words
Everywhere you turn,
Telling you what you want
And never knew you wanted;
Shop windows; chandeliers;
Presents for that time of year;
Cell phone pylons with twinkling,
Bright lights on top, like Christmas trees;
Christmas trees, with stars and angels
Speckled, Frosted,
Dusted on the tops;
Disgusting glare on sunglasses,
And a smiting gaze along the arms;
Bridges and fountains with gold poured on;
Platinum bands in every size, laying all forlorn;
Bedside lamps; and taxis; and taxi stands;
Every window, but the ones
Being jumped off of;
TVs and refrigerators, opened
Thoughtlessly at night;
Screens shooting onto impassive glass
That used to be faces;
Cameras, going off in quick succession,
Quicker than you can keep up;
I'm drowning.
We are taught desire, in light,
We learn to read in light
and scarlet letters of fluorescence
We are blind,
Now that the road is paved for us,
To the light that was before.
Goodbye, jungle of pylons and scrapers of the sky. I will live among your shards no longer.

My first list poem (that actually remained a list poem by the time I was done with it)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCzccXAF8Lo
Andrew Rueter Sep 2017
I can't hear the choir from my couch
It becomes a funeral pyre in a pouch
Like the unnatural fire in my slouch
That is where I retire
To superficially admire
A world I'll never see
Placing trust in the screen
I'm as lonely as can be
Until couches set me free
From a life worrying about others
The couch becomes my banal brother
That is where I concoct my cowardly plan
To avoid my fellow meddlesome man
Living a life in silence
The couch creates pylons
Determining where I can go
Determining what I can know

This Ottoman Empire
Lights the world on fire
With cushions that fuel
Flames and drool
I attempt to stand
But life seems bland
With feeling constant comfort
So my personality I import
From the images on TV
And my brain it impedes
When I can't think for myself
I put my life on the shelf
And flee into furniture
The couch my burning cure
Men may
land on Mars one day but
some are stilled,
locked in to bones and skin.

Men may explore
look and want more and sometimes find,
some unlock the potential of
the untapped mind.

Some men are blind and others can't see but
men will be what they will be.

Men may one day
do what they say,
men who control the state of play but
I can't wait,
my ideas are ready to germinate.

Some
men would hesitate
prefer alternatives but
I believe that the status quo is a safe place
where the unimaginative go and so
I press on.
.
                                                Enough is not enough
                                                     I want too much.

                                                      “Excuse me sir
                                           you haven’t paid too much.
                                                  I gave you too much
                                               and you ate everything.
                                        I need to throw away something
                                                 and the bin’s spilling."

"I drove too many footsteps
past too many throwaways
too many pylons
water towers
possum-eaten polystyrene cups
Mcdonalds
Mcdonalds
Mcdonalds
camel boxes
and walkers
with socks as hard as coffins.”

                                             Enough is not enough
                                                  I want too much.
Thoughts on the road in America.
Mitch Nihilist Nov 2016
a man in a trench coat
walked though construction
after dark,
dead branches grew
from the holes in the
end of his sleeves,
the night painted
over retinas
but his skin still seemed pale,
dyed dark hair
shined without hygiene,
and his boots
kicked the road torn,
I though of columbine
when I saw his trench coat,
I saw guns and children hiding
I heard shotgun shells
breathing smoke
onto the pylons,
I saw brand new
blood pained lane lines
in the middle of the road,
I couldn’t make out his face
but I looked at a smiling maniacal,
and I was just driving by
and it seemed cold,
I had the window down for a smoke and
I smelled tired exhaust
from sleeping machines,
and it was then that I realized
he was most likely walking home
from work or going to get milk
from the convenient store,
perception will always drape over us
in a cloak no one else can see,
it will never disappear and
to the trench coat man I apologize.
The media is a funny thing.
Joe Bradley Mar 2015
Nestled
in a gyroscope
of allotment, haybail and heath
is the scenery of
my solemn country.
The skyrise, hollows. the
dripping
fat of the land.

The cities have boomed
and they're beautiful.
Like open roses they're
garlands of wire,
pylons and street-lights.
A thorny crown
on a girl in a nightclub. They're
blistering
they drink, kiss and drink.

And all the while
we live with whispers
splashed like
blood in a gutter.
As murmurs
pumped
through the strip-lit veins
of an office block.
Its a life where
prayers
are mist on train windows.

When we walk
we check our
reflection in car windows
and we're beautiful
we run
our hands
through our hair
knowing
we were babies born with
horns for this.

When we ride
its over
railroad boneyards,
the sleepers are
metal teeth locked in
asymmetrical laughter
at everything
at everyone
at nothing.

The skies are a
psychosis of sunlight, clouds,
vapour trails,
it's heaven
and
we're bent at the alter,
our shadow on
the crypt
has horns.
Dagoth I Am Nov 2012
I AM OLDER THAN MUSIC

WHAT I BRING IS LIGHT

WHAT I BRING IS A STAR

WHAT I BRING IS

AN ANCIENT SEA

WHEN YOU SLEEP YOU SEE ME

DANCING AT THE CORE

IT IS NOT A BLIGHT

IT IS MY HOUSE

I PUT A STAR

INTO THE WORLD'S MOUTH

TO ****** IT

TEAR DOWN THE PYLONS

MY BLIND FISH

SWIM IN THE NEW

PHLOGISTON

TEAR DOWN THE PYLONS

MY DEAF MOONS

SING AND BURN

AND ORBIT ME

I AM OLDER THAN MUSIC

WHAT I BRING IS LIGHT

WHAT I BRING IS A STAR

WHAT I BRING IS

AN ANCIENT SEA
At age 45 I decided to become a sailor.  It had attracted me since I first saw a man living on his sailboat at the 77th street boat basin in New York City, back in 1978.  I was leaving on a charter boat trip with customers up the Hudson to West Point, and the image of him having coffee on the back deck of his boat that morning stayed with me for years.  It was now 1994, and I had just bought a condo on the back bay of a South Jersey beach town — and it came with a boat slip.

I started my search for a boat by first reading every sailing magazine I could get my hands on.  This was frustrating because most of the boats they featured were ‘way’ out of my price range. I knew I wanted a boat that was 25’ to 27’ in length and something with a full cabin below deck so that I could sail some overnight’s with my wife and two kids.

I then started to attend boat shows.  The used boats at the shows were more in my price range, and I traveled from Norfolk to Mystic Seaport in search of the right one.  One day, while checking the classifieds in a local Jersey Shore newspaper, I saw a boat advertised that I just had to go see …

  For Sale: 27’ Cal Sloop. Circa 1966. One owner and used very
   gently.  Price $6,500.00 (negotiable)

This boat was now almost 30 years old, but I had heard good things about the Cal’s.  Cal was short for California. It was a boat originally manufactured on the west coast and the company was now out of business.  The brand had a real ‘cult’ following, and the boat had a reputation for being extremely sea worthy with a fixed keel, and it was noted for being good in very light air.  This boat drew over 60’’ of water, which meant that I would need at least five feet of depth (and really seven) to avoid running aground.  The bay behind my condo was full of low spots, especially at low tide, and most sailors had boats with retractable centerboards rather than fixed keels.  This allowed them to retract the boards (up) during low tide and sail in less than three feet of water. This wouldn’t be an option for me if I bought the Cal.

I was most interested in ‘blue water’ ocean sailing, so the stability of the fixed keel was very attractive to me.  I decided to travel thirty miles North to the New Jersey beach town of Mystic Island to look at the boat.  I arrived in front of a white bi-level house on a sunny Monday April afternoon at about 4:30. The letters on the mailbox said Murphy, with the ‘r’ & the ‘p’ being worn almost completely away due to the heavy salt air.

I walked to the front door and rang the buzzer.  An attractive blonde woman about ten years older than me answered the door. She asked: “Are you the one that called about the boat?”  I said that I was, and she then said that her husband would be home from work in about twenty minutes.  He worked for Resorts International Casino in Atlantic City as their head of maintenance, and he knew everything there was to know about the Cal. docked out back.  

Her name was Betty and as she offered me ice tea she started to talk about the boat.  “It was my husband’s best friend’s boat. Irv and his wife Dee Dee live next door but Irv dropped dead of a heart attack last fall.  My husband and Irv used to take the boat out through the Beach Haven Inlet into the ocean almost every night.  Irv bought the boat new back in 1967, and we moved into this house in 1968.  I can’t even begin to tell you how much fun the two of them had on that old boat.  It’s sat idle, ******* to the bulkhead since last fall, and Dee Dee couldn’t even begin to deal with selling it until her kids convinced her to move to Florida and live with them.  She offered it to my husband Ed but he said the boat would never be the same without Irv on board, and he’d rather see it go to a new owner.  Looking at it every day behind the house just brought back memories of Irv and made him sad all over again every time that he did.”

Just then Ed walked through the door leading from the garage into the house.  “Is this the new sailor I’ve been hearing about,” he said in a big friendly voice.  “That’s me I said,” as we shook hands.  ‘Give me a minute to change and I’ll be right with you.”

As Ed walked me back through the stone yard to the canal behind his house, I noticed something peculiar.  There was no dock at the end of his property.  The boat was tied directly to the sea wall itself with only three yellow and black ‘bumpers’ separating the fiberglass side of the boat from the bulkhead itself.  It was low tide now and the boats keel was sitting in at least two feet of sand and mud.  Ed explained to me that Irv used to have this small channel that they lived on, which was man made, dredged out every year.  Irv also had a dock, but it had even less water underneath it than the bulkhead behind Ed’s house.

Ed said again, “no dredging’s been done this year, and the only way to get the boat out of the small back tributary to the main artery of the bay, is to wait for high tide. The tide will bring the water level up at least six feet.  That will give the boat twenty-four inches of clearance at the bottom and allow you to take it out into the deeper (30 feet) water of the main channel.”

Ed jumped on the boat and said, “C’mon, let me show you the inside.”  As he took the padlock off the slides leading to the companionway, I noticed how motley and ***** everything was. My image of sailing was pristine boats glimmering in the sun with their main sails up and the captain and crew with drinks in their hands.  This was about as far away from that as you could get.  As Ed removed the slides, the smell hit me.  MOLD! The smell of mildew was everywhere, and I could only stay below deck for a moment or two before I had to come back up topside for air.  Ed said, “It’ll all dry out (the air) in about ten minutes, and then we can go forward and look at the V-Berth and the head in the front of the cabin.”

What had I gotten myself into, I thought?  This boat looked beyond salvageable, and I was now looking for excuses to leave. Ed then said, “Look; I know it seems bad, but it’s all cosmetic.  It’s really a fine boat, and if you’re willing to clean it up, it will look almost perfect when you’re done. Before Irv died, it was one of the best looking sailboats on the island.”

In ten more minutes we went back inside.  The damp air had been replaced with fresh air from outside, and I could now get a better look at the galley and salon.  The entire cabin was finished in a reddish brown, varnished wood, with nice trim work along the edges.  It had two single sofas in the main salon that converted into beds at night, with a stainless-steel sink, refrigerator and nice carpeting and curtains.  We then went forward.  The head was about 40’’ by 40’’ and finished in the same wood as the outer cabin.  The toilet, sink, and hand-held shower looked fine, and Ed assured me that as soon as we filled up the water tank, they would all work.

The best part for me though was the v-berth beyond.  It was behind a sold wood varnished door with a beautiful brass grab-rail that helped it open and close. It was large, with a sleeping area that would easily accommodate two people. That, combined with the other two sleeping berths in the main salon, meant that my entire family could spend the night on the boat. I was starting to get really interested!

Ed then said that Irv’s wife Dee Dee was as interested in the boat going to a good home as she was in making any money off the boat.  We walked back up to the cockpit area and sat down across from each other on each side of the tiller.  Ed said, “what do you think?” I admitted to Ed that I didn’t know much about sailboats, and that this would be my first.  He told me it was Irv’s first boat too, and he loved it so much that he never looked at another.

                   Ed Was A Pretty Good Salesman

We then walked back inside the house.  Betty had prepared chicken salad sandwiches, and we all sat out on the back deck to eat.  From here you could see the boat clearly, and its thirty-five-foot mast was now silhouetted in front of the sun that was setting behind the marsh.  It was a very pretty scene indeed.

Ed said,”Dee Dee has left it up to me to sell the boat.  I’m willing to be reasonable if you say you really want it.”  I looked out at what was once a white sailboat, covered in mold and sitting in the mud.  No matter how hard the wind blew, and there was a strong offshore breeze, it was not moving an inch.  I then said to Ed, “would it be possible to come back when the tide is up and you can take me out?”  Ed said he would be glad to, and Saturday around 2:00 p.m. would be a good time to come back. The tide would be up then.  I also asked him if between now and Saturday I could try and clean the boat up a little? This would allow me to really see what I would be buying, and at the very least we’d have a cleaner boat to take out on the water.  Ed said fine.

I spent the next four days cleaning the boat. Armed with four gallons of bleach, rubber gloves, a mask, and more rags than I could count, I started to remove the mold.  It took all week to get the boat free of the mildew and back to being white again. The cushions inside the v-berth and salon were so infested with mold that I threw them up on the stones covering Ed’s back yard. I then asked Ed if he wanted to throw them out — he said that he did.

Saturday came, and Betty had said, “make sure to get here in time for lunch.”  At 11:45 a.m. I pulled up in front of the house.  By this time, we knew each other so well that Betty just yelled down through the screen door, “Let yourself in, Ed’s down by the boat fiddling with the motor.”  The only good thing that had been done since Irv passed away last fall was that Ed had removed the motor from the boat. It was a long shaft Johnson 9.9 horsepower outboard, and he had stored it in his garage.  The motor was over twelve years old, but Ed said that Irv had taken really good care of it and that it ran great.  It was also a long shaft, which meant that the propeller was deep in the water behind the keel and would give the boat more propulsion than a regular shaft outboard would.

I yelled ‘hello’ to Ed from the deck outside the kitchen.  He shouted back, “Get down here, I want you to hear this.”  I ran down the stairs and out the back door across the stones to where Ed was sitting on the boat.  He had the twist throttle in his hand, and he was revving the motor. Just like he had said —it sounded great. Being a lifelong motorcycle and sports car enthusiast, I knew what a strong motor sounded like, and this one sounded just great to me.

“Take the throttle, Ed said,” as I jumped on board.  I revved the motor half a dozen times and then almost fell over.  The boat had just moved about twenty degrees to the starboard (right) side in the strong wind and for the first time was floating freely in the canal.  Now I really felt like I was on a boat.  Ed said, “Are you hungry, or do you wanna go sailing?”  Hoping that it wouldn’t offend Betty I said, “Let’s head out now into the deeper water.” Ed said that Betty would be just fine, and that we could eat when we got back.

As I untied the bow and stern lines, I could tell right away that Ed knew what he was doing.  After traveling less than 100 yards to the main channel leading to the bay, he put the mainsail up and we sailed from that point on.  It was two miles out to the ocean, and he skillfully maneuvered the boat, using nothing but the tiller and mainsheet.  The mainsheet is the block and pulley that is attached from the deck of the cockpit to the boom.  It allows the boom to go out and come back, which controls the speed of the boat. The tiller then allows you to change direction.  With the mainsheet in one hand and the tiller in the other, the magic of sailing was hard to describe.

I was mesmerized watching Ed work the tiller and mainsheet in perfect harmony. The outboard was now tilted back up in the cockpit and out of the water.  “For many years before he bought the motor, Irv and I would take her out, and bring her back in with nothing but the sail, One summer we had very little wind, and Irv and I got stuck out in the ocean. Twice we had to be towed back in by ‘Sea Tow.’  After that Irv broke down and bought the long-shaft Johnson.”

In about thirty minutes we passed through the ‘Great Bay,’ then the Little Egg and Beach Haven Inlets, until we were finally in the ocean.  “Only about 3016 miles straight out there, due East, and you’ll be in London,” Ed said.”  Then it hit me.  From where we were now, I could sail anywhere in the world, with nothing to stop me except my lack of experience. Experience I told myself, was something that I would quickly get. Knowing the exact mileage, said to me that both Ed and Irv had thought about that trip, and maybe had fantasized about doing it together.

    With The Tenuousness Of Life, You Never Know How Much      Time You Have

For two more hours we sailed up and down the coast in front of Long Beach Island.  I could hardly sit down in the cockpit as Ed let me do most of the sailing.  It took only thirty minutes to get the hang of using the mainsheet and tiller, and after an hour I felt like I had been sailing all my life.  Then we both heard a voice come over the radio.  Ed’s wife Betty was on channel 27 of the VHF asking if we were OK and that lunch was still there but the sandwiches were getting soggy.  Ed said we were headed back because the tide had started to go out, and we needed to be back and ******* in less than ninety minutes or we would run aground in the canal.

I sailed us back through the inlets which thankfully were calm that day and back into the main channel leading out of the bay.  Ed then took it from there.  He skillfully brought us up the rest of the channel and into the canal, and in a fairly stiff wind spun the boat 180’ around and gently slid it back into position along the sea wall behind his house.  I had all 3 fenders out and quickly jumped off the boat and up on top of the bulkhead to tie off the stern line once we were safely alongside.  I then tied off the bow-line as Ed said, “Not too tight, you have to allow for the 6-8 feet of tide that we get here every day.”

After bringing down the mainsail, and folding and zippering it safely to the boom, we locked the companionway and headed for the house.  Betty was smoking a cigarette on the back deck and said, “So how did it go boys?” Without saying a word Ed looked directly at me and for one of the few times in my life, I didn’t really know where to begin.

“My God,” I said.  “My God.”  “I’ll take that as good Betty said, as she brought the sandwiches back out from the kitchen.  “You can powerboat your whole life, but sailing is different” Ed told me.  “When sailing, you have to work with the weather and not just try to power through it.  The weather tells you everything.  In these parts, when a storm kicks up you see two sure things happen.  The powerboats are all coming in, and the sailboat’s are all headed out.  What is dangerous and unpleasant for the one, is just what the other hopes for.”

I had been a surfer as a kid and understood the logic.  When the waves got so big on the beach that the lifeguard’s closed it to swimming during a storm, the surfers all headed out.  This would not be the only similarity I would find between surfing and sailing as my odyssey continued.  I finished my lunch quickly because all I wanted to do was get back on the boat.

When I returned to the bulkhead the keel had already touched bottom and the boat was again fixed and rigidly upright in the shallow water.  I spent the afternoon on the back of the boat, and even though I knew it was bad luck, in my mind I changed her name.  She would now be called the ‘Trinity,’ because of the three who would now sail her —my daughter Melissa, my son T.C. and I.  I also thought that any protection I might get from the almighty because of the name couldn’t hurt a new sailor with still so much to learn.

                                  Trinity, It Was!

I now knew I was going to buy the boat.  I went back inside and Ed was fooling around with some fishing tackle inside his garage.  “OK Ed, how much can I buy her for?” I said.  Ed looked at me squarely and said, “You tell me what you think is fair.”  “Five thousand I said,” and without even looking up Ed said “SOLD!” I wrote the check out to Irv’s wife on the spot, and in that instant it became real. I was now a boat owner, and a future deep-water sailor.  The Atlantic Ocean had better watch out, because the Captain and crew of the Trinity were headed her way.

                 SOLD, In An Instant, It Became Real!

I couldn’t wait to get home and tell the kids the news.  They hadn’t seen much of me for the last week, and they both wanted to run right back and take the boat out.  I told them we could do it tomorrow (Sunday) and called Ed to ask him if he’d accompany us one more time on a trip out through the bay.  He said gladly, and to get to his house by 3:00 p.m. tomorrow to ‘play the tide.’  The kids could hardly sleep as they fired one question after another at me about the boat. More than anything, they wanted to know how we would get it the 45 miles from where it was docked to the boat slip behind our condo in Stone Harbor.  At dinner that night at our favorite Italian restaurant, they were already talking about the boat like it was theirs.

The next morning, they were both up at dawn, and by 8:30 we were on our way North to Mystic Island.  We had decided to stop at a marine supply store and buy a laundry list of things that mariners need ‘just in case’ aboard a boat.  At 11:15 a.m. we pulled out of the parking lot of Boaters World in Somers Point, New Jersey, and headed for Ed and Betty’s. They were both sitting in lawn chairs when we got there and surprised to see us so early.  ‘The tide’s not up for another 3 hours,” Ed said, as we walked up the drive.  I told him we knew that, but the kids wanted to spend a couple of hours on the boat before we headed out into the bay.  “Glad to have you kids,” Ed said, as he went back to reading his paper.  Betty told us that anything that we might need, other than what we just bought, is most likely in the garage.

Ed, being a professional maintenance engineer (what Betty called him), had a garage that any handyman would die for.  I’m sure we could have built an entire house on the empty lot across the street just from what Ed had hanging, and piled up, in his garage.

We walked around the side of the house and when the kids got their first look at the boat, they bolted for what they thought was a dock.  When they saw it was raw bulkhead, they looked back at me unsure of what to do.  I said, ‘jump aboard,” but be careful not to fall in, smiling to myself and knowing that the water was still less than four feet deep.  With that, my 8-year old son took a flying leap and landed dead center in the middle of the cockpit — a true sailor for sure.  My daughter then pulled the bow line tight bringing the boat closer to the sea wall and gingerly stepped on board like she had done it a thousand times before. Watching them board the boat for the first time, I knew this was the start of something really good.

Ed had already unlocked the companionway, so I stayed on dry land and just watched them for a half-hour as they explored every inch of the boat from bow to stern. “You really did a great job Dad cleaning her up.  Can we start the motor, my son asked?” I told him as soon as the tide came up another foot, we would drop the motor down into the water, and he could listen to it run.  So far this was everything I could have hoped for.  My kids loved the boat as much as I did.  I had had the local marine artist come by after I left the day before and paint the name ‘Trinity’ across the outside transom on the back of the boat. Now this boat was really ours. It’s hard to explain the thrill of finally owning your first boat. To those who can remember their first Christmas when they finally got what they had been hoping for all year —the feeling was the same.

                            It Was Finally Ours

In another hour, Ed came out. We fired up the motor with my son in charge, unzipped the mainsail, untied the lines, and we were headed back out to sea.  I’m not sure what was wider that day, the blue water vista straight in front of us or the eyes of my children as the boat bit into the wind. It was keeled over to port and carved through the choppy waters of ‘The Great Bay’ like it was finally home. For the first time in a long time the kids were speechless.  They let the wind do the talking, as the channel opened wide in front of them.

Ed let both kids take a turn at the helm. They were also amazed at how much their father had learned in the short time he had been sailing.  We stayed out for a full three hours, and then Betty again called on the VHF. “Coast Guards calling for a squall, with small craft warnings from five o’clock on.  For safety’s sake, you guy’s better head back for the dock.”  Ed and I smiled at each other, each knowing what the other was secretly thinking.  If the kids hadn’t been on board, this would have been a really fun time to ride out the storm.  Discretion though, won out over valor, and we headed West back through the bay and into the canal. Once again, Ed spun the boat around and nudged it into the sea wall like the master that he was.  This time my son was in charge of grabbing and tying off the lines, and he did it in a fashion that would make any father proud.

As we tidied up the boat, Ed said, “So when are you gonna take her South?”  “Next weekend, I said.” My business partner, who lives on his 42’ Egg Harbor in Cape May all summer and his oldest son are going to help us.  His oldest son Tony had worked on an 82’ sightseeing sailboat in Fort Lauderdale for two years, and his dad said there was little about sailing that he didn’t know.  That following Saturday couldn’t come fast enough/

                          We Counted The Minutes

The week blew by (literally), as the weather deteriorated with each day.  Saturday morning came, and the only good news (to me) was that my daughter had a gymnastic’s meet and couldn’t make the maiden voyage. The crew would be all men —my partner Tommy, his son Tony, and my son T.C. and I. We checked the tides, and it was decided that 9:30 a.m. was the perfect time to start South with the Trinity.  We left for Ed and Betty’s at 7:00 a.m. and after stopping at ‘Polly’s’ in Stone Harbor for breakfast we arrived at the boat at exactly 8:45.  It was already floating freely in the narrow canal. Not having Ed’s skill level, we decided to ‘motor’ off the bulkhead, and not put the sails up until we reached the main bay.  With a kiss to Betty and a hug from Ed, we broke a bottle of ‘Castellane Brut’ on the bulkhead and headed out of the canal.

Once in the main bay we noticed something we hadn’t seen before. We couldn’t see at all!  The buoy markers were scarcely visibly that lined both sides of the channel. We decided to go South ‘inside,’ through the Intercoastal Waterway instead of sailing outside (ocean) to Townsends Inlet where we initially decided to come in.  This meant that we would have to request at least 15 bridge openings on our way south.  This was a tricky enough procedure in a powerboat, but in a sailboat it could be a disaster in the making.  The Intercoastal Waterway was the back-bay route from Maine to Florida and offered protection that the open ocean would not guarantee. It had the mainland to its West and the barrier island you were passing to its East.  If it weren’t for the number of causeway bridges along its route, it would have been the perfect sail.

When you signaled to the bridge tender with your air horn, requesting an opening, it could sometimes take 10 or 15 minutes for him to get traffic stopped on the bridge before he could then open it up and let you through.  On Saturdays, it was worse. In three cases we waited and circled for twenty minutes before being given clear passage through the bridge.  Sailboats have the right of way over powerboats but only when they’re under sail. We had decided to take the sails down to make the boat easier to control.  By using the outboard we were just like any other powerboat waiting to get through, and often had to bob and weave around the waiting ‘stinkpots’ (powerboats) until the passage under the bridge was clear.  The mast on the Trinity was higher than even the tallest bridge, so we had to stop and signal to each one requesting an opening as we traveled slowly South.

All went reasonably well until we arrived at the main bridge entering Atlantic City. The rebuilt casino skyline hovered above the bridge like a looming monster in the fog.  This was also the bridge with the most traffic coming into town with weekend gamblers risking their mortgage money to try and break the bank.  The wind had now increased to over 30 knots.  This made staying in the same place in the water impossible. We desperately criss-crossed from side to side in the canal trying to stay in position for when the bridge opened. Larger boats blew their horns at us, as we drifted back and forth in the channel looking like a crew of drunks on New Year’s Eve.  Powerboats are able to maintain their position because they have large motors with a strong reverse gear.  Our little 9.9 Johnson did have reverse, but it didn’t have nearly enough power to back us up against the tide.

On our third pass zig-zagging across the channel and waiting for the bridge to open, it happened.  Instead of hearing the bell from the bridge tender signaling ‘all clear,’ we heard a loud “SNAP.’ Tony was at the helm, and from the front of the boat where I was standing lookout I heard him shout “OH S#!T.”  The wooden tiller had just broken off in his hand.

                                         SNAP!

Tony was sitting down at the helm with over three feet of broken tiller in his left hand.  The part that still remained and was connected to the rudder was less than 12 inches long.  Tony tried with all of his might to steer the boat with the little of the tiller that was still left, but it was impossible in the strong wind.  He then tried to steer the boat by turning the outboard both left and right and gunning the motor.  This only made a small correction, and we were now headed back across the Intercoastal Waterway with the wind behind us at over thirty knots.  We were also on a collision course with the bridge.  The only question was where we would hit it, not when! We hoped and prayed it would be as far to the Eastern (Atlantic City) side as possible.  This would be away from the long line of boats that were patiently lined up and waiting for the bridge to open.

Everything on the boat now took on a different air.  Tony was screaming that he couldn’t steer, and my son came up from down below where he was staying out of the rain. With one look he knew we were in deep trouble.  It was then that my priorities completely shifted from the safety of my new (old) boat to the safety of my son and the rest of those onboard.  My partner Tommy got on the radio’s public channel and warned everyone in the area that we were out of control.  Several power boaters tried to throw us a line, but in the strong wind they couldn’t get close enough to do it safely.

We were now less than 100 feet from the bridge.  It looked like we would hit about seven pylons left of dead center in the middle of the bridge on the North side.  As we braced for impact, a small 16 ft Sea Ray with an elderly couple came close and tried to take my son off the boat.  Unfortunately, they got too close and the swirling current around the bridge piers ****** them in, and they also hit the bridge about thirty feet to our left. Thank God, they did have enough power to ‘motor’ off the twenty-foot high pier they had hit but not without doing cosmetic damage to the starboard side of their beautiful little boat. I felt terrible about this and yelled ‘THANK YOU’ across the wind and the rushing water.  They waved back, as they headed North against the tide, back up the canal.

      The Kindness Of Strangers Continues To Amaze Me!

BANG !!!  That’s the sound the boat made when it hit the bridge.  We were now sideways in the current, and the first thing to hit was not the mast but the starboard side ‘stay’ that holds the mast up.  Stays are made of very thick wire, and even though the impact was at over ten knots, the stay held secure and did not break.  We were now pinned against the North side of the bridge, with the current swirling by us, and the boat being pulled slowly through the opening between the piers.  The current was pulling the boat and forcing it to lean over with the mast pointing North. If it continued to do this, we would finally broach (turn over) and all be in the water and floating South toward the beach towns of Margate and Ventnor.  The width between the piers was over thirty feet, so there was plenty of room to **** us in and then down, as the water had now assumed command.

It was at this moment that I tied my Son to myself.  He was a good swimmer and had been on our local swim team for the past three summers, but this was no pool.  There were stories every summer of boaters who got into trouble and had to go in the water, and many times someone drowned or was never found or seen again.  The mast was now leaned over and rubbing against the inside of the bridge.  

The noise it made moving back and forth was louder than even the strong wind.  Over the noise from the mast I heard Tommy shout, “Kurt, the stay is cutting through the insulation on the main wire that is the power source to the bridge. If it gets all the way through to the inside, the whole boat will be electrified, and we’ll go up like a roman candle.”  I reluctantly looked up and he was right.  The stay looked like it was more than half-way through the heavy rubber insulation that was wrapped around the enormous cable that ran horizontally inside and under the entire span of the bridge.  I told Tommy to get on the VHF and alert the Coast Guard to what was happening.  I also considered jumping overboard with my son in my arms and tied to me hoping that someone would then pull us out of the water if we made it through the piers. I couldn’t leave though, because my partner couldn’t swim.

Even though Tommy had been a life-long boater, he had never learned to swim.  He grew up not far from the banks of the Mississippi River in Hardin Illinois and still hadn’t learned.  I couldn’t just leave him on the boat. We continued to stay trapped in between the piers as the metal wire stay worked its way back and forth across the insulated casing above.

In another fifteen minutes, two Coast Guard crews showed up in gigantic rubber boats.  Both had command towers up high and a crew of at least 8 on board.  They tried to get close enough to throw us a line but each time failed and had to motor away against the tide at full throttle to miss the bridge.  The wake from their huge twin outboards forced us even further under the bridge, and the port side rail of the Trinity was now less than a foot above the water line.

              Why Had I Changed The Name Of This Boat?

The I heard it again, BAMMM !  I looked up and saw nothing.  It all looked like it had before.  The Coast Guard boat closest to us came across on the bullhorn. “Don’t touch anything metal, you’ve cut through the insulation and are now in contact with the power source.  The boat is electrified, but if you stay still, the fiberglass and water will act as a buffer and insulation.  We can’t even touch or get near you now until the power gets turned off to the bridge.”  

We all stood in the middle of the cockpit as far away from anything metal as possible.  I reached into the left storage locker where the two plastic gas containers were and tightened the filler caps. I then threw both of them overboard.  They both floated harmlessly through the bridge where a third Coast Guard boat now retrieved them about 100 yards further down the bay.  At least now I wouldn’t have to worry about the two fifteen-gallon gas cans exploding if the electrical current ever got that far.

For a long twenty minutes we sat there huddled together as the Coast Guard kept yelling at us not to touch anything at all.  Just as I thought the boat was going under, everything seemed to go dark.  Even though it was early afternoon, the fog was so heavy that the lights on the bridge had been turned on.  Now in an instant, they were off.

                               All Lights Were Off

I saw the first Coast Guard boat turn around and then try to slowly drift our way backward. They were going to try and get us out from between the piers before we sank.  Three times they tried and three times again they failed.  Finally, two men in a large cigarette boat came flying at us. With those huge motors keeping them off the bridge, they took everyone off the Trinity, while giving me two lines to tie to both the bow and the stern. They then pulled up alongside the first large inflatable and handed the two lines to the Coast Guard crew.  After that, they backed off into the center of the channel to see what the Coast Guard would do next.

The second Coast Guard boat was now positioned beside the first with its back also facing the bridge.  They each had one of the lines tied to my boat now secured to cleats on their rear decks.  Slowly they motored forward as the Trinity emerged from its tomb inside the piers.  In less than fifteen seconds, the thirty-year boat old was free of the bridge.  With that, the Coast Guard boat holding the stern line let go and the sailboat turned around with the bow now facing the back of the first inflatable. The Captain continued to tow her until she was alongside the ‘Sea Tow’ service vessel that I hadn’t noticed until now.  The Captain on the Sea Tow rig said that he would tow the boat into Somers Point Marina.  That was the closest place he knew of that could make any sailboat repairs.

We thanked the owners of the cigarette boat and found out that they were both ex-navy seals.  ‘If they don’t die hard, some never die at all,’ and thank God for our nation’s true warriors. They dropped us off on Coast Guard Boat #1, and after spending about 10 minutes with the crew, the Captain asked me to come up on the bridge.  He had a mound of papers for me to fill out and then asked me if everyone was OK. “A little shook up,’” I said, “but we’re all basically alright.” I then asked this ‘weekend warrior’ if he had ever seen the movie ‘Top Gun.’  With his chest pushed out proudly he said that he had, and that it was one of his all-time favorites.

            ‘If They Don’t Die hard, Some Never Die At All’

I reminded him of the scene when the Coast Guard rescue team dropped into the rough waters of the Pacific to retrieve ‘Goose,’ who had just hit the canopy of his jet as he was trying to eject.  With his chest still pumped out, he said again proudly that he did. “Well, I guess that only happens in the movies, right Captain,” I said, as he turned back to his paperwork and looked away.

His crew had already told me down below that they wanted to approach the bridge broadside and take us off an hour ago but that the Captain had said no, it was too dangerous!  They also said that after his tour was over in 3 more months, no one would ever sail with him again.  He was the only one on-board without any real active-duty service, and he always shied away from doing the right thing when the weather was rough.  He had refused to go just three more miles last winter to rescue two fishermen off a sinking trawler forty miles offshore.  Both men died because he had said that the weather was just “too rough.”

                     ‘A True Weekend Only Warrior’

We all sat with the crew down below as they entertained my son and gave us hot coffee and offered medical help if needed.  Thankfully, we were all fine, but the coffee never tasted so good.  As we pulled into the marina in Somers Point, the Trinity was already there and tied to the service dock.  After all she had been through, she didn’t look any the worse for wear.  It was just then that I realized that I still hadn’t called my wife.  I could have called from the Coast Guard boat, but in the commotion of the moment, I had totally forgotten.

When I got through to her on the Marina’s pay phone, she said,  “Oh Dear God, we’ve been watching you on the news. Do you know you had the power turned off to all of Atlantic City for over an hour?”  After hanging up, I thought to myself —"I wonder what our little excursion must have cost the casino’s,” but then I thought that they probably had back up generation for something just like this, but then again —maybe not.

I asked my wife to come pick us up and noticed that my son was already down at the service dock and sitting on the back of his ‘new’ sailboat.  He said, “Dad, do you think she’ll be alright?” and I said to him, “Son, she’ll be even better than that. If she could go through what happened today and remain above water, she can go through anything — and so can you.  I’m really proud of the way you handled yourself today.”

My Son is now almost thirty years old, and we talk about that day often. The memory of hitting the bridge and surviving is something we will forever share.  As a family, we continued to sail the Trinity for many years until our interests moved to Wyoming.  We then placed the Trinity in the capable hands of our neighbor Bobby, next door, who sails her to this day.

All through those years though, and especially during the Stone Harbor Regatta over the Fourth of July weekend, there was no mistaking our crew when you saw us coming through your back basin in the ‘Parade of Ships.’  Everyone aboard was dressed in a red polo shirt, and if you happened to look at any of us from behind, you would have seen …

                               ‘The Crew Of The Trinity’  
                         FULL CONTACT SAILING ONLY!
MereCat Dec 2014
There are two ‘Institutions for the Mentally Ill’ in my town
One is grimly Victorian. Lunatic Asylum.  
Forgotten by all but the pigeons and pylons
As it thrashes and wrangles and mangles the memories
Of the ghosts of the ghosts that lived out their non-lives there.
The other is a modern, glass, Christmas tree
A circus tent in brown and beige
Like sepia and coffee stains.
You aren’t Lunatics anymore, we got told
Like renaming a problem could diminish it.
You slip past us just a little too quickly
So that you don’t see the woman who smokes cheap cigarettes
Out the front
And who bites December like it was something that could be torn from the walls
And pressed out of sight somewhere
And the metaphors in her head get muddled in her oesophagus
And she speaks to a man who’s never been evicted from her right ear
And who’s never been born or been buried but has simply whispered
With meretricious comfort
Up the road you could pay to gawp at the carol singers
But why bother because she’s singing
Driving Home For Christmas
Like no-one ever wrote her a melody or an audience
Gives a nice festive atmosphere, our psychiatrist said
And I asked the car park if optimism had ever been so odious
And if the snow around our feet was ‘festive’ and ‘nice’
While a girl as papery as December
Tried to smother herself in it
She rolled it in her bare hands as if hoping there’d be nothing left of her
If she could only freezer her heart
And scrape back the whiteness of the snow and her skin to the ivory
That still lingered beneath
Unstable death trap, rigged scaffolding
Although it was threatening to slice its way out
From her shrinking face and arms and thighs.
She lay down and made a snow angel in the hope that she’d become one
If she could only riddle out a way to please Anorexia.
And did the car park see that no one cares that there’s a fourteen year old
Who’s hung a cigarette from his lips and is chewing on it
Because what more damage can be done
That isn’t already curdled and notched into the skin of his wrists?
And written into the lining of his skull
Or branded in each heckled vein or carved into his gums
By the lip piercing he’s worn since he was twelve.
He has pulled the arms of his sweater beyond his finger tips
And hugged them into him to stop the secrets
He’s stashed there from spilling in front of a car.
If only he could forget what he was.
And I kick my boots against the curled up world
And want to shout it out of my vision
And want to ask if I’m thinking ‘nice festive’ thoughts
Because I’m thinking about the snow I’m ploughing  
And the way that I’d like to tie fairy lights
Over my eyes until I can’t see anything but fairy tales
And I’m thinking about our parade of broken-bottle people
Wearing masks so empty that we don’t look human
Not to you
And I wonder if this is enough of a pantomime for you
That I’ve dressed my thoughts up in drag
And they’re telling you a ****** joke from a ****** Christmas *******
Thoughts rolled and congealed like the rims of strained bathtubs
Thoughts broken and fleeting and self-imploding like headphones
That got left to tangle beyond redemption in a back pocket
Too far gone to be saved
Thoughts that are forever curled back to the replay button
Re-destruct, re-punish, re-****
Pink Elephant thoughts that will never be sorted and thrown out
Cynical self-disposal
I’m on a retrieval mission that never knows what it’s trying to find
Because I’m a Chinese doll
And each face is cruller
And uglier
And blanker
Than the one before it
Until at the centre you find that the last doll is missing
And there are only a few jumbled messages where she’s supposed to be
And fairy lights
And maybe a memory of when Christmas meant stockings and fireside
Not carparks and frigidity
If only all my ******* repeats led to redemption.
Look;
We’ve built you a snowman, is that enough of a freak show for you?
Can you move on and join the carol singers in glorifying God
Safely out of Purgatory and back on holy ground
Or do you require something more?
The pitiful Christmas Dinner that’s currently being counted out in teaspoons?
The girls and the boy who’ll press their fingers across their lips
Like prison bars
And keep themselves under lock and key in their own
Lunatic Asylum
Lawrence Hall Feb 2017
A Burner on the Bridge

A burner on the bridge.  A human burns,
Trapped in technology and beer and fire
We hear the cold dispatch, the desperate call
To go, to see, to mend, if possible
We drive.  The flashers, blue and red, rotate
In the startled faces of those we pass
At speed, Hail Mary speed, surreal speed
Time, motion, space, and light obscure the night

In a pattern tail lights wink dim, then bright
Stalled traffic makes a long glowworm in reds
Boats, trailers, trucks, tankers, Volkswagens, Fords,
People in shorts drift around, slug Cokes, laugh
Unshaven men smoke cigarettes and swear
Blue-haired killers in Chrysler New Yorkers
Blink blankly through bifocals in the glare
Of flashers and flashlights, flares and taillights.
A burner on the bridge.  A Human burns.

We drive slowly through the curious crowds
Who mill about and stare and point and laugh
They consider a charred corpse fair reward
For being delayed on their trip home from the lake
When they ‘rive home they’ll hoist stories and yip:
“I was there; I seen it, man; it was gross!”
But some already are anxious to go
They honk, and pop a top, and cuss the cops.
A burner on the bridge.  A human burns.

Below the bridge, old, silent water lurks
Oozing warmly, fetidly, in its drift
Slithering blackly in the warm spring night
A silent observer of fire and death
A carrier of beer cans and debris,
Radiator coolant, plastic, and blood
Concrete pylons pounded into the mud
Where once were trees.  And now the water sees
A burner on the bridge.  A human burns.

The bridge is an altar.  The wreckages
Are vessels sacred to our gods, the dead
Are sacrifices to our gods, an incense of death
Our offering is broken flesh, and blood:
“The is my body, burnt on this spring night;
This is my blood, shed on the center stripe.
A burner on the bridge.  A human burns.

A shapeless hat among the smoking ash,
Old clothes, a shoe, cans of beer, fishing lures:
The sad trifles and trinkets of the dead
Now, firemen in their yellow rubber suits
Climb slowly through the tortured, broken steels
And gently stow a man into a bag
Ashes and smoke, green radiator fluid
The old river flows, wherever it goes.
A burner on the bridge.  A human burned.

Hours later: coffee at the Dairy Queen
High school baseball players yelp cheerfully as
They wreck fast cars in a video game.
Under the fluorescents, the flashers seem
Still to turn, endlessly turn, in the night
Hamburgers, possibly char-broiled, are gulped
Sloppily, laughingly, as cleated feet
And deep-fried breath cheer a video death.
A burner on the bridge.  A human burned.

A burner on the bridge.  A human burned.
Connor Reid Jun 2014
1992, seldom electric fire
  Top tier tenement
grease paint balcony
White flack veranda, in cold
     Aircraft damage
diamond hill - screen run
  centipedes crawling from under carpets
  Three stacked wage
Lighters tossed in
click click click
            Shared alternate
          Wiping vandal on jeans
- aquatic codex
     Ran       G - Er
Cleaning ***** pipes to play
     Brushes
Pushing out bits of pigeon meat
             Nature
                   Takes back
                         Inner pink
walking through valley, 2 shops
   Butchers, newsagents, bag on back, 75p Irn Bru
     - niaroo, old folks
a Roman decoration
   Holding hands, woken camping
Damp - Sleep
             Dams
man-made, man-made
   shoes
Taken off
  tiptoeing in inch high slow decline
Straddling fallen tree rings
           Egyptian replicant
      Citerazine, bag full of frogs
       Tree swings
                  - rope burn
    Cap full of Night Nurse
And a newtonian lung full of phlegm
  Mattress protector, cold sweat, menthol
                      - Or
  Retailed Jelly Beans pushed through face
      Lactic acid
          food pylons
     change t-shirts on trains home
     Thawing moments
     In a misty aether
       - That we found
            While eating in the Rain
     Sidestep
         Sidestep
              sidestep
         Til' we ***** rocks on waxpaper
                                Quasi-negativity
overheard on the 57th chemical bus
           Imitated cough
  Flash point culture
Aching on
a woken bad comfort, 50 minutes
    Surfing on liquid Archipelagos
- Camping - On a swollen inner thigh
                 Cause the
                 (carriage)
                           Today
Several dead.
   Yet cosmos vanished lacquer
                              Manslaughter
boiled mouthwash
       in the future
- drole
        acryllic ****
Shoes taken off at doors
      A need to laugh, Not in bars
    Not in rigor, not in Lips
Blankets on open doors to Firs
         rings century heat fort
  eight days external
             licking
     The imaginary
                  (Wound)
Shameless St. John
  Bricks
  Smashed off 204th launch
          finger split.   Splint
      -Fibration
              g
               oo -
finding Love in Junipers
        enchanted, Vanilla pod
Apple fries, casual ***, loose horseshoes
    Draper
           &
             a cold Vermont
        Liberty, capitol savings/Planck
        Ever twisting Venetian control
           Executive seep
        - In Sunlight
          skies scraped Cosgrove, Skies
presents, present
maybe sunny side of Barstow
    Agony aunt Limericks
and - Deep thrombosis
Let's build pyramids          In our Dreams
the night time sky
here
Will         never     Win    any    Awards
Hie Yamaha Wegman ****** voyager, voted vonage valuable, unrepentant TIME Magazine subscriber. Spotify sportsman Snapchat smartly. Sleuth slenderman silences Shutterfly schvitzing. Saxby sassy Santander sais sage rues rudimentary router rotorooter.

Royale Rococco rigged remarkably regular referee reefers red reddit reeder recuperating. Reconnaissance recluse really rabid. QVC quotient quoting, quo quoi quivering quite quirky. Quisling quipped. Quintuplets quintessentially quiet. Quids Quicken questions.

Quartermaster qualified quaint quaffing quadrilateral Pythons. Pyrex pylons put purdy purposeful puny punsters punching. Pumpkin pumice publicized prudential protean pros properly pronouncing prolific prodigies.

Proletariats professors' problematic. Pro privileges prioritized. Principle primates prevaricate. Preppy pregnant, praying prattler possibly Porgie. Poseidon pooping poodle ponders poppycock. Plum? Polite poison pods ply pitiful pinterest.

Pinhead Pillsbury pillager Pi. Pigskin pierce petsmart pests permanently. Perdition percolates peppered PennState pedigreed PearlJam Patagonian. Pastor pastes passion passably. Papas' paginated orbitz okayed. Nutty node needs money.

Next netzero nee naugahyde. Nattering nationwide nabob Moxie Molly McGee. Monosodium livingsocial joyus je kickstarter. Identityguard Huffington GMO. Gluten Glutamate footloose fancy free footlocker. Fingerhut fetishistic fabrication Cingular.
Mary Pear Aug 2016
Deserted streets at dusk,
Grey skies and lowering cloud,
Trees and hedges shrunk like a model train landscape
And pylons that could snap their wires, tuck them under their arms
And walk away.

Lego houses with lids to lift
Releasing smells of Sunday lunch chicken
And tea time bath salts.

I could pluck the towers from the power station and roll
Them down the dual carriageway.
An Alice or a Gulliver.
A non- participant;
A reluctant participant;
A can't participant.

Roads and trees and factories and pubs
Retreat
And shrink.

God- like in stature only-
Clumsily stepping,
Not wanting
To crack the road
Or gouge out windows
With a misplaced elbow.
willow May 2014
i hand you your things and flee the driveway,
wind up at the site of a gas leak
firetrucks and pylons and
hazmat suits and me in
my ’85 corolla
declaring
myself
king
Isaace Apr 2023
And opposite,
In the electricity fields,
Sit rows of hollowed-out shells.

Now in-land,
Though out of place,
The Lightning Whelks generate Hell.

And parallel—
Conducting phantasmagorical light—
The pylons coil around them:

Reverberations from the industrial fields
Where the blood lines coagulate and dwell.

And the blood lines—
They feed the hollowed-out shells—
Form conglomerate veins.

And in their hands—
The great fires they weld—
Ever-surging, moth-coaxing light.
Rob Tuck Dec 2014
What will haunt me until my dying day
is electricity pylons on motorway verges
for mile after elongated mile

and crash barricades, ebbing and flowing
with nauseating regularity and the
inexplicable sadness of the north circular

because believe me, purgatory is real
and its the central reservation of the A406
a haunted island where time is suspended
where days are ruined, dreams shattered
and lives ended
in my eyes im fishing the pylons,awed by the sunset, inspired by the sunrise.one with nature and its pure beauty,firmness in body and spirit: Alive.pure and simply energized by the elixir of lifeLove. with Love comes serenity.my spirit expounds Joy to the extentthat one couldn’t contain it inside himselfthe pureness and simplicity in which I can be pleasedis identical to the pureness and simplicity of love
topaz oreilly Jul 2013
Fire storm gave  you a cleansing  hand
cajoling not unlike a rabbit breaking through fences.
I feel more for foxes
but don't let that guise serve as something else.
Sheild my dignity by the pylons
deeply electric
azure as a dream
the bugles will surely entertain.
can closure be provided?
JR Rhine Feb 2017
…the dream sequence
plays like vaudeville
in the peephole
of a kinetoscope

my drunken subconscious thoughts
undulate in murky waters
and slurin the visions of specters past

infrastructures and pylons
formed from childhood homes schools
skate parks friend’s houssand churches

faces familiar unfamiliar
mold and mend in wicked contortions
and diaphanous ambiguity
what obfuscates me from the truths
of my mind

I stumble through the chambers
haunted by childhood nightmares
and tickled by ancient fantasies

my arms
               and legs
                             are like
                                          rubber
           ­                              I
                                 feel
                  torpidity
overcome

and the words
are like alphabet soup
in the director’s commentary
splashing around aimlessly mingling
in the waves of broth

what will be revealed
in this phantasmagoric phenomena
wax figures coming to life
and panoramas dancing on the walls

my body somewhere in time
waits with pen and paper in hand
eager to counter the façade
with the utmost coherence

just you wait til I wake up
and reveal all your secrets
oh wondrous mind…
Fields of green is surely a lovely scene
unspoilt of man's vision!
Which seems build on everything
plus adding pollution!
In between swaying trees plastic bags
lot's of cans and rotting rags!

Any idyllic view fly tipping is common
saving money the priority!
With a touch of pylons and mobile masts
and those wind turbines to.
Land spattered with concrete and steel
in despair helpless you kneel!

Completely drained at what's being done
over two centuries plundered.
That's detrimental to earth's natural order
continuing to **** the resources!
Certainly will take it's toll on civilisation
like the Mayans obliteration!

Has this happened before and now replaying?

The Foureyed Poet.
How much longer can man go on abusing our Mother Earth? The Foureyed Poet
Randall Walker Sep 2017
I thrive in silence
These mental pylons requiring void
I need all of my neurons to be employed


Modernity calls…

Undulating waves lambast the structure
My zigs start zagging when they should be zigging
The course turns inward
Noise so noisome, I then soil the blank
Cursing God, myself, and the bank
For such a hideous, heinous, everyday mistake

This arsenal
This armory
My six-digit word bank
Fall all out of order
Twenty-six slots, filled in with haste
The instrument bears air greedily in
My fingers can’t trace the holes amongst the din
So I issue out garbage
And pretend
This new edition is
Just another win.
//
I stack words like pebbles,
In a shivering tower,
Creation bets Wind
Me
'e could easily overpower.
//
But take a glance at my mouth,
It's holding something sour,
I'll sweat till I'm sweet—
Now wouldn't that just wow her?
Nat Lipstadt Jun 2014
to the fore, no dilly dallying,
no words wasting,
I don't write nursery rhymes,
just relay tales re the peoples
I have met journeying on this
natural good earth

I know, I have met,
Little Bo-Peep,
no fiction she,
she has counted my sheep and I,
hers

she pins and pylons,
her tales on my heart,
beetles, bugs and little boys,
crumbs in the bed,
no bleeding hearts here,
maybe a bandaid
on a boo-boo'd finger

this shepherdess tends her flock
and records their history,
the little foibles that make
life's little tantrums into loving poetry

when I think of her escapades,
I recall well that old Yiddish proverb:

God could not be everywhere,
so he created mothers...


and when not tending her babes,
she can bake one hell of a good word cake,
on her island~continent kingdom
Little Bo-Peep has lost her sheep,
And can't tell where to find them;
Leave them alone, and they'll come home,
Bringing their tails behind them.

Little Bo-Peep fell fast asleep,
And dreamt she heard them bleating;
But when she awoke, she found it a joke,
For they were still all fleeting.

Then up she took her little crook,
Determined for to find them;
She found them indeed, but it made her heart bleed,
For they'd left their tails behind them.

It happened one day, as Bo-Peep did stray
Into a meadow hard by,
There she espied their tails, side by side,
All hung on a tree to dry.

She heaved a sigh and wiped her eye,
And over the hillocks she raced;
And tried what she could, as a shepherdess should,
That each tail be properly placed.

Source: The Dorling Kindersley Book of Nursery Rhymes (2000)
Donall Dempsey Jan 2019
"...FOR GREED ALL NATURE IS TOO LITTLE..."

first the city
ate an adjacent town then

put out a suburb
like a great paw

belched
a factory

devoured a well known
beauty spot

that was soon
forgotten as such

ate a field and
ate another field

the city's hunger
fed by greed

sent out pylons
striding across countryside

like giant
alien beings

vomiting asphalt
so that green was as if

it had
never been

its scenic magnificence
now only available

in an out of print
1930's guide book

even its memory
dying now with old Joe Hart

who managed to make it
past the hundred mark

the town he was born in
no longer to be seen

except in sepia
or Kodachrome

a picture postcard
(3 for 2)

in the bright new
museum.

*

The title is supplied by one Seneca the Younger (c. 4 BC – AD 65) that well known and renowned Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist.
Donall Dempsey Jan 2016
FOR GREED ALL NATURE IS TOO LITTLE

first the city
ate an adjacent town then

put out a suburb
like a great paw

belched
a factory

devoured a well known
beauty spot

that was soon
forgotten as such

ate a field and
ate another field

the city's hunger
fed by greed

sent out pylons
striding across countryside

like giant
alien beings

vomiting asphalt
so that green was if

it had
never been

its scenic magnificence
now only available

in an out of print
1930's guide book

even its memory
dying now with old Joe Hart

who managed to make it
past the hundred mark

the town he was born in
no longer to be seen

except in sepia
or Kodachrome

a picture postcard
(3 for 2)

in the bright new
museum.
***

The title is supplied by one Seneca the Younger (c. 4 BC – AD 65) that well known and renowned Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist.
Trinity O Feb 2012
Strangers packed into the subway
   through the guts of the city
they ride thigh to thigh, eyes velcroed on
thick lamplight,    flash mobs drowning
the stop at Powell Station.

It’s not only night but the inside
   of a piston badly lit
and always leaving someone short-changed.
River of yellow between
   the platform and the train

makes everyone take sides
   and rearrange.    Girls who had wandered
off, stayed stationed on knobby-kneed pylons,
   holding their skirts to the wind
to anyone who’d take them.
A W Bullen Jun 2016
How low lies the line, the thin
Separation of Earth and Sky, far, far,
Beyond the bending ambles, the
Solitary gables, where descending pylons,
Unroll their cables, deep into the womb
Of distant cities.

Bellicose clouds in league with
The sea wind, wrest samphire fragments
From a sentinel peace, while folding
The hamlet in pitying glamours
Of harridan water on slate.

In Spartan gardens, Bu-gloss leans
Bruised petals hard, by rusted stanchions,
as bind-**** , knots the flaking perch
Of tumbled gantries, in a throttled
Slew of searching.

Melancholy anthems, quiver and hail
In the breeze-plucked tune of loose
Slung wire. Pleas of long gone mariners
Mutter and choir through salted gorse,..
..
Hurry inland to rattle at doors of
Norman churches, as if seeking
Some last sanctuary.
Wahhaa!!!...had clear this little box of too much Elderflower Gin and Tonic rantings!!!...was good fun though!!!
Reece Oct 2014
The rusted pylons
the endless rain
the drifting soils
spoils of war
spoiled, spoilt
remember the illuminating fear
soldiers of war


Baby laid flat unbreathing
pillow cases ajar by the splintered doors
eye sore, the sadness in your I's
when the plane touched down and you knew I was home
where the wind blew gales
over all these fields
and the way you thought of them,
brought tears to my eyes
or just because I was thinking of our child
- who died


My deer lay down, right here
this time
its different
this time it ends


Stray bullets with names etched out
it didn't matter, the importance of the target
green grass turned red
should have been safe until the end
lowered now into a manifest grave

Now the moment had come
now the songs had been sung
now the dirt it is ground fine
and so now is the time


- He who watched them descend
will be here to the end.
SøułSurvivør Mar 2017
A Story of Scientology and the
Mental Health System Connection

THE CAUSEWAY

By the time I got to Tampa Florida I was so weary that I was stumbling off my feet. I hadn't had any proper sleep in 4 days. My bones felt as if they had eaten a cancer. I can't remember sitting and waiting for motor pool to pick me up from the bus station. I must have been sleeping on my bags. Not that there were that many of them. I had very little clothing or toiletries. In fact I believe all that I owned was in one tiny suitcase and a carry-on duffle.

I don't remember the name of the man who picked me up that day. We'll just call him Noah. And the white van that traversed the Courtney Campbell Causeway carrying State Road 60 from Tampa to Clearwater? We'll just call that The Ark. Because we were about to meet a *deluge...


The first part of the trip I was nervous. It was raining and extremely windy. I remember asking Noah if we could wait for the storm to pass. He told me that he was under orders to get me to the Fort Harrison within a certain time frame. He would meet those orders come hell or high water. He didn't actually say that but that is what he meant. And that, my friends, is what we got!

The first part of the causeway appeared to be wide. It had palm trees on either side and some greenery. But at a certain point all it was was some roadway perched upon pylons. The engineers had started construction of the causeway in 1927. It was a total of 52,165' long. And, brother, I was feeling EVERY INCH!!!

The wind was blowing so hard that the rain was almost at a horizontal slant. The waves worse. They were spilling over the roadway and frothing. There was no one on the road of course. Nobody else would have been crazy enough to go out in that storm over that Causeway. But Noah had his orders, by God. And he was going to carry them out. That's how brainwashed and insane some scientologists are. Especially in the Sea Organization. Failure to follow "Command Intention" could be seen as grounds for the RPF. More on that horror later.

Well. I remembered Elsie. How she said the Lord Jesus Christ answered prayer. She'd told me that if you confessed your sins with a pure & contrite heart and asked anything of him, he would grant them. That's just what I did. I recall closing my eyes and talking to a man. I didn't know Him. But I told him I was sorry. And if he'd just get us to our destination safely I promised I'd try to be a better person...

Noah was terrified. I can still see his face locked in a rictus of fear. But now I felt strangely calm. Even when we hydroplaned over the asphalt I wasn't afraid. Finally we arrived at the end of that terrifying strip of water and wind. I don't recall exactly. But I believe Noah stopped the van and wept. For the first time in my life I thanked God. I recognized the event for what it was... A PURE MIRACLE.

*AND I WILL ALWAYS REMEMBER IT AS SUCH.
What I've written is what I remember to be. I don't know how we could have made it over that Causeway and not been swept over the side. It had to be an act of God.

What I will be writing from now on are my impressions of my time in the sea organization at the Flag Land base. All the names save one will be changed. There is one I don't hesitate to mention by name... the swaggering little dictator David Miscavige. A human monster of ****** prepositions. He will receive NO MERCY.

HE HAS SHOWN NONE TOWARDS ME.
Connor Reid Oct 2014
A man - Caked in thick, matte black bodypaint
Reeking of desolation, clinging to his skin like perfume would to a harlot
Staring awkwardly through walls, through time and space
Hoping to catch the gaze of any who hope to find themselves around the back garden on a folded beach chair.

Weightless in form, floating out from out where
Cones, rods and a pupillary light reflex as the absence of stimulation is introduced
Shifting - As if guided on rails, pulling out onto a stoop
There are no stars in the night-time sky tonight...
The trees, pylons and blackness overhead seem to bend and contort across the sky
- Covering up the hot countryside air and denying my imagination may it wander.

A feeling, polarised by dread and a curiosity
- A curiosity, to peer over the edge
Yet all I know is that whatever I do, I don't want to look over that edge
Suddenly, a traction pulls at every bad idea I ever had
Forcing me to lose trust in any control once possessed.

Tethered to the eventuality of curing this culmination
- Tilting into infinity
Smashed against comfort and lost in cymatic fibration,
Thoughts of before turn to liquid gold, cherished in an off-key harmony no longer sung.
The ground reveals itself, sporting a familiar sick green blush.

I see that man.

He paints with a ******* to my chest
Ingesting a week and a halfs worth of weeks - Burning to my delight
A volcanic pastiche of horror and abandon
- Peering into the whites of his eyes, I see nothing
Among the darkened streaked skin of his naked body
His features remained impartial, withdrawing his humanity from pretense
This performance is one that destroys my grip on actuality.

As if seeing God himself, I wretch uncontrollably at the conception of circadian fog
Filling up the lungs of our own incomprehension to repeat existence in ignorance (Eternal)
Shuddering from every sub-atomic particle to bone in the human body - 206 tremors of glass etched neurosis
The unknown, the unspoken and unborn come slithering down to remind all of its putridity.

An almost impossibly sonorous scream of agonising despair
- Echoes reluctantly through the ribbons of eventide,
Passing through every particle like ink to paper, creating a gaussian of impetus.
Making it's way into my ears - rattling me backwards, as if being shot from a cannon
I cannot turn, I cannot move, I cannot think, I cannot be.

In an instant I'm gone...

Shooting up from dormancy - Just as quick as I was gone, I was suspended back into the urgency of normality
Anxiety rushing, almost racing through me - I take a lifetime to regain my breath
And settle into composure, wondering if I'd understand.
Propping myself on one arm, my mind wanders yet my clothes and covers cling like glue - As if heavier from a nervous sweat
Looking into the featureless dark of this room I feel frightened
- The whole house sags to one side, becoming sinister, malevolent.

An ambience joins me, I am no longer alone
I am being watched and I am scared like I can't tell you...
Everything becomes sinister, even my own thoughts hate me,
Yet I begin to plague my ego with a question of identity - Internally and externally
Who was that man?
What had I saw?
I don't feel safe anymore, something feels like it could happen
Something perverse,
Reality is no better an anchor,
Setting ship in an ocean of ambiguity - Occupied by a school of Samsara.

One day I'll find myself walking out of a house onto a stoop
And I'll ask myself the question - "What is over the edge of this wall?"
When the opportunity presents itself, (Silver lined)
Maybe then I'll know the answer.
Tyler A Sullivan Jun 2017
I can still see the bulbous lights over the courtyard
How they hanging there resembled a December holiday
And when the night could no longer march forward
I'd lay me down and meditate with the soft glowing rays

I can still remember the old cracked fountain
When the swells of spring where all full of strife
It would overflow down the mountain
And join another person's life

Do you remember the electric lines entangling the sky
Their poles rising up to the matte sky like pylons
The dusk would burn out our eyes
And my shoulder was for you to lean on

Life was so much more back then
At the apex of humanity
At childhoods end
We are met with insanity
kevin g Aug 2010
the path of wisdom dwells beneath
the open sewers of the street
and far above the ancient pylons
of a lonely gravity.

the sea of roses flows between
an old forgotten shattered dream
and young, immortal gods of new,
creating truth, or so it seems.

the strings that bind us to this place;
they are the same that make her face,
the beauty and the horror, truth,
beseech the strings to truth, erase.

this parade of fiction shall cease
only when the gods, with ease,
decide to shatter dreams once more:
how beautifully impossible this love is.
march 25th, 2009
Whit Howland Sep 2022
Orange
reflecting
channel
markers

making
passage
one way
and

dependent
on men
to wave us
on

and yet this
is where
the road
diverges

literal
and symbolic
is
the fork

it's hot today
so right now
well travelled
looks pretty good

to me
so so sorry
frost
and W.D.

— The End —