Like a psychotic docent in the wilderness,
I will not speak in perfect Ciceronian cadences.
I draw my voice from a much deeper cistern,
Preferring the jittery synaptic archive,
So sublimely unfiltered, random and profane.
And though I am sequestered now,
Confined within the walls of a gated, golf-coursed,
Over-55 lunatic asylum (for Active Seniors I am told),
I remain oddly puerile,
Remarkably refreshed and unfettered.  
My institutionalization self-imposed,
Purposed for my own serenity, and also the safety of others.
Yet I abide, surprisingly emancipated and frisky.
I may not have found the peace I seek,
But the quiet has mercifully come at last.

The nexus of inner and outer space is context for my story.
I was born either in Brooklyn, New York or Shungopavi, Arizona,
More of intervention divine than census data.
Shungopavi: a designated place for tribal statistical purposes.
Shungopavi: an ovine abbatoir and shaman’s cloister.
The Hopi: my mother’s people, a state of mind and grace,
Deftly landlocked, so cunningly circumscribed,
By both interior and outer Navajo boundaries.
The Navajo: a coyote trickster people; a nation of sheep thieves,
Hornswoggled and landlocked themselves,
Subsumed within three of the so-called Four Corners:
A 3/4ths compromise and covenant,
Pickled in firewater, swaddled in fine print,
A veritable swindle concocted back when the USA
Had Manifest Destiny & mayhem on its mind.

The United States: once a pubescent synthesis of blood and thunder,
A bold caboodle of trooper spit and polish, unwashed brawlers, Scouts and      
Pathfinders, mountain men, numb-nut ne'er-do-wells,
Buffalo Bills & big-balled individualists, infected, insane with greed.
According to the Gospel of His Holiness Saint Zinn,
A People’s’ History of the United States: essentially state-sponsored terrorism,
A LAND RUSH grabocracy, orchestrated, blessed and anointed,
By a succession of Potomac sharks, Great White Fascist Fathers,
Far-Away-on-the Bay, the Bay we call The Chesapeake.
All demented national patriarchs craving lebensraum for God and country.
The USA: a 50-state Leviathan today, a nation jury-rigged,
Out of railroad ties, steel rails and baling wire,
Forged by a litany of lies, rapaciousness and ******,
And jaw-torn chunks of terra firma,
Bites both large and small out of our well-****** Native American ***.

Or culo, as in va’a fare in culo (literally "go do it in the ***")
Which Italian Americans pronounce as fongool.
The language center of my brain,
My sub-cortical Broca’s region,
So fraught with such semantic misfires,
And autonomic linguistic seizures,
Compel acknowledgement of a father’s contribution,
To both the gene pool and the genocide.
Columbus Day:  a conspicuously absent holiday out here in Indian Country.
No festivals or Fifth Avenue parades.
No excuse for ethnic hoopla. No guinea feast. No cannoli. No tarantella.
No excuse to not get drunk and not **** your sister-in-law.
Emphatically a day for prayer and contemplation,
A day of infamy like Pearl Harbor and 9/11,
October 12, 1492: not a discovery; an invasion.

Growing up in Brooklyn, things were always different for me,
Different in some sort of redskin/****/****--
Choose Your Favorite Ethnic Slur-sort of way.
The American Way: dehumanization for fun and profit.
Melting *** anonymity and denial of complicity with evil.
But this is no time to bring up America’s sordid past,
Or, a personal pet peeve: Indian Sovereignty.
For Uncle Sam and his minions, an ever-widening, conveniently flexible concept,
Not a commandment or law,
Not really a treaty or a compact,
Or even a business deal.  Let’s get real:
It was not even much in the way of a guideline.
Just some kind of an advisory, a bulletin or newsletter,
Could it merely have been a free-floating suggestion?
Yes, that’s it exactly: a suggestion.

Over and under halcyon American skies,
Over and around those majestic purple mountain peaks,
Those trapped in poetic amber waves of wheat and oats,
Corn and barley, wheat shredded and puffed,
Corn flaked and milled, Wheat Chex and Wheaties, oats that are little Os;
Kix and Trix, Fiber One, and Kashi-Go-Lean, Lucky Charms and matso *****,
Kreplach and kishka,
Polenta and risotto.
Our cantaloupe and squash patch,
Our fruited prairie plain, our delicate ecological Eden,
In balance and harmony with nature, as Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce instructs:
“These white devils are not going to,
Stop ****** and killing, cheating and eating us,
Until they have the whole ******* enchilada.
I’m talking about ‘from sea to shining sea.’”

“I fight no more forever,” Babaloo.
So I must steer this clunky keelboat of discovery,
Back to the main channel of my sad and starry demented river.
My warpath is personal but not historical.
It is my brain’s own convoluted cognitive process I cannot saavy.
Whatever biochemical or—as I suspect more each day—
Whatever bio-mechanical protocols govern my identity,
My weltanschauung: my world-view, as sprechen by proto-Nazis;
Putz philosophers of the 17th, 18th & 19th century.
The German intelligentsia: what a cavalcade of maniacal *******!
Why is this Jew unsurprised these Zarathustra-fueled Übermenschen . . .
Be it the Kaiser--Caesar in Deutsch--Bismarck, ******, or,
Even that Euro-*****,  Angela Merkel . . . Why am I not surprised these Huns,
Get global grab-*** on the sauerbraten cabeza every few generations?
To be, or not to be the ***** bullgoose loony: GOTT.

Biomechanical protocols govern my identity and are implanted while I sleep.
My brain--my weak and weary CPU--is replenished, my discs defragmented.
A suite of magnetic and optical white rooms, cleansed free of contaminants,
Gun mounts & lifeboat stations manned and ready,
Standing at attention and saluting British snap-style,
Snap-to and heel click, ramrod straight and cheerful: “Ready for duty, Sir.”
My mind is ravenous, lusting for something, anything to process.
Any memory or image, lyric or construct,
Be they short-term dailies or deeply imprinted.
Fixations archived one and all in deep storage time and space.
Memories, some subconscious, most vaporous;
Others--the scary ones—eidetic: frighteningly detailed and extraordinarily vivid.
Precise cognitive transcripts; recollected so richly rife and fresh.
Visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, and olfactory reloads:
Queued up and increasingly re-experienced.

The bio-data of six decades: it’s all there.
People, countless, places and things cataloged.
Every event, joy and trauma enveloped from within or,
Accessed externally from biomechanical storage devices.
The random access memory of a lifetime,
Read and recollected from cerebral repositories and vaults,
All the while the entire greedy process overseen,
Over-driven by that all-subservient British bat-man,
Rummaging through the data in batches small and large,
Internal and external drives working in seamless syncopation,
Self-referential, at times paradoxical or infinitely looped.
“Cogito ergo sum."
Descartes stripped it down to the basics but there’s more to the story:
Thinking about thinking.
A curse and minefield for the cerebral:  metacognition.

No, it is not the fact that thought exists,
Or even the thoughts themselves.
But the information technology of thought that baffles me,
As adaptive and profound as any evolution posited by Darwin,
Beyond the wetware in my skull, an entirely new operating system.
My mental and cultural landscape are becoming one.
Machines are connecting the two.
It’s what I am and what I am becoming.
Once more for emphasis:
It is the information technology of who I am.
It is the operating system of my mental and cultural landscape.
It is the machinery connecting the two.
This is the central point of this narrative:
Metacognition--your superego’s yenta Cassandra,
Screaming, screaming in your psychic ear, your good ear:

“LISTEN:  The machines are taking over, taking you over.
Your identity and train of thought are repeatedly hijacked,
Switched off the main line onto spurs and tangents,
Only marginally connected or not at all.
(Incoming TEXT from my editor: “Lighten Up, Giuseppi!”)
Reminding me again that most in my audience,
Rarely get past the comic page. All righty then: think Calvin & Hobbes.
John Calvin, a precocious and adventurous six-year old boy,
Subject to flights of 16th Century French theological fancy.
Thomas Hobbes, a sardonic anthropomorphic tiger from 17th Century England,
Mumbling about life being “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
Taken together--their antics and shenanigans--their relationship to each other,
Remind us of our dual nature; explore for us broad issues like public education;
The economy, environmentalism & the Global ****** Thermometer;
Not to mention the numerous flaws of opinion polls.



And again my editor TEXTS me, reminds me again: “LIGHTEN UP!”
Consoling me:  “Even Shakespeare had to play to the groundlings.”
The groundlings, AKA: The Rabble.
Yes. Even the ******* Bard, even Willie the Shake,
Had to contend with a decidedly lowbrow copse of carrion.
Oh yes, the groundlings, a carrion herd, a flying flock of carrion seagulls,
Carrion crow, carrion-feeders one and all,
And let’s throw Sheryl Crow into the mix while we’re at it:
“Hit it! This ain't no disco. And it ain't no country club either, this is L.A.”  

                  Send "All I Wanna Do" Ringtone to your Cell              

Once more, I digress.
The Rabble:  an amorphous, gelatinous Jabba the Hutt of commonality.
The Rabble: drunk, debauched & lawless.
Too *****-delicious to stop Bill & Hilary from thinking about tomorrow;
Too Paul McCartney My Love Does it Good to think twice.

The Roman Saturnalia: a weeklong **** fest.
The Saturnalia: originally a pagan kink-fest in honor of the deity Saturn.
Dovetailing nicely with the advent of the Christian era,
With a project started by Il Capo di Tutti Capi,
One of the early popes, co-opting the Roman calendar between 17 and 25 December,
Putting the finishing touches on the Jesus myth.
For Brooklyn Hopi-***-Jew baby boomers like me,
Saturnalia manifested itself as Disco Fever,
Unpleasant years of electrolysis, scrunched ***** in tight polyester
For Roman plebeians, for the great unwashed citizenry of Rome,
Saturnalia was just a great big Italian wedding:
A true family blowout and once-in-a-lifetime ego-trip for Dad,
The father of the bride, Vito Corleone, Don for A Day:
“Some think the world is made for fun and frolic,
And so do I! Funicula, Funiculi!”

America: love it or leave it; my country right or wrong.
Sure, we were citizens of Rome,
But any Joe Josephus spending the night under a Tiber bridge,
Or sleeping off a three day drunk some afternoon,
Up in the Coliseum bleachers, the cheap seats, out beyond the monuments,
The original three monuments in the old stadium,
Standing out in fair territory out in center field,
Those three stone slabs honoring Gehrig, Huggins, and Babe.
Yes, in the house that Ruth built--Home of the Bronx Bombers--***?
Any Joe Josephus knows:  Roman citizenship doesn’t do too much for you,
Except get you paxed, taxed & drafted into the Legion.
For us the Roman lifestyle was HIND-*** humble.
We plebeians drew our grandeur by association with Empire.
Very few Romans and certainly only those of the patrician class lived high,
High on the hog, enjoying a worldly extravaganza, like—whom do we both know?

Okay, let’s say Laurence Olivier as Crassus in Spartacus.
Come on, you saw Spartacus fifteen ******* times.
Remember Crassus?
Crassus: that ***** twisted **** trying to get his freak on with,
Tony Curtis in a sunken marble tub?
We plebes led lives of quiet *****-scratching desperation,
A bunch of would-be legionnaires, diseased half the time,
Paid in salt tablets or baccala, salted codfish soaked yellow in olive oil.
Stiffs we used to call them on New Year’s Eve in Brooklyn.
Let’s face it: we were hyenas eating someone else’s ****,
Stage-door jackals, Juvenal-come-late-lies, a mob of moronic mook boneheads
Bought off with bread & circuses and Reality TV.
Each night, dished up a wide variety of lowbrow Elizabethan-era entertainments.  
We contemplate an evening on the town, downtown—
(cue Petula Clark/Send "Downtown" Ringtone to your Cell)

On any given London night, to wit:  mummers, jugglers, bear & bull baiters.
How about dog & **** fighters, quoits & skittles, alehouses & brothels?
In short, somewhere, anywhere else,
Anywhere other than down along the Thames,
At Bankside in Southwark, down in the Globe Theater mosh pit,
Slugging it out with the groundlings whose only interest,
In the performance is the choreography of swordplay and stale ****** puns.
Meanwhile, Hugh Fennyman--probably a fellow Jew,
An English Renaissance Bugsy Siegel or Mickey Cohen—
Meanwhile Fennyman, the local mob boss is getting his ya-yas,
Roasting the feet of my text-messaging editor, Philip Henslowe.
Poor and pathetic Henslowe, works on commission, always scrounging,
But a true patron of my craft, a gentleman of infinite jest and patience,
Spiritual subsistence, and every now and then a good meal at some,
Sawdust joint with oyster shells, and a Prufrockian silk purse of T.S. Eliot gold.

Poor, pathetic Henslowe, trussed up by Fennyman,
His editorial feet in what looks like a Japanese hibachi.
Henslowe’s feet to the fire--feet to the fire—get it?
A catchy phrase whose derivation conjures up,
A grotesque yet vivid image of torture,
An exquisite insight into how such phrases ingress the idiom,
Not to mention a scene once witnessed at a secret Romanian CIA prison,
I’d been ordered to Bucharest not long after 9/11,
Handling the rendition and torture of Habib Ghazzawy,

An entirely innocent falafel maker from Steinway Street, Astoria, Queens.
Shock the Monkey: it’s what we do. GOTO:
Peter Gabriel - Shock the Monkey/
(HQ music video) - YouTube//
www.youtube.com/
Poor, pathetic, ******-on Henslowe.


Fennyman :  (his avarice is whet by something Philly screams out about a new script)  "A play takes time. Find actors; Rehearsals. Let's say open in three weeks. That's--what--five hundred groundlings at tuppence each, in addition four hundred groundlings tuppence each, in addition four hundred backsides at three pence--a penny extra for a cushion, call it two hundred cushions, say two performances for safety how much is that Mr. Frees?"
Jacobean Tweet, John (1580-1684) Webster:  “I saw him kissing her bubbies.”

It’s Geoffrey Rush, channeling Henslowe again,
My editor, a singed smoking madman now,
Feet in an ice bucket, instructing me once more:
“Lighten things up, you know . . .
Comedy, love and a bit with a dog.”
I digress again and return to Hopi Land, back to my shaman-monastic abattoir,
That Zen Center in downtown Shungopavi.
At the Tribal Enrolment Office I make my case for a Certificate of Indian Blood,
Called a CIB by the Natives and the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs.
The BIA:  representing gold & uranium miners, cattle and sheep ranchers,
Sodbusters & homesteaders; railroaders and dam builders since 1824.
Just in time for Andrew Jackson, another false friend of Native America,
Just before Old Hickory, one of many Democratic Party hypocrites and scoundrels,
Gives the FONGOOL, up the CULO go ahead.
Hey Andy, I’ve got your Jacksonian democracy: Hanging!
The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) mission is to:   "… enhance the quality of life, to promote economic opportunity, and to carry out the responsibility to protect and improve the trust assets of American Indians, Indian tribes, and Alaska Natives. What’s that in the fine print?  Uncle Sammy holds “the trust assets of American Indians.”

Here’s a ******* tip, Geronimo: if he trusted you,
It would ALL belong to you.
To you and The People.
But it’s all fork-tongued white *******.
If true, Indian sovereignty would cease to be a sick one-liner,
Cease to be a blunt force punch line, more of,
King Leopold’s 19th Century stand-up comedy schtick,
Leo Presents: The **** of the Congo.
La Belgique mission civilisatrice—
That’s what French speakers called Uncle Leo’s imperial public policy,
Bringing the gift of civilization to central Africa.
Like Manifest Destiny in America, it had a nice colonial ring to it.
“Our manifest destiny [is] to overspread the continent,
Allotted by Providence for the free development,
Of our yearly multiplying millions.”  John L. O'Sullivan, 1845

Our civilizing mission or manifest destiny:
Either/or, a catchy turn of phrase;
Not unlike another ironic euphemism and semantic subterfuge:
The Pacification of the West; Pacification?
Hardly: decidedly not too peaceful for Cochise & Tonto.
Meanwhile, Madonna is cash rich but disrespected Evita poor,
To wit: A ****** on the Rocks (throwing in a byte or 2 of Da Vinci Code).
Meanwhile, Miss Ciccone denied her golden totem *****.
They snubbed that little guinea ****, didn’t they?
Snubbed her, robbed her rotten.
Evita, her magnum opus, right up there with . . .
Her SNL Wayne’s World skit:
“Get a load of the unit on that guy.”
Or, that infamous MTV Music Video Awards stunt,
That classic ***** Lip-Lock with Britney Spears.

How could I not see that Oscar snubola as prime evidence?
It was just another stunning case of American anti-Italian racial animus.
Anyone familiar with Noam Chomsky would see it,
Must view it in the same context as the Sacco & Vanzetti case,
Or, that arbitrary lynching of 9 Italian-Americans in New Orleans in 1891,
To cite just two instances of anti-Italian judicial reach & mob violence,
Much like what happened to my cousin Dominic,
Gang-***** by the Harlem Globetrotters, in their locker room during halftime,
While he working for Abe Saperstein back in 1952.
Dom was doing advance for Abe, supporting creation of The Washington Generals:
A permanent stable of hoop dream patsies and foils,
Named for the ever freewheeling, glad-handing, backslapping,
Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force (SCAEF), himself,
Namely General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the man they liked,
And called IKE: quite possibly a crypto Jew from Abilene.

Of course, Harry Truman was my first Great White Fascist Father,
Back in 1946, when I first opened my eyes, hung up there,
High above, looking down from the adobe wall.
Surveying the entire circular kiva,
I had the best seat in the house.
Don’t let it be said my Spider Grandmother or Hopi Corn Mother,
Did not want me looking around at things,
Discovering what made me special.
Didn’t divine intervention play a significant part of my creation?
Knowing Mamma Mia and Nonna were Deities,
Gave me an edge later on the streets of Brooklyn.
The Cradleboard: was there ever a more divinely inspired gift to human curiosity? The Cradleboard: a perfect vantage point, an infant’s early grasp,
Of life harmonious, suspended between Mother Earth and Father Sky.
Simply put: the Hopi should be running our ******* public schools.

But it was IKE with whom I first associated,
Associated with the concept 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
I liked IKE. Who didn’t?
What was not to like?
He won the ******* war, didn’t he?
And he wasn’t one of those crazy **** John Birchers,
Way out there, on the far right lunatic Republican fringe,
Was he? (It seems odd and nearly impossible to believe in 2013,
That there was once a time in our Boomer lives,
When the extreme right wing of the Republican Party
Was viewed by the FBI as an actual threat to American democracy.)
Understand: it was at a time when The FBI,
Had little ideological baggage,
But a great appetite for secrets,
The insuppressible Jay Edgar doing his thang.

IKE: of whom we grew so, oh-so Fifties fond.
Good old reliable, Nathan Shaking IKE:
He’d been fixed, hadn’t he? Had had the psychic snip.
Snipped as a West Point cadet & parade ground martinet.
Which made IKE a good man to have in a pinch,
Especially when crucial policy direction was way above his pay grade.
Cousin Dom was Saperstein’s bagman, bribing out the opposition,
Which came mainly from religious and patriotic organizations,
Viewing the bogus white sports franchise as obscene.
The Washington Generals, Saperstein’s new team would have but one opponent,
And one sole mission: to serve as the **** of endless jokes and sight gags for—
Negroes.  To play the chronic fools of--
Negroes.  To be chronically humiliated and insulted by—
Negroes.  To run up and down the boards all night, being outran by—
Negroes.  Not to mention having to wear baggy silk shorts.



Meadowlark Lemon:  “Yeah, Charlie, we ***** that grease-ball Dominic; we shagged his guinea mouth and culo rotten.”  

(interviewed in his Scottsdale, AZ winter residence in 2003 by former ESPN commentator Charlie Steiner, Malverne High School, Class of ’67.)
                                                        
  ­                                                                 ­                 
IKE, briefed on the issue by higher-ups, quickly got behind the idea.
The Harlem Globetrotters were to exist, and continue to exist,
Are sustained financially by Illuminati sponsors,
For one reason and one reason only:
To serve elite interests that the ***** be kept down and subservient,
That the minstrel show be perpetuated,
A policy surviving the elaborate window dressing of the civil rights movement, Affirmative action, and our first Uncle Tom president.
Case in point:  Charles Barkley, Dennis Rodman & Metta World Peace Artest.
Cha-cha-cha changing again:  I am Robert Allen Zimmermann,
A whiny, skinny Jew, ****** and rolling in from Minnesota,
Arrested, obviously a vagrant, caught strolling around his tony Jersey enclave,
Having moved on up the list, the A-list, a special invitation-only,
Yom Kippur Passover Seder:  Next Year in Jerusalem, Babaloo!

I take ownership of all my autonomic and conditioned reflexes;
Each personal neural arc and pathway,
All shenanigans & shellackings,
Or blunt force cognitive traumas.
It’s all percolating nicely now, thank you,
In kitchen counter earthen crockery:
Random access memory: a slow-cook crockpot,
Bubbling through my psychic sieve.
My memories seem only remotely familiar,
Distant and vague, at times unreal:
An alien hybrid databank accessed accidently on purpose;
Flaky science sustains and monitors my nervous system.
And leads us to an overwhelming question:
Is it true that John Dillinger’s ******* is in the Smithsonian Museum?
Enquiring minds want to know, Kemosabe!

“Any last words, *******?” TWEETS Adam Smith.
Postmortem cyber-graffiti, an epitaph carved in space;
Last words, so singular and simple,
Across the universal great divide,
Frisbee-d, like a Pleistocene Kubrick bone,
Tossed randomly into space,
Morphing into a gyroscopic space station.
Mr. Smith, a calypso capitalist, and me,
Me, the Poet Laureate of the United States and Adam;
Who, I didn’t know from Adam.
But we tripped the light fantastic,
We boogied the Protestant Work Ethic,
To the tune of that old Scotch-Presbyterian favorite,
Variations of a 5-point Calvinist theme: Total Depravity; Election; Particular Redemption; Irresistible Grace; & Perseverance of the Saints.

Mr. Smith, the author of An Inquiry into the Nature
& Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776),
One of the best-known, intellectual rationales for:
Free trade, capitalism, and libertarianism,
The latter term a euphemism for Social Darwinism.
Prior to 1764, Calvinists in France were called Huguenots,
A persecuted religious majority . . . is that possible?
A persecuted majority of Edict of Nantes repute.
Adam Smith, likely of French Huguenot Jewish ancestry himself,
Reminds me that it is my principal plus interest giving me my daily gluten.
And don’t think the irony escapes me now,
A realization that it has taken me nearly all my life to see again,
What I once saw so vividly as a child, way back when.
Before I put away childish things, including the following sentiment:
“All I need is the air that I breathe.”

  Send "The Air That I Breathe" Ringtone to your Cell  

The Hippies were right, of course.
The Hollies had it all figured out.
With the answer, as usual, right there in the lyrics.
But you were lucky if you were listening.
There was a time before I embraced,
The other “legendary” economists:
The inexorable Marx,
The savage society of Veblen,
The heresies we know so well of Keynes.
I was a child.
And when I was a child, I spake as a child—
Grazie mille, King James—
I understood as a child; I thought as a child.
But when I became a man I jumped on the bus with the band,
Hopped on the irresistible bandwagon of Adam Smith.

Smith:  “Any last words, *******?”
Okay, you were right: man is rationally self-interested.
Grazie tanto, Scotch Enlightenment,
An intellectual movement driven by,
An alliance of Calvinists and Illuminati,
Freemasons and Johnny Walker Black.
Talk about an irresistible bandwagon:
Smith, the gloomy Malthus, and David Ricardo,
Another Jew boy born in London, England,
Third of 17 children of a Sephardic family of Portuguese origin,
Who had recently relocated from the Dutch Republic.
******* Jews!
Like everything shrewd, sane and practical in this world,
WE also invented the concept:  FOLLOW THE MONEY.

The lyrics: if you were really listening, you’d get it:
Respiration keeps one sufficiently busy,
Just breathing free can be a full-time job,
Especially when--borrowing a phrase from British cricketers—,
One contemplates the sorry state of the wicket.
Now that I am gainfully superannuated,
Pensioned off the employment radar screen.
Oft I go there into the wild ebon yonder,
Wandering the brain cloud at will.
My journey indulges curiosity, creativity and deceit.
I free range the sticky wicket,
I have no particular place to go.
Snagging some random fact or factoid,
A stop & go rural postal route,
Jumping on and off the brain cloud.

Just sampling really,
But every now and then, gorging myself,
At some information super smorgasbord,
At a Good Samaritan Rest Stop,
I ponder my own frazzled neurology,
When I was a child—
Before I learned the grim economic facts of life and Judaism,
Before I learned Hebrew,
Before my laissez-faire Bar Mitzvah lessons,
Under the rabbinical tutelage of Rebbe Kahane--
I knew what every clever child knows about life:
The surfing itself is the destination.
Accessing RAM--random access memory—
On a strictly need to know basis.
RAM:  a pretty good name for consciousness these days.

If I were an Asimov or Sir Arthur (Sri Lankabhimanya) Clarke,
I’d get freaky now, riffing on Terminators, Time Travel and Cyborgs.
But this is truth not science fiction.
Nevertheless, someone had better,
Come up with another name for cyborg.
Some other name for a critter,
Composed of both biological and artificial parts?
Parts-is-parts--be they electronic, mechanical or robotic.
But after a lifetime of science fiction media,
After a steady media diet, rife with dystopian technology nightmares,
Is anyone likely to admit to being a cyborg?
Since I always give credit where credit is due,
I acknowledge that cyborg was a term coined in 1960,
By Manfred Clynes & Nathan S. Kline and,
Used to identify a self-regulating human-machine system in outer space.

Five years later D. S. Halacy's: Cyborg: Evolution of the Superman,
Featured an introduction, which spoke of:  “… a new frontier, that was not,
Merely space, but more profoundly, the relationship between inner space,
And outer space; a bridge, i.e., between mind and matter.”
So, by definition, a cyborg defined is an organism with,
Technology-enhanced abilities: an antenna array,
Replacing what was once sentient and human.
My glands, once in control of metabolism and emotions,
Have been replaced by several servomechanisms.
I am biomechanical and gluttonous.
Soaking up and breathing out the atmosphere,
My Baby Boom experience of six decades,
Homogenized and homespun, feedback looped,
Endlessly networked through predigested mass media,
Culture as demographically targeted content.

This must have something to do with my own metamorphosis.
I think of Gregor Samsa, a Kafkaesque character if there ever was one.
And though we share common traits,
My evolutionary progress surpasses and transcends his.
Samsa--Phylum and Class--was, after all, an insect.
Nonetheless, I remain a changeling.
Have I not seen many stages of growth?
Each a painful metamorphic cycle,
From exquisite first egg,
Through caterpillar’s appetite & squirm.
To phlegmatic bliss and pupa quietude,
I unfold my wings in a rush of Van Gogh palette,
Color, texture, movement and grace, lift off, flapping in flight.
My eyes have witnessed wondrous transformations,
My experience, nouveau riche and distinctly self-referential;
For the most part unspecific & longitudinally pedestrian.

Yes, something has happened to me along the way.
I am no longer certain of my identity as a human being.
Time and technology has altered my basic wiring diagram.
I suspect the sophisticated gadgets and tools,
I’ve been using to shape & make sense of my environment,
Have reared up and turned around on me.
My tools have reshaped my brain & central nervous system.
Remaking me as something simultaneously more and less human.
The electronic toys and tools I once so lovingly embraced,
Have turned unpredictable and rabid,
Their bite penetrating my skin and septic now, a cluster of implanted sensors,
Content: currency made increasingly more valuable as time passes,
Served up by and serving the interests of a pervasively predatory 1%.
And the rest of us: the so-called 99%?
No longer human; simply put by both Howards--Beale & Zinn--

Humanoid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Here Silence gathers
thoughts of you

Letters shall never
spell your grace

No melody could
describe your face

No rhythm dance
the way you move

Only Silence can
express my love

ever yours ever
yours ever yours


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

PROLOGUE
               Hyde Park weekend of politics and pop,
Geldof’s gang of divas and mad hatters;
Sergeant Pepper only one heart beating,
resurrected by a once dead Beatle.
The ******, Queen and Irish juggernauts;
The Entertainer and dead bands
re-jigged for the sake of humanity.
   The almighty single named entities
all out for Africa and people power.
Olympics in the bag, a Waterloo
of celebrations in the street that night
Leaping and whooping in sheer delight
Nelson rocking in Trafalgar Square
The promised computer wonderlands
rising from the poisoned dead heart wasteland;
derelict, deserted, still festering.
The Brave Tomorrow in a world of hate.
The flame will be lit, magic rings aloft
and harmony will be our middle name.

On the seventh day of the seventh month,
Festival of the skilful Weaving girl;
the ‘war on terror’ just a tattered trope
drained and exhausted and put out of sight
in a dark corner of a darker shelf.
A power surge the first lie of the day.
Savagely woken from our pleasant dream
al Qa’ida opens up a new franchise
and a new frontier for terror to prowl.

               Howling sirens shatter morning’s progress
Hysterical screech of ambulances
and police cars trying to grip the road.
The oppressive drone of helicopters
gathering like the Furies in the sky;
Blair’s hubris is acknowledged by the gods.
Without warning the deadly game begins.

The Leviathan state machinery,
certain of its strength and authority,
with sheer balletic co-ordination,
steadies itself for a fine performance.
The new citizen army in ‘day glow’
take up their ‘Support Official’ roles,
like air raid wardens in the last big show;
feisty  yet firm, delivering every line
deep voiced and clearly to the whole theatre.
On cue, the Police fan out through Bloomsbury
clearing every emergency exit,
arresting and handcuffing surly streets,
locking down this ancient river city.
Fetching in fluorescent green costuming,
the old Bill nimbly Tangos and Foxtrots
the airways, Oscar, Charlie and Yankee
quickly reply with grid reference Echo;
Whiskey, Sierra, Quebec, November,
beam out from New Scotland Yard,
staccato, nearly lost in static space.
      
              LIVERPOOL STREET STATION
8.51 a.m. Circle Line

Shehezad Tanweer was born in England.
A migrant’s child of hope and better life,
dreaming of his future from his birth.
Only twenty two short years on this earth.
In a madrassah, Lahore, Pakistan,
he spent twelve weeks reading and rote learning
verses chosen from the sacred text.
Chanting the syllables, hour after hour,
swaying back and forth with the word rhythm,
like an underground train rocking the rails,
as it weaves its way beneath the world,
in turning tunnels in the dead of night.

Teve Talevski had a meeting
across the river, he knew he’d be late.
**** trains they do it to you every time.
But something odd happened while he waited
A taut-limbed young woman sashayed past him
in a forget-me-not blue dress of silk.
She rustled on the platform as she turned.
She turned to him and smiled, and he smiled back.
Stale tunnel air pushed along in the rush
of the train arriving in the station.
He found a seat and watched her from afar.
Opened his paper for distraction’s sake
Olympic win exciting like the smile.

Train heading southwest under Whitechapel.
Deafening blast, rushing sound blast, bright flash
of golden light, flying glass and debris
Twisted people thrown to ground, darkness;
the dreadful silent second in blackness.
The stench of human flesh and gunpowder,
burning rubber and fiery acrid smoke.
Screaming bone bare pain, blood-drenched tearing pain.
Pitiful weeping, begging for a god
to come, someone to come, and help them out.

Teve pushes off a dead weighted man.
He stands unsteady trying to balance.
Railway staff with torches, moving spotlights
**** and jolt, catching still life scenery,
lighting the exit in gloomy dimness.
They file down the track to Aldgate Station,
Teve passes the sardine can carriage
torn apart by a fierce hungry giant.
Through the dust, four lifeless bodies take shape
and disappear again in drifting smoke.
It’s only later, when safe above ground,
Teve looks around and starts to wonder
where his blue epiphany girl has gone.

                 KINGS CROSS STATION
8.56 a.m. Piccadilly Line

Many named Lyndsey Germaine, Jamaican,
living with his wife and child in Aylesbury,
laying low, never visited the Mosque.   
                Buckinghamshire bomber known as Jamal,
clean shaven, wearing normal western clothes,
annoyed his neighbours with loud music.
Samantha-wife converted and renamed,
Sherafiyah and took to wearing black.
Devout in that jet black shalmar kameez.
Loving father cradled close his daughter
Caressed her cheek and held her tiny hand
He wondered what the future held for her.

Station of the lost and homeless people,
where you can buy anything at a price.
A place where a face can be lost forever;
where the future’s as real as faded dreams.
Below the mainline trains, deep underground
Piccadilly lines cross the River Thames
Cram-packed, shoulder to shoulder and standing,
the train heading southward for Russell Square,
barely pulls away from Kings Cross Station,
when Arash Kazerouni hears the bang,
‘Almighty bang’ before everything stopped.
Twenty six hearts stopped beating that moment.
But glass flew apart in a shattering wave,
followed by a  huge whoosh of smoky soot.
Panic raced down the line with ice fingers
touching and tagging the living with fear.
Spine chiller blanching faces white with shock.

Gracia Hormigos, a housekeeper,
thought, I am being electrocuted.
Her body was shaking, it seemed her mind
was in free fall, no safety cord to pull,
just disconnected, so she looked around,
saw the man next to her had no right leg,
a shattered shard of bone and gouts of  blood,
Where was the rest of his leg and his foot ?

Level headed ones with serious voices
spoke over the screaming and the sobbing;
Titanic lifeboat voices giving orders;
Iceberg cool voices of reassurance;
We’re stoical British bulldog voices
that organize the mayhem and chaos
into meaty chunks of jobs to be done.
Clear air required - break the windows now;
Lines could be live - so we stay where we are;
Help will be here shortly - try to stay calm.

John, Mark and Emma introduce themselves
They never usually speak underground,
averting your gaze, tube train etiquette.
Disaster has its opportunities;
Try the new mobile, take a photograph;
Ring your Mum and Dad, ****** battery’s flat;
My network’s down; my phone light’s still working
Useful to see the way, step carefully.

   Fiona asks, ‘Am I dreaming all this?’
A shrieking man answers her, “I’m dying!”
Hammered glass finally breaks, fresher air;
too late for the man in the front carriage.
London Transport staff in yellow jackets
start an orderly evacuation
The mobile phones held up to light the way.
Only nineteen minutes in a lifetime.
  
EDGEWARE ROAD STATION
9.17 a.m. Circle Line

               Mohammed Sadique Khan, the oldest one.
Perhaps the leader, at least a mentor.
Yorkshire man born, married with a daughter
Gently spoken man, endlessly patient,
worked in the Hamara, Lodge Lane, Leeds,
Council-funded, multi-faith youth Centre;
and the local Primary school, in Beeston.
No-one could believe this of  Mr Khan;
well educated, caring and very kind
Where did he hide his secret other life  ?

Wise enough to wait for the second train.
Two for the price of one, a real bargain.
Westbound second carriage is blown away,
a commuter blasted from the platform,
hurled under the wheels of the east bound train.
Moon Crater holes, the walls pitted and pocked;
a sparse dark-side landscape with black, black air.
The ripped and shredded metal bursts free
like a surprising party popper;
Steel curlicues corkscrew through wood and glass.
Mass is made atomic in the closed space.
Roasting meat and Auschwitzed cremation stench
saturates the already murky air.              
Our human kindling feeds the greedy fire;
Heads alight like medieval torches;
Fiery liquid skin drops from the faceless;
Punk afro hair is cauterised and singed.  
Heat intensity, like a wayward iron,
scorches clothes, fuses fibres together.
Seven people escape this inferno;
many die in later days, badly burned,
and everyone there will live a scarred life.

               TAVISTOCK ROAD
9.47 a.m. Number 30 Bus  

Hasib Hussain migrant son, English born
barely an adult, loved by his mother;
reported him missing later that night.
Police typed his description in the file
and matched his clothes to fragments from the scene.
A hapless victim or vicious bomber ?
Child of the ‘Ummah’ waging deadly war.
Seventy two black eyed virgins waiting
in jihadist paradise just for you.

Red double-decker bus, number thirty,
going from Hackney Wick to Marble Arch;
stuck in traffic, diversions everywhere.
Driver pulls up next to a tree lined square;
the Parking Inspector, Ade Soji,
tells the driver he’s in Tavistock Road,
British Museum nearby and the Square.
A place of peace and quiet reflection;
the sad history of war is remembered;
symbols to make us never forget death;
Cherry Tree from Hiroshima, Japan;
Holocaust Memorial for Jewish dead;
sturdy statue of  Mahatma Gandhi.
Peaceful resistance that drove the Lion out.
Freedom for India but death for him.

Sudden sonic boom, bus roof tears apart,
seats erupt with volcanic force upward,
hot larva of blood and tissue rains down.
Bloodied road becomes a charnel-house scene;
disembodied limbs among the wreckage,
headless corpses; sinews, muscles and bone.
Buildings spattered and smeared with human paint
Impressionist daubs, blood red like the bus.

Jasmine Gardiner, running late for work;
all trains were cancelled from Euston Station;  
she headed for the square, to catch the bus.
It drove straight past her standing at the stop;
before she could curse aloud - Kaboom !
Instinctively she ran, ran for her life.
Umbrella shield from the shower of gore.

On the lower deck, two Aussies squeezed in;
Catherine Klestov was standing in the aisle,
floored by the bomb, suffered cuts and bruises
She limped to Islington two days later.
Louise Barry was reading the paper,
she was ‘****-scared’ by the explosion;
she crawled out of the remnants of the bus,
broken and burned, she lay flat on the road,
the world of sound had gone, ear drums had burst;
she lay there drowsy, quiet, looking up
and amazingly the sky was still there.

Sam Ly, Vietnamese Australian,
One of the boat people once welcomed here.
A refugee, held in his mother’s arms,
she died of cancer, before he was three.
Hi Ly struggled to raise his son alone;
a tough life, inner city high rise flats.
Education the smart migrant’s revenge,
Monash Uni and an IT degree.
Lucky Sam, perfect job of a lifetime;
in London, with his one love, Mandy Ha,
Life going great until that fateful day;
on the seventh day of the seventh month,
Festival of the skilful Weaving girl.

Three other Aussies on that ****** bus;
no serious physical injuries,
Sam’s luck ran out, in choosing where to sit.
His neck was broken, could not breath alone;
his head smashed and crushed, fractured bones and burns
Wrapped in a cocoon of coma safe
This broken figure lying on white sheets
in an English Intensive Care Unit
did not seem like Hi Ly’s beloved son;
but he sat by Sam’s bed in disbelief,
seven days and seven nights of struggle,
until the final hour, when it was done.

In the pit of our stomach we all knew,
but we kept on deep breathing and hoping
this nauseous reality would pass.
The weary inevitability
of horrific disasters such as these.
Strangely familiar like an old newsreel
Black and white, it happened long ago.
But its happening now right before our eyes
satellite pictures beam and bounce the globe.
Twelve thousand miles we watch the story
Plot unfolds rapidly, chapters emerge
We know the places names of this narrative.
  
It is all subterranean, hidden
from the curious, voyeuristic gaze,
Until the icon bus, we are hopeful
This public spectacle is above ground
We can see the force that mangled the bus,
fury that tore people apart limb by limb
Now we can imagine a bomb below,
far below, people trapped, fiery hell;
fighting to breathe each breath in tunnelled tombs.

Herded from the blast they are strangely calm,
obedient, shuffling this way and that.
Blood-streaked, sooty and dishevelled they come.
Out from the choking darkness far below
Dazzled by the brightness of the morning
of a day they feared might be their last.
They have breathed deeply of Kurtz’s horror.
Sights and sounds unimaginable before
will haunt their waking hours for many years;
a lifetime of nightmares in the making.
They trudge like weary soldiers from the Somme
already see the world with older eyes.

On the surface, they find a world where life
simply goes on as before, unmindful.
Cyclist couriers still defy road laws,
sprint racing again in Le Tour de France;
beer-gutted, real men are loading lorries;
lunch time sandwiches are made as usual,
sold and eaten at desks and in the street.
Roadside cafes sell lots of hot sweet tea.
The Umbrella stand soon does brisk business.
Sign writers' hands, still steady, paint the sign.
The summer blooms are watered in the park.
A ***** stretches on the bench and wakes up,
he folds and stows his newspaper blankets;
mouth dry,  he sips water at the fountain.
A lady scoops up her black poodle’s ****.
A young couple argues over nothing.
Betting shops are full of people losing
money and dreaming of a trifecta.
Martin’s still smoking despite the patches.
There’s a rush on Brandy in nearby pubs
Retired gardener dead heads his flowers
and picks a lettuce for the evening meal

Fifty six minutes from start to finish.
Perfectly orchestrated performance.
Rush hour co-ordination excellent.
Maximum devastation was ensured.
Cruel, merciless killing so coldly done.
Fine detail in the maiming and damage.

A REVIEW

Well activated practical response.
Rehearsals really paid off on the day.
Brilliant touch with bus transport for victims;
Space blankets well deployed for shock effect;
Dramatic improv by Paramedics;
Nurses, medicos and casualty staff
showed great technical E.R. Skills - Bravo !
Plenty of pizzazz and dash as always
from the nifty, London Ambo drivers;
Old fashioned know-how from the Fire fighters
in hosing down the fireworks underground.
Dangerous rescues were undertaken,
accomplished with buckets of common sense.
And what can one say about those Bobbies,
jolly good show, the lips unquivering
and universally stiff, no mean feat
in this Premiere season tear-jerker.
Nail-bitingly brittle, but a smash-hit
Poignant misery and stoic suffering,
fortitude, forbearance and lots of grit
Altogether was quite tickety boo.



NOTES ON THE POEM

Liverpool Street Station

A Circle Line train from Moorgate with six carriages and a capacity of 1272 passengers [ 192 seated; 1080 standing]. 7 dead on the first day.

Southbound, destination Aldgate. Explosion occurs midway between Liverpool Street and Aldgate.

Shehezad Tanweer was reported to have ‘never been political’ by a friend who played cricket with him 10 days before the bombing

Teve Talevski is a real person and I have elaborated a little on reports in the press. He runs a coffee shop in North London.

At the time of writing the fate of the blue dress lady is not known

Kings Cross Station

A Piccadilly Line train with six carriages and a capacity of 1238 passengers [272 seated; 966 standing]. 21 dead on first day.

Southbound, destination Russell Square. Explosion occurs mi

“You’re turning eighteen, you know. Have you thought of the things you’ve done with your life? Don’t you think it’s time we get you a life?” Recently, I had coffee with a friend. He looked at me from head to foot in mid-conversation, and made this comment. As always, he managed to drive me into deep thought. After much contemplation, I now realize how much I have truly gone through. I also realize the reason for this paper: I want to tell you about my life. I want to prove to you that people like me, who are afflicted with cerebral palsy should not be demeaned, but rather looked up to for how they face the challenges life brings forth.

    I remember that day. I was a baby and my eyes didn’t move. They refused to follow the finger my aunt moved back and forth. I just lay there, unmoving. My family didn’t really give much thought to it until a few months later when I began to be extremely dependent on others when it came to simple things like getting up from a fall. Right then, they knew something was wrong. I was taken to the hospital a few weeks after, and true enough I was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, a condition that caused me to walk on tip-toe and my legs to look like sticks due to weak muscles.

   The hospital became my second home. By the time I was three, I had grown immune to the stale smell of disease and death that greeted patients at hospital entrances. I sat in wheelchairs and was a patient to three different doctors and physical therapists. Physical therapy was, and still is to this day a gruesome routine that I didn’t look forward to. Those sessions lasted for three hours, starting off with cold ultrasound gel being smeared slowly on my thigh muscles, slowly progressing into the limb-twisting that drove me into screams of excruciating pain, and then finally ending with attempts at “walking normally” with steel bars for support. Soon after, the doctors discovered that physical therapy alone was not enough, and recommended orthopedic surgery.

   I underwent seven surgeries in three different countries: the Philippines, Thailand, and Greece. Although these surgeries gave me the opportunity to see the world, they were not at all full of pleasantries. To this day, I remember how each surgery went: being laid on the cold operating table, feeling as though my body was a pincushion as needles were forced into me. I shrieked at the sight of blood and nurses tried to calm me down, talking to me in languages I didn’t understand. Soon, my vision blurred, my eyes shut and I couldn’t open them. A tube made its way down my throat, and soon I was going, going, gone. Hours later, I woke up groggy, and the sleepless nights in the children’s ward started. Tears clouded my eyes as I stared at the ceiling or the walls covered with Disney characters grinning annoyingly at me as I was under the mercy of painkillers that didn’t even seem to work.

    As I got older, I began to question why things were the way they were for me. I began to raise questions why a certain child in my class could do things that I couldn’t. My early years of schooling were the most challenging ones to face. Like me, the other children didn’t realize how it was like to be in the situation I was in. Bullying and name-calling was common in the schools I attended. “Slowpoke” and “snail” are only some of the few names I was called by. Sometimes, children would even go as far as “crazy” and “*******”. They mimicked the way I walked and called my attention, asking me who it was they were pretending to be. Often times, I did what I was told to do at home and stood up for myself, firing back with a witty, sharp remark. Other times, I chose to ignore them instead.

    On the first days of all my Physical Education courses, I’d try to blend in with my classmates hoping that the teacher wouldn’t notice that I was incapable of doing the routines. I tried to get away with it, to no avail. As soon as I got found out, I was tasked to watch everyone else’s belongings, clear up scattered basketballs, or score a game I really had no knowledge of each meeting. I remember how it felt like to be a benchwarmer, while all the others were doing warm-ups or playing sports. I didn’t look at their faces much, instead I closed my eyes and listened as their laughs echoed their enjoyment into the air. That, or I looked down at their feet, watching them jump, listening to the thumps as their shoes hit the ground again. They made it look so easy.

   During dance rehearsals, I’d stare down at my own shoes, dirtied and scratched from constant dragging. I’d feel a sharp, imagined pain in my stick-thin legs, and imagine them moving to the music they’d be dancing to. Gently. Tap. Tap. Tap.

   While I admit that I felt a lot of resentment towards this disability in the past, I now find that there isn’t really much to resent about it. I have grown so much as a person through this disability. It has become part of who I am and how others define me. It is true that I have missed out on a lot of the things teenagers my age have gone through, but how this disability has enabled me to see life actually happen, to discover life’s true essence, and most of all, touch the lives of people I have encountered in the past and those I continue to encounter, makes me feel as though I have not missed out on anything at all.

   As I end this essay, I’d like to leave two challenges. If you happen to afflicted with cerebral palsy or any other disability, I challenge you to be proud and fight. Do not let others look down on you. People will demean you, if you choose to demean yourself. Do not wallow in self-pity. Instead, strive to turn your misfortune around. Touch lives of the people you meet. Inspire.

   On the other hand, if you do not have to struggle with any disability at all, I challenge you even more. Do not take your “normalcy” for granted. Do not look down on people with disabilities; instead aim to broaden your understanding of how it’s like to live life in their shoes. Everyday, realize how lucky you are to have what you have. I ask you the same question my friend asked me in the coffee shop that afternoon: Have you thought of the things you’ve done with your life?

red car, yellow car, blue car, white car

no lucky black car, no orange to wish on

they just sat there for awhile on the edge of the rooftop, feet dangling looking at the rush of cars passing by playing the game they invented and derived from the tongue twister red lorry yellow lorry
if a black car passes by, luck will come through
spot the first green car and you pick the way you die
look for an orange car and make a wish

it was a game they played to **** time or whenever they went up the rooftop of the ballet studio they've been performing at since they were children and they were currently taking a break from swan lake rehearsals. they played the game for a little more though heather could tell that megan-meg for short- had her mind somewhere else.

"penny for your thoughts?"

meg just shook her head, tilting it across the pink skies that matched the tutus they still had on. a dreamy smile was strewn across her face

heather just watched her friend and the world surrounding them, a light gentle bubble in her stomach. she loved the building's rooftop so much; she was actually the one who first went up here and ever since then, it had been their place her place. she went here on weekends sometimes, when they didn't have rehearsals. everytime she was up here, she felt more than she was, like she was a goddess and everything below her was under a microscope like she could change anything with the click of her fingers. but most of all, in here she could freely be. it was her safe haven.

"okay spill tell me this isn't about hendrix again?"

meg smirked, looking at heather's ice blue eyes "okay you caught me" she says, traces of the english accent she had come with still evident in her voice

"i knew it. boy he's got you in such a haze. you've got a school girl crush on him" she teased, making her friend giggle nervously. meg was dating hendrix peters, a senior in the high school they were attending. theyve been seeing each other for six months now and heather knew how much of a ride it was almost as much as meg (being the first person meg ranted to everytime things occurred) the two were a match made in heaven and it was testified by the amount of gossip about them that was circulated, mostly by the senior girls who were head over heels for him and would hiss whenever their paths crossed with meg's and try to flirt with him every chance they got though he politely shook them off. he supported meg in all the possible ways, from attending to her performances on stage to supporting and showing off her stunning makeup looks and she did the same with him, coming to all his football games and enthusiastically cheering for him. they were madly in love, you could say

"it's not like that" meg scoffed, clasping both of her hands together. "ive just been thinking about the both of us and our togetherness and how we haven't done it yet and yea it's been in my mind alot" she bit her lip, a habit of nervousness she had "it's not a big deal i know, i mean, people do it all the time, people who aren't even together and it's not this eureka moment or anything of the sorts but i want it to be special at least"

"has he been asking you to do it?"

"no he doesn't really no, forcing there" meg shakes her head "but we did talk about it some time, once, thrice yea"

"someday then or tomorrow just be safe my dear friend" heather replies in a playful tone, trying to bring back the lightness of the conversation

"ugh help me practice my skills give it all to me darling, let me do you" her friend wickedly retorts, launching atop her and pinning her to the concrete, playfully mock *******

"ew dude *******'re so gross get off me" she says trying to act annoyed but she was laughing too all the while trying not to get crushed by meg's weight who was strangely heavy despite her small wiry frame

"ow babe im coming ugh" meg continues, laughing fooling around-this was how their friendship worked

"*******. now your germs are all over me" heather grunts, finally pushing meg off her and both of them just lay there for minutes, laughing too much and choking in their breaths, as the sky was bathed in watercolor above them, the sounds of the city being their soundtrack


"what's it like?" heather blurts once theyve both calmed down

"hmmm?"

"what's it like, being with him?"



meg raises her hands like she was touching the clouds, taking the question in deeply "it's....wonderful....i mean...we aren't always happy and we have loads of fights but....we manage to make it work and the whole thing drives me crazy but it's a good kind of crazy"

her answer dissolves in heather's thoughts are completely lost in it


"you know that when we first got together i told him how much i hated clichés? flowers, chocolates stuffed animals, fancy dinner dates you name it and he nodded and the first gift he gave me was a boquet out of makeup products and i laughed because it was thoughtful and he's just full of surprises but you know he did give me flowers and letters on an occasion but i didn't mind it.
i guess that's how love is, made out of all the things you love thrown in with things you don't like but you don't mind at all"

heather nodded, still deep in thought "how did you know?"


the question seemed to have an incomplete thought but meg got the gist "i just did. well i didn't know itd last but i did know that he was for me but he's not my soulmate see, you don't find soulmates, you make them. anyone could be your soulmate, soulmates are just a ****** up idea at finding love. someday you'd know kid"

heather rolled her eyes. she hated being called kid because she was reminded of how much younger she was from meg when it came to these sorts of things "don't call me that"

"you'd know" meg pats her friend in the head, lovingly still teasing her

she sits up, tying the ribbons of her satin slippers. they climb down the fire exit and join the rest of the ballet dancers, rehearsing for the rest of the day



and heather went back to the rooftop the day after, a saturday in solitude sorting out the contents of her brain, replaying the conversation she and her bestfriend had in this very place the previous day, all the while feeling a sort of feeling in her heart very familiar to nostalgia. she realized it was the feeling of longing. longing for love like meg's description of it. longing for love like the glow of stardust. longing for love
sure she had a boyfriend before but not once did she feel like how meg described love out to be with him not once did she feel like their kisses and hugs mean something and their fights never felt worth fighting for. sure she had this guy in her grade whom she passed notes and looks with and texted for days but it was never serious and he didn't see her in that certain light that makes people glow that you fall for and even if they dated it would have been too complicated.

it was a winding day for her mind to wander and she played their game as the cars went on their journey on the highway down below.

an orange car swooshes out of nowhere and she closes her eyes and makes a wish when my person comes please i hope i'll know, holding on for a beat more. after that a black car passes and her luck was aligned with the stars

So what's it they have, what's it all about
Work for the bossman.
Use your brawn Earn your pittance,
Then eat, Pub, drink, **** and pay the bills
Go footie, shout and scream, at one with your tribe
then  go sit in front of the telly, play at family
Week is done
Till the morrow when you do it all again

How about a soap opera, you direct and act
Gotta a Royal down the road ripe for the taking
Lets go invade, see how the other halves lives
Come, lets all join and become Kingmakers
Under our ***** thumbs he goes, we pull the strings
Entertainment for the masses, beats our mundane cages

For once, we are the bosses and can pull the strings
Knowledge is Power and its all here in Mao's Red Book
Lies, fabrication, distortions and misinformation
Disinformation, half-truths, slander it ain't no matter
Everything he says will be taken down and used against him
This is control at our finger tips, this is power to play with
He's going through the Red mill, drilled and ground into dust

Look we've got him as the puppet, we destroy all his trappings
So gather round and join the fun, this is us like God
Lights, action, now you do this and this and watch us play him
what do you mean puppet ain't moving or re-acting
OK let's do this, you go there and you do this and do this now
Still no action, OK let's try this, if you go there and say ah
You drive here, you stand there, you watch here, you stand
Nothing still, OK you come here, you put this here
Still nothing, This puppet is NUMB, this puppetting is no fun

They had drawn up the master plan, written their ****** script
The puppet looked and laughed, what a bunch of prime morons
No substance, no value system, no morality or basic sense
Infantile, one track minded sociopaths full of flaws and manure
Go back to your drinking and ******* and your mundanity
The united pack of crooks, ****, racists and the vacuous coerced

Go look after the Leading Lady stuck with rehearsals and scripts
The imagined romantic interest paying debts for UK residency
Waiting for the Prince to come running and tomfoolery begins
The bit part actors are still playing, too stupid to realize
The control is on them, their time energy and effort all a sham
Our Directors are directing making it up as they go along
The supporting actress are still hopping and hoping
The new characters are still buying false scripts and playing
Playing with themselves as Puppet stands and watches it all

They wheel out their demented scribes and brain dead peoters
To write dirges, glooms, ******* and negativities galore
Casting their dark fantasies and the rancid spittles of their dregs
Muds from the festered pools of their putrid minds dresses up
Ready to visit nightmares of their making from their darknesses
Areas thankfully unknown to a mind and soul untainted, unsoiled
As is their bitter lives, valueless breeding and hate and prejudices One ignorance and neurotic existence, the depravities of depraves..

Poor, poor imbeciles, they really don't have much in their lives
Illusions and delusions by the bucket loads, anything would do
To remove them from their sad, miserable sorry realities
Hey its Clockwork orange, we are all stars in our *****
Diversions to their mundane, unrewarding and depressing realities
Their frustrations and powerlessness, their insignificance
At last a vent for their frustrated lives, miseries loves company
A release valve for pains of centuries being underdogs and serfs
A safe playground for psychos, control and pain in abundance
Let's call it Revolution and add Republic to make it more palatable

Down at the palace of Attrition, a blameless man sits and muses
Crazed dogs of war at the gates, salivating insanely, bloodthirsty
Watching Controllers tieing chains to masses and jerking them
Into frenzied hysteria, nothing beats permitted wickedness shared
Dropping poisons and acids into hungry jaws, patting heads
Shouting rallying calls, we got the Bastille of the blinds going on
Scientists please take notes, this is Herd mentality and Groupthink
This is how to manipulate the masses and incite Hate unawares
Majority wins here, this is Democracy, this is people power

Do, you are ******, don't, you are ******, Hate abides all.
Puppet sees injustices but better to play dumb and numb
They can't abide a black do well, hate spews from fear
Hate festered by the unique decency of a successful blackman
Who had all they wished for but could never have or be
Riddled with lust and envy they merely went on to steal his
But that wasn't enough, the bullies and cowards had to ruin.
Under the pretext of them and us, blue versus Red they lied
Rabid racists takes another black man down, green bottle falls

Man proposes, God disposes, UK, KKK now play god
Thy will will be done O'Lord, I am but your servant
It's rather flattering being The Real Deal in this production
Confirmation of differences betwixt Gifted and the Depraves
A Travesty full of sound, false images and fury by the loonies
A Red Racist Production by Idiots and psychos for fools and sociopaths.

Lights, camera, action
Yawn.......................

Abandonment in the form of a 8 year old who's most loyal friend triped n left him to be beaten by the 5th graders

Abandonment in the form of a 10 year old boy, told to wait outside before going to the park only to wait an hour n see his siblings return in a sweat from the park.

Abandonment in the form of a 15 year old boy, told to wait in front of school for rehearsal only to be told a lie n wait there for countless hours while rehearsals were somewhere else.

Abandonment in the form of a 17 year old boy, told to come out to eat with friends only to return from the restroom n be left with the bill.

Abandonment in the form of a 21 year
Old man, who realized people aren't what they seem n abandoned them all.

When the engine rattled itself to a stop he opened the driver’s door letting the damp afternoon displace the snug of travel. He was home after a long day watching the half hours pass and his students come and go. And now they had gone until next year leaving cards and little gifts.
 
The cats appeared. The pigeons flapped woodenly. A dog barked down the lane. The post van passed.
 
The house from the yard was gaunt and cold in its terracotta red. Only the adjacent cottage with its backdoor, bottles filling the window ledges, and tiled roof, seemed to invite him in. It was not his house, but temporarily his home. He loved to wander into the garden and approach the house from the front, purposefully. He would then take in the disordered flowerbeds and the encroaching apple trees where his cats played tag falling in spectacular fashion through the branches. He liked to stand back from the house and see it entire, its fine chimneys, the 16C brickwork, the grey-shuttered living room, and his bedroom studio from whose window he could stretch out and touch the elderberries.
 
Inside, the storage heaters giving out a provisional warmth, he left the lights be and placed the kettle on the stove, laid out on the scrubbed table a tea ***, milk jug, a china mug, a cake tin, On the wall, above the vast fireplace, hung a painting of the fields beyond the house dusty in a harvest sunset, the stubble crackling under foot, under his sockless sandals, walking, walking as he so often felt compelled to do, criss-crossing the unploughed fields of the chalk escarpment.
 
Now a week before St Lucy’s Day he sat in Tim’s chair and watched the night unmask itself, the twilight owl glimmer past the window, a cat on his knee, a cat on the window ledge, porcelain-still.
 
He let his thoughts steal themselves across the table to an empty chair, imagining her holding a mug in both hands, her long graceful legs crossed under her flowing skirt. When she lay in bed she crossed her legs, lying on her back like the pre-Raphaelite model she had shown him once, Ruskin’s ****** wife, Effie. ‘I was in a pub with some friends and I looked out of the window and there he was, painting the church walls’, she said musingly, ‘I knew I would marry him’. He was older of course; with a warm voice that brought forth a childhood in the 1930s spent at a private schools, a wartime naval career (still in his teens), then Oxford and the Slade. He owned nothing except a bag of necessary clothes, his paints of course and an ever-present portfolio of sketches. Tim lived simply and could (and did) work anywhere. Then there was Alison, then a passion that nearly drowned him before her Quaker family took him to themselves, adoring his quiet grace, his love of music, his ability to cook, to make and mend, to garden like a God.
 
Sitting in her husband’s chair he constantly replayed his first meeting with her. Out in the yard, they had arrived together, it was Palm Sunday and returning from Mass he gave her his palm as a greeting. He loved her smile, her awkwardness, her passion for the violin, and her beautiful children. He felt he had always known her, known her in another life . . . then she had touched his hand as he ascended the kitchen stairs in her London home, and he was lost in guilt.
 
Tonight he would eat mackerel with vicious mustard and a colcannon of vegetables. He would imagine he was Tim alone after a day in his studio, take himself upstairs to his bedroom space where on his drawing board lay this work for solo violin, his Tapisserie, seven studies and Chaconne. For her of course; of the previous summer in Pembrokeshire; of a moment in the early morning sailing gently across Dale sound, the water glass-like and the reflections, the intense mirroring of light on water  . . . so these studies became mirrors too, palindromes in fact.
 
The cats slept on his sagging quilted bed where he knew she had often slept, where he often felt her presence as he woke in the early hours to sit at his desk with tea to drag his music little by little into sense and reason.
 
When Jenny came she slept fitfully, in this bed, in his arms, always worried by her fear of rejection, always hoping he would never let her go, envelope her with love she had never had, leave his music be, be with her totally, rest with her, own her, take her outside into the night and make love to her under the apple trees. She had suggested it once and he had looked at her curiously, as though he couldn’t fathom why bed was not sufficient unto itself, why the gentleness he always felt with her had to become hurt and discomfort.
 
He had acquired a drawing board because Elizabeth Lutyens had one in her studio, a very large one, at which she stood to compose. He liked pushing sketches and manuscript paper around into different configurations. He would write the same passage in different rhythmical values, different transpositions, and compare and contrast. After a few hours his hearing became so acute that he rarely had to go downstairs to check a phrase at the piano.
 
Later, when he was too tired to stand he would go into the cold sitting room, light some candles, wrap himself in a blanket and read. He would make coffee and write to Jenny, telling her the minutiae of the place she loved to come to but didn’t understand. She loved the natural world of this remote corner of Essex. Even in winter he would find her walking the field paths in skirt and t-shirt insensible of the cold, in sandals, even bare feet, oblivious of the mud. He would guide her home and wash her with a gentleness that first would arouse her, then send her to sleep. He knew she was still repairing herself.
 
One evening, after a concert he had conducted, Jenny and Alison found themselves at the same table in the bar. Jenny had grasped his hand, drawing it onto her lap, suddenly knowing that in Alison’s presence he was not hers. And that night, after phoning her sister to say she would not be home, she had pulled herself to him, her mass of chestnut hair flowing across her shoulders and down his chest as she kissed his hands and his arms, those moving appendages she had watched as he had stood in front of this student orchestra playing the score she had played, once, before this passion had taken hold. At those first rehearsals she had blushed deeply whenever he spoke to her, always encouraging, gentle with her, wondering at her gauche but wondrous beauty, her pear-shaped green eyes, her small hands.
 
He threw the cats out into the chill December air. He closed the door, extinguished the lights and climbed the stairs to his bedroom. In bed, in the sheer darkness of this Ember night, the house creaked like an old sailing ship moored in a tide race. For a few moments he lay examining the soundscape, listening for anything new and different. With the nearest occupied house a good mile away there had been scares, heart-thumping moments when at three in the morning a knock at the door and people in the yard shouting. He carried Tim’s shotgun downstairs turning on every light he could find on the way, shouting bravely ‘Who’s there?’. Flinging open the door, there was nothing, no one. A disorientated blackbird sang from the lower garden . . .

He turned his head into the pillow and settled into mind-images of an afternoon in Dr Marling’s house in Booth Bay. In his little bedroom he had listened to the bell buoy clanging too and fro out in the sea mist, the steady swish, swash of the tide turning above the mussled beach.

acting on a stage,
she builds with each step,
step,
    step,
        stepping,
the floorboards trail behind her feet.
they form from the soil,
the earth breathing beneath,
wooden planks sprouting between her toes.

she sings in a voice strained and trained,
her diaphragm strong and core
rumbling in single breaths.

her skin brushed with pigment,
cheeks tinted rouge and lips scrubbed till pain,
gold-dusted on her bones
rays reflecting and blinding from her beauty.

stomach she ***** in,
twenty-four
seven,
always prim and proper,
a perfect specimen of femininity,
her blood flows in a viscosity unique
only to the elite.

fingers down
but she lacks words to throw up,
she's silent,
an empty vessel,
her lips meant to be a two-way gate
but nothing flows either way.

her skin sunkissed turmeric,
her irises tapioca pearls,
hair flowing and falling from her face
toasted nori on the white rice her dress.

daily rehearsals of sixteen
odd years practicing lines;
memorizing them, repeating internally,
the stage she builds like a church
her loves oppose to the act,
but she builds an antidisestablishment
forcing her audience of parishioners
away from her.

This year, Spring has been stopped in its tracks.
Incessant rain has driven life underground,
so as a diversion, we're putting on a play.

It's not the real world, rather a representation of it.

The director is a control freak, so her role is perfect-
she can dictate without having to act.

Rehearsals take place in the Philharmonic Hall where the local
band used to practice. But the young have all gone to the city
looking for work, so the drum kit in the corner stays shrouded
in a black cloth and the unplayed snooker table supports our props.

On the stage, the backdrop is dominated by a church.
Its steeple points to God only knows where, aiming to instill pure thoughts.
Impossible to believe, its true aim is to inject fear into its people-
depending on your point of view.

The main player likes to be different. He turns up.
A vain attempt to give some structure to his life.
Late as usual, he's unshaven, and drowsy with wine.
No one can decide whether he's in character or himself.

Waiting for our cue, we stand on the narrow balcony,
flicking damp cigarettes into the river of rain below.

Eventually, we all change, put on our monstrous armour,
become the same curious creatures following the same script.  

Except one....

who refuses to change, deciding in his own mind where he will play his part.
So he pulls on his proofed coat and heads out for the bar.

Outside, the power is off.

The streets are silent. Even the cafes have closed earlier than usual,
tables and chairs left out in the rain chained together, like prisoners
crying for release.

He slips along the cobbled streets, chanting his lines in time with his own footsteps:
'There are more dead people than living....the living are getting rarer.'
Even he's not sure if he's quite himself or still in character.

Briefly, the clouds part to reveal the cold light of the moon,
the only thing in which he has absolute faith to guide him on his way.


copyright © Caroline Grace 2013

I watched you dance around the floor
With beads of sweat dripping from your face
You had tears in your eyes
It was perfect, you were perfect

The place was packed with 800 people
All of you prancing with emotion
But i could only see their shadows
Because i couldn't get my eyes off of you

Every move you made was *******
You spun around, you arched your back
You stared across the room and into the spotlight
As if you were a slave seducing your master

You had your green shirt on
That hugged your body so well
And I blushed as i gazed at your perfection

The moment the music stopped playing
You looked up at me and smiled
You waved and you started to walk towards me
You were saying something but I couldn't hear you
I replied but I couldn't hear myself either
I didn't know what we were saying

I watched you walk away to join the second round of rehearsals

You were set to perform that evening, I couldn't wait
I could have watched you all day
I would see you up on stage and I'd be proud as others see how amazing you are

I doubt you know that I think you're perfect
And by perfect I mean beautifully flawed
You held my hand before but I never told you it made me wonder
If you did it because you wanted to or because it was cold

I planned to wear my white dress for you, the one with the lace and all
And I planned to hand you a bouquet of flowers, but not roses
Red tulips and yellow chrysanthemums, probably
Or better yet hydrangeas. I don't know.

I was hoping that after I slipped in my white dress
And after I bought you the flowers
And after you danced
And after they saw how amazing you are
And after I handed you the flowers
That maybe we can spend some time together and maybe you can hold my hand again
I hope it won't be cold so I wouldn't have to wonder, either
And maybe this time when you look at me, you wouldn't look away
But instead press your lips against mine

What I hoped for the most was that I wouldn't wake up
Because if I did, I'd have to dream this dream again till I get the ending I hoped for
I don't mind seeing you every night, having all this happen again
But I can't wait for the night when I'd find out how it ends

It’s easy to see what others see,
Just look into a mirror.
Except when my eyes approach the glass
And a trembling hand moves hair out of a face
That belongs to a me that isn’t there,
When I feel the clench of teeth that aren’t mine
Baring a terrified, threatened smile,
The lungs of someone else threatening collapse
Like a tower of rose coloured glasses,  
A facade so beautifully crafted that upon its creation
It was given the wrong name.

I look into that mirror and only when the eyes,
The bars of the prison my soul desperately claws at,
Meet my mind do I truly see the person who is there,
The man who grew so safe in complacency
That he refused to question what it meant
To be anything other than what
His body told him.

There’s comfort in conformity,
Especially when the character is curated in such a way
Where no one's the wiser.
A costume so extravagant that even the mind gets swept away
By the splendors of dissociation because surely,
Surely this body belongs to this character
That was so painstakingly molded
By the roles and rehearsals presented to it, surely
The discomfort it feels with these mounds of flesh that hide the lungs
Is not because they shouldn’t be there, but because
They are making it so much easier to play the part
Of the one that isn’t me.

Surely I feel guilty and complicit when I speak because I am fooling everyone,
Fooling, Deceiving, Making it so incredibly easy to see
Someone who just isn’t nor has ever been there.
Even Myself, for 22 years.
For 22 years I’ve let myself take on a role rather than actually stop and think
That maybe I am not a girl who likes dolls,
Who likes dancing and dresses and lover’s confessions
And wrestling and writing and eating and lighting
Up the entire room when I laugh, No,
Maybe that was the rough draft of a character that was meant
To be played by a man.
Maybe, just maybe, it was a boy doing these things.
And when that name was crossed out and replaced
While the critics walked out and looked down with disgrace,
The boy in a dress with his chest all in lace
Finally let out the breath he was holding
For 22 years.

The mirror still lies on occasion to others,
But to me, I look and see past this body,
Past the hair and the chest and the shortness of breath
From the noose of conformity around my neck,
And I see the man that god made me.
And while I want so badly to be seen by the masses,
How I want to shatter their rose coloured glasses
So they see the waves of purple and blue that adorn me.
How I want the people who have scorned me
To say I didn’t delve from the scriptwriter’s plan,
It just took them awhile to see I was a man.

I know it will never happen.
That even as the curtain falls, no matter the costume or lack thereof,
They will only see the girl that isn’t there.
And maybe I will take this facade to my grave but as I return
To the one who truly made me,
He will say ‘welcome home, my son.
Your performance as her, it’s finally done.’

my head is filled to the brim

with other **** i have to do

like job applications
going to class
reading ******* textbooks
dress rehearsals laundry
writing papers that won't make any sense
drinking too much coffee




when all i want to do
is lay shirtless on your floor with you

and write poetry about the palms of your hands

Black out, fade in,
spot light on the boy with his guitar.
Dim light, dim blue flush,
she sits in the corner,wishing on her imaginary star.
Same stage, same adrenaline,
same passion but time never intended for them to meet.
She plays on her role,
and he strums away at his gig.
Sound of guitar coming from his window,
no audience and no standing ovations.
On rented wings, she takes flight,
no rehearsals, no scripts,just tucked away passion.
In his camouflaged green,
he wakes up to his responsibility.
In her traditional prints,
she's all set for the working society.
The clock strikes twelve,
it's the end of two thousand ten.
He's at the eating place
and she comes by with her friends.
He's sitting at the corner
and she's at the other end.
Their eyes met for the very first time,
when they reach out to shake hands.
No lights, no stage,
no audience and that adrenaline.
Just the boy with his guitar, strumming
and in his room she sits, watching.
She talks about the plays, the roles
and in his room he strums, listening.
No lights, no stage,
no audience, just he and her,and their spoken adrenaline.
Twenty-six February,
two thousand eleven.
He and her,
like a match made in heaven.
You know what they said about heaven and earth?
A new chapter begins
for the guitarist and the wannabe actress.

Almost a week has past
Since it was announced you will die
A day like that was always destined to come
But I am still not ready
Gordon Downie I want to write your eulogy now
And maybe you will see it
And understand how you've changed the life
Of this child of America

Gordon Downie you have made me scared
And if any sort of courage is going to come
Let it come now
I can't think of a worse time than this
Why must all my heroes leave me here?
But I understand that before a person becomes a saint they must perform miracles after their death

The three words I would use to describe you, you already know
Gordie you are a man
A machine
And a poem
The first song I remember learning how to sing, you beckoned me in from the wicked prairie winds  
And now I just hope that when I hear the news of the final words I smile
And it will be fine
But Gordie
I have avoided all the trends and clichés a young man of 20 can
I have sat in parking lots and coffee shops and witnessed beautiful things continuing as long as this world will let them

But it is you who has traveled to the hundredth meridian
The man who can get behind anything
The man who stood neck deep in the lake and yelled "you are not the ocean" and refused to swim
I learned that I must be ready to live my life because we get no dress rehearsals
I learned to be honest with who I am because no one's interested in the things I didn't do

Gordon Downie you are the machine that powered my childhood so this poem is for you
And when you die Heaven will truly be a better place
And one day I will meet you there
But until then
I will go to Bobcaygeon
And watch those constellations
Reveal themselves
One star
At a time

I am not an artist
I cannot paint a beautiful landscape that makes you believe you're looking at the real thing.
You will not stare in awe as you wonder what compelled me to paint those lines so uneven
And I can't make my color choices dance in your eyes like sugarplum fairies
Off of the canvas and into your mind
For you to transpose the choreography
To your own understanding

I am not an artist
I cannot capture a single moment in time with the simple click of a camera.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words but every shot I capture seems to be silent
Mute
But they're beginning to be heard
Screaming millions of words
Hoping someone will just hear one

I am not an artist
I cannot make your skin shiver as my lyrics echo through the room
Your emotions will not crescendo as each note burns nostalgia in your memory
And I will not leave you wanting to hear more

I am not an artist
And I can't create a masterpiece in two hours
I can't write words that will break your heart as they enter your ears and fill your soul with the emotions I'm feeling
I can't make you believe that I'm actually the character
I tried so hard to become at rehearsals for the last three months
My movements on the dance floor dont flow with ease or grace
And you will never give me a standing ovation
Or shower me with roses as you cheer for the art I've created.

But
With every step that I take on this earth
I am leaving brush strokes in the dirt and in your memory
Every laugh
every sob
every word that I speak
Is going through your ears for your own musical enjoyment
My eyes are like cameras capturing every moment and every face each time my lashes flutter
And even though most of we don't have photographic memories
We still remember the precious moments our personal cameras caught on film

I am not an artist
I am art

The only reason I ever went downtown
was for music class
or orchestra gigs
or for LA Phil concerts,
but I found this cool bookstore once.

I walked around with you once
during a break between rehearsals
and you asked me if I thought anyone
actually lived here
"LA's just a movie set," you said.

I was downtown for an audition once
and they were filming Batman.
There was fake snow everywhere
and you told me that you and a friend
pretended to have
a snowball fight.

Imagine.
A snowball fight in Los Angeles.
Impossible.
Except when Los Angeles is Gotham
or New York
or Chicago
for the day.

No one is ever on the streets in LA.
Unless LA is Gotham
or New York
or Chicago
for the day.

Teaching high school kids the craft
Directing them in their school show
Teenagers singing just off key
With a band that's one beat slow
Holding rehearsals when the gym is free
Have you really sunk this low
Are you truly at your bottom
Or are you "Waiting for Godot"?

"YOU'RE ON IN FIFTEEN MINUTES...MR. WILSON"

Doing plays in local theater groups
With untrained  amateurs on stage
You tell them all your stories
And you keep them on their page
It's not exactly where you started
Talent that you just can't gauge
Selling programs in the lobby
It's time you act your age

"TEN MINUTES TILL SHOWTIME MR. WILSON"

Touring shows around the country now
Second touring group, smaller towns
Doing revival shows of Sondheim
"Sweeney Todd " and "Send in the clowns"
Living out of an old suitcase
The countryside a sea of browns
Where you are at the local's mercy
And there's less ups than there are downs

"FIVE MINUTES TO SHOW TIME MR. WILSON"

You've made it, you're on Broadway
Starring roles are yours to choose
Where the highlights of last nights show
Are in today's reviews
Where a sold out run continues
And your name is in the news
You're an actor, and you're famous
The world is yours to lose

"SHOW TIME MR.. WILSON...ON STAGE PLEASE"

The kids are out there schlepping
working their way through the *****
singing songs sung by the Beatles
"All This and World War II"
You're just a pillar standing, sweating
As you see what you can do
You're still an actor, and you know it
You'll need a drink when this is through.

They leave Jerusalem, with the acrobats from Shiraz. They were ghosts of poetry, wine, roses and fireflies; they were conjuring the path of the twelve camels to the intersection with the Cenotaph, where King David with the Cherubs of Kafersesuh will stay. They were Epi ghosts, basking in camelid footsteps. They went in all the intermittences of the bent nails and plants of the areas of the marquee of the other four ghosts that accompanied him. They were the jumpers with water wheels, wheel scales with tutelary cords, some with stilts of gold disgrace from the coins of Judas Iscariot and the last propelled by a caper that ruled all the others on the wings of the Fireflies. Withdrawn from the road that leads to the Kidron valley, 2,500 years of clay tablets from Persepolis fall on all of them, they were phonetized with the plaintive nightmare of Tirazis's one-eyed poem; which is currently Shiraz, in this way these ghosts escorted the Hexagonal Birthright, they were exiled from their ghostly cities for not paying the tribute of obedience to destroy and rebuild. As they began to be with them in the cove, the ghosts of the acrobats boiled with the eagerness to prevent everyone from being saddened by the departure from the orchard, which was falling further and further behind their footsteps, dancing with their pirouettes along the way, they told little stories. in the ears of travelers.

Hydro Saltimabanqui: “I come from Roknabad (also known as Aub-e Rokní), an underground canal that carries spring water to the city from a mountain located ten kilometers northeast of Shiraz. Here I have to mend the propellers and water ropes to do my acrobatics on the water, with greater songs in the poems of the Poet Hafiz. When we bite our tongues, we repair it with Hafiz's verses from the Koran; there are three hundred creeds, three hundred hectares to irrigate with my wheel the sadness of those who cannot have the gift of the rivalry of Montenegro and Monteblanco, to overestimate the liveliness of the caravan trembling with uncertain doubts on its way to Jaffa. "

Saltimbanqui of Bacule: "We are Epi ghosts, the reverie with tutelary ropes, to jump through the trapeze of the photometric units of the heavy Almería of the highest Mirror of the Sea. Here we look; from here we will board the barge that will take them from back to Limassol. Curiously, the same ship from Lepanto that sleeps in the swings of the sea and in the arms of Anaximander, in a new awakening from the lethargy of the super-string theorization, here is the intrinsic speculation of science, since this is not just to research purely empirical. "

Says Anaximander: “First…, we have no proof that string theory is not ultimately correct and in the future in any verifiable way. Second, we propose a project of the order of string theory, which is necessary for science and its importance, going even beyond the scientific to also project itself on the metaphysical and the religious, right here in this order of greater what to do together with the rope that leads me to Patmos.

Saltimabanqui of Bascule responds: “metaphysical and religious legitimacy, here we are tying knots in the rope that inaugurates a new masonry in the observable futuristic look. Here is the original fiction of continuing to raise the necks of the ants over our optics. We will jump on these ropes, but we will fall on intervals of placental physical dens, which were born from the new embryo in the twelve caves of Gethsemane, in a primitive late germinal process. The micro phonetic vibrations will lift us up from the hunger to follow and leave King David in his cenotaph, gored on his hips by the Cherubim, marking his holy antlers that become entangled in the blunting of the cuneiform scratches of his epigram.

In the middle of the magical theorists exotically as associativity of substance causally of the poetic and multiverse song, believing in the ghosts of Shiraz, as dreams injected to sublimate the Aeneids that they lamented on the bottom stones, even though they were independent of their material origin. Multi universes, multi paraphrase for who has to dress the word “Rosa in her noble long dress to the cliff of Ebdara when Vernarth acclaims his brother Etréstles, he comes with the Auriga from Messolonghi. Rested and determined to head to Tel Gomel, he comes with his horse Kanti to keep him company on this crusade. Kanti defied the Cliffs of Crete, he was servile to Markos Botsaris, 1821 (Royal Hero of the Liberation of Greece in the Turkish Invasion, Koumeterium Messolonghi - Palibrio USA), until in the afternoon he approached from a herd of beautiful places of steeds to him. This was heard by Etréstles and he seized His horse to have more than a Life from his company, more than a lost and lost aroma of his natural mother, to reach the one who would treasure it”.

The ghosts attribute quantitative passages from before leaving King David, and then continuing on the road to Jaffa and advancing on the ship back to Cyprus; Limassol. All were hyperkinetic bowls leveraged by the terrain that was on the **** of the acrobatic histrion foreshadowing the contours of the temporal filigree, which in each one made them smile at the carriage with oxidizing wheels, still being immaterial beings, but alive in its marvel gases, wading the serious bile that emerged from the glasses in his allegories. His footsteps and his undulating phonetic figures did not stop over the caravan, which had already passed Jerusalem. They were already undaunted by themselves and overshadowed by the foreboding modulation and encryption of the rehearsals they were doing, over the heavy atmosphere that seized and begged a small piece of the attention of those who did not celebrate their Shiraz pirouettes.
The areas, volumes, and lengths were fully encompassed by the Ghosts of Shiraz, the acrobats ran along the banks of Ramallah, it was already winter, the city received them with winds and rains from the southwest alternating with cold and dry winds from the northeast. The acrobats went like master geometricians to condone the fuss of the caravan, devising a dodexagesimal system. (Twelve centuries of ultra-nocturnal geometry and shipwrecks at the Alexandria lighthouse)

Positioning as a base the number 12, to measure times and angles that they needed to avoid the voluminous rains that hit the caravan.  Incredibly, the volumetric position of the plantar legs of the camels seemed like wheels that rotated without stopping in any anti circumferential radius, making some clouds a shutter that enclosed them like a trapezoid of God's flock in the high semicircle of the waters that tried to fall. , like axiomatic staves of Euclid's beard tempering his elemental construct.

The linear position of each one of those who were mounted was a perfect ergonometric based on the Muladhara pressing the four red petals on pressing the Achilles heel of Vernarth, which was dimensioning the Ramallah triangulation, with the fungi that were housed in its Xifos sword in the jet tip that carried the dodexagesimal cartography. In the same position, the Apostle Saint John seemed, he carried the rosary in his left hand in geometry that elongated his nose and feet in an adonis triangle, thirsty for one hundred and twenty degrees of the sextant that broadened its spectrum to align with this Birthright. Thus the stars and planets are positioned as celestial spheres with the gravitation of the Olivos Berna, revolutionizing curved and flat equations that intuited to go beyond the crossed pirouettes that the acrobats did all the way, even further than those of the withered path of oil, purposely of the axiomatic systems that the Ghosts of Shiraz intended to establish.

Shiraz  Ghosts

These Persian Epi ghosts, axiomatized abstract and ideal entities relating models of austerity and lyricism, which fluctuated in the lines and planes of movements of the clouds with the counterpoint of the legs of the Gigas, leaving marks in the sand like a point Morse, straight and flat, until the fifth step that tried to cross the lines of Ramallah, for the parallelism that the centuries that asked Vernarth to reorder the geometric geography of time and the positions that were added as a delay effect in the Garden, essentially of a hyperbolic vision, to appropriate the entities of the Ghosts that grasp with their little finger the strings of the times associated with Gaugamela in his palatial sovereignty with the footsteps of Vernarth and in the phylogeny of a world that is born behind the confines of religious micro- genetics , from whose space is born in another and would accommodate a circular bijective function, to attract the aerosisms of Ein Kerem in the new life signs of J Joshua in the reborn One-dimensional Beams.

Vernarth diluted his bones to sit near the tarsus and accommodate it at the end of the vertebra of the Muladhara (Chakra of 4 petals), making a sub-technical geometric function to preserve the figures of darkness that were also diluted, to arrive at night close to of Jaffa, in the surroundings the isometric fire existing in each one and in two dimensions…, but born of a common one. Raeder and Petrobus wore their floating eyelashes full of dusty and dense manias on their faces, with splinters gum that they had released from one of the pirouettes of one of the mountebanks when colliding with the basic postulates of the Ghosts of Shiraz, deducing undulating spaces like snakes within the isometric fire that dazzled them with the burning senses of humor of the last drops of the Shemesh codifying themselves in an absolute intuitive measure, beyond all dimensions, which is Consciousness destroying the planes and spaces that multiplied among themselves as members of another geometric conscious dimension.

Arriving at the Ben Shemen crossing, everyone undergoes collective hypnosis; the ghosts manage to embody each of the components of the Birthright but omitting a great factor. They relegated the Hexagonality of the genetics of this caravan, not raising the ghosts when calculating the area of once they were being intracorporeal within the members, thus having to abandon before the last ray of Shemesh threw them on their faces ashes of the Gehenna, for this supposed reason to leave them condemned to recycle the human species, for the purpose of reproducing sacred human beings, but being subservient to the cravings beyond the immortality of the miscalculation that led them to the citadel of Karim Khan, surprised with its stamp of thick stone walls and circular towers in the heart of Shiraz. This gave them a warrior aspect contrary to their fame and history: this was a city famous for two thousand years for its culture, with its gardens and its poets, now if in a conspiracy by this beautiful odalisque ruse that attracted the guide of the ecstatic ghosts, in a bad moment of extradition to a bad context of epi ghosts not yet defined in their pockets of apprentices boasting on the laurels of weak and doubtful ideas, which still swarmed within his white heart, trying to reach Vernarth's as former commander Hetairoi, now a servile mystic. In such a way, the complicated as ghosts like "Sufi", being, in reality, the genetic soul of the double ax that carries the double edge of today ..., of the sacrament of Medea in Abdera.

Pro says a ghost from Shiraz (embarrassed):

"The Universe is a sea that longs for dry shores,
without sea and without other wet longings ...,
no possible maiden could
Try to dry it with your star hands ...
Who calms the crying of the Universe ...
even so ..., simile remains floating as a verse between his dreams "

"How can I make my dreams another dimension of the universe?
if he is quiet and does not make me float in his sea ...
How can I make it possible for the tips of its stars
fill the spaces that have revealed it ...
and that have made circular shores without a sea in the mists "

"I walk alone and nobody sees me ...
so I don't wake up the candles that smile and accompany me ...
between days that turn into mornings on the shore
of the solitude of the universe, that nobody embraces him ... "

“Now the days tremble from almost falling on themselves,
They come out alive from their own loneliness of exhaustion and fullness ...of whoever appreciates them in the mists ...
being able to surrender their attention in Ben Shemen ”.
As the Ghost of Shiraz expires in Ben Shemen, he escapes all for nothing in the triad of hypnotizing conventions that still resided in the shameless air that engulfed him, all over the stationary enclosures of the entertainment spaces caused by the acrobats and epi ghosts. That seduced the indecisive beings that sailed over the limbs that made them doubt where to refrain from continuing, outside the radius of the caravan or beyond the skies that did not cease to be in good spirits, of the universe passing through the white hearts, six on the inside and six on the outside in their traveling artist folds.

The lands that are accommodated by the time of parapsychological hypnosis tremble again, as a separation from the physical magnitude of Gethsemane.  Creating a sequence that bends the heads of the ghosts, filling their translucent physiognomies between a cold past and a frozen future, from a classic mechanic, which from now on would depend on the dice thrown by the Third Phantasm of time. Here a relativism would be opened to those who want to see the past in the orchard in an unstable particulate present, leaving far from splitting both parts of the archetype of today, like a subdivided clash of several times that allowed integrating the remaining phantasmagorical spectra, taking over a story on a pluriaxial axis that prevailed in the time of a supposed numerical line from a vector, aligning itself towards the compass of the distance that shines between both northern hemispheres in the minutes that go to the right and the solid-gas seconds that burst almost in the walls of their own liberated beings. The four ghosts of Shiraz, had time differentials before this event with the caravan, verifying the simultaneous prop between the two pairs of ghosts between four dissimilar, but poetic ones that made them here at this point obviate and cancel between two relative nomenclatures of physical structure. The durability and classification of these micro-times of the phantom epi would make the database that St. John the Apostle and Vernarth will accumulate with their eyes closed, each one surpassing himself from the debatable areas, which concern to estimate in occupying the spaces physical in some of them at will so that one of them could embark to Limassol. This simultaneous and relativistic multi-active line, encloses events and squares of spaces in the cinematographic time of the parapsychological regression, as a link of physical images slowed down in the evolutionary and cognitive memory, passing from the conduit of expectation memorization events towards the set of absolute figures. not pigeonholed, but approaching the universe in grasping scales of those who value them. This elucidates even the very conception of conceiving oneself as a ghost, rather in what is called "Epi Ghosts", of absolute belonging of the identical ..., outside of oneself "Being with them and not, as a tacit phase of a dragged story with the seconds that were not lived ... "

This scaling conception will allow them to reside a few millimeters from the consciences of the caravan that was advancing automated along the tracks that already made time and distance in front of the absolute, in a jiffy, having in their faces Rizhon Lezion, who was made of images more than a marked and concrete story in a mechanics that kept the body as part of a large volume in all, to the rhythm of the plantar areas of the Camels Gigas, dividing as a stream of water that would flow fragmented between past, present and future, but as a starting pattern to the future as the only "today" for the time of the times. This unified three-dimensionality would mark the mathematical space of the attempts towards the future of the contiguous camelids of the ghosts of Shiraz, for the ownership of time between all with a single identity that cries out for the univocal will to rearm, even if the winds are very strong. Of the partition,  which separates the world from God and the believing observer into the future with a believer from a historical past in obscurantism, leaving and entering a new world whose notion is to spend connected and bound in a systematization dependent on the great causes, although the static feels isolated from the dynamics, inquiring probative to unite between the ghosts and others, even though they are inferior forces under the line of the generous gaze and the parallelism of the attentive spectator, which suggests more openness to receive and delegate the circumstances of all physical, emotional, spectral and mental-spiritual dimensions, flexing the emotional states hierarchical night and day. Everyone falls asleep hugging on cushions of lamb saddlebags, making it possible to get closer to them too, close to the Ghosts and sleep next to them hugging with the decanted strength of the frames that hang from their faces showing the emotion of being favorite children of the Mashiach, absorbed in the Kidron Valley.

The frontier of the future will be the pre-act of not traveling too much of the physical love to the touch that only awaits the love of the sleeping of a Cherub, this may occur when the sheep climb the hill of our consciences, and manage to be perceived as the simultaneous harness of satisfaction, who lack the vision that would speak to them of a past belonging immobile, to this ethereal topology that will have to biodegrade the molecules of the seconds that sleep in the sheep-man wool saddlebags, at a higher speed than it would last to go back near from the palisade, where it crosses the path to the immemorial arcades of the Mashiach, spinning around all creation at a speed that determines a verse in its soul around the orthogonal of Shemesh, quadrupled and cloistered in its self-consciousness scattered like iceberg down the back in the submissive thoughts that long to be tied to more precious time.

Our lord has us more tied to an absolutist past and future, looking at his calendar divided in such a way that it always fits the day that hurts the shadows of a sharp past, so that it always smiles in us, as the best luminous sign, of whom and with whom to repair the damage of various wounds that travel through the times of time, always wounded, to and from the borders of an anachronistic past. The ghosts, always fast tetra, marginalize themselves to the sound of greater diligence, they fled in Rizhon Lezion, to wake up a little further away from the rays of the stationary Sun, which from now on always surfaced in the degraded dark circles of the mountebank, prowling around the festivities of who knows how to wait, to make a toast under the pretext of faith and hope that exempts the cardinal turned into a flower in white attire.

Shvil from the Angels

The fast epi phantom tetra was emaciated, they lost their north and since they could not walk, they were not energized by the radiosities of the earth, which dominates those who lend divine graces if their feet rested on the tapestry of those who threw their footsteps in winter already near Jaffa. The Shvil Angels were angels that were on the route that cordoned off the pilgrimage of Vernarth and Saint John the Apostle, they were full of flowering Berne Olive Trees that made trunks of floral arches at the entrance of this ancient port. They were three when they walked, they were always distributed so fast that they seemed to be six, but they ended up averaging the quantum of three for each of the components of the Birthright, which from today would be the great circumcision event of the Universe, to make it part of those who one day will have to caulk the rhombuses of the fragmented light beams on the path of heaven so high, in the name of the phrases that never tire of looking at the incautious years that are of our father by the exogalaxies in the total company of the invisibility and relativity of cautious time.

This Semitic seashore beauty indicates and invites us to reach its salty Hebrew waters of Yofi, reinforcing the phonetics that runs madly through the border hills with its heart in hand, when foreigners appear in the name of plausive phylogeny. That brings him a piece of bearable land from the Universal Flood, this is why the ancient Canaanites have to receive them with the table set, to entertain them with winter flowers in Jaffa. The Hellenistic tradition relates the name to Iopeia, which is Cassiopeia herself, mother of Andromeda. After Pliny the Elder the name is connected with Joppa, who was the daughter of ******, god of the wind. Where Vernarth locked his Aspis Skolié shield so that it would shine in the bilges of the Eurydice, under the pentagon’s of the bronze layer of his shield, every time he approached the Dodecanese when the Auriga descended from Andromeda on the back of a punished rower by the storms taking him away from his mother galaxy.

Thousands of years BC Its merchants glorified themselves with their baskets full of belongings and merchandise, for its inhabitants, who today pretended to be pharaohs who paid tribute to the marine corners through the coast that today seemed to open up with more new waters that were reborn from the capering of the swells, founding thus the omens of embarking to attempt and submit to the omens of sovereignty between Judah and the Hellenic lands, to work with noble trees in their armories and utensils, of which they played an honorable part after the maintenance of the emblem of the last portion, of the shaft of the libertarian triumph of Alexander the Great over the Phoenicians in Tire. In the New Testament, it is related how Peter resurrected the believer Tabitha (Dorcas, in Greek, gazelle) in Joppa (Jaffa) and, later, how near this city he has a vision in which Yahweh told him that he should not distinguish between Jews and Gentiles while ordering the removal of ritual (kosher) food restrictions followed by Jews.

The Shvil of the angels distanced themselves from the desire of this station without reaching them and not making them drink salty water from Jaffa, therefore they resorted to Petrobus who a few meters before reaching the port, summoned a large number of Dodecanese Pelicans who were waiting in great celestial flocks, which hovered happily above the sky welcoming them. The pelicans levitate from a risky juggling act, over the caravan and headed to the high seas, collecting saltwater, then they went along the initiation path of Shvil and reconvert the saltwater into sweet with hazelnuts so that they would have holy water, to insolate it and pour it into the canteens of the temple guards of the Canaanites who were waiting for them, to distract them, making them believe they were other Syriac lands such as those of Ashera, which in this act, perhaps it would be good for them to sponsor the Hexagonal Birthright.

But the paths of the angels have confederated before the noisy crowds and Ptolemaic lemurs, who were incorporated into the empty spaces that remained. Faced with this gravesite, Vernarth shouted to the sky with the force of Falangist tradition to himself, and acclaimed heaven, for the sake of freeing them from their definitive income to Jaffa, summoning the Hypatists; elite warriors and spearmen, for them to gather at the portal of the ante entrance of Jaffa, for others who never came from nowhere and nowhere, only blocking it from its perfect plan of memorial and theological heritage conservation, upon return from the exit Judah, to embark with destiny through the sulphurous point that  will boil them in temporary waters, towards the Cyclades and then the Dodecanese, triumphing in inhabiting them wherever whoever was and whoever arrived with foreign promise.

As dusk falls in its first nubile shadows, the  Shvil presents itself to you with these three angels dressed in ivory white, each with a book in each hand and in the other a candelabrum, giving signs of ultra-interpretive catechesis, allying with silica. In combination, after the vision of the charms of the knowledge spread. Earth and sky in the second angel, washing the Semitic dew of anguished Jaffa, with teachings of sleeping well and awakening, to walk in the lands that want to seize the senses, of those who are called not to be oppressed, behind the bars of the Morbid and illiterate pan-vision of the angles of hasty entertainment of the angels when they were called by the Angel Regent, simply relaying information easy to carry to their hearts, in faint powers and poetic lessons, before falling into a thorny forest, burning their tongues in furrows of afflicted human positions, to later redeem them fervently with the judicious power of God.

Vernarth, is distressed by matters of seeing them so tender and so fragile, allowing them to crawl toward him gently. Finally, on these three rules of the Shvil, Hanael introduces herself; "Speaking of hindrances stuck in the literary cabal of grateful compliments for all".   Alluding to Vernarth, a subject desensitized and also distant from any Sub Yóguica disciplinary doctrine. This led him to stand behind San Juan, protecting himself and scared of everything around him, he was seeing in front of him, on the upper left side itself, that Zebedeo was, San Juan's own father calling him!

Saint John the Apostle says: “Justice, at this time, allows us to alleviate ignorance, if the riddles allow us only to look for the answer, God will not be here…, it will only be emotional catharsis, through a merely ideological  Shvil or passage, which moves our meaningless sentences, definitely leading us to the coffers that rearm one after one, after the mistake. We are faithfully interpreted by them, but we detest our regencies with the Escaton, when we all pretend to follow his light of thunderous density towards the sky, prophesying to follow him without losing ourselves in him ..., held on his shoulder glossary. On the claws that are released from the dazed angelic prey, correcting its wavering vision, unraveling the living presence of condemnations or salvation, in Eden with your bare feet or in hell with no departure time”

Inexplicably, some Praetorian soldiers of Domitian appear, who would be restricting the departure of the tretacontero to Limassol, curiously they were the same ghosts from Shiraz that continued to represent such a bad event, just as when he was expelled to Patmos by Domitian in 95 BC, in size was the scandal that the Shvil angels produced with their impractical ideologies, who opposed such spectral imagery, in such a way that they replaced their figure with that of another Hellenic man who wanted to embark for Patmos, the other members were fully incorporated to the ship, which frolicked on the pranks as it proudly carried them to a new ocean. Around the last drops that jumped in Jaffa on the coastal rocks, others appeared when the last divided and scattered drops were going to shine the navigation temples, thus it is possible to board in the same ship that brought the principle from Limassol to Judah that transited from Lepanto.

The chapel of ministers reappears offering a ceremony, which would return the messianic remora to the Angels of Shiraz, to return to their former positions within the paths of biblical characters, who tend to commit adultery in the game of loss of consciousness of the Escaton, probably requiring that everyone have to make pilgrimage routes for all humanity secluded and liberated by themselves. The Saltimbanqui finally manage to jump into the boat to sail to the Dodecanese, but the Shvil of the Angels stayed where other celebrities will require them to reroute the Shvil Escaton.

For someone who is as busy and as big a deal as Tamannaah Bhatia, her courtesy comes as breath of fresh air. "I am in Mumbai in the middle of back-to-back shoots for endorsements," she says, apologising profusely, for a few minutes' delay in keeping her appointment with us. With films lined up in Telugu, Tamil and Hindi, Tamannaah is one busy bee, indeed. "The Bahubali shoot still on — I have some work left in it which will be completed this month," she says, as she settles down down for a chat with Hyderabad Times. Excerpts.

So, you must have become quite a pro at sword-fighting, horse-riding et al, now that you are close to wrapping up the shoot for Bahubali...

(Laughs) Playing Avantika has changed my life. Horse riding was something I had never tried before. It was a completely new space to be in and it was scary. I realised that the only way to deal with it is to first face my fears, even before I stepped into the arena to train. Because once I'm on the horse, it's either me riding the horse or the horse taking me for a ride. (laughs). So there was no room for fear. But the training really helped me become more agile and sensitive to my body. This film changed how the industry looked at me. I went from being a dainty, soft girl to this strong woman.

So, do you look at yourself differently as well?

Well, I have overcome a lot of fears — be it the fear of heights or anything that's even remotely challenging physically. I feel empowered now. I have seen myself transform. I was someone who would think twice before going out alone; now, when someone says you have to do an aerial shot, I am like, 'Bring it on!' I'm not scared of things any more. I'm not nervous; not anxious. In general, I'm a braver person.

After this, acting in entertainers might seem like a cakewalk...

Not necessarily. Even the song in Abhinetri demanded a lot from me physically. I mean, there were 15 days of hectic rehearsals alone before we got to the real shoot. The job of an actor is such that you are required to be fit all the time. This is one profession that gives you the ability, no, the right to focus on yourself — physically, mentally and emotionally. It makes you stronger. And I quite enjoy it!

You seem to be enjoying being the fashionista too, of late...

(Laughs) Believe it or not, before I went to Bollywood, I thought there was no such thing as fashion industry. I thought movies drove fashion. I had no clue how trends came about. I did not know that there were trends for every season, nor was I aware of the many fashion weeks. I was more of an actor; less of a fashionista.

When I started doing Hindi films, I realised that fashion was not some frivolous business! People might think, 'Arrey, what's the fuss about what shoe you wear?'. But, now,

I like dressing up because I realise that it is an expression, and an extension, of your personality. There was a lot of trial and error, but in the end, I found my personality through clothes. Now, when I am sitting and chilling, I find myself researching on trends. I feel responsible for the fashion choices I make, because when you set a trend, hundreds are going to follow you. You don't want to set the wrong example.

So much pressure! How do juggle it all and manage to stay sane?

Family. I have always had them around me, even if they aren't physically present. So when I am having a crazy day and need to find some sanity, I will look for solace in family. In fact, there have been times when they felt I didn't sound alright on the phone, so they took the next flight to come see me. Having a support structure like that keeps me sane.Read more at:http://www.marieaustralia.com/formal-dresses-canberra | www.marieaustralia.com/plus-size-formal-dresses

I

Oft have I seen at some cathedral door
  A laborer, pausing in the dust and heat,
  Lay down his burden, and with reverent feet
  Enter, and cross himself, and on the floor
Kneel to repeat his paternoster o’er;
  Far off the noises of the world retreat;
  The loud vociferations of the street
  Become an undistinguishable roar.
So, as I enter here from day to day,
  And leave my burden at this minster gate,
  Kneeling in prayer, and not ashamed to pray,
The tumult of the time disconsolate
  To inarticulate murmurs dies away,
  While the eternal ages watch and wait.

II

How strange the sculptures that adorn these towers!
  This crowd of statues, in whose folded sleeves
  Birds build their nests; while canopied with leaves
  Parvis and portal bloom like trellised bowers,
And the vast minster seems a cross of flowers!
  But fiends and dragons on the gargoyled eaves
  Watch the dead Christ between the living thieves,
  And, underneath, the traitor Judas lowers!
Ah! from what agonies of heart and brain,
  What exultations trampling on despair,
  What tenderness, what tears, what hate of wrong,
What passionate outcry of a soul in pain,
  Uprose this poem of the earth and air,
  This mediæval miracle of song!

III

I enter, and I see thee in the gloom
  Of the long aisles, O poet saturnine!
  And strive to make my steps keep pace with thine.
  The air is filled with some unknown perfume;
The congregation of the dead make room
  For thee to pass; the votive tapers shine;
  Like rooks that haunt Ravenna’s groves of pine
  The hovering echoes fly from tomb to tomb.
From the confessionals I hear arise
  Rehearsals of forgotten tragedies,
  And lamentations from the crypts below;
And then a voice celestial that begins
  With the pathetic words, “Although your sins
  As scarlet be,” and ends with “as the snow.”

IV

With snow-white veil and garments as of flame,
  She stands before thee, who so long ago
  Filled thy young heart with passion and the woe
  From which thy song and all its splendors came;
And while with stern rebuke she speaks thy name,
  The ice about thy heart melts as the snow
  On mountain heights, and in swift overflow
  Comes gushing from thy lips in sobs of shame.
Thou makest full confession; and a gleam,
  As of the dawn on some dark forest cast,
  Seems on thy lifted forehead to increase;
Lethe and Eunoë—the remembered dream
  And the forgotten sorrow—bring at last
  That perfect pardon which is perfect peace.

V

I lift mine eyes, and all the windows blaze
  With forms of Saints and holy men who died,
  Here martyred and hereafter glorified;
  And the great Rose upon its leaves displays
Christ’s Triumph, and the angelic roundelays,
  With splendor upon splendor multiplied;
  And Beatrice again at Dante’s side
  No more rebukes, but smiles her words of praise.
And then the ***** sounds, and unseen choirs
  Sing the old Latin hymns of peace and love
  And benedictions of the Holy Ghost;
And the melodious bells among the spires
  O’er all the house-tops and through heaven above
  Proclaim the elevation of the Host!

VI

O star of morning and of liberty!
  O bringer of the light, whose splendor shines
  Above the darkness of the Apennines,
  Forerunner of the day that is to be!
The voices of the city and the sea,
  The voices of the mountains and the pines,
  Repeat thy song, till the familiar lines
  Are footpaths for the thought of Italy!
Thy fame is blown abroad from all the heights,
  Through all the nations, and a sound is heard,
  As of a mighty wind, and men devout,
Strangers of Rome, and the new proselytes,
  In their own language hear thy wondrous word,
  And many are amazed and many doubt.

Typically the savior gets attached
To the one who's falling that they catch
But this is a clear role reversal
Guess I missed too many play rehearsals
I suppose I was your Persephone
Hibernating winters on my knees
Soon your Zeus-like ego began to show
With all the focus on your lightning bolt
I was there through all eleven seasons
Throwing away caution, rhyme and reason
Now you say our future is yours only
Dividing a union that was holy
But I refuse to coil 'round your finger
Under thumb or stone I will not linger
Though I'm in between Satan and the sea
You will find you have no power o'er me

Many people, including yourself say I do what I do because I am fighting hard for a prize.
I have news for them, you are no prize, what so-ever. As harsh as this sounds, it is really a great phrase.
When I say you are not a prize, it means you are not an object that can be taken or to be possessed. Instead,
you are a beautiful human being that I am lucky to have in my life, and that everything I do, is intended to earn
the right to be the official person that will make you happy, take care of you, support you, as well as grow as a team, whether
if it is labeled only has best of friends or something special. Only selfish want I always had that the chance that I see the true feelings I sometimes see in you in waves, maybe a breath of fresh love from time to time, that I could one day improve myself and prove to be a best person in your life in a meaningful way.

    A deep connection like this should be pleasurable and fun everyday as we build each other up and frolic under the stars. A beautiful friendship with deep feelings is most similar to dancing, as it should not be painful work but a journey of smiles at the end of the day.....

    That mentioned, to best describe the world of deep friendship up to true love and anything between is to describe why two people dance. When we chose to dance,
unless professional, it was never meant to be an object of hard work or stress, but the activity that brings out the best of each other while enjoying the rhythm    
of music, as we know as life. It's all about combining out best moves to show the audience that the duo can dance to any beat. Sometimes dancing can demand a lot skill. To maintain a great performance,  it does take good communication, social cues,  and proper response to accurately synchronize the dance steps as a team. A second look back is sometimes needed to execute a shocking introduction without injury; But more or less, without targeting the end result as in the audiences approval or a prize at the end, the true gift is the laughter and excitement of celebrating the music in a coordinated dance skit.

    I have danced with many partners, but I must say I have enjoy dancing with you the most, despite hiccups on the disco floor and few skipped rehearsals. Some moves you made can put the king of pop to shame, as I do believe I can rock the Caspar  from time to time. I am satisfied with any genre of music while dancing with you. I must admit I am no Fred Astaire, as I can be a klutz. I made a few misleads that I accidentally stump on your toes while some of your moves have place bruises on my shin. This is common when you dance hard to the loudest, most brilliant music we tend to discover. There are times I blow the dance routine by misreading your next step totally, where at other times, I come unprepared to a new move that impresses the best judges. My main error is when I over-coordinate my special moves when the music of life drops the beat. I am happy though we are savvy enough to whip back into rhythm. I may not be the greatest show partner on floor, as I have not maintained my dancing jacket over the years, even though I believe that jacket was once cute. I understand that a good dancing partner must take the time to visit the tailor to replenish the thinning cloth around the collar, maybe add a bulk of fluff to the shoulder pads, refresh the color, and most important replacing the missing white buttons. Until then I do understand you want to dance with other people that still maintained their jackets, but I know that my dance moves are best coordinated to the rhythm of your style of music  :). That being said....

Let's enjoy today, enjoy the flow of the music and where t leads us, and most importantly,.. May I have this next dance :) I am always honored to tear the floor with you, and redefine the musical genre called love and friendship.

When Truth Came A Calling

There's A knock on my door,
I ask "who is there". ?
Standing there are five faces. .
They answer" IN UNISON "Truth"
I ask" Why the disguise"...?
It is I,"Truth" they all refrain.

How will I know which one of
you is to cross my threshold,
Let us all in and you will
figure it out in the end.
"No" I shouted I will never-
I will dismiss the one in
front he is much too "Clever".

Now there are four. Who shall I leave
to come through my door.
The next one began to explain,
every reason he should entrance gain,
a very convincing argument, I exclaimed,
"Go away you are nothing but" Rhetoric";
Everyone knows that the truth is Plain.

Now standing there in
front of my door left three,
The next one to speak
was beautiful, and very ****...
"let me in, and I will prove I am truth.
You knew my mother her name was Ruth".

No! -You cannot lure me with ***
I read the story of your mother
and interpreted well.
If you do not leave my
door I will surely get vexed.

Now that I sent all but two away,
It was easier to tell ,
Who was left to welcome in..
Which of these two should enter my abode?
I had to ponder as to What truth really meant.
Was it something to be applied like a first aid kit.?

Is it true, that the truth is
sometimes ugly, and always plain?
Will the truth set you free after the pain.  
Hmm...
I pondered some more and let them both in.

One was life and one was death-
One was yen and one was yang.  
Truth number one started to speak, He said:
"No" The truth is not always in plain sight
Sometimes you have to search for it !

And:"Yes", The truth
can be ugly at times,
but you were right;
Real truth never wears a disguise.
Some truth is Imagined and
real truth's are universal

Depends on the mindset of the
thinker. What he perceives to be real-
has had many rehearsals;
As his thoughts have been trained -
as to what he see's, knows and feels.

The truth is not convoluted,
nor contrived,and
you will always KNOW
more than you think you do;
When the truth arrives.

When you enjoy the lies,
and the rhetoric,
It's because the lies
you believe, benefit you,
Though PREJUDICE eyes
can barely RECOGNIZE
the TRUTH again ever.

And so you will remain
as a BIAS SLAVE,
To the self seeking lies forever.

We are truth,they lamented-
We are the wide and the narrow
THE good,THE bad,
The HAPPY, The SAD-
LIFE AND THE DEATH.
THE YEN AND THE YANG.

WE DO NOT CHANGE- ACCORDING TO
WHAT YOU BELIEVE-WE ARE A CONSTANT-
AND WE ARE also CHANGE.

There was a knock on my door--
Someone had come,
disguised as one of truth's
predictions.
Somehow he has come
to blame the innocent victims.

I prayed for my secret
eye to be opened,
and my judgement
to be discerning.

Because the truth,
as it seems, I am learning.
Is subject to Interpretation.

And before "Truth"
left my home, I was told.  
Man cannot reason out, that
which he does not understand-

If he thinks he understands the proof
but calls upon no spirit to discern -
He alone, is unable to interpret the truth
Copyright © 2015 Vicki Acquah

Do you recall when it all began?
Where it began?
How it began?
Why it began?
Do you recall anything at all?

Do you recall being in all the same classes?
Always partnering together on assigned projects?
Giving each other funny looks?
Trying to make each other laugh?
All those inside jokes?
Our rehearsals and performances?
Going on our "First Date"?

Then there's those moments we always regret
Not talking to each other
Walking away from one another
Getting frustrated at one another
Pointless arguments that ruined us
Forgetting one another

Please don't forget me.
Don't forget you.
Don't forget us.

i mean,
who does comedy with
rehearsals
and inviting crowds
to laugh when a
sign prompts them
to "laugh"?

For an Actor, preparation is everything.
We are much more than
our face paint and props.
Rehearsals can go on for hours,
as we block out our scenes in our parts.
So it will not surprise you that Friday
The fourteenth of April found me
at Ford’s theater  in Washington
preparing for my part in the play.
My horse would be held at the ready
My pistol was loaded and clean.
I was known and well liked by the company.
Like a ghost, I could wander unseen.
I’m disappointed Grant  missed my performance
His wife Julia hates Mary some say.
Her aversion has stolen one target, but
the other will not get away.
Theater is a matter of timing
and I knew this crowd and this play
I entered amidst raucous Laughter
and fired, once, in the “Emancipator’s” brain.
Some soldier attempted to grab me
and got himself stabbed for his pains.
I balanced myself on the railing
preparing to leap on the stage.
I could hear Mary Todd Lincoln Screaming.
“Sic Semper Tyrannis!” I raged.
My boot spur got caught in the bunting
I lost balance and fell on the stage.
The actors were stunned to inaction
as I limped, none impeded my way.
Mister Lincoln has made his last speech
and likely seen  his last play.
What actor worth his salt wouldn’t ****
to make his exit my way?

Sun slipping through clouds of evening
Dampened car windows
Sleepy people startled by the faint clatter of metal on tracks
Quiet smells of Pop-tarts, coffee, and gasoline fill-ups
Talk that stems from the weariness of the night and the promise of the morning
Casual, mechanical kisses of goodbye
Morning... follows night, greets the new with rehearsals of old
Begins one more session of hope.

late night rehearsals
jogging in my sleep
most days it feels like
this hard work is worth it
just something i repeat
to myself
when life is a lull
thick vellum around me

We rocked and rolled
We danced and jumped
Music played on for all
Ecstasy gripped the jiffy
As we all in one accord
Like the sheep on hillside
Reached for the rhythm
Dance steps synchronized
To say rehearsals were rigorous
But the passion for such a rhythm
Was secrete for the unusual dance

Whilst you nurse and tend your Vain, Swollen Foot
After hours of Practice did Hone your Length
You played the Player; By Mile's Minds re-boot
Merely welted your Soles from out of Strength
Of course, lonely were Rehearsals increment,
Much did the Egyptian wrap Portions complete
But knew your Pores; Thus applied Fortiment
That Stung-Itched Balm by Glossy Herbs replete
The Mobile rings. Of Double Versions heard
One by your chest and the Other near soul
Each held Respect-of-Confections your Word
Then sample enough to make your Man whole.
What else could I say? Save my Starling Greet
Your Long-Distance Call I would haply meet.

(Happy Birthday, WILLZY!)